More stories

  • in

    Trump news at a glance: Lutnick threatens Harvard patents; former Fox commentator bound for UN

    The Trump administrations has threatened Harvard’s lucrative portfolio of patents amid its long-running dispute with the university, accusing it of breaching legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research.In a letter, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick demanded that Harvard provide within four weeks a list of all patents stemming from federally funded research grants, including how the patents are used and whether any licensing requires “substantial US manufacturing”. Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Many civil rights experts, faculty and White House critics believe the Trump administration’s targeting of schools for supposedly failing to address antisemitism on campus is a pretext to assert federal control and threaten academic freedom and free speech.Trump administration threatens Harvard federal funding and patentsIn his letter to Harvard, Lutnick also said the commerce department had begun a “march-in” process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses.As of 1 July 2024, Harvard held more than 5,800 patents, and had more than 900 technology licenses with over 650 industry partners, according to the Harvard Office of Technology Development.Read the full storyTammy Bruce nominated for US deputy ambassador to UNDonald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating former Fox News commentator Tammy Bruce as the next US deputy representative to the United Nations.Bruce has been serving as the chief spokesperson for the state department since Trump took office this year. Trump said Bruce, who had no prior foreign policy experience before becoming spokesperson in January, “will represent our country brilliantly at the United Nations”.Read the full storyIRS commissioner reportedly removed over immigration policy disputeThe removal of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner Billy Long after just two months came after the federal tax collection agency said it could not release some information on taxpayers suspected of being in the US illegally, it was reported on Saturday.The Washington Post reported the Department of Homeland Security had sent the IRS a list of 40,000 names that it suspected of being in the country illegally. DHS asked the tax service to crosscheck confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses.The IRS reportedly responded that it was able to verify fewer than 3% of the names on the DHS list, but declined requests for further information, citing taxpayer privacy rights.Read the full story‘We are at war – bring it on’: Democrats ready to fight dirty to stop TrumpKen Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, speaking in Chicago this week, said: “This is a new Democratic party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight, and we are going to fight fire with fire.”It was a brutally honest acknowledgement of what a decade of Donald Trump’s politics has wrought. Out go the courtly and courteous playing-by-the-rules Democrats convinced that Maga is a passing phase, a fever that will break. In come a new generation of pugnacious Democrats prepared to take off the gloves and fight dirty.The trigger for this scorched-earth approach is Trump’s push to find more Republican seats in the House of Representatives ahead of next year’s crucial midterm elections through gerrymandering, a process of manipulating electoral maps to benefit one party over another.Read the full storyHow did we get all this gerrymandering? A brief history Extreme GOP gerrymanders have remade American politics over the last 15 years. They have locked Republicans into office in state legislatures nationwide, even in purple states when Democratic candidates win more votes. They have delivered a reliable and enduring edge to the GOP in the race for Congress.How did we get here? How did gerrymandered lines, rather than voters, gain the power to determine winners and losers?Read the full storyPete Hegseth reposts video that says women shouldn’t be allowed to voteThe US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.Hegseth reposted a nearly seven-minute report CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist. In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.Doug Pagitt, a pastor and the executive director of the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good, said the ideas in the video were views that “small fringes of Christians keep” and said it was “very disturbing” that Hegseth would amplify them.Read the full storyUnder-fire FDA figure returns just days after leaving Vinay Prasad is returning to his role overseeing vaccine, gene therapy and blood product regulation at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a little more than a week after he left the agency.Two days before Prasad stepped down last month, Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist, had released misleadingly edited audio to suggest Prasad had admitted sticking pins in a Trump voodoo doll, when the full audio made it clear that he was talking about the kind of thing an imagined liberal Trump-hater would do.Prasad is an oncologist who was a fierce critic of US Covid-19 vaccines and mask mandates.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    A Georgia man who opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta on Friday, killing a police officer, had blamed a Covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, a law enforcement official said.

