Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on Tuesday in a Republican runoff election for the Texas Senate seat.
The Associated Press called the race for Paxton around 9:00 p.m. ET, after Paxton secured 62.6 percent of the vote compared to Cornyn’s 37.4 percent.
Continue reading “Armed With Trump’s Last Minute Endorsement, Paxton Defeats Cornyn in Texas GOP Runoff Primary”South Carolina on Tuesday joined the outlier southern states that will not redraw their lines to snuff out Black voting power before the 2026 midterms.
Continue reading “In Defiance of Trump, South Carolina Senate Kills Pre-2026 Redistricting Push”Alabama immediately appealed a lower court decision blocking it from using a racially discriminatory map Tuesday, hoping that the Supreme Court will overturn that ruling and allow it to use a map with only one Black-majority district for the 2026 midterms.
Continue reading “If SCOTUS Invokes Purcell Principle to Let Alabama Use Discriminatory Map, It’ll Be the Most Egregious Abuse We’ve Seen Yet”The South Carolina state senate has just again killed the state’s redistricting bill. Given what’s already happened — definitely happening, definitely not happening, definitely re-happening with the help of the governor — I wouldn’t say anything should be treated as final. But it’s another major reverse. And it certainly seems like a sign these senators aren’t kidding, whatever Trump threatens.
As we discussed a few weeks ago, South Carolina is already VERY gerrymandered. Distribute Rep. Jim Clyburn’s voters to the rest of the delegation and you have a real chance in a wave year that you lose net seats. Not saying that would be guaranteed to happen. But I think it’s the real driver in the Senate.
I went to my college reunion this weekend. It was cold and rainy at a time of the year when it’s supposed to be warm and sunny or at least warm and rainy. So I didn’t stay as long as I’d planned. But in the short time I was there, I had a number of people come up to me and say that I’d brought them around on the idea of Court reform. This was about things I’ve written here in the Editors’ Blog but, interestingly and somewhat surprisingly to me, far more of the comments were about things I’ve said on the podcast. This was of course gratifying to hear personally. But I note it here because it was an example, out in the wild if you will, of the broader pattern: a sea change in ideas, goals and judgments of the Supreme Court and the necessity of reform. I saw it at this elite university reunion. I’m seeing more and more examples of it within the legal academy – at least the beginnings of it. And perhaps most importantly we’re seeing discussion about it from elected members of Congress.
Continue reading “Saving the Country Game, You Can Play at Home”This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
President Donald Trump’s second Cabinet was never exceptionally diverse from the start. And in the past three months, four women have been fired or resigned.
The first to go, on March 5, was ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Then, less than a month later, Trump ousted former Attorney General Pam Bondi. On April 20, embattled Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced her resignation. The latest to leave is Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s chief intelligence official, who announced on Friday that she planned to resign to care for her husband, Abraham, who has been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer.
Continue reading “In Three Months, Trump’s Cabinet Has Lost Four Women”The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is just a part of the broader rewriting of the history of Jan. 6, the pace of which seems to be accelerating ahead of the midterms.
Among the things that make the $1.776 billion reparation so toxic is that it builds off the Big Lie fantasy that the Jan. 6 defendants are victims to create a slush fund to perpetuate the Trump regime. It’s a bank shot that requires such epic gall that even GOP senators, who’ve shown themselves willing and able to swallow whatever Trump asks them to, are balking over it.
“One of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R) said in describing GOP senators’ meeting last week with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Fiery does not begin to cut it,” said Cruz, who noted that some senators were screaming at Blanche.
Since senators left town for the holiday without resolving the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” here’s what happened:
The American people are being compelled to fund—and by funding to implicitly endorse—a bounty for the people who stormed the Capitol, beat police officers, and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. All of us are, in effect, being conscripted into Trump’s campaign to rewrite the history of January 6th. The message the fund sends—that the rioters were victims, that their convictions were injustices, that the government owes them not accountability but a check—is sent in all of our names, with all of our money. We are being made, without our consent, co-signatories to the biggest lie of Trump’s presidency.
A federal judge in Nashville ruled Friday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump DOJ and dismissed the criminal case against him.
The ruling came after a day-long evidentiary hearing in February where the DOJ had a chance to prove the prosecution was legitimate. U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, Jr. was unmoved by the government’s presentation. “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” Crenshaw wrote in his ruling.
The Telegraph: “All but three of the 6,069 refugees taken in by the United States since October are White South Africans, according to state department statistics.”
“Callais is well on its way to becoming the Dred Scott of our time, a decision so reviled by civic society that it marks a before and after in our constitutional democracy. And like Dred Scott, which denied Black citizenship, and other anti-canons that live in infamy, the ruling will be remembered less for its full caption or precise legal holding than by the harm it caused Black and marginalized people, our body politic, and the idea of these United States.”—Cristian Farias
Don Moynihan with an indispensable list:
1. The leader is everywhere
2. The rule of law is secondary to the leader’s whims
3. The inner circle has free rein to pillage
4. The routine debasement of other public leaders
5. Presidential vibes, not facts, determine our new reality
6. Conspiratorial ravings become a loyalty test
7. Only loyalists need apply
Drawing on the new book on Argentina’s Dirty War by two German political scientists, “Making a Career in Dictatorship,” Amanda Taub writes: “It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.”
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
A panel of lower court judges issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking Alabama from using a 2023 map it had previously found to be unconstitutional.
Continue reading “Alabama Blocked from Using Map ‘Tainted By Intentional Race-Based Discrimination’”With the latest “peace deal” now perhaps receding into what we might call the eternal “two weeks,” I wanted to provide some mix of guidance or thoughts on what is going on. How do we go from a peace deal that is all but inked (despite only being a ceasefire and agreement to negotiate) to now where the deal is drifting off into the distance and Trump is adding new demands on Truth Social?
Let’s go back to the fundamentals.
Continue reading “Taking the L … and Trump’s Long Iran Walk Into the Twilight”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On Thursday, House Judiciary Committee Republicans held a hearing to discuss, as they put it in the hearing’s official title, “a threat to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.” The threat to which they referred, though, was not the Court’s myriad ethical scandals, or its efforts to gut both the Voting Rights Act and the Fifteenth Amendment, or its 200-plus-year track record of concentrating power in the hands of well-connected white guys named John.
Instead, the threat that had House Republicans all riled up is the idea of increasing the number of justices on the Court. On its website, the Judiciary Committee promised during the hearing to “examine the history and perils of court packing,” as well as “other policy proposals that threaten to undermine the integrity of the judicial branch.”
Continue reading “Republicans Sound Like They’re Getting Nervous About Supreme Court Expansion”
