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      Sixty years after the Voting Rights Act, our voices are being eroded | Al Sharpton

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      In a moment when we should be celebrating one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, we are in fact at a worse place as a nation than when it was passed. Those of us fighting to protect the right to vote find ourselves against a movement that doesn’t want to take us back to 1965. They want to create an America that more closely resembles the one of 1865.Sixty years ago, in a rare and profound act of consensus, Congress passed a law to end the centuries-old rigging of American democracy. Yet today the system is as rigged as ever, with the battered Voting Rights Act on life support.The erosion of our rights is playing out before our eyes. Purged voting rolls have helped to install a regime that arrests undocumented people and American citizens alike. A loss of faith in the system led many people to stay at home on election day; now they live in fear of walking outside their door. Empowering states to create restrictive laws has yielded less access to not only the right to vote, but to healthcare, jobs and home ownership.At the center of this is Donald Trump – a man whose legacy as president is marked by rampant voter disenfranchisement. This is a man whose claim to fame is fame itself, who views voting as nothing more than a popularity contest that he’s terrified to lose. It’s why he questioned the integrity of our democratic network in 2020 instead of graciously accepting that 7 million more Americans preferred Joe Biden over him.Trump’s campaign against voting rights marches on, as he fills the courts with judges who will continue to kill civil rights through a thousand cuts. Barriers to voting and the silence of those still able to cast ballots has emboldened and empowered him to bully media conglomerates into complacency and corporations into abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Free of fear from the voters, Trump has gone full bore in desecrating the legacy of the civil rights movement – going so far as to use government files on Dr Martin Luther King Jr to distract from his own political headaches.But we cannot in this moment forget the power King saw in the right to vote. In his 1957 Give Us the Ballot speech at the Lincoln Memorial, King declared to 25,000 people that with the vote: “We will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.”Yet today that fear persists, perhaps stronger than ever. We have indeed come full circle from March 1965, when the nation was rattled by the images of a young John Lewis and dozens of peaceful protesters getting their heads cracked open and their organs bruised on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The national outrage of Bloody Sunday that sparked mobilization toward passage of the Voting Rights Act has been replaced by a numbness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the arrests of elected officials and the snipping of social safety nets.The solution to it all remains the right to vote. A week after the brutal beatings in Selma, King declared voting “Civil Right No. 1” in the New York Times. He called it the “foundation stone for political action”, one we must build upon today. Within five months, Congress bravely voted to end racist literacy tests, enable federal examiners to protect voter registration, and fight the ugliest forms of voter suppression.America was stronger for a generation, until the election of her first Black president sparked a conservative backlash that is today at its peak. The opening salvo came in 2013, when the supreme court gutted the law’s core federal pre-clearance provisions in Shelby county v Holder. It chipped away more eight years later, giving states further authority to enforce stricter voter ID laws, purge voter rolls, and reverse early and absentee programs meant to expand access to the polls. In short, Shelby v Holder opened the door for a manicured version of Jim Crow.It is for these reasons that we will lead a March on Wall Street later this month. The 28 August demonstration, held on the anniversary of the March on Washington, will send a message to Trump and his Maga allies in Congress. You may restrict our ability to vote in the president, the senators and the Congress members we support. But you cannot restrict how we vote with our dollars. Black voters have a skyrocketing buying power expected to hit $1.7tn by 2030. We must use it to make sure those we support stand by us.Until we get to a day when the integrity of voting is restored, when we can finally pass the John R Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, we will use the power we have. Trump may use the bully pulpit of the White House to influence companies’ investments in Black America, but we have the ability to hit their bottom line.Celebrating this anniversary of the Voting Rights Act means honoring the sacrifices of those who shed their blood and laid down their lives for our most fundamental freedom and recommitting ourselves to the struggle by tapping into the unwavering hope and persistence that fueled the civil rights movement. To settle for anything less would be unconditional surrender to the segregationists against whom King, congressman Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer and the other great civil rights leaders stood.

