This premonition is not a well-kept secret. It shows up in the Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s public pronouncements about a white-collar blood bath and in the disappearing-message Signal chats in which tech executives boast about the roles they plan to automate. You feel it in the fretting of recent college graduates who apply to hundreds of jobs without landing a single interview. You hear it in the gallows humor of the software engineers who joke about replacing themselves with Claude Code.
May 3, 2026
The economic hazards of AI
NY Times - Since its early years, OpenAI believed that A.G.I. would transform the global economy and generate untold wealth for its creators. The leadership held that government action would be critical for helping people navigate the disruption that A.I. caused. In a 2021 blog post, the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, predicted that within decades, “unstoppable” A.I. systems would be able to do almost any job a human could, and thus would shift power from labor to capital. His proposed solution was to aggressively tax assets: land and A.I.-company shares. “If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today,” Mr. Altman wrote....
Money
Robert Reich - A history of the top marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans:
1940: 81%
1950: 84%
1960: 91%
1970: 72%
1980: 70%
1990: 28%
2000: 40%
2010: 35%
Now Trump wants to invade Cuba
Express, UK - US President Donald Trump has threatened to take over Cuba, claiming his military could do so "almost immediately." Speaking on Saturday, he said: "Cuba, which we will be taking over almost immediately." Addressing the crowd in Florida, Trump suggested the US could move away from the Iran war and deploy vessels towards Cuba on their return.
Sinking Mexico City
ABC News - The fact that Mexico City is sinking is not new. NASA says it has been documented the changes for more than a century. According to a 1995 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the city was already sinking roughly two inches per year by the late 1800s. By the 1950s, that number jumped to 18 inches, the report found.
The first finding was reported by engineer Roberto Gayol in 1925, who pointed to a large canal and tunnel built to drain water out of the city's waterlogged ground as the potential cause. Scientists now point to a more direct culprit — decades of draining the ancient lakebed aquifer that the city was built on.
As water is pumped out, the ground above it compacts and stays that way, according to a study published by the American Geophysical Union. Think of wet clay that gets squeezed flat and hardens in place.
Supreme Court
Independence Journal - Supreme Court unanimously ruled that First Choice Women’s Resource Centers can challenge New Jersey’s subpoena in federal court, rejecting the state’s attempt to compel sensitive donor and operational records. New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin issued a sweeping 2023 subpoena to the pro-life pregnancy center network under the Consumer Fraud Act, which critics describe as politically motivated targeting. The ruling establishes important precedent protecting nonprofits across the political spectrum from state harassment through invasive investigative demands
Polls
Washington Post - Trump’s overall approval now stands at 37 percent, largely the same as the 39 percent figure in February. But his disapproval has reached 62 percent, the highest of his two terms in office. Among Republicans, Trump’s approval has held steady at 85 percent, but his ratings among Republican-leaning independents have reached a new low of 56 percent. His approval rating stands at 25 percent among independents overall.
Cost of living: 76% disapprove
Inflation: 72%
Iran: 66%
Allies: 65%
Economy: 65%
Taxes: 61%
Immigration: 59%
Border: 54%
Washington Post - Americans reported the lowest trust in their government to regulate AI responsibly of any country surveyed: just 31 percent. The global average was 54 percent. In Singapore, that number was 81 percent.
Way to Win commissioned a March poll of 1,282 likely voters in Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas that also drilled down into 14 congressional battleground districts in four of those states. The good news for Democrats is that there’s a yawning gap in voters’ enthusiasm in those districts: 72 percent of Democratic voters said they were extremely motivated to vote in November, compared to 34 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of independents.
The bad news is that among those six states, Democrats are ahead only in only one of them—Georgia—on the generic ballot, and down five points overall across all of them. In the battleground districts specifically, voters favor Republicans over Democrats by seven points. This is a stark difference from national generic ballots, where Democrats lead Republicans by five points, on average.
This doesn’t mean voters are happy with Trump and the GOP. In Way to Win’s poll, the president is underwater on the economy by 17 points. That’s significantly lower than his overall approval rating of 49 percent in this poll, which itself is higher in these purple and red states than it is nationally. Respondents were more likely to blame rising costs on GOP politicians and big corporations than Trump’s preferred scapegoats—immigrants, Democrats, and the Federal Reserve. MORE
Why Spirit mattered
Axios - Spirit Airlines may have been the butt of jokes, but it filled a vital niche for cost-conscious travelers...
