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JD Vance says ‘I do’ see Israel-Hamas peace deal as end to Gaza war: Full interview

admin - Latest News - October 12, 2025
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Vice President JD Vance joins Meet the Press as President Trump travels to the Middle East to sign a deal aimed at ending the Gaza war, while tensions mount in Washington as the government shutdown drags on with no end in sight.



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Oct. 12, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Lawrence HurleyWASHINGTON — The way Louisiana’s Republican leaders put it, the pervasive racial discrimination in elections that led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is all in the past.That is why they are now urging the Supreme Court, in a case being argued on Wednesday, to bar states from using any consideration of race when drawing legislative districts, gutting a key plank of the law that was designed to ensure Black voters would have a chance of electing their preferred candidates.Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told NBC News that the Voting Rights Act was designed to address blatantly discriminatory policies and practices that prevented Black people and other minorities from voting decades ago.“I think the question now is, have we gotten to a point where those obstacles really don’t exist anymore?” she said. “I don’t think they exist in Louisiana,” she added.At issue is a congressional district map that Louisiana grudgingly redrew last year after being sued under the Voting Rights Act to ensure that there were two majority-Black districts. The original map only had one in a state where a third of the population is Black, according to the U.S. census.The state’s new legal argument, which may appeal to a conservative-majority Supreme Court, is that drawing a map to ensure majority-Black districts violates the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments, which were both enacted after the Civil War to ensure former slaves had equal rights under the law, including the right to vote.Supreme Court appears skeptical of LGBTQ conversion therapy bans04:02Conservatives say those amendments bar any consideration of race at any time, and the Supreme Court has previously embraced this “colorblind” interpretation of the Constitution.Civil rights activists say that approach makes a mockery of both the post-Civil War amendments and the Voting Rights Act, not to mention their experience on the ground in Louisiana.Press Robinson, who is one of the plaintiffs who challenged Louisiana’s original congressional map, said he had to sue in 1974 just so he could take his place as an elected official on the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board.“Has Louisiana really changed? I don’t see it,” he told reporters on a recent call.The issue reaches the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, just two years after it surprisingly rejected a similar bid to weaken the Voting Rights Act in another redistricting case.The court, however, has struck blows against the law in other rulings in 2013 and 2021.In the 2023 case, the court rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map in Alabama on the grounds that it discriminated against Black voters, leading to a new map being drawn that included two majority-Black districts.The vote was 5-4, with two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joining the court’s three liberals in the majority. Four other conservatives dissented.In Wednesday’s oral argument, Kavanaugh will be a focus of attention, in part because of what he said in his separate concurring opinion in the Alabama case.Although Kavanaugh voted with the majority, he expressed some sympathy for the argument that even if race could at one point be considered as a factor in ensuring compliance with the Voting Rights Act, it no longer can be.But, he added, “Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.”Now, piggybacking on Kavanaugh’s opinion, Louisiana’s lawyers eagerly embrace the argument Alabama did not make.Among other things, Louisiana points to the court’s 2023 ruling that ended the consideration of race in college admissions, which was issued just three weeks after the Alabama voting rights ruling.Chris Kieser, a lawyer at the right-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation, which supports Louisiana in the case, said in an interview that the upshot of a ruling in the state’s favor is that there could be no obligation to ever intentionally draw majority-Black districts.“Districts should not be drawn based on the expected race of the — whoever is going to be the member of Congress representing it,” he said.That could lead to a decline in the number of legislators at the national and state level who are Black or Latino.In that scenario, minority voters would still be able to bring separate racial gerrymandering claims under the Constitution if there is obvious racial discrimination, Kieser argued, although such cases are difficult to win.Depending on what the court does, the provision of the Voting Rights Act in question, known as Section 2, could survive in limited form.A ruling that leads to a reduction in majority-Black and other minority districts would have a partisan impact that could favor Republicans, as Black voters historically favor Democrats. If the court rules quickly, there is even a chance that new maps could be drawn ahead of the hotly contested 2026 midterm elections.The case has a convoluted history, arising from litigation over the earlier map drawn by the state Legislature after the 2020 census that included one Black-majority district out of the state’s six districts.The state drew the current map in order to comply with that ruling, but was then sued by a group of self-identified “non-African American” voters who argued that in seeking to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the state had violated the Constitution.The Supreme Court originally heard the current case earlier this year on a narrower set of legal issues but, in an unusual move, asked in June for the parties to reargue it. Over the summer, the court then raised the stakes by asking the lawyers to focus on the constitutional issue.As a result of that complicated background, the various briefs filed in the case — including one submitted by the Trump administration in support of Louisiana — make a number of different legal arguments.That makes it difficult to know ahead of Wednesday’s oral argument what the justices will focus on, said Sophia Lin Lakin, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who is part of the legal team defending the latest Louisiana map.“It is so strange. Normally, we would always understand the question we are trying to answer,” she said.Lin Lakin does not think the case should be used as the vehicle for a “full-on assault” on the Voting Rights Act.But, she conceded, “there is some risk the way that’s being presented that the court may be interested in that bigger question.”Lawrence HurleyLawrence Hurley is a senior Supreme Court reporter for NBC News.
