Virginia Democrats Pass Major Amendment Amid GOP Gerrymandering Wars

Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature just got one step closer to victory in the battle against Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme.

The commonwealth’s Senate passed an amendment Friday that would allow the state to redraw its congressional map before the upcoming midterm elections, potentially netting Democrats, who already control six of the state’s 11 districts, an additional three or four seats.

The measure, which will amend Virginia’s Constitution to allow lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map if another state does the same outside of the typical decennial cycle, can now be slated to appear on a special election ballot sometime before April 16. If voters pass the amendment, that gives Democrats a major step up come November.

Earlier this month, Trump told Republican lawmakers that he needed the party to maintain control of the House and Senate in order to avoid being impeached.

Unfortunately for him, this seems increasingly unavoidable, as in a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party pretty consistently loses ground. Those basic odds, coupled with Trump’s dismal approval rating and Democratic candidates’ growing momentum is a particularly bad sign for the president, who has started babbling about potentially cancelling the midterm elections altogether.

So far, five red states have redrawn their congressional maps at the behest of Trump in order to hand a potential nine seats to the Republican Party: Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah. California also revamped its district lines to hand five seats back to the Democrats.

A Reagan-appointed federal judge says the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian activists is an “unconstitutional conspiracy.”

U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, criticized Trump’s draconian crackdown on people like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, whose only crimes were being vocal supporters of Palestine, while announcing his plans to issue an order to prevent those kinds of targeted deportations from happening again.

“I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government—Cabinet secretaries—conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States,” Young said, alluding to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “These Cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”

Young even compared the administration’s larger deportation policy to people catching and returning enslaved African Americans under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

“I’ve asked myself why—how did this happen? How could our own government, the highest officials in our government, seek to infringe the rights of people lawfully here in the United States? And I’ve come to believe that there’s a concept of freedom here that I don’t understand,” he said at the same hearing. “The record in this case convinces me that these high officials, and I include the president of the United States, have a fearful view of freedom.”

Young plans on releasing a formal ruling sometime next week.

“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,’” he said. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”

A majority of Americans said that President Donald Trump’s first year back in office was a failure, according to a humiliating CNN poll published Friday. No kidding.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans called Trump’s first year a failure, according to the poll, which showed Americans had found a new floor for the president’s dismal economic performance.

One year of Trump’s so-called “Golden Era” for America has landed him the worst approval rating on the economy in his entire presidential career. Just 39 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 61 percent disapproved, landing him a net rating of -21 in the latest poll. In Trump’s first term, his worst net rating was -5 in 2017, with a 44–49 split.

A 55 percent majority said that Trump had worsened economic conditions, while just 32 percent said they’ve improved. And a whopping 64 percent of respondents said that Trump hadn’t done enough to lower the price of groceries. (Despite Trump’s lifeless promises to lower the price of groceries, healthy whole foods still remain out of reach for average Americans.)

The new year has only brought about more pessimism regarding the economy. Just over 4 in 10 respondents said that they expect the economy to improve a year from now, down from 56 percent from last January.

As economic anxieties have blossomed, more and more people have begun to believe that Trump has lost touch with the average American. Only thirty-six percent of respondents said he has the right priorities, down from 45 percent at the beginning of his term. And in a new all-time low for Trump, only one-third of respondents said they believed the president actually cared about them, down from 40 percent last March.

Again, is anyone actually surprised? As the president throws lavish parties, Americans struggle against the weakening job market, soaring prices, and steadily increasing inflation—and our cities fall into chaos at the hands of masked federal agents. But no, the president should really have a new ballroom.

Looking back on the many promises he made during his inaugural address, most respondents felt that he’d not made any progress toward actually achieving them.

Notably, the promise that the most respondents thought Trump had made progress on was “restoring safety to the United States.” But only 35 percent felt that way, while 38 percent thought he’d made things worse. And that was his best result. Thirty-five percent.

Meanwhile, the promise the most respondents felt he’d failed at was “being a peacemaker and unifier.” Just 25 percent of respondents said they felt he’d made progress on being a peacemaker, while 47 percent said he’d made things worse. This comes after Trump has launched a campaign of extrajudicial military strikes on boats the government claims—but won’t prove—are smuggling drugs, threatened multiple countries with military intervention (including our own allies), and weakened diplomatic ties with his ridiculous approach to foreign policy.

It seems that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s ultimate show of fealty to President Trump will get her nothing.

Machado met with Trump on Thursday and brought along her Nobel Peace Prize, offering it to the president. It was clearly a last-ditch attempt to earn a larger role in any upcoming regime change effort in the wake of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping. But Trump couldn’t care less.

“You just called Machado a ‘very nice person,’” reporters asked Trump Friday afternoon. “Why align yourself with [interim President] Delcy Rodríguez and the remnants of the Maduro regime, not with Machado, who has the support of the Venezuelan people?”

“Well, if you ever remember a place called Iraq, where everybody was fired, every single person. The police, the generals, everybody was fired,” Trump said. “And they ended up being ISIS. Instead of just getting down to business, they ended up being ISIS.... But I’ll tell you I had a great meeting yesterday by a person who I have a lot of respect for … and she gave me her Nobel Prize.”

When asked why he would want someone else’s Nobel Prize, Trump replied, “Well, she offered it to me.”

At least six high-profile congressional Republicans have voiced their staunch opposition to President Trump’s desire to take over Greenland.

“I’ll be candid with you: There’s so many Republicans mad about this,” Nebraska Representative Don Bacon told the Omaha-World Herald. “If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: The off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this and he’s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.”

It’s the “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Bacon later told Politico.

“If there was any sort of action that looked like the goal was actually landing in Greenland and doing an illegal taking … there’d be sufficient numbers here to pass a war powers resolution and withstand a veto,” Senator Thom Tillis threatened.

Senator Lisa Murkowski argued that Greenland “needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset,” and even Senator Mitch McConnell stated that any incursion on Greenland would be “an unprecedented act of strategic self-harm” that risks “incinerating” NATO diplomacy.

Even so, the Trump administration still seems to be committed to seizing Greenland. On Friday, the president threatened countries who oppose his Greenland takeover with tariffs.