Virginia Democrats ask Republican-dominated US supreme court to restore congressional map designed to boost Democrats
Virginia Democrats filed an emergency application to the US supreme court on Monday, asking the Republican-dominated body to set aside a state court decision and permit Virginia to use a new map of congressional districts for this years’s midterms that was approved by voters in a referendum last month.
The map was thrown out by Virginia’s supreme court last week.
Virginia’s supreme court ruled that the state cannot use new congressional maps approved by voters to help Democrats gain as many as four new seats in the US House of Representatives, handing Republicans a major win ahead of November’s midterm elections.
In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the state’s general assembly did not follow the appropriate constitutional procedure in approving the map, which voters then passed in a referendum last month.
“This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” the court wrote.
The ruling was a setback for Democrats’ efforts nationwide to counter gerrymanders approved by Republican-led states that may oust Democratic House representatives and boost the odds Donald Trump’s allies retain their majority in Congress’s lower chamber in the November midterm elections.
The Virginia Democrats, led by Don Scott, the Democratic speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, told the justices in a filing that the state court’s ruling has “deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts”.
The lawmakers cited a 2023 supreme court ruling that warned that state courts “may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”
Key events
Banners thanking Trump for Washington DC renovations use image of him inspecting Federal Reserve renovation he derided
Banners hung across Washington DC by the Trump administration, thanking Donald Trump for publicly funded improvements to federal parks, feature an image of the president inspecting the renovation of the Federal Reserve, a project he has derided as a massive waste of money that could be a crime.
The banners, compared to North Korea-style agitprop by critics in a city that voted 90% for his opponent in 2024, show Trump in a white hard hat walking along construction scaffolding draped in orange tape, with the words, “Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP” printed on the blue sky above him.
It is strange, then, that the National Park Service, which apparently produced the banners to cover fencing around sites the president is spending taxpayer money to renovate, chose a photograph of Trump taken on 24 July 2025, during the president’s antagonistic tour of the Federal Reserve renovation with Jerome Powell, the chairman he was trying to bully into lowering interest rates.
The photograph was posted on the official White House Flickr account to commemorate the intensely awkward visit, during which the president made a point of confronting the chairman with false information about the cost of the renovation.
After Powell resisted Trump’s demands to lower interest rates, despite the ongoing threat of inflation, the president’s justice department opened an investigation of the Federal Reserve chairman over the alleged “abuse of taxpayer dollars”.
When the Democratic influencer Brian Tyler Cohen shared a photograph of one of the banners that had been “modified by local residents”, who used orange spray paint to change the slogan to “FUCK PRESIDENT TRUMP”, and transform the hard hat to a penis, the most popular comment on the post was: “Not modified, fixed.”
Trump nominates election deniers Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake to be US ambassadors
In a slate of nominations sent to the Senate on Monday, Donald Trump asked senators to confirm two prominent supporters of his lie that he won the 2020 presidential election, Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, as US ambassadors.
Mastriano, a chemtrail conspiracy theorist who was at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 and then suffered a landslide loss in the 2022 race to be governor of Pennsylvania , was nominated to be the top US diplomat in Slovakia.
Lake, a former television news anchor who claimed that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump, and disputed her own 2022 loss in the race to be Arizona’s governor, was nominated to represent the United States in Jamaica.
Other nominees sent to the Senate on Monday included: Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Brett Matsumoto, to replace Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner the president fired last year after she reported a drop in employment; and his third pick to be Surgeon General, Dr Nicole Saphier, a Fox News contributor who replaces the withdrawn nominee Casey Means, a wellness influencer who had in turn replaced the first nominee, former Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat.
In a procedural vote, the Senate moved to advance the nomination of Kevin Warsh to be a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for a term of fourteen years from February 1, 2026.
The 49-44 vote, with the support of two Democrats, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Chris Coons of Delaware, moves Donald Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Reserve a step closer to a seat on the board.
A vote on his nomination as chair will follow.
Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had previously promised to block Warsh’s nomination unless a politically motivated criminal investigation into the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell, was dropped.
After the US attorney for the District of Columbia, former Fox host Jeanine Pirro, said that the investigation was over, for now, Tillis said that he would support Warsh.
“I take the Department of Justice at its word: the investigation is closed,” Tillis said in a statement.
US supreme court clears the way for Alabama to eliminate majority-Black Congressional district
By a 6-3 vote along partisan lines, the Republican-dominated US supreme court granted Alabama’s request to vacate a federal court order that a Congressional map drawn to eliminate a majority-Black district violated the 14th Amendment to the US constitution by discriminating against Black voters.
