Supreme Court Justice Sammy Alito put a temporary hold on counting undated ballots in the razor-thin Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary between Mehmet Oz and David McCormick on Tuesday, reversing a lower court decision that permitted the votes – thought to mostly favor McCormick who trails Oz by less than a thousand going into the recount – to be counted, which could tip a judicial race where David Ritter, a Republican state judge candidate in the Lehigh Valley trails Dem opponent Zachary Cohen, CNN reports. Ritter brought the case, which was joined by the Oz campaign legal team, putting McCormick’s team on the side of a socialist Dem.
Also on Tuesday he Court upheld a lower court injunction blocking the Texas state law that would ban social media companies from monitoring and censoring content on their sites, a major defeat for conservative complaints that they are being silenced online. The decision does not rule on the legality of the law, but it does make it unlikely that the Court would uphold the law; the Supreme Court would have allowed the law to go into effect if it felt that it had reasonable legal merits. Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch, joined by liberal Kagan, voted to lift the lower court injunction.