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Texas GOP Set to Trigger National Redistricting Battle With Map Vote
Lawyer Interview |
2025/08/18 07:43
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The first domino in a growing national redistricting battle is likely to fall Wednesday as the Republican-controlled Texas legislature is expected to pass a new congressional map creating five new winnable seats for the GOP.
The vote follows prodding by President Donald Trump, eager to stave off a midterm defeat that would deprive his party of control of the House of Representatives, and weeks of delays after dozens of Texas Democratic state lawmakers fled the state in protest. Some Democrats returned Monday, only to be assigned round-the-clock police escorts to ensure their attendance at Wednesday’s session. Those who refused to be monitored were confined to the House floor, where they protested on a livestream Tuesday night.
Furious national Democrats have vowed payback for the Texas map, with California’s legislature poised to approve new maps adding more Democratic-friendly seats later this week. The map would still need to be approved by that state’s voters in November.
Normally, states redraw maps once a decade with new census figures. But Trump is lobbying other conservative-controlled states like Indiana and Missouri to also try to squeeze new GOP-friendly seats out of their maps as his party prepares for a difficult midterm election next year.
In Texas, Democrats spent the day before the vote continuing to draw attention to the extraordinary lengths the Republicans who run the legislature were going to ensure it takes place. Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier started it when she refused to sign what Democrats called the “permission slip” needed to leave the House chamber, a half-page form allowing Department of Public Safety troopers to follow them. She spent Monday night and Tuesday on the House floor, where she set up a livestream while her Democratic colleagues outside had plainclothes officers following them to their offices and homes.
Dallas-area Rep. Linda Garcia said she drove three hours home from Austin with an officer following her. When she went grocery shopping, he went down every aisle with her, pretending to shop, she said. As she spoke to The Associated Press by phone, two unmarked cars with officers inside were parked outside her home.
“It’s a weird feeling,” she said. “The only way to explain the entire process is: It’s like I’m in a movie.”
The trooper assignments, ordered by Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows, was another escalation of a redistricting battle that has widened across the country. Trump is pushing GOP state officials to tilt the map for the 2026 midterms more in his favor to preserve the GOP’s slim House majority, and Democrats nationally have rallied around efforts to retaliate.
House Minority Leader Gene Wu, from Houston, and state Rep. Vince Perez, of El Paso, stayed overnight with Collier, who represents a minority-majority district in Fort Worth.
On Tuesday, more Democrats returned to the Capitol to tear up the slips they had signed and stay on the House floor, which has a lounge and restrooms for members.
Dallas-area Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez called their protest a “slumber party for democracy,” and she said Democrats were holding strategy sessions on the floor.
“We are not criminals,” Houston Rep. Penny Morales Shaw said.
Collier said having officers shadow her was an attack on her dignity and an attempt to control her movements.
Burrows brushed off Collier’s protest, saying he was focused on important issues, such as providing property tax relief and responding to last month’s deadly floods. His statement Tuesday morning did not mention redistricting, and his office did not immediately respond to other Democrats joining Collier.
“Rep. Collier’s choice to stay and not sign the permission slip is well within her rights under the House Rules,” Burrows said.
Under those rules, until Wednesday’s scheduled vote, the chamber’s doors are locked, and no member can leave “without the written permission of the speaker.”
To do business Wednesday, 100 of 150 House members must be present. The GOP plan is designed to send five additional Republicans from Texas to the U.S. House. Texas Democrats returned to Austin after Democrats in California launched an effort to redraw their state’s districts to take five seats from Republicans.
Democrats also said they were returning because they expect to challenge the new maps in court. |
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Trump’s nominee to oversee jobs, inflation data faces shower of criticism
Lawyer Interview |
2025/08/11 07:11
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The director of the agency that produces the nation’s jobs and inflation data is typically a mild-mannered technocrat, often with extensive experience in statistical agencies, with little public profile.
But like so much in President Donald Trump’s second administration, this time is different.
Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to be the next commissioner at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s nomination was quickly met with a cascade of criticism from other economists, from across the political spectrum.
His selection threatens to bring a new level of politicization to what for decades has been a nonpartisan agency widely accepted as a producer of reliable measures of the nation’s economic health. While many former Labor Department officials say it it unlikely Antoni will be able to distort or alter the data, particularly in the short run, he could change the currently dry-as-dust way it is presented.
