Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would let ordinary citizens and state attorneys general sue a president for money obtained through corruption.

Senator Alex Padilla and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer unveiled the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act on 30 July 2026 at a Public Citizen forum in Washington.

The bill would create the first independent federal agency dedicated to policing corruption across the executive branch. Its sponsors describe it as a direct answer to what they call the unprecedented self-dealing of President Donald Trump's second term.

The US Supreme Court has refused to freeze a $656m judgement against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) after the two groups said they were too cash-strapped to compensate Americans for attacks in Israel during the Second Intifada.

This comes 22 years after the lawsuit was first launched, and it means the collection of the funds can begin immediately.

In 2015, the plaintiffs, who said they were victims of attacks between 2002 and 2004, won the damages. Then in 2016, the US Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out the judgment on the grounds that US courts cannot consider lawsuits against foreign groups if the violence was not aimed at American citizens.

"Congress passed special laws to make the Palestinian Authority submit to US jurisdiction against its will if it continued to provide families of martyred Palestinians with salaries," Raed Jarrar, advocacy director with Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), told Middle East Eye.

How bad do we let things get? Should we wait until the planet can't sustain life anymore? Should we wait until it's 100 degrees F in the Artic? Until wildfires blanket entire continents or the last glacier is gone? Should we wait until fascist billionaires take even more from us? Until there are Flock cameras at every mail box? Maybe we should wait until the wells run dry or the tornadoes never stop. When is it going to be enough? I'm so tired of seeing things getting worse. Every. Single. Day. I'm ready. I've been ready. How about you?

How do we coordinate? How do we look after each other? What is the signal? If we don't work together then we are just continuing our slow march to destruction to the drum of the parasitic billionaires. Please, for us, for the cats, the dogs, the birds and trees. The fish and the whales, the beatles and the centipedes. Please tell me it's worth it to you, that you're willing to get uncomfortable, that you're willing to fight. There are more of us than them, and we are rapidly running out of time to make that mean something.

National Guard troops seized Anna King, slamming her to the ground and leaving her with injuries that required surgery, according to a federal tort claim

A retired U.S. Army captain and Iraq War veteran is taking legal action after National Guard troops approached her outside her Washington, D.C. home, pushed her to the ground and detained her in an aggressive, caught-on-camera confrontation.

Anna King, who received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for her service, was cornered on her front porch by three National Guard troops on the evening of May 8.

“Get away from me right now,” King can be heard telling the guards in footage taken on a Ring security camera. “You have absolutely no authority to detain me.”

Footage shared by the ACLU of the District of Columbia shows King trying to go inside her home as the men, three Idaho National Guard members, grab King and force her to the ground as she screams for them to get off her.

A video shared by Ukraine’s police shows a Russian drone deliberately tracking a man at a market in Kherson. President Zelenskyy said the footage is evidence of Moscow’s “drone safari” against civilians.

Britain exported 139,000 tonnes of rubbish to Turkey last year, leaving smallholders and poor districts of Adana to cope with the debris, microplastics and toxic smoke

Plastic debris clings to the reeds in a waterway metres from where Ayhan*, a farmer in Adana, southern Turkey, is harvesting aubergines. “We get pollution from all sides here,” he says, referring to the plastic recycling zone upstream, as well as a nearby textile plant that he suspects is making the water acidic. “The plastics are all there, by the bank, and the fumes come this way.”

“Every year we install the greenhouse tarps, and when we bring them down we have to clean the surface because we find a black coating, coming from the fumes of these places,” says Ayhan.

In January, canal water flooded on to his land after heavy rain, destroying seven hectares (17 acres) of crops, he claims. “We had to plant new ones. But what can we do? Nothing. Nowhere to file a complaint – nobody cares.”

Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn each reneged on their promises to meet with victims of Jeffrey Epstein, with Tillis even leaving them waiting in his office for 45 minutes before they gave up.