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Sept. 23, 2025, 4:00 PM EDTBy Daniella Silva, Rob Wile and Nicole AcevedoAfter announcing a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed overhauling the visa’s lottery selection process to prioritize higher-paid and higher-skilled foreign employees.The proposed policy changes could reignite the debate over the use of foreign labor by U.S. employers. The move comes as President Donald Trump has taken aim at H-1B visas, a program used widely by Big Tech and outsourcing companies to hire foreign workers, announcing Friday that companies would be required to pay a $100,000 fee with new applications submitted after Sept. 21. The administration on Tuesday targeted H-1B visa allocation, proposing a “weighted selection process” for when annual demand for the visas tops the 85,000 limit set by Congress, which it says has happened every year for more than a decade. The new process would replace the current lottery system that determines who gets to apply for those limited visa spots in favor of putting more weight on higher skilled and higher paid foreign workers, according to a proposed rule set to be published in the Federal Register on Wednesday. Under the current lottery rules, offers to apply for an H-1B visa are assigned at random. The Trump administration’s proposal would assign prospective employees to four different wage bands, with workers in the highest wage category being entered into the selection pool four times and those in the lowest wage category being entered into the selection pool once. The Department of Homeland Security stated in the proposal that the weighted system would better serve the visa program’s original intent and “incentivize employers to offer higher wages or higher skilled positions to H-1B workers and disincentivize the existing widespread use of the H-1B program to fill lower paid or lower skilled positions.”It said the proposed selection process would still maintain opportunities for employers to hire H-1B workers at “all wage levels.” ‘A strong signal’The H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to temporarily hire skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations” across health care, tech and finance industries, and other STEM-related fields.The two new proposed policies together send “a strong signal of the direction that the administration wants to go,” said Xiao Wang, CEO of Boundless Immigration, a company that offers services to people navigating the immigration process in the U.S.If adopted, the policies would benefit companies seeking to keep foreigners with specialized skills who studied at American universities in the U.S., as well as ensuring H-1B visas “disproportionately go to people who are deemed higher skilled, represented by higher wages and higher salary,” he said.Trump stated Friday that changes were needed in the visa system, saying it was designed to bring in temporary workers with “additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”For the last H-1B lottery round, which closed its registration in March, about 339,000 people applied. Of those, 120,141 applications were selected for the lottery, according to USCIS data.The proposal faces a 30-day public comment period before it is considered by the administration for a final rule, a process that could take months.If the changes are adopted, companies seeking to hire lower-wage workers from India and China for computer-related jobs appear likely to be among the most affected. For more than a decade, about 60% of H-1B workers approved every year have held computer-related jobs, according to Pew Research.Start-ups and smaller companies who cannot afford to pay their workers in the higher pay categories compared to major tech companies would also be impacted, Wang said.Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures venture capital group, said in a social media post that the latest proposal would hurt many tech companies.“Overall, it’s really bad for startups, early employees, helps IT consulting shops and can be easily gamed,“ Das wrote.Trump’s announcement of a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas touched off a frenzy among current visa holders, the companies that employ them and countries around the world as they worked to understand the edict.Eventually, the White House clarified that it would be a one-time fee and apply only to new visa applicants. Trump said companies would have to pay the fee for new H-1B visa applications submitted after Sept. 21. That’s a steep rise from current fees, which are usually $2,000 to about $5,000.Both the fee and Tuesday’s proposal are likely to face challenges in court. A growing chorus on both the left and the right say an over-reliance on the visa by U.S. firms has put U.S.-born workers at a disadvantage. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has called the H-1B visa program a “scam,” while the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has claimed that some of the companies most reliant on H-1B visas, such as Amazon and Facebook’s parent, Meta, have also had sizable layoffs, though it did not cite evidence that the use of the visa and the layoffs are related.In the first half of 2025, Amazon received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Meta received more than 5,000. Representatives for both companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Daniella SilvaDaniella Silva is a national reporter for NBC News, focusing on immigration and education.Rob WileRob Wile is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist covering breaking business stories for NBCNews.com.Nicole AcevedoNicole Acevedo is a national reporter for NBC News and NBC Latino.
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