cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/43457696

One of the biggest mysteries that has emerged from the Trump-era Supreme Court is the 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan.

In Milligan, two of the Republican justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — voted with the Court’s Democratic minority to strike down Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional maps, ordering the state to redraw those maps to include an additional district with a Black majority.

So why did two Republican justices break with their previous skepticism of gerrymandering suits in the Milligan case? A new order that the Supreme Court handed down Friday evening appears to answer that question.

The new order, in a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, suggests that the Court’s decision in Milligan was merely a minor detour, and that Roberts and Kavanaugh’s votes in Milligan were largely driven by unwise legal decisions by Alabama’s lawyers. The legal issues in the Callais case are virtually identical to the ones presented in Milligan, but the Court’s new order indicates it is likely to use Callais to strike down the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against gerrymandering altogether.

The Callais order, in other words, doesn’t simply suggest that Milligan was a one-off decision that is unlikely to be repeated. It also suggests that the Court’s Republican majority will resume its laissez-faire approach to gerrymandering, just as the redistricting wars appear to be heating up.

On Friday, the Court issued a new order laying out what these parties should address in those briefs. Those briefs should examine whether the lower court order requiring Louisiana to draw an additional Black-majority district “violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” The justices, in other words, want briefing on whether Gingles — and the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering more broadly — are unconstitutional.

This suggestion that the Voting Rights Act may be unconstitutional — or, at least, that it violates the Republican justices’ vision of the Constitution — should not surprise anyone who has followed the Court’s voting rights cases.

“There is no denying,” Roberts wrote for the Court in Shelby County, “that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.”

Although Kavanaugh joined nearly all of the majority opinion in Milligan, he also wrote a qseparate opinion indicating that he wanted to extend Shelby County to gerrymandering cases in a future ruling. “Even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under [the Voting Rights Act] for some period of time,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

Gingles also suggests that Voting Rights Act suits challenging racial gerrymanders should eventually cease to exist. If the electorate ceases to be racially polarized — something that appears to be slowly happening — then Gingles plaintiffs will no longer be able to win cases, and the federal judiciary’s role in redistricting will diminish. But Kavanaugh seems to be impatient to end these suits while many states remain racially polarized.

Read in the context of Kavanaugh’s Milligan opinion, in other words, the new Callais order suggests that a majority of the justices have decided the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering have reached their expiration date, and they are looking for arguments to justify striking them down.

It now looks like Milligan was Gingles’s last gasp. The Republican justices remain hostile both to the Voting Rights Act and toward gerrymandering suits more broadly. And they appear very likely to use Callais to remove one of the few remaining safeguards against gerrymanders.

One of the biggest mysteries that has emerged from the Trump-era Supreme Court is the 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan.

In Milligan, two of the Republican justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — voted with the Court’s Democratic minority to strike down Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional maps, ordering the state to redraw those maps to include an additional district with a Black majority.

So why did two Republican justices break with their previous skepticism of gerrymandering suits in the Milligan case? A new order that the Supreme Court handed down Friday evening appears to answer that question.

The new order, in a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, suggests that the Court’s decision in Milligan was merely a minor detour, and that Roberts and Kavanaugh’s votes in Milligan were largely driven by unwise legal decisions by Alabama’s lawyers. The legal issues in the Callais case are virtually identical to the ones presented in Milligan, but the Court’s new order indicates it is likely to use Callais to strike down the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against gerrymandering altogether.

The Callais order, in other words, doesn’t simply suggest that Milligan was a one-off decision that is unlikely to be repeated. It also suggests that the Court’s Republican majority will resume its laissez-faire approach to gerrymandering, just as the redistricting wars appear to be heating up.

On Friday, the Court issued a new order laying out what these parties should address in those briefs. Those briefs should examine whether the lower court order requiring Louisiana to draw an additional Black-majority district “violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” The justices, in other words, want briefing on whether Gingles — and the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering more broadly — are unconstitutional.

This suggestion that the Voting Rights Act may be unconstitutional — or, at least, that it violates the Republican justices’ vision of the Constitution — should not surprise anyone who has followed the Court’s voting rights cases.

