<....A refusal by Texas lawmakers to show up is a civil violation of legislative rules. During a previous walkout by Democratic legislators, the Texas Supreme Court held in 2021 that House leaders had the authority to "physically compel the attendance" of missing members, but no Democrats were forcibly brought back to the state after warrants were served that year. Two years later, Republicans pushed through new rules that allow daily fines of $500 for lawmakers who don't show up for work as punishment.

Rep. Wu responds to Gov. Abbott's lawsuit

In a statement to CBS Texas, Wu said that "denying the governor a quorum was not an abandonment" of office, rather it was "a fulfillment of my oath."

"This office does not belong to Greg Abbott, and it does not belong to me," Wu said in his statement. "It belongs to the people of House District 137, who elected me. I took an oath to the Constitution, not a politician's agenda, and I will not be the one to break that oath."

Wu also said that the governor has failed the people of Texas and is "using the courts to punish those who refused to fail" with him.

"When a governor conspires with a disgraced president to ram through a racist gerrymandered map, my constitutional duty is to not be a willing participant," Wu's statement reads. "When that governor holds disaster relief for 137 dead Texans and their families hostage, my moral duty is to sound the alarm — by any means necessary."

Abbott wants the Supreme Court to issue a ruling by 5 p.m. on Thursday.

"Greg Abbott is attempting to silence House Democratic Caucus leader Rep. Gene Wu by weaponizing the courts," Texas Democratic Party Chairman Kendall Scudder said in a statement. "It is a complete violation of the separation of powers for the governor of this state to think he has the authority to unilaterally remove duly elected officials simply because he disagrees with them using constitutionally protected procedural safeguards."

The Texas Solicitor General also said if House Democrats don't return by 1 p.m. Friday, when Speaker Dustin Burrows set the House to hold its next session, the attorney general will pursue all available judicial remedies.>

<Lordy, there are tapes.

In the latest turn of the immortal scandal over Jeffrey Epstein, CNN first reported Tuesday that Donald Trump’s administration has recorded conversations with Epstein’s convicted sex trafficker accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and is working on a transcript, which it may even release.

The revelation about Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s conversations with Maxwell last month is certain to renew demands for transparency from sectors of the president’s base that first whipped the Epstein storm into overdrive.

And it comes as senior administration officials plan to meet at Vice President JD Vance’s residence for dinner Wednesday to discuss how to better handle the Epstein case, CNN’s team reported.

Taking a step back, it’s an extraordinary use of an administration’s power for a top Justice Department official to spend two days talking to someone convicted of grooming, abusing and trafficking young girls for a figure as reviled as Epstein. The idea that officials would then consider releasing an account of the meeting to brazenly help a president escape a political scandal raises ethical, legal and political questions that reflect the unfathomable times in Trump’s second term.

But it’s hard to see how releasing a transcript of the interview with Maxwell could end up making people less interested in the intrigue — which would be the ostensible purpose of the exercise.

More likely, such a move would risk repeating the damaging cycle that has plunged the White House ever deeper into a political morass.

Every time the administration takes a step designed to quell the scandal, all it succeeds in doing is raising expectations and brewing new conspiracy theories among MAGA activists obsessed with the case while widening public exposure to an episode that has blotted out the president’s summer winning streak.

Three senior administration officials told CNN that discussions are taking place about releasing the transcript of Maxwell’s interviews with Blanche in Florida two weeks ago. That was before she was moved, without explanation, to a less draconian prison in Texas — a step that itself launched new speculation and suggestions that Trump was misusing presidential power to advance his personal interests. A final decision on next steps on a transcript has not been made, one of the officials said.

But this news came on a day when the Epstein question broke the surface in Washington again — just when the White House hoped it was fading.

News came Tuesday that the House Oversight Committee had issued a dozen subpoenas to the Justice Department and high-profile Democratic and Republican figures for files and information related to Epstein.

And in the latest step of a complex dance with the administration, Maxwell’s lawyers warned against the release of sealed grand jury transcripts about the Epstein case. They said the move — one way the DOJ is seeking to appease demands for transparency from the Trump base — would prejudice her due process interests as she petitions the Supreme Court to take up her appeal.

“Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not,” Maxwell’s attorney, David Oscar Markus, wrote to the judge in a filing.

The aphorism is factual. But Epstein’s poisoned influence on politics has never been so alive, six years after he was found dead by suicide in his cell while awaiting trial on a catalogue of horrific charges of abusing young women and girls.

Many of those victims on Tuesday questioned the motives of the Trump administration in its dealings with Maxwell and said that indications that she was being “legitimized” had traumatized them all over again. They told the judge in the grand jury documents case that survivors supported transparency but said the “safety, privacy and dignity” of victims must be protected.

