Dam shame..........

Austrian jets intercept US military planes two days in a row

By Linus Höller

Austrian Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets scrambled two days in a row to intercept U.S. military aircraft, the government said.

The interceptions took place on May 10 and 11 and were related to modified PC-12 turboprop aircraft that the U.S. military uses primarily for signals intelligence and scouting operations. The U.S. designation for the aircraft is U-28.

Contrary to initial reporting in German-language media, no aircraft seems to have illegally violated Austrian airspace. The U.S. Air Force had filed for an overflight permit for two aircraft on May 10, but didn’t use it. When later that day two different USAF aircraft approached Austrian airspace unannounced, jets were scrambled to meet them - but they turned back before crossing the border, Austrian military spokesperson Michael Bauer said in a statement on X on Wednesday.

The U.S. refiled the overflight permit for the following day and used it then. The Austrian air force sent fighter jets to confirm that the aircraft overflying the airspace matched what had been approved. “Some things you have to see for yourself,” Bauer said in a reply on X

Austrian jets were scrambled in a “priority A intercept” on May 11, Bauer said on Tuesday, marking the highest urgency in the Austrian air force’s nomenclature.

Later reporting by the major Austrian daily Der Standard cited the Austrian government as saying that, as of Wednesday, the verdict was still out on whether the planes that overflew Austrian airspace were the ones for which a permit had been issued. No further details were provided on what was taking so long for the verification.

Austria is not a member of the NATO alliance and has perpetual neutrality enshrined in its constitution. Transits by foreign militaries - whether by land or by air - require prior approval and are generally granted only if they are unrelated to a war. Austria was the fifth European country to close its airspace to U.S. activity related to the war in Iran, with the country’s vice chancellor, Andreas Babler, saying that Austrians want “nothing to do with Trump’s politics of chaos and his war.”

The May 11 intercept reportedly took place over the Totes Gebirge mountain range in Upper Austria, over 60 kilometers from the German border. The American planes were met by Eurofighter Typhoons.

Swiss news portal “20 Minuten” first reported on the incursion and it was later confirmed by other German-language media, although initial reporting stated that unpermitted airspace violations had taken place - a claim that was refuted by the Austrian military on Wednesday

“This flight took place after an administrative error in the overflight clearance paperwork was corrected,” an official from U.S. European Command told Defense News in an email. “The United States continues to work closely with Austrian authorities on any questions regarding overflights and fully complies with Austrian laws and procedures.”

Publicly available reporting of unauthorized U.S. overflights is rare, and permissions are generally granted in peacetime. Austria’s location and geography - a thin sliver of land between major NATO allies Germany and Italy, and dividing northern from southern Europe - makes it a prime transit route. Neighboring Switzerland has similar neutrality policies.

The most remarkable precedent is a case in October 2002, when the U.S. attempted to smuggle two F-117A Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft through Austrian airspace by filing a flight plan only for the accompanying KC-10A tanker aircraft. Austrian Draken fighter jets identified the undeclared aircraft and Vienna later lodged a formal diplomatic complaint.

The recent incidents, too, will be addressed through diplomatic channels, Bauer said.

Competitive authoritarianism

Is the U.S. slipping into 'Competitive Authoritarianism?'

Frank Langfitt

What kind of political system do we have in America these days?

Some experts say the United States is no longer a liberal democracy, but operating under a system called "competitive authoritarianism."

For this installment of NPR's Word of the Week, we explore the term's origin story and how it is being applied in a way those who came up with it never imagined.

If you're not familiar with the term, here is a basic definition:

Competitive authoritarian countries have democratic rules and hold competitive elections, but the party in charge uses various tactics to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor to maintain power.

Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard who helped come up with the concept, explained it last year on NPR member station WAMU's show, 1A.

"Elected authoritarians, when they come to power, try to convert the state, which is supposed to be a neutral arbiter, into both a weapon and a shield," said Levitsky, who co-authored the book How Democracies Die. "It's a weapon to be deployed against political rivals, and it is a shield to protect themselves and to protect their allies who engage in authoritarian or illegal behavior."

Levitsky says Trump's pardoning of the people convicted in the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol is a prime example.

Competitive authoritarianism is a pretty new term. Levitsky and Lucan Way – now a professor at the University of Toronto – came up with it in 2002 to describe systems in countries such as Serbia, Kenya and Peru.

"We never – when we coined this term 25 years ago – never imagined that we would apply it to the United States," said Levitsky.

But Levitsky says Trump is following a familiar playbook crafted by leaders such as former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"When we began to see the Justice Department go after people who were public critics of Trump, when we began to see lawsuits against (the) media or attacks on universities that are viewed as critical of the government," said Levitsky, "all these things are raising the cost of opposition."

To describe these kinds of political systems, Way and Levitsky initially came up with the phrase, "Contested Autocracy."

Way admits it was a "horrible" term. Then, in conversation, Way's faculty adviser, Harvard professor Timothy Colton, unwittingly provided a eureka moment. He misremembered the concept as "competitive authoritarianism."

"So, we thought, 'Oh my God,' that was it!" Way recalled.

Since President Trump took office last year, searches on Google Trends for competitive authoritarianism have spiked. It has also shown up in scores of publications, from the Ventura County Star in California to The Scotsman in Edinburgh and The Indian Express in Mumbai.