Alabama argued that it should be free to ignore the court order based on a supreme court ruling last month that struck down a majority-Black US House district in Louisiana as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, gutting a key achievement of the 1960s civil rights movement, the federal Voting Rights Act.
The high court agreed and overturned that order, directing a lower district court to reconsider the case in light of the Louisiana decision. That could free the state to instead use a map approved in 2023 by the Republican-led legislature that includes only one district where Black residents comprise a majority.
Anticipating a court reversal, Alabama officials recently enacted a law allowing it to void the results of a primary election scheduled for next week for some congressional districts and instead hold a new primary under the revised district boundaries.
Last week, Alabama’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed two bills to authorize the her to call a special election in certain congressional and state senate districts in anticipation of a favorable supreme court ruling in the state’s ongoing redistricting litigation.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all nominated by Democratic presidents, dissented from the ruling. In addition to holding that Alabama’s 2023 Redistricting Plan violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the justices noted, the District Court held “that Alabama violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama.”
“That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by,” they added, “any of the legal issues discussed in Callais,” the Louisiana case.
The justices also noted that just three years ago, the supreme court had “affirmed the District Court’s order instructing Alabama to remedy this identified racial discrimination by drawing a new map containing two districts in which Black voters would have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice”.
They went on to note that the district court’s “finding of discriminatory intent,” was based on “a comprehensive examination of Alabama’s transparent, intentional attempt to limit Black voting power”.
Meet the new Fema boss, same as the old Fema boss
As our colleague Maya Yang reports, Donald Trump has once again nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) just over a year after Hamilton was fired for publicly opposing plans to abolish the agency.
During a House oversight hearing on 7 May 2025, Hamilton, then the acting administrator of the disaster relief agency was asked by representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, whether he agreed with plans floated by the president and his homeland secretary at the time, Kristi Noem, to eliminate Fema.
Hamilton asked the appropriations committee’s chair, the Republican Tom Cole, if he had to answer the question.
“I’m not going to let you off that easy,” Cole replied.
“As the senior adviser to the president on disasters and emergency management,” Hamilton answered, measuring his words carefully, “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
Twenty-four hours later, Hamilton was no longer leading the agency and was replaced by David Richardson, a former Marine Corps officer who was serving as an assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction. Richardson, who had no experience in managing responses to natural disasters, resigned six months ago after intense criticism of his handling of deadly floods in Texas.
Cameron, a former Navy SEAL who worked for a defense contractor and ran unsuccessfully for Congress, also has limited disaster management experience.
Trump administration plans to reduce tariffs on beef imports until after midterms – reports
Faced with rising anger over inflation, as his war on Iran sends fuel and fertilizer costs sky-rocketing and beef prices reach record-highs in the US, Donald Trump plans to temporarily reduce tariffs on imported steaks and ground beef, at least until after the midterm elections in November, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and Politico.
The Journal reports that the cuts to tariffs on beef imports could come as soon as Monday, by suspending “the annual tariff-rate quota—which applies a higher tariff rate after a certain level of beef imports are reached—on all beef-exporting nations,” enabling Americans to buy more imported beef at lower tariff rates.
According to Politico, the planned reduction in tariffs on beef imports is for 200 days, which could lower prices for American consumers until a few weeks after they vote in the midterm elections Trump’s Republican allies in Congress are in danger of losing.
The cut in tariffs on imported beef is likely to anger US cattle ranchers.
The administration reportedly plans to placate domestic cattle ranchers by removing a number of regulations intended to protect endangered species, including gray and Mexican wolves, and a new USDA rule that requires electronic ear tags on livestock intended to help limit disease outbreak impact.
One Congressional Republican told Politico reporter Meredith Lee Hill the measure to cut tariffs on imported beef was “a shit sandwich,” and called the other policies mere “window dressing”.
Virginia Democrats ask Republican-dominated US supreme court to restore congressional map designed to boost Democrats
Virginia Democrats filed an emergency application to the US supreme court on Monday, asking the Republican-dominated body to set aside a state court decision and permit Virginia to use a new map of congressional districts for this years’s midterms that was approved by voters in a referendum last month.
The map was thrown out by Virginia’s supreme court last week.
Virginia’s supreme court ruled that the state cannot use new congressional maps approved by voters to help Democrats gain as many as four new seats in the US House of Representatives, handing Republicans a major win ahead of November’s midterm elections.