      Rev Al Sharpton is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and radio talkshow host More

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      My travels in Trump’s Florida: Maga superstars, gen Z Republicans – and the shame of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

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      The mezzanine floor of the Tampa Convention Center buzzes chaotically with rightwing chatter: conspiracy theories, grievance politics and Christian nationalism. Look in any direction and someone in front of you, washed in sharp studio lights, is drawing a crowd and creating content.Ahead of me, Russell Brand sits on a white sofa, broadcasting live on the conservative video-streaming service Rumble – his guest is the “alt-right” influencer Jack Posobiec. To the left, along an alleyway lined with small broadcast booths, is the longtime Donald Trump adviser and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who is holding court on a podcast. To the rear, on a large metal scaffold, is Steve Bannon’s War Room channel, busy cutting between live footage of a small protest outside the event and adverts for various Trump-aligned products.View image in fullscreenThe panorama serves as a realisation of one of Bannon’s notorious PR idioms: flooding the zone with shit. This is the Turning Point Student Action summit, an annual gathering targeted at gen Z conservatives, which draws thousands from across the US. It was a driving force in Trump’s success among younger male voters at the last election.In the arena next to the mezzanine, a conveyor belt of Maga superstars walk out to deliver keynote speeches, accompanied by spitting-flame cannon, pounding dubstep, spinning lasers and strobe lights. Brand delivers a bizarre diatribe – part standup comedy, part evangelical sermon – about his newfound conversion to Christianity in a word salad of alliteration and non sequiturs. Unsurprisingly, he makes no mention of the multiple rape and sexual assault charges he faces in the UK (to which he has pleaded not guilty).He is immediately followed by Tom Homan, Trump’s loudmouth border tsar, who is met with cries of “USA, USA!” as he refers to himself in the third person: “Tom Homan is running one of the biggest deportation operations this country has ever seen!” It is hard to keep up with this melange of fearmongering, severity and self-congratulation. It’s the epitome of Trump’s America.My colleague Tom Silverstone and I came here as the first stop on a journey across southern Florida. Once the quintessential swing state, it is now solidly Republican – and home to some of the president’s vast sources of personal wealth, including his beach club, Mar-a-Lago. It is also one of the hubs of his mass‑deportation programme.It seems no coincidence that the fast pace at Turning Point mirrors the first six months of Trump’s second term, which has lurched from scandal to extreme policy to blatant self-dealing at extraordinary speed – from the administration’s acceptance of a $400m luxury jet from the state of Qatar to his family’s creation of a private members’ club in Washington DC, charging $500,000 (£380,000) in annual fees.The apex of these brazen efforts to monetise the presidency is Trump’s venture into the world of cryptocurrency. He lauched his $TRUMP memecoin three days before he was sworn into office. These digital currencies have little to no financial use and are prone to rapid market fluctuations. Analysts estimate that the president’s family has netted about $315m since the venture launched into this volatile and speculative market and hundreds of thousands of investors have lost out. The whole episode lends itself to the argument that Trump’s return to power marks the advent of a second gilded age, last seen in the US after the civil war, when the unprecedented dominance of industry and technology led to rampant corruption and pronounced inequality.In May, some of the largest $TRUMP coin investors were invited to a dinner with the president at his Virginia golf course, then on a VIP tour of the White House, which some observers described as a blatant pay-to-play. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has said that Trump abides by all conflict of interest laws “that are applicable to the president”.No one at Turning Point seems particularly concerned about any of these apparent grifts, though. Anthony Watson, a contributor, stands in the merchandise area of the convention, where limited-edition gold Trump golf shoes are $500. He flicks away my questions about the Qatari jet with little thought.“What’s wrong about accepting it?” he says, after I point out it might fall under the general definition of a bribe. “Well, what did they get in exchange? Until you know, it’s speculation.”I track down Stone to ask how he thinks the founding fathers, who authored the foreign emoluments clause of the US constitution to block corruption and limit foreign influence, might view Trump’s move into memecoin. “I don’t think they could envisage cryptocurrency, period, or the technological age that we’re in,” he says, dodging the question.Beyond sheer audacity, these money-making schemes also strike at a clear contradiction within the Maga movement and its America First agenda. While most remain anonymous, some of the largest investors in Trump’s memecoin have been revealed as foreign nationals, one with ties to the Chinese Communist party. How does that tally with America First?View image in fullscreenI address this question to Bannon, who greets me with a smile and professes his love of the Guardian, despite labelling us “fucking commies from England”.He is willing to acknowledge a degree of unease, particularly when I mention the Chinese Communist party. But he still finds a way of reconciling it, arguing that the VIP event at the White House underscored a drive for “entrepreneurial capitalism”. “I’ve just got so much on my plate right now, I just don’t even focus on the memecoins,” he says, adding that “the crypto thing is not at that big a level”.It seems to mark a turn for Bannon who, in 2019, described cryptocurrencies as having a “big future … in this global populist revolt” and – according to reporting by ABC News – partly took control of an anti-Joe-Biden memecoin in 2021, along with the Republican strategist Boris Epshteyn. He seems uneasy when I ask about this venture, named $FJB (officially Freedom Jobs Business, unofficially shorthand for Fuck Joe Biden), given allegations of missing funds, reported failures to donate promised money to charity and a potential examination by the US justice department (DoJ) in 2023.