President Trump has repeatedly insisted he is not an autocrat.

"A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last August. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator."

Other scholars say the U.S. remains very much a democracy. They point out that despite Trump's repeated calls for late night host Jimmy Kimmel to be fired, he remains on the air. In addition, citizens routinely protest and criticize Trump and his policies online and on the streets.

Nor does competitive authoritarianism ensure permanent rule.

Just ask Orbán. The former Hungarian leader was widely seen as perfecting the competitive authoritarian playbook during his 16 years in power.

But a poor economy and rampant corruption took a toll. Last month, a unified opposition swept Orbán's party in a landslide.

NGC 188

The New General Catalog of star clusters and nebulae really isn't so new. In fact, it was published in 1888 - an effort by J. L. E. Dreyer to consolidate the work of astronomers William, Caroline, and John Herschel along with others into a useful single, complete catalog of astronomical discoveries and measurements. Dreyer's work was largely successful and is still important today, as this famous catalog continues to lend its "NGC" to bright clusters, galaxies, and nebulae. Take for example the star cluster known as NGC 188 (item number 188 in the NGC compilation). It lies about 6,000 light-years distant in the northern constellation Cepheus and represents a galactic or open star cluster. With an age of about 7 billion years, NGC 188 is old for an open cluster. Its old, evolved red giant stars have yellowish hues in this colorful, deep sky view. NGC 188 also enjoys the designation Caldwell 1 in a modern compilation of deep sky objects. Located well above the plane of the Milky Way and seen in the direction of planet Earth's north celestial pole, the ancient stellar group is known to some as the Polarissima Cluster.

Escaped the Abortion Trap

Trump Thought He’d Escaped the Abortion Trap

Now the Supreme Court is facing a blockbuster case that threatens to spin out of control.

Nina Martin

By all accounts, President Donald Trump really, really did not want abortion to become a major issue this election year. But here we are, six months before the midterms, and abortion pills are back at the Supreme Court, as the state of Louisiana and abortion drug manufacturers ask to fast-track oral arguments in what is shaping up to be a blockbuster case. Conservatives are invoking the Comstock Act. And Trump’s Food and Drug Administration has been AWOL, while its top official has been forced to resign.

The swift escalation of the showdown between Louisiana and the FDA over telemedicine abortion highlights just how little control Trump has over the abortion issue—both in terms of the timeline and the outcome. Meanwhile, the case is sparking confusion, uncertainty, and dread among patients, providers, and advocates across the US.

Just to recap how we got to this point. On May 1, the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, siding with Louisiana, issued a nationwide order suspending FDA rules that allow the abortion drug mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and dispensed through the mail. A few days later, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the order, and on Monday, he extended his stay until May 14.

The decision to take a few more days suggests that the full court is struggling to figure out its next steps in a case that could upend abortion access throughout the US—and possibly much sooner than many SCOTUS-watchers had thought likely.

All last week, justices were blasted with amicus briefs from parties with keen and conflicting interests in the outcome. Former FDA officials warned about the dire consequences of allowing states to upend drug regulations put in place years or even decades ago. Doctors and reproductive health advocates pointed to the mass of research from around the world showing that abortion pills are safe and effective, including via telemedicine.

Conservatives, meanwhile, repeatedly brought up the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity statute that hasn’t been enforced for decades. Named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it, Comstock made it a federal crime to mail or ship “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Reviving the law could end legal access to most abortions nationwide and possibly threaten other reproductive health care, such as IUDs. 

In its own brief to SCOTUS, Louisiana offered an audacious option: If justices don’t allow the Fifth Circuit suspension of mail-order mifepristone to take effect, they should put the case on the 2025-2026 docket and schedule oral arguments ASAP, so that a final decision could be made as soon as the end of June or the first days of July. Drug makers GenBioPro and Danco Laboratories also suggested the court should consider taking the full case on an expedited schedule. The current term already includes such hugely consequential issues such as birthright citizenship and Temporary Protected Status for asylum seekers.

The one interested party that did not weigh in was the federal drug agency Louisiana sued in the first place. Even though the Fifth Circuit’s order was directed at the FDA, GenBioPro and Danco filed the emergency appeals asking the Supreme Court to hit pause.

As of Tuesday, the FDA remained radio silent. “There’s a really long list of briefs, but nothing from the federal government on this,” says Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “And in a case that’s challenging the agency’s authority, that’s remarkable.”

Abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, sees the FDA’s failure to speak up as yet more evidence that the Trump administration has backed itself into a very uncomfortable corner, caught between voters who overwhelmingly support reproductive rights and abortion opponents who are furious the president hasn’t worked harder on their behalf. “It’s clear,” she says, “that the Trump administration still doesn’t know what to do about this issue politically.”

The anti-abortion movement expected that when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortions would plummet across much of the US. The opposite has happened: In the four years since the Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has risen nationwide, including in states where abortion is almost entirely banned.

As abortion opponents have strategized to stop the flow of pills, they have focused much of their energy on attacking Obama- and Biden-era FDA rule changes for mifepristone, one of two drugs that make up the gold-standard abortion-pill regimen. Approved by the FDA in 2000, mifepristone was subject to extremely strict rules and placed in a program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs. Starting in 2016, some of those rules were relaxed, including a requirement for in-person prescribing and dispensing that was finalized in 2023. Now, almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen with abortion pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.

