Summary
Closing summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
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The supreme court will allow Texas to use a congressional map redrawn to favor Republicans in 2026. The ruling will impact elections as soon as the March primaries. Texas redrew its congressional map this summer as part of an effort Donald Trump initiated to protect Republicans’ slim majority in the House ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The effort kicked off a nationwide redistricting battle that saw California voters respond by voting to redraw their state’s congressional map as well.
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US forces struck another alleged drug trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific, killing four men. The attack is the 22nd such strike in recent months. The US Southern Command released a statement on X saying the strike came at the direction of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
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Adm Frank “Mitch” Bradley arrived on Capitol Hill earlier today to discuss the “double-tap” boat strike on suspected drug boats off the coast of Venezuela with the House and Sentate armed services committees. The top Navy official spoke at a classified briefing alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Cain. Responses from lawmakers have generally been along party lines. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, said today that he is “deeply disturbed” by the footage of the 2 September strike. While Republican Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the follow-up strike was “entirely lawful and needful”. According to the members of Congress who were briefed, Bradley received no “kill them all order, and that there was not an order to grant no quarter”.
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The Department of Defense’s inspector general released the much-anticipated unclassified report on Thursday about Pete Hegseth’s disclosure of plans for military airstrikes in Yemen in a Signal group chat earlier this year. It found that Hegseth violated departmental policies when he shared information in the chat, and that if a foreign enemy force intercepted that information it could have endangered the lives of US troops, as the Guardian reported on Wednesday.
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After a contentious meeting, vaccine advisers for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted to delay a vote on restricting hepatitis B vaccination for infants. The meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) turned confrontational at times before one member introduced a motion to delay the vote, which passed by 6 to 3, to give advisers time to examine the wording before taking a vote.
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A man was arrested for planting pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic party headquarters on the eve of the January 6 insurrection. At a justice department press conference today, attorney general Pam Bondi confirmed that Brian Cole Jr was in custody, but side-stepped questions about possible political motivations.
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A grand jury has declined to re-indict Letitia James, the New York Times and Associated Press report, citing sources familiar with the matter. A Virginia grand jury chose not to indict James, a Trump critic, on a mortgage fraud charge the Trump administration has sought to revive. The president has sought to prosecute James since returning to office in January, following a years-long civil case James had overseen investigating Trump for overstating his wealth.
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National guard troops may temporarily remain in Washington DC while a federal appeals court evaluates a challenge to the Trump administration’s deployment of troops to the nation’s capital. A three judge panel from the appeals court sided with the Trump administration, which requested a pause to a lower court’s order that would have seen troops withdrawn on 11 December. The decision comes just days after a shooting of two national guard members near the White House.
Key events
Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, denounced recent statements Donald Trump has made calling the state’s Somali community “garbage”.
Walz said the president’s comments were “unprecedented for a United States president. We’ve got little children going to school today who their president called them garbage.”
Here’s more from my colleague Rachel Leingang on the incident:
Letitia James’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, drew attention to the rarity of a grand jury refusing to indict James during an appearance on CNN this evening.
“I can’t tell you a time in the federal system … where a federal prosecutor thought a case was strong enough to bring to a grand jury, and the grand jury said no,” Lowell said.
In a separate statement, Lowell said: “A federal court threw this case out after President Trump illegally installed a US attorney to file baseless charges against attorney general James that career prosecutors refused to bring. This should be the end of this case. If they continue, undeterred by a court ruling and a grand jury’s rejection of the charges, it will be a shocking assault on the rule of law and a devastating blow to the integrity of our justice system.”
A bevy of House Republicans raised criticisms of Speaker Mike Johnson after the Louisiana Republican told reporters that he had instructed his party “to come to me, don’t go to social media” with any concerns.
“I certainly think that the current leadership and specifically the speaker needs to change the way that he approaches the job,” representative Kevin Kiley, a Republican from California, said.
“Anxious is what happens when you get nervous. I’m not nervous. I’m pissed,” representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida wrote on social media, responding to leadership comments that she was overly anxious.
Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina told reporters that she shared her frustrations directly with Johnson, particularly around work to release the Epstein files.
The new Dietary Guidelines, which federal law requires be updated every five years, will not be released this year, the New York Times reports, citing a spokesperson from the department of health and human services.
The guidelines will instead be published in early 2026, the spokesperson said, adding that the government shutdown was responsible for the delay.
This spring, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., a vocal critic of ultra processed foods, said his agency expected to publish the guidelines ahead of schedule. But their release has now been delayed twice.
Donald Trump has met with the family of wounded national guard member Andrew Wolfe, the president said at the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony. Trump shared a photo from the meeting on his social media site shortly after.
“His parents, brother, and all of his friends are praying,” Trump said. “I just met them in the Oval Office — They are fantastic American Patriots!”
He added that Wolfe “is in the process of healing”.
California’s redrawn congressional map is likely to hold, the supreme court noted in its decision today, despite a Trump administration-backed lawsuit against the state.
Speaking on CNN, John Garamendi, a California congressman, said: “Let’s understand the supreme court. The supreme court is marching side by side with Trump on most every issue … He’s trying to control the next congress through the use of redistricting. It is wrong.”
He added: “We didn’t want to do it in California. But if Trump is going to do this, then we have to fight fire with fire.”
Suzan DelBene, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, called Texas’ redrawn congressional map “racially gerrymandered” in a statement responding to the supreme court’s decision today.
“The people of Texas don’t want this map, but it was put in place at the behest of national Republicans who are desperate to cling to their majority in the House of Representatives by decimating minority voting opportunity,” she said. “And because the public continues to turn on Republicans and their broken promises, we know Republicans will not net nearly the number of seats in Texas as they hoped. House Democrats remain poised to re-take the majority next year.”
California senator Adam Schiff also criticized the supreme court ruling and accused the court of abandoning its “commitment to justice”.
He said: “The Roberts Court will go down in history as having upheld the desires of Donald Trump and the GOP, rather than its commitment to justice, precedent or the rule of law. Today’s ruling – which substitutes its own fact finding for that of the lower court – is yet another example.”
Justice Elena Kagan sharply dissents, calling ruling disrespectful of lower court
Lauren Gambino
In a sharply worded dissent, Elena Kagan objected to the decision by the supreme court’s majority, arguing that it disrespected the work of the lower court, whose ruling actually was authored by a judge appointed by Trump.
“We are a higher court than the district court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision,” Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“This court’s stay guarantees that Texas’s new map, with all its enhanced partisan advantage, will govern next year’s elections for the House of Representatives. And this court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the constitution,” she continued.
Hakeem Jeffries condemns supreme court’s decision on Texas congressional map
Meanwhile, Democrats have criticized the supreme court’s decision to allow Texas to use its new congressional map in 2026.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, said the court had “once again shredded its credibility by rubber-stamping a racially gerrymandered map in Texas”. In an X post, he added: “Republicans know the extremists can only win by cheating. The people of California and beyond will prevent that from happening.”
In a statement Jeffries added: “Tonight’s ruling by far-right justices on the supreme court is further proof that the extremists will do anything to rig the midterm elections. The gerrymandered Texas congressional map is a partisan and racially discriminatory power grab designed to subvert the will of the voters — particularly in Black and Latino communities.”
He added: “California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop 50 and other states will soon follow suit. We will not let Republicans cheat their way to holding the majority in the House of Representatives. Donald Trump and Republican extremists started this fight. Democrats will finish it.”
Here’s our full report on the boat strike, which we will keep updating as more details emerge:
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