Hayes RIPS Supreme Court ruling: Back towards 'policies of Jim Crow'

Tonight on All In. I've been with contractors because we're trying to get the ballroom built. The president keeps his eye on the ballroom as Pete Hegseth faces Congress. I'm just asking what your perspective is. Are you afraid to take ownership of this? Do you think it was a good idea or not? As I've consulted the president, do I think it's a good idea to confront a nuclear bomb? Tonight, Ro Khanna on the Hegseth hearing and the cost of a war with no end in sight. You know what I'm sad for? I'm sad for all the people who voted for Trump. I'm sad for them because you betrayed them. Then the growing fears of a return to Jim Crow after today's Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. Plus. The question now recurs on final passage of HB1D. The clerk will unlock the machine and the members will proceed to vote. The legal fight against Florida's push to redraw democracy. And Senator Adam Schiff on Donald Trump's second attempt to get James Comey. Are you telling the American people this morning that this is a serious case and this is a serious set of charges and that laws and facts are not being warped to carry out a political agenda? But All In starts right now. Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. Donald Trump's war on Iran turns two months old this week, and he's required by law to seek authorization from Congress by Friday to continue the war. But Trump is not seeking a war declaration. Crucially, though, he's also not ending it, right? I mean, the war's not over. There's a temporary ceasefire. But we are now in a quagmire of Donald Trump's own making, one that's threatening the global economy and your own bank account, as you surely have noted. Republicans in Congress, somewhat shockingly, don't seem to really care. They're just kind of shrugging their soldiers, sidestepping their duty to check the president at every opportunity. But today, as the House Armed Services Committee met to discuss the Pentagon's enormous, totally unprecedented budget request for next year, a 50% increase year over year, one of the biggest architects of this war, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, tried to avoid talking about it. Get this. He comes before the committee, right? This is the number one issue vis-a-vis the Pentagon. And he finally mentioned the war that we're in, that he helped start seven minutes into a nine-minute opening statement. This is a fiscally responsible budget. This is a warfighting budget. And speaking of warfighting, The topic of Iran, I'm sure, will come up today, which I very much welcome discussing. I look forward to sharing the incredible successes of our military, achieved in a matter of weeks. I literally laughed out loud at that. Speaking of war fighting, nice segue, Mr. Secretary. Do you think the war might come up in a hearing with the guy who's calling himself the Secretary of War? Is that a possibility? For more than five hours today, mostly Democratic lawmakers tried to pin Hegseth and his deputies down on just what is happening in the Middle East and in the DOD. And Hegseth more or less acted like a truculent young teen with tanks and ships. The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans. Don't say I support the troops on one hand and then a two-month mission is a quagmire. That's a false equivalence. Who are you cheering for here? Who are you pulling for? You and you are disparaging me that I don't care about the passing of our troops. Nope, I asked if you thought they're lying, Terry. That's disparaging and smearing in every way. Nobody cares more about the fate of our troops. Nobody cares about the health of our troops. Nobody wants to bring them all hope more than I can. Mr. Secretary, I understand, but he controls the time. He controls the time. You get to control your answer. instead of answers and accountability, instead of a strategy out of this mess, all the administration has is that. Very, very manufactured outrage. And when they do offer details, it's tough to know if they're telling the truth. Like today, the big headline today, when Jules Hurst, Hegsess acting CFO and former aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson, finally put a price tag on the fighting. So approximately at this day, we're spending about $25 billion on Operation Epic Fury. So you're saying the full cost at this point is $25 billion? Yeah, that's our estimate for the cost. Okay. Interesting, because I'm glad you answered that question, because we've been asking for a hell of a long time and no one's given us the number. $25 billion. I got to say, color me a little skeptical on that one. I mean, when the Pentagon told Congress in March that the first six days of the war alone cost taxpayers more than $11 billion, but weeks two through nine combined cost just a little more than that. Now, to be clear, right, we're bombing less than at the beginning of the war, but we still have more than 50,000 troops, a dozen ships in the Middle East in a two-month-old war. That estimate doesn't take into account the bigger costs of the conflict. You know about the energy shocks, the rising costs of gas and diesel fuel at the pump. Brent crude oil jumped another 6% just today to $118 a barrel. When Iran responded to the U.S. bombing by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, they