Federal Judge Deals Massive Blow to Republicans in Gerrymandering War

There’s some good news in Utah: On Monday, Judge Dianna Gibson blocked the state’s Republican-controlled legislature from enacting their heavily gerrymandered congressional map, declaring it unconstitutional. Instead the state will defer to the independent redistricting reform that citizens voted for back in 2018, known as “Proposition 4.” 

“Proposition 4 is the law in Utah on redistricting. H.B. 2004, the 2021 Congressional Map, which was not enacted under S.B. 200 and not Proposition 4, cannot lawfully govern future elections in Utah,” Gibson wrote. “The Legislature intentionally stripped away all of Proposition 4’s core redistricting standards and procedures that were mandatory and binding on it.... To permit the 2021 Congressional Plan to remain in place would reward the very constitutional violation this Court has already identified and would nullify the people’s 2018 redistricting reform.” 

Republican attempts to supersede Proposition 4 began in 2021, when they ignored ballot measures and split up Salt Lake County, the district that contains most of the state’s Democratic voters. Now that their move has been struck down, lawmakers have just under a month to bring the map up to Proposition 4 standards.   

This comes as Texas and California are locked in a heated gerrymandering battle, as the former carries out a Trump-backed effort to add multiple Republican seats to the House, while the latter starts its own retaliatory redistricting effort under Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. The results in Utah, in addition to the language in Gibson’s ruling, serve as a positive sign for those who want to bring legal challenges on gerrymandering in the near future. 

Nobody seems to like Cracker Barrel’s brand overhaul—including the president.

Donald Trump weighed in on the culture war fiasco Tuesday, urging the Tennessee-born “old country store” to return to its design roots.

“Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right. Very tricky to do, but a great opportunity. Have a major News Conference today. Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again.”

The U.S. leader then took the opportunity to toot his own horn, absurdly claiming that he had resurrected America from a supposedly decrepit state last year.

“Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World,” Trump noted. “One year ago, it was ‘DEAD.’ Good luck!”

The restaurant chain’s redesign stripped down its logo, removing the imagery of the old man (known as “Uncle Herschel”) and his barrel, replacing it with simple, minimalist text. The stores are expected to undergo a similar redecoration, eschewing the company’s old-timey, gold and wood-toned brand for grayer, cleaner decor that would have been on trend if it was unveiled some 15 years ago.

It took the brains of three PR firms—Prophet, Viral Nation and Blue Engine—to cook up Cracker Barrel’s $700 million transformation.

While no one seems particularly jazzed about the overhaul—the company’s stock plummeted by almost $100 million in the wake of the announcement—MAGA pundits have taken particular issue with Cracker Barrel’s rebrand.

Podcaster Matt Walsh called the effort “generic.” Fox & Friends called it “woke.” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was particularly chuffed—in separate posts, Kirk claimed that Cracker Barrel was “targeted” to promote “LGBTQ propaganda,” and also used the fiasco as an opportunity to fat shame, likening the new logo to an overweight woman while comparing the old one to Sydney Sweeney in her “great genes” American Eagle ad campaign.

The division wasn’t entirely partisan, however. The official X account for the Democratic party chimed in on the rebrand last week, writing: “We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks too.”

The company practically apologized for its new look Monday, releasing a statement recognizing the design misstep while emphasizing that the brand had not forgotten about Uncle Herschel.

“If the last few days have shown us anything, it’s how deeply people care about Cracker Barrel,” the company posted on its website Monday. “You’ve also shown us that we could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be.”

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order to bolster his federal occupation of Washington, D.C., and create a “quick reaction force” in the National Guard that could be deployed to tamp down civil protests across the country.

Hidden in that executive order is a chilling directive to the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” led by White House adviser Stephen Miller to “establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement entities” in support of his previous order declaring a “crime emergency” in D.C.

The order continues:

“Each law enforcement agency that is a member of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, as well as other relevant components of the Department of Justice as the Attorney General determines, shall further, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.” [emphasis added]

The move is sure to receive a warm reception from the far-right vigilante groups that are already, as The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote, nodding along to federal forces’ actions on the streets of D.C.

