Search
721 results for “democracydocket”
-
NOW ON VERDANT SQUARE RADIO ==
URGENT: Trump is ramping up efforts to pass the poll-taxing, vote-suppressing #SAVEAmericaAct in the #MAGA #GOP -led Senate to strip #votingrights from millions. Tell your senator NO Save America Act! NO abolishing #filibuster! CALL (202) 224-3121Marc Elias of Democracy Docket has the latest on Trump's dangerous #SAVEAct efforts.https://youtu.be/7TVaZYRF6f8?si=6JU3jakZleM36-2q#activism https://mastodon.social/@VerdantSquareRadio/116313537281380061
-
NOW ON VERDANT SQUARE RADIO ==
URGENT: Trump is ramping up efforts to pass the poll-taxing, vote-suppressing #SAVEAmericaAct in the #MAGA #GOP -led Senate to strip #votingrights from millions. Tell your senator NO Save America Act! NO abolishing #filibuster! CALL (202) 224-3121Marc Elias of Democracy Docket has the latest on Trump's dangerous #SAVEAct efforts.https://youtu.be/7TVaZYRF6f8?si=6JU3jakZleM36-2q#activism https://mastodon.social/@VerdantSquareRadio/116313537281380061
-
NOW ON VERDANT SQUARE RADIO ==
URGENT: Trump is desperate to pass the poll-taxing, vote-suppressing #SAVEAmericaAct in the #MAGA #GOP -led Senate to strip #votingrights from millions. We must stop him: Tell your senator NO Save America Act! NO abolishing #filibuster! CALL (202) 224-3121Marc Elias of Democracy Docket has the latest on Trump's dangerous #SAVEAct.https://youtu.be/Z0bOpqsrRoM?si=DPPNFcSUU4_bh8hi#activism https://mastodon.social/@VerdantSquareRadio/116256440103975842
-
NOW ON VERDANT SQUARE RADIO ==
URGENT: YOUR voice is needed to stop the poll-taxing, vote-suppressing #SAVEAmericaAct, the #MAGA #GOP -led scheme to kill #votingrights for millions. Tell your senator NO Save America Act! NO abolishing #filibuster! CALL (202) 224-3121Marc Elias of Democracy Docket has updates on Trump's dangerous #SAVEAct efforts.https://youtu.be/Z0bOpqsrRoM?si=DPPNFcSUU4_bh8hi#activism #congress https://mastodon.social/@VerdantSquareRadio/116245305874533510
-
NOW ON VERDANT SQUARE RADIO ==
URGENT: The #MAGA #GOP -led Senate is debating the #SAVEAmericaAct, a #VoteSuppression & #PollTax bill that will strip #votingrights from millions. Tell your senator NO Save America Act! NO abolishing #filibuster! CALL (202) 224-3121Marc Elias of Democracy Docket offers an in-depth, up-to-the-minute look at the dangerous #SAVEAct.https://youtu.be/ecmky5jtYiI?si=B_xP5lmWfCvvdODC#activism https://mastodon.social/@VerdantSquareRadio/116139348180576747
-
⚠️The Purge Goes National
One of the administration’s ultimate aims in obtaining states’ data
is to use it to create the first-ever national voter database.(In the suit against California, no fewer than 17 former DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyers filed a brief attesting to the likelihood of this intent, according to Democracy Docket.)
A national voter database would become a clearinghouse for discriminatory purges
and would enable the administration to assemble and point to dubious “evidence” for fraudulent claims.An analysis from the Brennan Center describes how a national database would likely be used
“to further promote false claims about election fraud,
target political opponents,
or attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls,”
in addition to the privacy risks of cybersecurity breaches.With highly suspicious timing,
the Trump administration has simultaneously been altering what’s known as the
"Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements", or #SAVE, tool.Originally a verification system for immigration status to determine if non-citizens were eligible for benefits,
it has been “refashioned” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a platform for scrutinizing immigration statuses on the rolls, Stateline reported.
That may well have consequences beyond elections
— there are clear indications that voter data would be opened up to all sorts of federal intervention,
including criminal probes and immigration enforcement inquiries.The Trump administration has confirmed that the DOJ is making the roll data available to the DHS.
(Comparably, a ProPublica investigation found that an agreement had already been reached to allow DHS to use private information from the Social Security Administration
in a very similar way,
incorporating it into SAVE to hunt for putative illegal voting.)#AshiyaBrown #AllVotingIsLocal #MassDisenfranchisement #electionfraud
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-doj-sues-to-force-states-to-share-confidential-voter-data/
-
⚠️The Purge Goes National
One of the administration’s ultimate aims in obtaining states’ data
is to use it to create the first-ever national voter database.(In the suit against California, no fewer than 17 former DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyers filed a brief attesting to the likelihood of this intent, according to Democracy Docket.)
A national voter database would become a clearinghouse for discriminatory purges
and would enable the administration to assemble and point to dubious “evidence” for fraudulent claims.An analysis from the Brennan Center describes how a national database would likely be used
“to further promote false claims about election fraud,
target political opponents,
or attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls,”
in addition to the privacy risks of cybersecurity breaches.With highly suspicious timing,
the Trump administration has simultaneously been altering what’s known as the
"Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements", or #SAVE, tool.Originally a verification system for immigration status to determine if non-citizens were eligible for benefits,
it has been “refashioned” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a platform for scrutinizing immigration statuses on the rolls, Stateline reported.
That may well have consequences beyond elections
— there are clear indications that voter data would be opened up to all sorts of federal intervention,
including criminal probes and immigration enforcement inquiries.The Trump administration has confirmed that the DOJ is making the roll data available to the DHS.
(Comparably, a ProPublica investigation found that an agreement had already been reached to allow DHS to use private information from the Social Security Administration
in a very similar way,
incorporating it into SAVE to hunt for putative illegal voting.)#AshiyaBrown #AllVotingIsLocal #MassDisenfranchisement #electionfraud
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-doj-sues-to-force-states-to-share-confidential-voter-data/
-
⚠️The Purge Goes National
One of the administration’s ultimate aims in obtaining states’ data
is to use it to create the first-ever national voter database.(In the suit against California, no fewer than 17 former DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyers filed a brief attesting to the likelihood of this intent, according to Democracy Docket.)
A national voter database would become a clearinghouse for discriminatory purges
and would enable the administration to assemble and point to dubious “evidence” for fraudulent claims.An analysis from the Brennan Center describes how a national database would likely be used
“to further promote false claims about election fraud,
target political opponents,
or attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls,”
in addition to the privacy risks of cybersecurity breaches.With highly suspicious timing,
the Trump administration has simultaneously been altering what’s known as the
"Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements", or #SAVE, tool.Originally a verification system for immigration status to determine if non-citizens were eligible for benefits,
it has been “refashioned” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a platform for scrutinizing immigration statuses on the rolls, Stateline reported.
That may well have consequences beyond elections
— there are clear indications that voter data would be opened up to all sorts of federal intervention,
including criminal probes and immigration enforcement inquiries.The Trump administration has confirmed that the DOJ is making the roll data available to the DHS.
(Comparably, a ProPublica investigation found that an agreement had already been reached to allow DHS to use private information from the Social Security Administration
in a very similar way,
incorporating it into SAVE to hunt for putative illegal voting.)#AshiyaBrown #AllVotingIsLocal #MassDisenfranchisement #electionfraud
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-doj-sues-to-force-states-to-share-confidential-voter-data/
-
⚠️The Purge Goes National
One of the administration’s ultimate aims in obtaining states’ data
is to use it to create the first-ever national voter database.(In the suit against California, no fewer than 17 former DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyers filed a brief attesting to the likelihood of this intent, according to Democracy Docket.)
A national voter database would become a clearinghouse for discriminatory purges
and would enable the administration to assemble and point to dubious “evidence” for fraudulent claims.An analysis from the Brennan Center describes how a national database would likely be used
“to further promote false claims about election fraud,
target political opponents,
or attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls,”
in addition to the privacy risks of cybersecurity breaches.With highly suspicious timing,
the Trump administration has simultaneously been altering what’s known as the
"Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements", or #SAVE, tool.Originally a verification system for immigration status to determine if non-citizens were eligible for benefits,
it has been “refashioned” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a platform for scrutinizing immigration statuses on the rolls, Stateline reported.
That may well have consequences beyond elections
— there are clear indications that voter data would be opened up to all sorts of federal intervention,
including criminal probes and immigration enforcement inquiries.The Trump administration has confirmed that the DOJ is making the roll data available to the DHS.
(Comparably, a ProPublica investigation found that an agreement had already been reached to allow DHS to use private information from the Social Security Administration
in a very similar way,
incorporating it into SAVE to hunt for putative illegal voting.)#AshiyaBrown #AllVotingIsLocal #MassDisenfranchisement #electionfraud
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-doj-sues-to-force-states-to-share-confidential-voter-data/
-
⚠️The Purge Goes National
One of the administration’s ultimate aims in obtaining states’ data
is to use it to create the first-ever national voter database.(In the suit against California, no fewer than 17 former DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyers filed a brief attesting to the likelihood of this intent, according to Democracy Docket.)
A national voter database would become a clearinghouse for discriminatory purges
and would enable the administration to assemble and point to dubious “evidence” for fraudulent claims.An analysis from the Brennan Center describes how a national database would likely be used
“to further promote false claims about election fraud,
target political opponents,
or attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls,”
in addition to the privacy risks of cybersecurity breaches.With highly suspicious timing,
the Trump administration has simultaneously been altering what’s known as the
"Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements", or #SAVE, tool.Originally a verification system for immigration status to determine if non-citizens were eligible for benefits,
it has been “refashioned” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a platform for scrutinizing immigration statuses on the rolls, Stateline reported.
That may well have consequences beyond elections
— there are clear indications that voter data would be opened up to all sorts of federal intervention,
including criminal probes and immigration enforcement inquiries.The Trump administration has confirmed that the DOJ is making the roll data available to the DHS.
(Comparably, a ProPublica investigation found that an agreement had already been reached to allow DHS to use private information from the Social Security Administration
in a very similar way,
incorporating it into SAVE to hunt for putative illegal voting.)#AshiyaBrown #AllVotingIsLocal #MassDisenfranchisement #electionfraud
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-doj-sues-to-force-states-to-share-confidential-voter-data/
-
"Combined with previously announced commitments, the total amount Big Law has ceded to the aspiring dictator is now just shy of $1 billion.
Think about that: one billion dollars of legal work from the top law firms across the country to do Trump’s bidding. And that number is sure to grow as more cowardly law firms follow suit." - Mark Elias, Democracy Docket
-
Republicans have unleashed a flurry of ➡️ lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ⬅️ ahead of the November elections,
🔥setting the stage for what could be a far larger and more contentious legal battle over the White House after Election Day.The onslaught of litigation,
much of it landing in recent weeks,
includes nearly 90 lawsuits filed across the country by Republican groups this year.The legal push is ⭐️already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before Election Day in 2020,
according to Democracy Docket, a Democratically aligned group that tracks election cases.🆘 Voting rights experts say the legal campaign appears to be an ⚠️effort to prepare to #contest #the #results of the presidential election after Election Day should Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, lose and 💥refuse to accept his defeat as he did four years ago.
The lawsuits are concentrated in swing states
— and key counties
— likely to determine the race.Several embrace #debunked #theories about voter fraud and so-called stolen elections that Mr. Trump has promoted since 2020.
In Montgomery County, Pa., the state’s third-largest county, the party is seeking to ♦️force local officials to count ballots by hand, evoking debunked conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines. 👀
A case filed by the Republican National Committee in Nevada this month #falsely asserts that nearly 4,000 noncitizens voted in the state in 2020,
a claim that was rejected at the time by the state’s top election official, a Republican. -
#LawyersForHarris is a growing movement of Dem fundraisers in the legal profession with big name counsel endorsing the #Veep's run for #Prez.
Amongst the #barristers begging for #donations on behalf of the candidate's cause include Sally Yates, ex US AG and now partner at King & Spalding, there's Tony West, chief legal officer of Uber, and Marc Elias of Democracy Docket.
-
#LawyersForHarris is a growing movement of Dem fundraisers in the legal profession with big name counsel endorsing the #Veep's run for #Prez.
Amongst the #barristers begging for #donations on behalf of the candidate's cause include Sally Yates, ex US AG and now partner at King & Spalding, there's Tony West, chief legal officer of Uber, and Marc Elias of Democracy Docket.
-
So because we can all agree on the sentiment behind #FuckCNN I just thought I would share some news outlets that I follow religiously, just in case this toot reaches somebody who is migrating away from #CNN
As for big outlets, I read Associated Press, for pretty obvious reasons, but I also read Politico.
For matters relating to ongoing legal cases in defending Americans' civil rights, I read Democracy Docket and follow both Marc Elias of Democracy Docket and Glenn Kirschner of MSNBC religiously.
For political analysis and media literacy I follow Brian Tyler Cohen, Farron Cousins, David Pakman, and Beau of the Fifth Column.
For socialist think pieces and far left discussion I follow First Thought (A project started by JT Chapman of Second Thought and Yugopnik, both of whom I also follow separately) Dan Arrows of Three Arrows (When he actually posts) and The Kavernacle.
I highly recommend all of these folks who are helping to actually fight for a better world.
-
The origin story of the proposed executive order is murky, but it appears to trace back to a network of pro-Trump activists who have spent years pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
One of them is
#Peter #Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who has known Trump since the two attended the New York Military Academy as teenagers.Ticktin represented his former classmate in a 2022 civil suit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to smear Trump with claims that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
A federal judge later dismissed the suit and sanctioned Trump’s attorneys
—including Ticktin
—finding that the suit amounted to the “deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”Ticktin currently represents #Tina #Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a 2021 breach of her office’s voting machines.
In an interview, Ticktin told us he wrote what he described as a “precursor” to the 17-page draft executive order that has been circulating since April of last year.
“I'm not sure exactly who prepared this one,” he said of the version dated April 12,
which he provided to Democracy Docket last month.But Ticktin said he believed the April 12 version of the draft order was “really well done”
—well done enough that he emailed it to the president.Ticktin said his outreach to government officials about the draft executive order also extended to #Kurt #Olsen, the White House director of “election security and integrity.”
Olsen, an attorney, represented Texas in its unsuccessful post-2020 suit to overturn Trump’s loss.
He was later sanctioned by a federal judge for advancing “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in Kari Lake’s failed bid to challenge her 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona.
Now, as a White House official, Olsen has reportedly been tasked with leading a probe to reexamine the 2020 race.
Last month, an unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit revealed that a criminal inquiry into election irregularities in Fulton County began with a referral from Olsen.
According to Ticktin, others involved with the effort surrounding the draft order include #Michael #Flynn, the former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before receiving a sweeping pardon from Trump in December 2020;
#Patrick #Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and prominent election skeptic;
and #Stefanie #Lambert, an attorney who is awaiting trial in Michigan over allegations that she illegally accessed voting tabulators in an attempt to prove that the 2020 election was stolen.
Both Flynn and Byrne have repeatedly and publicly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the upcoming election.
Authorship of the April 12 draft is difficult to pin down,
but several figures connected to the election-denial movement say they had a hand in shaping it.A key figure is "#Juan O. #Savin",
the nom de plume of #Wayne #Willott, a private investigator turned QAnon influencer who has cultivated a significant following in far-right conspiracy circles.Savin is perhaps best known among QAnon followers as the subject of a theory that he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr.
—who died in a plane crash in 1999
—living under an assumed identity.Beyond his QAnon celebrity, however, Savin has formed notable political connections:
In 2021, he co-founded the "America First Secretary of State Coalition", which worked to place election-denying candidates in charge of state elections in key swing states.
The coalition received significant funding from "The America Project",
the organization co-founded by Flynn and Byrne.In a recent appearance on the right-wing program "Nino’s Corner", Savin said he reviewed an early version of the executive order during Trump’s re-election campaign in the summer of 2024.
Finding that version “inadequate,” he assembled a coalition of “legal minds” and “election experts”
to formulate a new version of the proposed order.According to Savin, the group met for several days in Washington, D.C. shortly after the inauguration.
Over the following months, he said, the coalition produced approximately 13 drafts before arriving at the 17-page version circulated that spring.
The page count may not be coincidental:
Within QAnon lore, the number 17 carries symbolic meaning,
because “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet,
and believers often treat the number as a coded signal. -
The origin story of the proposed executive order is murky, but it appears to trace back to a network of pro-Trump activists who have spent years pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
One of them is
#Peter #Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who has known Trump since the two attended the New York Military Academy as teenagers.Ticktin represented his former classmate in a 2022 civil suit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to smear Trump with claims that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
A federal judge later dismissed the suit and sanctioned Trump’s attorneys
—including Ticktin
—finding that the suit amounted to the “deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”Ticktin currently represents #Tina #Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a 2021 breach of her office’s voting machines.
In an interview, Ticktin told us he wrote what he described as a “precursor” to the 17-page draft executive order that has been circulating since April of last year.
“I'm not sure exactly who prepared this one,” he said of the version dated April 12,
which he provided to Democracy Docket last month.But Ticktin said he believed the April 12 version of the draft order was “really well done”
—well done enough that he emailed it to the president.Ticktin said his outreach to government officials about the draft executive order also extended to #Kurt #Olsen, the White House director of “election security and integrity.”
