'Cowardice': Justice Samuel Alito under fire for 'acrobatics' in his latest opinion

A legal expert shredded Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's "acrobatics" from his latest opinion in a major voting rights case during a new interview with Slate.

Janai Nelson, who argued on behalf of Louisiana voters in Louisiana v. Callais, told Slate staff writer Dahlia Lithwick in an interview that the Supreme Court's decision in the case was "catastrophic." The court decided that Louisiana's election map, which had been challenged by a group that described itself as "non-African Americans," constituted a racial gerrymander and paved the way for the court to shrink Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.

"This is a day of infamy for the court," Nelson told Lithwick. "It is a day of devastation for our democracy."

She also noted that the decision stood in direct opposition to a similar case the Supreme Court decided in 2023 called Allen v. Milligan. In that case, the Supreme Court held that Alabama's election map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by packing the state's Black voters into a single district.

"I think what we can glean from the acrobatics in the Alito majority opinion is a degree of cowardice to admit that what they are doing is gutting what this same court, with a different constellation of justices, once called the crown jewel of civil rights legislation, and what this very court, in its current configuration, upheld in a 5–4 majority opinion just three years ago authored by Chief Justice John Roberts in Allen v. Milligan," she added. "So in order for the justices to even come up with any sort of logical or seemingly logical veneer of rationality for this opinion, they had to engage in that twister effort to reconcile past decisions."

A GOP senator was forced to backtrack on comments he made regarding filibusters after he switched sides when it came to voting on the Iran war.

"When Republicans were in the minority, you described it and repeatedly defended it as vital and necessary to protect minority parties' rights," CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins told Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) during an appearance on her show on Thursday.

Scott had been complaining about how Democrats "only block all the votes" Republicans try to make. He blamed "this sixty-vote threshold, which I think we ought to get rid of."

"Why do you have a different position now that Republicans are in the majority?" Collins asked Scott.

"Well then, let's do the filibuster," he said, pulling a full 180 and changing the issue. "We're not making people talk. The filibuster was set up, so I'm fine with it if we were going to do the filibuster, where people have to talk."

Collins, not really buying what Scott was selling, brought up that Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said that the filibuster is still around because "y'all, Republicans, don't have the votes to get rid of that."

"Well, I'm from Florida," he responded. "This is what I believe in. I talk to the people in my state. They agree with me."

A system implemented by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency program accidentally leaked the Social Security numbers of health care providers, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

"The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last year created a directory to help seniors look up which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance plans, framing it as an overdue improvement and part of the Trump administration’s initiative to modernize health care technology," said the report. However, "a publicly accessible database used to populate the directory contains some of the providers’ Social Security numbers, linked to their names and other identifying information."

This directory was available to the public for at least "several weeks," according to the report, before The Post got in touch with federal officials about the problem.

"CMS officials said they are working to fix the problem that led to the exposure," said the report. "A spokesperson said the problem 'stems from incorrect entries of provider or provider-representative-supplied information in the wrong places' — essentially, that providers entered information in the wrong place and left their own Social Security numbers exposed."

DOGE was created in part with the guidance of tech billionaire Elon Musk before a public feud that saw him exit the administration.

The initiative was meant to identify areas where the government is wasting money or could be made leaner; however, analysts have observed DOGE didn't actually save any money for taxpayers.

The Supreme Court has fired the starting gun for a "race to the bottom" in a gerrymandering war that will be "a nightmare for democracy," according to a new legal analysis.

In a Slate report on Thursday, political writer Jim Newell cautioned that the GOP has "carte blanche" to gerrymander after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision that weakens protections in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against racial redistricting.

"The political effect of the decision in Callais will be to set off a new wave of extreme partisan gerrymandering," Newell wrote. "The redistricting scramble ahead of the 2028 election will make the battle we’ve seen thus far look like a skirmish."

Newell warned that the GOP could now target congressional seats at least a dozen "predominantly Black and Hispanic districts" in the south, on top of the five that Republicans now expect to gain in Florida.

Sean Trende, a senior elections analyst from RealClearPolitics, laid out a long-term and more severely damaging situation that will be hard to get out of.

“This is increasingly kind of the nightmare scenario: What happens if one party gets hit with a wave in 2030?” Trende told Newell. “Where you just get Republicans controlling almost all of the states, or Democratic trifectas in all of the states. Then you can really draw maps that make it impossible for the House to flip. Our institutions are fragile enough as it is. You can get real problems.”

John Bisagnano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told Slate that "Republicans have been consistently threatened." He added that "all states need to be ready for a call to action" in response to Republicans' power grab.

"Democrats across the country, in any place where they have the opportunity to do so, need to be prepared to take action to combat what's about to happen across the south."