‘A devastating blow’: major civil rights group calls supreme court ruling on voting case ‘a major setback for our nation’ – live

The mayor of New Orleans, Helena Moreno, a Democrat who represents the largest city in Louisiana’s other predominantly black congressional district, said the supreme court’s ruling was “a step backward”.

For decades, the Voting Rights Act has served as a critical safeguard to ensure every voice, especially those historically marginalized, has a meaningful opportunity to be heard.

Striking down a district that reflected diversity suppresses voices and weakens our democracy. We should be working to expand representation, not roll it back.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, executive director of Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based voting rights group founded by Democrat and former US representative Stacey Abrams, said the supreme court’s decision “guts” voting rights protection while “pretending to uphold it”.

She said the court rewrote the law to require a showing of intentional discrimination. That’s after Congress in the early 1980s specifically rewrote the Voting Rights Act to overturn an earlier supreme court decision in an Alabama case that tried to do the same thing.

At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts was a justice department attorney advocating for a showing of intentional discrimination.

She said:

It allows states, counties and cities to shield their discriminatory maps by claiming they are advancing their own partisan interests, ignoring that race and party are highly correlated in places across the country, particularly the South.

Indeed, the ruling could open the door for Republican-led states to eliminate Black and Latino electoral districts that tend to favor Democrats and affect the balance of power in Congress. Donald Trump has already sparked a nationwide redistricting battle to boost the GOP’s chances.

Meanwhile, Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation’s oldest civil rights group, said the high court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais delivers “a devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act”.

The ruling is “a license for corrupt politicians who want to rig the system by silencing entire communities,” Johnson said in a statement today.

He went on:

The Supreme Court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy.

This ruling is a major setback for our nation and threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled, and died for. But the people still can fight back. Our democracy is crying for help.

The White House has hailed the supreme court’s decision to effectively demolish a key Voting Rights Act that prevented racial discrimination in a landmark decision that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map.

“This is a complete and total victory for American voters,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.

“The color of one’s skin should not dictate which congressional district you belong in. We commend the court for putting an end to the unconstitutional abuse of the Voting Rights Act and protecting civil rights,” she said.

Answering questions from ranking Democrat Adam Smith, defense department official Jules Hurst told the committee that the federal government has spent about $25 billion on the war so far, providing the first official estimate of the war’s cost.

“Most of that is in munitions, there’s part of that that’s obviously O&M [operations and maintenance] and equipment replacement” as well, said Hurst, who is performing the duties of the comptroller.

“I’m glad you answered that question because we’ve been asking for a hell of a long time and no one’s given us the answer,” Smith replied.

Back to the House armed services committee hearing, Pete Hegseth said the president’s request for $1.5tn for the Pentagon “reflects the urgency of the moment”.

This is an “historic” and “warfighting budget”, he said, and his department needed to get back on a “wartime footing” after what he called years of underinvestment under the Biden administration.

In his opening remarks, General Dan Caine called the budget request “a historic downpayment for future security” as he argued that “global risk is scaling”.

All of those ways that are now manifesting themselves on the battlefields around the world require a higher end of capital investment.

The US supreme court has ruled that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map, in a landmark decision that effectively guts a major section of the Voting Rights Act.

In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court rendered ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 specifically has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting.

“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, wrote for the majority opinion. “Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court had now accomplished a “demolition of the Voting Rights Act”.

At the heart of the case, Louisiana v Callais, was a thorny question of how much lawmakers are allowed to consider race when they redraw districts to ensure that Black voters are adequately represented. The supreme court initially heard oral arguments in the case last March, but took the unusual step of asking lawyers to re-argue the case last fall. In setting the case for a re-argument, the justices raised the stakes of the case, asking lawyers to focus on whether section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was constitutional.

The decision comes after years of legal wrangling over the boundaries of the map.

Here’s Sam’s full report:

US supreme court oral arguments have begun in a case that will ultimately decide whether the Trump administration can strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the United States.

The hearing was supposed to begin at 10am ET, but it started late as the court released decisions, including a major ruling that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map (more on that to follow).

As my colleague José Olivares wrote in this preview, people with TPS are given the permission to live and work in the US because the government has deemed their home countries to be unsafe due to war, political instability or natural disasters.

In the past year, the Trump administration has attempted to cut the program for various countries, opening the door to the removal of hundreds of thousands of protected immigrants in the US.

Last year, the supreme court allowed the administration to strip TPS status for more than 300,000 Venezuelans under the court’s emergency docket. Now, the court will hear arguments challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to remove the same protections from Syrians and Haitians.

If the supreme court sides with the Trump administration in its effort to cut the program for Syrians and Haitians, analysts say the administration would likely seek to end the TPS program for all countries. Nearly 1.3 million people were TPS holders at the start of the second Trump administration.

In his opening statement, Pete Hegseth defended the war on Iran, saying of the US-Israeli war:

Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb. We are proud of this undertaking.

“The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans,” he added.

In his opening remarks, ranking member Adam Smith praised the US military before expressing concern about the Pentagon’s budget request given the state of the national debt.