Olsen, an attorney, represented Texas in its unsuccessful post-2020 suit to overturn Trump’s loss.
He was later sanctioned by a federal judge for advancing “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in Kari Lake’s failed bid to challenge her 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona.
Now, as a White House official, Olsen has reportedly been tasked with leading a probe to reexamine the 2020 race.
Last month, an unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit revealed that a criminal inquiry into election irregularities in Fulton County began with a referral from Olsen.
According to Ticktin, others involved with the effort surrounding the draft order include #Michael #Flynn, the former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before receiving a sweeping pardon from Trump in December 2020;
#Patrick #Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and prominent election skeptic;
and #Stefanie #Lambert, an attorney who is awaiting trial in Michigan over allegations that she illegally accessed voting tabulators in an attempt to prove that the 2020 election was stolen.
Both Flynn and Byrne have repeatedly and publicly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the upcoming election.
Authorship of the April 12 draft is difficult to pin down,
but several figures connected to the election-denial movement say they had a hand in shaping it.A key figure is "#Juan O. #Savin",
the nom de plume of #Wayne #Willott, a private investigator turned QAnon influencer who has cultivated a significant following in far-right conspiracy circles.Savin is perhaps best known among QAnon followers as the subject of a theory that he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr.
—who died in a plane crash in 1999
—living under an assumed identity.Beyond his QAnon celebrity, however, Savin has formed notable political connections:
In 2021, he co-founded the "America First Secretary of State Coalition", which worked to place election-denying candidates in charge of state elections in key swing states.
The coalition received significant funding from "The America Project",
the organization co-founded by Flynn and Byrne.In a recent appearance on the right-wing program "Nino’s Corner", Savin said he reviewed an early version of the executive order during Trump’s re-election campaign in the summer of 2024.
Finding that version “inadequate,” he assembled a coalition of “legal minds” and “election experts”
to formulate a new version of the proposed order.According to Savin, the group met for several days in Washington, D.C. shortly after the inauguration.
Over the following months, he said, the coalition produced approximately 13 drafts before arriving at the 17-page version circulated that spring.
The page count may not be coincidental:
Within QAnon lore, the number 17 carries symbolic meaning,
because “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet,
and believers often treat the number as a coded signal. -
The origin story of the proposed executive order is murky, but it appears to trace back to a network of pro-Trump activists who have spent years pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
One of them is
#Peter #Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who has known Trump since the two attended the New York Military Academy as teenagers.Ticktin represented his former classmate in a 2022 civil suit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to smear Trump with claims that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
A federal judge later dismissed the suit and sanctioned Trump’s attorneys
—including Ticktin
—finding that the suit amounted to the “deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”Ticktin currently represents #Tina #Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a 2021 breach of her office’s voting machines.
In an interview, Ticktin told us he wrote what he described as a “precursor” to the 17-page draft executive order that has been circulating since April of last year.
“I'm not sure exactly who prepared this one,” he said of the version dated April 12,
which he provided to Democracy Docket last month.But Ticktin said he believed the April 12 version of the draft order was “really well done”
—well done enough that he emailed it to the president.Ticktin said his outreach to government officials about the draft executive order also extended to #Kurt #Olsen, the White House director of “election security and integrity.”
Olsen, an attorney, represented Texas in its unsuccessful post-2020 suit to overturn Trump’s loss.
He was later sanctioned by a federal judge for advancing “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in Kari Lake’s failed bid to challenge her 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona.
Now, as a White House official, Olsen has reportedly been tasked with leading a probe to reexamine the 2020 race.
Last month, an unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit revealed that a criminal inquiry into election irregularities in Fulton County began with a referral from Olsen.
According to Ticktin, others involved with the effort surrounding the draft order include #Michael #Flynn, the former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before receiving a sweeping pardon from Trump in December 2020;
#Patrick #Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and prominent election skeptic;
and #Stefanie #Lambert, an attorney who is awaiting trial in Michigan over allegations that she illegally accessed voting tabulators in an attempt to prove that the 2020 election was stolen.
Both Flynn and Byrne have repeatedly and publicly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the upcoming election.
Authorship of the April 12 draft is difficult to pin down,
but several figures connected to the election-denial movement say they had a hand in shaping it.A key figure is "#Juan O. #Savin",
the nom de plume of #Wayne #Willott, a private investigator turned QAnon influencer who has cultivated a significant following in far-right conspiracy circles.Savin is perhaps best known among QAnon followers as the subject of a theory that he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr.
—who died in a plane crash in 1999
—living under an assumed identity.Beyond his QAnon celebrity, however, Savin has formed notable political connections:
In 2021, he co-founded the "America First Secretary of State Coalition", which worked to place election-denying candidates in charge of state elections in key swing states.
The coalition received significant funding from "The America Project",
the organization co-founded by Flynn and Byrne.In a recent appearance on the right-wing program "Nino’s Corner", Savin said he reviewed an early version of the executive order during Trump’s re-election campaign in the summer of 2024.
Finding that version “inadequate,” he assembled a coalition of “legal minds” and “election experts”
to formulate a new version of the proposed order.According to Savin, the group met for several days in Washington, D.C. shortly after the inauguration.
Over the following months, he said, the coalition produced approximately 13 drafts before arriving at the 17-page version circulated that spring.
The page count may not be coincidental:
Within QAnon lore, the number 17 carries symbolic meaning,
because “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet,
and believers often treat the number as a coded signal. -
The origin story of the proposed executive order is murky, but it appears to trace back to a network of pro-Trump activists who have spent years pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
One of them is
#Peter #Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who has known Trump since the two attended the New York Military Academy as teenagers.Ticktin represented his former classmate in a 2022 civil suit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to smear Trump with claims that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
A federal judge later dismissed the suit and sanctioned Trump’s attorneys
—including Ticktin
—finding that the suit amounted to the “deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”Ticktin currently represents #Tina #Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a 2021 breach of her office’s voting machines.
In an interview, Ticktin told us he wrote what he described as a “precursor” to the 17-page draft executive order that has been circulating since April of last year.
“I'm not sure exactly who prepared this one,” he said of the version dated April 12,
which he provided to Democracy Docket last month.But Ticktin said he believed the April 12 version of the draft order was “really well done”
—well done enough that he emailed it to the president.Ticktin said his outreach to government officials about the draft executive order also extended to #Kurt #Olsen, the White House director of “election security and integrity.”
Olsen, an attorney, represented Texas in its unsuccessful post-2020 suit to overturn Trump’s loss.
He was later sanctioned by a federal judge for advancing “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in Kari Lake’s failed bid to challenge her 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona.
Now, as a White House official, Olsen has reportedly been tasked with leading a probe to reexamine the 2020 race.
Last month, an unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit revealed that a criminal inquiry into election irregularities in Fulton County began with a referral from Olsen.
According to Ticktin, others involved with the effort surrounding the draft order include #Michael #Flynn, the former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before receiving a sweeping pardon from Trump in December 2020;
#Patrick #Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and prominent election skeptic;
and #Stefanie #Lambert, an attorney who is awaiting trial in Michigan over allegations that she illegally accessed voting tabulators in an attempt to prove that the 2020 election was stolen.
Both Flynn and Byrne have repeatedly and publicly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the upcoming election.
Authorship of the April 12 draft is difficult to pin down,
but several figures connected to the election-denial movement say they had a hand in shaping it.A key figure is "#Juan O. #Savin",
the nom de plume of #Wayne #Willott, a private investigator turned QAnon influencer who has cultivated a significant following in far-right conspiracy circles.Savin is perhaps best known among QAnon followers as the subject of a theory that he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr.
—who died in a plane crash in 1999
—living under an assumed identity.Beyond his QAnon celebrity, however, Savin has formed notable political connections:
In 2021, he co-founded the "America First Secretary of State Coalition", which worked to place election-denying candidates in charge of state elections in key swing states.
The coalition received significant funding from "The America Project",
the organization co-founded by Flynn and Byrne.In a recent appearance on the right-wing program "Nino’s Corner", Savin said he reviewed an early version of the executive order during Trump’s re-election campaign in the summer of 2024.
Finding that version “inadequate,” he assembled a coalition of “legal minds” and “election experts”
to formulate a new version of the proposed order.According to Savin, the group met for several days in Washington, D.C. shortly after the inauguration.
Over the following months, he said, the coalition produced approximately 13 drafts before arriving at the 17-page version circulated that spring.
The page count may not be coincidental:
Within QAnon lore, the number 17 carries symbolic meaning,
because “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet,
and believers often treat the number as a coded signal. -
The origin story of the proposed executive order is murky, but it appears to trace back to a network of pro-Trump activists who have spent years pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
One of them is
#Peter #Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who has known Trump since the two attended the New York Military Academy as teenagers.Ticktin represented his former classmate in a 2022 civil suit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to smear Trump with claims that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
A federal judge later dismissed the suit and sanctioned Trump’s attorneys
—including Ticktin
—finding that the suit amounted to the “deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”Ticktin currently represents #Tina #Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a 2021 breach of her office’s voting machines.
In an interview, Ticktin told us he wrote what he described as a “precursor” to the 17-page draft executive order that has been circulating since April of last year.
“I'm not sure exactly who prepared this one,” he said of the version dated April 12,
which he provided to Democracy Docket last month.But Ticktin said he believed the April 12 version of the draft order was “really well done”
—well done enough that he emailed it to the president.Ticktin said his outreach to government officials about the draft executive order also extended to #Kurt #Olsen, the White House director of “election security and integrity.”
Olsen, an attorney, represented Texas in its unsuccessful post-2020 suit to overturn Trump’s loss.
He was later sanctioned by a federal judge for advancing “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in Kari Lake’s failed bid to challenge her 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona.
Now, as a White House official, Olsen has reportedly been tasked with leading a probe to reexamine the 2020 race.
Last month, an unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit revealed that a criminal inquiry into election irregularities in Fulton County began with a referral from Olsen.
According to Ticktin, others involved with the effort surrounding the draft order include #Michael #Flynn, the former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before receiving a sweeping pardon from Trump in December 2020;
#Patrick #Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and prominent election skeptic;
and #Stefanie #Lambert, an attorney who is awaiting trial in Michigan over allegations that she illegally accessed voting tabulators in an attempt to prove that the 2020 election was stolen.
Both Flynn and Byrne have repeatedly and publicly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the upcoming election.
Authorship of the April 12 draft is difficult to pin down,
but several figures connected to the election-denial movement say they had a hand in shaping it.A key figure is "#Juan O. #Savin",
the nom de plume of #Wayne #Willott, a private investigator turned QAnon influencer who has cultivated a significant following in far-right conspiracy circles.Savin is perhaps best known among QAnon followers as the subject of a theory that he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr.
—who died in a plane crash in 1999
—living under an assumed identity.Beyond his QAnon celebrity, however, Savin has formed notable political connections:
In 2021, he co-founded the "America First Secretary of State Coalition", which worked to place election-denying candidates in charge of state elections in key swing states.
The coalition received significant funding from "The America Project",
the organization co-founded by Flynn and Byrne.In a recent appearance on the right-wing program "Nino’s Corner", Savin said he reviewed an early version of the executive order during Trump’s re-election campaign in the summer of 2024.
Finding that version “inadequate,” he assembled a coalition of “legal minds” and “election experts”
to formulate a new version of the proposed order.According to Savin, the group met for several days in Washington, D.C. shortly after the inauguration.
Over the following months, he said, the coalition produced approximately 13 drafts before arriving at the 17-page version circulated that spring.
The page count may not be coincidental:
Within QAnon lore, the number 17 carries symbolic meaning,
because “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet,
and believers often treat the number as a coded signal. -
Wednesday Reads: Democrats Dominated Yesterday’s Off-Year Elections
Good Day!!
Finally some good news! Democrats won big in yesterday’s elections, as voters sent a clear message to Trump. Democrats won the four big races: Virginia governor, New Jersey governor, New York City mayor, and California redistricting question. They also won less publicized races.
Here’s what happened:
NBC News: Democrat Abigail Spanberger wins Virginia governor’s race.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger has defeated Republican Winsome Earle-Sears to flip control of the Virginia governorship, NBC News projects, setting her up to become the first woman to lead the state.
Abigail Spanberger acceptance speech
Spanberger, a former congresswoman, won the race in the blue-leaning state after holding polling and fundraising advantages throughout the campaign. Her victory provides Democrats with a shot of momentum as the party attempts to chart its path forward after its 2024 election defeat.
With an estimated 95% of the vote in, Spanberger had 57.4% of the vote, compared to 42.4% for Earle-Sears.
Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, that held the first governor’s races of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Spanberger, 47, centered her campaign heavily on economic and affordability issues, as well public safety and her support for abortion rights. Her campaign and allied groups attacked Earle-Sears over her conservative record on social issues and her fealty to Trump.
“Tonight, we sent message,” Spanberger said in victory speech in Richmond. “We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025 Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship. We chose our Commonwealth over chaos.”
Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket: Democrats Sweep Statewide Races in Virginia, Projected to Gain Delegate Seats, As Voters Reject Trumpism.
In a rebuke to President Donald Trump, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won Virginia’s gubernatorial race Tuesday, part of a Democratic sweep of statewide races. Her support for constitutional amendments on redistricting and voting rights restoration could make it easier to pass both pro-democracy measures.
Spanberger, a former U.S. Representative and CIA official, will replace term-limited Glenn Youngkin (R) in Richmond, after defeating Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears (R) to become Virginia’s first female governor. Spanberger ran a staunchly anti-Trump campaign.
In another sign of Democratic strength, former delegate Jay Jones (D) unseated incumbent Jason Miyares (R) in the attorney general’s race — a contest many observers had expected Miyares to win after Jones was mired in a texting scandal. And State Sen. Ghazala F. Hashmi (D) won the Lt. Governor’s race over Republican radio host John Reid, becoming the first Muslim woman to win a statewide race in the U.S.
“Commonwealth voters made it clear what they were looking for from their next governor: lower costs, good jobs, affordable health care, and strong schools. And tonight, those same voters made it clear who they want to lead: Abigail Spanberger,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “With tonight’s victory, Virginians also delivered a resounding rejection of the self-serving and corrupt Trump establishment.”
Down ballot, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) announced that the party had maintained control of the Virginia House of Delegates. “With several key races yet to be called, Democrats have already secured enough seats to protect their majority in the Virginia House of Delegates tonight – the most competitive legislative chamber on the ballot this year,” the DLCC said in a statement.
That would mean Democrats hold a trifecta of both chambers of the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion as they push for a series of pro-democratic reforms next year.
NBC News: Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill wins New Jersey governor’s race.
Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race, NBC News projects, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli after a hard-fought contest in which President Donald Trump loomed over voters’ choice.
Governor Elect Mikie Sherrill speaks to the crowd at the Hilton East Brunswick on Election Night. November 4, 2025
Sherrill worked to make the race a referendum on the president, casting Ciattarelli as a Trump acolyte who will not stand up to the president….
Trump made gains across the country in 2024, but his second-biggest gain in any state came in New Jersey. The president lost the state by 6 points last year, a 10-point improvement over his margin in the 2020 election. Now, Sherrill’s victory sends a signal that Republicans can’t expect those improved results from Trump to represent a straight line forward into future elections. Instead, the party is facing headwinds, as voters react to the president’s handling of the economy and other issues.
Following Trump’s closer-than-expected finish in 2024, the New Jersey governor’s race drew more than $100 million in ad spending from both parties, according to AdImpact. The contest presented an early test, ahead of next year’s midterm elections, of how to appeal to swingy Latino voters and navigate rising costs, especially for electricity. Democrats also looked to energize their party’s core supporters, particularly Black voters, while Republicans confronted the persistent challenge of turning out Trump’s supporters when he is not on the ballot.
A majority of New Jersey voters (54%) disapproved of Trump’s job as president and nearly two-thirds were dissatisfied or angry about the direction of the country, according to the NBC News exit poll.
Trump was also a factor for a slim majority of New Jersey voters, with Sherrill winning virtually all of the 38% of voters who said their vote was to oppose Trump, while Ciattarelli won the 13% of voters who said their vote was to support Trump.
NBC News: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race.
Democrat Zohran Mamdani has won New York’s mayoral race, NBC News projects, after the 34-year-old democratic socialist energized progressives in the city and across the country while generating intense backlash from President Donald Trump and Republicans, as well as some Democratic moderates.
Zohran Mamdami wins NYC mayoral race.
In his victory speech after vanquishing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani claimed a broad mandate and set himself up in direct opposition to Trump, who made a late endorsement against him. “In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light,” Mamdani said.
“Together, we will usher in a generation of change, and if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves,” Mamdani said later, before challenging Trump directly.
“This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one,” Mamdani said. “So Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”
Trump wasn’t the only subject of Mamdani’s speech, which he started by quoting the 19th- and 20th-century American socialist Eugene Debs and continued by promising the “most ambitious agenda” to address costs in New York City since the administration of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia nearly 100 years ago.
Mamdani defeated Cuomo, who ran as a third-party candidate after losing the Democratic primary in June, by about 9 points, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa trailing far behind. Mayor Eric Adams, who also mounted a third-party campaign for re-election after he won as a Democrat in 2021, dropped out of the race in September and endorsed Cuomo last month.
