Think More: Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Justice Alito restores the VRA to its original purpose, 148 House districts come back into play, and a plurality of Democrats now call America evil.
Alito Restores the Voting Rights Act to Its Purpose
Mark Pulliam • The American Mind
Pulliam, a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, traces how Justice Alito’s 6-3 majority in Louisiana v. Callais unravels four decades of post-Gingles jurisprudence and restores the 1965 statute to its original purpose: ending poll taxes, literacy tests, and white primaries, not engineering proportional racial outcomes. Alito’s opinion narrows Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) and aligns Section 2 with the Equal Protection Clause’s command of color-blindness. The Court did not gut the VRA, despite Justice Kagan’s dissent claiming it would render Section 2 “all but a dead letter”; it ended the misreading that compelled states to draw districts to demographic targets.
The 148 Districts Now in Play
Moran builds on Mark Hemingway’s American Spectator analysis: Ballotpedia’s count of racially gerrymandered districts now stands at 148 nationwide, of which 122 are held by Democrats. That is more than half of the party’s 212 House seats. The Justice Department, through Civil Rights Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, has confirmed it will enforce Callais in every state with such a district. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ “everything on the table” response indicates the party understands what is at stake.
The Democrats’ Counter-Strategy Runs Into State Law
Vespa, drawing on Axios’s survey of more than twenty Democratic legislators, catalogues the constraints on mid-decade Democratic redistricting: Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled state Senate and a state Supreme Court that struck down a 2018 GOP map under the same anti-gerrymander provisions; Michigan’s independent commission; Illinois Black Caucus members who balked at Gov. JB Pritzker’s map last fall. Colorado and New York remain fertile ground; nearly everywhere else, the response runs aground. The 2030 census, expected to shift Electoral College weight away from the blue wall, sits behind the urgency.
Newsom’s California Bill Comes Due
Nicholas Ballasy • Just the News
Ballasy catalogues a sequence of California setbacks compounding ahead of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s potential 2028 run: a voter-ID initiative qualified for the fall ballot, a state budget deficit projected between $20 billion and $30 billion, a high-speed rail authority that missed its May 1 statutory reporting deadline on a project now estimated at $126.2 billion, and Proposition 50 left in legal limbo after Callais. Redistricting analyst Matt Rexroad notes that Prop 50’s author Paul Mitchell publicly described one of the new districts as a “VRA district,” a characterization that under the new precedent invites a successful legal challenge.
A Plurality of Democrats Now Call America a Force for Evil
Scott Rasmussen • Napolitan News Service
Rasmussen’s latest survey of 1,000 registered voters finds 51 percent describe the United States as a force for good in the world and 24 percent as a force for evil, both figures records in his polling. The internal Democratic split is the story: 36 percent of Democrats now call the country a force for evil, against 34 percent who call it a force for good. In October 2024, 64 percent of all voters called the country a force for good and 10 percent a force for evil. The collapse, almost entirely on the Left, has occurred in eighteen months.
Forty-Seven Percent
Steven Camarota & Karen Zeigler • Center for Immigration Studies
A Center for Immigration Studies analysis of three years of Census Bureau Current Population Survey data finds that 47 percent of households headed by non-citizens use one or more traditional means-tested welfare programs, rising to 54 percent when the Earned Income Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit are included; the comparable figure for native-born households is 31 percent. Variation by country is severe and tracks educational attainment with a correlation coefficient of −0.83: Afghanistan 87 percent, the Dominican Republic 78, Guatemala 77; Korea 30, the United Kingdom 25, India 16. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was supposed to bar most of these households from most federal programs.
Congress Owns the Asylum System
George Fishman • Center for Immigration Studies
Fishman, a former DHS deputy general counsel who helped draft the Trump-era asylum architecture, agrees with the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in RICELS v. Mullin: the President cannot unilaterally bar illegal entrants from applying for asylum, because the Immigration and Nationality Act grants that right to “any alien who is physically present” or “arrives in” the United States. Border Patrol apprehensions have nonetheless fallen 91 percent since the Trump proclamation, from 1.53 million in FY 2024 to an annualized 86,000 today. The court’s opinion places the burden where it belongs: on Congress, the only branch with authority to amend the INA.
California’s Compelled-Speech Curriculum
Greg Gonzalez & Adam Goldstein • FIRE
FIRE’s legislative team documents two California bills: Assembly Bill 1803 would mandate “anti-hate speech training” for every employer with five or more employees; Assembly Bill 1578 would mandate the same for all state and local elected officials. The bills define hate speech as expression that “vilifies, humiliates, or incites hatred” on the basis of protected characteristics, terms with no settled legal meaning. British police arrested more than 12,000 people in 2023 alone for online speech under analogous laws. California is now copying the model and routing it through the workplace.
