WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar - Episode 38

Episode Date: April 25, 2026

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear an important update to the Supreme Court case challenging the Voting Rights Act, a set of executive orders using war powers to expedite energy and infrastructure production, a bill requiring the new DHS secretary to designate Haitians under temporary protected status, and more.

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, here an important update to the Supreme Court case that challenges the Voting Rights Act, a set of executive orders using war powers to expedite energy and infrastructure production, a bill requiring the new DHS secretary

to designate Haitians under temporary protected status, and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media. Well, they're covering the president's latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is a potential leaked decision in the Louisiana v. Calais Supreme Court case. Now, we covered this case on the show in March of

2025, which was a very long time ago at this point. That was when the Supreme Court heard the case. The case is about racial gerrymandering, and it has pretty strong implications for the future of the Voting Rights Act, which has been a huge part of American life and American elections for at least the 60 years. So to give a short recap of the details of the case, Louisiana proposed a congressional districting map in 2022 that was challenged by the Supreme Court because it only offered one majority black district. Now, Louisiana gets six congressional districts and one third of their citizens are black. So under the Voting Rights Act, only having one majority black district meant that black voters are underrepresented in the congressional vote. This is evidence of discrimination

under the Voting Rights Act, which does not look at intent to discriminate. It only looks at results. If the outcomes are disproportionate by race, then that is racial discrimination under the Voting Rights Act, and that election policy or congressional map in this example must be thrown out. So that map was thrown out in 2022. So as a result, the Louisiana legislature had to draw up a new congressional map, one that had more majority black districts. So in 2024, they created a second majority black district, which prompted another Supreme Court case, which was challenged the exact same way by a group of plaintiffs who called themselves non-African Americans who sued the state of Louisiana for the new congressional map on the grounds that it too was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, which I mean, it pretty explicitly was.

They were drawing this new congressional district on the basis of race. They were trying to add another majority black district because of the Supreme Court decision in 2022. So the state of Louisiana was really stuck between a rock and a hard place where if they left the old map in place, that was illegal under the Voting Rights Act. And if they tried to fix the problem with a new congressional map, That was also a violation of the Voting Rights Act. So that's what's brought this case to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has run into the logical fallacy of the Voting Rights Act here, which is that states have to avoid racial gerrymandering,

but in order to avoid it, they often have to racially gerrymander, if that makes any sense. They're not allowed to discriminate based on race in their voting practices or electoral practices, but because that decision is not based on intent or intent to discriminate, the courts can find that a voting practice has a disparate racial outcome, and that'd be evidence of discrimination. Thus, you have an electoral system that is violating the Voting Rights Act. But in order to fix that system, you have to racially discriminate by adding another majority-minority district in this situation, or racially derrymandering to favor minority voters, which again is a violation of the Voting Rights Act that is required to fix a different violation of the Voting Rights Act.

So this Louisiana versus Kale case was heard by the Supreme Court about a year ago, just over a year ago actually. And the Supreme Court has deliberated on the case. they've heard more arguments, but have yet to actually publicly release a decision. But we have a new insider piece of information from former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who served as press secretary for Donald Trump in 2017. We got a new insider piece of information from him about the future of this Louisiana v. Kale case and the future of the V. Rights Act. Take a listen. I have been told by reliable sources that that decision is done and that the minority is

slow walking the dissent so that states can't, states, do not have time to redistrict ahead of it. But I have been told very reliably that the minority is slow walking that dissent. All right. Wait, hold a second. Because I don't think I've read that anywhere. That is news. Oh, yeah.

Okay. So you can hear the interviewer surprise at that little tidbit of information there, but Spicer doubles down on it afterwards and confirms that his insider sources are saying that the Louisiana V. Kale case has been decided by the Supreme Court. And they're slow walking the release of it so that states can't redistrict before the 2026 midterms based on the results of this Supreme Court case. Now here's the logic that I expect that the Supreme Court would use if this piece of information was true. And I want to stress that. This is just an insider report from Sean Spicer. This has not been confirmed just yet how the Supreme Court has

decided this case, but it is likely that he has reliable sources with the Supreme Court. But if this were to be the result of this case, if that were to be the decision by the Supreme Court, that would have drastic ramifications for the future of the Voting Rights Act and the future of redistricting in elections in the United States. But I'll get into that a little bit more. The logic I would expect the Supreme Court to use in this case is that there is a logical fallacy in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that there be majority minority districts, meaning that minority races in the United States have majority districts so that they are well represented and their votes are not diluted. The only way that you can enforce that is not merely by checking intent to discriminate

for congressional maps. You have to check disparate outcomes. And that's where the problem presents itself. Because if the courts were to find that a disparate outcome has been created, you have to create a disparate outcome in the reverse direction to fix it, which is a form of racial classification. And of course, drawing congressional districts with race as the key factor is racial classification. Racial classification is one of the things that triggers the strictest judicial scrutiny under the Constitution, meaning it's probably going to be unconstitutional. Therefore, complying with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act could itself be unconstitutional, which I think is true. And I expect that's what the Supreme Court is arguing, if that's the decision that they've passed down in this case.