Grant observed, for example, that Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, in a recent interview, spoke favorably of Trump’s crackdown on the capital and urged him to call up a militia for immigration enforcement. “He should call up all of us,” Rhodes said. “Every able-bodied male in this nation, age 17 to 45 could be called up as the militia.” For Rhodes and his ilk, Trump’s Monday executive order is surely a step in the right direction.

Some of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters are arguing that he just made a very bad move.

On Monday, the president offered a concession to China amid ongoing trade talks with Beijing, informing reporters at the White House that the administration would permit hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to continue their studies in the U.S.

“We’re going to allow their students to come in,” Trump said. “It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important. But we’re going to get along with China.”

But that did not sit well with his MAGA base, who claimed that the administration would never accomplish its “mass deportation” if it allowed immigrants into the country.

“I didn’t vote for more Muslims and Chinese people to be imported to my country,” far-right provocateur Laura Loomer wrote on X. “Sorry but these immigrants from communist countries and Sharia shitholes where child rape is legalized don’t make America great.”

“Please don’t Make America China,” she continued. “MAGA doesn’t want more immigrants.”

In another post, Loomer urged Trump to “do the math,” lamenting that the country would never “get rid of the millions who came in under Biden” if it followed through on Trump’s plan.

“If we are only mass deporting 1,000 illegals each day but allowing 600,000 Chinese spies to come to our country, how can we call them mass deportations?” she wrote.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was also outraged, preaching on social media that the country should not “let in” thousands of students who she claimed could be “loyal” to the Chinese Communist Party.

“If refusing to allow these Chinese students to attend our schools causes 15 percent of them to fail then these schools should fail anyways because they are being propped up by the CCP,” Greene wrote. “Why are we allowing 600,000 students from China to replace our American student’s opportunities? We should never allow that.”

America’s relationship with China has been fraught since Trump returned to office. Earlier this year, the president imposed a whopping 145 percent tariff on all Chinese goods—a threat that provoked a quick response from Beijing, which imposed a 125 percent tariff on U.S. exports in return.

China’s defiant negotiating strategy with the U.S. became an international model in May when Trump’s tariffs plummeted, proving that the country’s refusal to play the White House’s waiting game had earned them a significantly better deal.

But the U.S. leader’s economic threats have continued, nonetheless. In the same White House presser Monday, Trump curiously fixated on magnets, warning China that it must hand more over or face a “200 percent tariff or something.”

President Trump and his Justice Department have finally given up on charging D.C. woman Sidney Lori Reid with a felony after failing to convince three different grand juries that she deserved eight years in prison for allegedly placing herself between ICE agents and someone they were detaining.

This is a pretty impressive failure on D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s part. It’s not often that prosecutors are denied an indictment from a grand jury given the preexisting bias towards federal prosecution (defendant’s lawyers aren’t even allowed in the room in front of a grand jury).

In July, Reid was accused of assaulting, impeding, or interfering with federal agents while they transferred two alleged gang members into FBI custody at a D.C. jail. According to prosecutors, she recorded the agents and tried to block them from getting to one of the detainees. After being pushed against a wall by agents, prosecutors claimed Reid “forcibly pushed” an FBI agent’s arm off of her with the intent to injure the agent.

The argument didn’t work in court, as Reid’s lawyers argued she was simply arrested by officers who didn’t want to be filmed, and the physical altercation occurred because of the agents.

Federal prosecutors have now refiled the case as a low-level misdemeanor.

“Three grand juries have now declined to indict Ms. Reid for felony assault on a law enforcement officer,” her lawyers, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, wrote in a statement Monday night. “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word. We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”

If Reid had been charged with the felony, she would have faced up to eight years in prison.

The case proves the obvious: The Trump administration is being overly aggressive, and is more focused on making brutal legal examples of people rather than actually having a punishment that fits the “crime.”

