What the Columbia Riot Decision Gets Wrong About Civil Rights
A federal judge makes a puzzling deviation from established law on who gets included in a protected class.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have eased the way for states to enact more partisan gerrymanders. Now legislatures are racing to redraw their congressional maps in rare mid-decade redistricting efforts that may reconfigure the calculus of who will win the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after the midterm elections this November.These endeavors were inspired by President Donald Trump, whose exhortations last year for Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps in favor of his party kicked off a frenzy of tit-for-tat redistricting from both GOP-controlled and Democratic-led states, with Republicans in particular benefiting under the aegis of the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Trump has successfully challenged some of the GOP state legislators that stood in the way of his redistricting plan, supporting primary opponents more likely to follow his bidding.Legal experts worry that the end result of this partisan gerrymander scramble will be a reduction in fair representation in the U.S. House, with Republican voters in blue states and Democrats in red states less likely to have their voices heard. Moreover, Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters could see their political power considerably diluted—if not wiped out entirely in the red states racing to delete majority-minority districts.“By 2028, I think we are likely to be looking at a radically and maximally gerrymandered national map, in which blue states elect almost entirely blue delegations, red states elect just about entirely red delegations,” worried David Daley, a senior fellow at the civic organization FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “It’s the kind of map we’ve seen before in this country. It’s just that back then, we called it the Union and the Confederacy.”Since Trump called on Texas to redraw its maps last year, several states have undertaken this process, resulting in new districts ahead of the midterms. These efforts could add up to a dozen or more new Republican House seats after the November elections. Although some Democratic states—notably California, the most populous state—have punched back, other efforts have been rebuffed. An attempt to redraw Virginia’s electoral map to add new Democratic seats in 2026 was struck down by the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, both Republican- and Democratic-majority states will take up redistricting ahead of the 2028 cycle. (In their gerrymandering efforts, some Democratic-led states have argued that this is a temporary measure intended to counter Republican mid-decade redistricting.)Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a government watchdog group that supports national redistricting reform, said allowing politicians to “choose their voters” would skew lawmakers’ incentives away from the constituents they purport to represent.“When politicians don’t believe that there is accountability, that allows for those politicians to advance either their personal interests or very narrow political interests—by the wealthy, the well-connected, corporations,” said Noureldin. As a result, he continued, Congress will become “less and less responsive to the needs of everyday Americans.”In April, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act, making it much more difficult to challenge partisan gerrymanders that dilute the power of minority voters. Piling onto the preexisting map-redrawing efforts in states such as Ohio, Texas, and Missouri, additional GOP-controlled Southern states moved this spring to redraw their congressional maps with the goal of reducing the number of Democratic districts. This will result in reduced representation for Black voters.In early June, the Supreme Court paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one of two majority-Black districts, in an unsigned shadow-docket decision. This proposed map had been struck down by a lower court, which included two Trump-appointed judges. To Kareem Crayton, a vice president for the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on democracy and voting rights, this decision demonstrates how the conservative majority on the court believes drawing maps to benefit Republicans is wholly divorced from how it might affect minority voters—who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.“This court seems way more attentive to the concerns of protecting power than they are to the Constitution’s attention to assuring that voters have their say,” said Crayton.The current race to gerrymander congressional districts is not unprecedented in the modern era. Republicans underwent a concerted effort ahead of the 2010 election to win state legislative majorities with the goal of controlling redistricting after that year’s census.
A federal judge makes a puzzling deviation from established law on who gets included in a protected class.
The Trump administration’s Department of War is expressing concern that Israel is spying on the U.S., including on its negotiations to end the Iran war, according to […]
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Iran fired at least 10 missiles at Israel on Sunday, hours after the Israeli Defense Forces launched its own attack on a Hezbollah command center in Beirut.
The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring network at the precise moment scientists say the world's oceans are behaving in alarming ways — and a Democratic congressman says the timing is not a coincidence.Rep. Mike Levin, a California Democrat and environmental attorney who represents San Diego's North County coast, posted a scathing response Saturday to CNN's reporting on the decision, arguing the move serves a hidden agenda."The same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals," Levin wrote. "So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident. That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first."The system being dismantled is the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 instruments positioned throughout the world's oceans that launched in 2016 with an expected 25-year lifespan. It provides continuous real-time data on ocean temperatures, carbon absorption, circulation patterns, and coastal flooding risks. The Trump administration's fiscal 2026 budget cut its funding by 80 percent, and removal of the anchored instruments began this month from sites off Oregon, North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea near Greenland.Scientists say the timing could not be worse. Ocean temperatures are breaking records. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the system of currents that regulates climate across the Northern Hemisphere — is showing signs of potential collapse, a scenario researchers warn could bring severe winters to Europe and accelerating sea level rise on the U.S. East Coast.The administration described the decision as a "nimbler approach" and "smart lifecycle management." Levin was unimpressed. "That is fancy nonsense for 'we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why,'" he wrote. "There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives."His bottom line: "That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency."
As pressure intensifies, universities have restructured, fired faculty, cancelled classes and limited discussion topics.
Platner, who is married and faces a primary-election race Tuesday, was accused last week of allegations of deeply disturbing behavior toward female partners and him harboring fantasies about raping home intruders.
Former U.S. Army Major and Intelligence Officer Harrison Mann issued a grave warning Saturday over a “ticking time bomb” he argued President Donald Trump was ignoring, one that if not addressed would undoubtedly lead to an “unmistakable recession” – or worse.“At this point, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that Trump’s lack of urgency to sign a deal with Tehran is in part because he’s been very slow to understand the actual situation on the ground,” Mann wrote in an analysis published Saturday in Zeteo.“Trump’s trusted advisers – both in the Situation Room and on Fox News – rarely if ever deliver bad news about the war, whether out of ideological desire to see the president 'finish the job,’ or because they’re afraid he’ll shoot the messenger.”The United States and Iran remain in a fragile ceasefire, and despite countless reports of a deal to end the conflict between Washington and Tehran being near, no such deal has materialized.Trump's failure to close a deal with Tehran, Mann argued, stemmed not only from a steady diet of briefings that 'minimize bad news' about the conflict, but from a personal failing of the president himself – one who Mann said would “rather forget” the potentially catastrophic consequences of a prolonged Middle East war.“The problem is that Trump apparently views today’s pseudo-ceasefire double-blockade impasse as a satisfactory solution to a problem he’d rather forget, instead of a ticking time bomb,” Mann wrote. “Unfortunately, it may take a new crisis within this crisis – an unmistakable recession or more U.S. troops killed in the Gulf – to change his mind.”