Democrats had a very good night last night. That's even an understatement -- in actual fact, Democrats had a blowout night last night, as they romped home in just about every election everywhere. One year from Donald Trump's electoral victory, the Democratic Party came back strong. What it all means for the future is anyone's guess, but for the first time in an entire year, it's better to be a Democrat than a Republican, looking towards that future.

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New York City is in the midst of holding a sort of hybrid election to choose its new mayor. The Democratic primary used "ranked-choice voting" (R.C.V.), while the general election tomorrow will be the traditional "whichever candidate gets the most votes wins" sort of contest. I saw an article today in Salon which contrasted how these two contests played out, which pointed out how the Democratic primary was a less-vicious affair, with candidates not only vying to be the first selection on people's ballots but also the "number two" choice for voters backing other candidates. It posited that the general election would have been a much more civil affair if R.C.V. had been in place, since the same sort of effect might have changed the way the candidates campaigned. The article was probably right to some degree or another, but it missed a rather large point -- one that might be pertinent for Republican voters: if the N.Y.C. mayoral general election had indeed been held under R.C.V. rules, then frontrunner Zohran Mamdani might have wound up losing.

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Next Tuesday is Election Day. No matter what happens in this off-off-year election, this will produce a flurry of speculation about the current state of the political landscape in America, and what it will all mean for the election that is going to happen next year, when all of the House and one-third of the Senate will be on the ballot. As usual, though, drawing sweeping conclusions this far out is likely to prove laughably mistaken, since a year's time in a normal political atmosphere is still an eternity, and an entire year in the Trump era feels like an even longer time than that.

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Over two weeks ago, on September 23rd, Adelita Grijalva won a special election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, in Arizona's seventh congressional district. She won handily -- by a whopping 39 percent margin -- so the results aren't being contested or undergoing recounts or anything of that nature. She won, plain and simple. It was an emotional victory for her because she will be taking the seat vacated by the death of her father Raúl earlier this year. But she still hasn't been sworn in. She is still just "Representative-Elect Grijalva."

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After Donald Trump held two back-to-back summits, in an effort to get a quick ceasefire and peace agreement in Ukraine, not much of anything has actually changed. Unless you count the rest of the world either laughing at America's president or gingerly trying to not bruise his all-too-fragile ego. Both of those things have increased, sadly.

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Donald Trump has ushered in a period of political shamelessness. Things that politicians used to do very quietly or in secret are now done right out in the open. There is no longer any pretense about such moves, the politicians now brag about what they're doing. This is evident in too many ways to even list, but the most prominent example right now is the mid-decade redistricting battles being waged in the states. Led by Texas and California, this could soon spread to other states as well, as Republicans jockey to avoid losing control of the House of Representatives next year and Democrats move to counterbalance these efforts.

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Two stories dominated the political headlines this week: Texas Democrats fleeing the state to halt the Republican-dominated legislature's efforts to redraw their U.S. House district lines to hand Republicans five more safe seats, and Donald Trump letting incredibly high tariffs begin against over 90 countries worldwide.

We'll get to them in a moment, but what's more interesting is the dog that didn't bark today. Russia was supposed to have a "10-day deadline" to end its invasion of Ukraine, and steep tariffs were supposed to be slapped on them if Vladimir Putin hadn't manage to do so by today. However, nary a headline is talking about the tariffs that were supposed to appear, because once again Putin played Trump like a violin.

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There's a slogan used by those who support redistricting reform that is worth starting with today: "Voters should pick their politicians; the politicians shouldn't be able to pick their voters." But the process of designing districts -- for U.S. House of Representatives seats as well as state legislative seats -- has long been a political process. The word "gerrymandering" was coined to describe a Massachusetts governor (Elbridge Gerry) who, while serving in office in 1812, approved a district so convoluted that a newspaper drew it as a mythical lizard with the name "the gerrymander." The name stuck, which shows you this sort of thing has been going on for over two centuries now.

Usually these battles are fought immediately after the decennial Census, as states have to adjust to a new number of House members (whether fewer or more). But it's not illegal for a state to redistrict mid-decade, which has been happening more and more frequently over the past couple of decades.

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When the Supreme Court rules, in many instances it issues the final legal word on a particular issue. Congress can always try to legislate changes to the law after such a ruling, but as far as the judicial system is concerned, once the Supreme Court rules all lesser judges must follow their ruling. But this legal finality is not always true, because a Supreme Court ruling can, in many instances, only address one particular legal facet of the underlying constitutional case. The high court sometimes takes this route intentionally, ruling on one legal detail and then returning the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings -- allowing the initially-filed case to continue, just with new technical (and limited) instructions from the Supreme Court about how the lower judges should handle it. And although some saw the Supreme Court's recent decision on Donald Trump's executive order which attempted to redefine what birthright citizenship means in the Fourteenth Amendment as the final legal word, it was not. It wasn't even close to a final decision, since the Supreme Court actually completely ignored the underlying constitutional issue in question. Instead, they used the case to make a sweeping ruling limiting lower-court judges to issue nationwide injunctions which block some move by the president or his administration. By doing so, they overturned a nationwide injunction which barred the Trump administration from attempting to implement his new definition (which would have severely limited the grant of citizenship for babies born on American soil). But they put their order on a 30-day pause, and they left a loophole.

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I've written about this subject before, where I used the phrase: "Be careful what you wish for" in the opening paragraph, so I thought I'd just use it as today's headline. Previously, I had written about an effort in the Senate to introduce a bill that would remove the ability of federal judges below the level of the Supreme Court to issue nationwide (or "universal") injunctions which banned government behavior while a case was being litigated. Here's how Republican Senator Josh Hawley explained the need for the bill he intended to introduce:

What needs to happen is one of two things: Either the Supreme Court needs to intervene and make clear there's only one court that can issue rules for the whole country, that's the Supreme Court, that's why we only have one of them. [O]r, if they won't do that, Congress needs to legislate and make clear that district courts do not have the ability to issue these kinds of injunctions.

Today, the issue was indeed argued before the Supreme Court. And the conservatives on the court seemed open to perhaps limiting or removing the ability of lower-court judges to issue such universal injunctions. To which I again say: Be careful what you wish for.

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