    Documents filed recently in the New Orleans Roman Catholic archdiocese’s five-year bankruptcy case provide more clarity on how claims will be doled out to survivors of clergy abuse if a proposed settlement is approved.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened on 8 August 2025. More

  • in

    Trump administration threatens to strip Harvard University of lucrative patents

    The latest phase of the Trump administration’s offensive against Harvard University is a comprehensive review of the university’s federally funded research programs, and the threat to strip the school’s lucrative portfolio of patents.In a letter to the Harvard president, Alan Garber, posted online on Friday, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, accused Harvard of breaching its legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research programs and patents.Lutnick also said the commerce department has begun a “march-in” process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses.“The Department places immense value on the groundbreaking scientific and technological advancements that emerge from the Government’s partnerships with institutions like Harvard,” Lutnick wrote.He said that carried a “critical responsibility” for Harvard to ensure that its intellectual property derived from federal funding is used to maximize benefits to the American people.Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Friday’s letter ratchets up White House pressure on Harvard, which it has accused of civil rights violations for failing to take steps dictated by the administration in response to accusations that student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza were antisemitic.Harvard sued in April after the administration began stripping or freezing billions of dollars of federal research money.In his letter, Lutnick demanded that Harvard provide within four weeks a list of all patents stemming from federally funded research grants, including how the patents are used and whether any licensing requires “substantial US manufacturing”.As of 1 July 2024, Harvard held more than 5,800 patents, and had more than 900 technology licenses with over 650 industry partners, according to the Harvard Office of Technology Development.Other universities faced with federal research funding losses have signed settlement agreements with the government, including Columbia University, which agreed to pay more than $220m, and Brown University, which agreed to pay $50m.Harvard’s president reportedly told faculty that a New York Times report that the university was open to spending up to $500m to settle with the government was inaccurate and had been leaked to reporters by White House officials.The bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act was sponsored by senators Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas and signed into law by Jimmy Carter near the end of his term.Carter said at the time it was important that industrial innovation promote US economic health, and the legislation “goes far toward strengthening the effectiveness of the patent incentive in stimulating innovation in the United States”.Many civil rights experts, faculty and White House critics believe the Trump administration’s targeting of schools for supposedly failing to address antisemitism is a pretext to assert federal control and threaten academic freedom and free speech. More

  • in

    Trump nominates ex-Fox commentator Tammy Bruce for deputy UN ambassador

    Donald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating Tammy Bruce, the state department spokesperson, as the next US deputy representative to the United Nations, which would make the former Fox News commentator an ambassador.The president made the announcement on Truth Social, where he praised Bruce as a “Great Patriot, Television Personality, and Bestselling Author”.She has been serving as the chief spokesperson for the state department since Trump took office this year.Trump said Bruce, who had no prior foreign policy experience before being named state department spokesperson in January, “will represent our Country brilliantly at the United Nations”.Bruce is a former radio host who was a commentator on Fox News for more than 20 years, where she also served as an occasional guest host of Trump favorite Sean Hannity’s show. She served as the president of the National Organization for Women’s Los Angeles chapter from 1990 to 1996. Before her political conversion to conservatism, she hosted a radio show where her outspoken views were broadcast widely on Los Angeles station KFI, and she was one of the few radio commentators representing the progressive movement at that time.Bruce was fired from her radio job after she vocally protested OJ Simpson’s 1995 acquittal and later became a critic of progressive feminism.She rose to national prominence thanks to her conservative TV appearances and writing. In 2002, Bruce published her book The New Thought Police, in which she claimed to “expose the dangerous rise of Left-wing McCarthyism”. She was also briefly a contributor to the Guardian’s opinion pages.Bruce, a lesbian who was given an award by the Log Cabin Republicans at a Mar-a-Lago gala in 2022, has been outspoken in her opposition to transgender rights. She has shared articles that spread misinformation about the trans community, including pieces featuring anti-trans “detransitioner” activist Chloe Cole.As a spokesperson, she has defended the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions, ranging from its mass deportation policies to its handling of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which Trump had promised on the campaign trail he would quickly end.If Bruce is confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, she could be in post before the man nominated to be her boss, Mike Waltz. The former national security adviser’s Senate confirmation for US ambassador to the UN has reportedly been stalled by Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who clashed with Waltz over his prior support for keeping US troops in Afghanistan. More