In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the state’s general assembly did not follow the appropriate constitutional procedure in approving the map, which voters then passed in a referendum last month.
“This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” the court wrote.
The ruling was a setback for Democrats’ efforts nationwide to counter gerrymanders approved by Republican-led states that may oust Democratic House representatives and boost the odds Donald Trump’s allies retain their majority in Congress’s lower chamber in the November midterm elections.
The Virginia Democrats, led by Don Scott, the Democratic speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, told the justices in a filing that the state court’s ruling has “deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts”.
The lawmakers cited a 2023 supreme court ruling that warned that state courts “may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”
US supreme court temporarily extends access to mail-order abortion medication mifepristone
Melody Schreiber
The US supreme court extended a short-term order to continue allowing nationwide access to mail-order mifepristone, an abortion medication, in a shadow-docket decision on Monday.
The US court of appeals for the fifth circuit in Louisiana ordered a ban on shipping mifepristone through the mail on 1 May, but Justice Samuel Alito, who responds to emergency requests from the fifth circuit, granted a temporary stay on 4 May to last until at least Monday’s decision. The emergency appeal to the court came from two mifepristone manufacturers.
Alito extended his 4 May order to continue allowing the pill’s distribution by telehealth and mail until at least 14 May while the court considers its next steps.
Louisiana sued the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last fall in an attempt to end the agency’s rules on prescribing mifepristone remotely, arguing the rules interfered with the state’s ban on abortion.
Former FDA leaders, researchers and lobbyists submitted amicus briefs in the case – but notably absent was the US government.
In 2023, the FDA ended a requirement to prescribe mifepristone in person, opening up remote dispensation via telehealth.
In 2024, the supreme court ruled on a similar case, FDA v the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, that challenged the FDA’s rules on how the drug is dispensed. The court found the coalition of anti-abortion groups did not have standing because they were unable to demonstrate how they were harmed.
The same law firm that represented the 2024 case, Alliance Defending Freedom, is now representing Louisiana in their suit.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Ahead of travelling to China on Tuesday, Trump said that he hoped to get “a lot” out of his meeting with Xi Jinping. The president noted that he had a “great relationship” with Xi, and noted that there had been no ships from Iran to China, despite the country’s reliance on Iranian oil.
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Seventeen tech and finance executives will join the president this week in Beijing, a White House official confirmed to the Guardian. Notably, the president’s on-off again ally Elon Musk will be in attendance, as well as outgoing CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Dina Powell McCormick of Meta and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg.
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Trump also pledged to suspend the US federal gas tax in a bid to reduce pressure on Americans after the US-Israel war on Iran sparked a sharp rise in fuel prices. The president told reporters on Monday that his administration would look to pause the tax “till it’s appropriate”, as the price at the pump continues to spike. Trump did not note that it would require congressional approval to scrap the tax, which raises about $500m each week for the federal government.
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The suspect accused of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump last month at a gala in Washington has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Cole Tomas Allen did not speak in court on Monday as his attorney entered the plea on his behalf. The charges against him include attempted assassination of the president, assault on a federal officer and firearms offenses.
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Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, has vowed that Democrats will limit GOP leaders in Congress from passing a budget bill that confers $72bn for federal immigration enforcement, which includes $1bn for security measures for Donald Trump’s ballroom project. “Democrats will fight the Republicans’ reconciliation bill with every tool we have,” Schumer wrote in a Dear Colleague letter, and noted that lawmakers plan to challenge the legislation by claiming that some of its provisions violate the Byrd rule, and are extraneous and not actually budgetary.
Oliver Laughland
A group of 40 House Democrats have described “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s secretive program of deportation flights and demanded the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) address allegations of mistreatment and inhumane conditions on ICE charter jets.
In a letter shared with the Guardian and addressed to the FAA administrator, Bryan Bedford, the lawmakers describe the “urgent need for transparency” over ICE’s expanded use of commercial airliners to transfer detained immigrants and its “inappropriate and dangerous” efforts to shield these flights from public scrutiny.
“Credible reports indicate that individuals have been placed on flights without notice to counsel or family members, effectively disappearing from public view when flights are inappropriately shielded from tracking systems,” the letter states. “Families are left searching for their loved ones, and attorneys are denied meaningful opportunities to intervene, raising serious due process concerns.”
The letter references an investigation by the Guardian, based on leaked flight data, which revealed the Trump administration transported detained immigrants in ways that routinely violated their constitutional rights. The reporting also identified allegations of abuse and rights violations at a private detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, a central node in the administration’s deportation program.
