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      Texas Senate passes Republican-drawn gerrymandered map as House Democrats continue to deny quorum – live updates

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      The Texas Sentate has passed a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.The map passed 19-2 along party lines. Nine Senate Democrats left the floor in solidarity with their House colleagues – who broke quorum again earlier today in protest of the map. The legislation can’t advance without the absent Democrats in the lower chamber.Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.“I’ll call special after special until the Texas first agenda is passed,” Abbott said in a post on X.The Trump administration sanctioned an armed group accused of illegally trading minerals in eastern Congo, as Washington seeks to lead peace efforts in the region while securing US access to its mineral resources.A senior US government official told the AP that the state and treasury departments are targeting the Codeco armed group, which controlled the key coltan mining site of Rubaya from 2022 until early 2024.“During this period, Codeco generated revenue by overseeing mining operations, collecting illegal fees and taxes for miners and engaging in mineral smuggling. It also imposed forced labor and executed civilians in mining areas under its control,” the official said.The sanctions also target the Congolese mining company CDMC, accused of selling minerals sourced and smuggled from mines near Rubaya, as well as two Hong Kong exporters, East Rise and Star Dragon, that purchased minerals from the area.Mexico has transferred a group of imprisoned cartel members to the United States, amid growing pressure from the Trump administration to dismantle the country’s powerful drug organizations, the Wall Street Journal reported.The group, sent on Tuesday, was roughly the same size as the 29 prisoners transferred in February.WSJ reports:
      The group sent Tuesday included members of top criminal organizations facing drug charges in the US who are being sent to locations including Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, San Diego and New York, one of the people said.
      Terry Cole, the Drug Enforcement Administration chief overseeing the federal takeover of DC police, said in an interview that, starting tonight, federal agents will be “embedded with the Metropolitan police department”.“You will see federal agents working hand in hand on patrol with the Metropolitan Police Department, you will also see an increase of activity, patrol activity in certain sectors to go after the violent criminal offenders that are the drivers of this crime,” Cole said in an interview with Fox News.Earlier today, Texas Senate Democrats staged a walkout in protest of the chamber’s proposed congressional redistricting map, which was moving forward to the Texas House.Despite the senators’ absence, the Republican-controlled Senate approved the map in a 19-2 vote. But it cannot win final approval while the quorum is broken. Texas House Democrats have been out of state for weeks to block Republican lawmakers from conducting business.Senate Democrats are challenging governor Greg Abbott’s decision to prioritize redistricting over urgent flood relief for the state’s affected communities.“This special session is about one thing: flood relief,” said Texas state senator Roland Gutierrez. “Greg Abbott tried to sneak in a rigged mid-decade redistricting beneath voters’ noses. Let’s be clear, the governor can provide this relief anytime he wants. But Abbott is holding it hostage so that he has an excuse to do Trump’s bidding.”“Texas has a long tradition of independence. But when Donald Trump tells Greg Abbott to roll over and fetch him five seats, he does it like a good lapdog,” Gutierrez added. “This governor has failed to uphold Texas values, defend the people of Texas, or make the lives of its citizens better in any meaningful way.”Democratic senators Judith Zaffirini and Chuy Hinojosa did not participate in today’s walkout and stayed in the chamber, according to the Dallas Morning News.Democratic representative Adam Smith, of the state of Washington, said it is “pretty clear” President Trump “wants his own domestic police force” after the president seized control of DC’s Metropolitan police department.“Look, this president is trampling on basic freedoms of the American people to a degree we, I don’t think we’ve ever seen,” Smith said on CNN. “You see that with what the ICE agents are doing, in terms of picking people up off the streets with no evidence, no due process, locking people up.”“This is happening all across the country,” Smith added. “Look, it’s pretty clear the president wants his own domestic police force, and step by step, he’s trying to create it, and we should be deeply alarmed by that, regardless of how you feel about crime in Washington DC, or any other city.”

