This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.

Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts. 

In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942. 

More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country. 

Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate. 

Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.

Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance. 

‘We Were Very Fortunate That Something Much, Much Worse Did Not Happen’

For years, but with increasing ferocity lately, the far-right has been directing its hatred toward Indian Americans and other immigrants of South Asian descent. Some Republican candidates have seized on this strain of bigotry, perhaps hoping a panic over demographic change will fuel voter turnout.

This week, this dark, very American story advanced to its inevitable next chapter, as a young man who police have described as unstable targeted a Hindu temple west of Chicago for a mass shooting.

However, when 19-year-old Alexandros Paporakis showed up at the temple in Aurora, Illinois, his gun jammed, police say.

He texted a colleague at Taco Bell, where he worked, about what he was up to. The colleague called the authorities.

“I think we were very fortunate that something much, much worse did not happen,” Palatine, Illinois’ police chief, Bill Nord, told press. “The seriousness of this alleged threat cannot be overstated,” he said later.

Police found tactical gear and hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the 19-year-old suspect’s home, as well as white nationalist material. They also found a manifesto titled “Why I Fought: A.K.A.: (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto).” The manifesto targeted South Asian, Jewish and Black people, per local reports.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) was at the temple on Sunday when Paporakis turned up, he said, and on Thursday called on the feds to get involved.

“We know this type of hate is coursing thorough social media online, it’s exploded,” Krishnamoorthi told a local news station. “We can’t rely on luck, that’s why we have to condemn the hatred. We can’t stay silent, or worse, condone it or fan the flames.”

“Secondly,” he continued, “we have to redirect the FBI’s focus to domestic violent extremism and trying to uncover these plots.”

The FBI, under Trump, has largely abandoned efforts to track neo-Nazi extremists, in some cases repositioning resources toward targeting the president’s critics and political enemies.

Trump’s Long-Brewing Effort to Oust Ilhan Omar From America

The Trump administration effort to eject Muslim representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the country is the culmination of a years-long fixation.

• Way back in 2019, TPM reporter Christopher Mathias noted this week, attendees at Trump rallies were chanting “send her back” when the president mentioned Omar.
• That year, the Washington Post reported yesterday, a “political appointee in the first Trump administration” demanded that DHS scrub Omar’s immigration records for any indication of fraud. It ultimately did not find what it needed to to move forward with a case.
• In its second term, the Trump administration is increasingly attempting to make use of denaturalization, an extremely difficult outcome to achieve legally. That, however, is the goal with its latest investigation of Omar, per the Wall Street Journal.
• To successfully denaturalize someone, “the government needs to show that there was an omission or falsehood on the naturalization paperwork of such magnitude that it would have prevented the person from getting citizenship had the truth been shared with immigration authorities,” writes TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who has been covering the administration’s denaturalization efforts for us since 2024.
• The administration appears to specifically be looking into whether Omar’s father filed immigration paperwork claiming she was 17 when she was actually 18, a theory that has been pushed on the right for years, most prominently by a QAnon-supporting candidate who once challenged Omar in a primary campaign, Josh reports. A 17-year-old minor naturalizes with their parent when their parent obtains citizenship, while an 18-year-old adult must apply for citizenship independently.
• “I think her citizenship is solid and there wasn’t any fraud there,” one former official involved in the 2019 investigation told the Washington Post.

Tabs

• The White House is denying that Trump himself gave the order to restrict Ukraine’s access to Starlink, Bloomberg reports. But the order came “from inside the White House,” Reuters reports. “The officials said ‌leaders at the Defense Department received a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed,” the Reuters report says.
• Meanwhile, Ukraine has run out of patriot missiles, CNN reports. The U.S. seems to be withholding them as Trump punishes the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, for criticizing his pre-midterms diesel deal with Russia. Patriot missiles, which are used as interceptors, are in extremely short supply more generally thanks in part to the war with Iran. As a result, Russian missiles are more easily striking Ukrainian targets.
• Hunter Walker profiles Bobby Pulido, the Tejano singer who, thanks in part to a GOP Texas gerrymandering effort that appears increasingly to have been misguided, stands a real chance of flipping his district from red to blue.