Antoni was nominated by Trump after the BLS released a jobs report Aug. 1 that showed that hiring had weakened in July and was much lower in May and June than the agency had previously reported. Trump, without evidence, charged that the data had been “rigged” for political reasons and fired the then-BLS chair, Erika McEntarfer, much to the dismay of many within the agency.
Antoni has been a vocal critic of the government’s jobs data in frequent appearances on podcasts and cable TV. His partisan commentary is unusual for someone who may end up leading the BLS.
For instance, on Aug. 4 — a week before he was nominated — Antoni said in an interview on Fox News Digital that the Labor Department should stop publishing the monthly jobs reports until its data collection processes improve, and rely on quarterly data based on actual employment filings with state unemployment offices.
The monthly employment reports are probably the closest-watched economic data on Wall Street, and can frequently cause swings in stock prices.
When asked at Tuesday’s White House briefing whether the jobs report would continue to be released, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration hoped it would be.
“I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt also defended Antoni’s nomination, calling him an “economic expert” who has testified before Congress and adding that, “the president trusts him to lead this important department.”
Yet Antoni’s TV and podcast appearances have created more of a portrait of a conservative ideologue, instead of a careful economist who considers tradeoffs and prioritizes getting the math correct.
“There’s just nothing in his writing or his resume to suggest that he’s qualified for the position, besides that he is always manipulating the data to favor Trump in some way,” said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.
Antoni wrongly claimed in the last year of Biden’s presidency that the economy had been in recession since 2022; called on the entire Federal Reserve board to be fired for not earning a profit on its Treasury securities holdings; and posted a chart on social media that conflated timelines to suggest inflation was headed to 15%.
His argument that the U.S. was in a recession rested on a vastly exaggerated measure of housing inflation, based on newly-purchased home prices, to artificially make the nation’s gross domestic product appear smaller than it was.
“This is actually maybe the worst Antoni content I’ve seen yet,” Alan Cole of the center-right Tax Foundation said on social media, referring to his recession claim.
On a 2024 podcast, Antoni wanted to sunset Social Security payments for workers paying into the system, saying that “you’ll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes but never actually receive any of those benefits.” As head of the BLS, Antoni would oversee the release of the consumer price index by which Social Security payments are adjusted for inflation.
Many economists share, to some degree, Antoni’s concerns that the government’s jobs data has flaws and is threatened by trends such as declining response rates to its surveys. The drop has made the jobs figures more volatile, though not necessarily less accurate over time.
“The stock market moves clearly based on these job numbers, and so people with skin in the game think it’s telling them something about the future of their investments,” Albrecht said. “Could it be improved? Absolutely.”
Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland who was BLS Commissioner under President Bill Clinton, said updating the jobs report’s methods would require at least some initial investment.
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US completes deportation of 8 men to South Sudan after weeks of legal wrangling
Lawyer Interview |
2025/07/06 10:21
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Eight men deported from the United States in May and held under guard for weeks at an American military base in the African nation of Djibouti while their legal challenges played out in court have now reached the Trump administration’s intended destination, war-torn South Sudan, a country the State Department advises against travel to due to “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”
The immigrants from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan arrived in South Sudan on Friday after a federal judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to relocate them in a case that had gone to the Supreme Court, which had permitted their removal from the U.S. Administration officials said the men had been convicted of violent crimes in the U.S.
“This was a win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people,” said Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin in a statement Saturday announcing the men’s arrival in South Sudan, a chaotic country in danger once more of collapsing into civil war.
The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the transfer of the men who had been put on a flight in May bound for South Sudan. That meant that the South Sudan transfer could be completed after the flight was detoured to a base in Djibouti, where they men were held in a converted shipping container. The flight was detoured after a federal judge found the administration had violated his order by failing to allow the men a chance to challenge the removal.
The court’s conservative majority had ruled in June that immigration officials could quickly deport people to third countries. The majority halted an order that had allowed immigrants to challenge any removals to countries outside their homeland where they could be in danger.
A flurry of court hearings on Independence Day resulted a temporary hold on the deportations while a judge evaluated a last-ditch appeal by the men’s before the judge decided he was powerless to halt their removals and that the person best positioned to rule on the request was a Boston judge whose rulings led to the initial halt of the administration’s effort to begin deportations to South Sudan.
By Friday evening, that judge had issued a brief ruling concluding the Supreme Court had tied his hands.