The first sweeping assault on the FDA rules, in a 2022 case that also originated in the Fifth Circuit, ended when the Supreme Court ultimately held that the plaintiffs—anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations—didn’t have standing to sue. But the justices made no determination on the underlying issue—the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone—and left the door open to other plaintiffs who might have standing.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill tried her luck with a narrower lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to permanently ditch the in-person dispensing requirement was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and “avowedly political.” It was not based on sound science, she argued, but on the Democrats’ determination to thwart the effects of the Dobbs decision that handed abortion policy to the states. Murrill claimed that the telemedicine rule interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as it sees fit, while making it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want.

The FDA responded, not by defending the 2023 rules, but by pointing to its own ongoing review of mifepristone’s safety, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and then-FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced last fall. At the time, Kennedy and Makary cited the Biden administration’s purported “lack of adequate consideration” before making the 2023 rules change; they also cited “recent safety concerns”—such as supposedly high rates of abortion pill complications—raised by the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center in a dubious study that has been widely debunked as junk science. In its court filings, the FDA argued that Louisiana’s lawsuit threatened to “short-circuit the agency’s orderly review” and should be put on hold. It also argued that Louisiana didn’t have standing to sue.

But the FDA study has been widely seen as a delaying tactic by a president reluctant to take a stand on abortion that might alienate voters. Trump has blamed many of his past political setbacks on abortion, and in his second term has avoided sweeping actions that would put the issue on the political front burner. For example, in defiance of the hopes of many conservatives, his Justice Department has declined to enforce the Comstock Act. His failure to take meaningful action to stop the flow of pills in the US has infuriated anti-abortion leaders. “Trump is the problem,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the influential president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal last week. “The president is the problem.”

In the Louisiana case, the anti-abortion ideologues on the Fifth Circuit did what Trump officials have not. Using the FDA’s sham mifepristone review, and citing the statements by Kennedy and Makary about the Biden FDA’s “lack of adequate consideration,” they have set up the circumstances to potentially gut access to abortion pills. “You have the FDA conceding that there’s a question about whether they did this properly [on mifepristone],” says Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University. “That only heightens the Fifth Circuit’s belief that the FDA had no authority to [get rid of the in-person dispensing rule] in the first place.” 

The FDA’s silence at the Supreme Court may well be construed to further bolster Louisiana’s case, Ziegler says. The state is arguing that the FDA’s actions—or lack thereof—show that the agency agrees that the 2023 rules change was problematic. “The court could easily use the FDA’s silence the way Louisiana is using it.”

But Makary’s resignation, or perhaps firing, on Tuesday—which abortion opponents and others have been pushing for some time—also highlights the agency’s wider “disarray,” says Drexel University law professor David Cohen. “They’ve been under a lot of pressure—threading this needle of defending the agency’s past actions [on mifepristone], while a lot of people within the Republican Party are upset about them.” Given the politics and the chaos, he says, “I wasn’t surprised they didn’t file anything.”

The central question raised by Alito’s extension of his stay against the Fifth Circuit is, why? SCOTUS “seems to be really struggling,” Suter says, “not so much with the legal questions, but with how what they do is going to affect the integrity of the court.” Battered by reporting about the court’s shadow docket, she says, justices “may be worried about looking like they’re rushing too much” to resolve the kinds of hugely consequential issues that the FDA case raises—not just about abortion, but also about the rights of states to second-guess federal drug regulation.

Yet Louisiana and mifepristone manufacturers have all indicated they want SCOTUS to take the case on its merits, perhaps on an expedited schedule during the current term. “Basically, they’ve said, We know what the district court is going to ultimately rule,” Suter says. “We know what the Fifth Circuit is going to ultimately rule…Why wait?”

If the Supreme Court does take the case, conservative groups have made clear they plan to use the opportunity to push the justices on the Comstock Act. At least two archconservatives—Alito and Clarence Thomas—have signaled they think the long-defunct statute remains the law of the land.

In one amicus brief filed last week, more than 100 Republican members of Congress accused the Biden-era FDA of flouting Comstock when it ended the in-person dispensing requirement. “The FDA cannot purport to authorize conduct criminalized under federal law,” the brief contends. “[T]hat would exceed its constitutional authority.”

The far-right nonprofit Advancing American Freedom, writing for dozens of other groups, argues that by failing to comply with Comstock, “the FDA has directly harmed Louisiana and undermined the exercise of its authority to prohibit abortion drugs.” 

Louisiana made similar arguments when it first sued the FDA last fall, but generally, Comstock has remained very much a background issue. The conservative briefs are aimed at “injecting” it back into the case—and further into mainstream discourse, says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “It’s just an extremely anti-democratic argument,” she says. “. . . They’re trying to transform [Comstock] into a no-exceptions nationwide abortion ban that they could never convince modern voters to enact.”

Give them the middle finger...

New York Hospital Faces Criminal Subpoena in Texas Over Trans Youth Care

“This is mafia-type behavior.”

