Saturday, December 20, 2025

On Our "Virtual Route 99" : Out & About in America




This is our final edition of the "Virtual Route 99" for the year as we decided to headline the key excerpts of the White House Chief of Staff Interview with Vanity Fair--and as the War With Venezuela Looms.  

We share thoughts from leading thinkers we consult as we gear up to go dark through the end of the year, with thoughts courtesy the Brennan Center, Defense One, Pod Save America,  Zeteo, and concluding with an analysis of President Trump's Speech On Wednesday, December 17: 

 

Rep. Ayanna Pressley speaks alongside Senator Elizabeth Warren during a news conference on March 4, 2025. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

The libs are out of the wilderness, and they want every institution that’s bowed before Trump to know they’ll soon be out for blood.

In Tuesday’s edition of ‘First Draft,’ I detailed how MAGA-friendly billionaire oligarchs are intent upon warping American reality by any means necessary.

The latest plot, hatched by father-and-son duo Larry and David Ellison, involves a mass consolidation of US media. In mere months, the Oracle co-founder and his Silicon Valley scion have seized control of Paramount and its library of subsidiaries, including Showtime, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and CBS News. They’ve managed to wrap their tentacles around TikTok, and now they’re trying to gobble up Warner Bros. Discovery – thereby planting a flag in HBO, CNN, and a host of other properties.

It seems Democrats on Capitol Hill (or perhaps a handful of their staffers) are fans of ‘First Draft.’ .....Yesterday, Semafor’s Max Tani first reported Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the WBD board and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, warning them in no uncertain terms that when (not “if’!) Democrats return to power, they may very well go nuclear.

“Future Congresses… will review many of the decisions of the current Administration, and may recommend that regulators push for divestitures, which would undermine the strategic logic of this merger,” Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Sam Liccardo of California vowed, “We urge the Board to weigh… regulatory liabilities in evaluating a transaction burdened by uncertain but potentially extensive mitigation obligations, foreign influence risks, or adverse regulatory action.”

The pair went further, explicitly laying out their concerns about the Ellisons getting into bed with Gulf state actors like the Saudis and Qataris in order to launch a hostile bid for WBD.

“These [foreign] investors, by virtue of their financial position or contractual rights, could obtain Influence — direct or indirect — over business decisions that bear upon editorial independence, content moderation, distribution priorities, or the stewardship of Americans’ private data.”

Pressley and Liccardo, both members of the House Financial Services Committee, warned that any pushback on the part of either WBD or the administration in allowing the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment to review any Paramount bid would constitute “a serious lapse in fiduciary judgment and could expose the company to significant regulatory… harm.”

Is the day finally upon us? Have Democrats, at long last, summoned the resolve to stop bringing a butter knife to a bazooka fight?

Pressley and Liccardo’s letter is a good sign. It’s, dare I say, a great sign. But we need so much more from the party of Hakeem Jeffries. We need a clear plan. We need a true and proper Project 2027 that lays out all the many, many ways in which congressional Democrats will make MAGA’s life a living Hell after the midterms. And, no, I don’t mean merely impeaching Donald Trump. Perhaps this is a hot take for another time, but, personally, I worry about giving Republicans a rally around the flag opportunity. The GOP is rapidly becoming a circular firing squad; why give them what could turn out to be a political gift?

No, believe it or not… and I can’t believe I’m saying this… I now want strongly worded letters. I want clear, explicit communications sent to all the major institutions and corporations that bent the knee to the Bad Orange Man, warning them that they better lawyer up.

Get ready to be subpoenaed out of the wazoo.

You bet on a permanent fascist autocracy – and you bet wrong.

Now, yes, the House is coming to collect.

🗞️ What You Need to Know

  • Epstein update: A New York federal judge ruled to unseal grand jury records in Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case at the request of the Justice Department. The move comes a day after another federal judge ordered the release of grand jury material in the sex trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell.

  • Mad about Maduro: US forces seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. The Venezuelan government called the move “a blatant theft and an act of international piracy.”