cut off more than just a fifth of the world's oil supply. But it's more than just the oil supply. Batteries and fertilizer and pharmaceuticals all depend on safe passage out of there. Here's an example. Aluminum cans, to give one example, are right now getting scarcer. So is helium for balloons and medical applications, which again, I've only learned in the last few months since it was shut, like MRIs. We use helium in MRIs. Mortgage rates are rising because nobody trusts U.S. bond markets right now. So we haven't even felt most of the shocks yet. And the administration says discussing those shocks is loser talk. Do you know how much it will cost Americans in terms of their increased cost in gas and food over the next year because of the Iran war? I would simply ask you what the cost is of an Iranian nuclear bomb. I'm going to give you that. I would simply ask you what the, you're playing gotcha questions about domestic things. I'm not. You're asking, you're saying it's a gotcha question to ask what it's going to be in terms of the increased cost of gas? I'm just asking if you know what your war costs the average American taxpayer. What is the cost of Iran having a nuclear weapon that they wield over? I'm just asking if you know the cost of the average American taxpayer. I'm asking you what the cost would be of that. So for the American taxpayers out there, my constituents, some of the constituents you wanted to represent in Minnesota, I'm just wondering if they have an extra $600 lying around to pay for your war. I think that's just a question that we ought to ask. How do we get out of this, by the way? To the extent Trump and Hexer do have a plan, And it seems to amount to pulling an Uno reverse card on the Iranian blockade. But are we winning the war? Absolutely. Okay, so do you call Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz winning? Well, I would say the blockade that we hold that doesn't allow anything to come in or out of Iranian ports. Okay, so we've blockaded their blockade. So they blockaded us, and then we blockaded their blockade. That's like saying, tag, you're it. Or, you know, if President Madison has said, well, the British just burned down Washington, but don't worry, we're going to burn it down as well. As dumb as that idea sounds, that plan is all Trump's got, as he made clear today. How long are you prepared to maintain the blockade? Could that go several more months? Well, the blockade is genius. Now they have to cry uncle. That's all they have to do. Just say, we give up. We give up. Just say give up. Just say give up. I mean, again, if the war worked, then why are you now using the blockade, right? It certainly seems like an admission that the war didn't work and now you have to use the blockade, but why do you think the blockade is going to work if the more aggressive strategy of the war didn't? They don't have a coherent way out. They don't have an account for it. And they can't account for its growing costs. They are, as we've all known, in a word, incompetent. Mr. Hexeth, I stand by what I said last time you were here. You were incompetent then, you're incompetent now, and you're the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to incompetence. You don't even know what the average American is paying. You don't know what we paid in terms of the missiles that hit the Iranian school. You don't know what we're paying in terms of gas. You don't know what we're paying in terms of food. Your 25 billion number is totally off. It's the incompetence. It's the incompetence. The incompetent war regime appears to have that new solution. Let the blockade and the war and the global energy crisis it caused just go on indefinitely and yell at the people for asking any questions about them. Congressman Ro Khanna of California serves on the House Armed Services Committee, and he grilled Secretary Hegseth in today's hearing. He's also co-sponsoring a bipartisan war powers resolution. He joins me now. I want to start on this cost of gas question you asked him, because one of the things I don't think people quite realize right now is gas is spiking again. And the biggest beneficiary right now is that a bunch of ships are coming to the U.S. to buy oil and gas from American producers. And the big winner are going to be American oil companies who are about to post like literally record profits. While the gas guy who tracks this on Twitter, a lot of people following, he says that gas prices are highly likely to spike soon in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio. Wholesale gas prices have already surged. Retailers have not yet passed the increase. Prices are likely to jump 50 to 80 cents in the area very soon. Refiner issues and rising oil prices to blame. Do you think people are prepared for what the next phase of this might be? Chris, they are not. I mean, I was shocked that Secretary Hegs had no idea how much the cost was going to be of gas and food and the higher costs on the American people. The studies are out there. It actually estimated at billion over the next year That amounts to about for every family And you absolutely right The people who are benefiting are the big oil companies They making record profits. But he kept saying, well, what is the cost of denying Iran a nuclear bomb? Well, to do a cost-benefit analysis, you need to know what the cost is