The men had final orders of removal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said. Authorities have reached agreements with other countries to house immigrants if authorities cannot quickly send them back to their homelands.
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Getty Images and Stability AI clash in UK copyright trial testing AI's future
Lawyer Interview |
2025/06/10 11:05
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Getty Images is facing off against artificial intelligence company Stability AI in a London courtroom for the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry.
Opening arguments before a judge at the British High Court began on Monday. The trial could last for three weeks.
Stability, based in London, owns a widely used AI image-making tool that sparked enthusiasm for the instant creation of AI artwork and photorealistic images upon its release in August 2022. OpenAI introduced its surprise hit chatbot ChatGPT three months later.
Seattle-based Getty has argued that the development of the AI image maker, called Stable Diffusion, involved “brazen infringement” of Getty’s photography collection “on a staggering scale.”
Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images. Getty was among the first to challenge those practices when it filed copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States and the United Kingdom in early 2023.
“What Stability did was inappropriate,” Getty CEO Craig Peters told The Associated Press in 2023. He said creators of intellectual property should be asked for permission before their works are fed into AI systems rather than having to participate in an “opt-out regime.”
Getty’s legal team told the court Monday that its position is that the case isn’t a battle between the creative and technology industries and that the two can still work together in “synergistic harmony” because licensing creative works is critical to AI’s success.
“The problem is when AI companies such as Stability AI want to use those works without payment,” Getty’s trial lawyer, Lindsay Lane, said.
She said the case was about “straightforward enforcement of intellectual property rights,” including copyright, trademark and database rights.
Getty Images “recognizes that the AI industry is a force for good but that doesn’t justify those developing AI models to ride roughshod over intellectual property rights,” Lane said.
Stability AI had a “voracious appetite” for images to train its AI model, but the company was “completely indifferent to the nature of those works,” Lane said.
Stability didn’t care if images were protected by copyright, had watermarks, were not safe for work or were pornographic and just wanted to get its model to the market as soon as possible, Lane said.
“This trial is the day of reckoning for that approach,” she said.
Stability has argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the training of the AI model technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon.
The judge’s decision is unlikely to give the AI industry what it most wants, which is expanded copyright exemptions for AI training, said Ben Milloy, a senior associate at UK law firm Fladgate, which is not involved in the case.
But it could “strengthen the hand of either party – rights holders or AI developers – in the context of the commercial negotiations for content licensing deals that are currently playing out worldwide,” Milloy said.
In the years after introducing its open-source technology, Stability confronted challenges in capitalizing on the popularity of the tool, battling lawsuits, misuse and other business problems.
Stable Diffusion’s roots trace back to Germany, where computer scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich worked with the New York-based tech company Runway to develop the original algorithms. The university researchers credited Stability AI for providing the servers that trained the models, which require large amounts of computing power.
Stability later blamed Runway for releasing an early version of Stable Diffusion that was used to produce abusive sexual images, but also said it would have exclusive control of more recent versions of the AI model.
Stability last year announced what it described as a “significant” infusion of money from new investors including Facebook’s former president Sean Parker, who is now chair of Stability’s board. Parker also has experience in intellectual property disputes as the co-founder of online music company Napster, which temporarily shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and popular rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations.
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Trump formally asks Congress to claw back approved spending targeted by DOGE
Lawyer Interview |
2025/06/02 08:05
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The White House on Tuesday officially asked Congress to claw back $9.4 billion in already approved spending, taking funding away from programs targeted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
It’s a process known as “rescission,” which requires President Donald Trump to get approval from Congress to return money that had previously been appropriated. Trump’s aides say the funding cuts target programs that promote liberal ideologies.
The request, if it passes the House and Senate, would formally enshrine many of the spending cuts and freezes sought by DOGE. It comes at a time when Musk is extremely unhappy with the tax cut and spending plan making its way through Congress, calling it on Tuesday a “disgusting abomination” for increasing the federal deficit.
White House budget director Russ Vought said more rescission packages and other efforts to cut spending could follow if the current effort succeeds.
“We are certainly willing and able to send up additional packages if the congressional will is there,” Vought told reporters.
Here’s what to know about the rescissions request:
Will the rescissions make a dent in the national debt?