Why a Maxwell transcript might make the scandal even worse

There’s been intense speculation about the past friendship between Epstein and Trump, both New York and Florida celebrities, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, before the future president threw the disgraced financier out of his Mar-a-Lago club. Epstein “stole” his employees, Trump told reporters last week.

There’s no evidence that Trump did anything legally wrong during his friendship with Epstein, and he has never been charged with any crimes related to their connection.

The president, however, keeps refocusing attention on Epstein’s case by refusing to rule out a pardon or commutation for Maxwell. Trump instead keeps noting that he has the power to ease the plight of someone who has a huge incentive to help him.

“I’m allowed to do it, but nobody’s asked me to do it. I know nothing about it. I don’t know anything about the case, but I know I have the right to do it,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax, a conservative outlet, last week....>

<....It is unclear what Blanche and Maxwell spoke about. But the point of releasing a transcript might be to show Epstein knew multiple famous people and not just Trump. This might defuse concerns about the president’s past relationship with him.

But such a release might also be unfair to people who came across Epstein but who committed no crimes.

There would be issues with Maxwell’s credibility as a witness, given the nature of the conviction for which she is serving a 20-year prison sentence. People would ask what she got in return for her cooperation. Already, survivors of Epstein’s abuse and the family of Virginia Giuffre, one of his most well-(known) victims, who took her life this year, have warned there should be no leniency.

Trump insisted, as he answered a question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday, that he knew nothing about the contents of Blanche’s talks with Maxwell.

“So, I know this. I didn’t discuss it with him, but anything he talked about with her, or the fact that he did that — not unusual, number one, and most importantly, is something that would be totally above board,” the president said.

But it is highly unusual for a deputy attorney general to meet with an imprisoned inmate convicted of child sex trafficking as a related scandal swirls around the president who appointed him. And Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer.

And in any case, any notion that a transcript would end the Epstein drama feels far-fetched. The document would need to be heavily redacted to avoid revealing sensitive details like the names of victims. But this would surely fuel fringe intriguers who argue that the government is involved in a massive cover-up. It’s the nature of conspiracy theories that efforts to squelch them only spark new tributaries of unhinged speculation. This has already happened. Previous disclosures by Attorney General Pam Bondi of documents and details in the case only conjured claims of a deep state plot to hide the truth when the release fell far short of her promises to MAGA activists.

House Oversight ensures this drama will run and run

The House Oversight Committee’s subpoena to the Justice Department calls for the provision to Congress of any Epstein files in its possession, with victims’ names redacted. The GOP-led panel also wants communications between former Biden administration officials and the Justice Department related to the case.

Departments of Justice often resist releasing sensitive documents to Congress: They often leak. But Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who serves on the House Oversight Committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday the House would reinforce the demand for action in September, when Khanna is hoping for a vote on his bipartisan bill demanding the full release of information. “I think soon you are going to see many victims speaking out themselves about how this is important for them, in terms of disclosure in terms of transparency,” Khanna said.

The Republican-led panel additionally subpoenaed 10 individuals for closed-door depositions between August and mid-October. Those are: former Attorneys General Merrick Garland, William Barr, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder and Alberto Gonzales; former FBI Director James Comey; former special counsel and FBI Director Robert Mueller III; former Secretary of State and first lady Hillary Clinton; and former President Bill Clinton....>

<....But there are huge omissions on the list of subpoenas that raise doubts about whether it’s really seeking full transparency. Like Trump, who was mentioned multiple times in the Epstein files, and his first-term Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who handed Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2008. There are also no victims — people who have often been ignored in the current political uproar — on the subpoena list.

Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor, said the omission of Trump from the subpoenas was “very glaring,” since a subpoena sent to former President Bill Clinton said Clinton could have information regarding Epstein that may be relevant to the investigation. The same is true of Trump. “It only stands to reason that if you are looking around for the people that would provide information for the investigation, he (Trump) would be pretty close to the top of that list,” Goodman told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

The subpoenas likely mean months of negotiations and legal battles about the timing and scope of testimony. So the Epstein saga is here to stay.

The inclusion of the names of high-profile Democrats and past Republican officials may be an attempt to spare Trump from being the only person tainted by association with Epstein.

Maxwell’s legal conundrum

The warning by Maxwell’s lawyers that grand jury testimony should not be released potentially puts their client in opposition to the Justice Department at a time when she has strong incentives to help the administration.

The DOJ went to court to ask for the release of grand jury transcripts about Epstein and Maxwell, hoping to placate the MAGA base. The testimony, however, is thought to be only a fraction of investigative material the DOJ is holding. Some observers question whether officials really want grand jury documents released or whether they petitioned the judge only to create political cover.

CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig explained that Maxwell’s lawyers are protecting her interests in the event that Supreme Court accepts her appeal. Her lawyer would “not want this grand jury material out there for the public,” he told CNN’s Kasie Hunt.

Taken together, Tuesday’s developments mean Epstein drama will go on.

And the history of tapes in American scandals — from Watergate onward — create evocative echoes. Audio and questions about its release, redaction and editing have been inseparable from lore about cover-ups and chicanery in Washington politics. That’s why — amid a previous scandal — Comey replied, when asked whether there were recordings of his conversations with Trump: “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”>

As opposed, of course, to having a later antecedent.

This is straight from the lexicon of those paragons of perfection <fagasaurus prevaricator> or <fredremf>, both proud possessors of sublime skills in English.

<Two weeks into President Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just days after he pardoned hundreds of Capitol rioters, officials Trump had placed in charge of the Justice Department made a sweeping demand. They wanted the names of the thousands of FBI employees who had played a role in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Fearing mass firings, or worse, retaliation by the people they helped prosecute, a group of agents scrambled to enlist a legal team who could stop the administration in court. Norm Eisen, a prominent ethics lawyer now leading dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, agreed within hours to represent the agents pro bono, along with Mark Zaid, a veteran whistleblower attorney. For more firepower, the two approached the giant Chicago-based law firm Winston & Strawn, which has a history of providing free representation to people and organizations that squared off against Trump’s first administration.

But Winston declined to represent the FBI agents, three people with knowledge of the matter said. It was one of several cases Winston turned down in quick succession, they added, that would have pitted the firm against an openly retributive president.

Some of the country’s largest law firms have declined to represent clients challenging the Trump administration, more than a dozen attorneys and nonprofit leaders told ProPublica, while others have sought to avoid any clients that Trump might perceive as his enemies. That includes both clients willing to pay the firms’ steep rates, and those who receive free representation. Big Law firms are also refusing to take on legal work involving environmental protections, LGBTQ+ rights and police accountability or to represent elected Democrats and federal workers purged in Trump’s war on the “deep state.” Advocacy groups say this is beginning to hamper their efforts to challenge the Trump administration.

Their fears intensified after Trump signed a battery of executive orders aimed at punishing top firms over old associations with his adversaries. But as the Winston episode shows, Big Law began to back away from some clients almost the minute he returned to power. The country’s top firms remain deeply wary, even though the president has lost all four initial court challenges to those executive orders.

“The President’s Policy is working as designed,” said a lawsuit the American Bar Association filed against the administration in June. “Even as federal judges have ruled over and over that the Law Firm Orders are plainly unconstitutional, law firms that once proudly contributed thousands of hours of pro bono work to a host of causes — including causes championed by the ABA — have withdrawn from such work because it is disfavored by the Administration.”

The bar association itself has struggled to find representation, the lawsuit said. One unnamed firm, which has represented the association since the 1980s in lawsuits related to ABA’s accreditation of law schools, “is no longer willing to represent the ABA in any litigation against or potentially adverse to the Administration and its policies.” Sidley Austin, the sixth-ranked corporate firm by revenue in the world, has represented the ABA in at least five lawsuits over its accreditation practices since 1989.

The ABA and Susman Godfrey, which is representing the association in its lawsuit against the administration, declined to comment. Winston, Sidley and the White House did not respond to questions sent in writing.

Trump’s grievances with Big Law stem partly from its role in blocking his first-term agenda. In his executive order targeting Jenner & Block, a firm with close ties to the Democratic Party that fought Trump on transgender rights and immigration, he assailed the firm for allegedly “abus[ing] its pro bono practice to engage in activities that undermine justice.” Another firm, WilmerHale, was where former Special Counsel Robert Mueller worked before and after leading the Russian interference investigation.

The executive orders barred attorneys working for the firms from entering federal buildings where they represent clients, terminated the firms’ government contracts, revoked partners’ security clearances and required government contractors to disclose if they work with the targeted firms. Perkins Coie, one of Trump’s first targets, began to lose business “within hours,” its suit said. The judge who halted the executive order against WilmerHale wrote that the firm “faces crippling losses and its very survival is at stake.”

“I just think that the law firms have to behave themselves,” Trump said at a press conference in late March....>

<....Nine corporate law firms behaved themselves in the form of reaching public settlements with Trump. The deals require them to provide $940 million in total of pro bono support for Trump-approved causes. There has been no public indication of the White House calling on them to perform specific work, and Trump has not released any new executive orders against firms since April.

Yet organizations that challenge the government are still feeling the chill.