“I think I put $500,000 into it,” Bannon recalls. Did he lose it all? “Yes. I think I lost all of it,” he says. He calls reports of a DoJ probe “fake news”.We leave Turning Point shortly after Bannon’s keynote address, which includes a flurry of praise for the immigration crackdown and receives a large round of applause. “Mass deportations now. Amnesty never,” he says. We drive about four hours south of Tampa to the centre of the Everglades, where a single‑lane highway is surrounded by cypress trees and mangroves.The administration’s immigration enforcement efforts are, in some ways, as brash and open as the Trump family’s presidential profit-making. Half a mile out, a large, newly installed bright-blue road sign announces we are approaching “Alligator Alcatraz”, a hastily constructed tent-like detention centre, surrounded by mosquito-infested swampland, about 50 miles outside Miami.View image in fullscreenIn a calculated display of draconian showmanship, Trump toured the facility in July, seeming to revel in its harsh conditions. It has become a symbol of this era of removals. Of the 57,000 people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than 70% have no criminal record.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis morning, a small congregation of protesters stand by the roadside looking on in dismay. “This place is shameful,” reads one sign.View image in fullscreenI explain where we have come from in Tampa and ask how they think the centre they are protesting against is connected to my conversations about Trump’s self-enrichment at the convention.“It’s all part of the same thing,” says one older female protester. “For Trump, it’s about power and money. He’s doing everything he can to make money while he’s president. But he knows he has to be in power to maintain that, and this is all about power,” she says, gesturing towards the detention centre. “Power and fear.”View image in fullscreenA few minutes later, a white SUV emerges from a roadway leading to the centre. The car pulls over to a grassy embankment and a family emerges. They had tried to gain access to a relative named Martin Sanchez. They were blocked from entering.Sanchez, they tell me, has lived in the US without paperwork for the past 25 years, since coming from Mexico. He has two young children and no criminal record; he pays his taxes and works as a landscaper in the city of Palm Beach. He was arrested there four days earlier while on his way to work, mowing lawns.“He calls me a lot,” says his cousin Janet Garcia. “He hasn’t showered. They treat him like a prisoner. He got caught for working and that’s it.”She stares back towards the detention centre in the piercing sunlight. “Without immigrants, this country is gonna go down,” she says. “We have a felon in the White House, but the people they’ve got in here don’t even have a [traffic] ticket.”There is something stark about the location of Martin’s arrest. Palm Beach county, on Florida’s eastern coast, is the location of some of the most pronounced and expanding income disparities in the state. Average house prices here exceed the median income by six times. Known as the “Wall Street of the south”, its corporation-tax-friendly climate has drawn many of the world’s biggest finance groups and it is home to at least 67 billionaires. The highest profile of these is, of course, Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago club is situated on a tree-lined street by the sea. A year ago, it raised its annual membership fees to $1m.We drive to a food pantry a short distance from Trump’s club, where a line of about 20 people are waiting for the doors to open. A laminated sign on the wall warns that immigration officials will need a valid warrant to enter the premises and that the pantry, run by a local non-profit group, continues to serve people regardless of their legal status.The county has a significant population of people from Haiti, many of whom are under threat of deportation after Trump moved to end their temporary immigration protections, despite the security crisis in the country. “Some of them are afraid to come,” says a volunteer minister. “It’s hard, you can imagine. You have no food, but, because of your immigration status, you stay home.”The programme’s director, Ruth Mageria, shows me the large stockpiles of food in the fridges and tells me the pantry has seen a 71% increase in use over the past five years. Things are expected to get worse, as a spending bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Trump will cut basic food-assistance benefits for an estimated 22.3 million families across the country, while securing a host of tax cuts for the wealthy. The pantry has started preparing to ration its reserves.With a thunderstorm rolling in over the Atlantic and dark clouds forming like a tidal wave on the horizon, we seek out Mar-a-Lago. We stand on a bridge, on the newly renamed President Donald J Trump Boulevard, and look out over billionaires row. I’m reminded that this community was founded during the US’s first gilded age.It is an inauspicious end to this 400-mile journey across the state. The roads have emptied, but a small crew of landscapers, already drenched, are trimming the tall palms outside the club. Oliver Laughland is the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief More

