Bluesky

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Republicans are aggressively moving to gerrymander away the Congressional Black Caucus and eliminate Black voting power in red states. In my most recent piece, I wrote that it is largely too late for the Democratic Party to stop this race toward the racist bottom ahead of the 2026 midterms. But, assuming Trump doesn’t get us into a global nuclear war while he’s in China, life will go on, and future elections will happen.

Democracy Docket has put forth a plan for how states controlled by Democrats might re-gerrymander their maps ahead of the 2028 election to offset the Republican gains this cycle. This plan offers a way for Democrats to pick up 17 to 27 seats in 2028 while Republicans gain only four to five. The operating theory is that Republicans are currently in the process of getting all the juice they can out of the states they control, while Democrats have barely begun to squeeze. Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Virginia, Wisconsin are all states where Democrats can make up significant ground—should voters in those states choose to abandon independent redistricting commissions, amend their state Constitutions, and fight fire with fire.

The plan is doable, and necessary. But I don’t want people to miss what is still being lost even if Democrats can pull off these gerrymanders. The loss of Black representation in the South cannot be offset with a few more liberal white representatives from Wisconsin. The inability of Black people in Memphis to elect a fighter like Justin Pearson is not mitigated by spitting out another corporate Democrat from Hoboken.

The great Black Congressman William Lacy Clay once said, “Black people have no permanent friends, and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” Those interests cannot be adequately served solely by white Democrats gerrymandered into suburban districts in the North. Some of those interests cannot even be adequately served by Black Democrats elected from majority-white districts.

Let me put it like this: I live in a suburb of New York City. Could you gerrymander my district in such a way that a guy like me could be elected? Probably. I mean, not me specifically—I’ve written far too much about [gestures broadly] America to be elected to public office. But somebody with my pedigree and profile, sure. But if you can’t spot the difference between me and, say, Cori Bush or Justin Pearson or Jamaal Bowman (who did represent my district until it was gerrymandered away from him), then you’re not really in tune with the Black community.

As I’ve said many times, the point of the Supreme Court’s decision was not only to help the Republican Party win elections. Helping Republicans win elections was the side benefit. The point of the ruling was to crush the political power of Black people in America. You can’t restore that power by creating new districts where very few Black people live.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Trump is set to make his first set of federal district court appointments in states where Senate Democrats could use what is known as the “blue slip” process to try to block them. Blue slips allow senators to stall judges appointed by the president to their states. The Republicans got rid of this tradition for circuit court appointments but have kept it in place for district courts. One would think Democrats would be chomping at the bit to stop any of Trump’s judicial nominees, but Michigan Senators Gary Peters and Elisa Slotkin, and Senator John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, have been “tight-lipped” about whether they will use their power to block Trump’s picks. In related news, I support the dumbest political party on the entire planet.
• The Federal Reserve produced its annual “financial well-being” survey and concluded that Black people are doing worse in Trump’s economy than any other racial or ethnic group. Everyone is doing poorly, but Black folks are being hit the hardest. Of course, “Black people doing worse” is precisely why white people voted for Trump.
• Last month, the Office of Legal Counsel summarily declared that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. Donald Trump, you know, doesn’t want the public to ever know what he’s actually doing. The thing is, it’s not the OLC’s call about whether an entire federal law is unconstitutional, and it’s looking like a judge will block the DOJ’s attempt to get rid of it. However, that’s just the start of the process. I’d say the DOJ will also lose in front of the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court upheld the Presidential Records Act when Richard Nixon challenged it. Then again, if this Supreme Court had been around when Nixon was president, it would have helped him cover up Watergate.
• Republicans in Congress seem poised to give Trump $1 billion of taxpayer money for his ballroom. They’ll just say it’s for “enhanced security” and trust that everybody else is stupid.
• A class of children is suing Roblox for violating child labor laws. Please add this data to my ongoing campaign to get people to stop letting their children use Roblox. Letting your kids spend 20 hours a week playing the most violent video game you can think of is arguably better than subjecting them to the predation of Roblox.

Inspired Takes

• Former NBA player Jason Collins died of cancer this week. Collins made news 13 years ago by becoming the first openly gay professional athlete in one of the four major American team sports. Like The Nation’s Dave Zirin, at the time, I thought Collins would usher in a new era of tolerance and acceptance, and I have been bitterly disappointed. But Collins should go down as one of the bravest athletes in modern sports.
• I’m not really ready to dig into what is going on with the Hantavirus. I still have so much PTSD from Covid. But if you can handle it, The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard has you covered on this emerging pestilence.
• Slate’s Susan Matthews “went deep” on Neil Gorsuch, the justice you should hate more than you do. There’s also a Slow Burn about his terrible career. 