- 🚌 It was the Fung Wah bus of the skies, offering a cheap way to get around so long as you managed your expectations, brought your own snacks and didn't mind a delay or two.
- 🤳 Wharton School professor Mohamed A. El-Erian wrote on Bluesky yesterday that Spirit "helped democratize the skies, providing a bridge for those who previously found travel out of reach."
It also provided badly needed competition, pushing rivals to offer no-frills basic economy options of their own.
- 💵 Delta and United are now essentially operating premium and budget airlines all at once, extracting maximum cash from folks sitting up front while filling as many seats as possible in the back.
- Spirit and Southwest both tried to go upscale in response — but it wasn't enough to save the former.
📊 Even Spirit's reputation for delays was unearned — about 77% of Spirit flights arrived on time in 2025, per Transportation Department data.
- That's nearly as good as Delta (79%) and United (78%), and notably better than American (73%).
The bottom line: Spirit's primary cause of death will be listed as skyrocketing jet fuel prices tied to the Iran war that exacerbated longstanding financial issues. MORE
Black voting rights
NY Times - Two Southern governors on Friday said they would summon their state’s lawmakers to consider new House maps under the newly weakened Voting Rights Act, as Republicans rushed to dilute majority-Black districts before November’s midterm elections.
The governors, Bill Lee of Tennessee and Kay Ivey of Alabama, both Republican, moved to call special sessions next week, as the effect of this week’s Supreme Court decision began spreading beyond its immediate target, Louisiana. The court on Wednesday rejected Louisiana’s congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander, prompting that state’s governor, the Republican Jeff Landry, to delay his state’s House primary as lawmakers considered a new congressional map that would endanger at least one Democratic seat.
....At least six majority-Black districts held by Democrats — two in Louisiana, one in Tennessee, two in Alabama and one in South Carolina — could be in play, though a clean sweep is unlikely.
Social Security
MS NOW - The Trump administration is reportedly looking to shrink supplementary Social Security Income payments for disabled adults who live with their families. The report has already raised a lot of concern about how it might play out, but “the confusion is a feature, not a bug,” argues David M. Perry, a journalist whose son is autistic and has Down syndrome. “You’re not supposed to know what you or your loved ones qualify for,” he writes. “Otherwise, you might get what you are actually owed.” The cuts are being done through changes to administrative rules, a tactic politicians have long used to shrink the safety net without admitting they are cutting benefits. MORE
Donald Trump
The I Paper - Donald Trump’s former lawyer has called for the President to be removed from office because he has turned into a “madman”. Ty Cobb, who worked closely with Trump during his first administration, claimed that the President’s “mental condition has deteriorated substantially” to the point where he was now unfit to serve.
In an exclusive interview with The i Paper, Cobb said that Trump’s second term was “scary and dystopian” because the President was now surrounded by enablers who were unable and unwilling to control his impulses. Cobb warned that the President, 79, the oldest person ever to be inaugurated into the role, appeared to growing “desperate” and more dangerous the longer his war on Iran went on. Despite a fragile ceasefire, both the US and Iran are blockading the global chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, fuelling a rise in energy prices worldwide and threatening spiralling disaster.
“We’re in a real crisis here in the US,” he said. The President had become a “dictator” who was “destroying our democracy”, he added
In an exclusive interview with The i Paper, Cobb said that Trump’s second term was “scary and dystopian” because the President was now surrounded by enablers who were unable and unwilling to control his impulses. Cobb warned that the President, 79, the oldest person ever to be inaugurated into the role, appeared to growing “desperate” and more dangerous the longer his war on Iran went on. Despite a fragile ceasefire, both the US and Iran are blockading the global chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, fuelling a rise in energy prices worldwide and threatening spiralling disaster.
“We’re in a real crisis here in the US,” he said. The President had become a “dictator” who was “destroying our democracy”, he added
May 2, 2026
A nation on the verge of collapse
Sam Smith - Although other presidents in the past hundred years - including Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter - got some Gallup poll results below those of Donald Trump, these were problems with policies and not competency or decency. With a news career that started in Washington over 60 years ago, a father who worked for FDR, and some good college history books , I can assure you that there has been no one as incompetent and dangerous to constitutional democracy as Trump.