      National guard troops began to arrive at their headquarters in Washington DC on Tuesday, after Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was deploying them to the nation’s capital and putting city police under federal control, even though the violent crime rate is at a 30-year low. Leading Democrats have called the move a “distraction” from the president’s economic agenda and the plague of the Epstein files.

      Earlier, the DC mayor Muriel Bowser met with attorney general Pam Bondi, after saying that her office intends to comply with federal law enforcement, as Bondi will now oversee the DC police for the next 30 days. On social media, Bondi described the meeting as “productive”, saying the pair agreed there is “nothing more important” than keeping residents and tourists “safe from deadly crime”.

      Meanwhile in the White House briefing room today, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president’s DC police takeover was “just the beginning”, saying that the massive surge in law enforcement resulted in 23 arrests yesterday. She added that if individuals living in homeless encampments refuse to accept places in shelters or addiction facilities they would be subject to fines or jail time. Leavitt added that the administration is still considering moving the homeless population out of the city.

      Beyond Washington, the press secretary characterised Friday’s upcoming meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin as a “listening exercise” for the president, confirming that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would not be in attendance, but the president has hopes for a trilateral meeting in the future.

      For his part, Zelenskyy said today that Ukraine could not agree to a Russian proposal to give up more of his country’s territory in exchange for a ceasefire, because Moscow would use it as a springboard to start a future war. Speaking to journalists a day before a virtual meeting with US and European leaders, Zelenskyy said he believed Putin wanted to dominate his country because he “does not want a sovereign Ukraine”.

      Closer to home, the Texas Sentate approved a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. But since House Democrats continue to break quorum, the legislation isn’t going anywhere. Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.

      When it comes to the economy, the latest inflation data released today showed that the Consumer Price Index held steady at 2.7 percent. “Core” inflation – which leaves out volatile goods like food and energy to track how prices are increasing – rose by 0.3 percent. This marks a 3.1 percent increase over the course of a year – and the highest level in five months.

      In response, Donald Trump wasted no time calling out Jerome Powell on social media, continuing his long-running campaign against the chair of the Federal Reserve. “The damage he has done by always being Too Late is incalculable,” the president wrote. He also said that he was considering allowing a lawsuit – focused on Powell’s renovation of the fed’s headquarters– to proceed.
      The New York Times is reporting that investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is “at least in part” responsible for a recent hack of the computer system of the federal court system.According to the Times’s sources, this breach includes highly sensitive records that could contain information with names and details of people charged with national security crimes.The Times also reports that it’s not immediately clear what specific Russian entity might be responsible for the hack.Just a quick post here to sum up the latest analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which breaks down the financial impact of Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill that became law last month.The topline: the CBO estimates that the poorest 10% of Americans can expect to lose around $1200 per year due to the restrictions and cut backs in the legislation – namely when it comes to Medicaid and Snap benefits. By contrast, the richest 10% of Americans can expect to gain around $13,600 each year, due to the extension of the president’s 2017 tax cuts.In response to Congressional Democratic leadership’s request for analysis on the distribution of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a letter from the CBO’s director noted that while, on average, American households can expect to see an increase in resources, this will not be evenly distributed.He writes:
      Resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.
      The Trump administration is evidently extending its control of cultural representation at the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex.In a letter obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the White House told the Smithsonian that it plans a wide review of exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2026.The letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, from Trump administration officials said the White House wants the museums’ program to reflect “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story” in keeping with an executive order issued in March that ordered the elimination of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums.Donald Trump’s order from March, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, said the president “aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud”.But Monday’s letter to the institution, according to the Journal, places the institution under curatorial scrutiny ranging from public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine could not agree to a Russian proposal to give up more of his country’s territory in exchange for a ceasefire because Moscow would use what it gained as a springboard to start a future war.The Ukrainian president said he did not believe that Donald Trump supported Russia’s demands, and he expressed hope the US leader would act as an honest mediator when he meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.He added there was no sign that Russia was preparing to implement a ceasefire, as reports emerged that small sabotage groups had pierced Ukrainian defences in the eastern Donbas, advancing about six miles in three days. Zelenskyy also warned that Russia was planning new offensives on three parts of the frontline.Speaking to journalists in the run-up to the Trump-Putin summit, and a day before a virtual meeting with US and European leaders, Zelenskyy said he believed Putin wanted to dominate his country because he “does not want a sovereign Ukraine”.Read more on the lead-up to both meetings hereThe Texas Sentate has passed a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.The map passed 19-2 along party lines. Nine Senate Democrats left the floor in solidarity with their House colleagues – who broke quorum again earlier today in protest of the map. The legislation can’t advance without the absent Democrats in the lower chamber.Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.“I’ll call special after special until the Texas first agenda is passed,” Abbott said in a post on X.The White House heralded today’s Consumer Price Index report as an clear picture of inflation remaining stable.But another notable exchange in the press briefing was a reporter’s question about why the public should trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation data report, given the administration undermining the jobs data released earlier this month. This led to the firing of former commissioner Erika McEntarfer, and yesterday’s announcement that the president is nominating EJ Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to replace her. Antoni is a longtime critic of the BLS.“The jobs data has had massive revisions,” Leavitt said, referring to the routine practice of issuing revisions to provide a more accurate picture of data. “We want to ensure that all of the data, the inflation data, the jobs data, any data point that is coming out of the BLS, is trustworthy and is accurate”.When asked in today’s press briefing, the White House offered little clarity on administration’s view of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Gaza City takeover.
      This is, of course, an incredibly complex and complicated situation. The administration has made our goal clear. We want to see this conflict end. We want to see the hostages released…the President and his national security team has given extensive effort and time in doing that. More

