A 34-year-old queer lawyer just won a seat on the LA City Council
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Ysabel Jurado had every reason to gloat when I caught up with her earlier this week at the Highland Park home she shares with her father and teenage daughter.
By beating incumbent Kevin de León for a City Council seat that stretches from downtown through Boyle Heights and up to Eagle Rock, the 34-year-old sustained the political earthquake she first unleashed in March, when she finished ahead of him and two Latino Assembly members in the primary.
Outspent in the general election and subjected to an onslaught of negative ads and mailers and headlines in the weeks leading up to election day, she nevertheless trounced De León, a Latino political giant now reduced to a cautionary tale after his fall from grace for his role in a secretly recorded conversation that upended L.A. politics.
Against all odds, liberal judges won across the country
Speaking Of...
The 2024 election marked a painful setback for Democratic hopes of rebalancing the federal judiciary: When Donald Trump reenters the White House in January, he will have a pliant Republican Senate majority eager to confirm his hard-right judges. But federal courts don’t tell the whole story: Across the country, voters also elected liberal justices to their state Supreme Courts, which function as a key backstop for civil rights and democracy as federal courts lurch rightward. Progressives didn’t win a clean sweep, but they emerged with an impressive scorecard, carrying seats in battlegrounds like Michigan and safely red states like Kentucky and Montana. Left-leaning judicial candidates even prevailed in deep-red Arkansas and Mississippi, bucking the national shift rightward. And a progressive jurist is now leading the tally heading into a recount in an extraordinarily close race for the North Carolina Supreme Court, with a victory there promising to end the left’s painful losing streak on that bench and serve as a capstone for the one piece of the 2024 election where progressives actually flourished.
How did these judges pull it off? Abortion surely played a role: State courts have immense leeway to expand or curtail reproductive rights in a post–Roe v. Wade world, and liberal judges have perfected the art of running on abortion.
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Diana Becton is California’s last progressive DA
Down But Not Out
Diana Becton, the relatively low-profile district attorney of Contra Costa County for the last seven years, has suddenly become California’s leading progressive local prosecutor.
With the likely recall of Pamela Price by voters in Alameda County, and George Gascón’s defeat for reelection in Los Angeles County, Becton is the only remaining district attorney on the advisory board of the Prosecutors Alliance of California, the state’s most prominent group of liberal prosecutors. She is also the first Black and first female district attorney in her county’s 167-year history.
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800 lawyers are ready to take on Project 2025
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Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal organization that frequently battled the first Trump administration in court, on Thursday unveiled a large-scale new effort aimed at thwarting President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second-term agenda from his first day in office.
More than 800 lawyers at 280 organizations have begun developing cases and workshopping specific challenges to what the group has identified as 600 “priority legal threats” — potential regulations, laws and other administrative actions that could require a legal response, its leaders said. The project, called Democracy 2025, aims to be a hub of opposition to the new Trump administration.
Unlike in 2017, when Democratic lawyers were unprepared for the onslaught of conservative policies, the intent is to be ready to unleash a flurry of lawsuits immediately.
“We’re leveling up and lawyering up,” Skye Perryman, the chief executive of the organization, said. “This wasn’t something that just everybody woke up the day after the election and started to plan.”
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