  • So much for free speech: All foreign tourists must provide their social media histories from the last five years to enter the United States, according to a new notice from Customs and Border Protection. Tourism numbers are already plummeting, and the World Cup is just months away.

  • Zeteo late-night scoop: The Trump administration is in talks to revoke the visas of two European green card holders – former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton and Imran Ahmed, CEO and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate – who are prominent critics of Elon Musk’s Twitter, Zeteo scooped. If implemented, the move would mark one of the administration’s first attempts to revoke the visas of those they deem to be engaging in the “censorship” of Americans.

  • Judge slams LA deployment: A federal judge in San Francisco ordered the Trump administration to end its National Guard deployment to Los Angeles in the latest blow to the MAGA militarization agenda. Judge Charles Breyer wrote that the administration’s “argument for a president to hold unchecked power to control state troops would wholly upend the federalism that is at the heart of our system of government.”

  • NDAA passes the House: The House passed the National Defense Authorization Act, thereby approving a $900 billion budget for the Pentagon and enacting several provisions, including increased pay for service members and reduced diversity efforts.

‘Make Europe Great Again’ and more from a longer version of the National Security Strategy

By Meghann Myers

A fuller version reviewed by Defense One outlines the Trump administration’s plans for shedding old relationships and creating new ones.

Brennan Center for Justice The Briefing
The 2026 election will take place in a political system that is divided, discordant, flagrantly gerrymandered, and marked by widening racial discrimination. Thank Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues on the Supreme Court. And the supermajority of highly activist justices seems poised, even eager, to make things appreciably worse.
In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court refused to adopt any standard to police partisan gerrymandering, and it even prevented federal courts from hearing that claim. Fast-forward through a census, six years of line-drawing, and a flurry of lawsuits, and predictably, our democracy has become much less fair.
Redistricting is supposed to take place once a decade, after the census. In fact, that’s why the census is written into the Constitution. But earlier this year, Texas abruptly drew new congressional maps in a gambit to squeeze out five extra seats for Republicans. It was in the middle of the decade and at the behest of someone who doesn’t live there (President Trump) — and all at the expense of Black and Latino voters. Even though 95 percent of population growth in the state came from those communities, the map’s main feature was fewer districts where those voters can elect their preferred candidates.
Bad, right? The very conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, temporarily blocking the map from being used in the upcoming election until a full trial could be held. Texas first resisted allegations of a partisan gerrymander, then insisted it was actually acting at the behest of the Justice Department for racial reasons, then said it was, in fact, a partisan power grab. (“I don’t see race. Just Democrats.”) Talk about a Texas two-step! Amid these gyrations, the court found it illegal.
Enter the Supreme Court. Last week it blocked the lower court’s ruling, thus allowing the election to go forward with freshly gerrymandered maps. It’s yet another brazen use of the shadow docket — the Court’s supposed emergency docket (with limited briefing and no oral argument) — to hand Trump a win with only a few sentences of explanation.
Where does that leave things? The Texas seat grab set off a partisan arms race across the country. Furious Democrats acted. California voters overwhelmingly supported drawing new Democratic-leaning congressional districts there to counter the GOP gains in Texas. Republicans in Indiana and Florida are moving to redraw lines, while Democrats in Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia aim to do the same.
With all this headbutting, the gerrymander war of 2025 could turn out to be close to a wash in partisan terms. Moreover, voters may have their own ideas. If Democrats win big, as recent races have suggested is possible, the Republican gerrymandering might produce extra GOP losses. (The technical term for this, believe it or not, is a “dummymander.”)
All that sound and fury, in short, might signify . . . not exactly nothing, but not a decisive partisan gain.
That’s where the next big intervention by the Supreme Court would come in. And its impact could well be even more dramatic — and if possible, more harmful.
The Court seems poised to demolish the effectiveness of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Two weeks ago, in Louisiana v. Callais, it heard arguments about whether the law’s Section 2 remains constitutional. For decades, that provision effectively barred states, particularly in the South, from enacting maps that dilute or cancel out the voting power of racial minorities. As our friend-of-the-court brief pointed out, the provision has transformed both Congress and legislative bodies across the country. And the disparity in registration rates between white and Black voters dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to 8 percentage points just a decade later. Now the justices seem ready to wreck Section 2 if not strike it down entirely.
This would not only mark a shameful retreat from federal action to protect racial equality and fair representation. It could have a dramatic and specific impact: A bad ruling, especially early, could be followed by another wave of redistricting in coming months, maybe even in time for the 2026 election.
As my colleague Kareem Crayton writes, “The argument invites a return to the era when race was a barrier to entry for political representation — the cruel and painful experience of political exclusion that made passage of the Voting Rights Act necessary in the first place.”
Nate Cohn of The New York Times has crunched the numbers and predicts that an extreme Supreme Court ruling could allow Republican states to eliminate between 6 and 12 districts currently held by Democrats. That would be a margin larger than the House majority either party has had in recent years.
When politicians pick voters — whether based on race or politics — instead of the other way around, our elections become less fair and less democratic. The country would slide toward even greater division and balkanization. Republican voters in Massachusetts (where there are no Republican members of Congress even though Trump won 37 percent of the vote) have no party representation in Congress, while Democrats in Texas (where Kamala Harris won 42 percent) would have only about 7 of the state’s 38 seats. John Adams famously said that the legislature must be an “exact portrait of the people at large.” The current portrait doesn’t bear much of a resemblance.
So what’s the answer?
There must, above all, be national standards that apply to red states and blue states alike. The Constitution gives Congress that power. It should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country. In 2022, it almost did: The Freedom to Vote Act would have banned mid-decade redistricting and set other standards. And the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would have strengthened protections against racially discriminatory maps. Both came achingly close to enactment.
And then the ideologues on the Supreme Court should stop meddling in elections. Over the past 15 years, the Court demolished campaign finance rules in Citizens United, wrecked the Voting Rights Act starting in Shelby County, and gave ex-presidents vast and unprecedented immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office — thus ensuring no legal accountability for candidate, now president, Trump.
In a season when it seems increasingly clear that the justices plan to hand President Trump even more power, inexcusable rulings and interventions in partisan politics will leave a very sour taste for many voters. The Supreme Court itself, increasingly, will become an issue in American politics. That’s as it should be.