“There’s been a real, noticeable shift,” said Lauren Bonds, the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a national nonprofit that brings lawsuits over alleged police abuse and was a frequent pro bono client of Big Law.

In November, as soon as Trump won reelection, a top firm that was helping NPAP develop a lawsuit against a city’s police force abruptly stopped attending all planning calls, Bonds said. Later, the firm became one of the nine that struck a deal with Trump, after which the firm half-heartedly told Bonds, she said, that it would reconsider the case in the future. Bonds declined to identify the firm.

Activist nonprofits have long relied on free representation because they typically lack the resources to mount major lawsuits on their own. Civil rights cases in particular are complex undertakings usually lasting years. Many call for hundreds of hours spent deposing witnesses and performing research, as well as upfront costs of tens of thousands of dollars. Big Law, with its deep ranks of attorneys and paying clients to subsidize their volunteer work, is in a unique position to help. In exchange, the work burnishes the firm’s reputation and serves as a draw for idealistic young associates.

“I know that [cases] have been shot down that in Trump Administration 1, firms would crawl over each other to get our name at the top of the case so that we could get the New York Times headline,” said a Big Law partner whose firm has not been one of Trump’s targets. “That’s the environment. What’s become radioactive has grown from a very small number of things to anything this administration and Trump might notice and get angry about.”

Jill Collen Jefferson, the president and founder of Julian, a small nonprofit that investigates civil rights violations, has felt the chill too.

Three years ago, Julian partnered with the elite law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the country’s No. 1 corporate firm most years by per-partner revenue, to bring lawsuits against the town of Lexington, Mississippi, and its police force for racial discrimination.

“It wasn’t hard at all to get help,” she recalled. George Floyd’s death had raised public support for police accountability, and the details Julian was exposing in Lexington were especially grim. The police chief was secretly recorded promising to cover for a fellow officer if he killed someone “in cold blood.” A DOJ investigation released in 2024 found Lexington police operated in “a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law.” (The town’s board fired the chief, Sam Dobbins, over the recording. In a court filing, Dobbins said he was not guilty of “any actionable conduct” and denied Julian’s characterization of the recording, asserting that “the recording speaks for itself.” Julian’s litigation is still ongoing.)

Since January, when Trump began gutting police accountability measures, Jefferson’s efforts to recruit pro bono help have yielded almost no commitments. The official explanation many firms offer is that they lack the capacity to help, she said, though lawyers at those firms have privately told her that was false. Wachtell did not respond to a request for comment.

Jefferson now doubts Julian’s ability to bring a police abuse lawsuit it had planned to file before the statute of limitations expires this month.

“It’s been a nightmare,” she said. “People don’t want to stand up, and because of that, people are suffering.”

NPAP ultimately joined forces with another civil rights organization to salvage the case after its co-counsel disappeared from planning calls last November. But the suit will be “less robust” without the firepower of a major law firm, Bonds said. And NPAP’s capacity to file future suits is in question. Civil rights attorneys in NPAP’s network have developed novel legal theories for challenging arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement under state constitutions, but they lack enough outside partnerships.

“There are cases that aren’t being brought at a time when civil rights abuses are maybe at the highest they’ve been in modern times,” Bonds said....>

<....Big Law was often in the vanguard of fighting Trump’s first administration. After he signed the 2017 travel ban affecting several predominantly Muslim countries, partners from Kirkland & Ellis and Davis Polk rushed alongside hundreds of other lawyers to international airports to help travelers stuck in limbo. Kirkland teamed up with the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization Lambda Legal to challenge Trump’s transgender military ban.

Now, Davis Polk is among the many firms that are avoiding pro bono immigration cases, The New York Times reported. Kirkland, by some measures the top moneymaker in Big Law, entered a deal with Trump to provide $125 million in pro bono work, and the firm is notably absent from Lambda’s nearly identical challenge to Trump’s reinstated ban on transgender military service members. Kirkland and Davis Polk did not respond to requests for comment.

Winston & Strawn’s annual pro bono reports show how its focus — or at least, its language — has changed. The firm’s 2023 impact report highlighted its advocacy on behalf of a transgender competitive marathoner. “I am also pleased to report that Winston dedicated 30% of our pro bono hours to racial justice and equity matters in 2023,” nearly double its share in 2020, wrote Angela Smedley, the pro bono committee chair. The 2024 report, published after Trump’s reelection, contained zero mentions of “equity” and spotlighted attorneys who helped small nonprofits navigate “complex mergers and business challenges.”

Eisen and Zaid, the lawyers representing the FBI agents, themselves became the target of a presidential memorandum in March that revoked their access to classified material. Both have aggravated Trump for years. Zaid represented a whistleblower who helped bring about Trump’s first impeachment.