Sophie Hurwitz

The Trump administration has sent subpoenas to dozens of hospitals across the nation over the past year, demanding access to information about children receiving gender-affirming care and the doctors treating them.

Those efforts have mostly failed. At least eight separate Trump administration administrative subpoenas, which would force hospitals to release trans kids’ medical records, have been thrown out. Another massive slate of DOJ subpoenas against California hospitals was dropped in January.

Now, the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas is trying a new tactic: Its prosecutors sent out a grand jury subpoena to NYU Langone Hospital seeking confidential information about patients under age 18, according to a statement released by the hospital May 11. As S. Baum of the newsletter Erin In The Morning wrote, this means the federal government is pursuing a criminal case:

[T]his is a dire escalation…this round of subpoenas entails a criminal case, meaning providers or hospital officials face risk of arrest and jail time. It does not appear to target parents of trans kids or trans patients. News of the subpoena also means the federal government has assembled a grand jury, an important step towards criminal proceedings.

“We understand that these developments may be concerning to our patients, providers, and others,” the hospital told its patients. “Please know that NYU Langone takes the privacy of your protected health information very seriously and we are evaluating our response to the subpoena.”

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on the this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”

Since prior attempts to pressure hospitals into handing over patient information have been unsuccessful, Minter said, the Department of Justice is now trying to get that same information by pursuing federal criminal charges. And by doing so in Texas, he added, they’re attempting “to find a jurisdiction that would would likely be sympathetic to the administration’s goals.”

“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter said. “This is mafia-type behavior.”

This isn’t the first time NYU Langone has been targeted for its work with transgender patients. It’s the latest in a long back-and-forth between the hospital, its patients, and various government bodies. January 2025, the hospital stopped accepting new patients into its Transgender Youth Health Program following a Trump executive order which attempted to prohibit federally funded hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to minors. They were met with protests at the time. Then, just over a year later, the hospital announced it was ending that program altogether “due to the current regulatory environment,” and were met with more protests from trans kids and their families, many of whom scrambled to find care elsewhere.

In early March, New York Attorney General Letitia James ordered the hospital to resume care. On March 18, then-Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter to James demanding that the hospital not reinstate trans youth care. Meanwhile, trans community advocates in New York have pressed the hospital, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to do more to protect gender-affirming care for all New Yorkers.

In New York, patients and doctors are theoretically protected by a state-level “Shield Law,” which is designed to protect those seeking or providing gender-affirming or abortion-related healthcare from out-of-state retaliation. “New York has strong protections in place to protect the privacy of patient records,” a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told Mother Jones. “Every health care institution in New York should seek to protect both patients and providers.” New York’s shield law applies to criminal investigations, not just civil ones; many other state-level shield laws do not.

And there is little case law indicating how such protective legislation would hold up in the face of federal investigations—and this particular investigation is coming from a court with a track record of repeatedly ruling that trans people are not protected by federal anti-discrimination law. “This could turn out to be a very important battleground,” Minter said.  

More than 40 hospitals nationwide have terminated some form of gender-affirming care since Trump took office.

It shows he is stupid, no understanding of anything...

Trump’s Golden Dome Would Cost $1.2 Trillion

A Congressional Budget Office report deemed the missile defense scheme both wildly expensive and ineffective.

Sophie Hurwitz

Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense dream might seem like something out of science fiction, but it would cost real dollars, the Congressional Budget Office says—about $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years, according to a report the federal agency released today.

Trump has held the idea dear since his 2024 campaign, when he made  “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY” to “PREVENT WORLD WAR III” one of his 20 core campaign promises. Later, he rebranded it as the “Golden Dome,” and about a dozen major American weapons manufacturers (and over 2,300 smaller companies) started to compete for the privilege of building a massive interceptor-missile system in the skies over the United States.

As I reported in 2024 and again in 2025, scientists have a lot of questions about how this will work. It would nominally be modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome system, which is designed to protect a very small geographic area (something the US does not have) from improvised missiles launched from within 40 miles (which is also not happening here).

Given those constraints, the administration quickly moved to include satellite-based missile interceptors on their vision board. Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein admitted to the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee in April that this Star Wars–esque setup might not be cost-effective, either.

Trump estimated last May that his Golden Dome would cost around $175 billion and be deployable by the end of his term in 2029. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, says that estimate was off by approximately one trillion, seventy-four billion dollars.

Even at that staggering cost—almost the entire proposed Pentagon budget this year—the system still wouldn’t block all missiles, the CBO wrote in their report. “The system could be overwhelmed by a full-scale attack mounted by a peer or near-peer adversary,” they said.

“It would not be an impenetrable shield or be able to fully counter a large attack of the sort that Russia or China might be able to launch,” the CBO wrote. “As a result, the strategic consequences of deploying an NMD system with the capacity considered here are unclear.”

Even if the Golden Dome never intercepts a single missile, companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril are likely to profit: they’re among 12 companies that have already been awarded $3.2 billion in Golden Dome contracts.

Shows Its Naked Political Bias

In Approving Alabama Gerrymander, the Roberts Court Shows Its Naked Political Bias

The justices tossed precedents to allow Republicans to dismantle yet another majority-Black district.

Ari Berman and Pema Levy

In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.

Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.