on the American people. He didn't have any of the answers. It also strikes me as a little disingenuous to say that Iran was anywhere close to a nuclear bomb after, A, they pulled out of a deal stopping it and also bombed them and said they had, quote, completely obliterated their capabilities of doing so. Well, you're actually right. When Obama was in the JCPOA, you had under 440 pounds of enriched uranium. Ninety-seven percent was out. Trump ripped it up, and now you have over 900 pounds of enriched uranium, 60 percent of pure. And so they've only made the situation worse. And the irony is they only have a more hardline regime in Iran. I mean, Khamenei, for all his flaws, had a fatwa against nuclear development. The IRGC that's basically in charge with Khamenei Jr. does not have that fatwa. We got finally, partly through Adam Smith's questioning in a hearing, an estimate of the cost of the first two months of this undertaking. $25 billion price tag. And I got to say, I'm a little dubious of that number. And even when you listen to the Pentagon CFO, he said, that's our estimate. How accurate you think that is? Of course, because you're a wonk, let me explain why that number is wrong. First of all, they're using what we paid years ago for the material, not what it costs to replace it in today's dollars. Secondly, they're not accounting for any of the damage that was done with the bases in Iran. Third, they're not accounting for the replacement of the airplanes that were shot down. Fourth, they're not accounting for the troop movement or deployment there. So it is grossly off. And they're being trying to be cute by putting that number out. But they're doing it under oath and no expert agrees with it. They are due. The War Powers Resolution clock starts ticking. You have 60 days. I guess their argument, I mean, their argument is they don't care about Congress and they don't think it should exist, essentially. But to the extent they have a legible argument, it's basically that the hostilities have ceased so they don't have to come to you. I know that that that there's going to be more war powers resolutions brought to the floor. Like, what's the status of that? You can't have the president bragging about a blockade and at the same time saying hostilities and military activity has ceased. But what's been disappointing and I'm always a straight shooter when we were talking about the Epstein files, I came to you and I said, we're going to have the Republican votes. Right now, it's still really hard to get Republicans in the House to break. We've had Massey. We've had Davidson. We need a couple more. And they still are holding firm in their loyalty to Trump, even though many Republican voters have soured on the war, don't like the higher gas prices. It hasn't yet hit in Congress. How sustainable do you think this current status quo is? in terms of the uh republican loyalty i think every day the gas prices stay elevated uh every day you see more and more americans saying we want a negotiated settlement uh the more there's a chance of that cracking which is why many of us on the armed services committee talked about the economic cost i mean my bigger problem is the moral costs of threatening wiping out iranian civilization and the blunder of the policy but the economic cost in my view is what's going to shift some of the Republicans to actually be able to pass the war powers. There was also a vote today for a FISA reauthorization. That's for Intelligence Surveillance Act. There's a lot of provisions in there that have been quite controversial. Almost every Republican voted for it. The vast majority of Democrats voted against it, but significantly 42 joined. And I think it did pass this time. What do you think about that outcome? Very disappointing. I mean, you're basically giving Donald Trump more power to spy on Americans. How does this work? If you have a communication with anyone overseas and your communication as an American citizen is in this database, now the FBI and law enforcement can go in the database and read your information without a warrant. I don't understand why any Democrat would vote for that regardless of the president, but certainly you shouldn't be voting for that with Donald Trump in charge. Congressman Rochon of California, thanks for your time tonight. Thank you, Chris. Coming up, the conservative Supreme Court rips the heart of the Voting Rights Act. A truly infuriating and tragic day, an apocryl decision. And we have Sherilyn Ifill on what it means for this election and beyond. Next. Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, has spent basically his entire career, starting when he was just a little-known Reagan White House staffer, in pursuit of one major goal, eliminating the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And his court has been chipping away at the law bit by bit for years, and today, he may have dealt the final blow. Technically, today's ruling was about new congressional maps in Louisiana. Back in 2020, the state tried to draw maps with only one majority Black district, even though Black residents make up a third of the state's population. A lower court ruled that the VRA required a second majority Black district to ensure adequate representation for those voters. Well, today, the Supreme Court disagreed. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the conservatives on the court, including all three Trump-appointed justices, struck down those maps and in doing so also gutted enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, specifically as it relates to racial gerrymandering. While the conservatives denied what they were doing, they didn't explicitly strike down all of the section. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, quote, today's decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. As it stands, it seems those states across the country, most notably in the South, are going to be able to rewrite their districts to essentially ensure the mass disenfranchisement of black voters by denying them the opportunity to elect their own representatives. That means they're going to go around and crack apart these majority-minority districts in states like Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, where just hours after the Supreme Court ruling, the legislature approved new gerrymandered maps. in order to dilute the political power of black voters. I mean, the consequences of this ruling today could deal essentially a fatal blow to our current version of multiracial democracy, where we have many black elected politicians up and down the ballot. The struggle to achieve that vision of democracy has always faced fierce political opposition. I mean, after the Civil War, radical Republicans wrote the Reconstruction Amendment, 13, 14, 15 Amendment. And for about eight years, it inaugurated the first true era of multiracial democracy in the United States. There were black state legislators, state senators, congressmen, senators. Black voting registration and white voting registration levels were equal. And that era was destroyed. It was destroyed by white supremacist violence and terrorism, the Klan. But it was destroyed with the crucial assistance of the Supreme Court in a series of rulings that helped usher in decades of Jim Crow oppression and political terror. And it was about a century later, nearly 200 years after our country's founding, that Congress passed the VRA to once again bring us closer to true multiracial representation. I mean, basically, the Voting Rights Act 1965 was done to revive the portions of our Constitution the Supreme Court had destroyed. Right. Now, more than half a century after that, the Supreme Court has done it again. They once again intervened to pull us back towards the policies of Jim Crow. Sherilyn Eiffel is the founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard University. She was previously president, director of the council for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, also the author of Sherilyn's newsletter on Substack, where she wrote about today's ruling. She's been litigating voting rights for decades, and she joins me now. I first just want to get your takeaway of the decision about how bad it is a scale one to 10, how catastrophic we should think of it, if there's anything to salvage out of. This is feeling about like a 12, Chris. It's bad. You know, maybe there are things to salvage out of it. I'm not seeing them at this moment. And frankly, I don't think it does us any good to get to the salvaging stage. I think we have to deal head on with what has happened here and what it means. Tell me what what you what has happened and what you think it means. Well, I described in the piece I wrote that, you know, the Supreme Court has dropped the other shoe on the Voting Rights Act in 2013. They all but gutted Section five of the Voting Rights Act, leaving it standing hollow, removing the preclearance provision from the Voting Rights Act that was supposed to allow us to stop racial discrimination in voting practices before they were enacted. And when they did that, the Supreme Court said, the conservative majority said, you still have Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows you to sue, to bring cases challenging discriminatory racial practices or districts. And, you know, ever since then, we've been kind of waiting for this, but now it has happened. The Supreme Court has essentially done to Section 5 what they did to Section 2. And it's pretty shocking in the context of this case, to be perfectly honest. That makes it even more kind of insulting. But I think what you said at the top, Chris, is that, you know, this is not just about a congressional district in Louisiana. This is about Black representation and voice. This is about multiracial democracy. So many of us, you know, didn't live in the period when there was so little black representation. You know, you talked about the Reconstruction period. We had eight black members of Congress during Reconstruction. We didn't return to that number until 1969, Chris. And the reason we didn't return to that number is all the things that you've described. It was the Supreme Court really gutting the power of the 14th Amendment. It was violence. It was Congress not passing civil rights statutes. All of that was there. But if we think it can't happen, that what happened We had representation and then we had none for decades because of voter suppression because of gerrymandering and so forth And so this step by the Supreme Court is incredibly consequential and important And we have to look at it with clear eyes. I want to show this graph of this chart of black elected representatives in the country before and after the