  • in

    IRS commissioner’s removal reportedly over clash on undocumented immigrant data

    The removal of the Internal Revenue Service commissioner Billy Long after just two months in the post came after the federal tax collection agency said it could not release some information on taxpayers suspected of being in the US illegally, it was reported on Saturday.The IRS and the White House had clashed over using tax data to help locate suspected undocumented immigrants soon before Long was dismissed by the administration, according to the Washington Post.Long’s dismissal came less than two months after he was confirmed, making his service as Senate-confirmed IRS commissioner the briefest in the agency’s 163-year history. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent will serve as acting commissioner, making him the agency’s seventh leader this year.The outlet reported the Department of Homeland Security had sent the IRS a list of 40,000 names on Thursday that it suspects of being in the country illegally. DHS asked the tax service to crosscheck confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses.The IRS reportedly responded that it was able to verify fewer than 3% of the names on the DHS list, and mostly names that came with an individual taxpayer identification, or ITIN number, provided by DHS.Administration officials then requested information on the taxpayers the IRS identified, which the service declined to do, citing taxpayer privacy rights.The White House has identified the IRS as a component of its crackdown on illegal immigration and hopes that the tax agency help locate as many as 7 million people in the US without authorization. In April, homeland security struck a data sharing agreement with the treasury department – which oversees the IRS.But Long appears to have resisted acting on that agreement, saying the IRS would not hand over confidential taxpayer information outside its statutory obligation to the treasury.White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson rejected the notion that the IRS was not in harmony with administration priorities.“Any absurd assertion other than everyone being aligned on the mission is simply false and totally fake news,” Johnson told the Post. “The Trump administration is working in lockstep to eliminate information silos and to prevent illegal aliens from taking advantage of benefits meant for hardworking American taxpayers,” she added.In fact, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7bn in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, including $59.4bn to the federal government, helping to fund social security and Medicare, despite being excluded from most benefits, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy thinktank.DHS told the Post that its agreement with IRS “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected, while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations”.Pressure on federal agencies to conform to administration priorities has also led to pressures on the Census Bureau to conduct a mid-decade population review as well as the firing of Bureau of Labor head last week after it published a unfavorable job report.After being dismissed on Friday, Long, a former six-term Missouri congressman, said that he would be the new US ambassador to Iceland.“It is a honor to serve my friend President Trump and I am excited to take on my new role as the ambassador to Iceland,” Long said in post on X. “I am thrilled to answer his call to service and deeply committed to advancing his bold agenda. Exciting times ahead!”He followed that up with a more humorous entry that referred to former TV Superman actor Dean Cain’s decision, at 59, to join to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency.“I saw where Former Superman actor Dean Cain says he’s joining ICE so I got all fired up and thought I’d do the same. So I called @realDonaldTrump last night and told him I wanted to join ICE and I guess he thought I said Iceland? Oh well.” More

  • in

    Vinay Prasad returns to FDA days after leaving under pressure from Laura Loomer

    Vinay Prasad is returning to his role overseeing vaccine, gene therapy and blood product regulation at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a little more than a week after he left the agency.“At the FDA’s request, Dr Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,” Department Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement to Reuters.Prasad left the agency on 30 July after just a few months as director of the center.Endpoints News, which covers the biotech industry, first reported the return of Prasad.Prasad, an oncologist who was a fierce critic of US Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates, was named the center’s director by the FDA’s commissioner, Marty Makary, in May.Criticism of Prasad’s tenure intensified around the agency’s handling of a gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) from Sarepta Therapeutics.The FDA-approved therapy played a role in the death of two teens who had advanced DMD. After a third death in a separate experimental gene therapy from the company, the FDA asked Sarepta on 18 July to stop all shipments of the approved DMD therapy, saying it had safety concerns.The FDA changed course on Sarepta on 28 July and said shipments to the main group of patients for the drug could restart.Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist with outsized sway over Donald Trump, had called Prasad a “progressive leftist saboteur” who was undermining the agency’s work.Two days before Prasad stepped down last month, Loomer had released misleadingly edited audio to suggest that that Prasad had admitted sticking pins in a Trump voodoo doll, when the full audio made it clear that he was talking about the kind of thing an imagined liberal Trump-hater would do.Loomer reacted to the news of Prasad’s return on Saturday by renewing her attacks on him in a social media post in which she promised to produce “exposes of officials within HHS and FDA” in the weeks ahead. “There are several Senate Confirmation hearings coming up and I have multiple oppo books ready for distribution!” she wrote.Prasad was a physician who joined the agency from the University of California, San Francisco. He has had stints at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.The FDA and other health agencies have seen multiple shake-ups in recent months under the leadership of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. More