Zaid sued to restore his security clearance in May, in a case that is ongoing. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, is a high-profile defense attorney who left Winston this spring in order to form his own firm. Lowell said his goal is to represent those “unlawfully and inappropriately targeted.” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a fraud judgment against Trump and is now a target of his DOJ, was one of his first clients.

“The Administration’s attempt at retribution against Mark for doing his job — representing whistleblowers without regard to politics — is as illegal as its similar efforts against law firms that have been enjoined in every case,” Lowell wrote in an email to ProPublica.

Good-government groups and small and mid-sized law firms have stepped into the breach, helping to file hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration. And the four firms that sued Trump over his executive orders are devoting thousands of pro bono hours to others challenging the administration. Perkins Coie, for example, has replaced Kirkland as Lambda Legal’s partner in challenging Trump’s transgender military ban.

But until they build up the capacity to fully replace Big Law, Bonds said, some of the administration’s legally dubious actions will go unchallenged.

“There’s a financial resources piece that we’re really missing when we can’t engage a firm,” Bonds said. “Even if there’s a big case and we feel really confident about it, we’ll just have to pass on it.”>

<Amid all the ominous signs for the unraveling of our constitutional republic — and the 50 state governments contained therein — one last month struck me as particularly bleak.

The Atlantic first reported that Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz would be leaving the National Governors Association. The bipartisan group claims that it serves as “the voice of the nation’s Governors and a leading forum for bipartisan policy solutions.” Democrats Kelly and Walz apparently didn’t see it that way.

Meanwhile, Kelly has raised her national profile as chairwoman of the Democratic Governors Association and has called for a robust response to potential gerrymandering in Texas.

The cliche response to this storm of news would be: “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” But we are in Kansas, and in every other state besides. The notion that officials might benefit from listening to one another and working together has been thrown on the partisan bonfire. As Republicans attempt to extract maximum advantage from government, Democrats find themselves forced to react in kind.

None of this reflects reality. According to Pew, the United States splits right down the middle between Republican and Democrat party registration. There’s a similar division between governors, with 27 Republicans and 23 Democrats. But what does the real word have to do with politics?

Apparently Democratic governors have grouched about the national group for some time.

Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker of the Atlantic wrote July 24 that “some Democratic members of the group have privately been fuming in recent months over the organization’s tepid reaction to President Donald Trump’s federal incursions into state matters. They complain that the group did not respond forcefully enough when Trump’s Office of Management and Budget briefly ordered a disruptive pause on the disbursement of all federal funds in January; when Maine Governor Janet Mills and her staff clashed with the White House the following month, over transgender sports; and in June, when Trump deployed the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles over the objections of local authorities.”

That makes sense. But what an unfortunate situation for governance in this country. What an unfortunate lack of spine as the federal government spirals.

Kelly decided not to privately fume any longer, making her unhappiness public. Remember, we’re not talking about a stereotypical wild-eyed leftist here. We’re talking about Laura Kelly, a politician whose primary skill has always been demonstrating her sanity in an otherwise insane world of political maneuvering.

“I just felt like Kansas was not getting a return on investment, and we will keep our eyes on it,” Kelly said, according to KSNT. Dues for the organization run about $100,000 a year. “The NGA does some very good things particularly in the area of training for governor’s staff, but there also needs to be a state rights advocate, and I think they’ve sort of fallen down on that role.”

In the meantime, political tensions have flared over mid-decade redistricting for congressional seats. Lawmakers usually draw maps every decade, following U.S. Census results. However, Texas legislators have been pressed by Trump to create new maps earlier, making it more difficult for Democrats to win U.S. House seats. Given that the governing party usually loses seats in midterm elections, this redistricting could cushion the expected blow for Republicans.

This has enraged Democrats, and leaders of blue states like California have threatened their own gerrymanders in retaliation. Guess who’s OK with that? Laura Kelly.

“I have never believed in unilateral disarmament, and so while I may not want to participate in certain activities, if I have to, in order to level the playing field, I would support my Democratic colleagues who decide to answer in kind,” she told ABC News at a policy retreat last week.

She added: “If the other side is going to pursue this, regardless of the obvious unconstitutionality of it, then I don’t think we have any other choice but to go there. You just don’t go to the front lines without your bullets.”

By running and governing as authoritarian wanna-bes, Republicans have pushed moderate Democrats like Kelly toward bare-knuckle political combat. They have alienated would-be allies, all in the service of the dime-store strongman living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We live in a narrowly divided country, but the GOP has chosen to eschew rules, norms or the barest sense of shame.