Worst Argument of the Week

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to send yet another anti-trans case to the Supreme Court to further menace trans kids. The case, which the court heard on Tuesday, is called Wailes v. Jefferson County Public Schools and involves a religious family suing a school district in Colorado. (Why is it always Colorado?)

When kids at Jefferson Public Schools go on overnight field trips, they are assigned to accommodations based on their gender identity, not their sex at birth.

For reasons entirely passing understanding, this arrangement pissed off some parents. Three sets of families sued the school, and since I cannot explain their reasons without risking losing my entire freaking mind, I’ll let Courthouse News Service summarize their complaints:

Three sets of parents sued in September 2024 after the 11-year-old daughter of Joe and Serena Wailes was assigned to room with a transgender student from another school on a class trip to Washington, D.C. Around the same time, Bret and Susanne Roller learned a camp counselor for their son’s sixth grade camping trip, assigned to the boys’ bunks and showers, was non-binary but assigned female at birth. Rob and Jade Perlman say their daughter might play on her varsity basketball team, and they’re worried that she might room with a transgender student if the team travels for tournaments.

The behavior of all of these parents is unconscionable to me, but the Perlmans take the cake. They’re worried their daughter might play basketball, and that she might room with a transgender girl if the team travels. They joined an entire federal lawsuit just in case!

This case should be thrown out of court, but it won’t be thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Mamhoud v. Taylor, the most important anti-trans decision from the Supreme Court until whatever they rule this June in Little v. Hecox. (Little seeks to ban young transgender athletes from playing sports.) In Mamhoud, the court ruled that parents can prevent schools from reading books about trans kids to students.

The parents in Wailes argue that if parents can use their bigotry to stop a school from reading stories, they can certainly use the same bigotry to change how a school houses students on overnight trips.

The war against trans kids is disgusting, but it’s also very petty. These bigoted parents are effectively complaining about who gets a bunk bed—and they’ll win, because heaven forbid this country lets a trans teenager fall asleep without feeling hunted and bullied by all of American society.

And I’ll bet all the money in my pocket that these parents have no problem letting their kids play Roblox.

What I Wrote

As I indicated earlier, I wrote about the lawsuit the Virginia Democratic Party filed with the Supreme Court to try to win back its gerrymandered maps. Few people will be surprised to read that Virginia will probably lose this case. What might surprise them is that winning this particular lawsuit would quickly make things much worse for all of us.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I spent most of an evening this week in an animal emergency room because my dog ate some grapes. Well, we thought she ate some grapes. One of my kids left their half-eaten dinner on a low counter (the fault was really mine; I interrupted the kid’s dinner to talk to him about the feedback we received from his parent-teacher conference), and when he came back, the plate was empty. He couldn’t remember if he had finished his grapes or not. Grapes are toxic to dogs—they screw up their kidney function—so off we went to the emergency room. (Shout out to my kid for doing the right thing and telling us instead of pretending that nothing was wrong.)

The excellent veterinarians did some tests and induced doggy vomiting… where we found the remnants of my kid’s cheeseburger, but no grapes. I actually felt really sorry for my dog: Imagine hunting an entire cheeseburger and then being forced to give it back. I feel like we violated her natural rights. But, other than this cosmic insult, everything appeared to be fine for my dog and my family.Then, the bill came—and things were not fine, because it cost $569 to make my dog puke up her ill-gotten cheeseburger.

I had the money (well, my wife had the money—or, her credit card had the money), and I was of course thankful for the services provided. But for whatever reason, the bill really hit me hard. What do people do when they don’t have a spare $569 lying around for emergency grape problems? Does the dog just die? What will I do the next time a plate of unknown foodstuffs goes missing? Will I rush back to the emergency room, or will I Google “what are the first signs of kidney failure in dogs” and just ride it out?

I can’t really complain about pet healthcare, because we live in a country where people have to make these terrible decisions every day about human healthcare. But in a country where 87 million households own pets, and 97 percent of pet owners are like me and consider the pet a part of their “family,” it feels like we should do something to control the costs of pet health care—after we address our embarrassing inability to provide cost-effective human healthcare to be sure. But maybe right after?

Anyway, in the morning, we found approximately $569 worth of grapes, untouched, under the coffee table. The dog looked at me when I found them and I felt like I could hear her saying, “You see, you dumb simian. I don’t even like stupid grapes.”

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