What I'm Hearing - May 11th, 2026

Gerrymandering disaster and Trump goes to China.

This is "What I'm Hearing" — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

The Court Picked a Side. Democrats Have to Pick One Too.

The Virginia Supreme Court spent Friday afternoon explaining that voter-approved referendums don’t actually count when Republicans don’t like the result. In a 4–3 partisan ruling, the court threw out the congressional map Virginia voters had ratified — a map that would have given Democrats a likely 10–1 advantage — and reinstated the 6–5 GOP-tilted map instead.

This came less than two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Callais v. Louisiana. Within 48 hours, Tennessee Republicans moved to carve up the majority-Black congressional district in Memphis. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana are queued up next. Writing at Off Message, Brian Beutler argues this isn’t bad luck or a plot twist — it’s deliberate partisan warfare by Republican judges who have openly adopted a double standard: illegal pro-GOP maps stand through elections while Democratic maps get voided the same week they’re drawn. His line: “It’s unpleasant to coexist with a conservative judiciary; it is intolerable to coexist with a fully partisan one.”

Beutler’s prescription is procedural radicalism without apology — redraw Virginia by statute, use the legislature to remove the justices who struck down the map, and signal to the federal judiciary that a reckoning is coming in 2029.

Layered on top, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to verify voter eligibility and reject mail-in ballots from people not on approved lists. An agency losing $2 billion a quarter is now supposed to police voter rolls it has no legal authority over. He’s also deploying an “Election Integrity Army” across all 50 states. Election lawyer Marc Elias told Zeteo the VRA decision was the “worst Supreme Court decision” of his life. Sen. Raphael Warnock told Pod Save America the Democratic Party isn’t yet fighting at the scale the moment demands. Add in election-denying gubernatorial candidates running competitively in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and the picture is clear. The final defender of democracy has fallen.

Throughout Trump’s terms, the assurance has always been the same — as long as the courts hold, democracy holds. With this Virginia ruling, that line is gone. And honestly, it’s been gone for a while.

I understand the court system isn’t a monolith. A Virginia ruling isn’t a Texas ruling isn’t a Supreme Court ruling. They’re independent entities. But zoom out and look at what the judiciary is telling this country about how our democracy is supposed to function. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. It’s currently allowing Louisiana to disenfranchise voters and redraw maps mid-election against their will. It let Texas launch a mid-decade redistricting that no Texas citizen ever voted for. Done explicitly at Donald Trump’s request to rig the midterms. We don’t have to pretend that’s not what it is. They are stealing an election in slow motion, and the court is waving it through at every turn.

Now compare that to California, which did the same thing the right way. Put it to the voters. Made it temporary. Virginia followed that exact model — a referendum, a temporary map, an automatic reversion — and the Virginia Supreme Court struck it down anyway. Read that ruling carefully, and it gets worse: the court didn’t reject gerrymandering. It rejected voters’ gerrymandering. You can rig the map all you want, but you just can’t let the voters decide. Meanwhile, in Florida, voters passed the Fair Districts Amendments in November 2010 with nearly 63% of the vote — a constitutional ban on partisan-drawn maps — and Ron DeSantis and the legislature are openly defying it to rig their own. We don’t yet know what the courts will say. If the pattern holds, they’ll get away with it.

What the courts have been saying for a while now is that if you have power, you can do whatever you need to do to hold on to it.

Democrats need to hear that message. If we regain power, we have to act on it and raise the bar high enough that the Republican Party never wants to play this game again. That means packing the Supreme Court. I started at 13. Some are suggesting 20, 21. If John Roberts wakes up in 2029 to a Democratic president, House, and Senate, he better have a bunch of new colleagues joining him shortly. It also means statehood for D.C. and statehood for Puerto Rico. Maybe two states out of California. In my angry spiral on Friday, I even suggested forming a state that extends from El Paso through Austin to Dallas and Houston. I mean, why not? Because that would be unconstitutional?

The unfortunate reality is that power is right, and the courts are letting it happen. The Republican Party is unhindered in its attempts to subvert democracy. We have to be just as unhindered in our attempts to protect it.

Read more: Off Message — Beutler · The Bulwark — Southern Apocalypse · Zeteo — Marc Elias

The Dealmaker Goes to Beijing With Nothing to Trade

Trump heads to Beijing this week for the first U.S. presidential visit to China in nearly a decade, and he’s arriving as a weakened president asking Xi Jinping for a favor.

The Iran ceasefire collapsed over the weekend. Trump rejected Iran’s counterproposal as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” after Tehran demanded an end to the U.S. naval blockade as a condition for any deal. Brent crude briefly jumped 4% to about $105.50 a barrel. Robert Hubbell notes the national average gas price is now $4.50, and Strait of Hormuz traffic is down to 10% of normal. Iran responded with a drone strike on a tanker off Qatar. China vetoed a U.S. resolution at the UN Security Council calling for the strait to reopen, describing the American action as “unauthorized military operations.”

That’s the position Trump is bringing to the summit. Writing at The Bulwark, Bill Kristol notes that Beijing has signaled, via the New York Times, that it “no longer fears another escalation” — recently blocking Meta’s acquisition of a China-founded AI startup and codifying rules to punish foreign businesses that comply with U.S. sanctions. Sen. Jack Reed told Fox News Sunday that Trump enters the summit “terribly weakened” by gas prices, grocery inflation, and the Iran war. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on Meet the Press and refused to repeat his own earlier prediction of sub-$3 gas by summer. Meanwhile, Congress is pressing Trump to complete a delayed arms sale to Taiwan, which the administration has conveniently put on hold ahead of the summit.

Three of four deployed U.S. carrier groups are stuck in the Middle East. Xi holds leverage over both the oil supply and the U.S. economy. Trump needs a deliverable he can bring home. What is he going to trade? Taiwan? Chip restrictions? Both?

Read more: Zeteo — Trump the Golden Calf · Bill Kristol / Morning Shots · Robert Hubbell

Two Courts Said the Tariffs Are Illegal. Trump Is Trying a Third Theory.

The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled Trump’s second-attempt tariff regime illegal this week. The Supreme Court had already struck down the original “liberation day” tariffs earlier this year. The administration tried to re-impose blanket duties under an obscure 1970s trade-law provision. The trade court said no. Trump’s response was to attack the judges and signal he’ll try a third legal theory.

Then he publicly thanked importers who declined to seek refunds for illegally collected duties, telling them to skip the money “out of patriotism.” The refunds are owed to American companies, not foreign governments, and his pressure campaign to make them forfeit those refunds shows the administration treats tariff law as a loyalty test, not a legal constraint.

The economic damage continues regardless. Matt Stoller flags that consumer sentiment hit another record low in May, and Trump’s approval is at a polling-average record low. Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane told Bloomberg this week, “They’re literally running out of money at the end of the month. We’re seeing negative cash flows in the lower-income brackets where they’re dipping into savings.” April added 115,000 jobs, but wage growth continues to slow, and manufacturing payrolls are down. The tariffs are an inflation tax that two federal courts have now ruled illegal, paid by American businesses, passed through to American consumers, and Trump is asking the victims to give up their refunds.

Read more: David Pakman · Matt Stoller / BIG

That's your Monday. The courts have picked a side. Trump is going to China. Two federal courts said his tariffs are illegal.