New Lawsuit Challenging Wisconsin Congressional Districts

The story is here.

From the report:

MADISON, Wis. — A new lawsuit seeking to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional district boundary lines was filed on Tuesday, less than two weeks after the state Supreme Court declined to hear a pair of other lawsuits that asked for redistricting before the 2026 election.

The latest lawsuit brought by a bipartisan coalition of business leaders was filed in Dane County circuit court, rather than directly with the state Supreme Court as the rejected cases were. The justices did not give any reason for declining to hear those cases, but typically lawsuits start in a lower court and work their way up. 

This new lawsuit’s more lengthy journey through the courts might not be resolved in time to order new maps before the 2026 midterms.

The Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy argue in the new lawsuit that Wisconsin’s congressional maps are unconstitutional because they are an anti-competitive gerrymander. The lawsuit notes that the median margin of victory for candidates in the eight districts since the maps were enacted is close to 30 percentage points.

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DOJ Possibly Investigating Former Directors of the FBI and CIA

Glenn Thrush and Julian Barnes reporting here.

From the article:

The Trump administration appears to be targeting officials who oversaw the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, examining the actions of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan, according to people familiar with the situation.

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director and a harsh critic of his Democratic-appointed predecessors, has made a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan to the F.B.I., accusing him of lying to Congress, officials said. The bureau is also scrutinizing Mr. Comey for his role in the Russia investigation, other officials said, although the exact basis for an inquiry remains unclear.

Even if it is unclear whether the moves will lead to charges, they are among the most significant indications that President Trump’s appointees intend to follow through on his campaign to exact retribution against his perceived enemies. That includes people leading the investigation into what he has repeatedly denounced as the “Russia hoax” nine years ago and officials involved in two failed federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump during the Biden years.

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Crypto, Lobbying, & Trump

David Yaffe-Bellany and Kenneth Vogel of The New York Times provide an interesting account of how crypto lobbyists won over President Trump. Here are some key excerpts:

Just over a year ago, while sitting around a table in an ornate meeting room at Mar-a-Lago, David Bailey and a group of top Bitcoin executives made a pitch to Donald J. Trump.

They were looking for a savior.

For years, cryptocurrency companies had endured a sweeping crackdown in Washington — a cascade of lawsuits, regulatory attacks and prosecutions that threatened the industry’s survival.

Since Mr. Trump’s election, the price of Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, has skyrocketed to over $100,000, enriching executives who supported his campaign. Crypto advocates who were shunned in Washington during the Biden administration now enjoy astonishing access to the Trump White House, which has quickly unwound the regulatory crackdown. And the federal government has embraced sweeping pro-crypto policies that could upend the U.S. financial system for decades.

All of that resulted from one of the great lobbying free-for-alls in recent history. For months, industry executives, paid lobbyists, campaign operatives, and Trump business partners and family members orchestrated a diffuse but stunningly effective influence operation that turned Mr. Trump from an outspoken Bitcoin skeptic into crypto’s most important supporter.

Virtually every step of Mr. Trump’s transformation has been steered by the industry. Lacking much knowledge of its intricacies, Mr. Trump embraced crypto when he saw it could generate huge profits for himself or his political groups, while outsourcing the details to industry advisers with their own business ambitions, according to documents and audio recordings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people involved in Mr. Trump’s crypto plans.

Now he is deeply enmeshed in an industry his administration regulates — one that was founded as a renegade alternative to the big banks. He and his sons unveiled their own crypto business last fall, the start of a blitz of new ventures that has grown to include four Trump-branded digital currencies and even a Bitcoin mining company.

At some points, the only meaningful check on the industry’s power has come from rival crypto interests jockeying against one another to influence Mr. Trump. The competition has at times resembled a bidding war.

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Second Circuit Unanimously Reverses Conviction in Mackey (“Ricky Vaughn”) Case, Finding Insufficient Evidence of a Conspiracy to Deprive People of Their Right to Vote By Tricking Them into Voting By Text

You can find the court’s opinion at this link. The sole basis for the reversal was lack of sufficient evidence that defendant Mackey had conspired with others to deprive people of their right to vote.

The Court did not address the substantive scope of section 241 or address the First Amendment issues with convicting people of depriving others of the right to vote by fraud. I filed an amicus brief with Protect Democracy and the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic on these issues.

I explained those issues in this post:

and in this piece at Slate.

So resolution of these constitutional and statutory issues will await another day.

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Trump Administration Wants to Enter into a Consent Decree that Would Allow Churches and Other Religious Organizations to Get More Directly Involved in Electoral Politics Despite the “Johnson Amendment”

In the lawsuit raising constitutional objections to limits on religious nonprofits being involved in endorsing candidates and doing other election related activities, a proposed joint consent decree, in which plaintiffs and the federal government would agree to what would… Continue reading