This week, n00bdragon takes both top spots in the insightful side. In first place, it’s a comment about Trump’s latest attempt to get Jimmy Kimmel fired:

What gets me the most confused is that Kimmel gave his monologue multiple days before the WHCD. No one objected at the time. No one, not even the administration, is implying that his monologue inspired the gunman (who probably already has his hotel reservation booked). There is absolutely no nexus, real or even alleged, between Jimmy Kimmel’s joke and the attempted assassination. The demand to fire Kimmel is a complete non sequitur. What next? “The sky is blue today, so fire Jimmy Kimmel”?

In second place, it’s a comment about the details included in the DOJ’s crazy legal brief about the White House ballroom:

Uh, forget about telling the (fake?) National Trust for Historic Preservation about the details of a top secret military installation. Did… the White House just tell us about details of a top secret military installation? Pretty sure there are lots of spy networks all over the world that would LOVE to find out if all the air vents are connected and if hacking the security in the ballroom will get you into the underground bunker. I guess the Very Stable Genius (and lawyer, apparently) answered that for him. Best president ever!

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Thad about Tennessee’s Charlie Kirk Act:

I’ve said it before, but they tried to use his death like the Reichstag fire or 9/11 but the plain truth is most people didn’t know who he was.

And people like Kirk have spent the past25 years training Americans to just shrug and move on when there’s a shooting. He was literally in the middle of trivializing shootings when he was shot. Well, he got what he wanted; nobody fucking cares.

Next, it’s MrWilson with a reply to the first place winning comment:

We saw this post-9/11. The attacks (or terrorism in general) were used as an argument in favor of whatever cause a politician wanted to push. It didn’t require even the thinnest thread of a connection in their minds.

“I’m a proud American patriot and the terrorists are coming for our precious dairy industry, so the farmers in my district deserve a special tax break!”

It’s just abject and obvious opportunism.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment on our post comparing Palantir employees to the characters in a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch:

They’re already in the process of switching to a rat’s anus.

In second place, it’s Pixelation with a comment about Paramount trying to blame Netflix for all the negative merger press:

Follow the orange clown

They should go one step further and blame the real culprit. Biden! All that is wrong with America, Biden did it!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about James Comey’s seashell post:

Amazing! I have the same combination on my luggage!

Finally, it’s That One Guy with another comment about Jimmy Kimmel:

MAGAts: Make humor legal again!

Liberal Comedian: [Exists]

MAGAts: Not that kind!

That’s all for this week, folks!

We’ve arrived at the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Remix, and Best Digital Game winners, and now we’re wrapping things up with a look at the Best Analog Game: Diary of a Provincial Lady by donnabooby.

E. M. Delafield’s novel Diary of a Provincial Lady was a smash hit when it was published in 1930, and it’s remained in print ever since. Its success came from its combination of comedy with authentic slice-of-life insight into a particular lifestyle, and its stylistic influence can be seen even in modern classics like Bridget Jones’s Diary. This game of the same name might not quite achieve the same status, but there’s no reason it couldn’t: it’s an excellent little party game that blends the mechanics of games like Apples to Apples with the appropriation-and-remix techniques of blackout poetry and similar art forms.

Like many such games, it all starts with a randomly selected prompt — in this case, a random combination of an illustration from the novel with a short question or fill-in-the-blank sentence.

Players compete to impress the rotating judge (or Provincial Lady) for the round by deploying a card from their hand to match the prompt. But rather than just making a selection, first they make alterations. Players are asked to modify a diary entry from the novel by crossing out, changing, and inserting words, adding emphasis with underlines and circles, and otherwise editing the text on their card to craft the best prompt response.

Like any such party game, how it plays out depends entirely on the creativity and taste of the players. The creative freedom of the editing aspect opens it up to so many expressive possibilities beyond the acts of contrast and juxtaposition that dominate other similar games. The charming illustrations and tone-setting text of the diary entries give shape to this freedom, rooting everything in the sometimes-dated, sometimes-timeless atmosphere of the novel. Put it all together and you’ve got a genuinely fun and replayable exercise that is this year’s Best Analog Game.

Congratulations to donnabooby for the win! You can get everything you need to play Diary of a Provincial Lady from its page on Itch. That’s the end of our winner spotlights this time around, but don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the jam, and stay tuned for next year when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!