Lauren Gambino at The Guardian: Prop 50: Californians pass redistricting measure that helps Democrats flip up to five House seats.
Voters in California on Tuesday approved a high-stakes redistricting measure, a national triumph for Democrats hoping to stop Donald Trump and Republicans from retaining full control of the federal government in next year’s midterm elections.
It was a decisive victory for Democrats in deep-blue California, who had raced to counter a gerrymander in Texas, engineered at the US president’s behest, to carve out new safe Republican districts. The Associated Press declared Proposition 50 had passed almost instantly when polls closed statewide.
Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks after Prop. 50 win.
“We stood stood firm in response to Donald Trump’s recklessness, and tonight, after poking the bear, this bear roared with unprecedented turnout in a special election with an extraordinary result,” Gavin Newsom, the California governor, who spearheaded the initiative said in a speech at the Democratic party headquarters in Sacramento….
In approving the measure, voters chose to toss out the work of California’s independent redistricting commission and temporarily adopt maps drawn by the state legislature to help Democrats pick up five additional seats in the US House of Representatives.
Newsom and Democrats framed the measure as a way to safeguard US democracy from Trump’s “wrecking ball” presidency….
Democrats hold 43 of the state’s 52 House seats. The new maps are drawn to help Democrats flip as many as five of the nine Republican-held seats in the state. It could also help make several swing seats easier for Democrats to win.
Five seats could be decisive in the fight to retake control of the House, a chamber likely to be decided by razor-thin margins. The party that wins the majority will shape the final years of Trump’s second term in the White House – whether a unified Republican Congress will continue to deliver on his agenda or whether he will be met with resistance, investigations and possibly even a third impeachment attempt.
There were some notable victories for Democrats in the deep South:
Ashton Pittman at the Mississippi Free Press: Mississippi Democrats Break Republican Senate Supermajority, Flipping 3 Legislative Seats.
After 13 years, Mississippi Democrats have broken the Republican Party’s supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. Voters elected Democrats to two seats previously held by Republicans, reducing the number of Republican senators in the upper chamber from 36 to 34—one fewer than necessary to constitute a supermajority.
When a party has supermajority status in the Mississippi Senate, it can more easily override a governor’s veto, propose constitutional amendments and execute certain procedural actions.
Johnny DuPree
The Mississippi Democratic Party called the victory “a historic rebuke of extremism.”
“Breaking the supermajority means restoring checks and balances—and ensuring that every Mississippian’s voice counts in their state government,” Mississippi Democratic Party Vice Chair Jodie Brown said in a party press release this morning.
In the Mississippi Pine Belt region, Democrat Johnny DuPree won Senate District 45, previously held by Republican Sen. Chris Johnson of Hattiesburg. In North Mississippi, Democrat Theresa Gillespie Isom won the Senate District 2 seat held by Republican Sen. David Parker of Olive Branch, who decided not to run for reelection.
Republicans had held a supermajority in the Senate since sweeping the state government in 2011.
In the House, Democrat Justin Crosby also flipped House District 22, defeating incumbent Republican House Rep. Jon Lancaster. That district includes parts of Chickasaw, Clay and Monroe counties.
Elena Schneider, Erin Doherty and Jessica Piper at Politico:
For Democrats, Tuesday night felt like 2017 all over again.
All across the country, Democrats won big, from the marquee races to the down-ballot contests. Counties that had shifted right a year ago veered back to the left, and the suburbs that powered Democrats’ massive wins in the first Trump administration came roaring back. Exit polls even showed Democrats improved their margins with non-college educated voters.
The strength of the wins hints at Democrats’ appetite to take on Trump as he ends his first year in office and voters’ concerns about cost of living.
Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill cruised to double-digit victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Two Georgia Democrats flipped seats on the state’s Public Service Commission, the first non-federal statewide wins for a Democrat in nearly two decades. Democrats flipped a pair of Republican-held state Senate seats in Mississippi, cracking the GOP supermajority in a deep-red state. And a successful California ballot measure delivered five additional seats for the party’s House margins ahead of the 2026 midterms, offsetting Texas’ redistricting push.
It was an injection of life into a depleted, depressed Democratic Party that had been cast into the political wilderness by Donald Trump’s decisive victory a year ago. Democrats, locked out of power in Washington, have spent the last year soul-searching and data-digging, as their brand sagged to historic lows.
But they also started to overperform in special elections, hinting that the tide was turning. And on Tuesday, their first big electoral test of the second Trump era, they didn’t just match the wins from eight years ago that had been a harbinger of a blue wave in the 2018 midterms — in several key races, they exceeded them….
Democrats rode the traditional, party-out-of-power tailwinds, reenergizing their own base by pushing back on Trump’s second-term policies that have alarmed liberals. Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s messaging on the stagnant economy and affordability crisis helped their party bounce back in its first political test of the second Trump era — and by margins that even surprised some Democrats.
Ariel Edwards-Levy at CNN: CNN exit polls: Voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump helped fuel Democratic wins in key races.
Last November, Donald Trump won a return to the White House amid broad national dissatisfaction with the state of the country. A year later, CNN exit polling finds voters expressing similar pessimism and anti-incumbent sentiments — this time, helping to fuel a sweep of Democratic victories in some of the first major electoral tests of the second Trump presidency.
Across four closely watched contests — the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, the mayoral race in New York City and the redistricting-related Proposition 50 in California — majorities of voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance. In Virginia, New Jersey and California, more than half of the electorate sees their vote as sending a message to Trump. That message, largely one of opposition, helped to propel Democratic gubernatorial wins by Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. In California, it helped seal support for Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to redraw the state’s congressional maps.
Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s mayoral race, meanwhile, may owe more to local concerns about issues like cost of living. But it also reflects a loss for former governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Trump endorsed at the last minute.
Tuesday’s Democratic victories come despite middling ratings for the Democratic Party, with Spanberger, Sherrill and Mamdani winning 16% to 33% of the vote among voters who dislike their party.
Read the details at the CNN link.
Some deeper analysis from Paul Krugman: Which Party Is in Trouble, Again?
Yesterday was a very good day for Democrats and a very bad day for both MAGA and the oligarchy. If I were a properly house-trained pundit, I would immediately follow that statement by throwing some shade at Democrats. But this was a blowout, pure and simple.
Here are a few takes on what just happened:
The polls beat the pundits
Nobody should have been surprised that Democrats had a very good night. These elections were, as expected, largely a referendum on Donald Trump, and polling says that Trump is very, very unpopular. Even if you dismissed Trump’s dismal approval rating as fake news, there were plenty of other indications that Trump would drag his party down. The second No Kings Day was the largest one-day demonstration since Earth Day in 1970. Democrats have been outperforming by something like 15 points in special elections. And polling averages favored Democrats in key races.
So everything pointed to big Dem gains, although the scale of the victories was a surprise. There had been a steady drumbeat of warnings that Mikie Sherrill, in particular, might be in trouble. Instead she won in a 13-point landslide….
It’s still (largely) the economy, stupid
The 2024 election was mainly about economics. There was a big runup in prices in 2021-22, as the world economy, recovering from Covid, experienced a lot of supply-chain bottlenecks. This price surge, coming after decades of low inflation, upset voters. Biden administration officials could and did point out that it was a one-time price hike, that inflation — the rate of change of prices — fell rapidly from its 2022 peak, and was back to more or less normal levels by 2024. They could also point out that America’s inflation experience was very similar to the experiences of other nations, e.g. in Europe, indicating that global factors rather than Democratic policies were the main culprit.
But voters were unmoved by these arguments, if they heard about them at all. What they did hear was Donald Trump promising not just to reduce inflation but to bring prices way back down. And many of them believed him.
Of course, Trump didn’t have a plan, or even a concept of a plan, about how to accomplish this. Instead he imposed tariffs and began deporting immigrant workers, both of which raised prices….
So prices haven’t come down; instead, inflation has accelerated. And the job market has gotten worse. Thanks to the shutdown, we’re not getting official employment numbers, but I’ve been looking at private surveys. One number I find especially striking is the Conference Board’s “labor market differential,” the difference between the percentage of Americans who say jobs are “plentiful” and those who say jobs are “hard to get.” This number is way down, which says that ordinary Americans perceive a very tough job market.
Read more at the Substack link above.
Some significant legal news:
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Trump’s idiotic tariffs. CNN: Trump admin faces deeply skeptical Supreme Court in early tariff arguments.
In the most significant economic case to reach the Supreme Court in years, the justices are weighing whether President Donald Trump acted lawfully when he imposed sweeping emergency tariffs against most global trading partners. Those actions have been challenged by a group of small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as a dozen states.
• Early in arguments, President Donald Trump’s attorney faced deep skepticism from several key conservative justices. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh all pressed on the administration’s arguments for imposing tariffs.
• Both sides frame the appeal in existential terms, with Trump warning that a ruling against him could have “catastrophic” consequences for the nation’s economic health. The companies challenging the policy say the on-again-off-again tariff announcements have driven costs – and uncertainty – to intolerable levels.
• Plaintiff arguments are now underway.
Follow live updates and expert commentary at the CNN link.
Natalie Sherman at BBC News: Trump tariffs head to Supreme Court in case eagerly awaited around the world.
What may be the biggest battle yet in Donald Trump’s trade war is getting under way.
The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments over the legality of the Trump administration’s tariffs, as a number of small businesses and a group of states contend most of them are illegal and should be struck down.
If the court agrees with them, Trump’s trade strategy would be upended, including the sweeping global tariffs he first announced in April. The government would also likely have to refund some of the billions of dollars it has collected through the tariffs, which are taxes on imports.
Following Wednesday’s hearing, the justices will pore over the arguments and discuss the merits of the case, which could take months. Eventually they will hold a vote.
Trump has described the fight in epic terms, warning a loss would tie his hands in trade negotiations and imperil national security….
Trump previously said that if he does not win the case the US would be “weakened” and in a “financial mess” for many years to come.
The stakes feel just as high for many businesses in the US and abroad, which have been paying the price while getting whipped about by fast-changing policies.
More at the link.
The guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent is on trial in DC. Adam Downer at The Daily Beast: D.C. Hoagie Hurler Trial Begins—And It’s Already a Hot Mess.
A jury in Washington D.C. started hearing Tuesday the case against the man who agrees he threw a footlong at a federal agent surged into Washington D.C. by Donald Trump in August. The 12 citizens have to decide if DOJ paralegal Sean Dunn is guilty of misdemeanor assault, or was simply exercising his First Amendment rights.
FBI and Border Patrol officers speak with Sean Charles Dunn, after he allegedly assaulted law enforcement with a sandwich. Getty Images
Convicting Dunn, who was fired from his job, has become a personal mission for Trump’s United States District Attorney in D.C., Fox News personality “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, who failed to get a grand jury to agree to felony charges. She then took the rare step of pursuing a misdemeanor charge of assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating and interfering with a federal officer instead.
Dunn is accused of shouting “f—ing fascists” at a group of federal agents outside a Subway 14th St. N.W. in D.C. at 11p.m. on Sunday August 10. Prosecutors allege he said, “F— you! You f—ing fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!” before “winding his arm back and forcefully throwing a sub-style sandwich” at Border Patrol Agent Gregory Lairmore.
Footage of the sandwich stand-off went viral almost instantly and Dunn was quickly identified, fired, called a member of the “deep state” by Pirro and finally arrested in a SWAT-style raid on his home filmed by the DOJ and released gleefully by the White House. If convicted, Dunn would face a maximum of six months in jail and a $1000 fine.
Dunn’s attorney, Julia Gatto, told the jury Tuesday that Dunn “did it,” saying, “He threw the sandwich,” CNN reported.
But then the defense turned the proceedings upside down by effectively putting Lairmore on trial.
“The sandwich kind of exploded all over my uniform,” Lairmore initially told the jury. “It smelled of onions and mustard.”
A second defense attorney Sabrina Shroff, however, showed a photo of an almost intact sandwich lying on the ground.“In fact that sandwich hasn’t exploded at all,” she said.
“From the photo it looks bent and out of shape,” the officer said.
“Can you tell if it’s a turkey sandwich?” Shroff asked him. “Lettuce? Tomatoes?”
More silly stuff at the link.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m feeling more optimistic after yesterday’s elections, and I hope you are too.
#AbigailSpanberger #CaliforniaRedistrictingVote #DonaldTrump #MickieSherrill #MississippiSenate #offYearElections #SandwichThrowingGuyTrial #SupremeCourtTariffsCase #VoterDissatisfactionWithTrump #ZohranMamdani
-
Wednesday Reads: Democrats Dominated Yesterday’s Off-Year Elections
Good Day!!
Finally some good news! Democrats won big in yesterday’s elections, as voters sent a clear message to Trump. Democrats won the four big races: Virginia governor, New Jersey governor, New York City mayor, and California redistricting question. They also won less publicized races.
Here’s what happened:
NBC News: Democrat Abigail Spanberger wins Virginia governor’s race.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger has defeated Republican Winsome Earle-Sears to flip control of the Virginia governorship, NBC News projects, setting her up to become the first woman to lead the state.
Abigail Spanberger acceptance speech
Spanberger, a former congresswoman, won the race in the blue-leaning state after holding polling and fundraising advantages throughout the campaign. Her victory provides Democrats with a shot of momentum as the party attempts to chart its path forward after its 2024 election defeat.
With an estimated 95% of the vote in, Spanberger had 57.4% of the vote, compared to 42.4% for Earle-Sears.
Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, that held the first governor’s races of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Spanberger, 47, centered her campaign heavily on economic and affordability issues, as well public safety and her support for abortion rights. Her campaign and allied groups attacked Earle-Sears over her conservative record on social issues and her fealty to Trump.
“Tonight, we sent message,” Spanberger said in victory speech in Richmond. “We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025 Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship. We chose our Commonwealth over chaos.”
Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket: Democrats Sweep Statewide Races in Virginia, Projected to Gain Delegate Seats, As Voters Reject Trumpism.
In a rebuke to President Donald Trump, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won Virginia’s gubernatorial race Tuesday, part of a Democratic sweep of statewide races. Her support for constitutional amendments on redistricting and voting rights restoration could make it easier to pass both pro-democracy measures.
Spanberger, a former U.S. Representative and CIA official, will replace term-limited Glenn Youngkin (R) in Richmond, after defeating Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears (R) to become Virginia’s first female governor. Spanberger ran a staunchly anti-Trump campaign.
In another sign of Democratic strength, former delegate Jay Jones (D) unseated incumbent Jason Miyares (R) in the attorney general’s race — a contest many observers had expected Miyares to win after Jones was mired in a texting scandal. And State Sen. Ghazala F. Hashmi (D) won the Lt. Governor’s race over Republican radio host John Reid, becoming the first Muslim woman to win a statewide race in the U.S.
“Commonwealth voters made it clear what they were looking for from their next governor: lower costs, good jobs, affordable health care, and strong schools. And tonight, those same voters made it clear who they want to lead: Abigail Spanberger,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “With tonight’s victory, Virginians also delivered a resounding rejection of the self-serving and corrupt Trump establishment.”
Down ballot, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) announced that the party had maintained control of the Virginia House of Delegates. “With several key races yet to be called, Democrats have already secured enough seats to protect their majority in the Virginia House of Delegates tonight – the most competitive legislative chamber on the ballot this year,” the DLCC said in a statement.
That would mean Democrats hold a trifecta of both chambers of the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion as they push for a series of pro-democratic reforms next year.
NBC News: Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill wins New Jersey governor’s race.
Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race, NBC News projects, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli after a hard-fought contest in which President Donald Trump loomed over voters’ choice.
Governor Elect Mikie Sherrill speaks to the crowd at the Hilton East Brunswick on Election Night. November 4, 2025
Sherrill worked to make the race a referendum on the president, casting Ciattarelli as a Trump acolyte who will not stand up to the president….
Trump made gains across the country in 2024, but his second-biggest gain in any state came in New Jersey. The president lost the state by 6 points last year, a 10-point improvement over his margin in the 2020 election. Now, Sherrill’s victory sends a signal that Republicans can’t expect those improved results from Trump to represent a straight line forward into future elections. Instead, the party is facing headwinds, as voters react to the president’s handling of the economy and other issues.
Following Trump’s closer-than-expected finish in 2024, the New Jersey governor’s race drew more than $100 million in ad spending from both parties, according to AdImpact. The contest presented an early test, ahead of next year’s midterm elections, of how to appeal to swingy Latino voters and navigate rising costs, especially for electricity. Democrats also looked to energize their party’s core supporters, particularly Black voters, while Republicans confronted the persistent challenge of turning out Trump’s supporters when he is not on the ballot.
A majority of New Jersey voters (54%) disapproved of Trump’s job as president and nearly two-thirds were dissatisfied or angry about the direction of the country, according to the NBC News exit poll.
Trump was also a factor for a slim majority of New Jersey voters, with Sherrill winning virtually all of the 38% of voters who said their vote was to oppose Trump, while Ciattarelli won the 13% of voters who said their vote was to support Trump.
NBC News: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race.
Democrat Zohran Mamdani has won New York’s mayoral race, NBC News projects, after the 34-year-old democratic socialist energized progressives in the city and across the country while generating intense backlash from President Donald Trump and Republicans, as well as some Democratic moderates.
