The Dictatorship
Elena Kagan knows why the Supreme Court majority wrongly supported Texas’ redistricting effort
It’s emblematic of the Supreme Court’s increasingly tenuous legitimacy and image of rank partisanship that no one was surprised last week when it blocked a district court order overturning Texas’ recently redrawn congressional maps.
The new maps were intended to benefit Republicans and potentially flip five House seats from Democratic to Republicans, so, of course, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruled in their favor. That the court’s conservative justices simply ignore the law and lower-court decisions when they hurt Republicans — and create new legal doctrines when it benefits the GOP — is no longer news.
In a clinical 16-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out in withering detail how her fellow justices ignored the law, past precedent and common sense.
Indeed, in a clinical 16-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out in withering detail how her fellow justices ignored the law, past precedent and common sense in giving Texas Republicans a political boost. The conservative majority isn’t even pretending it’s not putting its finger on the scale to help the GOP.
Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional maps this year in a brazen and cynical effort to flip five House seats to the GOP next year. A host of progressive groups quickly sued, claiming Texas had violated the 14th and 15th amendments in using used racial data in its gerrymandering process. A U.S. district judge appointed by President Donald Trump conducted an exhaustive nine-day hearing, heard testimony from 23 witnesses and pored over more than 3,000 pages of evidence. Then, he issued a 160-page decision that found overwhelming evidence that Texas had, indeed, created a racial gerrymander — and he blocked the maps.
Yet, Kagan wrote,“this Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.”
Considering how breezily they dismissed the district court judge’s ruling, it’s hard to imagine the conservative majority even bothered to read the opinion. If they did glance at it, they did so with minds already made up.
To step back a moment, in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that while distasteful, unjust and “incompatible with democratic principles,” excessive partisan gerrymandering was “beyond the reach of the federal courts” and thus legal. And in a concurring opinion in the Texas case, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that state Republicans were motivated by “partisan advantage pure and simple.”
But the evidence uncovered by the district court suggests this simply isn’t true.
The district court found repeated instances of Texas legislators admitting the new districts were drawn along racial lines.
The evidence that emerged in trial of the GOP’s racial intent was overwhelming. For example, in direct testimony, Texas’ mapmaker argued that he was motivated by the goal of delivering Texas Republicans more House seats but then acknowledged that he had racial “data available at the press of a key on his redistricting software.”
The new maps constructed three majority Black or majority-Hispanic districts, “by the smallest amount possible” in some cases, less than half a percentage point. Kagan’s dissent notes that an expert witness testified “she had generated tens of thousands of congressional maps” that benefit Republicans and don’t use racial data and “not one of them had racial demographics that looked anything like those in the 2025 Map.”
Moreover, the district court found repeated instances of Texas legislators admitting the new districts were drawn along racial lines. For example, the Republican who introduced the bill redrawing the maps said, “[W]e created four out of five new seats” to have a ‘Hispanic majority. I would say that’s great.’”
This wasn’t even a close call, and yet, in a few paragraphs, the Supreme Court breezily dismissed the district court’s findings of fact.
Amazingly, Alito went a step further and attacked the plaintiffs for using false “claims of racial gerrymandering for partisan ends.” By this logic, the blatant partisans are not the Texas Republicans who redrew the state’s maps to give themselves a clear political advantage, but rather those who argued, correctly according to the district court, that Texas’ maps were motivated by racial intent.
What is particularly galling about the decision, as Kagan notes, is that under the court’s precedents, it is required to give “significant deference” to a lower court’s findings of fact regarding a racial gerrymander. The 6-3 conservative majority simply ignored that standard.
Kagan chastises her colleagues for acting like “we know better” than the court that actually listened to the evidence.
Compounding the court’s terrible decision is the main rationale used by the majority. “The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the Supreme Court’s majority wrote.
Here the court is obliquely referring to the Purcell principle, which establishes that courts should avoid making decisions too close to an election as it might cause “voter confusion.”