A group of Epstein survivors on Tuesday accused Blanche and Cornyn of going back on their word, as the senators prepared to vote in favor of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after he provided a weak promise in writing to kill President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

“The treatment we received from senators throughout this process was just as revealing. Senator Tillis publicly invited us, on camera, to come to his office and promised to meet with us. We did. We waited for 45 minutes in his lobby, only to be told by a staffer he would not meet with us after all,” the survivors wrote in a joint statement.

“Senator Cornyn also refused to hear directly from survivors before casting his vote. Senators Tillis and Cornyn were not willing to sit across from us and answer for the vote they were preparing to cast. If they believed they were doing the right thing, they should have had the courage to look survivors in the eye and tell us why. The message was unmistakable: They wanted us to go away. We are not going away.”

Tillis’s snubbing is particularly nasty given that he made a big fuss about not voting for Blanche’s confirmation unless he met with Epstein survivors.

Janine Jackson interviewed Vincent Southerland, from the New York University School of Law, about Louisiana v. Callais for the July 31, 2026, episode of CounterSpin*. This is a lightly edited transcript.*

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260731.mp3

Janine Jackson: In the United States, there’s an incantation evoked when we see something horrific happening, and that’s: “Well, just vote against it.” The belief that this country is a democracy is powerful, such that even intelligent, aware people believe that if a person got elected, or a law got passed, it must have been because more people wanted it than didn’t.

It’s hard, it’s depressing, to learn that that isn’t how it works, that there are obstacles and loopholes and backdoor cronyism and payoffs and favor-trading, a million things that make a travesty of “one person, one vote.”

It’s one thing to be an aspirational society. Pretending harms aren’t serious harms because they don’t fit the model of the country you’re pretending to be—that’s something else entirely. It’s dangerous to keep seeing what’s happening in front of you, and calling it aberration, because “this isn’t who we are.”

Black people have never had the privilege to pretend that all the work is done. There’s no pleasure in watching so many other people wake up to that. But we do know that you have to be awake to make real change happen.

Vincent Southerland is associate professor at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Criminal Defense and Reentry Clinic. He’s faculty director of NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and co-editor of Race, Rights and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory, from the New Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Vincent Southerland.

Vincent Southerland: Thanks so much for having me.

Brennan Center (4/29/26)

JJ: I want to take a moment to think about 1965, and the context of the Voting Rights Act. The hope of Black people that the law was the thing that could take us outside of existing racist power relationships, the law was our recourse. It wasn’t utopian; it was grounded. But talk a little about the Voting Rights Act and its impacts, to help us feel what’s happening now.

VS: Sure. So the Voting Rights Act in 1965 was really the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a result of years and years of struggle by countless individuals, working with every bit of their might: organizing, protesting, marching, but also pulling on levers of political and moral power to really vindicate the United States Constitution’s guarantee under the 15th Amendment that no government could deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Now, the critical point about the 15th Amendment was that it was part of a trio of amendments—the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments—that were enacted in the wake of the Civil War, during what is often referred to as this country’s second founding, kicking off the period of Reconstruction, which really tried to reorient the frame of this country, and remove the sorts of structural and moral racial barriers to full participation in the society. It really tried to vindicate the rights of Black people and ensure that the 13th Amendment ended enslavement; the 14th Amendment protected citizenship, as well as the full panoply of rights and privileges that come with citizenship; and the 15th Amendment securing the right to vote.

Equal Justice Initiative (8/13/24)

And so, even after the passage of the constitutional amendment, and the enactment of the constitutional amendment, there were still all sorts of efforts undertaken by states across the country, primarily in the South, to limit, prevent and otherwise undermine Black people’s political participation and the ability to vote. You think about things like poll taxes, think about things like the sorts of tests that people were forced to endure—count the number of jelly beans in this jar— pay a tax for being able to vote. And then downright and outright violence that was undertaken by individuals trying to prevent Black people from exercising their political power.

And so the Voting Rights Act was designed, really, to try and put an end to all those forms of discrimination, both the forms of discrimination that were explicit and intentional, and, over time, eventually with the amendment, forms of discrimination that were implicit, and more based on the effects rather than obvious expressions of intent by racists or others who were trying to deny Black people the right to vote.

