Weekend Open Thread
[guest post by Dana]
Let’s go!
First news item
The Supreme Court said Thursday that Texas can use its new gerrymandered House map in the upcoming midterm elections, likely yielding as many as five additional seats for Republicans in the battle for control of the House.
The decision is a major boost for President Donald Trump’s bid to preserve the narrow GOP majority in the House by urging Republican-led states to conduct unusual mid-decade redistricting aimed at shrinking the number of Democrats in congressional delegations in Red states.
By an apparent 6-3 vote, the justices granted an emergency request from Texas officials to block a lower court ruling that ordered the state to return to the district lines adopted in 2021.
Interestingly, the Supreme Court “took note of recent Democrat-led redistricting in California, signaling that the justices may not be inclined to interfere with those efforts or similar drives in other states”.
Second news item
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
“Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the post says.
Alongside the post is a 21-second-long video showing the boat being struck.
Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat. https://t.co/y8okwYhmHv
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 5, 2025
Hahaha. Nothing as funny as joking about extra-judicial killings, amiright?!
Also, about that double-strike attack that took out two survivors:
Reps. Adam Smith and Jim Himes: “The video we saw today showed two shipwrecked individuals who had no means to move, much less pose an immediate threat, and yet they were killed by the United States military… this was wrong.”
Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.
The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters
Third news item
Why does anyone believe that Putin is interested in peace? Fools:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would seize Ukraine’s Donbas region “by military or other means,” digging in on one of his key demands as Ukrainian officials prepare for more peace talks that have yet to yield a deal.
Fourth news item
Ah:
President Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was the result of something extraordinary for a Central American leader and convicted cocaine trafficker—a web of powerful advocates stretching from Washington to Mar-a-Lago. . . The decision allowed Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year prison sentence for conspiring with cartels to ship 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., to walk free this week as the Trump administration escalates its war on narco-traffickers by launching airstrikes on low-level smugglers at sea.
. . .
After Castro took office, projects with links to Trump allies and donors, as well as Silicon Valley investors, were canceled or audited. Those included Warren’s utility on the tourist island of Roatán, which came under scrutiny by Castro’s government, and Próspera, a libertarian “startup city” backed by Silicon Valley investors including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Hernández had made special zones known as ZEDEs—where investors could set their own tax, labor and regulatory rules under long-term legal guarantees—a hallmark of his presidency. Foreign backers embraced the idea, selling Próspera as a “Hong Kong of the Caribbean.” After Castro came into office and rolled back the ZEDE framework, its developers hired Washington lobbyists to pursue an $11 billion arbitration claim against Honduras—amounting to roughly two-thirds of the country’s annual budget.
. . .
Democrats alleged that the Trump administration and its allies had pardoned Hernández as part of an effort to influence the outcome of the election in favor of the conservative party linked to the business interests of Trump allies.
Fifth news item
Less than a year before the critical 2026 midterm elections, Speaker Mike Johnson is losing control of the House floor.
The Louisiana Republican suffered a bruising defeat before Thanksgiving when Donald Trump foe, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and a trio of GOP women defied Johnson and his top lieutenants and teamed with Democrats to force a near-unanimous vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files to the public.
Seeing Massie’s huge success in getting the Epstein bill signed into law, other Republicans are now turning to that same playbook to go over the speaker’s head.
. . .
That’s a far cry from the 218 signatures needed to go around the speaker and force a floor vote. But the signatures are notable; it was once unheard of for members of the majority to use discharge petitions against their own leadership.
Have a great weekend!
—Dana