Those of you reading that last paragraph might be confused. It’s December 2025. As Kagan dryly notes, “Texas is not on ‘the eve of an election.’”
If SCOTUS had upheld the district court’s decision, then Texas would use the same House maps from 2022 and 2024. One might even argue that alllowing Republicans to change that map creates far greater “voter confusion.”
The Supreme Court’s reasoning is ludicrous — and also incredibly dangerous. “If Purcell prevents” changing electoral law nearly a year before the election, said Kagan, then “it gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election.”
That means that Indiana and Florida, two Republican-run states that are currently considering redrawing their House maps, could create racial gerrymanders and, according to the Supreme Court, there is no legal discourse to stop them. What’s to prevent Florida from utilizing Jim Crow tactics, such as demanding voters pass a literacy test or adopting poll taxes? The court has, in effect, given Republican states carte blanche to disenfranchise minority voters and ignore the Voting Rights Act.
At the end of her dissent, Kagan chastises her colleagues for acting like “we know better” than the court that actually listened to the evidence and issued a decision. ”I cannot think of a reason why,” she said.
But Kagan is being far too kind. She knows exactly why — as do the rest of us. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is, in effect, an arm of the Republican Party, intent on helping the GOP, the law be damned. The law is no longer the law. The law is whatever is good for Republicans.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation.
President Donald Trump did something so brazen, so shameless, so stunning this week that it will stand out in history even in a presidential term drowning in self-dealing. This latest act deploys Trump’s favorite financial weapon — the bogus lawsuit — but in a way no one even contemplated before.
Trump is demanding $10 billion in taxpayer money, paid directly to him and his sons, because a few years ago, the public got a look at the tax returns he should have let us see in the first place.
What’s outrageous is that Trump will probably get it.
Trump is also seeking millions in “compensation” for the investigations into his misconduct in his first term.
This is not his first such lawsuit; Trump is also seeking millions in “compensation” for the investigations into his misconduct in his first term, about which he said that because he’s president, “I’m paying myself.” But this new suit is on a different scale.
This story begins in 2020, when a federal contractor working with the Internal Revenue Service leaked Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times. Among the revelations was that Trump paid only $750 in federal taxes in 2020.
Making someone’s tax returns public is against the law, and the contractor was eventually sentenced to five years in prison. Now Trump is suing the governmentclaiming his reputation was harmed to the tune of $10 billion because the public saw where he makes his money and how much he pays in taxes. You may recall that he was the first presidential nominee in modern times to keep his tax returns secret, even though there has never been a candidate whose tax returns would have been of greater interest to the public.
Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit is absurd on its face, but it’s not meant to win in a trial. Instead, the real goal here is a settlement. And who will decide whether to settle the lawsuit, and for how much? Why, Donald Trump!
Or, more precisely, decisions about the case will be made by Trump’s lackeys: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi. If they want to keep their jobs, then they’ll do whatever he asks.
This suit follows the template of the ones Trump has filed against multiple media organizations, which are little more than extortion schemes. Here’s how it works: Trump finds some offense he says a news outlet has committed against him — allegedly biased coverage, an inaccurate word spoken by a news anchor, a social media company temporarily blocking his account. Then, he claims he has been terribly wounded and demands a huge payout. Though the claims are laughable and stand little, if any, chance of prevailing in court, that doesn’t matter, because the message is clear: Pay me now, or I’ll use the power of the federal government to punish you. The targets of the lawsuit, fearing for what could happen to their businesses, pony up millions of dollars in a settlement.
It has worked remarkably well: He got multimillion-dollar payouts from CBS parent Paramount ($16 million), ABC ($15 million), Meta ($25 million), YouTube ($24.5 million) and Twitter/X ($10 million), with most of the money going to a future presidential library, which will likely be little more than a personal slush fund. In the past year, he has also filed nuisance suits against The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Des Moines Register and the BBC. Those are still pending.