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      RFK Jr’s health department to halt $500m in mRNA vaccine research

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      The US Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it would terminate 22 federal contracts for mRNA-based vaccines, questioning the safety of a technology credited with helping end the Covid pandemic and saving millions of lives.The unit, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, helps companies develop medical supplies to address public health threats, and had provided billions of dollars for development of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.HHS said the wind-down includes cancellation of a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans and the right to purchase the shots, as previously reported in May.The US health agency said it was also rejecting or canceling multiple pre-award solicitations, including proposals from Pfizer, Sanofi Pasteur, CSL Seqirus, Gritstone and others.In total, the affected projects are worth “nearly $500 million”, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said. Certain late-stage projects were excluded from the move “to preserve prior taxpayer investment”.This is the latest development under US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a longtime vaccine skeptic who has been making sweeping changes to reshape vaccines, food and medicine policies.“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” Kennedy said in a statement.Kennedy said the HHS is terminating these programs because data show these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”, but did not offer scientific evidence.“We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate,” Kennedy said.HHS said the decision follows a comprehensive review of mRNA-related investments initiated during the Covid-19 public health emergency.Since taking office, Kennedy, who spent two decades sowing misinformation around immunization, has overseen a major overhaul of US health policy – firing, for example, a panel of vaccine experts that advise the government and replacing them with his own appointees.In its first meeting, the new panel promptly voted to ban a longstanding vaccine preservative targeted by the anti-vaccine movement, despite its strong safety record.He has also ordered a sweeping new study on the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.Unlike traditional vaccines, which often use weakened or inactivated forms of the target virus or bacteria, mRNA shots deliver genetic instructions into the host’s cells, prompting them to produce a harmless decoy of the pathogen and train the immune system to fight the real thing.Though in development for decades, mRNA vaccines were propelled from lab benches to widespread use through Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed – a public-private partnership led by Barda that poured billions into companies to accelerate development.The technology’s pioneers, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, were awarded the 2023 Nobel prize in medicine for their work contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times”. More

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      Trump news at a glance: president says Republicans ‘entitled’ to more seats in Texas amid spiralling redistricting fight

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      A day after Texas Democrat lawmakers fled the state in an effort to halt Republican efforts to redraw their congressional map, Donald Trump said that his party was entitled to the five more seats they could pick up if the updated maps pass through the state’s congress.“We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” Trump said. “We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”Democrats in other states have said they will retaliate, setting the stage for a nasty and prolonged redistricting tit-for-tat that could last for years.Here are the key US politics stories of the day:Texas senator asks FBI to help locate and arrest Democrats for leaving stateThe US senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the FBI to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who left the state to forestall a plan sought by Donald Trump to aggressively redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that could help Republicans keep their House majority after the 2026 midterm elections.Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, announced what experts say is likely a longshot bid to convince a court to declare the seats of “any rogue lawmakers” vacant if they do not return to work at the statehouse by Friday.Read the full storyEpstein scandal broadens as new trove of letters publishedThe long-running scandal surrounding the disgraced late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein broadened on Tuesday after the New York Times published a trove of previously unseen letters to Epstein from numerous powerful figures as well as unseen photographs from inside his Manhattan mansion.Read the full storyHouse panel subpoenas Clintons for Epstein testimonyThe Republican-led House oversight committee on Tuesday issued subpoenas to Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as several former attorneys general and directors of the FBI, demanding “testimony related to horrific crimes perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein”.Read the full storyRwanda agrees to take up to 250 migrants from the USThe Rwandan government has said it would accept up to 250 migrants from the US under a deal agreed with Washington but gave no details on who could be included. The Trump administration’s deportation drive has included negotiating arrangements to send people to third countries, among them South Sudan and Eswatini.Read the full storyPam Bondi seeks grand jury review of origins of Trump-Russia investigationThe US attorney general, Pam Bondi, is said to be ordering prosecutors to present evidence to a grand jury investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia inquiry, according to the Associated Press.The criminal probe follows referrals from Trump administration intelligence officials and targets the investigation that established Moscow interfered in the 2016 election on Donald Trump’s behalf, a source who spoke on condition of anonymity told AP.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      News Corp has warned Donald Trump that AI is cannibalizing the content of his books, including The Art of the Deal.