Zohran Mamdami wins NYC mayoral race.
In his victory speech after vanquishing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani claimed a broad mandate and set himself up in direct opposition to Trump, who made a late endorsement against him. “In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light,” Mamdani said.
“Together, we will usher in a generation of change, and if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves,” Mamdani said later, before challenging Trump directly.
“This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one,” Mamdani said. “So Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”
Trump wasn’t the only subject of Mamdani’s speech, which he started by quoting the 19th- and 20th-century American socialist Eugene Debs and continued by promising the “most ambitious agenda” to address costs in New York City since the administration of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia nearly 100 years ago.
Mamdani defeated Cuomo, who ran as a third-party candidate after losing the Democratic primary in June, by about 9 points, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa trailing far behind. Mayor Eric Adams, who also mounted a third-party campaign for re-election after he won as a Democrat in 2021, dropped out of the race in September and endorsed Cuomo last month.
Lauren Gambino at The Guardian: Prop 50: Californians pass redistricting measure that helps Democrats flip up to five House seats.
Voters in California on Tuesday approved a high-stakes redistricting measure, a national triumph for Democrats hoping to stop Donald Trump and Republicans from retaining full control of the federal government in next year’s midterm elections.
It was a decisive victory for Democrats in deep-blue California, who had raced to counter a gerrymander in Texas, engineered at the US president’s behest, to carve out new safe Republican districts. The Associated Press declared Proposition 50 had passed almost instantly when polls closed statewide.
Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks after Prop. 50 win.
“We stood stood firm in response to Donald Trump’s recklessness, and tonight, after poking the bear, this bear roared with unprecedented turnout in a special election with an extraordinary result,” Gavin Newsom, the California governor, who spearheaded the initiative said in a speech at the Democratic party headquarters in Sacramento….
In approving the measure, voters chose to toss out the work of California’s independent redistricting commission and temporarily adopt maps drawn by the state legislature to help Democrats pick up five additional seats in the US House of Representatives.
Newsom and Democrats framed the measure as a way to safeguard US democracy from Trump’s “wrecking ball” presidency….
Democrats hold 43 of the state’s 52 House seats. The new maps are drawn to help Democrats flip as many as five of the nine Republican-held seats in the state. It could also help make several swing seats easier for Democrats to win.
Five seats could be decisive in the fight to retake control of the House, a chamber likely to be decided by razor-thin margins. The party that wins the majority will shape the final years of Trump’s second term in the White House – whether a unified Republican Congress will continue to deliver on his agenda or whether he will be met with resistance, investigations and possibly even a third impeachment attempt.
There were some notable victories for Democrats in the deep South:
Ashton Pittman at the Mississippi Free Press: Mississippi Democrats Break Republican Senate Supermajority, Flipping 3 Legislative Seats.
After 13 years, Mississippi Democrats have broken the Republican Party’s supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. Voters elected Democrats to two seats previously held by Republicans, reducing the number of Republican senators in the upper chamber from 36 to 34—one fewer than necessary to constitute a supermajority.
When a party has supermajority status in the Mississippi Senate, it can more easily override a governor’s veto, propose constitutional amendments and execute certain procedural actions.
Johnny DuPree
The Mississippi Democratic Party called the victory “a historic rebuke of extremism.”
“Breaking the supermajority means restoring checks and balances—and ensuring that every Mississippian’s voice counts in their state government,” Mississippi Democratic Party Vice Chair Jodie Brown said in a party press release this morning.
In the Mississippi Pine Belt region, Democrat Johnny DuPree won Senate District 45, previously held by Republican Sen. Chris Johnson of Hattiesburg. In North Mississippi, Democrat Theresa Gillespie Isom won the Senate District 2 seat held by Republican Sen. David Parker of Olive Branch, who decided not to run for reelection.
Republicans had held a supermajority in the Senate since sweeping the state government in 2011.
In the House, Democrat Justin Crosby also flipped House District 22, defeating incumbent Republican House Rep. Jon Lancaster. That district includes parts of Chickasaw, Clay and Monroe counties.
Elena Schneider, Erin Doherty and Jessica Piper at Politico:
For Democrats, Tuesday night felt like 2017 all over again.
All across the country, Democrats won big, from the marquee races to the down-ballot contests. Counties that had shifted right a year ago veered back to the left, and the suburbs that powered Democrats’ massive wins in the first Trump administration came roaring back. Exit polls even showed Democrats improved their margins with non-college educated voters.
The strength of the wins hints at Democrats’ appetite to take on Trump as he ends his first year in office and voters’ concerns about cost of living.
Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill cruised to double-digit victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Two Georgia Democrats flipped seats on the state’s Public Service Commission, the first non-federal statewide wins for a Democrat in nearly two decades. Democrats flipped a pair of Republican-held state Senate seats in Mississippi, cracking the GOP supermajority in a deep-red state. And a successful California ballot measure delivered five additional seats for the party’s House margins ahead of the 2026 midterms, offsetting Texas’ redistricting push.
It was an injection of life into a depleted, depressed Democratic Party that had been cast into the political wilderness by Donald Trump’s decisive victory a year ago. Democrats, locked out of power in Washington, have spent the last year soul-searching and data-digging, as their brand sagged to historic lows.
But they also started to overperform in special elections, hinting that the tide was turning. And on Tuesday, their first big electoral test of the second Trump era, they didn’t just match the wins from eight years ago that had been a harbinger of a blue wave in the 2018 midterms — in several key races, they exceeded them….
Democrats rode the traditional, party-out-of-power tailwinds, reenergizing their own base by pushing back on Trump’s second-term policies that have alarmed liberals. Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s messaging on the stagnant economy and affordability crisis helped their party bounce back in its first political test of the second Trump era — and by margins that even surprised some Democrats.
Ariel Edwards-Levy at CNN: CNN exit polls: Voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump helped fuel Democratic wins in key races.
Last November, Donald Trump won a return to the White House amid broad national dissatisfaction with the state of the country. A year later, CNN exit polling finds voters expressing similar pessimism and anti-incumbent sentiments — this time, helping to fuel a sweep of Democratic victories in some of the first major electoral tests of the second Trump presidency.
Across four closely watched contests — the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, the mayoral race in New York City and the redistricting-related Proposition 50 in California — majorities of voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance. In Virginia, New Jersey and California, more than half of the electorate sees their vote as sending a message to Trump. That message, largely one of opposition, helped to propel Democratic gubernatorial wins by Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. In California, it helped seal support for Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to redraw the state’s congressional maps.
Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s mayoral race, meanwhile, may owe more to local concerns about issues like cost of living. But it also reflects a loss for former governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Trump endorsed at the last minute.
Tuesday’s Democratic victories come despite middling ratings for the Democratic Party, with Spanberger, Sherrill and Mamdani winning 16% to 33% of the vote among voters who dislike their party.
Read the details at the CNN link.
Some deeper analysis from Paul Krugman: Which Party Is in Trouble, Again?
Yesterday was a very good day for Democrats and a very bad day for both MAGA and the oligarchy. If I were a properly house-trained pundit, I would immediately follow that statement by throwing some shade at Democrats. But this was a blowout, pure and simple.
Here are a few takes on what just happened:
The polls beat the pundits
Nobody should have been surprised that Democrats had a very good night. These elections were, as expected, largely a referendum on Donald Trump, and polling says that Trump is very, very unpopular. Even if you dismissed Trump’s dismal approval rating as fake news, there were plenty of other indications that Trump would drag his party down. The second No Kings Day was the largest one-day demonstration since Earth Day in 1970. Democrats have been outperforming by something like 15 points in special elections. And polling averages favored Democrats in key races.
So everything pointed to big Dem gains, although the scale of the victories was a surprise. There had been a steady drumbeat of warnings that Mikie Sherrill, in particular, might be in trouble. Instead she won in a 13-point landslide….
It’s still (largely) the economy, stupid
The 2024 election was mainly about economics. There was a big runup in prices in 2021-22, as the world economy, recovering from Covid, experienced a lot of supply-chain bottlenecks. This price surge, coming after decades of low inflation, upset voters. Biden administration officials could and did point out that it was a one-time price hike, that inflation — the rate of change of prices — fell rapidly from its 2022 peak, and was back to more or less normal levels by 2024. They could also point out that America’s inflation experience was very similar to the experiences of other nations, e.g. in Europe, indicating that global factors rather than Democratic policies were the main culprit.
But voters were unmoved by these arguments, if they heard about them at all. What they did hear was Donald Trump promising not just to reduce inflation but to bring prices way back down. And many of them believed him.
Of course, Trump didn’t have a plan, or even a concept of a plan, about how to accomplish this. Instead he imposed tariffs and began deporting immigrant workers, both of which raised prices….
So prices haven’t come down; instead, inflation has accelerated. And the job market has gotten worse. Thanks to the shutdown, we’re not getting official employment numbers, but I’ve been looking at private surveys. One number I find especially striking is the Conference Board’s “labor market differential,” the difference between the percentage of Americans who say jobs are “plentiful” and those who say jobs are “hard to get.” This number is way down, which says that ordinary Americans perceive a very tough job market.
Read more at the Substack link above.
Some significant legal news:
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Trump’s idiotic tariffs. CNN: Trump admin faces deeply skeptical Supreme Court in early tariff arguments.
In the most significant economic case to reach the Supreme Court in years, the justices are weighing whether President Donald Trump acted lawfully when he imposed sweeping emergency tariffs against most global trading partners. Those actions have been challenged by a group of small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as a dozen states.
• Early in arguments, President Donald Trump’s attorney faced deep skepticism from several key conservative justices. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh all pressed on the administration’s arguments for imposing tariffs.
• Both sides frame the appeal in existential terms, with Trump warning that a ruling against him could have “catastrophic” consequences for the nation’s economic health. The companies challenging the policy say the on-again-off-again tariff announcements have driven costs – and uncertainty – to intolerable levels.
• Plaintiff arguments are now underway.
Follow live updates and expert commentary at the CNN link.
Natalie Sherman at BBC News: Trump tariffs head to Supreme Court in case eagerly awaited around the world.
What may be the biggest battle yet in Donald Trump’s trade war is getting under way.
The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments over the legality of the Trump administration’s tariffs, as a number of small businesses and a group of states contend most of them are illegal and should be struck down.
If the court agrees with them, Trump’s trade strategy would be upended, including the sweeping global tariffs he first announced in April. The government would also likely have to refund some of the billions of dollars it has collected through the tariffs, which are taxes on imports.
Following Wednesday’s hearing, the justices will pore over the arguments and discuss the merits of the case, which could take months. Eventually they will hold a vote.
Trump has described the fight in epic terms, warning a loss would tie his hands in trade negotiations and imperil national security….
Trump previously said that if he does not win the case the US would be “weakened” and in a “financial mess” for many years to come.
The stakes feel just as high for many businesses in the US and abroad, which have been paying the price while getting whipped about by fast-changing policies.
More at the link.
The guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent is on trial in DC. Adam Downer at The Daily Beast: D.C. Hoagie Hurler Trial Begins—And It’s Already a Hot Mess.
A jury in Washington D.C. started hearing Tuesday the case against the man who agrees he threw a footlong at a federal agent surged into Washington D.C. by Donald Trump in August. The 12 citizens have to decide if DOJ paralegal Sean Dunn is guilty of misdemeanor assault, or was simply exercising his First Amendment rights.
FBI and Border Patrol officers speak with Sean Charles Dunn, after he allegedly assaulted law enforcement with a sandwich. Getty Images
Convicting Dunn, who was fired from his job, has become a personal mission for Trump’s United States District Attorney in D.C., Fox News personality “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, who failed to get a grand jury to agree to felony charges. She then took the rare step of pursuing a misdemeanor charge of assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating and interfering with a federal officer instead.
Dunn is accused of shouting “f—ing fascists” at a group of federal agents outside a Subway 14th St. N.W. in D.C. at 11p.m. on Sunday August 10. Prosecutors allege he said, “F— you! You f—ing fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!” before “winding his arm back and forcefully throwing a sub-style sandwich” at Border Patrol Agent Gregory Lairmore.
Footage of the sandwich stand-off went viral almost instantly and Dunn was quickly identified, fired, called a member of the “deep state” by Pirro and finally arrested in a SWAT-style raid on his home filmed by the DOJ and released gleefully by the White House. If convicted, Dunn would face a maximum of six months in jail and a $1000 fine.
Dunn’s attorney, Julia Gatto, told the jury Tuesday that Dunn “did it,” saying, “He threw the sandwich,” CNN reported.
But then the defense turned the proceedings upside down by effectively putting Lairmore on trial.
“The sandwich kind of exploded all over my uniform,” Lairmore initially told the jury. “It smelled of onions and mustard.”
A second defense attorney Sabrina Shroff, however, showed a photo of an almost intact sandwich lying on the ground.“In fact that sandwich hasn’t exploded at all,” she said.
“From the photo it looks bent and out of shape,” the officer said.
“Can you tell if it’s a turkey sandwich?” Shroff asked him. “Lettuce? Tomatoes?”
More silly stuff at the link.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m feeling more optimistic after yesterday’s elections, and I hope you are too.
#AbigailSpanberger #CaliforniaRedistrictingVote #DonaldTrump #MickieSherrill #MississippiSenate #offYearElections #SandwichThrowingGuyTrial #SupremeCourtTariffsCase #VoterDissatisfactionWithTrump #ZohranMamdani
-
Since January, Trump has launched a broad offensive to assert power over regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to operate without direct control from the White House.
That assault has included an effort to assert control over the Federal Elections Commission ( #FEC ), potentially making it easier for Trump to tilt elections in the GOP’s favor.
Charged with administering and enforcing the federal campaign finance laws and investigating campaign finance violations, the FEC is key to upholding the integrity of federal campaigns, reducing political corruption and providing transparency about who is spending money on federal elections.
Trump last month moved to fire Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic member of the commission, without cause, something no other president has ever done.
Weintraub hasn’t filed a lawsuit challenging her dismissal, but former FEC officials believe the attempt is likely illegal.Whether through a lawsuit over Weintraub’s dismissal or challenges to other firings, courts
— specifically the Supreme Court
— could ultimately give Trump the ability to fire FEC commissioners.Daniel Weiner, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Democracy Docket that would
“significantly” increase the possibility of the FEC being weaponized against Trump’s political opponents, as his administration would have increased influence to weigh in on its regulatory and enforcement decisions.“What we’ve seen with this administration is that they really do seem to want to go after their enemies,” Weiner said.
“No other president in recent history has been so overt about weaponizing the government against his political opponents.”
Additionally, Trump may sign an executive order that dissolves the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and incorporates the service into the Department of Commerce, according to the Washington Post.
Doing so would give Trump and his political appointees direct control over the agency that handles mail ballots.
Experts told Democracy Docket that not only could this shake voter confidence in mail voting, but the administration could make voting by mail more difficult by changing postage requirements for mail ballots or influencing how states mail ballots to voters.
-
Finally Friday Reads: The Chaos Times
“It’s now safe to go out to dinner in The Nation’s Capital!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The chaos surrounding voting rights continues to play out across many southern states. I’ve shared the craziness going on down here in Lousyana. It seems today’s news on voting rights and gerrymandering shenanigans were handled by Supreme Court judges in Virginia. It’s looking like Orange Caligula and his Republican enablers will be getting the Midterm Election chaos they seek. Our primary election is coming up in 8 days. Our U.S. Congressional representatives are not on the ballot as they should be.
Will the Virginia Supreme Court Decision impact more than just Virginia? That seems to be the question being asked in the national conversation. David A. Lieb and Geoff Mulvihill report the story for the AP. “Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats’ redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win.” It’s difficult to believe that so much disruption can happen in modern times.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections.
The court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment April 21, but the court’s ruling renders the results of that vote meaningless.
Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote that the legislature submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to voters “in an unprecedented manner.”
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” he wrote.
Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn U.S. House map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere at the urging of President Donald Trump. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections.
Redistricting could change the House Map. This is the next question the article addresses.
Mid-decade redistricting so far has resulted in 14 more congressional seats that Republicans believe they could win and six more seats that Democrats think they could win, putting the GOP up by eight. But some of those seats could be competitive in the November election, making the results uncertain. Redistricting is still being litigated in several states.
There is a map showing the general changes that have occurred following the Supreme Court decision, which has disrupted the entire concept of gerrymandering and its illegality. The Guardian reports today on the situation in Tennessee, which could eliminate its one black majority Congressional seat. We worry about that here in Louisiana. “Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district. Move comes days after supreme court ruling weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering.” George Chidi has the analysis.
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
The district had closely occupied the south-west corner of the state. Now three districts snake out from Memphis’ dense center, with two crossing the Tennessee River to reach Nashville’s suburbs 200 miles away.
“If Republican policies are so great, why are we changing the lines to rig elections?” asked Vincent Dixie, a state representative from Nashville, during debate on Thursday, pleading for Republicans to refrain. “Where is your humanity in this?”
As Democratic lawmakers spoke, the house speaker directed state troopers to remove a section of the audience in the gallery, which had begun shouting.
Justin Jones, a state Democratic representative, described Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee house speaker, as the “grand wizard in chief”, and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag. Jones offered amendments to the bill, which the speaker ruled had been submitted in an untimely manner. Jones described that as a “Jim Crow process”.