Before becoming a politician, Trump spent a lifetime using the courts to intimidate his enemies and enhance his wealth. Today, he is treating lawsuits as a way for him and his friends to raid the federal coffers. Jan. 6 insurrectionists are suing to get huge payouts because they were prosecuted for their crimes and will no doubt find a sympathetic ear in this administration. The family of Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer that day, sued the government and was given a multimillion-dollar settlement by the Trump administration.
He is treating lawsuits as a way for him and his friends to raid the federal coffers.
Throughout the past year, Trump has looked for new ways to use his office for personal gain. Forget the small-time action of his first term, such as having people who wanted favors from the government book rooms in his hotels. Today, his ambitions are much grander. Journalists are struggling to document all his self-dealing schemes — not because he is concealing them, but because they are so numerous and gargantuan. The New York Times put the total amount of Trump’s and his family’s profiteering in his first year in office at $1.4 billion; using a slightly different method, The New Yorker pegged the figure at $3.4 billion.
Anyone wanting to put money in the president’s pocket has a plethora of options. Give Trump a planebuy his meme coinspend billions on his stablecoininvest in his media companybuy his merch — whatever your budget, from $19.99 to a few billion, you can show him you care.
But this lawsuit beats them all. He wants every American taxpayer to open up their own wallets and give him a payoff. Not because he needs it, not because he deserves it, but because he can. Because he controls the government and everyone in it, and he is bound by neither principles nor shame.
A few years ago, we could still have a debate about who the most corrupt president in American history is. Consider that debate closed.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has approved a massive new series of arms sales to Israel totaling $6.67 billion and to Saudi Arabia worth $9 billion.
The State Department announced the sales to America’s allies in the Middle East late Friday as tensions rise in the region over the possibility of U.S. military strikes on Iran. They were made public after the department notified Congress of its approval of the sales earlier Friday.
The sales also come as President Donald Trump pushes ahead with his ceasefire plan for Gaza that is intended to end the Israel-Hamas conflict and reconstruct the Palestinian territory after two years of war left it devastated, with tens of thousands dead.
While the ceasefire has largely held, big challenges await in its next phasesincluding the deployment of an international security force to supervise the deal and the difficult process of disarming Hamas.
The sale to Saudi Arabia
The Saudi sale is for 730 Patriot missiles and related equipment that “will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a Major non-NATO Ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf Region,” the department said.
“This enhanced capability will protect land forces of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and local allies and will significantly improve Saudi Arabia’s contribution” to the integrated air and missile defense system in the region, it said.
It was announced after Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman met with top Trump administration officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
A series of arms packages to Israel
The sales to Israel are split into four separate packages, including one for 30 Apache attack helicopters and related equipment and weapons, with another for 3,250 light tactical vehicles.
The Apache helicopters, which will be equipped with rocket launchers and advanced targeting gear, are the biggest part of the total package, coming to $3.8 billion, according to the State Department.
The next largest portion is the light tactical vehicles, which will be used to move personnel and logistics “to extend lines of communication” for the Israel Defense Forces and will cost $1.98 billion, it said.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accused the Trump administration of rushing to announce the deals for Israel in a way that would “disregard Congressional oversight and years of standing practice.”
He said in a statement that “the Trump Administration has blatantly ignored long-standing Congressional prerogatives while also refusing to engage Congress on critical questions about the next steps in Gaza and broader U.S.-Israel policy.”
Under the deals, Israel will spend an additional $740 million on power packs for armored personnel carriers it has had in service since 2008, the State Department said. The remaining $150 million will be spent on a small but unreported number of light utility helicopters to complement similar equipment it already has, it said.
In separate but nearly identical statements on Israel, the State Department said none of the new sales would affect the military balance in the region and that all of them would “enhance Israel’s capability to meet current and future threats by improving its ability to defend Israel’s borders, vital infrastructure, and population centers.”
“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability,” the statements said.
HAVANA (AP) — Massive power outages in Cuba meant that many people awoke Friday unaware that U.S. President Donald Trump had threatened to impose tariffs on any country that sells or supplies oil to the Caribbean island.
