Excerpt: Last month, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority reinstated Texas’s Republican gerrymander after a lower federal court struck it down. The plaintiffs in that case presented considerable evidence that Texas’s gerrymander was enacted, at least in part, to racially gerrymander some parts of the state. But the Court’s Republican majority deemed this evidence insufficient.

Now, the Supreme Court is about to decide a similar case, Tangipa v. Newsom, which challenges California’s attempt to offset Texas’s Republican gerrymander by enacting a Democratic gerrymander that cancels out the GOP’s gains in Texas. While there is much less evidence that the California gerrymander was racially motivated than there was in the Texas case, the California GOP has produced some evidence that at least points in that direction. If the Supreme Court had struck down the Texas gerrymander, it’s possible to imagine a fair judge also concluding that California’s new maps must go.

But no competent lawyer, and certainly no reasonable judge, could conclude both that the Texas gerrymander is lawful and that the California maps are an illegal racial gerrymander. Tangipa, in other words, is a test of the Republican justices’ honesty. If they actually believe what they said in the Texas case, which is known as Abbott v. LULAC, they will deny the Republican Party’s attempt to undo California’s gerrymander.

Alternatively, if they rule in favor of this challenge, it will remove any doubt that this Court is trying to rig the game to benefit the Republican Party.

Excerpt: If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

Me again: That’s not “arguably” a Christian philosophy; it simply is, and a Jewish philosophy too: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.” Leviticus 19:34

Excerpt: The ostensible reason for the layoffs is that the Post, like many other newspapers, is losing money. But unlike other newspapers, the Post is also in the midst of a demoralizing destruction of its brand that has alienated hundreds of thousands of subscribers and left even its staff unsure what the paper is trying to do, both journalistically and business-wise. “I’m increasingly finding it hard to justify the cuts from a journalistic perspective,” said one staffer. “Of course, financially, the Post is in a deep hole and I understand that. But some of that hole, if not a lot of it, is because of Jeff Bezos.”

Excerpt: Wrote a Ronald Reagan-appointed judge last year in a different case: “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”

It’s also about honor, that judge added.
“It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked Marine?”

City police officers have been wearing professional uniforms, unmasked, for decades, while arresting dangerous street criminals.

So that’s the official debate. It was Sheriff Swank, a steadfast Trump supporter, who got to the nub of it from the MAGA perspective, however.

“I don’t recognize your authority.”

That’s the real significance of the masks. They say: We aren’t beholden to you. Not to state officials, the public, or the basic workings of democracy. You can’t touch us. You don’t even know who we are.

Excerpt: For years now, a certain strain of American political thought has operated on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish, that “community” is a sucker’s game, and that anyone who claims to care about their neighbors is either lying or being paid. It’s the philosophy that undergirds every policy designed to punish rather than help, every sneer at “the woke mind virus,” and every insistence that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

And then Minneapolis happened.