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RFK Jr. wins effort to leave ballot in North Carolina, but stays on in Michigan

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RFK Jr. wins effort to leave ballot in North Carolina, but stays on in Michigan
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RFK Jr. wins effort to leave ballot in North Carolina, but stays on in Michigan

2024-09-10 11:31 Last Updated At:11:41

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The highest courts in two states ruled differently Monday on efforts by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be removed from their presidential ballots, with a divided North Carolina Supreme Court affirming he should be omitted and the Michigan Supreme Court reversing a lower court decision and keeping him on.

Kennedy suspended his campaign more than two weeks ago and endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump. The environmentalist and author has tried to get his name removed from ballots in several battleground states where the race between Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris are expected to be close.

In Michigan, Kennedy sued Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, on Aug. 30 in an attempt to remove his name from the ballot so as not to siphon votes away from Trump, who won Michigan by about 10,000 votes in 2016. Monday’s decision reverses an intermediate-level Court of Appeals ruling made Friday. It ensures that Kennedy’s name will appear on voters’ ballots in Michigan despite his withdrawal from the race.

The Michigan Supreme Court said in a brief order that Kennedy “has not shown an entitlement to this extraordinary relief."

In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to deny efforts by the State Board of Elections to have the justices consider overturning a Court of Appeals decision on Friday directing that Kennedy be removed from ballots. The Court of Appeals order had reversed a trial judge's ruling the day before that upheld the State Board of Elections' decision to keep Kennedy and running mate Nicole Shanahan on the ballot.

The Democratic majority on the elections board had rejected the request by We The People party of North Carolina — a recently certified party assembled to collect signatures for Kennedy’s candidacy — to withdraw Kennedy from the ballot. The board's majority said it was impractical given actions already completed to begin ballot distribution, including printing and coding tabulation machines. Kennedy sued the next day.

A state law had required the first absentee ballots to be mailed or transmitted to voters who have already asked for them no later than 60 days before the general election, or last Friday. If it had occurred on time, North Carolina would have been the first state in the nation to distribute ballots for the Nov. 5 elections.

The North Carolina Supreme Court ruling means elections officials will have to reprint ballots without Kennedy and reassemble absentee ballot packets. Over 136,000 absentee ballot requests had been made as of late last week. More than 2.9 million absentee and in-person ballots with Kennedy’s name on them had already been printed, according to the state board. Counties must pay for reprinting costs.

Monday evening's order, backed by four of the court's five Republican justices, said it's clear Kennedy resigned as a candidate and that a vote for him would not count.

State attorneys for the board have said it could take two weeks to get reprinted ballots out the door — threatening violation of a federal law requiring absentee ballots be sent to military and overseas voters already requesting them by Sept. 21.

“We acknowledge that expediting the process of printing new ballots will require considerable time and effort by our election officials and significant expense to the State,” the order reads. “But that is a price the North Carolina Constitution expects us to incur to protect voters’ fundamental right to vote their conscience and have that vote count.”

The court's two Democratic justices — Allison Riggs and Anita Earls — and Republican Justice Richard Dietz each wrote separate dissents. Riggs said the “whims" of Kennedy “have been elevated above the constitutional interests" of voters who wanted to vote as soon as possible.

After Monday night’s order, North Carolina board Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell told county election officials not to mail any ballots until a statewide date is set. A potential waiver of the Sept. 21 federal deadline may be necessary, she wrote by email.

On the Michigan Supreme Court, justices nominated by Democrats currently hold a 4-3 majority. That court's order was unsigned, and two Republican-nominated justices wrote a dissenting opinion.

“We can only hope that the Secretary’s misguided action — now sanctioned with the imprimatur of this Court — will not have national implications,” the dissenting justices wrote.

Kennedy was nominated for president by the Natural Law Party in Michigan. Benson, Michigan's secretary of state, had previously cited a state law saying candidates who are nominated and accept a minor party’s nomination “shall not be permitted to withdraw.”

Angela Benander, spokesperson for Benson’s office, said the department is grateful for the high court’s “swift response.”

“Clerks can now move forward with the ballot printing process to ensure absentee ballots will be delivered to voters by the federal deadlines,” Benander said in a statement.

In separate statements, Kennedy attorney Aaron Siri criticized the Michigan ruling but said the North Carolina decision “will assure that nobody in North Carolina votes for a candidate who is no longer running in their state.”

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Robertson reported from Raleigh, North Carolina.

FILE - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces he is suspending his presidential campaign at a news conference Friday, Aug 23, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Darryl Webb, File)

FILE - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces he is suspending his presidential campaign at a news conference Friday, Aug 23, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Darryl Webb, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing the United States to again withdraw from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming and once again distancing the U.S. from its closest allies.

Trump's action, hours after he was sworn in to a second term, echoed his directive in 2017, when he announced that the U.S. would abandon the global Paris accord. The pact is aimed at limiting long-term global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels or, failing that, keeping temperatures at least well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels.

Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations indicating his intention to withdraw from the 2015 agreement, which allows nations to provide targets to cut their own emissions of greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Those targets are supposed to become more stringent over time, with countries facing a February 2025 deadline for new individual plans. The outgoing Biden administration last month offered a plan to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by more than 60% by 2035.

Trump's order says the Paris accord is among a number of international agreements that don't reflect U.S. values and “steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people."

Instead of joining a global agreement, “the United States’ successful track record of advancing both economic and environmental objectives should be a model for other countries,'' Trump said.

Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the Paris accord, called the planned U.S. withdrawal unfortunate but said action to slow climate change “is stronger than any single country’s politics and policies."

The global context for Trump's action is “very different to 2017,'' Tubiana said Monday, adding that “there is unstoppable economic momentum behind the global transition, which the U.S has gained from and led but now risks forfeiting."

The International Energy Agency expects the global market for key clean energy technologies to triple to more than $2 trillion by 2035, she said.

“The impacts of the climate crisis are also worsening. The terrible wildfires in Los Angeles are the latest reminder that Americans, like everyone else, are affected by worsening climate change,” Tubiana said.

Gina McCarthy, who served as White House climate adviser under President Joe Biden, a Democrat, said that if Trump, a Republican, “truly wants America to lead the global economy, become energy independent and create good-paying American jobs," then he must “stay focused on growing our clean energy industry. Clean technologies are driving down energy costs for people all across our country."

The world is now long-term 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.3 degrees Celsius) above mid-1800s temperatures. Most but not all climate monitoring agencies said global temperatures last year passed the warming mark of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and all said it was the warmest year on record.

The withdrawal process from the Paris accord takes one year. Trump’s previous withdrawal took effect the day after the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Biden.

While the first Trump-led withdrawal from the landmark U.N. agreement — adopted by 196 nations — shocked and angered nations across the globe, “not a single country followed the U.S. out the door,” said Alden Meyer, a longtime climate negotiations analyst with the European think tank E3G.

Instead, other nations renewed their commitment to slowing climate change, along with investors, businesses, governors, mayors and others in the U.S., Meyer and other experts said.

Still, they lamented the loss of U.S. leadership in global efforts to slow climate change, even as the world is on track to set yet another record hot year and has been lurching from drought to hurricane to flood to wildfire.

“Clearly America is not going to play the commanding role in helping solve the climate crisis, the greatest dilemma humans have ever encountered,″ said climate activist and writer Bill McKibben. “For the next few years the best we can hope is that Washington won’t manage to wreck the efforts of others.”

About half of Americans “somewhat” or “strongly” oppose U.S. action to withdraw from the climate accord, and even Republicans aren’t overwhelmingly in favor, according according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults “somewhat” or “strongly” in favor of withdrawing from the Paris agreement, while about one-quarter are neutral.

Much of the opposition to U.S. withdrawal comes from Democrats, but Republicans display some ambivalence as well. Slightly less than half of Republicans are in favor of withdrawing from the climate accord, while about 2 in 10 are opposed.

China several years ago passed the United States as the world's largest annual carbon dioxide emitting nation. The U.S. — the second biggest annual carbon polluting country — put 4.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the air in 2023, down 11% from a decade earlier, according to the scientists who track emissions for the Global Carbon Project.

But carbon dioxide lasts in the atmosphere for centuries, so the United States has put more of the heat-trapping gas that is now in the air than any other nation. The U.S. is responsible for nearly 22% of the carbon dioxide put in the atmosphere since 1950, according to Global Carbon Project.

While global efforts to fight climate change continued during Trump's first term, many experts worry that a second Trump term will be more damaging, with the United States withdrawing even further from climate efforts in a way that could cripple future presidents’ efforts. With Trump, who has dismissed climate change, in charge of the world’s leading economy, those experts fear other countries, especially China, could use it as an excuse to ease off their own efforts to curb carbon emissions.

Simon Stiell, the U.N. climate change executive secretary, held out hope that the U.S. would continue to embrace the global clean energy boom.

“Ignoring it only sends all that vast wealth to competitor economies, while climate disasters like droughts, wildfires and superstorms keep getting worse," Stiell said. “The door remains open to the Paris Agreement, and we welcome constructive engagement from any and all countries.”

Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

AES Indiana Petersburg Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant, operates in Petersburg, Ind., on Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

AES Indiana Petersburg Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant, operates in Petersburg, Ind., on Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

FILE - Wind turbines stretch across the horizon at dusk at the Spearville Wind Farm, Sept. 29, 2024, near Spearville, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

FILE - Wind turbines stretch across the horizon at dusk at the Spearville Wind Farm, Sept. 29, 2024, near Spearville, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

President Donald Trump gestures during the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)

President Donald Trump gestures during the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)

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