Even the Supreme Court Can’t Stop the Midterm Blue Wave

The DHS is open, but the fight to fund ICE is just beginning. Meanwhile, the FCC is going after another late night host.

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The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act this week. Republican states are already redrawing their maps to erase historically Black districts. But that’s still not going to stop the Blue Wave coming in November. Let’s talk about it.

Democrats Are Still Going to Sweep in November, SCOTUS Be Damned

The Supreme Court dropped a bomb on Wednesday. In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s conservative supermajority gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, making it nearly impossible to challenge racially discriminatory maps without proving outright intentional discrimination — a near-impossible legal bar.

The GOP’s response was immediate and shameless. Within an hour of the ruling, the Republican-controlled Florida House approved a gerrymandered map that could net the GOP four more House seats. Republicans in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Georgia are racing to redraw maps before November.

All told, analysts estimate Republicans could net as many as 18 new House districts in the 2026 midterms thanks to gerrymanders authorized by this Supreme Court ruling.

That sounds catastrophic. The ruling is a direct assault on the civil rights gains of the past sixty years. But here’s what the GOP’s triumphalists don’t want you to focus on: the political environment heading into November is historically brutal for Republicans.

Maps alone cannot save them from what’s coming.

The April 2026 Emerson College poll of likely voters finds Democrats leading Republicans by 10 points on the generic congressional ballot. Trump’s job approval sits at just 40%, with 56% of likely voters disapproving. Meanwhile, 53% view the U.S. military action in Iran as a failure.

History tells us what happens in environments like this. Just look at the 2018 blue wave, which produced massive Democratic gains even with Republican-gerrymandered maps.

Legal battles are already underway challenging the rushed Republican redistricting efforts, particularly Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry’s legally dubious move to suspend an already-underway primary. The court’s ruling gives Republicans little room to redraw maps before the midterms.

And crucially, the SCOTUS ruling itself may backfire, especially in Florida. When you gerrymander aggressively to squeeze out four extra seats, you don’t create four safe Republican districts. You create four razor-thin Republican districts.

Republicans in Florida should know this better than anyone right now. In March, Democrat Emily Gregory flipped a state legislative seat that includes Mar-a-Lago itself, which a Republican incumbent had won by 19 points just two years earlier. The same night, Democrat Brian Nathan flipped a Tampa state Senate seat. It was the 29th seat Democrats had flipped from Republican control since Trump took office.

DeSantis is now proposing to spread Republican voters even thinner across more districts in Tampa, Orlando, and South Florida — the regions already teeming with Democratic voters.

SCOTUS handed the GOP a sixty-year cheat code, and Florida Republicans immediately fumbled it. No map ever drawn has fixed a ten-point polling deficit. Republicans are about to learn that the hard way. Again.

The DHS Shutdown Is Over. The ICE Fight Has Just Begun.

If you need more proof that no amount of votes can save Republicans from themselves, look no further than the DHS shutdown.

The longest agency shutdown in American history ended Thursday when the House passed a bill to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE and Customs and Border Protection remain unfunded, meaning Democrats got exactly what they held out for.

This started in January, when federal agents killed two American citizens during an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Democrats refused to fund ICE without reforms. Republicans refused to fund anything without ICE. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill unanimously in March. Mike Johnson sat on it for five weeks. More than a thousand TSA officers quit. Airport lines stretched for hours. Johnson eventually passed the Senate’s bill word for word.

Republicans tried to blame Democrats for a shutdown that their own speaker refused to end. They called it the “Democrat DHS shutdown” on official government communications, all while Johnson privately told colleagues he didn’t have the votes.

This isn’t fully over. Republicans are now racing to push $70 billion in ICE and Border Patrol funding through budget reconciliation before Trump’s self-imposed June 1 deadline. The process requires them to bypass the Democratic filibuster – and keep all members of a famously dysfunctional party in line.

Wednesday’s vote to unlock that process took five hours and required Johnson to personally negotiate with a bloc of Midwestern lawmakers who were holding out over an unrelated ethanol provision. That is the coalition that now has thirty days to get it done.

Given that it took them 76 days to pass a bill they already had, we’re not holding our breath.

The FCC Threatened ABC’s License Because Jimmy Kimmel Made a Joke

We’re not editorializing. That’s just the sequence of events.

On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Jimmy Kimmel “should be immediately fired” after Kimmel made a joke about Melania Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By Tuesday afternoon, the FCC had ordered ABC to file early license renewals for all eight of its owned stations within 30 days.

The FCC says the investigation is about Disney’s DEI practices. The lone Democratic commissioner on the FCC called it “the most egregious action this FCC has taken in violation of the First Amendment to date.” The timeline did the rest of the talking.

This is not the first time. In September, Kimmel’s show was suspended for six days after he made a joke conservatives didn’t like. The FCC chair said at the time, about ABC affiliates: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

The legal standard for actually revoking a broadcast license is nearly insurmountable, and this process will take years. The FCC knows that. That’s not the point. The point is that a late-night comedian now has to wonder whether his employer’s federal operating licenses are safe every time he writes a monologue.

AlterNet America does not have a broadcast license. We do not have a parent company with eight TV stations a regulator can threaten. We have no advertisers to call us nervously on Tuesday morning, no merger pending before a Trump-appointed commissioner, and no lawyer who has to approve the monologue.

We have readers, and that is the only reason we can write this sentence without anyone doing the calculation first.

If that bothers you, the answer is to fund the journalism that doesn’t have a license to lose. And if you’ve been reading for free, today is a good day to change that. Become a paid subscriber.

We’ll still be here tomorrow, saying the thing ABC’s lawyers are currently meeting about.

–Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America