While there may be little prospect of a second Civil War there is very clearly the danger of a collapse of the core systems we have enjoyed for 250 years. We are not currently treating this as the crisis it is thanks in no small part to a media that handles impending disasters as just more of the morning news and President Trump as a top politician.
But the truth is that we have never had such a liar in such a high position nor one who even starts major wars without obeying constitutional procedures. And he gets away with this thanks in no small part, not only due to a flawed media but because of a Supreme Court whose majority see themselves as the country's real rulers, and a Congress that lacks the will to defend not only its country but its own constitutional powers.
The other major factor in this crisis is the way America has culturally collapsed in past half century. No longer defined by community, ethnicity, religion and other aspects of intrinsic culture, it has become dominated by the values and instructions of huge corporations, television, the Internet and major money, all increasingly the property of a small minority.
America is no longer the place it was when I started as a young journalist. Which is one reason why, nearly two decades ago, I moved to a small town in Maine where I feel not only more American again, but more human as well. Life here is not defined by huge institutions but by decent real people.
I started coming to Maine in the summer when I was nine years old. Nearly eight decades later it still enjoys the values and the habits that once defined a later collapsing place known as America.
To survive this crisis, we must make our nation and its leaders as good as those we find in our communities.
Immigration
Alternet America - A quick civics refresher: the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates federal crimes. Counterterrorism, organized crime, public corruption — that sort of thing.
Here’s what it does now. The FBI multiplied the number of employees assigned to immigration by a factor of 23 in the first nine months of the second Trump administration.
There were 279 FBI personnel working on immigration-related matters before Trump took office in January 2025. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500. In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total workforce of 38,000.
There has been no corresponding surge in cartel prosecutions or trafficking convictions to explain the scale. What the numbers do show is an agency that was functioning as the largest immigration enforcement operation in the country — bigger than ICE itself.
Abortions
Washington Post - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has temporarily reinstated a requirement that abortion pills be picked up in person. The move, which abortion rights advocates argue will make it harder for women to access the commonly used abortion pill, stems from Louisiana’s lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration that allowed patients to access the medicine through telehealth and mail.
What Maine can teach the Democrats
Thom Hartmann - Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time.
Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.
The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.
Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.
Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’s endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’s establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.
Meanwhile. . .
Alan Mcquillan - Suppose there are just 10 people in the world. Suppose that 9 of them have an income of just two dollars and the one other person has an income of 100 dollars. Total income equals 118. Now, suppose that income of the poorest 9 drops by 50 % to just one dollar each, and the income of the rich guy goes up by 10%. Total Income is now 119, an increase of one. Now look at the statistics: Total income has gone up by almost one percent despite the fact that 90% of people are a lot worse off. The lesson is that the poor do not count in this system.
Toilet paper kills too many trees
1440 - Every 24 hours, 27,000 trees are cut down … just to make toilet paper. We think that’s far too many, and honeycomb agrees, which is why they created luxury 3-ply made from bamboo. It feels just like regular high-end toilet paper, but doesn’t harm trees.
You might be wondering: why bamboo? It grows insanely fast—nearly 100x faster than the average tree—making it a sustainable option to save forests. Bamboo also has uniquely short fibers, which are perfect for creating soft toilet tissue you can feel good about. It’s biodegradable, 100% plastic-free, and honeycomb delivers straight to you. 1440 readers can use code 1440 to get 35% off your 1st shipment until midnight.
Gun deaths
Pew Research - About 44,000 people died from gun-related injuries in 2024, the most recent year with complete data. More than six-in-ten of those gun deaths (62%) were suicides, while 35% were homicides. Gun suicides reached their highest level on record, but gun homicides have declined substantially in recent years.
Trump regime
Alternet - An aide to President Donald Trump has revealed the current mood among White House insiders, telling MS NOW that administration officials are privately acknowledging the Republican Party is “already cooked” in the 2026 midterm elections. “The vibe right now is we know we are already cooked in the midterms,” the anonymous White House official told MS NOW, according to a report published Saturday morning.
