Democratic leaders are feeling pressure to join a brewing redistricting battle that is threatening to upend the midterms landscape — an effort that is likely to slam into legal and political reality.

As Texas Republicans pressed forward with a redistricting blitz designed to increase the number of red seats in the state, officials in the biggest Democratic states scrambled for a response. In New York, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke with Gov. Kathy Hochul in recent days to discuss what a counter-effort could look like. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration talked to state election officials about the logistics and timing of a special election to overturn its nonpartisan commission. And Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker joined Newsom in meeting with Texas Democratic lawmakers on Friday about a strategy for stalling the GOP’s brazen attempt to carve out five new seats, per President Donald Trump’s demand.

The problem is Democrats don’t have many options. In conversations with more than a dozen state lawmakers and redistricting experts, Democrats’ best shot at redrawing a map lies in California, a heavily blue state with a huge number of congressional districts. They see the second-best option in New York, which saw Democratic gerrymandering efforts sputter in recent years, and Illinois, which is already a heavily pro-Democrat gerrymander. Far less likely options lie with Maryland and New Jersey, which have just four Republican-held seats between them.

Discussion of these options come as a debate rages within the party over whether to play hard ball to the same degree as Republicans.

“At this moment, it seems very clear that self defense is something we have to put as a priority,” said Maryland House Majority Leader David Moon, who introduced a bill this week that would force open Maryland’s redistricting process if another state pursues redistricting ahead of the U.S. Census. “If that’s where we are, and that’s where we’re forced to go, then I think that’s where Democratic states need to be prepared to go.”

HAMILTON, Ohio — Planned Parenthood has announced the closure of two Southwest Ohio health centers after Medicaid cuts at both the state and federal levels.

The "big, beautiful bill" passed by Congress earlier this month included a provision that bans health care providers who perform abortions and receive more than $800,000 in federal reimbursements from participating in the Medicaid program, impacting Planned Parenthood.

Due to the funding cuts, Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region said its health centers in Springfield and Hamilton will close Aug. 1.

"Make no mistake: this was not a decision made by Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region," said Nan Whaley, the region's president and CEO. "We took every possible step to keep these centers open, but the devastating impact of state and federal political attacks has forced us into this very difficult position."

Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region said the two centers see thousands of patients each year for preventative health care services like STI testing and treatment, birth control and wellness exams. Neither location provides abortion services.

Sitting alone before the judge in Tucson's immigration court on Wednesday, her dark hair tied back with a bright pink ribbon, 14-year-old Karla appeared uncertain when asked if she wanted to be returned to her home country of Guatemala or continue fighting her deportation in court.

In January, when she was 13, Karla had crossed the southern border into Arizona from Mexico near Sásabe, outside an official port of entry and without her parents. She was among more than a dozen kids, ages 12 to 17, seated Wednesday morning in the courtroom of Judge Irene Feldman, who oversees the monthly unaccompanied minors' docket.

But Karla — whom the Star is only identifying by her first name because she's a minor — still hadn't found an attorney, like most of the children present, and she wasn't sure how to respond to Feldman's questions, translated into Spanish by an interpreter.

"You don't want to go back to Guatemala? I can see you hesitating," Feldman said, adding, "You've already had several months to find an attorney."

Michael Li 李之樸
@mcpli

After requests by two Texas Democrats, Texas Senate redistricting committee has asked U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillion to testify before the committee. #txlege

Dhillion is the author of a July 7 letter claiming that TX-09, TX-18, and TX-29 in Metro Houston and TX-33 in the DFW Metroplex were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. #txlege

That letter later served as Gov. Greg Abbott’s justification for adding redistricting to the special session call. #txlege

But the claims in the Dhillion letter have since been vigorously rejected by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who wrote in response that the state drew the four districts on a race-blind basis.

The Dhillion letter also is a bit of a mess legally. As one of the redistricting expert witnesses put it at a committee hearing this week, “The letter appears that it may have been drafted quickly and in haste.” #txlege

The Trump White House is ratcheting up pressure on Missouri Republicans reluctant to pursue a new map that could give the GOP seven of the state’s eight seats in Congress.

Missouri House Speaker Pro Tem Chad Perkins of Bowling Green said he received a call Friday afternoon from the White House after staff read his comments published Thursday in The Independent.

“We do redistricting every 10 years,” Perkins said Thursday. “We’ve already done that. To do it again would be out of character with the way Missouri operates.”

During the call Friday, he said, after verifying he was quoted accurately, he was told it was important to President Donald Trump.

“They said ‘well, we’re really going to try to do that’ and that might change the dynamic of it,” Perkins said.

