LONE STAR: Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state yesterday to deny Republicans the quorum they need to approve a redrawn Congressional map designed to assure them five more seats in the US House of Representatives.

  The 150-member Texas House can operate only if 100 members are present and most of the 62 Democrats left. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott says he will try to remove Democrats from office if they don’t return. 

  The proposed map carves up Democratic urban areas, distributing their votes to make them a minority in Republican districts. Redistricting is usually done every 10 years after the federal census, but the Texas Republicans are under pressure from President Trump to fix the vote in advance of the 2026 midterms.

  The Democratic walkout could delay the vote for weeks but might ultimately fail.

  State Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus in a statement accused Gov. Abbott of “using an intentionally racist map to steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal.”

  The practice of drawing districts in your own party’s favor is known as “gerrymandering,” and is general considered to be dirty politics. But the Republicans are doing it so brazenly that Democratic leaders are talking about playing dirty themselves. 

  An organization called the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is pushing Democrat controlled legislatures to respond in kind. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, for one, is reported to be  considering whether his legislature would respond to the move in Texas with a congressional redistricting to favor Democrats in his state.

REGIME NEWS:

— Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council yesterday said that President Trump was “absolutely not” shooting the messenger in firing the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics following an unflattering jobs report.

  Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hassett said the president sought to ensure jobs numbers could be “trusted”  yet repeatedly failed to provide evidence that the numbers coming from now former Commissioner Erika McEntarter were  not exactly that.

  Trump has a history of attacking and firing people who don’t tell him what he wants to hear. Peter Baker wrote for The NY Times that, “Career scientists, longtime intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.”

— Along those lines, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History this month removed a display referring to President Trump’s two impeachments, which museum officials said was part of a review of the institution’s content for bias.

  The Smithsonian says the reference will be restored, but for now the label mentions only the impeachments of former Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, as well the near impeachment of Richard Nixon. 

— Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, whose lies about 2020 election rigging were part of the grounds for a lawsuit against the network, was confirmed Saturday as the US attorney for Washington, D.C.

— The Office of Special Counsel is investigating former special counsel Jack Smith, who led criminal probes into President Trump’s possession of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

  The investigation is under the umbrella of the Hatch Act, which limits certain political activities of government workers. Trump always claimed the federal  prosecutions and indictments against him were political even though he clearly possessed documents he was not supposed to have and had campaigned for phantom votes to win the 2020 election.

  The Office of Special Counsel is now under the control of a Trump appointee.

— In what is purported to be an inquiry into voter fraud and voting by non-citizens, the Justice Department has demanded voter records from 15 states. The Justice department voting division has traditionally focused on access to the ballot, not fraud, which is rare.

THE OBIT PAGE: Former CIA counterintelligence analyst, Sandra Grimes, whose examination of bank statements identified Aldrich Ames as the biggest traitor in the history of “the company,” has died at age 79.

  Grimes noticed that on three occasions Ames made deposits of 9,000 following meetings at the Soviet Embassy. For years the CIA had tried to find the mole who gave up eight Russian double agents who had been executed.

— Loni Anderson, the blonde bombshell during the age of big hair who played the receptionist on the TV sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” starting in the late 1970s has died at 79. Anderson also became a tabloid figure during her marriage and contentious divorce from the actor Burt Reynolds.

THE SPIN RACK:  Hospital workers in Gaza yesterday said another 33 people seeking food aid were killed by Israeli gunfire. The number of deaths in Gaza has surpassed 60,000. — A massive volcano erupted in Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula for the first time in centuries, sending ash and smoke in a column reaching 27,000 feet. This came just days after a magnitude 8.8 earthquake rocked the area and the two events may be related.

BELOW THE FOLD:  Among the tabloid scandals in recent days involving  the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the “Real Housewives,” and anything to do with the Kardashians, currently trending actress Sydney Sweeney is in the hot tub for an advertisement she did for American Eagle blue jeans.

  In the ad as she lies prone buttoning her pants, Sweeney says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

  In the online world of instant outrage, Sweeney has been attacked for advocating eugenics, the racial breeding theory of white supremacists. The ad ends with a narrator saying, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

  Sometimes a pair of pants is just a pair of pants.

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