Kelly will do fine. I wish I could say the same for our state and nation.>

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.07.03"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "7"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Addison, James"]
[Black "Eggleston, Daniel"]
[ECO "A80"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "4th Harry Lyman Open"] [Site "Framingham Mass"]
[Date "2001.01.26"]
[EventDate "2001"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Kelleher, William"]
[Black "Terrie, Henry L"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "B40"]
[WhiteElo "2459"]
[BlackElo "2200"]

<[Event "3rd Foxwoods Open"] [Site "Mashantucket Conn"]
[Date "2001.04.13"]
[EventDate "2001"]
[Round "2.25"]
[White "Koenig, David"]
[Black "Shaw, Alan"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ECO "C83"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0-0 Nxe4 6.d4 b5 7.Bb3 d5 8.dxe5 Be6 9.Nbd2 Nc5 10.c3 d4 11.Bxe6 Nxe6 12.cxd4 Ncxd4 13.a4 Be7 14.Nxd4 Nxd4 15.Ne4 Rb8 16.axb5 axb5 17.Be3 Nf5 18.Ba7 Qxd1 19.Rfxd1 Rd8 20.Rxd8+ Kxd8 21.Nc5 Kc8 22.Rd1 Rd8 23.Rxd8+ Bxd8 24.Nd3 Kb7 25.g4 Kxa7 26.gxf5 Kb6 27.Kg2 Kc6 28.Kf3 Kd5 29.Nb4+ Kc5 30.Nc2 Kc4 31.Ke4 c5 32.Na3+ Kb4 33.Kd5 c4 34.Kc6 c3 35.bxc3 Kxa3 36.Kxb5 Kb3 37.c4 Kc3 38.Kc5 Be7+ 39.Kd5 Kb4 40.e6 fxe6+ 41.fxe6 Bf8 42.f4 Bc5 43.f5 Be7 44.Kc6 Kxc4 45.Kd7 Bf6 46.e7 Bxe7 47.Kxe7 Kd5 48.f6 1/2-1/2>

Still stalking me, <fredpigshit>?

<Congressional Republicans have, with little resistance, accepted all manner of indignities since Donald Trump’s rise to power. They’ve been made to answer for his likening a porn star’s looks to a horse, his testimonial to the endowment of a deceased golfer and, more regularly, swallowed a tariff regime that is about as faithful to the foundations of their modern party as Das Kapital.

But the president now is testing whether party loyalty ever asks too much in the Trump era by all but signing the political death warrants of a handful of blue state Republicans.

That’s what the president is inviting with his demand that Texas Republicans redraw their House boundaries this year to hand him more seats, which he thinks will protect the GOP majority next year and protect him from what he dreads: being impeached a third time.

This mid-decade redistricting of the country’s largest red state predictably triggered a vow from the country’s largest blue state to do the same. How could Trump not grasp that California Gov. Gavin Newsom would respond by swinging with Ohtani-like fervor at an opportunity to insert himself in the national debate, build a trans-continental fundraising list and demonstrate his mettle to Democratic primary voters?

“He was not given the full picture of the ultimate consequences,” ventured Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California Republican whose seat will likely be eliminated should Democrats have their way with a new map. Kiley is being diplomatic about Trump, who, as the MAGA catechism goes, can only be failed but never fail himself.

The better question may be whether Trump cares at all that he may sacrifice the careers of a handful of blue state House GOP incumbents in service of snatching more red state seats.

Because that is exactly what Newsom intends.

“If Texas wants to rig the maps, California will make sure they pay a price,” the governor told me. “They want to steal five seats? We’ll match and secure more — and turn the tables on their entire strategy.”

Let’s pause for a moment to recognize that neither party has clean hands when it comes to redistricting. Both have long used the process to protect themselves and punish the opposition.

However, many Republicans, needing to rationalize yet another Trump power grab, have conflated the post-census, decennial process with what the president is doing: lunging for additional safe GOP seats in the middle of the decade because he finds the stigma of an impeachment hat trick humiliating. Don’t believe me? Just listen to any of his speeches when he recounts the unfairness of the previous two.

Trump’s move may well work. Even if California’s new map wipes out five Republicans and shores up some Democratic seats there, more than neutralizing GOP gains in Texas, the president can likely rely on additional red states such as Ohio, Missouri and Indiana to salute him and overhaul their congressional boundaries to squeeze out the few Democrats left in their delegations. And this is to say nothing of how many more majority-minority districts in red states could be wiped out should the Supreme Court effectively gut the Voting Rights Act before next year’s elections.

Such an endgame will surely wind up in a series of state and federal courts, transforming the early going of the midterms into as much a legal fight as a political one. It would make for a mess.

And it wouldn’t stop with 2026. New York, for example, is constrained by its voter-approved independent redistricting commission and can’t undo the commission and redraw its House maps until the 2028 election.

