TV News LIES

A federal three-judge panel on Wednesday allowed North Carolina to use a redrawn congressional map aimed at flipping a seat to Republicans as part of Donald Trump’s multi-state redistricting campaign ahead of the 2026 elections.

The new map takes aim at North Carolina’s only swing seat, currently held by Democrat Don Davis, an African American who represents more than 20 counties in the state’s north-east. The first district has been represented by Black members of Congress continuously for more than 30 years.

The three-judge panel denied the preliminary injunction requests after a hearing in Winston-Salem in mid-November. The day after the hearing, the same judges separately upheld several other redrawn US House districts that GOP state lawmakers initially enacted in 2023. They were first used in the 2024 elections, contributing to Republicans gaining three more congressional seats.

North Carolina is one of several states this year in which Trump has broken with more than a century of political tradition in directing the GOP to redraw maps in the middle of the decade – without courts requiring it – to avoid losing control of Congress in next year’s midterms.

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said Monday that House Republicans have been sidelined by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), accusing the Republican leader of only obeying the Trump administration.

In a post on the social platform X, Greene wrote that she and other House Republicans “came courageously roaring into 2025 with legislation that matched the 2024 electoral mandate only to be totally sidelined by Johnson under full obedience of the WH.”

“Executive orders are temporary, [QAnon] memes have not … obliterated the deep state, and my colleagues constantly trying to pass loyalty tests instead of demanding what is right won’t help Americans pay their rent or stop corporations from buying up homes, buy their groceries, provide good paying jobs and stop foreigners with visas from stealing their jobs, stop American tax dollars from funding foreign wars and causes, or rebuild the value of the dollar,” Greene continued.

“Passing effective legislation that gets signed into law is permanent and actually solves Americans problems,” she wrote.

Greene warned that as lawmakers “are switching gears into campaign mode and will be fighting for their lives, our legislative majority has been mostly wasted.”

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President Trump’s heated rhetorical attacks on Democratic lawmakers, whom he called out as “traitors” who deserve to be jailed, have left his Republican allies in Washington dumbfounded and skeptical about any bipartisan dealmaking at the end of 2025.

Republican lawmakers and strategists fear Trump is undermining his own credibility and ability to get anything done before the midterm election.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that Trump labeling his political opponents as traitors was “reckless” and “irresponsible.”

“If you take it at face value, the idea that calling your opponents ‘traitors’ — and then specifically saying that it warrants the death penalty — is reckless, inappropriate, irresponsible,” Paul told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Other GOP lawmakers were quick to distance themselves from the president.

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Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) was hospitalized on Thursday after suffering facial injuries from a fall during a walk near his home in Western Pennsylvania.

According to a Fetterman spokesperson, the Pennsylvania Democrat was transported to a Pittsburgh hospital “out of an abundance of caution.”

“During an early morning walk, Senator Fetterman sustained a fall near his home in Braddock,” the spokesperson said.

“Upon evaluation, it was established he had a ventricular fibrillation flare-up that led to Senator Fetterman feeling light-headed, falling to the ground and hitting his face with minor injuries,” the spokesperson added. “He is doing well and receiving routine observation at the hospital. He has opted to stay so doctors can fine-tune his medication regimen.”

The spokesperson also noted that Fetterman made a self-deprecating joke about his face following the fall.

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Senate Democrats are furious that the Trump administration held a briefing for lawmakers on Wednesday about U.S. military strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and only invited Republican senators to attend.

“What the administration did in the last 24 hours is corrosive not only to our democracy but downright dangerous for our national security,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Thursday, warning that the move set a “troubling precedent” that had trampled on the longheld bipartisan tradition of bipartisan briefings of Congress on U.S. military activities abroad.

“They know they screwed up,” Warner added of Trump’s White House. “And where in the hell were my Republican senators, whom we have worked on everything [with] in a bipartisan fashion? Why didn’t they say, ‘Isn’t this a little bit weird they don’t have any Democrats in the room?’”

The U.S. military killed 14 people in missile strikes against alleged drug cartel boats in the Eastern Pacific earlier this week, part of nearly a dozen attacks on vessels off the coast of Venezuela in recent months. Critics have called the use of force unconstitutional since it lacks congressional authorization. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pressed for more information about the strikes, including their legal justification.

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As the two parties square off over an imminent government shutdown, Democrats are accusing House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) of keeping the House of Representatives out of session to delay a vote on the Epstein files.

The House had been scheduled to vote on Monday and Tuesday, but Johnson canceled the votes in order to put more pressure on Senate Democrats to accept a government funding bill Republicans pushed through the House earlier this month.

The canceled votes are also pushing back the swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won a special election last week to fill her late father’s Arizona seat. Grijalva would provide the crucial 218th signature on a “discharge petition” forcing a vote on legislation to make the Justice Department release its investigatory files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“Any delay in swearing in Representative-elect Grijalva unnecessarily deprives her constituents of representation and calls into question if the motive behind the delay is to further avoid the release of the Epstein files,” Rep. Katherine Clark (Mass.), the No. 2 Democrat in the House, complained in a letter to Johnson on Monday.

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