On the Bayou 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀🚢 

Gerrymandering Update: With a big assist by the Supreme Court’s six conservative Justices the election pendulum has swung to the red side the result of SCOTUS’s Wednesday decision striking down Louisiana’s voting map.  The Court ruled that lawmakers had illegally used race when drawing up the state’s new majority-Black district. Given that Chief Justice Roberts has long been hostile to the Voting Rights Act’s protection of minority voting rights and has been leading the court into decisions that have dismantled it piece by piece, Wednesday’s decision wasn’t a complete surprise. However, its timing was particularly atrocious because by issuing the decision now rather than waiting until late June, SCOTUS set off a frantic “scramble” as Republican led states consider redrawing their maps so that new whitewashed ones can be in place by the midterms.  To that end, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry has taken the unprecedented step of halting his state’s already in progress primary so that he can immediately oversee the elimination of its Black district. A few other states are likely to try to follow his lead with those unable to pull off a quick switcheroo putting new maps in place in time for the 2028 presidential year elections. States to watch now include Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. To be clear, each of these states have large Black populations but by slicing and dicing their maps in ways that disperse Black residents into neighboring white dominated districts, creatively nefarious map drawers can neutralize their votes, eliminating their election power and reducing the number of Democrats in the House. A few Democratically controlled states are likely to try to do some more gerrymandering of their own to counter some of the effects of Wednesday’s SCOTUS opinion.  To that end NY Governor Kathy Hochul said that she’ll start what is expected to be a two-year process. And just to rile the election waters even further, while testifying before the Senate yesterday, the agitated and particularly hostile Secretary of War and Beer, Pete Hegseth, refused to say that he wouldn’t send in troops to grab any ballots that Trump doesn’t like during the next two elections.

Peeps:  Trump has pulled the nomination of Casey Means, replacing his flailing and unlikely to be confirmed Surgeon General nominee with Nicole Saphier. Saphier who is Trump’s third Surgeon nominee, is a real doctor, she also has a wellness podcast and has appeared frequently on Fox News probably one of the reasons that Trump has chosen her.  She is the director of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Monmouth New Jersey branch. She’s viewed as a more conventional choice than Means but is MAHA adjacent as she has rejected vaccine mandates and wants the childhood vaccine schedule to be flexible enough to allow some parents to delay giving infants their shots.  That said, she’s on record saying that “when vaccination rates go down, preventable diseases come back.”  Trump blamed his inability to get Means confirmed on Louisiana Senator/Doctor Bill Cassidy who he hates because Cassidy voted him guilty during his second impeachment hearing.  However, Cassidy wasn’t the only Senator likely to vote against Mean’s confirmation.  Another one who, like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, was sitting on the fence was Maine’s Susan Collins.  It’s probably not a coincidence that Trump pulled Mean’s nomination shortly after Maine’s moderate Governor Janet Mills threw in the towel on her Senate run because though he doesn’t like Collins Trump really needs her to win reelection in November.  With Governor Mills out of the race, Senator Collins will face off against Oyster farmer Graham Platner, the left-wing media darling with an inconvenient Nazi tattoo and a history of ugly Reddit posts that he attributes to PTSD as one does when one wants to excuse saying disparaging things about victims of sexual violence.  Governor Mills dropped from the race because she was consistently polling significantly behind Platner. At the moment some but not all polls show Platner ahead of Collins.  We won’t know until November if Platner’s Mr. Unconventional shtick and his Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren endorsements work in Maine’s general election or if Collins, the so-called Republican moderate who mostly but not always votes with Trump and who Democrats, particularly progressive ones, love to hate can pull off another win in middle of the road Maine. It’s worth noting that Collins voted with Democrats yesterday to curb Trump’s war powers. She appears to be making the moves she thinks she’ll need to hold her seat and it’s likely that Trump will cut her some slack going forward, or not 🤷‍♀️.  In other confirmation news, now that North Carolina’s outgoing Senator Thom Tillis has removed his hold, it’s expected that Trump’s Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh will be confirmed but the man he’s replacing current Fed Chair Jerome Powell whose term as a Federal Reserve governor doesn’t end until 2028 says that he plans to stay on at least until the Supreme Court rules on whether or not Trump can remove Lisa Cook or any other Fed Governors that irritate him or happen to be Black.  Since decisions on interest rate changes are made by a vote of all the sitting governors, the highly respected Powell’s continued presence on the Fed Board is likely to influence future cuts or lack thereof.      

More 💩:  The decision to proceed with the indictment of Former FBI Director Comey was rushed out by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, part of his effort to get the acting part of his title removed.  Current FBI Director Kash Patel, another one who shouldn’t have his job but still does, says the investigation into Comey’s silly but not threatening “86 47” seashell social media post took nearly a year, a preposterous assertion but then again Patel had other things on his plate like attending and drinking his way through Olympic ice hockey matches and commuting back and forth to Las Vegas with his SWAT protected country music singing girlfriend.  As to those seashells,  Comey didn’t arrange them, he just photographed them and posted them on Instagram when he saw them laying on a North Carolina Beach.  On the funding front, Speaker Mike Johnson who is confident that Republicans will win in the midterms because they are the “adults in the room” 😂 finally caved on Homeland funding.  With Trump’s temporary order to fund DHS salaries about to expire, he allowed the House to vote on and pass funding all of DHS except for INS and Border Patrol leaving those already multi-year and  overfunded divisions to be included in the lower required Senate vote threshold reconciliation package that the Republicans plan to force through both the House and the Senate soon, or whenever they can pull it off.  And lastly, for now, Jeff Bezos Amazon is considering a reboot of The Apprentice starring Don Jr because he hasn’t already bent his knee enough and we need another Trump in the wings.  🤯🤯