  • in

    Trump reportedly considers reclassifying marijuana as less dangerous drug

    Donald Trump is considering reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.At a $1m-a-plate fundraiser at his New Jersey golf club earlier this month, Trump told attendees he was interested in making such a change, the people, who declined to be named, told the newspaper.The reclassification, to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I controlled substances and make it a Schedule III drug, was proposed by the Biden administration, but not enacted. The change would make it much easier to buy and sell marijuana and make the legal multibillion-dollar industry more profitable.The guests at Trump’s fundraiser included Kim Rivers, chief executive of Trulieve, one of the largest marijuana companies, who encouraged Trump to pursue the change and expand medical marijuana research, the report said.During Trump’s first term, two Soviet-born Republican donors, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, directly appealed to Trump for help with their plan to sell marijuana in states where recreational use was legal. Audio of the 2018 dinner, which was secretly recorded by the two men, revealed that Trump was skeptical, telling the two men that he believed marijuana use “does cause an IQ problem; you lose IQ points”.In the same conversation, the Ukrainian-born Parnas first suggested to Trump that he should remove the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and shared a false rumor that the diplomat was badmouthing the president by “telling everybody, ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached.’”Parnas and Fruman later helped Rudy Giuliani search for dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine, before being indicted and found guilty of campaign finance violations, for secretly using a Russian oligarch’s money to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns and committees, including Trump’s, in pursuit of favors for their planned legal marijuana business.Reuters contributed reporting More

  • in

    Pete Hegseth reposts video that says women shouldn’t be allowed to vote

    The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.Hegseth reposted a CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who co-founded the Idaho-based Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.“I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” Wilson said.Another pastor interview by CNN for its segment, Toby Sumpter, said: “In my ideal society, we would vote as households. I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”A congregant interviewed for the segment remarked that she considers her husband as the head their household, and added: “I do submit to him.”Hegseth reposted the nearly seven-minute report with the caption: “All of Christ for All of Life.”Later in the video, Wilson says he does not believe women should hold leadership positions in the military or be able to fill high-profile combat roles.A statement from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on Saturday said Hegseth “is a proud member of a church affiliated with” the CREC.“The secretary very much appreciates many of Mr Wilson’s writings and teachings.”Hegseth and his family were in attendance at the Wilson church’s inaugural service in Washington in July, according to CNN.Doug Pagitt, a pastor and the executive director of the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good, told the Associated Press that the ideas in the video are views that “small fringes of Christians keep” and said it was “very disturbing” that Hegseth would amplify them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHegseth’s repost on Thursday came as the Trump administration ramps up efforts to promote Christian nationalism. The push follows Donald Trump’s renewed alliance with the Christian right in his second presidential term, whose moves have included an executive order creating a federal taskforce to investigate what he calls “anti-Christian bias” in government agencies.The president also created a White House faith office in February, saying it would make recommendations to him “regarding changes to policies, programs and practices” and consult with outside experts in “combating antisemitic, anti-Christian and additional forms of anti-religious bias”.In May, Hegseth invited his personal pastor, Brooks Potteiger, to the Pentagon to lead the first of several Christian prayer services that the defense secretary has held inside the government building during working hours. Defense department employees and service members said they received invitations to the event in their government emails.The US constitution’s first amendment prohibits the government from establishing a state religion. But the US courts’ administrative office says the precise definition of “establishment” in that context historically has been unclear, especially with the constitution also protecting all citizens’ right to practice their religion generally as they please. More