But why would Democrats in Albany not do so if Trump effectively muscles a House majority into existence next year via a series of red states upending their own maps?

If New York Democrats do pursue such a redraw, it will likely doom the most politically vulnerable House Republicans still left there after the midterms.

Which gets to the cold reality for GOP lawmakers in California and New York: The very Republicans who helped deliver their party’s congressional majority by winning in the two mega-states in 2020 and 2022 could be collateral damage to Trump’s gambit.

That includes House veterans such as Reps. Darrell Issa and Ken Calvert, both of California, but also younger, promising Republican lawmakers such as Kiley, 40, and Rep. Mike Lawler (N.Y.), 38.

“This creates a situation where you’re going to lose blue state members, which over the long haul are critical to keeping the majority,” Lawler told me.

It’s all, Lawler said, “mutually assured destruction once people go full throttle.”....>

<....The redistricting threat is especially cruel to Lawler, who was already eager to avoid yet another tough race in his Hudson Valley district by running for governor next year. But Trump made clear he preferred Rep. Elise Stefanik, a born-again MAGA disciple, as the standard-bearer even though running a Trump acolyte statewide may only ensure Stefanik ends next year where she started this year: hoping for a Trump cabinet appointment.

For Kiley, the Newsom reprisal to Trump may extinguish a congressional career that just began in 2023.

“I certainly hope sanity can prevail,” the California Republican told me.

Kiley has been the most outspoken in the state’s House delegation. He’s introduced a bill that would block all mid-decade redistricting efforts and, while sparing Trump, doesn’t mince words about his expectations of House GOP leaders.

“The onus is on the speaker, along with the minority leader, to get this chaos under control,” he said, pointedly adding that Speaker Mike Johnson “needs to show some leadership.”

Kiley said he had conveyed his alarm to Johnson and also reached out to the House GOP campaign arm. “I’ve made my views very clear on the matter, privately and publicly,” he said.

But the rest of the California Republican delegation — notably Calvert, an able lawmaker who holds the Defense gavel on the Appropriations Committee — has been more restrained. That may amount to a recognition that Kiley’s Put the Toothpaste Back in the Tube Act of 2025 is unlikely to see the light of day.

“As a Republican in California, I’m used to fighting for my political survival,” quipped Calvert, vowing to fight what he called Newsom’s “power grab at every opportunity.”

Given how much Johnson depends on the president’s support to retain his post, there’s only so much the speaker could do to confront Trump on any matter, let alone something as delicate as denying Trump what he thinks Texas owes him.

The notion of Johnson telling Trump: “Mr. President, can you please give up your Texas play, it’s going to jam us in California and eventually New York” is… remote. In fact, it’s about as likely as Johnson telling Trump: “Mr. President, would you mind putting the same amount of time into selling your Big Beautiful Bill to voters that you commit to White House grounds renovation?”

So California Republicans, I’m told by California GOP officials, are being promised only legal, political and financial support from the House GOP — effectively a promise to help in the redistricting arms race rather than trying to stymie it altogether.

Shawn Steel, a longtime California Republican hand, is helping to organize the pushback against Newsom and was in Washington last week. And Charles Munger Jr., a wealthy California donor who helped fund the original effort to create an independent redistricting commission there, has reengaged and is hiring a legal team....>

<....Unlike in Texas, where Gov. Greg (Abbott) can simply call a special session and legislators can redraw the lines, the bar is higher for Newsom in California. The Democrat needs to gather support for ballot measures this fall that will both eliminate the state’s independent commission and implement new, Democratic-drawn House maps for 2026.

Such initiatives will surely invite a tsunami of spending for and against, from liberal and conservative donors across the country and vault California (and Newsom) to the center of the country’s political consciousness in November.

“You’re going to see a lot of money spent on this because this is their only path,” Jessica Millan Paterson, the former California GOP chair, said of her state’s Democrats.

That the bar is higher for California Democrats than Texas Republicans enrages those Democrats who are not of the Common Cause persuasion and think they’re being played for chumps by instituting independent commissions in blue states that places like Texas would laugh at.

“We simply can’t have a situation in which Republicans are gerrymandering the hell out of red states while in blue states we abide by good government commissions,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.). “The same rules need to apply equally, everywhere.”

Of course, part of the reason that there are fewer states for Democrats to redraw is because those blue states that are not ready for reform — Illinois! — have already indulged in expansive political cartography to maximize Democratic gains.

But to House Republicans now staring down early retirement, the redistricting wars “are bad across the board,” as Kiley put it.