Voting Rights Act, which I think we have, which I always I always think about this, this chart. I mean, there it is right there, right? like what you were saying, that little bump in the beginning, which is Reconstruction, and then basically none during the Jim Crow era, and then the Voting Rights Act. And there's another chart that also shows the progression that we're talking about. This is the registration rates between black and white folks over that period of time. And you see that black line is black voter registration, which is on par with white folks during that brief period of Reconstruction. It basically goes to zero, and then it goes back up. So this is, I mean, this is what it's meant. In a tangible sense, I mean, the first thing you're going to see, I think, is Republican-controlled southern states target the congressional districts that black people represent. I mean, you have Tate Rees in Mississippi saying, already calling to eliminate the only majority black house district in Mississippi as one of the blackest states in the nation. And we're going to see more of that, I think, as the immediate moves, do you suspect? Yeah, I certainly do. I think I saw before I came on that Louisiana was thinking about postponing its election for this year. Again, Chris, we should remember that, you know, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi had no black representatives, you know, in 1970. Right. And these are places where the black population, you know, in Mississippi was 35 percent. So if we're thinking that it can't happen, we should know that quite recently, before the Voting Rights Act, that's what we had. And the 1982 amendments, which essentially is what the court really struck down—they will say they didn't strike it down, but they did. They struck down the effects test. This is something that justices on this court have been against for 40 years. John Roberts was a lawyer in the Department of Justice fighting against the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, calling them a radical experiment. He was the point person in the Department of Justice to try and defeat this amendment to the Voting Rights Act in 1982. It's taken him decades, but now he has he has defeated it. But the point of the amendment was that they understood that southern jurisdictions were wising up and they were not on the record saying explicitly racist things. And so they needed to change the test to allow people to be able to get at discrimination as it presented itself at that time. So what we're seeing now is just the court finally getting what they wanted, at least what some members of them have wanted for some time, which is to create this insurmountable barrier to black voters who are seeking to have their voice and their representation, not just in Congress, but think about your city council districts, your county commission districts, your judicial districts. every place where there is districting that has allowed for black and, of course, Latino also representation is going to have to be on alert and looking for how we manage to keep black voices having power in the political sphere. One of the things I think it's difficult about covering this court or the court in general, this court, is it can, you know, when we cover Donald Trump, we cover the Republicans in the Senate or the other electives. Right. There's some sense in which there's this kind of Democratic agency. Right. Like a bunch of Republicans are going to stand for office in the midterms. And if you're really unhappy with the direction of the country. Right. Like people can express that with the court. It always I always feels like I'm sort of bashing my head against a brick wall a little bit. But today is one of those days where it feels that way, particularly like how how do you think about what needs to be done if and when Democrats have power again to change this court that feels incredibly out of control? Well, I don't want viewers to think even that what the court did today was just terrible from a kind of ideological democratic standpoint in terms of thinking about minority political representation. I do want them also to know that the Supreme Court ran roughshod over its own precedents, including precedents, including one from just a couple of years ago, which it tries to explain away so that it can get away with doing what it's doing. I think it's important for them to see that the court itself raised this question below. It wasn't even a question that was being litigated by the parties. I think it's important for people to see that they're essentially rewriting a statute that was written by Congress in 1982 and passed on a bipartisan basis because they didn't like it. I want them to see the excesses of this court so that when and if Democrats do get power, which they say they want after the midterms, they understand that Supreme Court reform has to be at the top of the list. It isn't just that this is a Supreme Court that is controlled ideologically by conservatives. It is that they have abandoned all of the rails and the safeguards that are supposed to give judicial decision making a measure of integrity. And that means that there has to be serious Supreme Court reform and soon. All right, Sharon and Eiffel, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. Still ahead, a wild scene in Florida where Republicans are