Since the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature has been pushing for a map that would give Black voters, who comprise 27 percent of the state’s population, the ability to elect their candidate of choice in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts. But after Callais, Republican leaders of the state legislature have gone further and vowed to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black districts, which would mean that the state that gave rise to the civil rights movement and was the home of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham church bombing, and Bloody Sunday in Selma would have no Black representation in Congress. The court’s Monday intervention puts the 6-1 map into effect, but leaves open the door for the legislature to attempt a 7-0 map, if not in time for this year’s elections, then in plenty of time for 2028.

Just last week, Chief Justice John Roberts gave a speech where he insisted the justices were not “political actors,” but the court’s last-minute intervention in favor of Alabama violates every norm the court claims to follow. “The rank disrespect of the Chief Justice coming out and warning people that they shouldn’t assume that the court is partisan tests basic credulity,” says Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “I don’t think you have to have a law degree to recognize that there’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

Part of what makes Monday’s order effectively instituting Alabama’s preferred map so brazen is that the court had already rejected it—twice. Just three years ago, the court tossed an Alabama map with one Black majority district in Allen v. Milligan, ordering Alabama to create a second majority-Black district. It then reaffirmed Allen in the run-up to the 2024 election when Alabama Republicans attempted to evade the court’s order. After the Supreme Court’s intervention, a three-judge panel sitting in a federal court in Alabama found in 2025 that the state’s new map not only violated the Voting Rights Act, but was also shaped by intentional racial discrimination, which violates the Constitution.

In last month’s Callais decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court had “not overruled” Allen, even though it had clearly sapped the decision of any meaning. For example, in Allen, the court affirmed its long-held methodology for evaluating vote dilution claims under the VRA, as well as Congress’ power under the 15th Amendment to prohibit discriminatory effects in redistricting. Callais discarded both of those promises. But overturning a decision with still-fresh ink on a highly political issue reeks of partisanship, so Alito crafted his opinion to give the majority plausible deniability that its sweeping ruling was anything but a mere tweak to current law.

Monday’s order puts the lie to Alito’s claim that Callais is a mere “update” that left Allen undisturbed. “Callais also insisted that this Court’s prior decision in Allen remains good law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent to Monday’s order. “These cases are, of course, Allen. So if Allen is good law anywhere, then it must be good law here.”

But Allen wasn’t the only decision the majority discarded Monday night. Just as galling, the order discarded that three-judge panel decision finding that Alabama had engaged in intentional racial discrimination when it refused to create a second majority-Black district in 2023. Instead of drawing a new majority-Black district following the Supreme Court’s Milligan ruling, the state legislature drew a seat that was only 40 percent Black and would have been easily carried by Trump. “We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature—faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a remedial plan that provides an additional opportunity district—responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the court wrote.

Alito’s opinion in Callais claimed that the Voting Rights Act and 15th Amendment still prohibit intentional discrimination in voting—in fact, Callais is silent on the type of 14th Amendment constitutional violation that the district court found in Alabama. Undeterred, the majority threw out the district court’s meticulous, 268-page opinion that had found deliberate discrimination against Black voters in Monday’s one-paragraph order without any basis for doing so in Callais.

“Nothing in the District Court’s Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this Court’s opinion in Callais,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “It said not a word about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims like the one that the District Court decided.”

“This is a pretty disrespectful end to a long case that produced a lot of evidence showing Alabama’s commitment not to abide by the terms of the Voting Rights Act,” Crayton said.

The use of Callais to wipe out a ruling on something Callais did not touch is particularly egregious. “There may be serious arguments for the Supreme Court to revisit the Alabama trial court’s decision as a normal appeal, via the regular appellate process,” Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School, wrote to Mother Jones shortly before the court released its Alabama order. “But an emergency order here with a drive-by ruling on an argument that wasn’t at issue in Callais would be the worst version of naked partisanship.” That’s exactly what happened.

As Levitt pointed out, the court’s method for tossing the finding of intentional discrimination—a single, unreasoned paragraph on the court’s emergency docket—is a middle finger to the hard work of the district court. It’s just one of many such recent examples, where the court majority weaponizes the oft-called shadow docket to vacate lower-court findings it dislikes. “Factual findings like discriminatory intent are reviewed for clear error, meaning that if a district court’s factual determination is ‘plausible’ in light of the full record,’ then that determination ‘must govern,'” Sotomayor reminded her colleagues Monday. But that was just another rule her colleagues threw aside.

It may seem like the GOP’s post-Callais push for districts is coming rather late in the year. Indeed, in Monday night’s decision unleashing Alabama Republicans, the court’s GOP appointees didn’t just wantonly discard precedent in Allen and Callais. There is also the so-called “Purcell principle,” which the justices have often invoked to urge lower courts not to intervene in voting-related disputes in the middle of an election season for fear of causing voter confusion. In December, the Supreme Court reinstated a Texas gerrymander that a lower court found had discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. They argued that it was too close to the election to stop it, even though the lower court decision was issued when the primary was 15 weeks away.