A quick reminder: America has not had a confirmed Surgeon General at the federal level since January of 2025. Yes, that’s over a year ago. How we got here is a microcosm of the Trump administration generally: chaos, misfires, and the wrong people at the very top. Janette Nesheiwat was Trump’s first nominee. MAGA gremlin Laura Loomer complained about her very loudly, leading Trump to obediently pull back the nomination.

In her place, he then nominated Casey Means in May of 2025. Means has been described as RFK Jr.’s “favorite wellness influencer”, which is a more subtle way of saying that she’s not a licensed doctor. That fact generated a lot of pushback in Congress, not only from Democrats, but Republicans too. Then, during her confirmation hearing in March of this year, Means dodged questions about vaccines as much as she possibly could, leading Senators like Bill Cassidy and others to question what her actual belief structure on vaccines is, and how much it aligns with RFK Jr.’s. Ultimately, few people thought her nomination was in a good place when it comes to confirmation.

Trump finally woke up to that fact, angrily of course, and has now pulled the Means nomination as well. In her place, he has now nominated radiologist Nicole Saphier, who also moonlights as a health commentator for Fox News. In many ways, Saphier is merely Casey Means wearing sunglasses and a false mustache.

In some ways she’s different. For instance, she’s an actual practicing doctor. On the other hand, she’s caked in the same wellness industry nonsense as Casey Means.

Saphier got her medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados, according to her LinkedIn profile. She then completed a radiology residency through Creighton University School of Medicine. She joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2016 and has been a Fox News contributor since 2018. She is also the founder of Drop Rx, a herbal supplement business that develops “clean, thoughtfully crafted tinctures that support focus, calm, balance, and overall wellness.”

Her Instagram account is peppered with dubious wellness claims such as “rosemary and sage decrease Alzheimer’s risk.” In another, she gathered friends for a “turmeric and cinnamon infused anti-inflammatory tea (yes, @drop__rx) … Topped off with a glass of champagne.”

As for the topic of vaccines, her commentary rings as though she has a similar belief structure to Means, but knows how to hide it better.

On this front, she appears to walk a fine line—being skeptical of vaccines and critical of vaccination recommendations, while avoiding overt opposition to them. In 2022, she falsely claimed on social media that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for schoolchildren—something the CDC does not have the power to do; school vaccination requirements are set by the states. Despite being wrong, her claim sparked outrage among right-wing media.

In August, she posted a video criticizing the American Academy of Pediatrics for continuing to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for children—after Kennedy had unilaterally dropped the recommendation in line with his anti-vaccine views.

Oh, and she was more than a little careless when it came to COVID.

This administration keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. The dual facts that we’ve been without a confirmed AG for over a year into this administration and that we can’t get a vanilla nominee that can pass through to confirmation without generating headlines is both crazy and a complete failure of this administration.

Trump has been on a tirade blaming Cassidy for all of this. But Cassidy isn’t the problem here. Trump and Kennedy keep stepping on rake after rake by nominating the wrong people for important jobs. I doubt that anyone that was skeptical of Means won’t have the same concerns about Saphier, so we may be back at this all over again months from now.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her city.

Urbina had fled Nicaragua in 2022 and legally resided with her husband, a fellow asylum-seeker, in New Orleans while reporting to immigration agents for check-ins as she awaited her day in court. Finally, the date was approaching, in late November 2025. Days later, the Trump administration would flood the region with federal officers in “Operation Swamp Sweep.”

Urbina, 35, began searching for a Spanish speaker who could help her, and said she stumbled on a Facebook post advertising the services of Catholic Charities, a prominent aid organization whose services include assisting immigrants. After a few clicks, she connected via WhatsApp with “Susan Millan,” who claimed to have a law degree. The woman’s photo looked professional, showing a small library in the blurry background, according to a screenshot Urbina shared with ProPublica. The asylum-seeker said she discussed her predicament with the woman she thought was an attorney.

Millan told Urbina the ordeal could be settled over a virtual hearing with U.S. immigration authorities. Millan sprinkled in details about her own life — a sick husband, two kids, a supportive church — so Urbina felt comfortable. In an interview, Urbina said she completed paperwork to be sent to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for a fee. Millan’s organization asked her for documentation, including five character references; for another fee, it would submit these up the line. Through the payment app Zelle, Urbina and her husband paid nearly $10,000, according to her financial records, money they had set aside to buy their first home.

