“Trump’s team is putting “maximum pressure on everywhere where redistricting is an option and it could provide a good return on investment,” according to a person familiar with the team’s thinking and granted anonymity to describe it.
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a handful of Democratic-leaning states — including California — handed mapmaking power to independent commissions instead of leaving it in the hands of the state legislatures. States where Democrats retain the power to gerrymander, like Illinois and Maryland, have very little room to draw more advantageous maps than their current ones.”
“Republican Gov. Mike Braun remained noncommittal about a mid-decade redistricting push following his meeting with Vice President JD Vance in Indiana on Thursday.
“We covered a wide array of topics. We listened,” Braun told reporters in response to a question about whether an agreement was reached.
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Vance’s visit to the state comes amid a push from President Donald Trump’s team to redraw maps “everywhere where redistricting is an option.” A plan in Texas is already well underway, where Republican lawmakers drew a new map that could net Republicans as many as five Republican-leaning seats, and Democrats in the Lone Star state fled in a last-ditch effort to stop the map from passing.”
The U.S. created a world based on relatively free trade. Most benefited from it. Now Trump is pulling us back from that world, and most people, including most Americans, will be hurt by that.
“With a series of short-sighted tariff maneuvers, the president has effectively told Toyota (and other Japanese carmakers) that it should do more of its manufacturing in Japan and stop trying to create jobs in America.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced a new trade deal with Japan that will include a 15 percent tariff on Japanese goods, including imported cars. The details of the deal remain somewhat vague, but that’s a significant discount compared to the 25 percent tariff the administration has imposed on cars imported from everywhere else.
The reduced tariffs for Japanese cars are significant because of how that provision interacts with the Trump administration’s other trade policies that are aimed at making it more expensive to manufacture cars in the United States. The president has imposed a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum (both of which are essential for automakers) and has slapped a 25 percent tariff on imported cars and car parts. Those tariffs are already dinging the profits of American carmakers—General Motors reportedly lost more than $1 billion in the second quarter of the year—and auto industry experts say they will raise prices, reduce demand for new cars, and generally make American cars less globally competitive.
In short, the Trump administration is offering an incentive to import finished cars from Japan, while making it more expensive to buy the stuff you need to build cars in America.
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Ultimately, the problem here is not the specific tariff rates the Trump administration is seeking to charge on steel, car parts, or cars imported from Japan or Mexico. (Those rates are likely to change anyway, if the past few months of the trade war are any indication.)
No, the real problem here is the Trump administration’s belief that it can use tariffs to shape the global trading system toward contradicting goals with no tradeoffs or distortions. In reality, each new tariff move causes both. The market responds to incentives, and right now, the Trump administration is creating a set of incentives that will raise costs for American manufacturers while driving investors overseas.”
“Abrego Garcia is accused of some unsavory actions—apart from the vague allegations of trafficking and gang membership, his wife filed for a temporary order of protection against him in 2021, which she later withdrew.
But importantly, he was never convicted of any of these things; before he was deported to a maximum security prison in Central America, he had not been charged with them, either.
Hanid Ortiz, meanwhile, was arrested, tried, and convicted of three murders, and yet the Trump administration used hundreds of people as bargaining chips, in part, to get him released and back on American streets. Trump seems to care much more about someone’s immigration status than the actual danger they pose.”
Israel is committing war crimes. However horrible a terrorist organization is, whatever that organization will or will not agree to, holding a civilian population hostage is not justifiable. The U.S. makes mistakes in its wars, but has not tried the mass starvation of civilians.
“A new report by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found that homicides are significantly down in major cities across the country compared to last year, and the Trump administration is claiming its mass deportation program is part of the reason.
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First, one must begin by congratulating the Trump administration on its sudden, enthusiastic embrace of crime statistics. Trump and his reelection campaign repeatedly claimed in 2024 that crime was spiking even though it had been generally dropping since 2022.
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“there were issues with the FBI crime data, which were eventually revised, but the data generally jibed with what other public safety researchers were reporting: that crime in 2024 was continuing to go down.
Now that those numbers are politically useful, the Trump administration and its allies would like to take a very early victory lap.
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there is no evidence yet of any deterrent effect, or that crime is falling now because of the administration’s mass deportation program, rather than for whatever reason it was falling in the past. Quantifying the effects of laws and law enforcement—and attempting to attribute causation to dips and spikes in crime—is a notoriously tricky problem in criminal justice research, and it usually takes years to collect and analyze the data.
On its face, the claim that Trump’s immigration enforcement is driving down crime runs into the problem that most of the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals. About 60 percent of people arrested by ICE between January and June had no criminal record. In fact, the Trump administration’s quotas for arrests and deportations have forced ICE and DHS to stop prioritizing investigations of criminal networks and serious offenders.
There may well be an incapacitative effect on crime from the scale of the Trump administration’s mass deportations, but even then, it would likely be statistically minor. Most studies that have attempted to quantify how much the “mass incarceration” era contributed to the national drop in crime that began in the mid-’90s have pegged it somewhere between single digits and 25 percent. And that represented the largest buildup of prisons and prison populations in U.S. history.
Crime also fell during the Obama administration and the second half of the Biden administration, but no one suggested that Joe Biden’s executive order banning police chokeholds or Barack Obama’s lax marijuana enforcement were responsible for safer cities.”