But on Monday they sided with Alabama just one week before the state’s primary, after mail voting had already begun. That’s the second time in recent days that the court has violated this norm to help Republicans. In Callais, they struck down the creation of a second-majority Black district in Louisiana just three weeks before the state’s primary, when mail voting was already underway, and 42,000 voters had cast ballots. Moreover, instead of waiting roughly thirty days to certify its decision, as is standard practice, the Court put Callais into effect immediately, which gave a green-light to Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s effort to suspend the state’s House primary to give the legislature time to eliminate one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.

The Callais decision has triggered a frantic rush by Southern states to undo decades of progress for Black voters and could ultimately lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. In a matter of days last week, Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-Black district. Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi are set to follow suit.

Republicans have regained a sizable advantage in the gerrymandering war started by Trump because of the Supreme Court’s decision to release the Callais opinion in the heat of the midterms. It’s clear that the court’s conservative justices have not had any second thoughts about what they’ve unleashed. The Republican appointees may claim to be apolitical, but they keep putting their foot on the gas to accelerate their party’s advantage, destroying whatever credibility the court still maintained in the process.

GOP ballroom funding concerns

Secret Service briefing fails to quiet GOP ballroom funding concerns

Senators left a closed-door lunch saying they still had unanswered questions.

By Jordain Carney and Katherine Tully-McManus

The White House is ramping up its sales pitch for security funding related to President Donald Trump’s ballroom project, but the administration is struggling for now to squash skepticism among Senate Republicans.

Secret Service Director Sean Curran met with GOP senators at a closed-door lunch Tuesday and walked through a $1 billion funding request for his agency, providing a handout to GOP senators breaking down the funding.

Several lawmakers said afterward they needed more details.

“There are still a lot of questions,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said after the lunch, summing up the feelings of many of his GOP colleagues.

The document given to Senate Republicans and obtained by POLITICO specifies that $220 million of the funding would go toward the ballroom project. That money, according to the document, would be used for “investments in the above and below ground hardening requirements of the East Wing Modernization Project,” including bulletproof glass and other security upgrades.

“Importantly, as the legislative text makes explicit, none of these funds will be used to support non-security improvements at the White House,” the document adds.

The rest of the $1 billion in funding would go toward several other priorities, including a new White House visitor screening facility, better protection for federal officials and Secret Service officer training.

The money is part of a larger immigration enforcement funding package that would provide more than $70 billion to immigration enforcement agencies. But it’s the Secret Service funding — and the portion that can go toward parts of the White House renovation project — that is creating a headache for GOP leaders as they try to quickly get the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted that most of the $1 billion is “going to be used for other purposes — training facilities or technology, lots of other things that law enforcement ... needs to ensure that they keep our president and other top officials safe.” He can lose three up GOP senators on the expected party-line vote, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a possible tie.

But so far Thune has several more than that who are saying they still have questions.

“I think they’ll probably have to come out with more detail,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a Trump ally. “Bottom line is, people want to be supportive. They want security for the president. But they want more detail.”

Kennedy said that he is drafting an amendment that would offset the Secret Service money by reducing the overall size of the reconciliation package from $72 billion to $71 billion. He brought up the idea during Tuesday’s closed-door lunch.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) indicated afterward that she still needed more details, adding that some of the requests “should have been in the president’s budget” and gone through the standard bipartisan spending process.

Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) also told reporters after the lunch that he needs more specifics from the White House.

Going into the lunch, Curtis noted that Trump has said the estimated $400 million ballroom would be privately financed: “It was one thing when private dollars were doing it. If you’re asking me for a billion dollars, I have some really hard questions.”

Iowa caucus

Buttigieg picks sides in Iowa

The former Transportation Secretary (and Iowa caucus winner) is backing Josh Turek over Zach Wahls for Senate.

By Adam Wren

Pete Buttigieg is picking sides in a heated Senate Democratic primary in the state that cemented his national political profile.

Buttigieg, who won the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2020, is backing state Rep. Josh Turek — a move that shows his willingness to wade into contested primaries ahead of another possible presidential campaign.

The endorsement comes shortly after Buttigieg’s former 2020 rival, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, visited earlier this week to campaign for Turek’s opponent, state Sen. Zach Wahls.

“We made history in Iowa in 2020 because our campaign went everywhere,” Buttigieg said in a statement shared first with POLITICO. “We connected with people in rural towns and the largest cities, focused on the issues that affect everyday life, and brought Democrats, Independents, and even Republicans into the fold. Josh Turek has taken that same proven approach to his campaign, and that’s why I know he will be successful. I believe Iowa can make history again in 2026 by sending Josh to the U.S. Senate.”

Buttigieg’s decision to pick sides in the once-early nominating state is a reversal for him. In March, he told POLITICO it was “not in my plans” when asked whether he would endorse in sharply contested primaries in his adopted home state of Michigan or in Iowa. And while it could help elevate Turek — and potentially give Buttigieg a valuable ally if he runs in 2028 — it carries some risk of alienating Wahls’ supporters in the hard-fought contest.

It’s not a shock, however. Turek’s campaign in Iowa marks something of a reunion for Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign operation: his former national press secretary Chris Meagher is a Turek adviser, while Buttigieg’s former senior adviser Lis Smith and former aide Matt Corridoni are both advisers to The Bench, a new political group that’s been choosing sides in other Democratic primaries.