apparently just going to go ahead and break the law to redraw congressional maps. Next. So as of today, Republicans have now begun a second wave of redistricting wars that Trump launched last year. This time, as we just noted, they're rewriting the maps with some cover of the Supreme Court. The latest state to take the lead in Trump's race to the bottom is Florida, where Republicans just passed a new gerrymandered congressional map in one day in both houses, despite protests from Democrats on the floor who pointed out the state constitution of Florida explicitly forbids partisan gerrymandering. And yes, as we've been covering, some blue states have joined this arms race too. But remember that in the two states where Democrats have retaliated, right? This is in California and Virginia. The issue was given to the voters to decide. They drew the maps and they went to the voters in Virginia and California, and they had the opportunity to kill the proposal, which they nearly did in Virginia last week. It passed narrowly. On the other hand, in all the states where Republicans have done this, and they were the ones who literally started it in Texas, voters have had no say. It's a pretty big difference. Stacey Abrams, a former Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia. She's founder of Fair Fight Action, now the host of Crooked Media's podcast, Assembly Required. Claire McCaskill served as Democratic senator from Missouri and is an MSNOW political analyst. It's great to have you. Stacey, let me just first get your reaction to the kind of double whammy today of the Supreme Court decision. One doesn't necessarily facilitate the other, although I think Florida is making an argument kind of that they are, of that Supreme Court decision. And then Florida moving again in a day, like in one day, no like long process, no committee hearings, certainly no vote for the people to be like, whoop, we're changing the maps. This is about power and this is about what authoritarianism looks like in America. The reason the Supreme Court dismantled the Voting Rights Act is because they want to be able to create the kind of Viktor Orban democracy-proof Duma that Russia has, that Venezuela had, that Hungary has. And you do that by getting rid of anyone who can disagree with you. And in a multiracial democracy, that means starting with black voters, starting with black elected officials, going after Latino elected officials, kicking almost 19 people out of Congress and creating a permanent majority. What Florida is doing is what it's always done, which is do it on a smaller scale. We have to remember the authoritarianism didn't just visit America. It was fomented in the South. And what we saw DeSantis do is exactly what Georgia has done, what Texas has done, what Louisiana is about to do, what Mississippi is starting to do. And that is take power away from those they do not like to give it to those who will never give it up. We have the you know, we've been covering the redistricting battle. Right. So, Trump, first of all, redistricting happens every 10 years after the census. The only exception I've ever seen was back when Karl Rove pushed through a mid-decade redistricting, again, under a Republican and in Texas, right, to get some advantage. So Trump starts this and he starts going to all the Republican states and says, you've got to redistrict because I don't want to lose the midterms and get impeached again. And I know basically that we will. And so this is the way I'm going to insulate myself. And then Democrats respond in California, Virginia. And as this map shows, we had basically gotten back to par. We had basically gotten back to par. Now you've got a new front open by Florida Republicans. What should people do? Well, first, I think DeSantis, and frankly, talking to some people down in Florida, I think he's overestimating how well they're going to do in this election. There have been some glimmers in Florida showing that, and it wasn't that long ago that they had Florida statewide elected officials in Florida that were Democrats. And some of these districts, Trump won by less than 10 points. Right. Well, Democrats have been overperforming by what, an average of 13 points. Right. In almost every election that has occurred since Trump took office, especially in specials. In specials. I mean, we expect that number to come down. We do. But I will tell you, people are paying attention to this. And they are seeing what the Supreme Court did today. And, you know, they're underestimating, I think, the enthusiasm that they are generating by trying to artificially stamp out the voices of voters. I think the point you made, Chris, is really important. Democrats take this to the voters and say, you decide. Republicans get in a room. They decide how to slice up the map. Most of the time, they're decimating black and brown districts in order to put white folks in there. And people are paying attention. And there's a swing back in the Hispanic community. And I think even in the black community, there is a lot of folks that maybe were willing to give Trump a chance, more so in the Hispanic community than in the black community, that are really saying now, boy, we screwed up and we need to do something to rein this guy in. I mean the polling shows that And to your point it looks like there going to be a few of these new districts