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      Texas redistricting fight with Democrats ‘could last years’, threatens Greg Abbott

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      Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has stepped up his war of words with Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to foil an aggressive redistricting plan aimed at giving his Republican party five additional seats in Congress, saying on Sunday that the fight “could literally last years”.Abbott issued his new threat on Fox News Sunday, saying that he would use his powers to call a special session of the Texas legislature to extend the battle indefinitely. The special session lasts 30 days, he said, “and as soon as this one is over, I’m going to call another one, then another one, then another one, then another one”.Whenever the absent Democrats return to Texas, Abbott said, they would be arrested for violating their oath of office. “If they want to evade that arrest, they’re going to stay outside Texas for literally years,” he remarked. “And they might as well start voting in California or Illinois, or wherever they may be.”Sunday’s TV political talk shows were dominated by the increasingly acrimonious dispute over Texas’s audacious gerrymandering plans which were instigated at the direct behest of Donald Trump.The move to flip five US House seats to the Republicans is being made as polls indicate that the US president’s party will struggle to hang on to its razor-slim majority in the chamber in next year’s midterm elections. The Republicans currently hold a margin of just three seats.The stakes could not be higher: were Trump able to hang onto his narrow control of Congress, he could cement the attacks on democratic and constitutional norms that he has begun in the first six months of his second presidency.As the crisis reaches a crunch, more than 50 Texas Democrats have left the state, heading to Democratically-controlled states, including Illinois and New York. The relocation is designed to deprive Republicans of a quorum needed to pass the new gerrymandered maps in the Texas legislature in Austin.Democratic governors went on the political shows on Sunday to launch their own barrage of words threatening counter-action. The strong language deployed was the latest indication that the leadership of the Democratic party, which has floundered in the face of Trump’s radical authoritarian-leaning tactics, is determined at this point to take a stand.New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul accused Abbott on Fox News Sunday of being a “lap dog” for Trump. “Knock it off,” she told her counterpart in Texas. “Let’s get back to governing.”She added that if Texas continued with what she called “these games”, “we’re not going to sit on the sidelines – we’re New Yorkers. We fight back.”New York’s room for maneuver, however, is more limited than that of Texas. The state has an independent redistricting commission that oversees the drawing of its electoral maps which has been the subject in recent years of much court action.Hochul said that the restrictions would not hold New York back. “We amend constitutions – we did it a few years ago,” she said. “We can put it to the people. I’m not going to let our democracy be eroded away because there’s a blatant power grab in our nation’s capital.”JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois where many of the Texas Democrats are holed up in an undisclosed hotel outside Chicago, unleashed his own verbal volley on NBC’s Meet the Press. He accused Trump of being a cheater, saying: “He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.”Pritzker was dismissive of claims by Texas US senator John Cornyn that the FBI had been brought in to help find the missing Democrats. “Texas law does not apply in the state of Illinois, and there’s no federal law that would allow the FBI to arrest anybody that’s here visiting our state,” Pritzker said. “So, it’s a lot of grandstanding.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs the governors were thrashing it out in the TV studios, lawsuits continued to fly around Texas’s courts as both sides seek to gain the upper hand legally. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is suing a sample group of 13 of the Democratic lawmakers claiming that the “runaways” have officially vacated their offices.Paxton is now asking the state’s supreme court to remove the 13 from their seats.Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic presidential candidate from El Paso, Texas, has also waded into the fray. On Friday, a state court in Fort Worth blocked his political action committee, Powered By People, from using its funds to support the fleeing lawmakers.O’Rourke has counter-sued, arguing that Paxton was trying to “intimidate” a potential rival in next year’s US senate race. Speaking at an event in New Orleans on Friday, he accused the Republicans of being “would-be fascists” and warned that if they got away with their plan to maintain power in Congress in 2026 “the consolidation of authoritarian control in the hands of Donald Trump will be nearly unstoppable”.Trump’s ruse to create more winnable congressional seats is being taken so seriously in Democratic circles that it has gelled even die-hard opponents of party political gerrymandering to come out in favor of counter measures. Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator from Vermont, is a fierce critic of the redrawing of electoral maps for partisan benefit.Yet he told CNN’s State of the Union that the Democratic party had no option but to fight fire with fire, saying: “Democrats have got to fight back. I think it’s pathetic, but I think that’s what they’ve got to do.”Asked whether that his position was defensible, given his years of opposing gerrymandering, Sanders said: “What we have now is terrible, and Republicans are making it worse. Well, what do you do if Republicans are doing it? You have to respond. It’s pathetic, but I think you have to respond.” More

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

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      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

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      The US supreme court paved the way for Texas’s gerrymandering mess | Steven Greenhouse

