Sotomayor Rips Supreme Court’s “Inappropriate” Decision on Alabama

The Supreme Court is letting another state’s Republican Party steal House seats.

The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map that disregards one of two majority-Black voting districts in the state—a decision that one justice predicts will cause “chaos” and “confusion.”

All three of the court’s liberal justices dissented against Monday’s order, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the counterargument. In five concise pages, Sotomayor flamed her conservative colleagues for the ruling, arguing that it was “inappropriate” for the court to alter the state’s voting lines mere days before the primary. She noted that Alabama had already been found to have violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of its Black voters.

“The Court today unceremoniously discards District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding & careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, noting that the decision will “cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”

The high court’s order will allow Alabama’s GOP leaders to redraw electoral boundaries, offering a path for the party to eliminate one or both Democratic seats in the House and potentially imperil Democratic Representative Shomari Figures.

The ruling was made possible by the court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act late last month.

Black voters in Alabama had fought for years to have their voices heard, navigating the legal system to carve out another Black-majority voting district in the red Southern stronghold.

“We are witnessing a return to Jim Crow. And anybody who is alarmed by these developments—as everybody should be—better be making a plan to vote in November to put an end to this madness while we still can,” NAACP National President Derrick Johnson said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Trump’s Iran War Has Already Cost Americans Another $4 Billion

The Department of Defense keeps asking for more and more money to fund the war.

The Pentagon has presented yet another nonsensical price tag for Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran: $29 billion.

During a hearing at the House Appropriations Subcommittee Tuesday, Undersecretary of Defense Jules Hurst faced a brutal fact-check on the Pentagon’s supposedly $29 billion war.

Late last month, the Pentagon testified that the estimated cost of the war so far was $25 billion. Now Hurst claimed it would cost $24 billion to replace and repair the U.S. munitions stockpile alone.

Hawaii Representative Ed Case pointed to a CSIS report from April 21 that estimated the aggregate unit cost of replacing and repairing seven precision systems to be $25 billion.

“Does that sound about right? I mean, you’re projecting everything at [$23 billion],” Case said.

“That number sounds a little high for me, for that stage of the war,” Hurst said.

Case asked how much it would cost to replace the 39 aircraft that have been reportedly lost since the beginning of the war. Hurst said that “repair on aircraft is something that it is very hard to calculate” but that an estimate had been included in the total cost. One might imagine it would be wildly expensive to “repair” planes that have been completely destroyed.

Hurst said that the estimates for the cost of fuel were included in the Pentagon’s operations and maintenance cost, but not the cost of repairing U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

“We have a lot of unknowns there, we don’t know what our future posture is gonna be. We don’t know how we construct those bases, and we don’t know what part our allies or partners could pay into our MILCON costs,” Hurst said.

At least 16 American installations across eight countries have been struck as part of Iran’s retaliatory strikes against the U.S. and Israeli military onslaught. It was previously reported that 13 U.S. bases in the Middle East had been rendered all but uninhabitable, forcing U.S. military service members to work remotely from hotels and office spaces.

Iran War Surges Inflation as Trump’s Approval Rate Hits Record Low

Inflation is now so high it’s wiping out all wage gains.

Inflation is surging under President Trump, reaching its highest level in three years thanks to the Iran war, and more Americans than ever don’t trust him on the economy.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly report Tuesday showing that inflation rose to 3.8 percent in April, a higher rate than wages, which grew at 3.6 percent. The price of oil is a big reason why, as it is up more than 70 percent since January thanks to the Iran war. As of Tuesday morning, the average national price for a gallon of gas is $4.50.

The worst is still yet to come, though; the full effect of high gas prices will not affect everything else for a few more months, according to Citigroup, who told its clients Monday that “energy costs likely would not start to feed through to core goods prices for at least a few more months.”

Meanwhile, a new CNN poll shows that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, with 77 percent of Americans (and a majority of Republicans) saying that the cost of living has gone up in their community. Only a........

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