 

Campaign Finance Laws Could Take Another Hit
Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case challenging long-standing federal rules that limit how much political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates. It’s fair to question the effectiveness of these rules given the radical changes to the campaign finance landscape in recent decades. “But evaluating those sorts of policy considerations is the job of Congress, not the Supreme Court,” Eric Petry writes. Read more
SCOTUS Weighs Expansion of Presidential Power
The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in another pivotal case, Trump v. Slaughter, which challenges the president’s decision to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Long-established federal law bars the president from firing the heads of independent agencies, such as the FTC, without cause. As Lauren Miller Karalunas told Roll Call, the justices “won’t just be deciding the technical question of whether President Trump can remove these officials, they’ll also be deciding a much more profound question of whether the president can override the will of Congress.” Read more
How to Fix NYC’s Jails
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will inherit a jail system plagued by mismanagement that has allowed neglect, abuse, and violence to run rampant. Soon a federal court will appoint an outside administrator to help run the jails. “One important task for the incoming Mamdani administration is establishing a productive and optimal relationship with the remediation manager,” Hernandez Stroud writes, adding that the new mayor should also heed long-standing calls to shutter the notorious Rikers Island. Read more
The Legacy of Bush v. Gore
This week marks the 25th anniversary of Bush v. Gore, the infamous Supreme Court decision that “changed the trajectory of election law and painted the Court in a partisan light like never before,” Stephen Spaulding writes. He recaps the issues that marked the 2000 election, the controversy and confusion surrounding the justices’ opinions, and the case’s impact on the public’s trust in the Court and American democracy writ large. Read more


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