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      With Texas Republicans rushing to fulfil Donald Trump’s wish to gerrymander to the max, many Americans are no doubt wondering why there isn’t some referee to stop this hyperpartisan race to the bottom that is poisoning our democracy. The supreme court should be the referee that puts a halt to this ugly, undemocratic mess, but in a shortsighted, 5-4 ruling in 2019, the court’s conservative majority essentially told state legislatures that anything goes when it comes to gerrymandering. Their message was: no matter how extreme the gerrymandering, we’ll look the other way.Writing the majority opinion in that case, Rucho v Common Cause, chief justice John Roberts declared that gerrymandering was a political matter that federal courts shouldn’t intervene in (unless it involves racial discrimination). Many legal experts said the conservative justices were defaulting on the court’s responsibility to prevent absurdly unfair, undemocratic elections, where the fix is in even before people vote. In a prescient dissent, justice Elena Kagan warned that the huge permission slip the court was giving to gerrymandering would encourage “a politics of polarization and dysfunction” and might “irreparably damage our system of government”.Trump and his team have been shrewd enough and shameless enough to seek to take maximum advantage of that ruling, and in doing so, they’re showing how right Kagan was. Trump and company are seriously damaging our system of government and our democracy by seeking to insulate Trump from the majority’s will, an expected Democratic-leaning vote in the 2026 congressional elections. Trump and team are also ratcheting up the “polarization and dysfunction” Kagan warned us about. Democratic lawmakers have fled Texas to prevent a GOP power grab, while Texas governor Greg Abbott has called for their arrest and removal from office.Gerrymandering further fuels polarization because November elections become largely irrelevant for choosing candidates. With gerrymandering, what counts are the party primaries, and there, the extremes, rather than moderate swing voters, determine who the winning candidate is. This in turn leads to increasingly polarized, dysfunctional legislative bodies, like the House of Representatives, where there’s plenty of performative, partisan showboating and very little legislation passed.In Rucho, the conservative majority declined to overturn a gerrymander in which the North Carolina GOP had rigged congressional districts so that Republicans would win 10 of the state’s 13 House seats even when the GOP won a bare majority of the statewide vote. (The case also involved some flagrant gerrymandering by Maryland’s Democrats.) It’s thanks to Roberts and the conservative justices’ indifference to gerrymandering that a person close to Trump could say that the administration’s attitude was “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time”.Seeking to maximize the chances of maintaining Republican control of the House, where the GOP has a mere three-seat majority, many Republicans also want GOP-led legislatures in Missouri, Florida, Ohio and Indiana to gerrymander to the max. In Texas alone, Trump hopes the GOP can pick up five House seats through redistricting. Even though Trump beat former vice-president Kamala Harris by 56% to 42% in Texas in 2024, the newly unveiled gerrymander aims to guarantee Republicans 30 out of Texas’s 38 House seats (a 79% to 21% ratio). Democrats accuse Trump and the Texas GOP of cheating, and it should be no surprise that they want to respond to fire with fire, with the Democratic governors of California, Illinois and New York saying that they, too, will push through gerrymanders.This unseemly electoral arms race results directly from the supreme court’s dodging of responsibility. In Rucho, chief justice Roberts shrugged at gerrymandering, saying that redistricting shenanigans were part and parcel of US history. Pointing to examples of gerrymandering from the 1780s and early 1800s, Roberts pooh-poohed this phenomenon, writing: “Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new. Nor is frustration