The redistricting comes eight days after the supreme court’s landmark Callais v Landry decision, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act which had restrained state governments from drawing congressional districts that left Black voters at a political disadvantage.
Despite demands from Donald Trump for conservative states to conduct mid-decade redistricting, Tennessee had refrained from taking action before the court’s ruling. But Sexton said the redraw will “ensure the state’s representation in Washington reflects its conservative values”.
Khaya Himmelman has more information about the Virginia situation in Talking Points Memo. “Virginia State Supreme Court Strikes Down Dem Redistricting Proposal.”
In a major loss for Democrats on Friday, the Virginia state Supreme Court rejected, in a 4-3 decision, the state’s recently approved redistricting proposal, which could have given Democrats four additional congressional seats, improving their chances of taking control of the U.S. House this year.
The proposal, which was introduced as a way to offset the impact of the Trump administration’s mid-cycle gerrymandering blitz, was narrowly approved by voters in a special election earlier this month.
The Supreme Court ruled that the process by which lawmakers moved forward the redistricting proposal violated the state’s constitution.
“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the state Supreme Court’s majority opinion read.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” it continued. “For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.”
Election analysts underscored that this is a major victory for Republicans, though the political environment could still be a considerable drag on their midterms changes.
G. Elliott Morris has an analysis up today that breaks down the statistical assumptions the Supreme Court used. This comes from his site Strength in Numbers. “The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA. The Court says vote dilution can be proven only after controlling for “controlling” racial polarization rather than partisan polarization. This is a nonsensical and impossible test.” For a kid who hated her algebra classes, I sure live in the realm of statistical and econometric analysis now. It helps to understand the numbers, believe me.
The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
That, more or less, is what the Court wrote when it invalidated the Voting Rights Act last week. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 on April 29, 2026, the conservative majority told voting-rights plaintiffs they must now “control for party affiliation” before their evidence of racial bloc voting will count under Section 2.
That sounds like a neutral statistical fix, but in reality, it’s a bad control — an error called “conditioning on a mediator variable“ that would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101. The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!
This is important (not just a piece for nerds) because Republican legislatures are already moving ahead with new partisan and racial gerrymanders based on SCOTUS’s new theory. Tennessee passed a 9-0 GOP map this week that splits Memphis’s majority-Black and solidly Democratic 9th District into three majority-white, Republican-leaning seats. Mississippi’s governor has called a special session for May 20. Louisiana is losing at least one of its majority-Black districts. And Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina could be next. (On this week’s podcast, David and I recap these new gerrymandering efforts that are unfolding with unprecedented haste.)
This week’s Chart of the Week is: a simple table (and one causal diagram) that shows how the Court’s new test makes racial polarization vanish on paper, while it is very much still alive in real life.
This is the decision that will dilute the vote of New Orleans and every black citizen of Louisiana. Again, here’s the link to the Governor’s site announcing the decision to gerrymander the state prior to voting for our Congressional Representatives. “Governor Jeff Landry Suspends Only U.S. House Primary Elections Following Supreme Court Ruling.” My mind boggles every time I read anything on this.
Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending Louisiana’s closed party primary elections only for offices of U.S. Representative in response to the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais. EO attached.
“The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” said Governor Jeff Landry. “Here in Louisiana, we’re proud to lead the nation on this charge. Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters. This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map. I would like to thank Attorney General Liz Murrill for her hard work throughout this process”
The ruling issued on April 29 found Louisiana’s current congressional district map, enacted under SB 8 during the 2024 First Extraordinary Session, to be an unconstitutional gerrymander. The decision effectively reinstates a lower court injunction prohibiting the state from conducting congressional elections under the invalidated map.
As a result, the state’s closed party primary elections for U.S. House seats, previously scheduled for May 16, 2026, and the second primary set for June 27, 2026, are suspended. Early voting for the May election was set to begin May 2. Other offices and ballot measures scheduled for May 16 will continue as planned. This suspension will only apply to the U.S. House races.
I do feel like I’ve been disenfranchised. And again, please remember the impact the SAVE Act will have on Women and Transexual individuals. Democracy Docket has this analysis of the Tennessee situation. “‘Jim Crow on steroids’: Tennessee gerrymander included nixing rule that voters must be notified about new districts.” The analysis is provided by Jacob Knutson.
In the aggressive congressional gerrymander they adopted Thursday, Tennessee Republicans also removed a provision in state law requiring the government to alert voters about changes to their designated polling places when electoral lines are redrawn.
Transparency groups and state lawmakers have warned that the change is likely to exacerbate voter confusion caused by state Republicans’ abrupt adoption of new congressional maps just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
One leading democracy advocate called it “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Before Thursday, state law required county election commissions to “immediately” notify voters by mail when their polling place or precinct changed because of redistricting. Among other notices, alerts also had to be published in newspapers. The law was meant to ensure that voters know where to cast their ballots during early voting or on election day.
But in their bill repealing a five-decade prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, Republicans included an amendment that only requires county election commissions to post a notice about redrawn congressional districts on their “official website, if one exists.”
Under the repeal, which is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R), the secretary of state also has to publish a notice, but mail and newspaper notices are no longer required to inform voters about changed boundaries.
Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (TCOG), a nonpartisan transparency group, said in a release Thursday that the change was likely meant to reduce costs, though she warned that the voting public will be harmed when it takes effect.
“When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” Fisher said.
Republicans had to repeal the prohibition on mid-decade redistricting before they pushed through their new congressional map, which cracks the state’s only majority-Black district between three separate districts.
Because of the new map, several local voting areas were shifted into new congressional districts. That means polling places likely changed for hundreds of voters across the state.
While debating the map in the Tennessee Senate Thursday, Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Democrat who represents Nashville, accused Republicans of intentionally misleading voters through the notice change.
“We’re not just redrawing the map. We’re making sure people don’t have to be told the map changed,” Campbell said.
Reacting to the notice change Thursday, Norman Ornstein, a prominent political scientist formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, called it “Jim Crow on steroids” in a social media post.
It’s clear to me that we really have something to worry about. We’re busy here in Greater New Orleans with actions. Please consider finding out how you can help our country’s voting system.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#GerryMandering #JimCrowOnSteroids #Louisiana #LouisianaVCallais #SupremeCourt #Tennesse #Virginia #votingRights -
Finally Friday Reads: The Chaos Times
“It’s now safe to go out to dinner in The Nation’s Capital!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The chaos surrounding voting rights continues to play out across many southern states. I’ve shared the craziness going on down here in Lousyana. Today’s news on voting rights and gerrymandering shenanigans was handled by judges in Virginia’s Supreme Court. It’s looking like Orange Caligula and his Republican enablers will be getting the Midterm Election chaos they seek. Our primary election is coming up in 8 days. Our U.S. Congressional representatives are not on the ballot as they should be.
Will the Virginia Supreme Court Decision impact more than just Virginia? That seems to be the question being asked in the national conversation. David A. Lieb and Geoff Mulvihill report the story for the AP. “Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats’ redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win.” It’s difficult to believe that so much disruption can happen in modern times.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections.
The court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment April 21, but the court’s ruling renders the results of that vote meaningless.
Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote that the legislature submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to voters “in an unprecedented manner.”
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” he wrote.
Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn U.S. House map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere at the urging of President Donald Trump. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections.
Redistricting could change the House Map. This is the next question the article addresses.
Mid-decade redistricting so far has resulted in 14 more congressional seats that Republicans believe they could win and six more seats that Democrats think they could win, putting the GOP up by eight. But some of those seats could be competitive in the November election, making the results uncertain. Redistricting is still being litigated in several states.
There is a map showing the general changes that have occurred following the Supreme Court decision, which has disrupted the entire concept of gerrymandering and its illegality. The Guardian reports today on the situation in Tennessee, which could eliminate its one black majority Congressional seat. We worry about that here in Louisiana. “Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district. Move comes days after supreme court ruling weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering.” George Chidi has the analysis.
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
The district had closely occupied the south-west corner of the state. Now three districts snake out from Memphis’ dense center, with two crossing the Tennessee River to reach Nashville’s suburbs 200 miles away.
“If Republican policies are so great, why are we changing the lines to rig elections?” asked Vincent Dixie, a state representative from Nashville, during debate on Thursday, pleading for Republicans to refrain. “Where is your humanity in this?”
As Democratic lawmakers spoke, the house speaker directed state troopers to remove a section of the audience in the gallery, which had begun shouting.
Justin Jones, a state Democratic representative, described Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee house speaker, as the “grand wizard in chief”, and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag. Jones offered amendments to the bill, which the speaker ruled had been submitted in an untimely manner. Jones described that as a “Jim Crow process”.
The redistricting comes eight days after the supreme court’s landmark Callais v Landry decision, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act which had restrained state governments from drawing congressional districts that left Black voters at a political disadvantage.
Despite demands from Donald Trump for conservative states to conduct mid-decade redistricting, Tennessee had refrained from taking action before the court’s ruling. But Sexton said the redraw will “ensure the state’s representation in Washington reflects its conservative values”.
Khaya Himmelman has more information about the Virginia situation in Talking Points Memo. “Virginia State Supreme Court Strikes Down Dem Redistricting Proposal.”
In a major loss for Democrats on Friday, the Virginia state Supreme Court rejected, in a 4-3 decision, the state’s recently approved redistricting proposal, which could have given Democrats four additional congressional seats, improving their chances of taking control of the U.S. House this year.
The proposal, which was introduced as a way to offset the impact of the Trump administration’s mid-cycle gerrymandering blitz, was narrowly approved by voters in a special election earlier this month.
The Supreme Court ruled that the process by which lawmakers moved forward the redistricting proposal violated the state’s constitution.
“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the state Supreme Court’s majority opinion read.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” it continued. “For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.”
Election analysts underscored that this is a major victory for Republicans, though the political environment could still be a considerable drag on their midterms changes.
G. Elliott Morris has an analysis up today that breaks down the statistical assumptions the Supreme Court used. This comes from his site Strength in Numbers. “The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA. The Court says vote dilution can be proven only after controlling for “controlling” racial polarization rather than partisan polarization. This is a nonsensical and impossible test.” For a kid who hated her algebra classes, I sure live in the realm of statistical and econometric analysis now. It helps to understand the numbers, believe me.
The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
That, more or less, is what the Court wrote when it invalidated the Voting Rights Act last week. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 on April 29, 2026, the conservative majority told voting-rights plaintiffs they must now “control for party affiliation” before their evidence of racial bloc voting will count under Section 2.
That sounds like a neutral statistical fix, but in reality, it’s a bad control — an error called “conditioning on a mediator variable“ that would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101. The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!
This is important (not just a piece for nerds) because Republican legislatures are already moving ahead with new partisan and racial gerrymanders based on SCOTUS’s new theory. Tennessee passed a 9-0 GOP map this week that splits Memphis’s majority-Black and solidly Democratic 9th District into three majority-white, Republican-leaning seats. Mississippi’s governor has called a special session for May 20. Louisiana is losing at least one of its majority-Black districts. And Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina could be next. (On this week’s podcast, David and I recap these new gerrymandering efforts that are unfolding with unprecedented haste.)
This week’s Chart of the Week is: a simple table (and one causal diagram) that shows how the Court’s new test makes racial polarization vanish on paper, while it is very much still alive in real life.
This is the decision that will dilute the vote of New Orleans and every black citizen of Louisiana. Again, here’s the link to the Governor’s site announcing the decision to gerrymander the state prior to voting for our Congressional Representatives. “Governor Jeff Landry Suspends Only U.S. House Primary Elections Following Supreme Court Ruling.” My mind boggles every time I read anything on this.
Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending Louisiana’s closed party primary elections only for offices of U.S. Representative in response to the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais. EO attached.
“The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” said Governor Jeff Landry. “Here in Louisiana, we’re proud to lead the nation on this charge. Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters. This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map. I would like to thank Attorney General Liz Murrill for her hard work throughout this process”
The ruling issued on April 29 found Louisiana’s current congressional district map, enacted under SB 8 during the 2024 First Extraordinary Session, to be an unconstitutional gerrymander. The decision effectively reinstates a lower court injunction prohibiting the state from conducting congressional elections under the invalidated map.
As a result, the state’s closed party primary elections for U.S. House seats, previously scheduled for May 16, 2026, and the second primary set for June 27, 2026, are suspended. Early voting for the May election was set to begin May 2. Other offices and ballot measures scheduled for May 16 will continue as planned. This suspension will only apply to the U.S. House races.
I do feel like I’ve been disenfranchised. And again, please remember the impact the SAVE Act will have on Women and Transexual individuals. Democracy Docket has this analysis of the Tennessee situation. “‘Jim Crow on steroids’: Tennessee gerrymander included nixing rule that voters must be notified about new districts.” The analysis is provided by Jacob Knutson.
In the aggressive congressional gerrymander they adopted Thursday, Tennessee Republicans also removed a provision in state law requiring the government to alert voters about changes to their designated polling places when electoral lines are redrawn.
Transparency groups and state lawmakers have warned that the change is likely to exacerbate voter confusion caused by state Republicans’ abrupt adoption of new congressional maps just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
One leading democracy advocate called it “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Before Thursday, state law required county election commissions to “immediately” notify voters by mail when their polling place or precinct changed because of redistricting. Among other notices, alerts also had to be published in newspapers. The law was meant to ensure that voters know where to cast their ballots during early voting or on election day.
But in their bill repealing a five-decade prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, Republicans included an amendment that only requires county election commissions to post a notice about redrawn congressional districts on their “official website, if one exists.”
Under the repeal, which is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R), the secretary of state also has to publish a notice, but mail and newspaper notices are no longer required to inform voters about changed boundaries.
Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (TCOG), a nonpartisan transparency group, said in a release Thursday that the change was likely meant to reduce costs, though she warned that the voting public will be harmed when it takes effect.
“When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” Fisher said.
Republicans had to repeal the prohibition on mid-decade redistricting before they pushed through their new congressional map, which cracks the state’s only majority-Black district between three separate districts.
Because of the new map, several local voting areas were shifted into new congressional districts. That means polling places likely changed for hundreds of voters across the state.
While debating the map in the Tennessee Senate Thursday, Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Democrat who represents Nashville, accused Republicans of intentionally misleading voters through the notice change.
“We’re not just redrawing the map. We’re making sure people don’t have to be told the map changed,” Campbell said.
Reacting to the notice change Thursday, Norman Ornstein, a prominent political scientist formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, called it “Jim Crow on steroids” in a social media post.
It’s clear to me that we really have something to worry about. We’re busy here in Greater New Orleans with actions. Please consider how you can help improve our country’s voting system.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #GerryMandering #JimCrowOnSteroids #Louisiana #LouisianaVCallais #SupremeCourt #Tennesse #Virginia #votingRights -
Finally Friday Reads: The Chaos Times
“It’s now safe to go out to dinner in The Nation’s Capital!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The chaos surrounding voting rights continues to play out across many southern states. I’ve shared the craziness going on down here in Lousyana. It seems today’s news on voting rights and gerrymandering shenanigans were handled by Supreme Court judges in Virginia. It’s looking like Orange Caligula and his Republican enablers will be getting the Midterm Election chaos they seek. Our primary election is coming up in 8 days. Our U.S. Congressional representatives are not on the ballot as they should be.
Will the Virginia Supreme Court Decision impact more than just Virginia? That seems to be the question being asked in the national conversation. David A. Lieb and Geoff Mulvihill report the story for the AP. “Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats’ redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win.” It’s difficult to believe that so much disruption can happen in modern times.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections.
The court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment April 21, but the court’s ruling renders the results of that vote meaningless.
Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote that the legislature submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to voters “in an unprecedented manner.”
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” he wrote.
Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn U.S. House map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere at the urging of President Donald Trump. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections.
Redistricting could change the House Map. This is the next question the article addresses.
Mid-decade redistricting so far has resulted in 14 more congressional seats that Republicans believe they could win and six more seats that Democrats think they could win, putting the GOP up by eight. But some of those seats could be competitive in the November election, making the results uncertain. Redistricting is still being litigated in several states.
There is a map showing the general changes that have occurred following the Supreme Court decision, which has disrupted the entire concept of gerrymandering and its illegality. The Guardian reports today on the situation in Tennessee, which could eliminate its one black majority Congressional seat. We worry about that here in Louisiana. “Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district. Move comes days after supreme court ruling weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering.” George Chidi has the analysis.
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
The district had closely occupied the south-west corner of the state. Now three districts snake out from Memphis’ dense center, with two crossing the Tennessee River to reach Nashville’s suburbs 200 miles away.
“If Republican policies are so great, why are we changing the lines to rig elections?” asked Vincent Dixie, a state representative from Nashville, during debate on Thursday, pleading for Republicans to refrain. “Where is your humanity in this?”
As Democratic lawmakers spoke, the house speaker directed state troopers to remove a section of the audience in the gallery, which had begun shouting.
Justin Jones, a state Democratic representative, described Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee house speaker, as the “grand wizard in chief”, and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag. Jones offered amendments to the bill, which the speaker ruled had been submitted in an untimely manner. Jones described that as a “Jim Crow process”.