      Donald Trump said he would soon announce his pick for an open seat on the Federal Reserve board and possibly his choice for Fed chair, but ruled out treasury secretary Scott Bessent.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 August 2025. More

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      US judge blocks Trump officials from diverting disaster prevention grants

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      A federal judge blocked the Trump administration on Tuesday from diverting funds from a multibillion-dollar grant program designed to protect communities against natural disasters.US district judge Richard Stearns in Boston issued a preliminary injunction preventing the government from spending money allocated to the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (Bric) program for other purposes.Twenty mostly Democratic-led states sued the administration last month, saying the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) lacked power to cancel the Bric program without congressional approval.Fema is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Neither agency immediately responded to requests for comment.Created in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term, the Bric program helps state and local governments protect major infrastructure such as roads and bridges before the occurrence of floods, hurricanes and other disasters.According to the lawsuit, Fema approved about $4.5bn in grants for nearly 2,000 projects, primarily in coastal states, over the last four years.But the agency announced in April it would end the program, calling it wasteful, ineffective and politicized.Stearns said that while Fema does not appear to have since canceled grants, states should not have to wait to sue until after they lose funding, while the cancellation of new grants suggested Fema considered an eventual shutdown a fait accompli.He also said the states have shown a realistic chance of irreparable harm if the Bric program ended.“There is an inherent public interest in ensuring that the government follows the law, and the potential hardship accruing to the states from the funds being repurposed is great,” the judge wrote.“The Bric program is designed to protect against natural disasters and save lives,” Stearns added. “The potential hardship to the government, in contrast, is minimal.”Led by Massachusetts and Washington, the 20 states that sued also include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.The offices of Massachusetts’ and Washington’s attorneys general had no immediate comment. More

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      Trump administration cuts New York City’s anti-terrorism funding days after skyscraper attack

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      The Trump administration said it would cut terrorism prevention funding for New York City, according to a grant notice posted days after a gunman killed four people inside a Manhattan skyscraper.The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) stated in a grant notice posted on Friday that New York City would receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund. The amount was listed in a single line of an 80-page Fema notice on the grant program.US Congress created the program to help cities prevent terrorist attacks.“It makes absolutely no sense, and no justification has been given to cut NY’s allocation given the rise in the threat environment,” a spokesperson for the New York state division of homeland security and emergency services said in a statement on Monday afternoon.Manhattan has been the site of two attacks on high-profile corporate executives in the last year. The most recent attack came from a gunman armed with an assault-style rifle in late July, who killed four people inside an office building that houses the headquarters of the NFL and several major financial firms.New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, highlighted the attack in her late July letter to the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, asking why the Trump administration had not announced the amounts each city would receive from the program this year. Fema is part of the Department of Homeland Security.Noem’s office did not respond to two messages from Reuters asking why the federal government cut New York’s funding.In December 2024, the chief executive of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot dead on the street in Manhattan in a targeted attack. And security has been particularly tight in New York City ever since the al-Qaida terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which killed almost 3,000 people in lower Manhattan when Islamist extremists flew hijacked passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.Fema uses “an analysis of relative risk of terrorism” to decide how much money cities will receive, according to the grant notice posted on Friday. The agency may change the amounts later, according to the notice.In 2023, the agency considered city visitor counts, population density and proximity to international borders, among other factors, to determine the totals, according to a report signed by then Fema administrator Deanne Criswell.Fema has been decreasing terrorism prevention money for New York City each year since at least fiscal year 2022. The drop is much more drastic this year at 41% year-over-year.The New York City police department has used the funding in the past to pay for the Domain Awareness System, a network of cameras, license plate readers and detection devices, according to a 2016 statement from the former mayor Bill de Blasio’s office. More

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      Texas senator asks FBI to help locate and arrest Democrats for leaving state