“There is no denying,” Roberts wrote for the Court in Shelby County, “that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.”

Although Kavanaugh joined nearly all of the majority opinion in Milligan, he also wrote a qseparate opinion indicating that he wanted to extend Shelby County to gerrymandering cases in a future ruling. “Even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under [the Voting Rights Act] for some period of time,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

Gingles also suggests that Voting Rights Act suits challenging racial gerrymanders should eventually cease to exist. If the electorate ceases to be racially polarized — something that appears to be slowly happening — then Gingles plaintiffs will no longer be able to win cases, and the federal judiciary’s role in redistricting will diminish. But Kavanaugh seems to be impatient to end these suits while many states remain racially polarized.

Read in the context of Kavanaugh’s Milligan opinion, in other words, the new Callais order suggests that a majority of the justices have decided the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering have reached their expiration date, and they are looking for arguments to justify striking them down.

It now looks like Milligan was Gingles’s last gasp. The Republican justices remain hostile both to the Voting Rights Act and toward gerrymandering suits more broadly. And they appear very likely to use Callais to remove one of the few remaining safeguards against gerrymanders.

Palantir topped Wall Street’s estimates and hiked its full-year guidance due to the artificial intelligence boom. The AI software provider’s revenues grew 48% during the period and hit $1 billion for the first time. The software analytics company has seen a boost from President Donald Trump’s focus on cutting government costs.

Vice President JD Vance’s waistline may have gotten a digital nip and tuck courtesy of the GOP.

To mark his 41st birthday on Saturday, the party’s official X account posted a photo of Vance overlaid with the message: “Happy Birthday Vice President J.D. Vance.”

Following that report, Miller appeared on Fox News in late May and stated that “under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for Ice every day.”

He added that Trump “is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day

However, in a court filing on Friday, lawyers representing the US justice department said that the Department of Homeland Security had confirmed that “neither Ice leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that Ice or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law.”

Oh, suddenly when you're trying to hire you don't give soul crushing quotas that require humans to be treated like cattle?

3000 people a day going into private prisons to keep Stephen Miller et al., rich and keep this whole operation going.

Donald Trump is looking to hire 10,000 officers to help carry out his administration’s widespread detention and deportation of migrants with tens of billions of dollars in funds from his “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Job postings show that in 25 cities from coast to coast, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is hiring deportation officers who will arrest, detain, and deport migrants, and manage migrants’ cases. The listings give insight into where ICE may be ramping up operations.

ICE has already been carrying out broad arrests, including at workplaces and courthouses. Agents have been wearing masks and lacking identifying information as they snatch immigrants, sometimes breaking their car windows to drag them out faster.

Texas Democrats are leaving the state in an attempt to prevent the state House from holding a vote Monday on new congressional maps that Republicans hope will net them several additional U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterm elections.

The dramatic move Sunday could expose Democrats to fines and other penalties — with the state’s attorney general having previously threatened to arrest them if they took such an action. Refusing to attend legislative session is a civil violation, however, so Democrats legally could not be jailed and it’s unclear who has the power to carry out the warrants.

Democrats have cast the decision to leave the state as a last-ditch effort to stop Republicans who hold full control of the Texas government from pushing through a rare mid-decade redrawing of the congressional map at the direction of President Donald Trump.

ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons has bluntly compared the movement of people to packages.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business, where this mass deportation operation is something like you would see and say, like, Amazon trying to get your Prime delivery within 24 hours,” Lyons told a law enforcement conference in Phoenix earlier this year.

Since before the Trump administration, the ICE field office in New Orleans — which is responsible for removal operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee — was modeling operations after shipping giant FedEx and its “spoke-hub” model.

Lyons, who has helmed ICE since March, addressed his now-viral remarks about treating immigrants like packages in an interview the following month.

"The key part that got left out of that statement was, I said, they deal with boxes, we deal with human beings, which is totally different,” he told Boston 25 News.

ICE “should be run like a corporation”, he told the outlet.

"We need to be better about removing those individuals who have been lawfully ordered out of the country in a safe, efficient manner,” Lyons continued. “We can’t trade innovation and efficiency for how we treat the people in our custody.”

