The GOP racially gerrymanders? No!
Feting a Saudi butcher, suggesting Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi had earned dismemberment, and calling a female reporter “piggy” are not the only items on Donald Trump’s lowlights reel from the last week.
His effort to shake up the 2026 congressional elections by asking (and getting) state-level allies to redraw district maps to favor Republicans mid-decade just came up TILT on Tuesday (Politico):
A panel of federal judges ruled against Texas’ redrawn congressional maps that offered Republicans a five-seat pickup opportunity, saying they likely created an illegal, race-based gerrymander. The ruling came as Indiana Republicans punted the White House’s redistricting push there to January’s regular session, amid local opposition.
Together, they represent roadblocks for the White House’s push to shore up a House majority through mid-decade redraws. Republicans began their rush to redraw the maps with the upper hand, but state-level backlash, Democrats’ big Election Day win for California’s redistricting measure and this court ruling have cut into that advantage, with just under a year until voters head to the polls in next year’s midterms.
Not to mention Trump’s epic Tuesday losses in the House (427-1) and Senate (unanimous consent; GOP senators did not want a recorded vote) on release of the Epstein files:
The bill forces the release within 30 days of all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison. It would allow the Justice Department to redact information about Epstein’s victims or continuing federal investigations, but not information due to “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”
The bill now lands on the Oval Office desk.
Trump does not dare veto the measure. Not with those vote margins and with 80 percent public approval of full disclosure. That doesn’t mean he, AG Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel won’t be casting about for “the dog ate my homework” excuses for drawing out the Epstein coverup. Don’t expect to see full disclosure anytime soon.
Team Trump Plans to Keep Ratf*cking the Epstein Files
Getting back to the 160-page Texas ruling authored by Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a conservative Donald Trump nominee, Mark Joseph Stern explains (Slate):
Remarkably, Brown found that it was Trump’s own Department of Justice that had injected race into the plot as part of its “hamfisted” effort to cook up a pretext for new maps. And he laid out a gobsmacking amount of smoking-gun evidence that all points in the direction of unlawful racism. The Texas Legislature, Brown noted, could simply have drawn a straightforward partisan gerrymander that benefited Republicans without regard to race. Instead, it colluded with the DOJ to reengineer congressional districts by skin color—the one thing that even this Supreme Court does not allow.
But it was a letter sent July 7 by Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, that set the stage for Brown’s ruling. She claimed that existing Texas districts were unconstitutionally racist and risked federal action if not redrawn.
Brown, explains Stern:
… largely blames Dhillon and her deputies at the DOJ for bungling the whole gambit. Partisan gerrymandering, he noted, is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. And “to be sure, politics played a role” in the creation of this map. But Texas Republicans repeatedly disclaimed that they were, first and foremost, attempting to comply with Dhillon’s demands. And her primary demand was that they re-sort voters along racial lines.
Why? That is the baffling question that Brown spent much of his opinion trying to resolve. Here is what appears to have happened: Texas Republicans wanted a pretext they could use as a fig leaf to pretend that their gerrymander was not purely partisan. Dhillon was well positioned to concoct one, since she could threaten to sue the state if it didn’t follow through on Trump’s demands. Her solution was to seize upon a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, Petteway v. Galveston County, which held that the Voting Rights Act does not require states to draw multiracial “coalition” districts. (In other words, Texas does not have to combine two minority groups to create one majority-minority district.) Petteway merely relieved states of the obligation to draw coalition districts. In her letter, though, Dhillon twisted the ruling into a prohibition against these districts. Because Texas currently has a number of them, she wrote, the state’s congressional map was unconstitutional and had to be retooled.
But Dhillon’s letter was so full of factual, legal, and typographical errors that, following its illogic, Stern summarizes, “Republicans targeted Texas’ nonwhite voters with almost surgical precision. [North Carolina knows something about surgical precision.] They left majority-white districts largely intact, even those that leaned Democratic. But they obliterated majority-minority “coalition” districts through the classic technique of a brazen racial gerrymander.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he would appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court and seek a stay. Voting Rights Act adversaries on the Roberts court may sympathize with Trump’s effort. But, Stern suggests, “Tuesday’s decision is not rooted in the VRA; it is, rather, based on the simple principle that the Constitution does not permit invidious racial discrimination in congressional elections.”
The question now is whether SCOTUS is prepared to stand by that principle despite Texas having broken the law to steal an additional 5 congressional seats.
“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement on X Tuesday. “This ruling is a win for Texas and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”
Meanwhile, at the White House:
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