Politics
In Texas case, it’s politics vs. race at the Supreme Court, with control of Congress at stake
WASHINGTON — The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court turns on a question that often divides judges: Were the voting districts drawn based on politics, or race?
The answer, likely to come in a few days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.
Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees appeals from Texas, put a temporary hold on a judicial ruling that branded the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racial gerrymander.”
The state’s lawyers asked for a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have a Dec. 8 deadline to file for election.
They said the judges violated the so-called Purcell principle by making major changes in the election map “midway through the candidate filing period,” and that alone calls for blocking it.
Texas Republicans have reason to be confident the court’s conservative majority will side with them.
“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote for a 6-3 majority last year in a South Carolina case.
That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters in or out of newly drawn congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.
In 2019, the conservatives upheld partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that drawing election districts is a “political question” left to states and their lawmakers, not judges.
All the justices — conservative and liberal — say drawing districts based on the race of the voters violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But the conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.
They also looked poised to restrict the reach of the Voting Rights Act in a pending case from Louisiana.
For decades, the civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their choice.”
The Trump administration joined in support of Louisiana’s Republicans in October and claimed the voting rights law has been “deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” that should be ended.
If so, election law experts warned that Republican-led states across the South could erase the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats who serve in Congress.
The Texas mid-decade redistricting case did not look to trigger a major legal clash because the partisan motives were so obvious.
In July, President Trump called for Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts in order to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.
At stake was control of the closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.
Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and by the end of August, he signed into law a map with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.
But last week federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared to be unconstitutional.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”
This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.
She said the Trump administration views these as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.
The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for the special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.
Voting rights advocates saw a violation.
“They said their aim was to get rid of the coalition districts. And to do so, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project.
Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” in believing these coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on her advice as basis for redrawing its election map.
He was joined by a second district judge in putting the new map on hold and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that had been drawn by the same Texas Republicans.
The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee on the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas.”
The “obvious reason for the 2025 redistricting, of course, is partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”
Most federal cases go before a district judge, and they may be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then the Supreme Court.
Election-related cases are different. A three-judge panel weighs the facts and issues a ruling, which then goes directly to the Supreme Court to be affirmed or reversed.
Late Friday, Texas attorneys filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to put on hold the decision by Brown.
The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal noted that Texas is not alone in pursuing a political advantage by redrawing its election maps.
“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset the new Texas districts, despite Democrats already controlling 43 out of 52 of California’s congressional seats,” they said.
They argued that the “last-minute disruption to state election procedures — and resulting candidate and voter confusion —demonstrates” the need to block the lower court ruling.
Election law experts question that claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
The state opted for a fast-track, mid-decade redistricting at the behest of Trump.
On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should deny it.
“The election is over a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’ congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.
“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts on account of their racial composition,” he said, and the judges heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.
In recent election disputes, however, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from new judicial rulings that came too close to the election.
Granting a stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP friendly map for the 2026 election.
The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal questions early next year.
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The Justice Department is turning to former Trump attorney Joeseph diGenova to spearhead a probe into ex-CIA Director John Brennan and others over the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, as the department reshuffles leadership of the sprawling inquiry.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has tapped diGenova to serve as counsel overseeing the matter, according to a New York Times report, putting a former Trump attorney in a key role in the high-profile probe. A federal grand jury seated in Miami has been impaneled since late last year.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
DOJ ACTIVELY PREPARING TO ISSUE GRAND JURY SUBPOENAS RELATING TO JOHN BRENNAN INVESTIGATION: SOURCES
Joseph diGenova represented President Donald Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, has repeatedly accused Brennan of misconduct tied to the origins of the Russia probe—allegations that have not resulted in criminal charges.
He also said in a 2018 appearance on Fox News that Brennan colluded with the FBI and DOJ to frame Trump.
The origins of the Russia investigation have been the subject of ongoing scrutiny by Trump allies, who have argued that intelligence and law enforcement officials improperly launched the probe.
BRENNAN INDICTMENT COULD COME WITHIN ‘WEEKS’ AS PROSECUTORS REQUEST OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPTS
Joseph diGenova has previously said that ex-CIA chief John Brennan colluded with the FBI and DOJ to frame Trump. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
DiGenova’s appointment follows the ouster of Maria Medetis Long, a national security prosecutor in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office. She had been overseeing the inquiry, including a false statements probe related to Brennan and broader conspiracy-related investigations.
As the investigation continues, federal investigators have issued subpoenas seeking information related to intelligence assessments of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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John Brennan has denied any wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation. (William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images; Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Brennan has previously denied wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation and has defended the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election.
Politics
Supreme Court weighs phone searches to find criminals amid complaints of ‘digital dragnets’
WASHINGTON — A man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia in May 2019 and demanded cash.
He left with $195,000 in a bag and no clue to his identity. But his smartphone was keeping track of him.
What happened next could yield a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on the 4th Amendment and its restrictions against “unreasonable searches.” The court will hear arguments on the issue on April 27.
Typically, police use tips or leads to find suspects, then seek a search warrant from a judge to enter a house or other private area to seize the evidence that can prove a crime.
Civil libertarians say the new “digital dragnets” work in reverse.
“It’s grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That’s opposite of how our system has worked, and it’s really dangerous,” said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.
But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals.
Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a “groundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.”
Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a “geofence warrant,” referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time.
The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.
Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal next week.
The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment.
The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned.
This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.
Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment.
Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled “geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.”
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing.
The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants.
Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie’s “private location information … with an unconstitutional general warrant that compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.”
Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie’s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.
“There was no search here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data.
He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant.
Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, “surely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one’s public movements” is not private either.
Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data.
Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to “frustrate law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals” or cause “more cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,” he wrote.
Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount.
The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank.
After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen.
The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder.
That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the “novelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.”
The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance.
By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.
The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment.
The “seismic shifts in technology” could permit total surveillance of the public, Roberts wrote, and “we decline to grant the state unrestricted access” to these databases.
But he described the Carpenter decision as “narrow” because it turned on the many weeks of surveillance data.
In dissent, four conservatives questioned how tracking someone’s driving violates their privacy. Surveillance cameras and license plate readers are commonly used by investigators and have rarely been challenged.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer relies on that argument in his defense of Chatrie’s conviction. “An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see,” he wrote.
The justices will issue a decision by the end of June.
Politics
Trump renews bridge, power plant threat against Iran in push for deal, mocks ‘tough guy’ IRGC
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President Donald Trump mocked the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on Sunday morning for staking claim to a Strait of Hormuz “blockade” the U.S. military had already put in place.
“Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing.
“In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be ‘the tough guy!’”
Trump declared Saturday’s IRGC fire was “a total violation” of the ceasefire.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” his post began.
“Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it? My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations.”
Trump remains hopeful about diplomacy, but is not ruling out a return to force, where he once warned about ending “civilation” in Iran as they know it.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” Trump’s stern warning continued.
“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
“They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!”
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