AP News in Brief
Supreme Court to issue gay marriage decisions Wednesday in last session before summer break
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court is meeting to deliver opinions in two cases that could dramatically alter the rights of gay people across the United States.
• The justices are expected to decide their first-ever cases about gay marriage Wednesday in their last session before the court's summer break.
• The issues before the court are California's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which denies legally married gay Americans a range of tax, health and pension benefits otherwise available to married couples.
• The broadest possible ruling would give gay Americans the same constitutional right to marry as heterosexuals. But several narrower paths also are available, including technical legal outcomes in which the court could end up saying very little about same-sex marriage.
• If the court overturns California's Proposition 8 or allows lower court rulings that struck down the ban to stand, it will take about a month for same-sex weddings to resume for the first time since 2008, San Francisco officials have said.
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Southern states promise quick action on election laws after Supreme Court ruling
• ATLANTA (AP) -- Across the South, Republicans are working to take advantage of a new political landscape after a divided U.S. Supreme Court freed all or part of 15 states, many of them in the old Confederacy, from having to ask Washington's permission before changing election procedures in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.
• After the high court announced its momentous ruling Tuesday, officials in Texas and Mississippi pledged to immediately implement laws requiring voters to show photo identification before getting a ballot. North Carolina Republicans promised they would quickly try to adopt a similar law. Florida now appears free to set its early voting hours however Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP Legislature please. And Georgia's most populous county likely will use county commission districts that Republican state legislators drew over the objections of local Democrats.
• Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 5-4 opinion that struck down as outdated a
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