“Seeking an indictment for a third time is extremely rare and usually only reserved for the most serious of crimes,” attorney Christopher Macchiaroli told D.C.’s local WUSA9. “If a governmental entity cannot convince a supermajority of grand jurors that there is a fair probability that a crime was committed, it is virtually impossible to believe that twelve jurors in the same relevant jurisdiction could unanimously at a future date find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest standard of proof under the law.”

The charges levied against Reid are the same ones levied against Sean Dunn, the Subway sandwich thrower in Washington, D.C., who had his apartment raided by agents when he was arrested.

Reid’s outcome should be a positive sign for people like Dunn, but the Justice Department isn’t giving up on their efforts to ruin people’s lives over low-level arrests just yet. Senior Justice Department official Akaash Singh told his prosecutors to ignore the losses and criticism, and to continue to overcharge people, according to The New York Times.

A demonstrator who identified himself as a disabled combat veteran was arrested Monday after burning an American flag in protest of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order.

Speaking through a megaphone to the onlookers outside of the White House, the protester explained that Trump’s latest decree penalizing flag burning was an affront to the First Amendment.

“I fought for every single one of your rights to express yourself in however you feel that you may want to express yourself,” the protester said, in a video shared to social media.

“No president can make a law—period—no Congress can make a law infringing on First Amendment rights,” he added. “I’m burning this flag as a protest of that illegal fascist president that sits in that house!”

The protester then lit the flag on fire.

Despite Trump’s claim that burning the American flag “incites riots at a level we’ve never seen,” no such riot materialized. The protester was promptly arrested by the Secret Service.

The Secret Service released a statement that it detained the man “for igniting an object” and that he was turned over to Park Police, who said they’d arrested him for violating a statute that prohibits lighting a fire in a public park, according to NBC News.

Trump’s blatant attack on free speech built on fictitious grounds is an affront to the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 in 1989 that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment.

Donald Trump’s move to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for unproven allegations of mortgage fraud is unprecedented. It also raises the troubling likelihood that the administration is using a federal agency to make its way through an enemies list.

In a shocking instance of presidential meddling with the central bank, Trump on Monday announced that he was removing Cook, the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board, for cause. Cook, for her part, refused to step down and responded with a statement: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so,” she said. “I will not resign.”

As Georgetown Law professor Adam J. Levitin wrote Monday at the blog Credit Slips, it’s far from clear that the allegations against Cook (of misconduct unrelated to the carrying out of her duties) can even constitute “cause.” The accusations are also quite flimsy.

But what may be most notable is how the attempted firing of Cook came about. The allegations of mortgage fraud were laid out by Bill Pulte, the MAGA director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who claimed Cook declared two primary residences.

As Levitin observed in an earlier post calling for Pulte’s resignation, it’s unlikely that the FHFA head just happened upon the alleged fraud “in some routine audit or the like.” Rather, he wrote, Pulte likely directed Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac “to pull her application”—an unheard-of move.

Taken with the Trump administration’s evidently politically motivated mortgage fraud claims against Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Cook’s corrupt firing raises the troubling possibility that Pulte is working through a list à la Richard Nixon’s list of political enemies to be targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.

“Unless Pulte somehow had particular knowledge about issues with Cook’s application, which is unlikely, then one has to conclude that Pulte handed Fannie and Freddie a list of political enemies and asked for their loan files for review,” Levitin wrote. “That’s got to be how the DOJ indictment of Senator Adam Schiff and NY Attorney General Letitia James arose too.”

Missouri Republican Representative Mark Alford was told to “take Trump’s head out of your ass” by a constituent on Monday as he had his own town hall turn on him. 

“I am pissed, and I’m pissed at you, because I have emailed you because it’s easier for me than to try to talk on the phone without profanity,” said Fred Higginbotham, a longtime Polk County resident who said he was at risk of losing his family farm. “I would appreciate you taking your father’s U.S. Constitution book, read it, study it, make your own lines underneath it, and get Trump out of office. The man is a dictator.”

Higginbotham went on to tell Alford that he may lose his family farm because of state and federal disdain for farmers and bias towards the wealthy. 

