The NAACP has sued Texas over its new map. NAACP president Derrick Johnson said, “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”

According to the Republicans running the Supreme Court, states are allowed to gerrymander if their goal is merely to give Republicans a political advantage in the next election. They’re not allowed to gerrymander if they’re trying to give white folks a racial advantage.

The problem with the Supreme Court’s standard is, and always has been, that states are usually trying to do both. Because the Republican party has gone all in on white supremacy, its political and racial motivations for gerrymandering are intertwined. Black people are likely to vote for the Democratic Party, not because being Black makes you more liberal and open-minded but because the Republican Party remains steadfastly committed to racial oppression, and most Black people can figure that out. Gerrymandering away the political influence of Black folks is the same as helping Republicans win elections, because Republicans have decided to win elections by appealing to the worst instincts of white folks.

The Supreme Court will almost certainly rule that the Texas maps are constitutional because Texas was trying to help Republicans, not harm Black people. It will then count on other white folks to be too stupid or cowardly to notice that these are the same thing.

• Donald Trump is attempting to fire Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook from her position. Cook has responded by suing the Trump administration. In a ruling earlier this year greenlighting Trump’s wholesale firing of government officials, John Roberts tried to carve out an exception for the Federal Reserve. The exception made no logical or legal sense, but Roberts is used to people jumping through hoops to uphold his gobbledygook. Not Trump; he isn’t willing to play the game. Firing Cook will trigger a direct confrontation between him and Roberts, and my guess is that Roberts will cower like the little punk he is.
• The Trump administration is attempting to fire the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, after she refused to rubber-stamp “reckless directives,” per her lawyer. Those directives were her attempt to protect the American public from the recklessness of the Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but whatever. John Roberts has not twisted himself into a pretzel trying to protect the CDC the way he has the Fed. He probably knows he can still go to Cuba to get good healthcare but needs the Fed to keep his portfolio afloat.
• Donald Trump is attempting to fire Robert Primus, a member of the Surface Transportation Board. Primus said he is “considering all legal options” to fight his termination. I couldn’t figure out what this guy at this agency could have possibly done to earn Trump’s unconstitutional ire, but then I read that Union Pacific announced an $85 billion purchase of Norfolk Southern, to create “America’s first transcontinental railroad.” That purchase is under review by the (wait for it)… the Surface Transportation Board. Primus was a dissenting vote in a 2023 railroad merger, and he’s Black, so that’s probably enough for Trump to want him gone. And I bet he’ll stay gone. Surely, at least one rich Republican donor who bankrolls the Republicans on the Supreme Court stands to profit if the merger goes through.
• Trump, a wealthy convicted felon, has a new plan to punish states that offer cashless bail. It’s unconstitutional, of course, but when has that stopped him before?
• The Fifth Circuit did something right for a change: It lifted an unconstitutional ban imposed by West Texas A&M University on drag shows. The problem is that it took the judges two years to do it. By refusing to decide a relatively easy First Amendment case in a timely manner, the court still did irreparable harm.

• I honestly want only bad things to happen to former national security adviser and James Bond villain John Bolton. But in The Nation, Jeet Here brought me around to the fact that Trump’s raid and persecution of the man is wrong and must be called out. So, there, I’ve called it out. Now leave me alone.
• I really don’t know how many of you read The Nation’s architecture correspondent, Kate Wagner, but you should, because she’s brilliant—and I say that as a person who cannot tell the difference between a doric column and an ionic one and would punch you in the face if you asked me to. Wagner’s latest piece is on why the White House will not be getting Trump’s 90,000-foot extension.
• My former colleague Kashmir Hill has a great and important piece on how the NYPD’s facial recognition technology once again landed the wrong Black man in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Cops do not use this technology responsibly. And innocent Black people disproportionately pay the price.

The Trump administration has offered Ábrego García a deal: plead guilty to (fake) charges and “self-deport” to El Salvador, or face the government’s threats to deport him to Uganda, a nation that he’s not from but which appears to be willing to torture immigrants Trump does not like.

This deal, and the administration’s entire persecution of Ábrego García, should be unconstitutional on at least two levels. First of all, Trump is violating Ábrego García’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. A person cannot be compelled to bear witness against themselves, and they certainly can’t be compelled to bear false witness against themselves under the threat of pain and suffering. The Trump administration’s deal is no different from telling a woman, “Admit that you’re a witch or we’ll drown you in the lake.”

The administration is also violating Ábrego García’s Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment. Deporting people to countries they aren’t from is unusual (at least it was before Trump) and deporting them to countries they aren’t from where they are likely to be tortured is “cruel” by any legal or colloquial definition of the word.

Trump and his legal goons should be barred from these tactics by the Bill of Rights even before we get to all of the protections embedded in immigration and international human rights law as well as the prohibition against malicious prosecutions.

Of course, none of these arguments are likely to stop Trump, or his MAGA sycophants who are titillated by his attempts to ethnically cleanse the country.

• Trump issued an executive order against flag burning, and I explained why it is unconstitutional, fascist, and patently stupid, but how the Supreme Court will probably let him do it anyway.
• With Texas moving ahead on its plans to gerrymander Democrats and Black people out of political power, I wrote about why New York can’t do the same—and how the Democrats need to learn to stop hamstringing themselves with rules Republicans refuse to follow.

Emergency inductions are no joke, so the lawyer filed a request with opposing counsel to move the deadline, which is a standard request that lawyers agree to out of professional courtesy all the time. But not this time. This time, the lawyer on the other side said that he would agree to the delay only if the defendant agreed to wrap the whole case up in one “omnibus” hearing that the defendant had previously objected to. The lawyer basically tried to use the defendant lawyer’s pregnant wife’s emergency delivery as leverage to get the kind of legal outcome he wanted.

The defending lawyer said no and filed an ethics complaint. My friends at Above the Law have the full story.

If you ever wonder where Trump is able to get so many lawyers who are willing to do his gross and unconstitutional work, remember this guy. Remember that Trump will always be able to find some lawyer willing to hold someone’s pregnant wife hostage. As I said, lawyers are assholes. We self-register as such when we graduate from law school.

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