As word spread in Havana and beyond, anger and anguish boiled over about the decision that will only make life harder for Cubans already struggling with an increase in U.S. sanctions.
“This is a war,” said Lázaro Alfonso, an 89-year-old retired graphic designer.
He described Trump as the “sheriff of the world” and said he feels like he’s living in the Wild West, where anything goes.
After Trump made the announcement late Thursday, he described Cuba as a “failing nation” and said, “it looks like it’s something that’s just not going to be able to survive.”
Alfonso, who lived through the severe economic depression in the 1990s known as the “ Special Period ” following cuts in Soviet aid, said the current situation in Cuba is worse, given the severe blackouts, a lack of basic goods and a scarcity of fuel.
“The only thing that’s missing here in Cuba … is for bombs to start falling,” he said.
Cuba is hit every day with widespread outages blamed on fuel shortages and crumbling infrastructure that have deepened an economic crisis exacerbated by a fall in tourism, an increase in U.S. sanctions and a failed internal financial reform to unify the currency. Now Cubans worry new restrictions on oil shipments will only make things worse.
‘Cuba is a threat to Cubans’
On Friday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on X that Trump’s measure was “fascist, criminal and genocidal” and asserted that his administration “has hijacked the interests of the American people for purely personal gain.”
Meanwhile, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez wrote on X that Trump’s measure “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat” and said he was declaring an international emergency.
Venezuela’s government also condemned the measure in a statement Friday, saying it violates international law and the principles of global commerce.
Trump previously said he would halt oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s biggest ally, after the U.S. attacked the South American country and arrested its leader.
Meanwhile, there is speculation that Mexico would slash its shipments to Cuba.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday that she would seek alternatives to continue helping Cuba and prevent a humanitarian crisis after Trump’s announcement.
Sheinbaum said one option could be for the United States itself to manage the shipment of Mexican oil to the island, although it was necessary to first understand the details of Trump’s order.
Mexico became a key supplier of fuel to Cuba, along with Russia, after the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela paralyzed the delivery of crude oil to the island.
“It’s impossible to live like this,” said Yanius Cabrera Macías, 47, a Cuban street vendor who sells bread and sweet snacks.
He said he doesn’t believe Cuba is a threat to the United States.
“Cuba is a threat to Cubans, not to the United States. For us Cubans here, it is the government that is a threat to us,” he said, adding that Trump’s latest measure would hit hard. “In the end, it’s the people who suffer … not the governments.”
The backbone of Cuba’s economy
Jorge Piñon, an expert at the University of Texas Energy Institute who tracks shipments using satellite technology, said a key question remains unanswered: how many days’ worth of fuel does Cuba have?
If no tanker looms in the horizon within the next four to eight weeks, Piñón warned Cuba’s future would be grim.
“This is now a critical situation because the only country we had doubts about was Mexico,” he said, noting that diesel is “the backbone of the Cuban economy.”
Piñón noted that the Chinese don’t have oil, and that all they could do is give Cuba credit to buy oil from a third party. Meanwhile, he called Russia a “wild card: It has so many sanctions that one more doesn’t bother (Vladimir) Putin,” adding that because of those sanctions, a lot of Russian oil is looking for a destination.
Meanwhile, many Cubans continue to live largely in darkness.
Luis Alberto Mesa Acosta, a 56-year-old welder, said he is often unable to work because of the ongoing outages, which remind him of the “Special Period” that he endured.
“I don’t see the end of the tunnel anywhere,” he said, adding that Cubans need to come together and help each other.
Daily demand for power in Cuba averages some 3,000 megawatts, roughly half what is available during peak hours.
Dayanira Herrera, mother of a five-year-old boy, said she struggles to care for him because of the outages, noting they spend evenings on their stoop.
She couldn’t believe it when she heard on Wednesday morning what Trump had announced.
“The end of the world,” she said of the impact it would have on Cuba.
___
Mexico City is contributed to Havana and Maria Verza.
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