A Harvard College and Yale Law graduate, Kiley said California’s reprisal redraw would be the opposite of the old line that good policy is good politics. “It’s bad for good government in our state and bad for the Republican cause in California,” he said.

Trump, Kiley insisted, “doesn’t want to see the California delegation upended or the New York delegation upended.”

Yet that’s exactly what he could get, at least after hundreds of millions of dollars are spent, dozens of court cases are waged and a referendum or two are passed.

But at least it would mean Trump is spared a third impeachment that, like the other two, would be killed by Senate Republicans.>

<JD Vance’s team had the army corps of engineers take the unusual step of changing the outflow of a lake in Ohio to accommodate a recent boating excursion on a family holiday, the Guardian has learned.

The request from the US Secret Service was made to “support safe navigation” of the US vice-president’s security detail for an August outing on the Little Miami River, according to a statement by the US army corps of engineers (USACE).

Vance was spotted in the south-western Ohio area on 2 August, his 41st birthday, according to social media posts that noted he was seen canoeing on the river, a tributary that Caesar Creek Lake feeds into.

One source with knowledge of the matter who communicated with the Guardian anonymously alleged that the outflow request for the Caesar Creek Lake was not just to support the vice-president’s Secret Service detail, but also to create “ideal kayaking conditions”. The Guardian could not independently confirm this specific claim.

The news raises questions about whether Vance’s office was potentially exploiting public infrastructure resources for his personal recreation at a time when the Trump administration has cut billions of dollars in foreign aid, scientific research and government jobs as part of its “efficiency” drive.

The vice-president’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Guardian first approached the USACE in Louisville for a comment about the change on Tuesday. Publicly available data on the US Geological Survey (USGS) shows a sudden increase in the river level and corresponding drop in lake elevation during the early August days when Vance was vacationing.

The request was forwarded to the USACE headquarters. In a statement emailed to the Guardian on Wednesday, spokesperson Gene Pawlik said the USACE Louisville had received “a request to temporarily increase outflows from Caesar Creek Lake to support safe navigation of US Secret Service personnel”.

In a statement, the Secret Service said it had closely coordinated with the Ohio department of natural resources and USACE to conduct planning to ensure motorized watercraft and emergency personnel could operate safely during a recent visit. It said it could not discuss specifics of its operational planning.

It is not unprecedented for the USACE to modify outflows to accommodate public use – for example, for use in community river events and training for emergency responders.

In one instance, Caesar Creek Lake’s USACE, Louisville district Facebook page announced a “special release” as requested by the Ohio department of natural resources last year on 22 August but later publicly announced that the special release had been cancelled. No such public announcement was made before 1 August.

According to the Guardian’s anonymous source with knowledge of the matter, “special releases” are generally not done for individuals or by individual request....>

<....The Guardian also sought information about whether the request was appropriately documented. USACE regulations regarding requests for so-called “deviations” – or any changes to normal practices – require approval and documentation that demonstrates why the deviation is justified. This process also ensures that risks associated with any deviation – including a flood risk or other environmental impact – is detailed.

Pawlik said the Secret Service request “met the operational criteria outlined in the Water Control Manual for Caesar Creek Lake and did not require a deviation from normal procedures”.

He added: “It was determined that the operations would not adversely affect downstream or upstream water levels. Downstream stakeholders were notified in advance of the slight outflow increase, which occurred August 1, 2025.”

While there is no allegation that Vance’s office did anything illegal, the ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who served in the George W Bush administration, said it seemed hypocritical and “pretty outrageous” for Vance to be receiving these particular accommodations for his family holiday when the administration’s cuts have led to drastic cuts in the National Park Service (NPS).

The National Parks Conservation Association has estimated that the NPS has lost about a quarter of its staff since January, which in turn has led to sections of some parks to be closed and hours to be changed due to staffing issues.

“Those cuts are directly impacting middle-class families’ vacations,” Painter said. “Whether they are doing it for the Secret Service or for him I think is splitting hairs. What he ought to be doing is choosing another place.”

Norm Eisen, a former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, said: “When I was President Obama’s ethics czar in the White House I got a lot of unusual requests, but I never got one to increase the outflow of a waterway as part of a government official going kayaking.

“My nickname was ‘Mr No’ and I certainly would have lived up to it in this situation. I never would have permitted this kind of a thing because whether it technically violates the rules or not, it creates the appearance that the vice-president of the United States is getting special treatment that’s not available to the average person who wants to utilise that body of water for recreational purposes.

“While there may well be security-related explanations or justifications that come into the analysis, my reaction is: I don’t care. We shouldn’t be utilising government resources in this way. I never would have allowed it.”>

https://www.bing.com/images/search?...

https://www.bing.com/images/search?...

https://www.bing.com/images/search?...