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One Republican governor isn’t going along with President Trump’s attempt to redraw congressional maps around the country.Georgia’s Brian Kemp said Friday that he isn’t going to cancel the state’s May 19 primary elections in order to draw new maps in time for November, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais Wednesday, which severely weakened the Voting Rights Act.Kemp still praised the decision, telling The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the ruling “restores fairness to our redistricting process and allows states to pass electoral maps that reflect the will of the voters, not the will of federal judges.” But it’s too late for the midterms, he added.“Voting is already underway for the 2026 elections,” Kemp said. “But it’s clear that Callais requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle.”Several Republican-run states, particularly in the South are scrambling to make changes to their congressional maps due to the high-court ruling, including Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry even announced that he was suspending his state’s May 16 primary elections in order to redraw the state’s congressional map.Still, Trump is not likely to be happy that one Republican governor won’t follow along with his efforts, especially in Georgia, where the president still claims that Joe Biden winning the state in 2020 was rigged due to fraud. Kemp was in his first term as governor at the time, and Trump held him responsible for not overturning the results. Kemp might see an angry Truth Social post directed at him pretty soon.

If Chief Justice John Roberts has uttered two quotable sentences in his career that will likely appear high up in his New York Times obituary, they are these. The first comes from his 2005 confirmation hearing: “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” The line was meant to convey to senators and America that he would be a neutral arbiter of constitutional interpretation, sans ideological agenda. It was later picked up by the entire conservative legal movement and repeated by numerous other right-wing judicial nominees at their confirmation hearings.It was a lie. He was there, as we have subsequently learned many times, to bat. And not to spray dinky little singles—to swing for the fences. You may recall Jeffrey Toobin’s stunning 2012 article in The New Yorker detailing how painstakingly the chief justice orchestrated the 2010 Citizens United decision to make sure that it went as far as possible in removing limits on the financing of campaigns. The John Roberts of that article was no umpire. He was Mark McGwire juiced up on steroids, trying to smash the ball out onto Clark Avenue. The subsequent 16 years have shown us the consequences of that decision, which will go down in U.S. history as one of the most corrosive and reactionary holdings of all time—if not right up there with Plessy and Lochner, then awfully close. It has handed our democracy on a silver platter to men who have nothing but contempt for it (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.).The other quote is one that I suspect many people will remember, although they may forget the context: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ring a bell? He said it early in his tenure, when the Roberts court handed down one of its first major decisions, concerning public school integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville. The court had already restricted forced integration efforts in a 1991 ruling. Then, in 2007, in two joined cases emanating from the above-named cities, the court went further: It ruled that even voluntary desegregation efforts were out the window. Roberts uttered his famous line while reading his 5–4 majority opinion from the bench. I remember well the predictions in the decision’s wake. Liberals warned that the public schools would likely resegregate. Conservatives said, Oh pshaw, you delicate little flowers; we’re such a different country from 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Things will be just fine. Well, guess what happened? In the 19 years since that ruling, the public schools have resegregated. Not to a mild degree. Not to a “concerning” degree. They have resegregated to a shocking degree.In 2024, Axios published an article based on two recent academic studies and its own review of official data from 1988 to 2022. In the former year, about 7.4 percent of the nation’s schools were “intensely segregated,” meaning at least 90 percent white. By the latter year, that figure had vaulted to 19.8 percent. In addition, Axios’s Russell Contreras wrote at the time, “several states saw about a 20-percentage point or more increase in intensely segregated schools, from 1988 to 2021.”Mind you, this happened while the racial demography of the United States went from 67 percent white to 58 percent white. In other words, you might have thought that in an increasingly diverse country, the schools would also become increasingly diverse. Instead, the opposite happened.Now, fast-forward to this week’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6–3 majority, assures us that there’s nothing to worry about in the evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We’re a different country. We don’t need it anymore. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote. The country has changed for the better in a number of ways, no doubt about that. But has it changed enough that laws to protect minority representation aren’t needed? We’re about to find out.Consider the following statistics. Mississippi today has a Black population of 38 percent. One of its four congressional districts is majority-minority, for a representation rate of 25 percent. Black Mississippians are ergo underrepresented in Congress. In South Carolina, Blacks make up 25 percent of the population, and one of seven congressional districts was cut for Black representation. That’s 14 percent. So Blacks are underrepresented in that state, as well. And in Tennessee, Blacks are 17 percent of the population but hold zero seats in Congress (0 percent, obviously).In some other states of the old Confederacy, Black representation is more on par. In Alabama, Blacks are 27 percent of the population and hold two of the state’s seven congressional seats (28 percent). In Louisiana, those population-representation figures are 33 percent and 33 percent (two out of six seats). In North Carolina, they are 21 percent and 21 percent (three out of 14 seats).Hooray for those three states, I guess. But the question is this: What will those numbers be come 2029, or 2031? It’s hardly going out on a limb to guess that Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina will reduce or even possibly eliminate their majority-minority seats. They probably can’t quite get away with that right now in North Carolina, where there’s a Democratic governor. But Alabama and Louisiana, where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and dominates both legislatures? Louisiana is already licking its chops: After this week’s SCOTUS ruling, its governor announced he was suspending the House primaries on May 16 so the legislature can redraw districts more favorable to the Republicans. It’s hard to believe they’d really have the gall to cut them down to zero. Then again, a lot of things have been happening lately in this country that once seemed hard to believe. Speaking of which, I find it kind of hard to believe that Roberts, Alito, and other conservative justices this week did not think back to the aftermath of their fateful 2007 decision on school integration. Can they possibly be unaware that schools aggressively resegregated in the wake of that ruling? That seems impossible. And if I’m right, that leaves only one explanation for this week’s decision. They understand the potential consequences quite fully. They just don’t care. Mark McGwire has hit another one, and the bleak outcome, similar to the one liberals predicted in 2007, awaits us.This article previously misstated the percentage of North Carolina congresspeople who are Black, the number its congressional seats, and which party controls the state Senate.This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