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      The US senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the FBI to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who left the state to forestall a plan sought by Donald Trump to aggressively redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that could help Republicans keep their House majority after the 2026 midterm elections.The senator’s request is a significant escalation in the fast-moving showdown that could set up a confrontation between the blue state leaders shielding the Democratic state lawmakers and the Trump administration. Earlier on Tuesday, Texas Democrats denied a legislative quorum for the second day in a row by scattering across the country, with many decamping to Chicago, Illinois, where the Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, has vowed to protect them.In a letter to the FBI director, Kash Patel, Cornyn, a Republican, said “federal resources are necessary to locate the out-of-state Texas legislators who are potentially acting in violation of the law”.The FBI declined to comment on the senator’s request to involve its agents.Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, said he would ask a court to declare vacant the seats of “any rogue lawmakers” who had not returned to work at the statehouse by Friday.“The people of Texas elected lawmakers, not jet-setting runaways looking for headlines,” Paxton, the long-embattled Trump loyalist challenging Cornyn for the Republican Senate nomination, said in a statement. “If you don’t show up to work, you get fired.”Texas House speaker Dustin Burrows said the chamber would attempt to reach quorum again on Friday, after it failed for a second consecutive day on Tuesday,Trump, who had been unusually silent on the dramatic showdown that he set in motion, also weighed in on Tuesday, arguing that Republicans were entitled to the five additional seats they could stand to gain if the new map were approved.“We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” Trump said in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box. “We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”“In Illinois, what’s happened is terrible what they’re doing,” the president added. “And you notice, they go to Illinois for safety, but that’s all gerrymandered. California is gerrymandered. We should have many more seats in Congress in California. It’s all gerrymandered.”Democrats and Republicans have both used gerrymandering to maximize their party’s political power, though in recent years Republicans have been far more aggressive – and effective – in deploying the tactic.California voters approved an independent re-districting commission to draw the state’s congressional maps for the first time in 2010. But the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has vowed to “fight fire with fire” by asking voters to override the commission and approve new maps that would favor California Democrats if Texas moved forward with its gerrymandering plan. At a press conference on Monday, Newsom said he hoped Texas Republicans would retreat, but that California would not hesitate to respond in a way that carried “profound national implications” for balance of power in Washington.At a news conference in Illinois, Texas Democrats were joined by Pritzker, who hailed them as “heroes”, and the Democratic National Committee chair Ken, Martin, who accused Republicans of attempting to “steal their way to victory”.Pritzker has also said that Illinois may respond to Texas’s efforts by redrawing its own map in Democrats’ favor, given that “everything has to be on the table”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump came up with a new scheme to rig the system by ramming through a corrupt, mid-decade redistricting plan that would steal five congressional seats, silencing millions of voters, especially Black and Latino voters,” the governor said.The Texas house reconvened at 1pm local time on Tuesday, but enough Democrats were still outside the state to deny quorum for a second day. “There being 94 members present, quorum is not present,” said the House speaker, Dustin Burrows, a Republican. Burrows added that the Texas department of public safety was “actively working to compel their attendance after I signed their civil arrest warrants yesterday”.He said the House would reconvene and try to make quorum again on Friday.Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic state representative who left Texas for Illinois on Sunday, said that she and her colleagues planned to be absent from the state capitol for “as long as it takes” to thwart the Republicans’ redistricting plans.The current special legislative session, called by Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, lasts until 19 August. “As long as we need to stay away and deny quorum on this bill to pass the truck maps, I will stay away,” Hinojosa said, speaking from a suburb of Chicago.Abbott could continue to call additional special sessions, and it’s not clear how long Democrats could stay outside the state. Each lawmaker who has absconded faces a $500-per-day fine, and Abbott has ordered the Texas department of public safety to “locate, arrest and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.Hinojosa shrugged off Republicans’ threats to remove Democratic members from office, calling it “disrespectful” to the Texans who elected them, many of whom, she said, have expressed gratitude to their lawmakers for standing up to Trump. Though she lamented the redistricting “arms race” that the Texas undertaking had set off – with Democratic states vowing to respond in kind – Hinojosa said it was imperative that her party confront the “real, present-day threats” posed by redrawn congressional maps.“Democrats need to fight to win,” she said. “We fight to win for the day, and we take tomorrow as it comes.” More