“You wanna straighten out the budget? Start taxing corporations and the wealthy like we’ve been telling you. Do you think we’re idiots? Do you think we don’t pay taxes? Do you think that we don’t have to make budgets? … You know nothing about what a working-class citizen does. Come down here … and start trying to pay your medical insurance.... You need to take your head out of Trump’s ass and start doing your representation of us!” 

This isn’t the first time Alford has drawn the ire of his own constituents in a town hall. Back in February, Alford was booed relentlessly for attempting to justify billionaire Elon Musk’s power over government personnel as a completely unelected official as head of DOGE.

Alford tried to soften the blow on Monday, thanking Higginbotham for his military service and acknowledging that running a small business was “tough” and trying to explain why his office never answered constituents’ emails. 

“I really want to have an open line of communication. You know, sometimes I’m even in my office, and my staff doesn’t really like this, but I answer the phone,” Alford told Higginbotham. “When I’m in the district and when I’m in D.C. If I have free time, I’m not in a committee meeting or on the House floor, I like to answer the phone because I like to hear from people like you.” 

But this may have fallen on deaf, angry ears. 

Alford isn’t the only Republican to face the music this month. Last week, Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman was booed for refusing to acknowledge that Trump’s tariff war will hurt consumers and stating that inflation hadn’t gone up when it has. New York MAGA hardliner Elise Stefanik was called a “Nazi” and a sellout at her last town hall over her support for Trump and refusal to release the Epstein files. And chants of “vote him out!” rained down on Mike Flood earlier this month.  

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker slammed President Donald Trump for planning to bring National Guard troops to Chicago while defunding state and local law enforcement.

During a press conference Monday, the Democratic lawmaker said that Trump’s plan to replicate his takeover of Washington D.C., and bring federal forces to the Midwest wasn’t a response to rising crime.

“Crime is dropping in Chicago. Murders are down 32 percent compared to last year, and nearly cut in half since 2021. Shootings are down 37 percent since last year, and 57 percent from four years ago,” Pritzker said, adding that property crimes in Chicago had also decreased in the last year.

“So, in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump’s military occupations, take note. Thirteen of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago,” Pritzker said. “Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

The governor continued, pointing out that cities in Tennessee and Mississippi have higher crime rates than Chicago. “And yet Donald Trump is sending troops here? And not there? Ask yourself why,” he said.

Pritzker accused the president and Republicans of cutting more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally. He added that Trump had cut $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs, $71 million for law enforcement grants, and $137 million for child protection measures.

“Trump is defunding the police,” Pritzker said.

While speaking to reporters earlier Monday, the president balked when asked whether he would consider sending National Guard troops to Republican-led cities and states that experience high rates of crime. In Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people, more than half of those cities were in states led by Republican governors.

Pritzker told Trump to stay out of Chicago. “You are neither wanted here, nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties, and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy,” he said.

Florida apparently has no intention of shutting down Alligator Alcatraz.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier revealed Monday that the state is planning to keep the ICE facility up and running, despite a court order demanding that it shut down within the next two months.

“We’re going to continue operating the facility,” Uthmeier told news outlet WINK over the phone, referring to the state-operated 3,000-person migrant detention center erected in a swamp and flood zone. “We believe that it’s a fully lawful facility. This is an effort by environmentalists, by the left, by Democrats and by honestly this judge, to stall our immigration enforcement efforts.”

“They do not like the deportations,” Uthmeier said, noting that he had filed a notice to appeal the court ruling.

Climate activists and the Miccosukee Tribe sued the government on the grounds that the immigration agency had violated a federal law by erecting the migrant detention center without conducting an adequate assessment of its potential impact on the Florida Everglades.

That proved to be a winning strategy last week, when U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams gave the government 60 days to dismantle the hastily constructed concentration camp, ordering the removal of the site’s lighting, fencing, and generators. Williams also ordered the facility to halt ongoing construction and to accept no new detainees.

The project, which has been described as having horrific living conditions by detainees and former employees alike, is projected to cost American taxpayers $450 million per year in operating fees. Florida’s state government is expected to front the costs, filing reimbursement claims through the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, which the Trump administration has spent months trying to dismantle.