  • in

    How did we get all this gerrymandering? A short history of the Republican redistricting scheme

    The gerrymandering wars are back. Perhaps they never really went away.Extreme GOP gerrymanders have remade American politics over the last 15 years. They have locked Republicans into office in state legislatures nationwide, even in purple states when Democratic candidates win more votes. They have delivered a reliable and enduring edge to the GOP in the race for Congress.Perhaps most importantly, they have entrenched hard-right lawmakers and insulated them from the ballot box, allowing them to enact conservative policies on reproductive rights and public education that are rejected by majorities of voters.Now Texas Republicans, spurred by Donald Trump, have readied a brazen mid-decade power grab that would award them as many as five additional seats in Congress. This would be a dramatic boost heading into the midterms, since the GOP only holds a three-seat majority. California has threatened to retaliate with a mid-decade redraw of its own. Other blue state governors are talking tough as well. But Republicans have more targets. They won’t stop in Texas. They will probably redraw Ohio, Missouri, Indiana and Florida as well.How did we get here? How did gerrymandered lines, rather than voters, gain the power to determine winners and losers?View image in fullscreenWhile politicians have gerrymandered since the dawn of the American experiment – even before it got its name from then Massachusetts governor Eldridge Gerry’s party crafting state senate districts around Boston that looked like salamanders – the modern story really begins in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama and a blue wave that delivered Democrats trifecta power and even a US Senate supermajority.On television that election night, even the sharpest Republican analysts spoke of unbreakable emerging coalitions and demographic changes that could provide Democrats with majorities for a generation. It didn’t exactly work that way. A handful of savvy Republican strategists recognized that while 2008 may have been historic, 2010 could be much more consequential. It would be a census year. And after every census, the nation redistricts every state legislature and US House seat.A lightbulb went off at the Republican state leadership committee (RSLC). Executive director Chris Jankowski recognized the opportunity first: target states where the legislature controls redistricting. Pour millions into underfunded state legislative races. Drown Democratic incumbents. Flip as many chambers as possible. Redraw the lines. If Republicans could pull it off, they would go from demographically challenged to the catbird seat for a decade.“We should do this,” Jankowski remembered, in an interview for my book Ratf**ked. “I think we can get millions – and you don’t have to do anything other than what you were going to do anyway.”They called this Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. It transformed the nation.Karl Rove laid out the plan in a March 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed that laid out the specific small towns in Indiana, Pennsylvania and Ohio where national Republicans would come gunning for small-town Democrats. His message: control redistricting, control Congress. “Republican strategists are focused on 107 seats in 16 states. Winning these seats would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats.”Despite Rove’s announcement, Democrats never saw it coming. The 2010 Tea Party wave placed all those seats and more in the GOP column. Republicans took over in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Indiana, Alabama, Wisconsin and Ohio, among others, adding them to trifecta control in states like Texas and Florida. The following year, the RSLC paid master GOP mapmaker Thomas Hofeller to draw new lines in crucial states. New computer mapping software and voluminous new voter data turned redistricting into a video game. Republicans won, voters lost.It all paid off with a high score in 2012. Obama won re-election by a slightly smaller margin than 2008, but Democrats added seats in the US Senate. Republicans, thanks to their new lines, held the House and it wasn’t close. They won 234 seats to the Democrats’ 201 – even though Democrats won 1.4m more votes nationwide. Or look at the impact this way. Obama carried Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Republicans drew congressional lines in those states and won 64 of 94 seats.The modern, technologically enhanced gerrymanders held throughout 2014 and 2016. Even when Democratic candidates won more votes, they could not budge the state legislature in Michigan, for example, or an astounding 13-5 edge in Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation.This futility and frustration at the ballot box turned into a national grassroots campaign to end gerrymandering. In 2018, grassroots movements in Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Utah and Colorado established citizen commissions or other nonpartisan processes to draw lines. Meanwhile, the same technology that allowed partisans to crack and pack voters with such precision