....“The numbers help explain the gloom,” MS NOW reports. “For the first time since 2010, voters say they trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy, 52 percent to 48 percent, according to a recent Fox News poll."
The report also details “bubbling frustration among Republican strategists working House and Senate races,” who warn Trump “and his team have been slow to focus on” the 2026 midterms. Still, two White House officials told MS NOW there’s a plan in place to “kitchen-table issues and flood battleground states with Trump and Cabinet surrogates in the coming months.”
....Trump, meanwhile, “has been consumed by the war in Iran and by the construction of a $400 million White House ballroom that has become an unlikely political liability — a gilded symbol, his critics argue, of a president more focused on monuments to himself than on voters squeezed by more everyday concerns,” the report notes.
According to the report, the President’s antics — including his “inflammatory Easter morning social media posts, his attacks on the pope and his habit of naming things after himself” — have also “made life harder for Republican incumbents.”
New Republic - Every few months, the Trump administration says that it will make a greater effort to denaturalize American citizens. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department plans to start the process for formally denaturalizing more than 300 current U.S. citizens, which would be the largest single push for citizenship stripping in modern American history.
Any attack on the integrity of American citizenship is concerning. The administration’s denaturalization threats often provoke a strong response from the president’s opponents and critics. But it is also important to calibrate one’s level of concern by understanding what the Trump administration can and can’t do about denaturalization in the first place.
For one thing, the Trump administration cannot denaturalize a natural-born citizen—that is, someone who acquired citizenship at birth by virtue of being born on U.S. soil or by being born to a U.S. citizen. The Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, which was enacted during Reconstruction in 1869, sought to place the scope of American citizenship beyond the limits of normal political debate for all time...
Second, there are strict legal and constitutional limits on when and how the United States can denaturalize a naturalized U.S. citizen...In the late 1930s, Congress and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration sought to clarify when and how someone could lose their U.S. citizenship. The Nationality Act of 1940 was drafted to harmonize dozens of different provisions that had been enacted piecemeal over the preceding decades. In the new law, Congress laid out a variety of circumstances in which a U.S. citizen could be deemed to have renounced their U.S. citizenship. More
Middle East
Robert Reich - Trump’s war is so unpopular that Republican members of Congress don’t want to have to go on record as voting in favor of it. With midterm elections in six months, they know their votes in favor of Trump’s war could be held over their heads — especially if the war drags on, or if gas prices continue to rise because Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, or both.
They’ve let the White House know that forcing them to vote on the war will hurt their chances of maintaining control of Congress.
So congressional Republicans are choosing the coward’s way out: agree with Hegseth and Trump that there’s no need for such a vote because the cease-fire has tolled the clock. Or claim, even more absurdly (as has the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson) that there’s no “war” to begin with, and hence no reason for such a vote.
The Hill - The partisan battle over authorizing the Iran War has shifted to one of semantics, as the sides haggle over a contentious deadline created by a Vietnam-era law.
....The clash is renewing the age-old debate over the separation of powers when it comes to the use of military force. And it promises to continue for many weeks to come, as Democrats are vowing a strategy of forcing vote after vote on war powers resolutions, if only to put Republicans on record supporting a conflict that’s grown wildly unpopular with voters.
“The Founders of our country gave Congress, as representatives of the American people, the ultimate decision of when we go to war,” said Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.). “Trump has no plan to sustain the current conflict, no plan to transition the current Iranian government toward democracy, and no plan to de-escalate or contain the conflict from spreading throughout the region.”
Garamendi is among a growing list of liberal Democrats who have introduced war powers resolutions in the days leading up to the 60-day threshold. The campaign, being led by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), is designed to stagger the resolutions so they “ripen” — that is, mature to the point of becoming eligible for a floor vote — on a rolling basis. The tactic will allow Democrats to force a barrage of votes on the war, interspersed at regular intervals as Congress inches closer to the midterm elections.
“This is what I hope will be a steady stream of these until we get some Republicans to join us,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), who has sponsored his own war powers resolution.
So far, Republicans have been virtually united against the notion of limiting Trump’s war powers. Two resolutions have already come to the floor in the House, and six more in the Senate. All of them have been blocked by Trump’s GOP allies, who have warned that any effort to restrain U.S. forces amid the conflict will only empower Tehran’s Islamic regime at the expense of America’s national security.