with it.” He also voiced skepticism and snark about judges’ use of standards and election experts’ predictions to determine when partisan redistricting crosses the line into unconstitutional gerrymandering that violates the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause.In contrast to Roberts’ who-cares casualness, justice Kagan was an I’m-warning-you Cassandra. In a stinging dissent joined by justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, she correctly predicted that terrible things would result from Roberts’s decision. She wrote that his opinion showed “a saddening nonchalance about the threat that such [extreme] redistricting posts to self-governance”.Kagan didn’t mince her words about how Roberts’s decision threatened our democracy and undermined the ability of Americans to elect a government of their choosing. “For the first time ever,” she wrote, “this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”In Rucho, Roberts wrote that the constitution neither expressly bans gerrymandering, nor points to a standard to determine when partisan redistricting is so unfair that it becomes unconstitutional. He suggested it would be a grievous, arbitrary wrong to select some legal or mathematical standard to determine when gerrymanders are illegal. Roberts wrote: “There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments, let alone limited and precise standards that are clear, manageable, and politically neutral.”Today’s headlines make clear that Roberts and his Rucho decision have left us with a far more grievous wrong. It has encouraged ultra-partisan gerrymandering that is sabotaging our democracy and the majority will – in this case with an eye to preventing Democrats from winning back control of the House and serving as a check on Trump, the most authoritarian president in US history. If Texas Republicans prevail and enact their gerrymander, despite Democratic lawmakers’ exodus from the state, then the votes of millions of Texas Democrats will become meaningless, their votes in effect erased by the Trump/GOP gerrymander juggernaut. The same thing will happen to many Republican voters in states where Democrats gerrymander.Roberts was dismayingly myopic in failing to realize how his Rucho decision would someday lead to a push for maximum, hyperpartisan redistricting and how new electoral and computer models would make gerrymandering far more sophisticated – and sinister. Roberts was flatly wrong when he wrote that there can’t be “clear, manageable, and politically neutral” standards that define when redistricting crosses the line from mere partisanship to over-the-top, undemocratic, grossly unfair ultra-partisanship. One study put forward a smart standard that says gerrymandering crosses the line into illegality when a certain, high percentage of votes are wasted, deliberately rendered meaningless through partisan redistricting.What we’re seeing right now in Texas is one political party seeking to squeeze every last drop out of a filthy gerrymandering sponge – fair play and democracy be damned. Foreseeing ugly episodes like this, Kagan cited the vision of James Madison, the main author of the constitution, who once wrote that the “power is in the people over the Government, and not in the Government over the people”.The whole purpose of Trump’s gerrymandering power grab is to prevent the people from having power over him and his increasingly unpopular government. Unfortunately, Roberts gave Trump a green light for such a power grab.Like Trump, Roberts hates admitting mistakes, but it’s not too late for him to admit how shortsighted and harmful his Rucho ruling was. Nor is it too late for the chief justice to get the court to set some sane, healthy limits on gerrymandering to safeguard our democracy as well as Madison’s vision that the “power is in the people over the Government”.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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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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      Spike Lee, Adam McKay and over 2,000 writers decry Trump’s ‘un-American’ actions in open letter