Now, the difficult part is finding a usable alternative to the Voting Rights Act system. Because the way the majority-minority districts part of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act works, creates logical problems. It creates contradictions, which is perfectly demonstrated by this Louisiana case. But is there an alternative that prevents actual racial discrimination in congressional districting? That's the problem. If the Supreme Court does in fact side with Calais against the Louisiana congressional district here that is going to undermine Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it'll still be on the books, but it won't really be able to be enforced. So if there's no enforceable solution to Section 2 violations, meaning congressional maps that actually racially gerrymander,

there's also no operable solution to it, which basically allows states to have full control over what they do with the congressional maps, who gets to vote how they want their state to swing, I think about people like Ilhan Omar in Minnesota who has a caucus in the state legislature and could likely use her influence to help get a congressional map passed in the state that would favor the Somali districts in Minnesota to give them more power over Minnesota state and federal elections. And you'd probably see other Democrats in the state of Minnesota go along with it in the name of giving representation to an underrepresented group of immigrants in the state of Minnesota. I could very easily see something like that happening.

However, the counter argument to that is that those, Those majority-minority districts are currently required under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It is a possibility if Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act were overturned. It is required under the Voting Rights Act currently. Now, that sort of racial gerrymandering is only acceptable in one direction right now. The majority-minority district system is the only acceptable way to do it. If you were to make a white majority district intentionally, that would clearly be a violation of the Voting Rights Act. But if you were able to nullify Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is essentially

what this decision could do, you could see that go both directions. And then I think there's also the possibility to see mutually beneficial deals made between factions who want equal representation, who want equal power in elections, and could actually result in a more fair and more equitable system. Again, it's possible that it goes the other direction, and you get all sorts of racial gerrymandering and all sorts of racial discrimination in electoral practices. I'm hoping that we're beyond that at this point, but you never know. So it'll be interesting to follow what the Supreme Court has to say about this decision to see about the future of elections and electoral practices in the United States.

You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio for Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a series of executive orders President Trump issued invoking wartime powers to expedite energy and infrastructure production in the United States. Now, when I say President Trump is using war powers here, he's not using a war powers resolution directly, what he's doing is he's invoking the Defense Production Act, which is a Cold War-era law that lets the federal government kind of direct American industry, American energy, American infrastructure production in the name of national defense. Now, a lot of the conditions that he says necessitate

his use of emergency powers are tied to the Iran war situation, particularly the Strait of Hormuz and the supply chains coming from the Middle East. Now, the Strait of Hormuz is a key detail for the situation because Iran blockaded it for a couple of weeks. Now, we have since taken it back. We have blockaded it from them actually now. But it was threatened. And that showed us that we need to have some sort of independence as far as oil routes, as far as supply chains from the Middle East. And that's part of what President Trump is going for here is if that can be threatened by Iran. If that's something that Iran can do to us, then it shows that other nations can too. And it basically pokes a hole in part of our national security strategy. So, emphasizing

energy dominance in particular is a response to that situation in the Iran War. Now, this is not the only time that President Trump has mentioned energy dominance in his second term. He declared a 2025 national energy emergency, and that was paired with expansions to fossil fuel productions and a lot of cutting back regulations from the Biden administration. I also remember a presidential memorandum that he issued that kind of framed energy dominance as part of our national defense and geopolitical strategy, really. So President Trump here is using emergency defense powers to kind of speed up some of his energy and infrastructure projects that will be key to our national defense. Some of the important production that he hopes to increase are oil and petroleum, natural gas extraction

and transport, coal-fired power generation, and energy infrastructure like refineries, pipelines, transformers, and turbines are the things that he lists. It also targets supply chain bottlenecks like the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, like, shortages of transformers and grid equipment that slow down new projects that we're working on with the through the American military to not only support our energy independence, but our energy dominance, as the Trump administration likes to phrase it. Now, you've probably noticed that gas prices are up a good amount over the last couple of months. The average gas prices across the United States are about $4.9.9 right now, which is lower

than most of the time in the Biden administration, but is still up 70 cents from the end of last year. It's about 382 in the state of Michigan right now, which is also up 70 cents from the end of last year. And that increase was pretty strongly correlated with the beginning of our actions in Iran and the Iranian takeover of the Strait of Hormuz. But in discussing this impris of gas prices, I was asked a very interesting question. We always hear politicians talk about bringing gas prices down and the fact that we have American oil reserves that we can activate. So why does it matter what happened in Iran? Why does it matter that the Strait of Hormuz was closed off to us for a couple of weeks? Why did gas prices go from $3.40 around here to $4.10?