And so what the Voting Rights Act did was change the political dynamics of this country. And what you saw was this tremendous uptick in the number of Black elected officials across the American South—across the country, really—at all levels of government, both in the federal and state and local elections. And so you had much more Black representation, because the law was used to remedy and prevent the sorts of efforts that individuals were engaging in to try to undermine the right to vote.

So 1965 was, at the time when the Voting Rights Act was signed as a law, I think there was a lot of hope about what the future held, and a lot of hope about the promise of the 15th Amendment and the promise of the Voting Rights Act to be able to vindicate people’s right to vote. And you saw the results of that over the ensuing years.

Hammer & Hope (Summer/26)

JJ: You can’t really overestimate the way the Voting Rights Act has been used to affect real change for Black people and, hence, for everyone. So let’s talk through what you write about, which is the historical significance of the 2026 Supreme Court ruling Louisiana v. Callais. It’s monumental.

VS: It really is. I mean, it represents one of the most consequential voting rights decisions in decades. And it really fundamentally shifts and alters the balance of power, not only in Congress and in federal elections, but in state and local elections as well. And, perhaps most importantly, rolls back the tremendous progress that has been made over decades to ensure that Black people and other people are able to exercise their right to vote. And what we think will be the result of this decision is an erasure of Black political power unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

And it’s hard to overstate just how deeply troubling and harmful this decision is going to be. It’s already having effects in states like Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina—and Louisiana, of course, where you’re seeing the elimination of seats that were previously held by Black elected officials––the elimination of Black elected political power across many of these states. And that sort of effort is going to only continue, unless and until either the federal government and our representatives in Congress, or those at the state level, take action to do something about it.

JJ: Maybe take a second to explain how that’s happening, how voter dilution happens when redistricting. You can’t give chapter and verse, but Louisiana v. Callais allowed states to do something. And what is that?

VS: Let’s take a step back and talk a little bit about the decision itself. So the Voting Rights Act had two primary pillars, if you will. One was Section Five, and Section Five of the Voting Rights Act basically required states that had engaged in historical discrimination in voting to submit to the federal government their plans for changing anything about the way in which the voting process was going to take place, to ensure that the changes they were making were not going to undermine the ability of Black people and other people of color to exercise their right to vote. That was one section.

Brennan Center (6/25/20)

Section Five was essentially gutted in an earlier Supreme Court decision a few years ago. So you have this one enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act that is already essentially dead letter.

What Callais did was strike at another provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section Two. And Section Two is often known as the sword of the Voting Rights Act because of its enforcement powers. What Section Two allowed individuals to do, was to challenge changes to the processes by which voting was going to take place, to ensure that Black people or other people of color were able to exercise the right to vote. And it would allow such challenges based on the effects of changes that states were going to make to their voting processes.

So let me give you one example, not necessarily drawn from the opinion, but just an example of the sorts of changes. Say I want to change a polling place from one part of town, where the vast majority of individuals who live in that part of town are Black and brown, to another part of town, or a place where Black and brown people are just unable to get to, because of lack of transportation, because it’s just difficult to get to, because the hours are difficult for them to be able to exercise the right to vote during those hours.

And so you want to make that change, just because you think it might be more convenient—you don’t have any animus, you’re not racist in any way, but you just want to make a change for some other unrelated reason. And maybe it’s better for Republican voters, or better for a certain class of voters unrelated to their race. Section Two would allow individuals to demonstrate that that change is going to have its effect on Black people’s ability to elect their candidate of choice, and therefore we need to prevent that change from happening, right?

Vincent Southerland: “What Callais does is weaken, and really in many ways upend, the entire framework of Section Two, and reduce the Voting Rights Act to little more than words on a paper.”