again that are plus four plus five plus six which you know in a wave election could sweep them in But there also you know there the racial aspect of this right So there the partisan aspect which is like can Democrats basically get back, again, just to par? What all anyone wants here is like an even playing field. But Stacey is someone who, you know, has been in elected office in the South and in one of the states that's, you know, in some ways with John Lewis, the kind of heart of the Voting Rights Act. But, you know, this is the Mississippi state auditor is already calling to get rid of the one majority black district in the state of Mississippi, which is, I think, I forget, but I think one of the highest black populations in the entire country. Benny Thompson, very, very well known. Like there's going to be a target painted on black representatives in the South starting now. I want to put the numbers around it. I completely agree with Senator McCaskill that there is an opportunity in this election cycle to begin the fight. But I want us to be really clear that we keep going election to election and they're thinking longitudinally. longitudinally. And what they are counting on is not that they can win in 2026, but that they can run the table in 28 and beyond. Because if you can eliminate black districts that were drawn using the Voting Rights Act, that's up to 19 districts. If you can eliminate at the state legislative level, that's up to 191 legislators. In 2030, we have the census. What happens in 2031? We have redistricting. And so we have to think about this, not just in terms of what does it mean for November, we have to think about what does it mean for the future. And what I would tell people is that one, if you hold a chamber, what we're watching happen and the fight that's happening in Maryland, the conversations happening in Illinois, if Democrats control the power they need to use it now, we have got to build bulwarks against this redistricting. We also have to start talking about voting rights at the state and local level. They've dismantled it there. We can start rebuilding it there. We have to fuel lawsuits. We may not win, but we have to fight. And ultimately, we have to use this election cycle to not just win for November, but have the conversation about why they are trying to steal power now, because they're not worried about November. They're worried about November 2028. And they know that if they can shave the margins, it doesn't matter what we want. they win. One of the things we've seen, to Stacey's point here, is how important those state houses are for this. I mean, even seeing in Florida today, right? The reason they're pushing through that, you know, Florida is a Republican state. It's been a Republican state. But the state assembly, it was like 86-26 or something. You're like, well, it's not that Republican, right? Like that state house is a very gerrymandered state house. Again, in a Republican state, we saw in Wisconsin and other places where they've kind of clawed it back. But it seems like for Democrats up and down the ballot, that's why these next two elections are so crucial. And our viewers really need, they are highly educated, they're motivated, they need to look at state legislative races. They need to do the research and find those swing districts where either a Republican or a Democrat can win, and they need to help. They need to send $5 or $20 to those candidates. Having power at the state level is, in fact, the bulwark that Stacey's talking about. It'll make a big difference. Yeah, particularly when you take away the Voting Rights Act protections and you see what someone like DeSantis is going to do. Stacey Abrams, Claire McCaskill, great to have you both. Still to come, the president's prosecution of his former FBI director pushes forward Senator Adam Schiff on Trump's vindictive campaign. Next. Today, former FBI Director James Comey made his first court appearance for his second criminal indictment under Donald Trump's Department of Justice. Comey's family joining him in court. It is, by all appearances, an extremely thin legal case, charging Comey literally with threatening Trump's life last year over his now-deleted Instagram photo of seashells, Spelling out 8647. Today, Comey's lawyer signaled to the court they would seek to dismiss the case based on a, quote, vindictive and selective prosecution. Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California, serves on the Judiciary Committee, and he joins me now. Senator, I think we probably share the same opinion about how strong a case this is, but how optimistic are you that once again the courts will sort of hold here and do what they're supposed to do as they, I think, did the first time we went through this? Well, I'm pretty optimistic about it. I was a federal prosecutor for almost six years. I never saw a case even remotely this week. It is weak to the point of frivolous, this seashell case. And I think the only real question is, does it get dismissed before there's a trial or does James Comey have to go through the exercise of a trial before the case is disposed of by the jury, but it does show the lengths to which Blanche is willing to go, the acting attorney general is willing to go to try to get the permanent job. And I think there's an enormously strong case for a vindictive prosecution. If you can't