From the right: Gerrymandering Lessons
“The GOP was dumb, and Democrats owe the Justices another apology,” concludes The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board of the “self-defeating fiasco” of the Republican gerrymandering gambit. President Trump demanded states “redraw House districts” for extra seats, but that meant “Republicans spread GOP voters thin,” letting Democrats carry districts “thought to be safe.” Now “the left is chortling” over “the magnitude of the GOP gerrymander bungle,” yet (contra hysteria about “the return of Jim Crow”), black Dem wins in majority-white districts debunk “the left-wing conceit that racial gerrymanders are needed to elect black politicians.” And so much for Justice Elena Kagan’s claim that the high court had “blinded itself to the very deleterious effects” of partisan maps. As Dems now “gerrymander their state maps to entrench the new House Democratic majority,” be sure “you won’t hear them — or their media cheerleaders — complaining about” the Supremes’ hands-off approach.
Mideast watch: Who Really Flooded Gaza?
Don’t blame Israel; “it was Hamas’s cannibalisation of Gaza’s infrastructure that made the current floods so bad,” explains Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. Gaza lacks basic drainage because “Hamas spent years ripping water pipes out of the ground to turn them into rocket fuselages” — even boasting, according to The Telegraph, about bending “30 miles of water pipelines” funded by the EU into “an arsenal of home-made rockets” while diverting aid into a “350-mile tunnel system.” For 20 years, “Hamas chose to build not a functioning society but a staging ground for slaughter.” In promoting “the moral absolution of Hamas,” Western activists treat Palestinians as “wide-eyed, child-like victims.”
Labor desk: Free Unions’ Hostage Workers
“Outdated” rules make union-decertification elections “harder to hold” than necessary, and harder than federal law requires, gripes Mark Mix at The Hill. His group, National Right to Work Legal Defense, has “petitioned the National Labor Relations Board” to fix that and “defend workers’ free choice.” First, end the right of unions to block votes for unique circumstances, like a change in ownership. Since “a recent study found 95 percent of currently unionized workers” never voted for their union, the NLRB should also require union bosses to periodically “prove they have the support of a majority” of employees. Such reforms are “nothing to fear” for “effective unions,” but could be “be the only way out” for trapped workers.
Conservative: GOP Can’t Escape Don’s Shadow
“The biggest factor in the Republicans’ 2026 midterm wipeout was [President] Trump,” argues National Review’s Jim Geraghty, but he’ll never own up to his “role in the coast-to-coast rebuke of Republicans.” So don’t “expect any significant improvement in the image of the GOP for the next two years.” Others may try to change the tone, but “Trump sucks up just about all the oxygen in the room,” making it hard for “any other Republican to develop a national reputation while living in Trump’s shadow. Plus, “most of his team believe their role is ‘owning the libs’ by putting on a show” — that “they’re in the content-creation business, when they’re really in the governing business.” All the way through the 2028 elections, it’ll be a brutal struggle to present the GOP “as a potential governing party as long as the administration keeps its current perspective and approach.”
Subversion beat: DSA Eyed for Cuba, China Ties
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier “is investigating the Democratic Socialists of America over contributions from China and Cuba,” including if “the organization accepted ‘tens of thousands of dollars’ to fund DSA delegations” on a trip to meet “government officials in the two communist countries,” reports The Washington Times’ Susan Ferrechio. The socialist organization appears to have violated a 2025 Florida law that “bans nonprofit organizations from soliciting donations from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria and the now-ousted Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro,” notes Uthmeier, who questions “whether its fundraising from Florida donors has been fully transparent and lawful.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board