What Callais does is essentially say that states and officials who are running the elections can make those sorts of changes, and make them as long as they are related to political party, that in order to prove that something nefarious was happening in the course of making those changes, you have to demonstrate that someone actually acted with racist intent, i.e., the person who’s making this change to the ways in which voting is going to happen has to declare that they’re doing it because they’re trying to harm Black people’s ability to exercise their right to vote, and disregards the very standard in the statute which looks to the effects of that sort of change. And so what Callais does is weaken, and really in many ways upend, the entire framework of Section Two, and reduce the Voting Rights Act to little more than words on a paper.

So let me give you an example of how this plays out in the context of a change that might affect Black people’s rights to vote. And the Callais decision lays out an example to help clarify what this all means.

So imagine, for a moment, a state that is shaped like a rectangle. In the center of that rectangle is a circle. The rectangle itself is 90% white. The circle is 90% Black. Now imagine, under normal conditions, the people who are in the circle, the Black people are able to elect their representative of choice, year after year after year. They decide they want to elect X, Y, Z candidate. They’re able to elect that candidate year after year after year. The same is true for the people in the rectangle.

Now imagine the state legislature decides, you know what? We want to eliminate the political power of the people inside that circle. And so what the state does, in order to eliminate their political power, is split the circle into six equal slices, right? And takes each one of those slices and apportions it to part of the larger rectangle. So now that 90% population that was inside that circle is spread out across the entire rectangle.

And therefore the people inside that circle no longer are able to elect their candidate of choice. They’re no longer able to use their political power to express their political voice, meaning that their vote now counts for less than the people in the rectangle who are majority white. And so that is racial vote dilution.

What Section Two, under the old regime, would have allowed litigants to do is to challenge the legislature’s action by saying, “Look, you’re eliminating the ability of those people inside the circle, their ability to elect their candidate of choice. That’s a problem. That’s a problem under the law. You need to recreate a district or several districts that allow them to do that.”

What Callais says is, unless the state legislature says, “we’re doing this because we want to make sure Black people can’t vote,” there is no remedy. The law has no effect. And the fact that you could see the elimination of Black political power inside that circle being split into six equal slices and spread across the state is meaningless; the effects of it are meaningless. We only want to pay attention to the intent, the actions that are intentionally taken by state legislature, which is precisely what Section Two was designed to address, the effects and not the intent. Because, as we know, people who engage in racist behavior don’t often say we’re doing it because we are racist, because we want to stop Black people or brown people or other people of color from being able to vote.

Harvard Business Review (10/11/17)

They might give any other excuse in the book, but they’re not going to be as explicit about why they’re taking particular actions.

So I think that was designed with that understanding in mind, because we understand how racism operates, and the drafters and legislators who created Section Two, Republicans and Democrats alike, understood that you need something that’s going to allow us to get at the racist effects of these voting changes, rather than just declarations of intentional discrimination made by people who are undertaking these sort of changes. And so Callais changes the landscape in ways that are hard to understand just how much of a sea change it sparks.

JJ: And it’s against a backdrop, the way it’s being sold to a lot of people is this notion of colorblindness. And I know that a lot of people, Black, white, brown, laugh out loud at that idea. It’s not colorblind when I walk down the street or sit in some restaurants. It’s not colorblind when I apply for a loan or a job. We live in a color-seeing world. And so I think, for a lot of people, it just lands hollow when we say, “Oh, well, but no, it’s all the same. We’re all equal. So why should it matter that there is no longer a protection for Black voice in the voting process?”

Vox (8/3/26)

VS: That’s 100% right. And the Supreme Court, in particular the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, has time and time again returned to this ideology of colorblindness, this notion that the way to deal with racial injustice is to ignore racism, and treat everyone as though race does not matter.

And so you see this colorblindness ideology, not only through the court’s jurisprudence around the death penalty—there was a case in 1987, McCleskey v. Kemp, where you had a situation where Black individuals were more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim in the case was white. And what the court essentially said was, there’s no remedies for that, because we don’t have anybody engaging in intentional racial discrimination, and we can’t look at the effects of these sorts of decisions.

You see that colorblindness notion in the context of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on affirmative action, on this idea that we can’t try and remedy the lack of diversity that we find in our educational institutions, and that doing so, and undertaking any action that acknowledges the ways in which race casts a shadow over everything in our society problematic, is in and of itself a problem under the law, based on this ideology of colorblindness.

