A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
America’s Original Sin
Republicans stripping majority-Black Memphis, where 39-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated 58 years ago, of its majority-Black congressional district takes its place in a rancid arc of American history that seems to be bending backwards.
The same folks who fought integration tooth and nail in the 1960s, continued to drag their feet in the 1970s and ’80s, and spent the intervening decades fomenting racial strife for their own electoral gains became the first people to insist — without irony or self-awareness, let alone repentance or shame — that racism was behind us.
Integration went from never to too soon to enough already.
One of the features of white supremacy, if you’re a white supremacist, is you get to expurgate your own sins.
You can shed the robe and hood. You can get cosmetic surgery, as David Duke literally did, and made yourself inoffensive and telegenic. You can craft elaborately self-serving legal theories stripped of overt racial animus. You can even flip the script and play indignant victim when accused of racism. But you never ever have to be accountable for America’s original sin.
In blue states, there will soon be a real tension between maximizing partisan gerrymandering to counter Republicans and maximizing minority representation. Once again, Black Americans will be asked, if only implicitly, to sacrifice for some greater good, to take the the long view, to settle for now.
Faced with the old burdens anew, State Rep. Justin J. Pearson (D), who was running for the eliminated congressional seat in Memphis, echoed civil rights leaders of the past in drawing on scripture: “This is not over. We will fight and will not stop until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Sign of the Times
BREAKING: Virginia Supreme Court Overturns Democratic Redistricting
The Virginia Supreme Court has just invalidated the state referendum that Democrats used to pick up an expected four seats.
The Great Whitening
- Tennessee: Amid loud protests at the state capitol, the legislature passed and Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed into law a new congressional district map that eliminates the state’s sole majority-Black district, in Memphis. The NAACP quickly filed suit in state court challenging the new map under state law.
- Alabama: The Alabama Senate could vote as soon as today on a plan to come back into special session later this year, void the results of the congressional primary set for later this month, revert to the 2023 map that eliminates one of the state’s two Black-held seats, and re-run the congressional primaries. It’s all dependent on the Roberts Court lifting an injunction that bars Alabama from using the 2023 map.
- South Carolina: The state Senate adjourned for the week without taking up a state House-passed measure that would give the the legislature the option of coming back into special session this summer and eliminating the state’s sole majority-Black district. A Senate vote could come next week, but some GOP senators remain leery that the newly released map would actually net Republicans more House seats.
Alito Cited Misleading Data
In his majority opinion in the landmark Louisiana v. Callais case, Justice Samuel Alito cited voter turnout numbers in the state that were based on a misleading data analysis provided by the Trump DOJ, The Guardian reports.
Must Read
A great piece by TPM’s Josh Kovensky: A unique feature of Texas’ electoral system that allows county political parties to run primaries gave the local GOP in Dallas a sandbox in which to build its ideal election. It was a disaster.
Trump DOJ Watch
Sweeping up a few developments that got pushed to the backburner because of the GOP redistricting-palooza in the South:
- FBI Director Kash Patel has ordered polygraphs of more than two dozen members of his team as part of his criminal leak investigation into who leaked details of his alleged on-the-job drinking and other proclivities to The Atlantic.
- Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche: “I wake up with a very clean conscience every morning. We are absolutely doing nothing but what we should be doing at the Department of Justice.”
- The Trump DOJ is attempting to sabotage E. Jean Carroll’s $83.3 million jury verdict against Donald Trump for defaming her by seeking to intervene and asking the Supreme Court to replace Trump as defendant with the United States. “That would require dismissal of the case because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation,” as Politico reports.
Quote of the Day
“As with every other aspect of the norms and best practices of the Department of Justice, Blanche, consumed by a desire to impress the president, has turned the standard to underpromise and overdeliver on its head.”—Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman
Jan. 6 Never Ends
A federal judge in Georgia denied Fulton County’s request for the FBI to return the 2020 ballots it seized as part of DOJ’s Big Lie “investigation” of Trump’s election loss.
In related news: Lawfare has obtained and published part of the investigative file in the since-abandoned RICO case brought by Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis over Trump’s interference in the state’s 2020 election.
Special Counsel to Investigate DOJ Lawyer
The federal judges in Rhode Island have appointed a special counsel to investigate whether a Trump DOJ lawyer should be disciplined for failing to disclose to one of the judges an outstanding arrest warrant on murder charges for an ICE detainee she ordered released. Despite telling the DOJ attorney not to disclose the warrant, the Trump DHS then attacked the judge as an “activist Biden judge” for the release.
Mass Deportation Watch
Some of the week’s most important developments:
- In the original Alien Enemies Act case, the ACLU is attempting to salvage U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s contempt of court inquiry into the Trump administration’s conduct by asking the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule a Trump-appointee-heavy three-judge panel that blocked Boasberg’s efforts.
- The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals became the second appeals court to reject the Trump administration policy of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond hearings. That makes two circuits opposed and two in favor of the administration’s radical new interpretation of a 30-year-old law. A fifth appeals court, the 7th Circuit, deadlocked on the issue earlier this week.
Trump Tariffs Blocked Again
The Court of International Trade overturned new tariffs that President Trump enacted to replace the tariffs previously blocked by the Supreme Court.
NEH Thumps DOGE
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon of Manhattan ruled Thursday that DOGE-driven cancellation of more than 1,400 previously approved grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities was unconstitutional.
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frist. which is surprising because for some reason even though it said I was signed in it asked me to sign in, didn’t like my password, had to wait for the email to sign in with an email link. WTF?
Here’s a good fix.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/ohio-republicans-ignoring-state-supreme-court-gerrymandering-redistricting-rulings-constitutional-amendment-federal-court
Welcome Friends to Dystopia, USA.
Good Morning!
All of this stuff has nothing to do with Obama getting elected 18 years ago.
So David beat me, but I’m still outa here.
A couple things that caught my attention this morning. I’m preparing them before I go on a ride so I’m sorry if someone else has already posted and commented.
You should go read the article, not because I said so but because it actually is symptomatic of both this DOJ and the SCOTUS.
The DOJ’s misleading behavior is a reminder to me of the dangers we face when prosecutors lie to achieve their ends. I know it’s not illegal to use misleading information, and in a criminal case I suspect you have to expect some misleading information from the defense. When the side supposedly arguing for justice decides that it’s OK to mislead it’s not unreasonable to question their entire case.
As for Alito, it’s not shocking that he believed the misleading information on a personal level. It is however telling that he relied on the misleading information as the basis of his justification for overturning not only the VRA, but to some extent Plessy v Ferguson. It does shatter this notion of judicial temperament however. He got some misleading information that confirmed his prejudices and ran with it. I think it’s fair to ask if he has ever made a decision that was not tainted by his own bigotry.
I’ve never read anything by this Avatans Kumar, but the first thing that struck me was his apparent outrage that his ox was gored. He’s complaining about “Woke” and “DEI” and doesn’t realize that a huge subtext of the revanchist movements opposing them is driven by an extreme proselytizing of that same flavor of Christian? It’s inherent, I’m not saying that all Christians are driven by that same impulse to bigotry, but many of the evangelical ones are. Those groups have muscled themselves into the drivers seat. As I was looking back at things I was writing to myself following Gingrich’s contract on America, I realized that one of the things you could see was an adoption of the proselytizing language of condemnation. I think you can argue that even without an actual overlap of people, their adoption of that language marked a quasi religious change in the GOP, and {Current Occupants} doubling down on the language makes it hard to distinguish him from a Mega Church pastor.