Fourteen of the 20 largest ICE detention centers in the U.S. are in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, a network that immigrant advocates have labelled “deportation alley.” The jails — most of which are operated by private prison companies — hold thousands of people each year.

More than 7,000 people are currently jailed in Louisiana’s immigration detention centers while Texas facilities are holding more than 12,000. More than 56,000 people are in ICE detention across the country.

But Louisiana is home to the nation’s only ICE detention center with a tarmac. The facility in Alexandria has become the nation’s busiest deportation airport with 1,200 flights to other U.S. detention centers and more than 200 planes leaving the country since Trump took office.

Louisiana locks up more people per capita than any other U.S. state, in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet.

Most incarcerated people in Louisiana are in local jails, and the state pays sheriffs a daily rate per inmate, creating what civil rights groups fear is a cruel pay-to-play system that incentivizes locking people up.

When the Biden administration created a safety institute at the standards agency and then used it to run “x-risk evals, I think we kind of lost our way there,” he said. (“X-risk” is a shortened term for “existential risk” that’s associated with the idea that AI poses major threats to humanity.)

“To me, I think we need to go back to basics at NIST, and back to basics around what NIST exists for, and that is to promulgate best-in-class standards and do critical metrology or measurement science around AI models,” Kratsios said.

Kratsios’s comments about the body once known as the AI Safety Institute came a day after the White House released its anticipated AI Action Plan — which made dozens of recommendations to do things like deregulate and rid AI of “ideological bias” — as well as three executive orders that set parts of that plan into motion. The Thursday panel, moderated by CTA’s CEO and vice chair Gary Shapiro, was focused on those actions.

The discussion also followed the Trump administration’s move last month to rename the NIST-located safety institute to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, cutting “safety” from the name. That component was initially announced by the Biden administration in November 2023 at the UK AI Safety Summit and, over the next year, focused on working with industry, establishing testing agreements with companies, and conducting evaluations.

I get that he's most likely just "following orders" from Thiel, and probably not coming up with any of this policy, but I still hate this guy so much. I have to give Thiel credit. Once again proving he sure knows how to craft a good public scapegoat for when things inevitably go horribly wrong.

“Fetterman?” one speaker yelled from a stage near the steps of City Hall.

“Jagoff!” protesters shouted back in unison.

“Fetterman?”

“Jagoff!”

in Fetterman’s case, it describes a politician who campaigned as a Bernie Sanders–loving populist and vowed to help Democrats advance their priorities past the party’s two obstructionists, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin—only to reprise their roles once in Congress and cozy up with Republicans.

“He ran in the 2022 primaries against Joe Manchin, and now he’s become Joe Manchin,” says Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic operative in Pennsylvania. “An unprincipled Manchin.”

He’s sided with Republicans on denying immigrants due process, voted to confirm a 2020 election denier to lead the Department of Justice, and approved a GOP budget that freed Trump to slash spending without oversight. His recent actions have enraged progressives, mystified colleagues, and alarmed former and current aides.

Link without paywall: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maga-attorney-hired-epstein-lawyer-215602325.html

A firm that represents Pete Hegseth and once represented Donald Trump now employs the co-executor of the disgraced financier’s estate.

In the summer of 2022, Donald Trump badly needed criminal-defense lawyers. Tim Parlatore, who was already working for the former president on an unrelated civil matter, joined the team defending Trump after an FBI search found classified government documents stored at his Florida estate. Parlatore had represented prominent Trump allies in their interactions with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attacks; that was helpful, because Trump also faced charges stemming from the riot. Parlatore was a star lawyer in Trump world, so it’s more than a little surprising that, in the fall of that year, he hired a close associate of one of the most notorious villains in the extended MAGA universe: Jeffrey Epstein.

Before he joined the Parlatore Law Group, Darren Indyke was Epstein’s personal attorney for nearly a quarter century and reportedly among his closest associates and advisers. Parlatore’s decision to hire Indyke appears to have escaped public notice. But Indyke, by his own account, has been working for the firm since October 2022.

The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.

But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.

Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.

To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.

Well you're going to need CEOs to manage your individual earthly monarchs for you until you can upload your consciousness and head to outer space 🚀