It’s not clear whether Iowa will have anywhere near the outsized role it historically held in the Democratic nomination process next time around. A calamitous caucus-night vote count and app breakdown played a role in Democrats bumping Iowa from the front of the primary line in 2024. Iowa Democrats are trying to get back in the first four states, along with a bevy of other states. Democrats are expected to choose their nominating order later this year.

Buttigieg joins Sens. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire in Turek’s corner — as well as former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the last Democrat to represent the state in the Senate.

“I am deeply honored to have Pete’s support in this race,” Turek said in a statement. “His unique ability to connect with Iowans who feel forgotten and left behind is exactly why he won the caucuses in 2020, and it’s that same approach that will help us win Senator Harkin’s seat back.”

Terrifying prospect

Trump-Xi summit raises a terrifying prospect for America and Europe: Chinese cars

The question is when, not if, U.S. and European auto markets will open up to Chinese EV investment.

By Zack Colman, Jordyn Dahl, Sara Schonhardt and Charlie Cooper

The walls that once kept Chinese electric vehicles out of the western economies are quickly developing some major cracks.

That’s made the U.S. auto industry and lawmakers nervous that President Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing for a Thursday summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping could accelerate the entry of cheap EVs, wiping out the nascent U.S. EV sector at a time when fuel costs are soaring because of the U.S. war against Iran and rising car prices are souring public sentiment.

“The only thing that terrifies me is BYD,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), whose family built a car dealership company before he entered Congress, said last week at an event in Washington. “The fact that it’s so inexpensive would destroy every other car company’s investment in electric vehicles.”

For now, the U.S. market is off limits to Chinese EVs due to a combination of national security regulations and a 100 percent tariff. A flurry of new legislation backed by the top auto lobbying organization and manufacturers along with bipartisan warnings from Congress to Trump to avoid deals are evidence that U.S. automakers are in a panic over the potential entry of Chinese EVs or manufacturing investment.

“They’re absolutely more than worried — they’re scared stiff,” said Michael Dunne, chief executive officer of Dunne Insights, an automotive consultancy. “Imagine if the Chinese come in with a $25,000 EV. That could catch like wildfire.”

While Cabinet officials insist protecting the auto sector is non-negotiable in the talks at this week’s summit, Trump himself has opened the door to Chinese investment.

“If they want to come in and build the plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbors, that’s great,” Trump told the Detroit Economic Club in January. “I love that. Let China come in, let Japan come in. They are and they’ll be building plants, but they’re using our labor.”

Lawmakers have focused on national security concerns to dissuade Americans from fantasizing about Chinese vehicles they can’t buy. They also have championed protecting the nation’s industrial core and the jobs they represent, pointing to European struggles to save auto jobs from Chinese competitors.

Michigan Reps. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat, and John Moolenaar, a Republican, co-sponsored legislation Monday to codify bans on Chinese models because of software and hardware that collect personal information like location data. Democratic Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno — who also made his fortune from car dealerships — introduced a version in the Senate, S. 2040, last month.

“I think we all understand the desire for a cheap car, just like I understand my nieces and nephews wanting to use TikTok and not caring that their data goes back to Beijing,” Slotkin said at a recent Washington event. “We have to care as leaders, even when people are laser-focused just on cost.”

Unpredictable Trump

Trump’s proclivity for splashy trade announcements and his previous stance on the Chinese car companies could set the stage for the U.S. to lower the barriers that have so far closed the country off to their EVs. For China, there is no bigger prize than accessing the U.S. market — a goal that could come into play in Trump’s long pursuit of an elusive trade deal with the world’s second-largest economy.

That backdrop has raised anxiety in the U.S. automotive sector that customers could be drawn to the cheaper Chinese vehicles, particularly as U.S. drivers contend with gasoline prices at four-year highs and Republicans’ repeal of buyers’ incentives last year.

Chinese EV-maker BYD markets its Seagull model at $7,800 in China, far less than the $29,000 Chevy Bolt, the cheapest EV available in the United States. Praise from mainstream news outlets like the Wall Street Journal has also helped dispel the perception that Chinese models are cheap knock-offs, and videos on TikTok are fanning the flames by appealing directly to American consumers.

The White House, in a statement, rejected the notion that it would allow any technology that would threaten U.S. national security.

“While the Administration is always seeking more investment into America’s industrial resurgence, any notion that we would ever compromise our national security is baseless and false,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement.

Automakers speaking to POLITICO expressed fears that Chinese EV brands could pose an existential threat to their business and impose security risks on American consumers. Some experts also said the entry of Chinese firms could undercut U.S. efforts to grow its EV sector — as they did in Europe, where they quickly gobbled up market share.

But consumer interest remains significant despite those warnings. Thirty-eight percent of Americans would consider buying a Chinese vehicle if they were available, compared with 39 percent who would not, according to a February survey by Cox Automotive, Inc.

Making inroads in Europe and Canada

The U.S. firewall on Chinese EVs remains in place, however, as other countries are lowering theirs. Canada reversed protectionist trade measures earlier this year to embrace new Chinese EV imports — those first shipments landed this week. Under the terms Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to, Canada will import enough Chinese cars to comprise 20 percent of its EV market.

Canada’s Industry Minister Mélanie Joly told POLITICO last week the joint ventures with Chinese EV companies could help boost Canadian manufacturing productivity.