It’s a confounding sentiment given the U.S. warships still blockading Iranian ports and the possibility that Trump could launch a new round of strikes at any time. But time has clearly become flexible to the Trump administration and its allies. Depending on who you ask, and when, America’s war against Iran is simultaneously ongoing and does not exist; it began 60 days ago but also 40 years ago. The war ended in early April, but our “warfighters” still need unconditional support to achieve victory.
The result is a quantum-flux state of play regarding the Iran war that’s as absurd as it is illegal.
ICE
The Guardian - US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a contract to a private security company that has faced accusations of “torture” and “enforced disappearance” to assist in tracking down undocumented immigrant children who arrived in the US alone, a contracting document shows.
ICE has stepped up its work so much in pursuing these minors in the US that it has contracted out some of its mission to a third party to put “boots on the ground” and locate immigrant children previously released from US government custody.
The agency characterizes the work of tracing immigrant children who reached the US without authorization and were released into communities while they go through immigration court proceedings as “safety and wellness checks”. ICE says it wants to confirm the child’s location, school enrollment and overall wellness, including checking for signs of abuse or trafficking, according to the contracting document.
But an internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian last year shows ICE actually runs the operations with the aim of deporting the children or pursuing criminal cases against them – or their adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US. A critic at the time called ICE’s efforts “backdoor family separation”.
May 1, 2026
Polls
PEW RESEARCH: Trump's net approval crosstabs
Age (four way) and gender
Men 18-29: (-51)
Women 18-29: (-49)
Men 30-49: (-32)
Women 30-49: (-44)
Men 50-64: (-3)
Women 50-64: (-25)
Men 65+: (-3)
Women 65+: (-25)
——
Race and education
White college Grad: (-27)
White some college or less: (-5)
Black college grad: (-79)
Black some college or less: (-69)
Hispanic college grad: (-42)
Hispanic some college or less: (-54)
——
and Education
Men college grad: (-31)
Men some college or less: (-17)
Women college grad: (-43)
Women some college or less: (-32
——
Race/Ethnicity
White: (-13)
Black: (-73)
Hispanic: (-52)
Asian: (-52)
——
Community type
Urban: (-51)
Suburban: (-33)
Rural (even)
——
Race and Gender
White men: (-7)
White women: (-18)
Black men: (-62)
Black women: (-90)
Hispanic men: (-43)
Hispanic women: (-57)
Asian men: (-40)
Asian women: (-53)
——
Gender
Male: (-22)
Female: (-36)
——
Age
18-29: (-51)
30-49: (-38)
50-64: (-14)
65+: (-14)
——
Party/lean
Rep/lean Rep: (+37)
Dem/lean Dem: (-89)
——
Religion
PROTESTANT (-8)
White Evangelical Protestant: (+32)
White non Evangelical Protestant: (-12)
Black Protestant: (-75)
CATHOLIC: (-28)
White Catholic: (even)
Hispanic Catholic: (-72)
UNAFFILIATED: (-57)
Atheist: (-82)
Agnostic: (-70)
——
Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll - Fifty-six percent of Americans oppose Trump's decision to tear down the White House East Wing for his $400 million ballroom. Only 28 percent support it. That's a 2-to-1 rejection — and it hasn't budged since October. Nearly three times as many people "strongly" oppose it as strongly support it. Sixty-one percent of independents are against it.
Trump won more than nine out of every ten rural counties in 2024. He’s now sitting at 52% favorable, 46% unfavorable among rural voters in battleground states, and 49% of rural voters in the same territory say they feel worse about him since he was re-elected, including a quarter of Republicans. That is not a man cruising into the midterms. That is a man whose coalition is fraying at the edges, and the edges are exactly where we live.
Money
Punch Up A private prison giant that runs a sprawling network of ICE jails has sparked allegations of “corruption” after it funneled $1 million to a Donald Trump-aligned fund for the midterms, PunchUp and Migrant Insider can reveal. The timing of GEO Group’s donation has set off alarm bells—it came just as news broke that the company was about to lose out on lucrative contracts.