Man of the Hour

It’s longtime Trump friend and now-former State Department Special Envoy for Arts and Culture Paolo Zampolli, who, Politico recently reported, has been in a bizarre, long-running, sprawling feud with his boss, cc-ing a dozen-plus people as they snap at each other over email. Among other issues, Zampolli blamed said boss, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, for, he thought, being the source of a New York Times article that said Zampolli got his longtime girlfriend deported by ICE as part of a custody battle over their son. (Yes, it’s messy.) The girlfriend, in turn, threatened to reveal details she said she knew about Trump, Melania, and Jeffrey Epstein. (Messy.) Anyway, Trump — who, as Josh Marshall observes, suddenly seems to have no taste for drama — canned Zampolli yesterday

Are We at War?

No, says Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA).

“Right now we are defending U.S. assets there, so there is no war as we speak,” Wittman told HuffPost Thursday.

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise

The Missouri gerrymandering fight felt a lot like old-school Republican politics: boring, procedural trickery to rig the systems of government in their favor. 

‘I Would Underscore the Seriousness Of the Violation Here’

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s election meddling scheme was declared unlawful by the California Supreme Court, which just issued unanimous decisions in two cases focused on Bianco’s seizure of 650,000 ballots in California this spring.

I’ll unpack Bianco’s extremist background and ties to the far-right constitutional sheriff’s movement a bit more below, but, crucially, Bianco seized ballots in April that were cast in the state’s 2025 special election — when voters approved Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to conduct redistricting mid-cycle. As you’ll recall, Newsom put forward Proposition 50 in an attempt to offset the damage of President Trump’s nationwide gerrymandering crusade.

Prop 50 was placed on the California ballot specifically in response to Texas’ redrawing of its congressional district lines, which is expected to net five seats for Republicans in the U.S. House in the midterms. Newsom was one of several Democratic officials across the U.S. who worked to combat Trump’s gerrymandering blitz, a bullying campaign Trump launched last summer in an attempt to pressure Republican-controlled state legislatures nationwide to redraw their district maps mid-cycle to help Republicans hold the House this fall. Texas was the first to act on Trump’s demands, followed by Missouri, North Carolina, Florida and others. Enough Republicans in Indiana’s state Senate bucked Trump to quash the effort there. Trump endorsed primary challengers for those who refused to bend the knee, and most of those who stood up to Trump lost their primary elections in May.

Anyway, back to California and the MAGA sheriff seizing ballots. California voters approved Prop 50 — which amended the state constitution so that state officials could, temporarily, bypass normal protocol for redistricting and approved new maps that gave Democrats an additional five seats in the House — with a 64% vote in November 2025. Shortly thereafter, Bianco seized the ballots from election officials as part of what he claimed to be an investigation into complaints from Riverside County activists (i.e. election conspiracy theorists) who claimed the vote count did not match the number of ballots election officials received.

The California Supreme Court ordered Bianco to halt his investigation back in April while the case challenging his seizure played out in court. The state’s highest court ruled on Thursday that Bianco did not have the authority to take the ballots, issuing unanimous decisions in two separate cases brought against the sheriff — one by Riverside County voters and another by California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta. The Supreme Court declared that Bianco’s actions threatened election integrity in the state of California. An excerpt from the ruling in the case brought by voters:

We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful. California law long has recognized that voted ballots require special care and handling to safeguard them from alteration or tampering. Consistent with this principle, the Elections Code narrowly limits the circumstances in which a court may order the production of ballots for inspection, and even in those narrow circumstances, requires that ballots remain in the physical custody of the responsible elections official.

“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu said in a concurrent opinion. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents — and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”

The Supreme Court will weigh in a third time on Missouri Republicans’ attempts to ram through a maximal gerrymander after twice rejecting those efforts.