Supreme Court may announce Trump ballot paper ruling ahead of Super Tuesday: Live

For all that, Trump moved closer to the Republican nomination on Saturday with victories in the Idaho, Michigan and Missouri caucuses that left Haley even further in his rear-view mirror.

In Michigan, the former president took all 39 delegates that were available on Saturday. In a separate Michigan primary earlier this week, Trump won 12 of the other 16 delegates up for grabs.

Saturday’s contests were the last before Super Tuesday where Haley is desperate to make her case for hanging on in the primaries and providing an alternative to voters.

John Bowden and Gustaf Kilander have this round-up.

He has not taken last night’s result at all well, claiming to have “purposely stayed away from the DC Vote because it is the ‘Swamp,’ with very few delegates, and no upside”.

In rather less welcome news from Trump’s point of view, the nation’s capital delivered Nikki Haley her first victory of the 2024 Republican primary season on Sunday, ending her losing streak and providing her campaign with the sliver of hope it desperately needed.

Haley’s defeat of Trump in DC marks the first time another Republican has beaten him in any contest since 2016 and is the first sign that the 2024 GOP primary will be anything more than a display of his continued dominance of the Republican electorate.

The race was called around 9pm last night, when Haley was leading with 62.9 per cent of the vote. Polls closed at the Madison Hotel, DC’s only Republican voting precinct for the 2024 primary, at 7pm.

Her campaign now looks ahead to Super Tuesday and the possibility of peeling off a few states from Trump’s incoming haul.

The former president remains widely favoured to win the majority of the more than one-third of all GOP delegates up for grabs this week.

He is leading in polls of both California and Texas, the two largest states by far voting on Tuesday.

Donald Trump could find out today whether the US Supreme Court will let him appear on this year’s ballot papers as he attempts to close in on his party’s nomination.

The justices are expected to decide at least one case on Monday, with signs strongly pointing to a resolution of the case from Colorado that threatens to kick Trump off state ballots over his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election.

Should any opinion be delivered, it will be posted on the court’s website later today.

Trump is challenging a ground-breaking decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, which found in December that he should be ineligible to run for the White House again or take part in the state’s primary – one of 16 taking place tomorrow on Super Tuesday – citing an anti-insurrectionist clause housed within Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.

Maine and Illinois followed Colorado’s example and America’s highest court heard arguments on the matter on 8 February, its justices strongly signalling their support for Trump’s arguments.

The Colorado court was the first to invoke the post-Civil War constitutional provision aimed at preventing those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office, a matter the Supreme Court has, until now, never ruled on.

The court indicated on Sunday there will be at least one case decided on Monday, adhering to its custom of not saying which one.

But it also departed from its usual practice in some respects, heightening the expectation that it’s the Trump ballot case that will be handed down.

Except for when the end of the term approaches in late June, the court almost always issues decisions on days when the justices are scheduled to take the bench.

But the next scheduled court day isn’t until 15 March. And, apart from during the coronavirus pandemic when the court was closed, the justices almost always read summaries of their opinions in the courtroom. They won’t be there Monday.

Separately, the justices last week agreed to hear arguments in late April over whether Trump can be criminally prosecuted on election interference charges, including his role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

The court’s decision to step into the politically-charged case, also with little in the way of precedent to guide it, calls into question whether Trump will stand trial before the November election.

The former president faces 91 criminal charges in four prosecutions. Of those, the only one with a trial date that seems on track to hold is his state case in New York, where he’s charged with falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. That case is set for trial on 25 March and the judge has signalled his determination to press ahead.

Additional reporting by agencies.

Super Tuesday, the biggest day of the US presidential primary season, arrives early next month and promises to have a decisive if perhaps somewhat anticlimactic impact on the respective Republican and Democratic races.

All but one of his challengers have fallen away, leaving only the well-funded but under-performing ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley still swinging.

But even she may not make it to Super Tuesday (although she has promised she will), as the next Republican primary takes place in her home state of South Carolina and current polling indicates the Palmetto State’s former governor could be in for another trouncing on her home turf, a further humiliation after she scored fewer votes than the “none of these candidates” box on Nevada ballot papers.