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      More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”Signees include Tony Gilroy, David Simon, Mike Schur, Ilana Glazer, Lilly Wachowski, Celine Song, Justin Kuritzkes, Desus Nice, Gillian Flynn, John Waters, Liz Meriwether, Kenneth Lonergan, Alfonso Cuarón, Shawn Ryan and many other prominent names in film and television.The letter, released on Tuesday, calls on elected representatives and industry leaders to “resist this overreach”, as well as their audiences to “fight for a free and democratic future” and “raise their voice”.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last Friday that it would shut down after 57 years in operation, following the decision by the Republican-controlled House last month to eliminate $1.1bn in CPB funding over two years, part of a $9bn reduction to public media and foreign aid programs.The corporation, established by Congress in 1967 to ensure educational and cultural programming remained accessible to all Americans, distributed more than $500m annually to PBS, NPR and 1,500 local stations nationwide. Despite the federal grants, stations mostly relied on viewer donations, corporate sponsorships and local government funds to stay afloat.The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions after Trump attempted to remove them.“This is certainly not the first time that free speech has come under assault in this country, but free speech remains our right because generation after generation of Americans have dedicated themselves to its protection,” the letter concludes. “Now and always, when writers come under attack, our collective power as a union allows us to fight back. This period in American life will not last forever, and when it’s over the world will remember who had the courage to speak out.” More

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      US House panel subpoenas Bill and Hillary Clinton for Epstein testimony