On Nov. 21, Urbina made the case that a “credible fear” was keeping her from going home. In the virtual hearing, which lasted five minutes, she said she spoke to a man dressed in a green uniform, stitched with what looked like government insignia, seated in front of an American flag. A day later, via WhatsApp, Millan told her she “won residency.” Her documents would be in the mail.

In an instant, Urbina’s fears had been assuaged. She asked if she should still attend her court date, Nov. 24. “No, don’t worry,” she remembers the woman replying. “There’s no need.”

But when Urbina asked to speak with someone in a message to Millan’s phone number the next day, according to screenshots she shared with ProPublica, the WhatsApp chat fell silent. After two days, she suspected she’d been duped and wrote in anger: “God is with us and He fights for His children; today you messed with the wrong person and you will get your payment from the Most High, you cowards.”

There was no attorney named Susan Millan associated with Catholic Charities, and the deceit was just one example of hundreds that the group has become aware of when desperate immigrants eventually reach the real organization.

“There’s a reason why we have a good reputation,” said Chris Ross, vice president of migration and refugee resettlement services at Catholic Charities. “And so for someone to be trading on that goodwill with nefarious intent is very frustrating.”

Urbina had fallen prey to “notario fraud,” in which scammers provide legal advice, often by saying they’re public notaries or other legal professionals. In many Latin American countries, a public notary is the equivalent of a lawyer, and notario fraudsters rely on this mistranslation to fake credentials.

Urbina shared documents that detail how she was lured into the scam, and ProPublica corroborated her story with her husband and Catholic Charities. After Urbina told local and federal authorities she had been tricked out of her day in court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement switched her scheduled December virtual check-in to an in-person meeting. When she showed up, agents arrested her. In January, she said, officers shackled her hands and feet and loaded her on a plane to Nicaragua.

She’d been scammed, then deported.

A spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about Urbina’s case but said, “Anyone caught impersonating a federal immigration agent will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” New Orleans police did not answer ProPublica’s questions about a complaint she filed.

Scams like those that destroyed Urbina’s dreams are on the rise, federal data analyzed by ProPublica shows, as profiteers seize on the fear and confusion wrought by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Complaints of immigration scams have doubled since Trump was elected, ProPublica found in analyzing more than 6,200 complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission by victims and advocates over the last five years.

From the start of 2021 through the election in fall of 2024, the FTC — the nation’s top consumer protection agency — fielded about 960 immigration complaints per year, such as reports of fake attorneys offering services or people impersonating federal officers. In 2025, the commission received nearly 2,000 complaints.

In all, at least $94.4 million was reported stolen in complaints to the FTC over five years. That number is certainly an undercount, as not all immigrants report wrongdoing for fear of deportation, and not every report included dollar amounts.

The spike in complaints is so severe that many states and legal organizations have alerted the public about them. California’s and North Carolina’s attorneys general released statements in late 2025, as did the American Bar Association and AARP. In June 2025, the New York City Council passed legislation increasing notario fraud penalties, and a similar law passed in Florida.

“Immigration scammers contribute to a lawless environment, undermining our immigration system,” said Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency Urbina falsely thought had awarded her residency. Online, the agency provides guides on how to spot immigration fraud and warns consumers that it does not use WhatsApp. The agency tells people who think they’ve been scammed to complain to the FTC.

Old Problem, New Sophistication

Scams targeting those mired in the U.S. immigration system are not new, but advocates say predators have become more sophisticated, using technologies like artificial intelligence and targeted ads. At the same time, immigrants have become increasingly anxious about speedy mass deportations, creating a bonanza for those looking to cash in.

“I believe AI is being utilized in these scams pretty effectively. People think they’re talking to a real person, or the logos and stuff look pretty professional to the untrained eye,” said Ross, of Catholic Charities.

Many victims say they were duped by scammers who had professional-looking photos, wore immigration uniforms and staged realistic virtual hearings.

A review of the image of the person named Millan who was supposedly helping Urbina suggests that it was AI-generated.

Ross added: “The biggest thing is the desperation — that’s really what’s driving this.”

In San Diego, attorneys working for the city have been impersonated by scammers. City Attorney Heather Ferbert told ProPublica her office has forwarded these cases to the FBI and warned residents to be on the lookout for advertisements that promise a government official or lawyer can help with immigration proceedings. The FBI declined to comment.