The redistricting comes eight days after the supreme court’s landmark Callais v Landry decision, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act which had restrained state governments from drawing congressional districts that left Black voters at a political disadvantage.
Despite demands from Donald Trump for conservative states to conduct mid-decade redistricting, Tennessee had refrained from taking action before the court’s ruling. But Sexton said the redraw will “ensure the state’s representation in Washington reflects its conservative values”.
Khaya Himmelman has more information about the Virginia situation in Talking Points Memo. “Virginia State Supreme Court Strikes Down Dem Redistricting Proposal.”
In a major loss for Democrats on Friday, the Virginia state Supreme Court rejected, in a 4-3 decision, the state’s recently approved redistricting proposal, which could have given Democrats four additional congressional seats, improving their chances of taking control of the U.S. House this year.
The proposal, which was introduced as a way to offset the impact of the Trump administration’s mid-cycle gerrymandering blitz, was narrowly approved by voters in a special election earlier this month.
The Supreme Court ruled that the process by which lawmakers moved forward the redistricting proposal violated the state’s constitution.
“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the state Supreme Court’s majority opinion read.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” it continued. “For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.”
Election analysts underscored that this is a major victory for Republicans, though the political environment could still be a considerable drag on their midterms changes.
G. Elliott Morris has an analysis up today that breaks down the statistical assumptions the Supreme Court used. This comes from his site Strength in Numbers. “The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA. The Court says vote dilution can be proven only after controlling for “controlling” racial polarization rather than partisan polarization. This is a nonsensical and impossible test.” For a kid who hated her algebra classes, I sure live in the realm of statistical and econometric analysis now. It helps to understand the numbers, believe me.
The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
That, more or less, is what the Court wrote when it invalidated the Voting Rights Act last week. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 on April 29, 2026, the conservative majority told voting-rights plaintiffs they must now “control for party affiliation” before their evidence of racial bloc voting will count under Section 2.
That sounds like a neutral statistical fix, but in reality, it’s a bad control — an error called “conditioning on a mediator variable“ that would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101. The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!
This is important (not just a piece for nerds) because Republican legislatures are already moving ahead with new partisan and racial gerrymanders based on SCOTUS’s new theory. Tennessee passed a 9-0 GOP map this week that splits Memphis’s majority-Black and solidly Democratic 9th District into three majority-white, Republican-leaning seats. Mississippi’s governor has called a special session for May 20. Louisiana is losing at least one of its majority-Black districts. And Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina could be next. (On this week’s podcast, David and I recap these new gerrymandering efforts that are unfolding with unprecedented haste.)
This week’s Chart of the Week is: a simple table (and one causal diagram) that shows how the Court’s new test makes racial polarization vanish on paper, while it is very much still alive in real life.
This is the decision that will dilute the vote of New Orleans and every black citizen of Louisiana. Again, here’s the link to the Governor’s site announcing the decision to gerrymander the state prior to voting for our Congressional Representatives. “Governor Jeff Landry Suspends Only U.S. House Primary Elections Following Supreme Court Ruling.” My mind boggles every time I read anything on this.
Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending Louisiana’s closed party primary elections only for offices of U.S. Representative in response to the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais. EO attached.
“The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” said Governor Jeff Landry. “Here in Louisiana, we’re proud to lead the nation on this charge. Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters. This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map. I would like to thank Attorney General Liz Murrill for her hard work throughout this process”
The ruling issued on April 29 found Louisiana’s current congressional district map, enacted under SB 8 during the 2024 First Extraordinary Session, to be an unconstitutional gerrymander. The decision effectively reinstates a lower court injunction prohibiting the state from conducting congressional elections under the invalidated map.
As a result, the state’s closed party primary elections for U.S. House seats, previously scheduled for May 16, 2026, and the second primary set for June 27, 2026, are suspended. Early voting for the May election was set to begin May 2. Other offices and ballot measures scheduled for May 16 will continue as planned. This suspension will only apply to the U.S. House races.
I do feel like I’ve been disenfranchised. And again, please remember the impact the SAVE Act will have on Women and Transexual individuals. Democracy Docket has this analysis of the Tennessee situation. “‘Jim Crow on steroids’: Tennessee gerrymander included nixing rule that voters must be notified about new districts.” The analysis is provided by Jacob Knutson.
In the aggressive congressional gerrymander they adopted Thursday, Tennessee Republicans also removed a provision in state law requiring the government to alert voters about changes to their designated polling places when electoral lines are redrawn.
Transparency groups and state lawmakers have warned that the change is likely to exacerbate voter confusion caused by state Republicans’ abrupt adoption of new congressional maps just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
One leading democracy advocate called it “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Before Thursday, state law required county election commissions to “immediately” notify voters by mail when their polling place or precinct changed because of redistricting. Among other notices, alerts also had to be published in newspapers. The law was meant to ensure that voters know where to cast their ballots during early voting or on election day.
But in their bill repealing a five-decade prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, Republicans included an amendment that only requires county election commissions to post a notice about redrawn congressional districts on their “official website, if one exists.”
Under the repeal, which is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R), the secretary of state also has to publish a notice, but mail and newspaper notices are no longer required to inform voters about changed boundaries.
Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (TCOG), a nonpartisan transparency group, said in a release Thursday that the change was likely meant to reduce costs, though she warned that the voting public will be harmed when it takes effect.
“When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” Fisher said.
Republicans had to repeal the prohibition on mid-decade redistricting before they pushed through their new congressional map, which cracks the state’s only majority-Black district between three separate districts.
Because of the new map, several local voting areas were shifted into new congressional districts. That means polling places likely changed for hundreds of voters across the state.
While debating the map in the Tennessee Senate Thursday, Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Democrat who represents Nashville, accused Republicans of intentionally misleading voters through the notice change.
“We’re not just redrawing the map. We’re making sure people don’t have to be told the map changed,” Campbell said.
Reacting to the notice change Thursday, Norman Ornstein, a prominent political scientist formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, called it “Jim Crow on steroids” in a social media post.
It’s clear to me that we really have something to worry about. We’re busy here in Greater New Orleans with actions. Please consider finding out how you can help our country’s voting system.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#GerryMandering #JimCrowOnSteroids #Louisiana #LouisianaVCallais #SupremeCourt #Tennesse #Virginia #votingRights -
Finally Friday Reads: The Chaos Times
“It’s now safe to go out to dinner in The Nation’s Capital!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The chaos surrounding voting rights continues to play out across many southern states. I’ve shared the craziness going on down here in Lousyana. Today’s news on voting rights and gerrymandering shenanigans was handled by judges in Virginia’s Supreme Court. It’s looking like Orange Caligula and his Republican enablers will be getting the Midterm Election chaos they seek. Our primary election is coming up in 8 days. Our U.S. Congressional representatives are not on the ballot as they should be.
Will the Virginia Supreme Court Decision impact more than just Virginia? That seems to be the question being asked in the national conversation. David A. Lieb and Geoff Mulvihill report the story for the AP. “Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats’ redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win.” It’s difficult to believe that so much disruption can happen in modern times.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections.
The court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment April 21, but the court’s ruling renders the results of that vote meaningless.
Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote that the legislature submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to voters “in an unprecedented manner.”
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” he wrote.
Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn U.S. House map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere at the urging of President Donald Trump. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections.
Redistricting could change the House Map. This is the next question the article addresses.
Mid-decade redistricting so far has resulted in 14 more congressional seats that Republicans believe they could win and six more seats that Democrats think they could win, putting the GOP up by eight. But some of those seats could be competitive in the November election, making the results uncertain. Redistricting is still being litigated in several states.
There is a map showing the general changes that have occurred following the Supreme Court decision, which has disrupted the entire concept of gerrymandering and its illegality. The Guardian reports today on the situation in Tennessee, which could eliminate its one black majority Congressional seat. We worry about that here in Louisiana. “Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district. Move comes days after supreme court ruling weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering.” George Chidi has the analysis.
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
The district had closely occupied the south-west corner of the state. Now three districts snake out from Memphis’ dense center, with two crossing the Tennessee River to reach Nashville’s suburbs 200 miles away.
“If Republican policies are so great, why are we changing the lines to rig elections?” asked Vincent Dixie, a state representative from Nashville, during debate on Thursday, pleading for Republicans to refrain. “Where is your humanity in this?”
As Democratic lawmakers spoke, the house speaker directed state troopers to remove a section of the audience in the gallery, which had begun shouting.
Justin Jones, a state Democratic representative, described Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee house speaker, as the “grand wizard in chief”, and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag. Jones offered amendments to the bill, which the speaker ruled had been submitted in an untimely manner. Jones described that as a “Jim Crow process”.
The redistricting comes eight days after the supreme court’s landmark Callais v Landry decision, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act which had restrained state governments from drawing congressional districts that left Black voters at a political disadvantage.
Despite demands from Donald Trump for conservative states to conduct mid-decade redistricting, Tennessee had refrained from taking action before the court’s ruling. But Sexton said the redraw will “ensure the state’s representation in Washington reflects its conservative values”.
Khaya Himmelman has more information about the Virginia situation in Talking Points Memo. “Virginia State Supreme Court Strikes Down Dem Redistricting Proposal.”
In a major loss for Democrats on Friday, the Virginia state Supreme Court rejected, in a 4-3 decision, the state’s recently approved redistricting proposal, which could have given Democrats four additional congressional seats, improving their chances of taking control of the U.S. House this year.
The proposal, which was introduced as a way to offset the impact of the Trump administration’s mid-cycle gerrymandering blitz, was narrowly approved by voters in a special election earlier this month.
The Supreme Court ruled that the process by which lawmakers moved forward the redistricting proposal violated the state’s constitution.
“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the state Supreme Court’s majority opinion read.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” it continued. “For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.”
Election analysts underscored that this is a major victory for Republicans, though the political environment could still be a considerable drag on their midterms changes.
G. Elliott Morris has an analysis up today that breaks down the statistical assumptions the Supreme Court used. This comes from his site Strength in Numbers. “The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA. The Court says vote dilution can be proven only after controlling for “controlling” racial polarization rather than partisan polarization. This is a nonsensical and impossible test.” For a kid who hated her algebra classes, I sure live in the realm of statistical and econometric analysis now. It helps to understand the numbers, believe me.
The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
That, more or less, is what the Court wrote when it invalidated the Voting Rights Act last week. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 on April 29, 2026, the conservative majority told voting-rights plaintiffs they must now “control for party affiliation” before their evidence of racial bloc voting will count under Section 2.
That sounds like a neutral statistical fix, but in reality, it’s a bad control — an error called “conditioning on a mediator variable“ that would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101. The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!
This is important (not just a piece for nerds) because Republican legislatures are already moving ahead with new partisan and racial gerrymanders based on SCOTUS’s new theory. Tennessee passed a 9-0 GOP map this week that splits Memphis’s majority-Black and solidly Democratic 9th District into three majority-white, Republican-leaning seats. Mississippi’s governor has called a special session for May 20. Louisiana is losing at least one of its majority-Black districts. And Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina could be next. (On this week’s podcast, David and I recap these new gerrymandering efforts that are unfolding with unprecedented haste.)
This week’s Chart of the Week is: a simple table (and one causal diagram) that shows how the Court’s new test makes racial polarization vanish on paper, while it is very much still alive in real life.
This is the decision that will dilute the vote of New Orleans and every black citizen of Louisiana. Again, here’s the link to the Governor’s site announcing the decision to gerrymander the state prior to voting for our Congressional Representatives. “Governor Jeff Landry Suspends Only U.S. House Primary Elections Following Supreme Court Ruling.” My mind boggles every time I read anything on this.
Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending Louisiana’s closed party primary elections only for offices of U.S. Representative in response to the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais. EO attached.
“The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” said Governor Jeff Landry. “Here in Louisiana, we’re proud to lead the nation on this charge. Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters. This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map. I would like to thank Attorney General Liz Murrill for her hard work throughout this process”
The ruling issued on April 29 found Louisiana’s current congressional district map, enacted under SB 8 during the 2024 First Extraordinary Session, to be an unconstitutional gerrymander. The decision effectively reinstates a lower court injunction prohibiting the state from conducting congressional elections under the invalidated map.
As a result, the state’s closed party primary elections for U.S. House seats, previously scheduled for May 16, 2026, and the second primary set for June 27, 2026, are suspended. Early voting for the May election was set to begin May 2. Other offices and ballot measures scheduled for May 16 will continue as planned. This suspension will only apply to the U.S. House races.
I do feel like I’ve been disenfranchised. And again, please remember the impact the SAVE Act will have on Women and Transexual individuals. Democracy Docket has this analysis of the Tennessee situation. “‘Jim Crow on steroids’: Tennessee gerrymander included nixing rule that voters must be notified about new districts.” The analysis is provided by Jacob Knutson.
In the aggressive congressional gerrymander they adopted Thursday, Tennessee Republicans also removed a provision in state law requiring the government to alert voters about changes to their designated polling places when electoral lines are redrawn.
Transparency groups and state lawmakers have warned that the change is likely to exacerbate voter confusion caused by state Republicans’ abrupt adoption of new congressional maps just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
One leading democracy advocate called it “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Before Thursday, state law required county election commissions to “immediately” notify voters by mail when their polling place or precinct changed because of redistricting. Among other notices, alerts also had to be published in newspapers. The law was meant to ensure that voters know where to cast their ballots during early voting or on election day.
But in their bill repealing a five-decade prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, Republicans included an amendment that only requires county election commissions to post a notice about redrawn congressional districts on their “official website, if one exists.”
Under the repeal, which is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R), the secretary of state also has to publish a notice, but mail and newspaper notices are no longer required to inform voters about changed boundaries.
Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (TCOG), a nonpartisan transparency group, said in a release Thursday that the change was likely meant to reduce costs, though she warned that the voting public will be harmed when it takes effect.
“When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” Fisher said.
Republicans had to repeal the prohibition on mid-decade redistricting before they pushed through their new congressional map, which cracks the state’s only majority-Black district between three separate districts.
Because of the new map, several local voting areas were shifted into new congressional districts. That means polling places likely changed for hundreds of voters across the state.
While debating the map in the Tennessee Senate Thursday, Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Democrat who represents Nashville, accused Republicans of intentionally misleading voters through the notice change.
“We’re not just redrawing the map. We’re making sure people don’t have to be told the map changed,” Campbell said.
Reacting to the notice change Thursday, Norman Ornstein, a prominent political scientist formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, called it “Jim Crow on steroids” in a social media post.
It’s clear to me that we really have something to worry about. We’re busy here in Greater New Orleans with actions. Please consider how you can help improve our country’s voting system.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #GerryMandering #JimCrowOnSteroids #Louisiana #LouisianaVCallais #SupremeCourt #Tennesse #Virginia #votingRights -
Finally Friday Reads: The Chaos Times
“It’s now safe to go out to dinner in The Nation’s Capital!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The chaos surrounding voting rights continues to play out across many southern states. I’ve shared the craziness going on down here in Lousyana. It seems today’s news on voting rights and gerrymandering shenanigans were handled by Supreme Court judges in Virginia. It’s looking like Orange Caligula and his Republican enablers will be getting the Midterm Election chaos they seek. Our primary election is coming up in 8 days. Our U.S. Congressional representatives are not on the ballot as they should be.
Will the Virginia Supreme Court Decision impact more than just Virginia? That seems to be the question being asked in the national conversation. David A. Lieb and Geoff Mulvihill report the story for the AP. “Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats’ redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win.” It’s difficult to believe that so much disruption can happen in modern times.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections.
The court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment April 21, but the court’s ruling renders the results of that vote meaningless.
Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote that the legislature submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to voters “in an unprecedented manner.”
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” he wrote.
Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn U.S. House map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere at the urging of President Donald Trump. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections.
Redistricting could change the House Map. This is the next question the article addresses.
Mid-decade redistricting so far has resulted in 14 more congressional seats that Republicans believe they could win and six more seats that Democrats think they could win, putting the GOP up by eight. But some of those seats could be competitive in the November election, making the results uncertain. Redistricting is still being litigated in several states.
There is a map showing the general changes that have occurred following the Supreme Court decision, which has disrupted the entire concept of gerrymandering and its illegality. The Guardian reports today on the situation in Tennessee, which could eliminate its one black majority Congressional seat. We worry about that here in Louisiana. “Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district. Move comes days after supreme court ruling weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering.” George Chidi has the analysis.
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
The district had closely occupied the south-west corner of the state. Now three districts snake out from Memphis’ dense center, with two crossing the Tennessee River to reach Nashville’s suburbs 200 miles away.
“If Republican policies are so great, why are we changing the lines to rig elections?” asked Vincent Dixie, a state representative from Nashville, during debate on Thursday, pleading for Republicans to refrain. “Where is your humanity in this?”
As Democratic lawmakers spoke, the house speaker directed state troopers to remove a section of the audience in the gallery, which had begun shouting.
Justin Jones, a state Democratic representative, described Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee house speaker, as the “grand wizard in chief”, and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag. Jones offered amendments to the bill, which the speaker ruled had been submitted in an untimely manner. Jones described that as a “Jim Crow process”.
The redistricting comes eight days after the supreme court’s landmark Callais v Landry decision, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act which had restrained state governments from drawing congressional districts that left Black voters at a political disadvantage.
