Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act last week, and is letting the ruling take effect early. DHS has shut down the only office that investigated abuse in immigration detention. RFK Jr. has announced his plan to take away your antidepressants. And Southern governors are rewriting district maps in real time, mid-election, while people are literally trying to vote.
Before we dive in: AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. Corporate networks are cheerleading the war in Iran, and the FCC chair is openly threatening broadcast licenses of outlets that don’t toe the line. Independent journalism has never been more essential than it is right now. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please become one today. It is how we stay standing when everything else is being bought or broken.
Today at 1 PM ET, AlterNet America co-founder and managing editor Ryan Rose will be conducting a live interview with independent journalist Erin Reed of Erin In The Morning, who will discuss how the Trump administration is using cases involving LGBTQ+ youth to erode the justice system for everyone. Watch live on our homepage at AlterNetAmerica.com.
The Supreme Court Couldn’t Even Wait 32 Days
The Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last week. It was a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, it was devastating, and it would normally sit for 32 days before taking formal effect, giving the losing side a chance to request a rehearing.
The court did not wait 32 days.
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed its ruling to take effect ahead of schedule, bolstering Louisiana Republicans as they pursue a new congressional voting map ahead of the November midterm elections.
The winning side — a group of voters who described themselves in court papers simply as “non-African American” — asked the court to move faster. The court agreed. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the decision “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.”
“Chaos” is one word for it. Louisiana officials delayed the state’s House primaries that were scheduled for May 16 to allow for a redraw of the current map even as absentee voting is already underway. Voting rights groups sued to keep the primaries on schedule. Louisiana said it would not count the votes already cast for House seats.
Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent from the original ruling, warned that plaintiffs challenging discriminatory maps would now find it nearly impossible to succeed in court. The court’s response was to also skip the waiting period. There was no time to waste.
Alabama and Tennessee Hold Special Sessions to Help Finish the Job
And if you thought states would wait for the dust to settle before acting, you have not been paying attention to the last several years.
Republican governors in Alabama and Tennessee called lawmakers into special sessions this week to draw new congressional districts. Alabama Republican legislative leaders said the session would “give our state a fighting chance to send seven Republican members to Congress.” The seven-member delegation currently has two Democrats.
In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee announced a special session for the GOP-controlled Legislature to break up the state’s one Democratic-held House district, centered on the majority-Black city of Memphis. The state already holds an 8-to-1 Republican advantage in its congressional delegation, but apparently that is not enough.
Opponents of Alabama’s redistricting session gathered across the street from the historic Alabama Capitol, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowd of thousands after the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. Alabama’s Attorney General offered his insightful analysis by saying, “The Alabama in 2026 is not the Alabama of the early 1960s.”
South Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi are all weighing whether to follow. Georgia declined.
RFK Jr. Would Like to Take Away Your Antidepressants
The nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has no medical training and once testified before Congress that antidepressants are harder to quit than heroin, held an event Monday to announce a new campaign.
The goal: get Americans off antidepressants. The vibe: a wellness retreat where four people cried, including Kennedy himself.
Kennedy announced a new campaign to reduce the use of antidepressants, including encouraging clinicians to “de-prescribe” Medicare patients from the drugs by instead prescribing “non-pharmacological” services such as therapy. This sounds reasonable until you remember that therapy costs money, takes time, is difficult to access, and is not a substitute for medication.
“We’re not telling you to stop” any medications, Kennedy said. Instead, the initiative aims to make sure patients and clinicians “have the information and support to make the right decisions.” He then released new guidelines on how to taper patients off psychiatric drugs.
So, not telling you to stop, but here is how to stop.
Researchers have warned that when you bad-mouth effective medications, you drive people away from lifesaving medical care, a pattern already documented with Kennedy’s vaccine rhetoric. The people who rely on them to function did not ask for a Secretary of Health who weeps at a think tank event while planning to make it harder for them to get care.
DHS Closed the Office That Investigated Abuse in ICE Detention
The Department of Homeland Security has shut down the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. The independent agency was created by Congress to investigate abuse, misconduct, and inhumane conditions in immigration detention facilities.
The timing is notable. So is the context.
Earlier this year, a record 73,000 people were being held in immigration detention facilities, though that number has recently decreased slightly to around 60,000. Over 30 people died in ICE custody last year, making it the deadliest year for ICE detainees since 2004.
The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was in the process of removing all its public signage and ending its inspections. The office’s public-facing website, which advised the families and attorneys of detainees on how to file complaints, was down as of Monday afternoon.
The office was created amid widespread abuse of detained migrants during the first Trump administration, including deaths in custody, family separation, and overcrowding. It was designed, specifically, to be independent of ICE and CBP. It was created, specifically, because those agencies were not self-policing.
As one DHS spokesperson told HuffPost in March: “Being in detention is a choice.” This is the government of the United States, explaining to you that the people who die in its detention facilities chose to be there.
The Reason We Can Write What We Write
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We don’t have that problem because we don’t have that person. Our subscribers are the whole business. That means our only obligation is to the people reading, so we can cover a congressman under investigation for how he treats his staff, a Justice Department that spent 197 pages looking for bias and found it in gay people, and the rose stolen from a dead woman’s memorial.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Judge Puts Brakes on Trump’s Plans to Take Over Public Golf Course. A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from seizing and bulldozing a public golf course in Washington, D.C., after a White House lawyer in open court couldn’t say the course wouldn’t be closed and was then handed a note confirming there were already closure signs on the grounds. The administration’s position, for those keeping score, is that they are merely removing dead trees, which apparently requires a golf course architect named Tom Fazio and emergency litigation.
Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire Hit With Layoffs Across a ‘Number of Teams.’ The Daily Wire laid off staff across a number of teams last week, largely concentrated at its Nashville headquarters, as the company said it was shifting resources toward new production in D.C., the Northeast, and Florida. Candace Owens, who was famously pushed out by the company in 2024, posted that she heard over 50% of staff was cut, which the editor-in-chief called “insane,” so the actual number remains somewhere between “a lot” and “not that many, please.”
Democrats launch New York counteroffensive following flood of GOP gerrymanders. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced a new initiative called the “New York Democracy Project” to explore redrawing the state’s congressional map in response to the Republican redistricting scramble. The catch: any changes to New York’s map would require a constitutional amendment passed by two consecutive legislative sessions and approved by voters, making a 2026 redraw unfeasible before the June primaries. So Democrats are fighting fire with fire, except the fire is in November and their house won’t be built until the 2030s.
Ron DeSantis almost let an LGBTQ+ org rot. It was saved by public outcry. Palm Beach County officials restored funding for repairs on a city-owned building that houses Compass Community Center, South Florida’s longest-running LGBTQ+ nonprofit, after previously denying a request for more than $300,000 in federal grant money to fix the building’s roof, air conditioning system, and elevato. The funding was restored only after public outcry, meaning the county’s position was, for a period of time, that serving the LGBTQ+ community was DEI, DEI is illegal, and therefore the roof could wait.