The Democrat then went on to call Pete Hegseth’s past comments about how the US military strategy is based on realism “absurd”. “It is the exact opposite of realism,” he said.

Starting wars in the Middle East that get out of control and lead us to have far greater costs with the benefits, is one of the cornerstones of the unrealistic strategy that this administration has criticized over and over and over again. And yet, here we are in a full scale Middle East war, and we’ve seen the costs of that.

Running through some of those costs, Smith underlined the human cost in thousands of civilian deaths, the deaths of 13 US service members, other countries being “dragged into the war”, gas prices at home, and the cost of fertilizer.

He then moved to a big question for Hegesth today, which is what is the US’s endgame in Iran, given that fundamentally nothing has changed in Iran despite the war?

One of the big questions that we need to get answered today is, where is this going? What is the plan to achieve our objectives? We’ve seen the cost, and the cost is very, very high. All we keep hearing on the objectives is we keep seeing all of the targets that we have struck …

We’re in this to fundamentally change Iran. And as we sit here today, Iran’s nuclear program is exactly what it was before this war started. They have not lost their capacity to inflict pain. They still have a ballistic missile program. They’re still able to blockade the strait of Hormuz and have the ships that are capable of doing that. What is the plan to get that to change? And most disturbingly, the president keeps telling us that it’s over.

Smith also criticized the administration’s harsh treatment of Nato for not joining the war, highlighting that Nato supported the US by invoking article 5 after 9/11 and adding:

There’s nothing realistic about starting a war in the Middle East, going it alone and pushing aside all diplomacy.

In his final point, Smith stressed the need for answers regarding the strike on the Iranian girls’ school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children:

There is absolutely no question at this point what happened. We made a mistake and that happens in war. We identified this target based on earlier charts. And yet two months after it happened, we refuse to say anything about it, giving the world the impression that we just don’t care.

Pete Hegseth is finally due to appear before the House armed services committee at 10am ET, giving lawmakers their first opportunity to publicly question the defense secretary since the US and Israel launched war on Iran over two months ago.

Since the war began, Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have only given press conferences and haven’t testified before Congress. Caine is also set to testify today. They are both also due to appear before the Senate armed services committee tomorrow.

Today’s appearance is formally billed as a routine hearing on the Pentagon’s budget request (the administration is requesting a record $1.5tn in defense spending, and the request was put together before the war), and comes amid intensifying questions over the rate at which the department is depleting weapon stockpiles.

Hegseth is also likely to face scrutiny over civilian casualties in the war on Iran – not least the horrendous strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. We can also expect questions on the US’s strategic rationale for the war, the effectiveness of the US-Israeli bombing campaign, the US’s preparedness for retaliatory strikes from Tehran, the strait of Hormuz crisis, his abrupt firings of senior defense officials, and more.

“Pete Hegseth’s got a lot to answer to from this disastrous war,” Jason Crow, a Democratic representative on the House committee, told Politico. “How much is this costing? What’s the end game?”

Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio told the outlet that Hegseth has been “dodging congressional questions about the Iran war since day one”.

We’ll be watching the hearing and will you bring you all the key lines here.

Former FBI director James Comey is expected to self-surrender to law enforcement at federal court in the eastern district of Virginia today, CNN (paywall) is reporting, citing a federal official familiar.

It comes after the US justice department filed new criminal charges against Comey yesterday, in what appears to be the latest instance of the DOJ wielding its power to target Donald Trump’s political adversaries.

A reminder that Comey was this time charged over a picture he posted on Instagram last year while on vacation, showing seashells arranged to say “86 47”. The post was read as a threat to Trump, the 47th president, as the number 86 can be used as shorthand for getting rid of something. Comey had captioned the image: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

Comey then deleted the post and apologized, saying he had not realized the numbers were associated with violence. “It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he wrote on Instagram.

The charges against Comey, approved by a grand jury in the eastern district of North Carolina where he allegedly took the photo of the shells, include making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat, via social media, across state lines, according to court documents.

According to the indictment, the seashell numbers are something a reasonable person “would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States”.

Comey published a video of himself yesterday saying:

Well, they’re back. This time, about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it, but nothing has changed with me. I am still innocent. I am still not afraid. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary. So, let’s go.

It’s really important that all of us remember – this is not who we are as a country, this is not how the Department of Justice is supposed to be, and the good news is we get closer every day to restoring those values. Keep the faith.

The justice department previously indicted Comey, who has long been the subject of Trump’s wrath, last year and charged him with lying to Congress. That case was thrown out when a judge in the eastern district of Virginia ruled that the prosecutor overseeing the case had been wrongfully appointed.

Donald Trump has told aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iranian ports, the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported last night, citing US officials.

Trump has reportedly said in recent meetings that he prefers the blockade over other methods to increase the pressure on Iran as peace talks stall and Tehran keeps the critical strait of Hormuz closed.

According to the WSJ’s report, Trump believes that his other options, such as resuming bombing or walking away from the war, would carry greater risks than maintaining the blockade.

The US military has been preventing ships from entering and departing Iranian ports since 13 April, after direct talks with Iran failed to yield results.