In Europe, Chinese models grabbed their highest share ever late last year, putting German automakers on edge. Manufacturing investment has followed suit: On Friday, Dutch-based Stellantis announced a deal to produce electric vehicles with Chinese firm Leapmotor at two sites in Spain.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government has resisted tariffs, which enabled cheaper Chinese models to get a sizable foothold in the market. Chinese cars represented 4.9 percent of new car registrations in the U.K. in 2024, 9.7 percent in 2025 and 14.6 percent in the first four months of 2026, according to figures shared by the U.K. automobile industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

The U.K. experience may be instructive for Trump. In a sign of the political ramifications of an open-door policy, the increasingly common sight of a BYD or Jaecoo (the U.K.’s best-selling car in March) on British streets has sparked a backlash among Trump-aligned, right-wing opposition to Starmer’s Labour Party.

Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party, currently topping opinion polls, has threatened to erect trade barriers to protect domestic manufacturing.

“British car makers currently don’t stand a chance against unfair Chinese competition,” Reform’s economy spokesperson Robert Jenrick said last month, raising the prospect of tariffs and quotas should his party win power.

A U.K. government spokesperson said the country was “open to global investment into the sector, including from China” and that ministers would “continue to engage closely with industry to ensure our approach reflects the sector’s and the U.K.’s national interests.” The spokesperson responded anonymously as per typical U.K. government procedure when asked for comment.

Automakers look for lessons abroad

U.S. automakers and their allies have warned of European automakers’ struggles to beat cut-rate Chinese pricing. They have claimed Chinese promises to invest in manufacturing are vaporware, arguing they would cut out U.S. suppliers to source from supply chains that rely on lower-cost foreign labor.

A U.S. auto executive who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations said three senior administration officials insisted the auto sector would not be on the negotiating table for Trump’s visit. That the U.S. industry and its boosters have rallied their Washington allies for this week’s summit is an indication that they are anxious about any unscripted dialogue between Trump and Xi.

“I hope it isn’t on the agenda. But we are also doing everything we possibly can to keep it off the agenda,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of U.S.-based companies. “There’s a great deal of concern about this one.”

Paul’s organization’s 54,000 members have spent weeks urging their congressional representatives to amplify that message, aiming to snuff out even the whiff of a deal that would give Chinese automakers access to the U.S. market.

Chinese investment was a “Trojan horse” for the auto sector, which he said accounts for one in nine U.S. manufacturing jobs. Chinese automakers’ entry would kill the “green shoots” of the burgeoning U.S. EV fleet, such as Ford’s forthcoming midsize Ranchero EV pickup targeted for $30,000 and the reintroduction of the Chevy Bolt.

Few automakers and analysts see Trump reversing course to allow imports to the U.S., which they say would undermine his America First trade policy to bring manufacturing back to the country. And for now, some experts say the Chinese sector may be wary of stirring up opposition that undercuts its long-term growth.

“I don’t think Chinese automakers are going to take the risk, even if they have the opportunity,” said Jacob Gunter at MERICS, a German research organization focused on China, adding that European automakers reeling at home from Chinese competition can continue to have confidence the U.S. market will be ringfenced for the near future.

But one foreign auto executive said Trump’s penchant for dealmaking and splashy announcements was worrisome. Imports are not the biggest concern, the person said, rather, it’s the promise of investment in U.S. states that could bring jobs and, in Trump’s mind, votes. Such a deal would likely see financial markets ding Western companies because it would raise the prospects of future investment, even if it doesn’t materialize before Trump leaves office.

“It would be a worry. Where the Chinese go, legacy brands die,” said an executive at a second global automaker.

That approach underlies BYD’s broader strategy. Stella Li, the company’s executive vice president, told the audience at London’s International Energy Week the company wants to “localize our manufacturing capacity” in hopes that Europeans think of it as one of their own within three years.

U.S. manufacturers are also taking note. Ford has reportedly pitched European joint ventures with Geely, China’s second-leading EV producer — though it is unclear whether any such partnership would involve a U.S.-focused strategy.

Chinese automakers have set their sights on the U.S. BYD has invested in its own logistics with a fleet of eight container ships that can each carry up to 9,000 vehicles, making it easy to redirect exports to the U.S. as soon as the barriers crumble.

The Chinese industry’s overcapacity is largely due to ramping up of production to address the U.S. market, said Matthias Schmidt, a long-time car analyst in Europe. Meanwhile, a costly price war in China has undercut profits, following the EU move to slap duties on made-in-China electric vehicles in an effort to stop them from flooding the market.

Those dynamics are manifesting at a sensitive time in the U.S., where Trump faces worsening poll numbers in large part due to rising costs. The surge in production and availability of cheap, tech-savvy cars come at a time when Americans have less ability to afford new vehicles, making the Chinese an alluring option.

“The Chinese are very good at infiltrating, influencing and persuasion,” said Rachel McCleery, executive director of the Coalition for Reimagined Mobility at Securing America’s Future Energy, a nonprofit. “They’re doing what they do best when it comes to getting people on board with the product they have to offer that they don’t currently have market access to offer.”

For the allies of the U.S. carmakers, though, the message to Trump is simple: “Find something else to give on,” Slotkin said. “Don’t give away the farm just to make a deal.”