The request to Congress is unlikely to meaningfully change the troublesome increase in the U.S. national debt. Tax revenues have been insufficient to cover the growing costs of Social Security, Medicare and other programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the government is on track to spend roughly $7 trillion this year, with the rescission request equaling just 0.1% of that total.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at Tuesday’s briefing that Vought — a “well-respected fiscal hawk,” she called him — would continue to cut spending, hinting that there could be additional efforts to return funds.
“He has tools at his disposal to produce even more savings,” Leavitt said.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus, among the chamber’s most conservative lawmakers, said they would like to see additional rescission packages from the administration.
“We will support as many more rescissions packages the White House can send us in the coming weeks and months,” the group said in a press release. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda.”
Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, gave the package a less optimistic greeting.
“Despite this fast track, the Senate Appropriations Committee will carefully review the rescissions package and examine the potential consequences of these rescissions on global health, national security, emergency communications in rural communities, and public radio and television stations,” the Maine lawmaker said in a statement.
Vought said he can send up additional rescissions at the end of the fiscal year in September “and if Congress does not act on it, that funding expires.”
“It’s one of the reasons why we are not putting all of our expectations in a typical rescissions process,” he added.
What programs are targeted by the rescissions?
A spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview some of the items that would lose funding, said that $8.3 billion was being cut from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. NPR and PBS would also lose federal funding, as would the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR.
The spokesperson listed specific programs that the Trump administration considered wasteful, including $750,000 to reduce xenophobia in Venezuela, $67,000 for feeding insect powder to children in Madagascar and $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies and condoms in Zambia.
Is the rescissions package likely to get passed?
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., complimented the planned cuts and pledged to pass them.
“This rescissions package reflects many of DOGE’s findings and is one of the many legislative tools Republicans are using to restore fiscal sanity,” Johnson said. “Congress will continue working closely with the White House to codify these recommendations, and the House will bring the package to the floor as quickly as possible.”
Members of the House Freedom Caucus, among the chamber’s most conservative lawmakers, said they would like to see additional rescission packages from the administration.
“We will support as many more rescissions packages the White House can send us in the coming weeks and months,” the group said in a press release. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda.”
Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, gave the package a less optimistic greeting.
“Despite this fast track, the Senate Appropriations Committee will carefully review the rescissions package and examine the potential consequences of these rescissions on global health, national security, emergency communications in rural communities, and public radio and television stations,” the Maine lawmaker said in a statement. |
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Court sides with the FDA in its dispute over sweet-flavored vaping products
Lawyer Interview |
2025/04/04 11:04
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The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled for the Food and Drug Administration in its crackdown on sweet-flavored vaping products following a surge in teen electronic cigarette use.
But the justices’ unanimous decision throwing out a federal appeals court ruling is not the final word in the case, and the FDA could change its approach now that President Donald Trump has promised to “save” vaping.
The high court ruled that the FDA, during President Joe Biden’s administration, did not violate federal law when it denied an application from Dallas-based company Triton Distribution to sell e-juices like “Jimmy The Juice Man in Peachy Strawberry” and “Suicide Bunny Mother’s Milk and Cookies.” The products are heated by an e-cigarette to create an inhalable aerosol.
Yolonda Richardson, president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, called the decision “a major victory for the health of America’s kids and efforts to protect them from the flavored e-cigarettes that have fueled a youth nicotine addiction crisis.”
The FDA has rejected applications for more than a million nicotine products formulated to taste like fruit, dessert or candy because their makers couldn’t show that flavored vapes had a net public benefit, as required by law.
It has approved some tobacco-flavored vapes, and recently it allowed its first menthol-flavored e-cigarettes for adult smokers after the company provided data showing the product was more helpful in quitting.
But the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Triton, agreeing that the FDA changed its standards with little warning in violation of federal law.
While mainly ruling for the FDA on Wednesday, the Supreme Court noted that the agency had said the company’s marketing plan would be an important factor in evaluating its application. But it ultimately did not consider the marketing plan, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court.
Attorney Eric Heyer, who represented the company, expressed disappointment with the ruling but said Triton believes “in the great harm reduction potential” of the products and plans to continue litigation.
The appeals court was ordered to consider if the failure to do so is an important mistake that might still lead to a decision in Triton’s favor.
The FDA has so far not instituted changes to its polices on vaping. But on Tuesday, the FDA’s top tobacco regulator, Brian King, was removed from his post amid sweeping cuts to the federal health workforce that have cleared out many of the nation’s leading health experts. King oversaw hundreds of warning letters issued to companies that make, sell and distribute flavored vapes.
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