“When you add the title and you add the government weight behind it — the city attorney’s office, the district attorney’s office, for example — the targets are sort of lulled,” Ferbert said. “We’ve heard stories where they promise that they can solve their immigration problems for them. No real lawyer is ever going to promise an outcome to you.”

Other scams extend beyond impersonating lawyers. The FTC complaints include a case in which people posing as Department of Homeland Security immigration officers received more than $600,000 from a family by claiming one of the relatives’ identities had been stolen and they needed to pay to protect it. In West Virginia, a “federal agent” threatened to deport a college student who was close to graduating unless they paid nearly $4,000 in gift cards.

“They claimed that if I did not comply immediately, I would be arrested, detained or deported,” wrote the student, who was legally residing in the U.S. on a student visa. The student, whose name was not disclosed in federal data, used prepaid Dollar General gift cards and then went broke and turned to family for help.

Immigrants from India and Bangladesh were told they had failed to update a necessary form and would be arrested and deported immediately unless they shared their Social Security numbers. Other scammers claimed the government had intercepted packages full of money and drugs addressed to immigrants, who were told to make a payment or face arrest.

“Well-Oiled Machine”

Most victims find the fake attorneys advertising on Facebook or TikTok. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has pledged to delete scam accounts and announced new tools to track them.

Charity Anastasio, practice and ethics counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the ads are often pay-per-click and targeted at Spanish-speaking users.

“They’ve designed such a well-oiled machine,” Anastasio said.

The ads appealed to those in deportation proceedings, clinging to any means to stay in the U.S., but also those who may have wanted to get their paperwork in order ahead of Trump’s crackdown, said Adonia Simpson, an attorney with the American Bar Association.

“A lot of people are trying to preemptively get representation to see what their options are,” Simpson told ProPublica. “The enforcement has been a big driver. It’s caused a lot of people to be very fearful.”

The White House declined to comment.

In October 2024, 56-year-old José Aguilar, who had been granted temporary protected status under George W. Bush’s administration, was in just that position when he came upon a Facebook ad. The advertiser claimed to work for Jorge Rivera, a well-known Miami immigration attorney, and promised Aguilar they could get him permanent residency. It would take $15,000. ProPublica sought comment from the real Rivera, who is not accused of wrongdoing; he did not respond.

A leather factory worker in Minnesota who had fled El Salvador, Aguilar cobbled together the money in installments through loans from friends and that year’s tax refund. Over several months, he had four video calls with the fake attorney and two calls with immigration agent impersonators. He was initially skeptical but became convinced when they sent him videos of residency cards with the Citizenship and Immigration Services logo.

“Don’t try to deceive me, because I’m borrowing money, I’m a man of faith, and I’m a person who has had a heart transplant, so I can’t get angry because it hurts me,” Aguilar remembered saying.

“No, don’t worry, sir,” Aguilar said the scammer responded. “This is real. It’s super real.”

During one of their last conversations, Aguilar says the scammer appealed to their shared Christian faith, thanking God for approving the paperwork and earning him residency.

By February 2025, the scammers had stopped responding. A month later, Aguilar realized he was probably never going to get the residency cards and contacted an attorney who confirmed he had been duped. Aguilar, who has two young daughters, says his family is subsisting on food banks and relies on donations for rent.

“It’s unforgivable,” Aguilar said. “Even bringing God into it.” 

Mother and Daughter Torn Apart

For Mariela, an undocumented Honduran mother of three, financial stress began long ago. In 2021, the father of her children headed for the U.S. along with one of their daughters, seeking construction work. Two years later, when she traveled 2,000 miles in blistering heat to join them, she broke her arm in three places after falling into the Rio Grande while crossing the border. ProPublica is withholding her last name because she fears being deported.

And then, in October 2025, immigration agents detained her 20-year-old daughter. Desperate, the mother reached out to what she thought was a Catholic Charities Facebook page.

She was pulled into a scheme involving a man who posed as a priest, another posing as an immigration judge, and another posing as Oscar Carrillo, an attorney licensed in Texas who practices tax law.

The real Carrillo told ProPublica he began getting calls from frustrated immigrants last spring, all of them Spanish speakers who claimed they had been referred by Catholic Charities. When he realized his name and photo were being misused, he alerted the FBI and FTC. The State Bar of Texas has posted a public warning on its webpage about Carrillo impersonators.