'Vanished: Puzzle Quest' takes players on a journey through the Muslim Middle Ages to preserve science, knowledge, and history. Its creators explain how gaming can be a tool to combat bigotry.

The president’s elder sons are making money hand over fist off of their father’s office.At least two companies tied to Don Jr. and Eric Trump have won large government contracts, setting the stage for the Trump family to make a sizable chunk of change from their involvement in the federal government.Powerus, a drone manufacturer led by former U.S. Army Special Operations veterans, was founded last year. Trump’s two sons became tied to the company’s board after it merged with a golf club in March, a decision that took the company public via a reverse merger. The brothers’ investment firm, American Venture, has backed the combined entity, and their boutique investment bank, Dominari Securities, was also involved in the transaction.This past week, the U.S. Air Force agreed to buy an undisclosed number of drones from Powerus as America’s war with Iran hits the 60-day mark. The company’s co-founder, Brett Velicovich, claimed the decision had nothing to do with its investors’ obvious ties to the White House.“They’re not going to pick a system because of who’s on an investor list,” Velicovich told Bloomberg. “They’re picking because they need it now.”There are at least 187 drone manufacturers based in the United States, according to a November report from Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.But that isn’t the Trump family’s only financial coup this week: A shell company backed by Don Jr. and Eric agreed to merge with a major tungsten mine in Kazakhstan that just last year secured $1.6 billion in U.S. government support.The two brothers bought into a construction company, Skyline Builders, last August, through a special-purpose vehicle arranged by Dominari Securities, sources told the Financial Times. Weeks later, in September, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told Donald Trump that he intended to award a major tungsten project to U.S. investment group Cove Kaz Capital, an entity backed by the U.S. government, to compete against Chinese and Russian mining companies. That story emerged in the press on October 21.By October 28, Eric and Don Jr. had added almost $24 million to their Skyline investment. On October 31, Skyline paid $20 million for a 20 percent stake in Kaz Resources, a subsidiary of Cove Capital, an investment company that controls Cove Caz.Cove Capital’s deal with the National Mining Company of Kazakhstan became public on November 6, with an announcement that they would jointly develop “the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.”Cove Kaz Capital and Kaz Resources agreed to merge with the brothers’ investment firm, Skyline, on Thursday, reported the Financial Times, which noted that there was no mention of either Trump brother in the merger announcement.A representative for Don Jr. denied that he had any knowledge of his father’s dealings prior to the initial investment or the merger.“Don is a passive investor in American Ventures and has no operational involvement in the company,” his spokesperson told the Financial Times. “He does not interface with the federal government on behalf of any company he invests in or advises.”

The Stock Market Gets Daily Coverage. The People Who Actually Build the Economy Get Almost None. May 1st is the international Labor Day. It’s an appropriate time to ask, where are the sections on labor news in leading news outlets? Don’t bother looking. They’re not there. They all have a business section, often with some [...] The post Where Is the Labor News? Why Major Outlets Bury Workers’ Stories appeared first on DCReport.org.

“CPCs are trying to avoid any state oversight or regulation, and that’s a huge problem, especially because we know that some of them provide substandard care and mislead patients,” Amy Myrick, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, explains to Jezebel.

We're talking an 8.2 million bottle recall of Thermos products sold over the course of 16 years. That is one hell of a lot of product.

China’s scrapping of import tariffs from 53 African countries burnishes its reputation as a trusted trade ally in stark contrast to Washington.