AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File Stacks and burn-off from the ExxonMobil refinery are seen at dusk in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. L ast Monday, the Supreme Court batted off ExxonMobil’s attempt to quash Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy’s investigation of the company’s outsized influence on the country’s climate change policies. Exxon has long been one of the fiercest climate change deniers in the fossil fuel industry. The company has also played a major role in feeding disinformation to the public and to a news media mired in he-said-she-said notions of journalistic balance. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s rejection of its petition to hear the case, the company could now be poised to take a hard fall as Massachusetts and other states and jurisdictions investigate how the company reacted to the climate threat. In 2016, Healey launched an effort to obtain several decades worth of materials on the company’s internal deliberations on climate to uncover what Exxon knew about...

AP Photo/Chuck Burton A voter arrives as a worker walks past during early voting at a polling place in Charlotte, North Carolina. D emocrat Anita Earls, founder and executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, won a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday in the Tar Heel State’s “blue moon” election, so-called since once every 12 years there is an election with no high-profile statewide races on the ballot. Earls is the daughter of a black father and a white mother. Her victory underscores the importance state-level judicial decision-making as the Supreme Court of the United States appears headed into a period of retrenchment on civil rights. Yet in her remarks Tuesday night, Earls turned to Washington as she condemned President Trump’s assertion that he can strike down the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship through an executive order. “The president is sworn, just as I will be, to uphold the Constitution. For him to openly say that...