“Most of these clients, because of their immigration status, are afraid to report this to the police,” Carrillo said. “I feel sorry for these clients. We’re not talking about wealthy individuals.”

In January, after her daughter was deported, Mariela realized the fraudsters had cheated her out of more than $18,000 over three months.

She said she had borrowed $3,000 from an uncle in Honduras, another $1,500 from a cousin, a few thousand from her boss, and another $2,000 from a friend from her Honduran hometown who had also emigrated to the U.S. In addition, she burned through her savings and her daughter’s.

Public Alerts, Little Recourse

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, local law enforcement, advocacy groups, state attorneys general and law firms have published notices warning immigrants about an uptick in scams.

“Our best advice is to make direct contact, outside of social media channels, with the organization you’re seeking help from,” said Kevin Brennan, vice president for media relations at Catholic Charities. “Call the organization on the phone or visit an office in person.”

Scammers show no signs of retreat.

In April, three months after her deportation to Nicaragua, Urbina received a call from someone claiming to be a lawyer. He said that he’d been referred to her by a bishop with Catholic Charities and that he’d help her obtain immigration papers.

The stress of being scammed and separated from her husband, who remains in the U.S., had taken a toll. “I’ve been through a lot of things, one right after the other,” Urbina said. She’s living with her mother in a remote village, afraid to step outside in a country where the government has ramped up surveillance of those who previously moved to the U.S.

Desperate, she gave the “lawyer” her personal information.

After earlier saying his help would be free, he then asked for money, she said.

“Where did you get my number?” she asked.

Intrigued but skeptical, Urbina followed up with WhatsApp messages, hoping he might really be an immigration attorney.

She never heard from him again.

I will continue to make the case for a 100 Justice Supreme Court because we need to get to the point that no single Supreme Court Justice matters. As it stands, each individual Justice has way too much power, and when they go mad with it, they can undermine the very structure of democracy. And while I’m sure some people will insist this is sour grapes about cases not going the way I want, it’s not that. I can accept rulings I disagree with, where I can see and understand the Constitutional logic behind them. For example, while I agree that the post-Citizens United change in campaign finance has been disastrous and needs to be fixed, I think the actual ruling in that case is not just defensible, but correct on the law (i.e. I think the fixes to campaign finance should come from elsewhere, not from getting rid of that ruling).

Similarly, while the underlying hatred and bigotry animating the decisions in 303 Creative and Chiles v. Salazar are deeply problematic, the actual rulings make some level of Constitutional sense on First Amendment grounds.

But the Roberts Court keeps handing down rulings that have no basis in any actual Constitutional principles, and are instead very clearly ideological and results-driven approaches to deciding cases. The Dobbs decision on abortion, most famously, but also (obviously) Trump v. US in which the Supreme Court effectively ruled that Trump could violate any law he wanted while President. And now we can add to that Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively brings back Jim Crow segregation and turns the Fifteenth Amendment into a dead letter.

If you want deeper analysis on just how fucked up this ruling is, I’ll point you to voting law expert Rick Hasen’s writeup in Slate, where he calls it “the worst ruling in a century.” But even more useful is his follow-up piece on just how cowardly Alito’s reasoning is:

In Callais, Alito purported to overturn no precedent, claiming he was merely “updating” a framework that the Supreme Court constructed in the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles case to determine when a redistricting plan violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting minority representation. This follows his 2021 majority opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, where he purported to provide mere “guidelines” for determining when a state violates Section 2 in passing a law related to voting or voter registration.

In both cases, however, Justice Alito made it impossible for plaintiffs to win their cases, leaving Section 2 on the books, but essentially toothless. Since Brnovich, as I showed in a recent law review article, no plaintiffs have brought successful suits under Section 2 challenging a law alleged to suppress votes. Justice Elena Kagan’s exasperated dissent in Callais cited this research and rightly predicted the same fate for redistricting claims under Section 2: “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

But I want to focus on something a bit different, which is just how hypocritical many of the recent decisions are. The supposedly “conservative” Justices contradict themselves over and over again to reach the motivated result they are seeking. We’ve already seen some of this in other rulings, such as when the court decided that nationwide injunctions by district courts were bad… but only when they were used against Trump (after blessing many against Biden).