The presumed target for the change is Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City, who has held the 5th District seat since 2005 and was re-elected in November with 60% of the vote.

It's almost time to redraw Ohio's congressional map, and Republicans hold all the power to draw more GOP districts headed into competitive national midterm elections.

Republicans control every aspect of the redistricting process in Ohio. They have a supermajority in the Ohio Legislature, which gets the first opportunity to draw a new congressional map. They hold five of the seven seats on the Ohio Redistricting Commission. And they have a 6-1 advantage at the Ohio Supreme Court, which will determine whether the map complies with anti-gerrymandering rules voters approved in 2018.

And Republicans already hold two-thirds of the state's seats in Congress under the current map.

The stakes are high for Republicans: the GOP holds a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and midterm elections are historically tough for the party that holds the White House. President Donald Trump's policies on immigration, Medicaid cuts and the "big, beautiful bill" have been polarizing.

Ohio is one of the only states redrawing its map before the 2026 elections. Texas is another. Other states could redraw their maps depending on the outcome of legal fights.

What the Florida Supreme Court just did to voting rights is fairly described by the famous words of the French politicienne, Jeanne-Marie Roland, as she was being guillotined in 1793: “Oh, Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”

Five Florida justices, all Gov. Ron DeSantis appointees, invoked the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to uphold his cynical 2022 gerrymander that deprived Black voters across North Florida of any chance to be represented in Congress by someone of their choice.

A historic amendment meant to protect members of a minority was turned against them.

The gerrymander put three-term U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, a Democrat and one of Florida’s most prominent Black politicians, in a redrawn majority white and Republican district that guaranteed he would lose to fellow Rep. Neal Dunn.

This DeSantis scheme gave his party four more Florida seats in Congress, which is their present slim majority. But only Lawson’s old District 5 was at issue before the Supreme Court.

PHOENIX — Gov. Katie Hobbs has announced that $429 million in medical debt has been erased for hundreds of thousands of Arizonans.

Undue Medical Debt, a national nonprofit, has a $10 million contract with the state to buy and cancel medical debt for Arizonans using federal COVID relief dollars. The group has so far spent $2 million to help more than 352,000 Arizonans.

"So that return on investment is actually pretty impressive — over, you know, $200 for every $1 that we spend," said Courtney Story, the group's vice president for government initiatives.

Undue Medical Debt purchased medical debt in bulk from hospitals and collection agencies for pennies on the dollar.

The nonprofit plans to announce more debt cancellations later this year and expects to spend the rest of the money by the end of next year, Story told ABC15.

No one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior justice in the majority—which is always the chief justice when he so votes—determines who will write the main opinion. Roberts reserved these milestones for himself.

And what milestones they have been. Roberts upheld the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” on the grounds that the president’s national-security role precludes courts from taking account of the bigotry undergirding an immigration order. He remanded a lower court’s enforcement of a congressional subpoena for Trump’s financial information, writing that “without limits on its subpoena powers,” Congress could exert “imperious” control over the executive branch and “aggrandize itself at the President’s expense.” He has come close to giving the president an untrammeled right to fire any officer in the executive branch at will. And he took the lead in inventing a presidential immunity from criminal prosecution that could exempt the president from accountability for even the most corrupt exercises of his official functions.

Going beyond the precise holdings in these cases, Roberts’s superfluous rhetoric about the presidency has cast the chief executive in all-but-monarchical terms. The upshot is a view of the Constitution that, in operation, comes uncomfortably close to vindicating Trump’s: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Trump’s confidence is surely bolstered also by the Roberts Court’s unsigned per curiam opinions blocking even temporary relief from his sweeping actions. In May, the Court held that Trump orders removing two federal officials at key independent agencies could remain in place while the issue of their legality makes its way through the judiciary. In June, it allowed the administration to proceed with so-called third-country deportations—that is, deporting undocumented noncitizens summarily to countries to which they had no prior connection, but where they might well face torture. On July 8, the Court effectively allowed Trump to proceed with a massive restructuring of the federal executive branch, notwithstanding that the power over executive-branch organization belongs to Congress, not the president. On July 14, the conservative majority allowed the sabotaging of the Department of Education to proceed. Trump’s use of executive power is not a distortion of the Roberts Court’s theory of the presidency; it is the Court’s theory of the presidency, come to life.

What America is witnessing is a remaking of the American presidency into something closer to a dictatorship. Trump is enacting this change and taking advantage of its possibilities, but he is not the inventor of its claim to constitutional legitimacy. That project is the work of John Roberts.