Despite demands from Donald Trump for conservative states to conduct mid-decade redistricting, Tennessee had refrained from taking action before the court’s ruling. But Sexton said the redraw will “ensure the state’s representation in Washington reflects its conservative values”.
Khaya Himmelman has more information about the Virginia situation in Talking Points Memo. “Virginia State Supreme Court Strikes Down Dem Redistricting Proposal.”
In a major loss for Democrats on Friday, the Virginia state Supreme Court rejected, in a 4-3 decision, the state’s recently approved redistricting proposal, which could have given Democrats four additional congressional seats, improving their chances of taking control of the U.S. House this year.
The proposal, which was introduced as a way to offset the impact of the Trump administration’s mid-cycle gerrymandering blitz, was narrowly approved by voters in a special election earlier this month.
The Supreme Court ruled that the process by which lawmakers moved forward the redistricting proposal violated the state’s constitution.
“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the state Supreme Court’s majority opinion read.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” it continued. “For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.”
Election analysts underscored that this is a major victory for Republicans, though the political environment could still be a considerable drag on their midterms changes.
G. Elliott Morris has an analysis up today that breaks down the statistical assumptions the Supreme Court used. This comes from his site Strength in Numbers. “The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA. The Court says vote dilution can be proven only after controlling for “controlling” racial polarization rather than partisan polarization. This is a nonsensical and impossible test.” For a kid who hated her algebra classes, I sure live in the realm of statistical and econometric analysis now. It helps to understand the numbers, believe me.
The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
That, more or less, is what the Court wrote when it invalidated the Voting Rights Act last week. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 on April 29, 2026, the conservative majority told voting-rights plaintiffs they must now “control for party affiliation” before their evidence of racial bloc voting will count under Section 2.
That sounds like a neutral statistical fix, but in reality, it’s a bad control — an error called “conditioning on a mediator variable“ that would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101. The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!
This is important (not just a piece for nerds) because Republican legislatures are already moving ahead with new partisan and racial gerrymanders based on SCOTUS’s new theory. Tennessee passed a 9-0 GOP map this week that splits Memphis’s majority-Black and solidly Democratic 9th District into three majority-white, Republican-leaning seats. Mississippi’s governor has called a special session for May 20. Louisiana is losing at least one of its majority-Black districts. And Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina could be next. (On this week’s podcast, David and I recap these new gerrymandering efforts that are unfolding with unprecedented haste.)
This week’s Chart of the Week is: a simple table (and one causal diagram) that shows how the Court’s new test makes racial polarization vanish on paper, while it is very much still alive in real life.
This is the decision that will dilute the vote of New Orleans and every black citizen of Louisiana. Again, here’s the link to the Governor’s site announcing the decision to gerrymander the state prior to voting for our Congressional Representatives. “Governor Jeff Landry Suspends Only U.S. House Primary Elections Following Supreme Court Ruling.” My mind boggles every time I read anything on this.
Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending Louisiana’s closed party primary elections only for offices of U.S. Representative in response to the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais. EO attached.
“The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” said Governor Jeff Landry. “Here in Louisiana, we’re proud to lead the nation on this charge. Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters. This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map. I would like to thank Attorney General Liz Murrill for her hard work throughout this process”
The ruling issued on April 29 found Louisiana’s current congressional district map, enacted under SB 8 during the 2024 First Extraordinary Session, to be an unconstitutional gerrymander. The decision effectively reinstates a lower court injunction prohibiting the state from conducting congressional elections under the invalidated map.
As a result, the state’s closed party primary elections for U.S. House seats, previously scheduled for May 16, 2026, and the second primary set for June 27, 2026, are suspended. Early voting for the May election was set to begin May 2. Other offices and ballot measures scheduled for May 16 will continue as planned. This suspension will only apply to the U.S. House races.
I do feel like I’ve been disenfranchised. And again, please remember the impact the SAVE Act will have on Women and Transexual individuals. Democracy Docket has this analysis of the Tennessee situation. “‘Jim Crow on steroids’: Tennessee gerrymander included nixing rule that voters must be notified about new districts.” The analysis is provided by Jacob Knutson.
In the aggressive congressional gerrymander they adopted Thursday, Tennessee Republicans also removed a provision in state law requiring the government to alert voters about changes to their designated polling places when electoral lines are redrawn.
Transparency groups and state lawmakers have warned that the change is likely to exacerbate voter confusion caused by state Republicans’ abrupt adoption of new congressional maps just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
One leading democracy advocate called it “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Before Thursday, state law required county election commissions to “immediately” notify voters by mail when their polling place or precinct changed because of redistricting. Among other notices, alerts also had to be published in newspapers. The law was meant to ensure that voters know where to cast their ballots during early voting or on election day.
But in their bill repealing a five-decade prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, Republicans included an amendment that only requires county election commissions to post a notice about redrawn congressional districts on their “official website, if one exists.”
Under the repeal, which is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R), the secretary of state also has to publish a notice, but mail and newspaper notices are no longer required to inform voters about changed boundaries.
Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (TCOG), a nonpartisan transparency group, said in a release Thursday that the change was likely meant to reduce costs, though she warned that the voting public will be harmed when it takes effect.
“When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” Fisher said.
Republicans had to repeal the prohibition on mid-decade redistricting before they pushed through their new congressional map, which cracks the state’s only majority-Black district between three separate districts.
Because of the new map, several local voting areas were shifted into new congressional districts. That means polling places likely changed for hundreds of voters across the state.
While debating the map in the Tennessee Senate Thursday, Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Democrat who represents Nashville, accused Republicans of intentionally misleading voters through the notice change.
“We’re not just redrawing the map. We’re making sure people don’t have to be told the map changed,” Campbell said.
Reacting to the notice change Thursday, Norman Ornstein, a prominent political scientist formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, called it “Jim Crow on steroids” in a social media post.
It’s clear to me that we really have something to worry about. We’re busy here in Greater New Orleans with actions. Please consider finding out how you can help our country’s voting system.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#GerryMandering #JimCrowOnSteroids #Louisiana #LouisianaVCallais #SupremeCourt #Tennesse #Virginia #votingRights -
Mostly Monday Reads: Which Century are we in?
“Size matters.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Every time I get the grocery list together these days, I think about what I need to bulk order. It’s really hard to look at a finished consumer good and find all the value-added producers along with their various locations. I wonder how the distributors are going to sort this all out. I noticed prices creeping up in the usual items. I’m pretty sure my sister has hit Costco by now and filled up the pantry. I also watched the last of the Jazz Festers leave with relief. I bet this was their last jaunt of the year. You can see it in the numbers.
USA Today had this analysis by Betty Lin-Fisher. “How will Trump’s tariffs affect grocery store prices? We explain.”
While higher tariffs could still be coming after a 90-day-pause, the baseline 10% tariff on all goods, plus higher duties on Chinese products already in effect are a big increase in food costs for American’s budgets, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at The Consumer Federation of America.
“The 10% ‘default’ tariffs alone represent a truly historic federal tax increase, maybe the largest in my lifetime, with a highly regressive impact,” Gremillion said.
The tariff only applies to the value of the product at the border, Ortega said. Then there are additional costs to the product, which are accrued domestically, like transporting the goods to the store, distribution, wholesale costs and retail markups. Those things are not subject to the tariff, Ortega said.
So that doesn’t mean that the price of a particular product will go up by 10% or whatever the tariff is, Ortega said.
Overall, 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 32% of fresh vegetables, 55% of fresh fruit, and 94% of seafood, according to the Consumer Federation of America, citing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Some products, like coffee and bananas, are almost exclusively grown abroad.
Tariffs are causing uncertainty from families checking off their grocery lists to companies importing food, he said.
“For consumers, this can mean added difficulties in managing a food budget. For food companies, this means havoc on supply chains that could lead to more food waste and more food safety risk,” Gremillion said.
Yup. And the FDA will not be looking around for that food safety risk now. It’s also upending Health Care, but we can rest knowing that all those generic names for medicine and things will be gender neutral now. I know I can’t even properly pronounce most of them, let alone identify their sexual preferences. MEDTECHDIVE has this headline: Trump policies are upending healthcare technology. “Track the effect on the medtech industry here. Policies and actions reshaping the healthcare industry began pouring out of President Donald Trump’s White House nearly from day one. Follow the changes affecting the medical device industry.”
Did I mention the youngest son-in-law is a biomedical engineer who is in charge of designing medical, surgical, and prosthetic devices? Plus, the oldest daughter and son-in-law are doctors. It’s just me and my youngest daughter out here trying to figure out what the economy and financial markets are experiencing. The others are just trying to deal with that, and the usual helpful regulations are being replaced with crazy ones.
Since Trump took office in late January, multiple Food and Drug Administration webpages were removed (and then restored); employees were fired from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (and some were asked back); and the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a plan to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including about 3,500 at the FDA.
Meanwhile, the economy has whipsawed due to an unpredictable and aggressive tariff strategy. Later, however, pieces were delayed or walked back.
The Trump administration has reshaped the medtech industry in significant ways, and potentially long-term, in just a few months. Now that Trump has settled into power, new questions have arisen about what the many changes will mean for companies and patients, and what’s coming next.
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
Also, lucky us, Medicare and Medicaid modernization with be the goal of TV snake oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz as he takes over both. This is also from the MEDTECHDIVE.
Dr. Mehmet Oz was sworn in as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator on April 18, cementing his role as head of the agency that provides insurance coverage to millions of Americans.
During a ceremony at the Oval Office, Oz, a physician and former TV personality, said he wanted to “save” the nation’s public health programs and focus on reducing chronic disease, “modernizing” Medicare and Medicaid, and targeting fraud, waste and abuse in government insurance offerings.
President Donald Trump reiterated that Republicans wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid. “Just as I promised, there will be no cuts. We’re not going to have any cuts. We’re going to have only help,” he said during the ceremony.
As I’ve spent most of this year being poked, prodded, pricked, shocked, MRI’d, Ultrasound’d, and EMG’d, I sure don’t feel good about any of this. I fret about someone disappearing all of that, plus my Social Security.
Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from NBC News. “Trump says he will reopen ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz prison. Alcatraz Island hasn’t been used as a federal penitentiary since 1963. It had a capacity of roughly 300 people.” I’m actually thinking this is another one of his threats to Judges since it’s way too small to hold many prisoners. I suppose that’s one way to destroy a national park and the US Constitution in one sweep.
Alcatraz Island, a former military fortress and prison in San Francisco Bay, was turned into a federal penitentiary in 1934 and over the course of 29 years housed more than 1,500 people “deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system,” according to the National Park Service.
According to aNational Park Service study, it was initially deemed unfit to serve as a federal institution because of its small size, isolated location and lack of fresh water. However, Sanford Bates, the director of the Bureau of Prisons in 1933,later found it “an ideal place of confinement for about 200 of the most desperate or irredeemable types.” It was formally opened as a federal penitentiary the next year.
Trump suggested in his post that he’d like to restore the facility to that purpose.
This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”
Alcatraz is currently part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has about 1.2 million visitors per year. Those who tour the island in San Francisco Bay see facilities in various states of decay. The prison was crumbling even as it was still in operation, and the high cost of maintaining it was a key reason it was shuttered in 1963.
Given those realities, restoring Alcatraz and then expanding it, as Trump called for on his Truth Social platform, would likely cost a fortune ― and then another pile of cash would be needed to maintain it.
Reopening it as a prison would also mean the loss of the tourism revenue the island currently generates as well as a loss of habitat for its thriving bird population.
The president, however, said Alcatraz’s return to use as a prison would “serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”
His critics fired back that the idea would be an expensive boondoggle:
This just really sounds like how he’d run his business. Also, he now wants tariffs on all incoming films. This is about as insane as it gets. “Trump threatens a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, saying the movie industry in the US is dying.”
President Donald Trump is opening a new salvo in his tariff war, targeting films made outside the U.S.
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.
“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.
It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.
Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today. “America’s least American president. Donald Trump isn’t making America great again. He’s making it into something else entirely.”
On Sunday, NBC News aired an interview with Trump in which he expressed ignorance of the black-letter standards of justice established in the country’s founding document.
“The Constitution says every person, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out. So why not bring Abrego García back to the U.S. and use legal avenues to potentially remove him?
“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll leave that to the lawyers, and I’ll leave that to the attorney general of the United States.”
Welker noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted that even immigrants had due process rights. Trump again downplayed the idea, saying that holding hearings would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.” This isn’t as big a hurdle as it may sound. In fiscal 2024, there were more than 900,000 immigration hearings completed. So far in fiscal 2025, there have been more than 460,000. More could be cleared if Trump hadn’t moved to fire a number of immigration judges.
Finally, Welker noted that Trump didn’t really have a choice.
“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” she asked, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
You may recall that, in January, Trump put his hand on a Bible and affirmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that he would “faithfully execute” his role as president and to the best of his “ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has never been an oath he has appeared to actually take to heart.
Trump’s dismissiveness of the Constitution has manifested itself in a lot of ways. You may recall his lack of interest in leaving office when he lost the 2020 presidential election. You may be aware that he has readily, if not giddily, accepted personal income from foreign governments while serving as president. He views the law as a cudgel, not a constraint, issuing pardons for various political allies ensnared in criminal activity while directing federal law enforcement to fish for potential criminal charges against those who work against his political power.
At its heart, Trump’s approach to his role is rooted in his parochial sense of patriotism. He didn’t come to the White House after having worked his way up through lower offices, building consensus and working to appeal to a broad range of constituents. He had no appreciation for how legislation is crafted or for the hard work of reaching compromise. Perhaps most importantly, he has never indicated any robust understanding of American history or of the debates and agreements that led to the country’s creation.
In 2011, for example, Trump was asked by Stephen Colbert if he knew what the 13 stripes on the American flag represent. He said he didn’t.
More recently, Trump was asked by ABC News journalist Terry Moran what the Declaration of Independence (a copy of which the president recently had installed in the Oval Office) means to him personally.
“It means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”
It is special to the country, of course, but not because it is a declaration of “love,” much less “unity.” As the name would suggest, it is precisely the opposite.
Trump doesn’t have the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office because he wants its message to serve as a guidepost for his administration. He doesn’t even appear to know its message. He has it there because it is A Famous American Thing, another decoration in the newly gilded room meant to send a message about his power, not the nation’s.
Dan Froomkin–writing for Press Watch–suggests we need to keep track of all Trump’s oddities. “We need a way to aggregate what Donald Trump is doing to this country.”
News organizations, along with good-government groups and other interested parties, are doing a commendable job of chronicling the damage the Trump regime is doing to the government, the country, and the world.
But none of them, individually, is in a position to give the public the full picture. It’s just too much.
This is a feature of Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” No one entity can possibly keep up.
And as we go forward, how can any one organization keep tabs on all the fallout? It’s not possible.
What we need is a central repository of information so that the full extent of the damage can be found in one place and assessed by the public — and so that there’s a comprehensive record of what needs to be fixed and restored when the time comes to do so. (Sort of like a truth commission, but in real time.)
To aggregate all the existing information, organize it, and collect new data, we need a place, a process, and people.
It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people. Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more. He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.
This is a site that I was just sent to by a Blue Sky Link. This DNYUZ link has an article by the NYT’s by Jack Goldsmith of Lawfare fame and Harvard Law School. This has been an issue for many people in modern times, with both parties playing the role of enablers. “It’s Not Just Trump. The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful.” So, I need to put this example of both siderisms into perspective. “Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is an author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.”
Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness.
Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies. The overall pattern of presidential action over the past few decades reveals an escalation of power grabs that put the country on a terrible course even before Mr. Trump took office again.
The presidency needs reform, and Americans must consider ways — however implausible they may seem in the context of today’s politics — to get there.
Expansionist presidential acts go all the way back to George Washington, who invited charges of monarchism with his use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined “executive Power.” From there the presidency, with its loose design, grew and grew, with major surges during the Civil War and New Deal era. That trend continued through the 20th century, aided by the rise of mass communication, substantial delegations of power from Congress and an approving Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump’s radical second presidency is, to an underappreciated extent, operating from a playbook devised by his modern predecessors.
His use of emergency powers to impose broad tariffs is similar to a move made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. His claims of untouchable national security authority echo arguments made after the Sept. 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration, in which I served.
Presidents for decades have issued pardons as political or personal favors or to avoid personal legal jeopardy. Mr. Trump took this practice to new extremes in his first term, and then President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his son and family as well as members of his administration and Congress, in a similar pattern. Mr. Trump in his second term has already issued many self-serving pardons.
Mr. Trump’s executive-order program is an heir of the strategy used by President Barack Obama for large-scale and sometimes legally dubious policy initiatives, including some (involving immigration) where Mr. Obama had earlier admitted he lacked authority to act. Mr. Biden also confessed a lack of power but then acted unilaterally in seeking to forgive student loans.
Mr. Trump has disregarded statutory restrictions to fire officials in independent agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But in 2021, Mr. Biden extended the Supreme Court’s unitary executive case law to fire the statutorily protected commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Mr. Biden was “the first unitary executive,” noted the legal writer Mark Joseph Stern in 2021.
Mr. Biden also purged the executive branch of Trump holdover officials who were not protected by statute, including members of arts and honorary institutions, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Biden administration’s defense of these firings resulted in judicial precedents that Mr. Trump is now wielding to clean house on a broader scale.