prove that here, I don't know what case would qualify, but it may also just simply fail to state a viable offense on the facts that they presented. Do you think it's fair to say that the Department of Justice has actually gotten worse since Pam Bondi's exit? Well, I guess by some measures, yes. I mean, these cases are just absurd. And so they failed under Bondi to get a conviction or even get a trial against James Comey. Now they're bringing even weaker cases forward. So that's a step in the wrong direction. And in that respect, it is worse. Will it be worse in terms of the handling of the Epstein files? Really too early to tell. Todd Blanche was really every bit as bad as Pambandi. Was he worse? I'm not sure. He may be worse in this respect. He's far more competent than Pambandi. He puts a better public spin on things than Pan Bondi. So in that sense, he is perhaps more dangerous. And for that reason, maybe Trump will prefer him. I spoke to your colleague or in your California colleague in the other house, Ro Khanna, at the beginning of the show about war power resolution in the House. They've been unable to sort of crack and get any real defections from Republicans. I think just two votes. You've undertaken similar efforts along with Democratic colleagues in the Senate to bring up this vote time and time again? Are you going to keep trying? Yes, I have one coming up tomorrow, and tomorrow just may be different. We'll see. And I say that because under the War Powers Act, after 60 days, if the president hasn't gotten an authorization to use force or ask for an extension for the purpose of removing troops from battle, then the war must come to an end. And several of my Republican colleagues have cited that 60-day threshold as important to them. Well, tomorrow at midnight, it will be 60 days. And tomorrow, they will have a vote on my War Powers resolution. So we'll see whether they adhere to what they have said about that 60-day clock. Now, I disagree with some of the premise of their argument, which is they believe the president properly began the war because there was some kind of a threat from Iran. And I don't think there was any imminent threat. So in my view, it was illegal from the beginning. But even using their own logic, it is illegal after 60 days, barring the passage of an authorization bill, which is not going to happen tomorrow. So the War Powers Act tomorrow, I think, gives us our best shot at getting some Republican votes. Senator Collins of Maine, who, of course, is facing reelection this year and likely a very strong challenge, had this to say. If there are military hostilities beyond the 60 days, Congress has to authorize them or Congress can block them. But Congress has to act. Do you have any any hope for her vote? Well, I do. I do hope so. I think Republicans are very concerned about the war, both from a policy matter that this is unauthorized, but more so from a political point of view. And that is this is a real liability for them. And they recognize that. And the longer it goes on, the worse it will become if they go forward with an authorization bill to actually formally authorize the war. They will have their name then associated strongly with this war for however long it goes on. That's a very perilous vote. So I think tomorrow we'll get a pretty good sense of whether that 60 days they have been talking about is meaningful or it's not. Finally, every time that we show this national U.S. average gas prices graphic, which we've been showing a lot, I hear from viewers in California who say, buddy, you don't know the half of it. I wish we were paying those national averages. It's very weird today. I just get a response to Pete Hegseth kind of every time gas prices sort of pivoting to like dump on California. As if California isn't part of the United States, it's very strange the way they talk about California, don't you think? Oh, yes, it is very strange the way they talk about California. It is even worse how they cancel renewable energy projects in California and all kind of things that would bring down energy costs. In fact, they went to the length of canceling a wind project in Morro Bay and paying the company in taxpayer dollars to invest instead in a gas or oil project. So they're literally paying renewable energy firms to go into gas and oil instead. that's how hostile they are, not just to our state, but to the idea of renewable energy. So, you know, they have full ownership of this energy crisis, full ownership of the high gas prices, full ownership of the increase in utility bills. It is all on them and just getting worse. Senator Adam Schiff, California, thank you very much. Stay tuned. In just a few minutes, Jen Psaki will be speaking with both Senator Raphael Warnock and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. We'll be right back. Remember the anti-ice protests in Chicago last year, including one incident where several people standing near ICE vehicles, including then-Congressional candidate Kat Abogazela, were indicted for allegedly conspiring to injure law enforcement? Today, six months later, federal prosecutors moved to drop the conspiracy count because, once again, there was nothing there. That does it for All In. You can catch us every weeknight at 8 o'clock on MSNOW. Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's facebook.com slash onwithchris.