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      The 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”.The investigative committee’s Republican chair, James Comer, sent the subpoenas in response to two motions lawmakers approved on a bipartisan basis last month, as Congress navigated outrage among Donald Trump’s supporters over the justice department’s announcement that it would not release further details about Epstein, a disgraced financier who died in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.The subpoenas raise the possibility that more details will become public about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, which stretched for years but appeared to have petered out by the time Epstein was convicted of sexually abusing girls in 2008. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of a sexually suggestive sketch and lewd letter Trump sent to Epstein as a 50th birthday gift in 2003.The president and his allies have long flirted with conspiracy theories around Epstein’s death in federal custody, but the justice department upended those by concluding he died by suicide and a long-rumored list of his client did not exist. That prompted some Trump supporters to criticize the president for failing to make good on his pledge to bring full transparency to the case, which Democrats moved to capitalize on by pushing congressional Republicans into tricky votes intended to make the Epstein case files public.Shortly before House lawmakers left Washington DC for Congress’s August recess, the Republican congressman Scott Perry won an oversight subcommittee’s approval to compel depositions from the Clintons and the former top federal law enforcement officials in a bid to reveal more about Epstein’s activities. Democratic congresswoman Summer Lee also successfully pushed a motion to subpoena justice department files related to the case.In addition to the Clintons, the committee sent subpoenas to former attorneys general Jeff Sessions, Alberto Gonzales and William Barr, who served in George W Bush and Trump’s presidencies, and Merrick Garland, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, who served under Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Former FBI directors James Comey and Robert Mueller also received subpoenas.In the letter to Bill Clinton, Comer noted that the former president had flown four times on Epstein’s private jet, and repeated an allegation that he had “pressured” Vanity Fair not to publish sex trafficking claims regarding Epstein. The chair further says that Clinton was “allegedly close” with Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted on sex trafficking charges related to Epstein.“Given your past relationships with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, the Committee believes that you have information regarding their activities that is relevant to the Committee’s investigation,” Comer wrote.In his letter to Hillary Clinton, Comer draws a more tenuous connect, writing: “Your family appears to have had a close relationship with both Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell”. In addition to details about them, Comer notes that Clinton “may have knowledge of efforts by the federal government to combat international sex trafficking operations of the type run by Mr. Epstein”.Comer set Bill Clinton’s deposition date as 14 October and Hillary’s as 9 October. Others who received subpoenas were given dates ranging from mid-August through early October, while US attorney general Pam Bondi has until 19 August to release documents related to the case.In addition to the subpoenas, Republican congressman Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna are collecting signatures for a discharge petition to force a vote on legislation compelling release of the Epstein files. That vote is not expected to happen until the House returns from recess in early September.Trump has authorized the justice department to request release of the transcripts from the federal grand juries that indicted Epstein and Maxwell, while last week, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche interviewed Maxwell in Florida in what the White House said was a bid to uncover new details about the case. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene says Republican party has lost touch with its base

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene, historically one of the most prominent voices in Donald Trump’s Maga movement, has declared in an interview that she feels that the Republican party has lost touch with its base, but she said she has no plans to leave the party.After telling the Daily Mail this week she was questioning whether she still belongs in the Republican fold, the Georgia congresswoman told the Guardian she would not become independent or seek a third party option.“No – I’m urging my own party to support ‘America first’,” Greene said.Still, she made clear resounding frustration with GOP leadership and her place within the party’s planning.“I don’t know if the Republican party is leaving me, or if I’m kind of not relating to Republican party as much any more,” Greene said in the Daily Mail interview. “I don’t know which one it is.”Greene, who boasts 7.5 million followers on X and commands one of the largest social media audiences of any Republican woman, accused party leaders of betraying core conservative principles.She did not criticize Trump himself, instead preferring to express her ire for what she attempted to paint as political elites.“I think the Republican party has turned its back on America First and the workers and just regular Americans,” she said, warning that GOP leadership was reverting to its “neocon” past under the influence of what she termed the “good ole boys” network.The 51-year-old lawmaker, in the roughly six-month mark following Trump’s return to the White House, said she was particularly frustrated with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, saying: “I’m not afraid of Mike Johnson at all.”Her remarks reflect a broader pattern of voter dissatisfaction with traditional party structures. Americans appear to also be holding deeply unfavorable views of both major parties: a July Wall Street Journal poll found 63% view the Democratic party unfavorably, its worst rating in 35 years, while Republicans fare only marginally better in most surveys.Independent or independent-leaning Americans now account for nearly half the electorate, according to July Gallup polling, and public support has increasingly shifted toward Democrats through those leaners in recent months.On Monday, Greene used social media to criticize the lack of accountability over what she deems key issues to the base, sharing a table showing no arrests for the “Russian Collusion Hoax”, “Jan 6th”, and “2020 Election”.“Like what happened all those issues? You know that I don’t know what the hell happened with the Republican Party. I really don’t,” she said in the interview. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the course that it’s on, I don’t want to have anything to do with it, and I just don’t care any more.”Her recent bills have targeted unconventional Republican territory: preventing cloud-seeding, making English the official US language, and cutting capital gains taxes on homes. She is also the first Republican in Congress to label the crisis in Gaza a genocide, and has called for ending foreign aid and using the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to cut down fraud and waste in the government.Greene acknowledged her isolation within the party, saying: “I’m going alone right now on the issues that I’m speaking about.” More