“Is there any way we can call the election for next Tuesday?” a cocky Mr Trump gloated on stage in Las Vegas after that result.

“That’s all I want. I want to call the election for next Tuesday.”

However, if Ms Haley can somehow conjure a surprise victory in either South Carolina on 24 February or Michigan on 27 February, it will be game on for Super Tuesday and we could find ourselves with a very interesting evening indeed.

The Democratic contest is looking equally one-sided, with President Joe Biden seemingly nailed-on to be his party’s candidate again as he seeks a second term in the White House, despite concerns about his advanced age and consistently poor polling.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Sunday she no longer feels bound by a pledge that required all GOP contenders to support the party’s eventual nominee in order to participate in the primary debates.

The Republican National Committee had made the pledge a prerequisite for all candidates, and nearly every major contender signed, except for Donald Trump, the current front-runner, who skipped the debates.

When Haley, Trump’s lone remaining major challenger for the nomination, was asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether she was compelled to honor that commitment, she said, “No. I think I’ll make what decision I want to make.”

She said the “the RNC is now not the same RNC” as it was at the time of the debates. She also maintained that she has always said she had “serious concerns” about Trump, for whom she served as U.N. ambassador.

The RNC is in the midst of major changes, with the chair, Ronna McDaniel, set to leave the job on Friday. She was Trump’s hand-picked choice to lead the RNC shortly after the 2016 election, but Trump now is poised to install loyalists atop the organization. He has announced his preference for North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley, a little-known veteran operative, to replace McDaniel. Trump also has picked his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to serve as committee co-chair.

Haley dismissed questions about whether she would drop out and eventually endorse Trump.

“Right now, my focus is, ‘How do we touch as many voters? How do we win?’” she said. “I want the American people to see that you don’t have to live this way. There is a path forward. And we can do it with someone who can put in eight years, that can constantly focus on results and not the negativity and the baggage that we have right now.”

Trump on Saturday continued his march toward the nomination, winning caucuses in Idaho and Missouri and sweeping the delegate haul at a party convention in Michigan.

Trump’s count is now 244, compared with 24 for Haley. A candidate needs to secure 1,215 delegates to clinch the nomination.

The next event on the Republican calendar was Sunday in the District of Columbia. Two days later is Super Tuesday, when 16 states will hold primaries on what will be the largest day of voting of the year outside of the November election. Trump is on track to lock up the nomination days later.

“I’ve always said this needs to be competitive. As long as we are competitive, as long as we are showing that there is a place for us, I’m going to continue to fight,” Haley said.

Major pharmacy retailers Walgreens and CVS will begin offering the abortion pill mifepristone as early as next week in stores across the US, a move that could significantly expand access to abortion care as the US Supreme Court once again prepares to hear a case that could radically restrict reproductive healthcare for millions of Americans.

Mifepristone is one of two drugs in a two-drug protocol for medication abortion, a procedure that accounts for more than half of all abortions in the US

The drug, which is only available with a prescription, was first approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2000. The pill blocks a hormone necessary for pregnancy development, and is followed by the pill misoprostol, which causes contractions to expel tissue.

That same regimen is also used in miscarriage treatment.

A phased rollout of the drug’s availability in two of the largest pharmacy chains in the US arrives just weeks before the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in a case from right-wing legal groups and anti-abortion activists seeking to revoke the FDA’s approval, part of a years-long campaign to outlaw abortion nationwide.

That case comes before the court less than two years after a decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned a constitutional right to abortion care affirmed in Roe v Wade nearly 50 years earlier.

Patchwork anti-abortion laws across the country have choked off abortion access or effectively outlawed abortion care entirely; mifepristone prescriptions from CVS and Walgreens will only be available in states where abortion is legal.

But “many women will soon have the option to pick up their prescription at a local, certified pharmacy – just as they would for any other medication,” President Joe Biden said in a statement on Friday.

“I encourage all pharmacies that want to pursue this option to seek certification,” he added.