also allowed data scientists and courts to see through extreme gerrymanders. Voters and public interest law firms won new maps in states including Florida (ahead of 2016) and Pennsylvania (2018), and won lower-court decisions in Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, North Carolina and Wisconsin that struck down extreme maps. This helped Democrats take back the House in 2018 without actually defeating the gerrymander: almost three-quarters of the seats they won were drawn by commissions or courts, or arose from new maps won via litigation.In states such as Wisconsin, the gerrymanders held strong: in 2018, Democrats swept the US Senate, governor’s offices in every statewide race and 53% of the state assembly vote. Republicans won 64% of the seats with just 45% of the vote.Polls showed that huge majorities of voters across party lines despised gerrymandering. Reform efforts won in red states and in blue states with big majorities. And in federal courts, judges appointed by presidents of both parties believed that they had all the tools they needed to strike down maps that decimated true political competition, and took aim at the radical outliers drawn by both parties. Reformers and voters had real momentum.Enter John Roberts.In 2019, the chief justice – whose antipathy to voting rights has been central to his life’s work ever since he arrived in Washington in 1982 as a young aide in Reagan’s Department of Justice – destroyed hopes that the federal courts would help defend voters and create a national standard.In a case from North Carolina called Rucho v Common Cause, a 5-4 majority ruled that partisan gerrymandering was a nonjusticiable political issue. The decision, written by Roberts, closed the federal courts to future claims at the precise moment that they’d become the most important part of the solution. After all, politicians have long proven unwilling to reform the very process that elected them and helped entrench them in office. Roberts, however, said the federal courts could no longer be involved, because there was no clear and manageable standard. Multiple federal judges, of course, pointed to multiple clear standards. And even if Roberts didn’t find a standard to his liking, nothing required him to leap to making the issue nonjusticiable.The decision signed the death warrant for reform. Without the threat of a national, court-enforced standard, states had no reason to behave themselves. In 2021, Democrats – now fully awakened to the problem – claimed seats in Illinois (14 of 17) and Maryland (seven of eight) and took extra seats in Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico. Republicans, already enjoying an edge, claimed four in Florida then worked the margins in Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, Georgia and Utah. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center, the GOP had a 16-seat advantage this decade thanks to gerrymandering. While some suggested that the national congressional map had become much more balanced, this is misleading: any balance in the national map arrived because many more state maps had been gerrymandered, harming more voters, everywhere.Both parties knew increasingly partisan state courts were unlikely to block partisan power plays. In New York, a Democratic court allowed Democrats to remake the map before 2024. In North Carolina, the state supreme court upended a fair map and reversed a year-old decision banning partisan gerrymandering as soon as they took partisan control. Given free rein, the GOP drew themselves three extra seats and a 10-3 advantage. Those three seats, by the way, match the margin of the GOP House majority. That’s the power of one state map.The absence of any federal deterrence also encouraged state lawmakers to defy courts, commissions and state constitutions. In Ohio, lawmakers stiff-armed the state supreme court when it attempted to enforce anti-gerrymandering provisions enacted decisively by 75% of voters in a 2018 initiative. In Arizona, Republicans gamed the independent commission by stacking the commission that selects the supposedly nonpartisan chair who controls the tie-breaking vote. Utah simply ignored the 2018 vote establishing a nonpartisan commission. They all got away with it.Which brings us to the current moment. Trump kickstarted this new redistricting arms race when he demanded that Texas flip Democratic seats to the GOP. California and New York have talked tough about suspending their commissions and retaliating with gerrymanders of their own. That’s a long and complicated road, however: California voters would need to agree this fall. New York’s constitution couldn’t be amended before the 2028 cycle. Meanwhile, Democrats have few other likely targets, and Republicans look likely to continue their push into Ohio, Missouri, Indiana and Florida – and even Kansas, Kentucky and New Hampshire, if they choose.Frustrated Democrats have few appealing options. Such are the ongoing consequences of falling asleep 15 years ago and failing to counter Redmap. It has done precisely what the Republicans said it would do – with greater success and a longer lifespan than they ever could have imagined. More