Virginia Democrats ask Republican-dominated US supreme court to restore congressional map designed to boost Democrats
Virginia Democrats filed an emergency application to the US supreme court on Monday, asking the Republican-dominated body to set aside a state court decision and permit Virginia to use a new map of congressional districts for this years’s midterms that was approved by voters in a referendum last month.
The map was thrown out by Virginia’s supreme court last week.
Virginia’s supreme court ruled that the state cannot use new congressional maps approved by voters to help Democrats gain as many as four new seats in the US House of Representatives, handing Republicans a major win ahead of November’s midterm elections.
In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the state’s general assembly did not follow the appropriate constitutional procedure in approving the map, which voters then passed in a referendum last month.
“This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” the court wrote.
The ruling was a setback for Democrats’ efforts nationwide to counter gerrymanders approved by Republican-led states that may oust Democratic House representatives and boost the odds Donald Trump’s allies retain their majority in Congress’s lower chamber in the November midterm elections.
The Virginia Democrats, led by Don Scott, the Democratic speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, told the justices in a filing that the state court’s ruling has “deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts”.
The lawmakers cited a 2023 supreme court ruling that warned that state courts “may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”
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By a 6-3 vote along partisan lines, the Republican-dominated US supreme court granted Alabama’s request to vacate a federal court order barring the state from using a Congressional map drawn to eliminate a majority-Black district.
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Donald Trump once again nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) just over a year after Hamilton was fired for publicly opposing plans to abolish the agency.
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Virginia Democrats filed an emergency application to the US supreme court on Monday, asking the Republican-dominated body to set aside a state court decision and permit Virginia to use a new map of congressional districts for this years’s midterms that was approved by voters in a referendum last month.
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The US supreme court extended a short-term order to continue allowing nationwide access to mail-order mifepristone, an abortion medication, in a shadow-docket decision on Monday.
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Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, vowed that Democrats will block Republicans from passing a bill that confers $72bn for federal immigration enforcement, which includes $1bn for security measures for Trump’s ballroom.
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Seventeen tech and finance executives will join the president this week in Beijing, a White House official confirmed to the Guardian. Elon Musk will be in attendance, as well as Apple’s Tim Cook, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Dina Powell McCormick of Meta and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg.
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In a rambling set of remarks to administration officials and law enforcement officers gathered for dinner on the patio that used to be the lawn of the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump said he was taking a night off from trying to stop the war he started with Iran and instead boasted about his cut-rate renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, the $1bn ballroom he is building where the demolished East Wing of the White House used to be, and claimed that before he arrived the White House was “a shit house”.
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Trump also repeatedly claimed that the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is “called the reflective pond”.
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He went on to survey the assembled diners about whether they would like JD Vance or Marco Rubio better as the 2028 Republican nominee for president.
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The NAACP’s president, Derrick Johnson, has described the US supreme court ruling on Monday, allowing Alabama to change its congressional map to eliminate at least one Black-majority district, as “madness”.
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“We are witnessing a return to Jim Crow,” Johnson said. “And anybody who is alarmed by these developments—as everybody should be—better be making a plan to vote in November to put an end to this madness while we still can.”
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Banners hung across Washington DC by the Trump administration, thanking Donald Trump for publicly funded improvements to federal parks, feature an image of the president inspecting the renovation of the Federal Reserve, a project he has derided as a massive waste of money that could be a crime.
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