In the first five months of fiscal 2026 alone, the immigration detention center monolith held more than $1 billion in obligated ICE contracts, an OpenSecrets analysis found, placing it second only to CSI Aviation among the agency’s top vendors.
The seven-figure payment from its subsidiary, GEO Reentry Services LLC, was recorded as received by MAGA Inc. on March 9—the same day The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had frozen the parent company out of $426 million in new ICE contracts. GEO Group has not received any new contracts since.
The Post also revealed that Department of Homeland Security officials had been privately pressuring GEO to slash prices on its existing contracts by 15 percent. By the end of the day, GEO’s core business model had been publicly called into question—the latest in a cascade of bad news that had seen the company’s share price lose more than half its value from its post-election peak, and it underwent a change at the top.
While federal law bars contractors from donating directly to federal candidates or super PACs, GEO Group has long relied on a loophole, routing money through corporate subsidiaries that do not hold government contracts, and has done so for around a decade.
100th anniversary of the weekend
!440 - Today marks 100 years since Ford Motor Company became one of the first American companies to officially adopt the five-day, 40-hour workweek for factory workers, a decision that reshaped work-life balance.
Henry Ford’s idea to eliminate Saturday from the workweek initially met hesitation from some hourly workers worried about reduced pay. However, his daily wages of $5 to $6—roughly double the industry average—helped to ease concerns (read 1920s reactions). Ford reportedly redirected Saturday wages to hire thousands more people for Monday through Friday shifts, reducing unemployment. The move also boosted productivity, reduced turnover, strengthened morale, and gave workers more leisure time, some of which they spent buying and traveling in Ford cars.
The US formally codified the 40-hour workweek in 1940, mandating overtime pay for hourly employees. More recently, momentum has grown around four-day workweeks, with the largest trial yet suggesting they could improve productivity and well-being.
Pope Leo
Newsweek - Pope Leo XIV has appointed three new U.S. bishops who have expressed criticism of President Donald Trump's actions. Washington auxiliary bishop Evelio Menjivar has been named as the new bishop for the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston covering West Virginia, according to the Catholic Standard. Father Gary Studniewski and Father Robert Boxie III have also been named as new auxiliary bishops for the Archdiocese of Washington.
Civil rights voting rights
Newsweek - States are supposed to redraw congressional maps once a decade to reflect population shifts and ensure the representation of communities within a given jurisdiction. Last year, though, President Trump asked Texas officials to create a rare new mid-decade map that would benefit Republicans in this year’s midterm election cycle. California came back with a new map that favored Democrats. A host of other states, both red and blue, followed. Now Wednesday’s [Supreme Court] decision has prompted Louisiana and other states to consider new maps immediately.
The last round of nationwide redistricting in 2021, when both Republicans and Democrats sought to protect their electoral advantages, resulted in far fewer contested races. “Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier,” Nick reports. Wednesday’s decision reinforces that trend.
Critics of the decision see a potentially devastating result in the South, reports Rick Rojas, who covers the region. They told Rick that new voting maps there “will not only endanger Black incumbents, some of whom have held office for decades, but also threaten a rising generation of Black Democrats.”
....And the decision could reach beyond Congress, into local governments — into state legislative districts, county boards and city councils. “None of us working on Capitol Hill would have gotten there without that foot in the door,” Representative Shomari Figures of Alabama told Rick.
The Guardian - After the US supreme court essentially struck down another major provision of the Voting Rights Act, advocates and Democratic lawmakers have renewed a push in the states to enact their own versions of the landmark civil rights bill to protect voters.
....Nine blue and purple states now have a version of a state voting rights act, a statute that works to protect voters in the state in the absence of federal protections. Eleven other states, including several in the south, have seen bills introduced to create their own versions.
Most of the state-level statutes have similar provisions, including some kind of prohibition on voter suppression, vote dilution, and voter intimidation and a requirement for pre-clearance of voting changes.
Department of Homeland Security reopened
NPR - The House of Representatives voted yesterday to reopen the majority of the Department of Homeland Security, ending the longest agency shutdown in U.S. history. The House passed a bill funding DHS, excluding dollars for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The measure was approved through a voice vote on the 76th day of the shutdown. After federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in January, Democrats pulled their support for a massive bipartisan spending bill that included DHS in order to push for reforms in the way agents do their jobs. |
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