The Trump administration has also built on past presidencies in not enforcing federal law — for example, in letting TikTok live on despite a congressional ban. This practice finds its modern roots in the Obama administration, which asserted broad nonenforcement discretion in high-profile cases involving immigration, marijuana and Obamacare, in effect changing the meaning of those laws.
Something similar has happened with spending. As one recent paper noted, “The past several presidents have all taken significant unilateral actions intruding on Congress’s control over federal spending.” The Trump 2.0 version greatly enlarges this unilateralist pattern.
There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about. The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from Democracy Docket explaining the theory and relating to it to Yam Tits. The analysis is written by Jacob Knutsen. “What Is Unitary Executive Theory? How is Trump Using It to Push His Agenda?”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has executed a whirlwind of dismissals across the federal government that violated federal statutes and decreed numerous executive orders, including one that blatantly defied the plain language of the Constitution.
Behind the seemingly scatter-shot opening acts of his second administration, legal analysts see a common goal: to test a once-fringe legal theory which asserts that the president has unlimited power to control the actions of the four million people who make up the executive branch.
If courts — specifically the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court — uphold arguments based on the so-called “unitary executive theory,” it would give Trump and subsequent presidents unprecedented power to remove and replace any federal employee and impose their will on every decision in every agency.
Rulings in favor of the Trump administration would also further jeopardize the independence of key regulatory agencies that are susceptible to conflicts of interest and political interference, like the Federal Election Commission, which oversees federal elections and campaign finance laws.
Trump and his administration have furthered the theory by repeatedly invoking Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, to justify the recent dismissals of federal officials. They have framed the article as allowing the president to use the whole of the executive branch for his political ends.
For example, the White House Feb. 18 invoked the article to rationalize an executive order signed that same day that asserted the president’s authority over almost all regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to act independently, or semi-independently, from the president.
Frank Bowman, a scholar of constitutional and criminal law at the University of Missouri School of Law, told Democracy Docket he believes the executive order is a step toward “an open declaration of dictatorship.”
“In essence, what he’s saying is, ‘I am the law. My will is the law. My view of what the law is the only view that can ever be expressed,’” Bowman said.
I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The Center for American Progress features an analysis in its series on Project 2025. This one was written back in October.”Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency. Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.” It is an imperative read. Trump knows that he can be both pope and king.
Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority
To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.”22 This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.
The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda.23 Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”24
If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.
Well, all these pithy reads should keep you busy for the day. I hope your week goes well. I’ve got 2 doctors’ appointments, but gladly no more procedures. And I’d like just to add if they come for professors, that I’d rather be in the gulag that holds the country’s political cartoonists. To think, I used to just use wonderful paintings.
Happy Cinco de Mayo to all the wonderful folks of Mexican descent and to those of us who just enjoy the holiday!
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
#Repeat1968 #CampAlcatraz #CrazyFARTUSPolicies #DonaldTrump #JohnBuss #misogyny #SCOTUS #SocialSecurity #TheoryOfUnitaryExecutive #TrumpTariffs #unemployment
-
Mostly Monday Reads: Which Century are we in?
“Size matters.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Every time I get the grocery list together these days, I think about what I need to bulk order. It’s really hard to look at a finished consumer good and find all the value-added producers along with their various locations. I wonder how the distributors are going to sort this all out. I noticed prices creeping up in the usual items. I’m pretty sure my sister has hit Costco by now and filled up the pantry. I also watched the last of the Jazz Festers leave with relief. I bet this was their last jaunt of the year. You can see it in the numbers.
USA Today had this analysis by Betty Lin-Fisher. “How will Trump’s tariffs affect grocery store prices? We explain.”
While higher tariffs could still be coming after a 90-day-pause, the baseline 10% tariff on all goods, plus higher duties on Chinese products already in effect are a big increase in food costs for American’s budgets, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at The Consumer Federation of America.
“The 10% ‘default’ tariffs alone represent a truly historic federal tax increase, maybe the largest in my lifetime, with a highly regressive impact,” Gremillion said.
The tariff only applies to the value of the product at the border, Ortega said. Then there are additional costs to the product, which are accrued domestically, like transporting the goods to the store, distribution, wholesale costs and retail markups. Those things are not subject to the tariff, Ortega said.
So that doesn’t mean that the price of a particular product will go up by 10% or whatever the tariff is, Ortega said.
Overall, 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 32% of fresh vegetables, 55% of fresh fruit, and 94% of seafood, according to the Consumer Federation of America, citing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Some products, like coffee and bananas, are almost exclusively grown abroad.
Tariffs are causing uncertainty from families checking off their grocery lists to companies importing food, he said.
“For consumers, this can mean added difficulties in managing a food budget. For food companies, this means havoc on supply chains that could lead to more food waste and more food safety risk,” Gremillion said.
Yup. And the FDA will not be looking around for that food safety risk now. It’s also upending Health Care, but we can rest knowing that all those generic names for medicine and things will be gender neutral now. I know I can’t even properly pronounce most of them, let alone identify their sexual preferences. MEDTECHDIVE has this headline: Trump policies are upending healthcare technology. “Track the effect on the medtech industry here. Policies and actions reshaping the healthcare industry began pouring out of President Donald Trump’s White House nearly from day one. Follow the changes affecting the medical device industry.”
Did I mention the youngest son-in-law is a biomedical engineer who is in charge of designing medical, surgical, and prosthetic devices? Plus, the oldest daughter and son-in-law are doctors. It’s just me and my youngest daughter out here trying to figure out what the economy and financial markets are experiencing. The others are just trying to deal with that, and the usual helpful regulations are being replaced with crazy ones.
Since Trump took office in late January, multiple Food and Drug Administration webpages were removed (and then restored); employees were fired from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (and some were asked back); and the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a plan to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including about 3,500 at the FDA.
Meanwhile, the economy has whipsawed due to an unpredictable and aggressive tariff strategy. Later, however, pieces were delayed or walked back.
The Trump administration has reshaped the medtech industry in significant ways, and potentially long-term, in just a few months. Now that Trump has settled into power, new questions have arisen about what the many changes will mean for companies and patients, and what’s coming next.
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
Also, lucky us, Medicare and Medicaid modernization with be the goal of TV snake oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz as he takes over both. This is also from the MEDTECHDIVE.
Dr. Mehmet Oz was sworn in as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator on April 18, cementing his role as head of the agency that provides insurance coverage to millions of Americans.
During a ceremony at the Oval Office, Oz, a physician and former TV personality, said he wanted to “save” the nation’s public health programs and focus on reducing chronic disease, “modernizing” Medicare and Medicaid, and targeting fraud, waste and abuse in government insurance offerings.
President Donald Trump reiterated that Republicans wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid. “Just as I promised, there will be no cuts. We’re not going to have any cuts. We’re going to have only help,” he said during the ceremony.
As I’ve spent most of this year being poked, prodded, pricked, shocked, MRI’d, Ultrasound’d, and EMG’d, I sure don’t feel good about any of this. I fret about someone disappearing all of that, plus my Social Security.
Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from NBC News. “Trump says he will reopen ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz prison. Alcatraz Island hasn’t been used as a federal penitentiary since 1963. It had a capacity of roughly 300 people.” I’m actually thinking this is another one of his threats to Judges since it’s way too small to hold many prisoners. I suppose that’s one way to destroy a national park and the US Constitution in one sweep.
Alcatraz Island, a former military fortress and prison in San Francisco Bay, was turned into a federal penitentiary in 1934 and over the course of 29 years housed more than 1,500 people “deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system,” according to the National Park Service.
According to aNational Park Service study, it was initially deemed unfit to serve as a federal institution because of its small size, isolated location and lack of fresh water. However, Sanford Bates, the director of the Bureau of Prisons in 1933,later found it “an ideal place of confinement for about 200 of the most desperate or irredeemable types.” It was formally opened as a federal penitentiary the next year.
Trump suggested in his post that he’d like to restore the facility to that purpose.
This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”
Alcatraz is currently part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has about 1.2 million visitors per year. Those who tour the island in San Francisco Bay see facilities in various states of decay. The prison was crumbling even as it was still in operation, and the high cost of maintaining it was a key reason it was shuttered in 1963.
Given those realities, restoring Alcatraz and then expanding it, as Trump called for on his Truth Social platform, would likely cost a fortune ― and then another pile of cash would be needed to maintain it.
Reopening it as a prison would also mean the loss of the tourism revenue the island currently generates as well as a loss of habitat for its thriving bird population.
The president, however, said Alcatraz’s return to use as a prison would “serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”
His critics fired back that the idea would be an expensive boondoggle:
This just really sounds like how he’d run his business. Also, he now wants tariffs on all incoming films. This is about as insane as it gets. “Trump threatens a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, saying the movie industry in the US is dying.”
President Donald Trump is opening a new salvo in his tariff war, targeting films made outside the U.S.
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.
“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.
It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.
Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today. “America’s least American president. Donald Trump isn’t making America great again. He’s making it into something else entirely.”
On Sunday, NBC News aired an interview with Trump in which he expressed ignorance of the black-letter standards of justice established in the country’s founding document.
“The Constitution says every person, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out. So why not bring Abrego García back to the U.S. and use legal avenues to potentially remove him?
“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll leave that to the lawyers, and I’ll leave that to the attorney general of the United States.”
Welker noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted that even immigrants had due process rights. Trump again downplayed the idea, saying that holding hearings would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.” This isn’t as big a hurdle as it may sound. In fiscal 2024, there were more than 900,000 immigration hearings completed. So far in fiscal 2025, there have been more than 460,000. More could be cleared if Trump hadn’t moved to fire a number of immigration judges.
Finally, Welker noted that Trump didn’t really have a choice.
“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” she asked, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
You may recall that, in January, Trump put his hand on a Bible and affirmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that he would “faithfully execute” his role as president and to the best of his “ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has never been an oath he has appeared to actually take to heart.
Trump’s dismissiveness of the Constitution has manifested itself in a lot of ways. You may recall his lack of interest in leaving office when he lost the 2020 presidential election. You may be aware that he has readily, if not giddily, accepted personal income from foreign governments while serving as president. He views the law as a cudgel, not a constraint, issuing pardons for various political allies ensnared in criminal activity while directing federal law enforcement to fish for potential criminal charges against those who work against his political power.
At its heart, Trump’s approach to his role is rooted in his parochial sense of patriotism. He didn’t come to the White House after having worked his way up through lower offices, building consensus and working to appeal to a broad range of constituents. He had no appreciation for how legislation is crafted or for the hard work of reaching compromise. Perhaps most importantly, he has never indicated any robust understanding of American history or of the debates and agreements that led to the country’s creation.
In 2011, for example, Trump was asked by Stephen Colbert if he knew what the 13 stripes on the American flag represent. He said he didn’t.
More recently, Trump was asked by ABC News journalist Terry Moran what the Declaration of Independence (a copy of which the president recently had installed in the Oval Office) means to him personally.
“It means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”
It is special to the country, of course, but not because it is a declaration of “love,” much less “unity.” As the name would suggest, it is precisely the opposite.
Trump doesn’t have the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office because he wants its message to serve as a guidepost for his administration. He doesn’t even appear to know its message. He has it there because it is A Famous American Thing, another decoration in the newly gilded room meant to send a message about his power, not the nation’s.
Dan Froomkin–writing for Press Watch–suggests we need to keep track of all Trump’s oddities. “We need a way to aggregate what Donald Trump is doing to this country.”
News organizations, along with good-government groups and other interested parties, are doing a commendable job of chronicling the damage the Trump regime is doing to the government, the country, and the world.
But none of them, individually, is in a position to give the public the full picture. It’s just too much.
This is a feature of Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” No one entity can possibly keep up.
And as we go forward, how can any one organization keep tabs on all the fallout? It’s not possible.
What we need is a central repository of information so that the full extent of the damage can be found in one place and assessed by the public — and so that there’s a comprehensive record of what needs to be fixed and restored when the time comes to do so. (Sort of like a truth commission, but in real time.)
To aggregate all the existing information, organize it, and collect new data, we need a place, a process, and people.
It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people. Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more. He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.
This is a site that I was just sent to by a Blue Sky Link. This DNYUZ link has an article by the NYT’s by Jack Goldsmith of Lawfare fame and Harvard Law School. This has been an issue for many people in modern times, with both parties playing the role of enablers. “It’s Not Just Trump. The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful.” So, I need to put this example of both siderisms into perspective. “Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is an author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.”
Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness.
Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies. The overall pattern of presidential action over the past few decades reveals an escalation of power grabs that put the country on a terrible course even before Mr. Trump took office again.
The presidency needs reform, and Americans must consider ways — however implausible they may seem in the context of today’s politics — to get there.
Expansionist presidential acts go all the way back to George Washington, who invited charges of monarchism with his use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined “executive Power.” From there the presidency, with its loose design, grew and grew, with major surges during the Civil War and New Deal era. That trend continued through the 20th century, aided by the rise of mass communication, substantial delegations of power from Congress and an approving Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump’s radical second presidency is, to an underappreciated extent, operating from a playbook devised by his modern predecessors.
His use of emergency powers to impose broad tariffs is similar to a move made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. His claims of untouchable national security authority echo arguments made after the Sept. 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration, in which I served.
Presidents for decades have issued pardons as political or personal favors or to avoid personal legal jeopardy. Mr. Trump took this practice to new extremes in his first term, and then President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his son and family as well as members of his administration and Congress, in a similar pattern. Mr. Trump in his second term has already issued many self-serving pardons.
Mr. Trump’s executive-order program is an heir of the strategy used by President Barack Obama for large-scale and sometimes legally dubious policy initiatives, including some (involving immigration) where Mr. Obama had earlier admitted he lacked authority to act. Mr. Biden also confessed a lack of power but then acted unilaterally in seeking to forgive student loans.
Mr. Trump has disregarded statutory restrictions to fire officials in independent agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But in 2021, Mr. Biden extended the Supreme Court’s unitary executive case law to fire the statutorily protected commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Mr. Biden was “the first unitary executive,” noted the legal writer Mark Joseph Stern in 2021.
Mr. Biden also purged the executive branch of Trump holdover officials who were not protected by statute, including members of arts and honorary institutions, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Biden administration’s defense of these firings resulted in judicial precedents that Mr. Trump is now wielding to clean house on a broader scale.
The Trump administration has also built on past presidencies in not enforcing federal law — for example, in letting TikTok live on despite a congressional ban. This practice finds its modern roots in the Obama administration, which asserted broad nonenforcement discretion in high-profile cases involving immigration, marijuana and Obamacare, in effect changing the meaning of those laws.
Something similar has happened with spending. As one recent paper noted, “The past several presidents have all taken significant unilateral actions intruding on Congress’s control over federal spending.” The Trump 2.0 version greatly enlarges this unilateralist pattern.
There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about. The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from Democracy Docket explaining the theory and relating to it to Yam Tits. The analysis is written by Jacob Knutsen. “What Is Unitary Executive Theory? How is Trump Using It to Push His Agenda?”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has executed a whirlwind of dismissals across the federal government that violated federal statutes and decreed numerous executive orders, including one that blatantly defied the plain language of the Constitution.
Behind the seemingly scatter-shot opening acts of his second administration, legal analysts see a common goal: to test a once-fringe legal theory which asserts that the president has unlimited power to control the actions of the four million people who make up the executive branch.
If courts — specifically the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court — uphold arguments based on the so-called “unitary executive theory,” it would give Trump and subsequent presidents unprecedented power to remove and replace any federal employee and impose their will on every decision in every agency.
Rulings in favor of the Trump administration would also further jeopardize the independence of key regulatory agencies that are susceptible to conflicts of interest and political interference, like the Federal Election Commission, which oversees federal elections and campaign finance laws.
Trump and his administration have furthered the theory by repeatedly invoking Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, to justify the recent dismissals of federal officials. They have framed the article as allowing the president to use the whole of the executive branch for his political ends.
For example, the White House Feb. 18 invoked the article to rationalize an executive order signed that same day that asserted the president’s authority over almost all regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to act independently, or semi-independently, from the president.
Frank Bowman, a scholar of constitutional and criminal law at the University of Missouri School of Law, told Democracy Docket he believes the executive order is a step toward “an open declaration of dictatorship.”
“In essence, what he’s saying is, ‘I am the law. My will is the law. My view of what the law is the only view that can ever be expressed,’” Bowman said.
I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The Center for American Progress features an analysis in its series on Project 2025. This one was written back in October.”Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency. Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.” It is an imperative read. Trump knows that he can be both pope and king.
Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority
To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.”22 This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.
The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda.23 Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”24
If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.
Well, all these pithy reads should keep you busy for the day. I hope your week goes well. I’ve got 2 doctors’ appointments, but gladly no more procedures. And I’d like just to add if they come for professors, that I’d rather be in the gulag that holds the country’s political cartoonists. To think, I used to just use wonderful paintings.
Happy Cinco de Mayo to all the wonderful folks of Mexican descent and to those of us who just enjoy the holiday!
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
#Repeat1968 #CampAlcatraz #CrazyFARTUSPolicies #DonaldTrump #JohnBuss #misogyny #SCOTUS #SocialSecurity #TheoryOfUnitaryExecutive #TrumpTariffs #unemployment