And I see it in the voting rights space as well, because what the court is doing is transforming any consideration of race into “suspect.”

JJ: You lay all of this out in your recent piece at Hammer & Hope. And you say in that piece: Given all that, what’s next? So I’ll ask you that. We won’t pretend things are simple or easy, but talk a little about what we can do besides hide under the covers.

VS: I think there are a few things. I think, first of all, we have to really take stock of just how much of a sea change and how significant this opinion actually is. And really take a step back and zoom out and think about what this court’s jurisprudence is actually signaling to us and telling us.

It’s of a piece with the Make America Great Again movement, the conservative or alt-right ideology. This notion that, basically, our past is our past; we’ve gotten over all of it, and we no longer need to think about or consider or be concerned about the ways in which race continues to shape our present-day and current-day reality. And that is the prevailing sentiment, this idea that trying to advance racial justice is an unnecessary task, because everything is blind now. Kind of, just get over it. And you see a Supreme Court that is almost signaling a sort of exhaustion with efforts to remedy our racial inequality.

The first thing you need to do is get to understand that our past is not past. It’s really with us right now, and it lives with us right now, and the effects of it are with us right now.

I think the second piece of it is to understand that we can’t simply ignore racial inequality. The only way to get beyond the sort of dynamics we find ourselves in today is to confront it head on, the same way that you would, if you go to the doctor and something’s bothering you, the doctor’s going to ask you, “What are your symptoms? What are your problems?” The doctor’s also going to ask you about your family history. And ask you about your past, about the things you’ve done, about the things that might have caused whatever ailment you have brought to her.

And you wouldn’t go to the doctor and say, “Well, I don’t know anything about the past. None of that stuff matters.” Of course not. The same is true when it comes to racial inequality. And so I think there is that piece of it.

Brennan Center (2/29/26)

I think the other piece of it is, at the state level, we’ve seen states reacting and responding to Callais. New Jersey, I think, is a good example of this, passing things like the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. These are state voting rights act provisions that essentially mirror a lot of what was set forth in the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, trying to replicate the regime that would allow state officials to ensure that Black people and other people of color are able to elect their candidates of choice. That will presume that changes that are being made to efforts to vote have to be cleared by the Secretary of State or other state officials before allowing those changes to go forward, to ensure that those changes are not going to have a disparate impact on Black voters. And so you see states passing laws, or that’s one of the things on the table to try and address the harm that Callais is certainly going to foster going forward.

And I think the last thing, among the last things that we need to do when we think about what comes next, and what we need to be focused on, is beginning to understand just how fragile the gains that we’ve made over the last half century, 75 years, actually are. And understand that whenever we’ve made progress, retrenchment is often what comes next, and follows almost immediately after that. And understand that our obligation is to continue to fight these fights, to continue to talk about and call out racial injustice when we see it, whenever we see it, wherever we see it. And to have an understanding of how racial injustice is not only a challenge for Black and brown people, but is a challenge for all of us. Because we live in a multiracial democracy, with a Constitution that has these lofty ideals, that we have a responsibility to close the gap between the reality that we are living and the ideals that we see in our foundational documents.

And so I think part of what I would implore us to do is stay educated, stay conscious, stay focused on the harmful things that our government, that our courts, are engaged in, so we don’t lose sight of those sorts of challenges and get distracted by the noise that’s out in the world today.

So I think if we do some of those things, alongside building durable political coalitions that I think draw on people from all walks of life who care about justice, care about freedom, who care about liberation, and understand that building political power in that way is going to allow us to leverage the law in ways that are going to advance our cause as well.

JJ: Well, there’s a lot more I could ask you, but we’ll have to end it there for now.

We’ve been speaking with Vincent Southerland. His piece, “The Supreme Court Blesses the Destruction of Black Electoral Power,” can be found at HammerAndHope.org. Vincent Southerland, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VS: Thanks so much, Janine. It’s wonderful to be here.

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