In Callais we see more of the same. Remember, just two years ago in the Loper Bright case, this same Supreme Court pretended to stand on principle against the administrative state by arguing that the executive branch had way less power than it had previously suggested in its old Chevron case, arguing that the power of Congress to define things rather than delegate decisions is key. Well, the Fifteenth Amendment explicitly says that “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation” in order to make sure that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race….”

So in one case it’s left for Congress to legislate to clarify governmental power, and in the other Justice Alito and the other conservatives on the Court have decided they can take that Constitutionally granted power away from Congress — not based on any actual Constitutional reason, but because they’ve concluded that racism is over. That’s literally the crux of Alito’s argument, in which he notes that:

By 2004, the racial gap in voter registration and turnout had largely disappeared, with minorities registering and voting at levels that sometimes surpassed the majority. Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.

Of course, this is both highly misleading and beside the point of what the Constitution actually says in the Fifteenth Amendment, which gives that power to Congress to decide. It’s misleading because he cherry-picked “two of the five most recent” elections to obscure the fact that it wasn’t true in the last three — elections that occurred only after the Court had already hollowed out the rest of the Voting Rights Act.

As we discussed last year in the Texas redistricting case, the Supreme Court has made it clear in previous rulings that it’s totally legal to gerrymander for partisan reasons, just so-long as it’s not explicitly for racial reasons. The problem in Texas was that its legislature had initially rejected the (already flimsy and obviously pretextual) partisan reasons for redistricting until the Trump DOJ threatened them over the racial makeup of districts, leading to the last minute decision to redistrict, solely in response to the warning about the racial makeup of districts from the Trump admin. The lower court (in a ruling issued by a Trump appointed judge) found that to be a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

But, bizarrely, this Supreme Court also tossed out that ruling on the shadow docket (naturally) in December, claiming it had to do this because it was too close to the election in Texas to toss out the redistricted maps… even though the election was many months away and the “redistricted” maps had only been created a few months earlier. Literally none of it made sense. That ruling was just a stay to allow the redistricted maps for the 2026 midterm elections, but the case technically continued over whether or not there could be an injunction against the maps.

In an absolutely bizarre ruling on Monday (right before this Callais ruling) the Supreme Court effectively further rejected the challenge to Texas’ redistricting by simply citing its original shadow docket ruling, even though (1) the issue before the court now is different and (2) that original shadow docket ruling was based on no significant briefing or oral arguments. Court watcher (and shadow docket coiner/criticizer) Steve Vladeck notes that this is a dangerous power grab by the court:

I can’t remember a prior case with this kind of (true) summary reversal—where the Court just reversed a three-judge district court on the merits without any detailed explanation.

The original (already questionable) order was procedural, and apparently deemed necessary due to the “emergency” nature of an election that wasn’t happening for months and for which there was plenty of time to adjust. But to then claim to rule on the merits of the case by simply pointing back to that other emergency ruling, without more detailed briefing and without explanation, is bizarre.

But remember: the stated basis for the December ruling was the supposedly imminent 2026 midterm primaries. And then look at what happened in Louisiana after the Callais decision, where Governor Jeff Landry literally declared a “state of emergency” to suspend the already ongoing primary election in order to initiate redistricting, based on the Callais ruling.

So if you’re playing along at home, in Texas they redrew the Congressional maps in August of 2025 for blatantly racial reasons (as called out by a Trump-appointed judge in November, who provided a ton of evidence). In December of 2025, the Supreme Court said that those racially-biased new districts had to stay because it was too close to the 2026 midterms (which were still months away) to try to redistrict (despite the ability to easily go back to the pre-August districts which were the existing districts). But now, in late April, based on this new Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana can magically stop elections in which voting has already occurred in order to redistrict to create more racist gerrymandering.

And all this because Alito and Roberts are happy to literally ignore the Fifteenth Amendment when they don’t like the results.

That is what results-driven judicial decision-making looks like. And it’s why the court is viewed as increasingly illegitimate across the board.

I can live with the Court issuing principled rulings I disagree with. But here there are no principles on display beyond “we’re racist and we want to deprive non-white people of their vote.” The Supreme Court makes it clear that it is illegitimate with such a move, and not worthy of any respect at all.

And that won’t change until we get real reform, such as by shifting the Court so that no single Justice (or small clique of Justices) has so much power.