Within the span of two weeks. And that's a really interesting point. America is the world's largest producer of oil and gas. America produces 13.58 million barrels per day in 2025. That makes the U.S. the largest oil producer in the world. And we have a lot of that oil sitting as reserves, particularly for situations like that. So why did it matter what happened in Iran? Well, the first answer is that global supply chains run through long-term contracts.

So if you're dealing with an oil producer or a gas company that's halfway across the world from you, you're not going to have a short-term contract with them. You're going to have a long-term contract to ensure that dealing with someone at such great difficulty and inconvenience is going to be worth it for you in the long run. It's going to be stable and it's going to be productive. American oil and gas companies were locked in with contracts to oil producers in the Middle East, and you can't just back out of those contracts in the span of two weeks when a war breaks out between the end. United States in Iran. Plus, with the Strait of Hormuz being blocked, that supply chain gets blocked. And so even if those companies still are on good terms, a lot of the oil that they would like to take back to the United States is not getting shipped out because of the Iranian blockade. You did see prices start to trickle back down after the blockade ended, and I think that's a good

reason why. Another answer to the question of why the situation in Iran matters to gas prices in the United States when we are the world's largest producer of oil is that we have not built new refineries in a very long time. We haven't added refining capacity in years. Many of those refineries that we did have were shut down during COVID. And because of that situation, the smaller number of refineries were run to a higher capacity, which meant that any disruption to their supply chain and shipping throughout the United States was very easily interrupted by things like storms or power outages or anything like that. Those problems would disrupt a greater area. That's the situation that we're living in now. We have very old oil refineries. We have a concentrated and kind of fragile refinery

supply chain system. And the type of oil that the United States produces needs to be pretty heavily refined to get to the type of products that we actually use. So because we don't refine at a super efficient level, we export a lot of what we produce to other countries that will refine it. And that difference between our refining capacity and other countries refining capacity brings us to the last answer to that question of why does what happen in Iran matter to gas prices in the United States? Well, our oil refineries are subject to heavy regulation from the U.S. government in ways that Middle Eastern countries' oil refineries are simply not, which means that they can produce much more efficiently. There's less red tape for them to cross in a situation that you might call an

emergency situation where you have an oil shortage because of a international situation like the war with Iran. They could probably activate their oil reserves much more quickly than we could, because of the problems with our supply chain and our inefficient system of oil production. Now, in spite of those inefficiencies and supply chain problems, we remain the number one producer of oil in the world. We export a lot of that, which is why President Trump wants us to be energy dominant. If we have all that oil, we should not be reliant on other countries for energy, for energy independence. In a situation like that, there's no reason that gas prices should rise 70, 80 cents across the United States, when we have the oil to simply make up for that here.

And obviously, the military needs massive levels of energy production to do what they do. If we can be independent with our energy production and efficiently supply the military of energy that we don't have to import from other nations, well, that makes our military a lot stronger, too. That makes them operate a lot more efficiently and helps the military to be more dominant as well. That's why President Trump is invoking the Defense Production Act under wartime powers under this Iran war for the purpose of national defense. If we can produce more energy locally, if we can build more. refineries, which is the infrastructure part of these executive orders, to build more refineries and pipelines and energy grids and wind turbines and those kind of things that can help our energy infrastructure to operate more efficiently than our national defense and our economy should be much stronger. The last piece of news I have for you this week is a bill that just passed through the House of Representatives entitled a bill to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to designate Haiti for temporary protected status.

So as you may remember, the Department of Homeland Security, under Christie Nome, issued an order revoking temporary protected status for the about 350,000 Haitians that live and work in the United States. But a district court judge blocked that order coming from the Trump administration, saying that the people that would be sent back to Haiti if they did revoke temporary protected status would face gang violence amid a collapsing rule of law because the government cannot effectively maintain security and criminal gangs and violence are widespread. They also pointed out that people returned to Haiti could lack access to life-sustaining medical care. So the judges then came to the conclusion that revoking temporary protected status would put Haitian immigrants in the United States legally under temporary protected status. Returning those people to Haiti would be to put them in immediate life-threatening danger, and thus we need to keep the temporary protected status. Now the problem with this case was that temporary protected status has been issued for Haitians since 2010. And temporary protected status has to mean temporary. That's 16 years at this point, and at the time Christy Noem pointed out that temporary protected status was never supposed to be a de facto amnesty policy,

meaning that individuals under one of these protected groups could just come to the United States and live there permanently without becoming a citizen under this refugee program. So that court case was pretty recent. That was just a couple of months ago. But now this bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives to extend temporary protected status for Haitians. It points out that the temporary protected status designation gives individuals. Individuals employment authorization. It means that they cannot be detained on the basis of their immigration status and They are not subject to removal while they retain temporary protected status Now I was pretty surprised to see that this bill had passed through the House of Representatives which is controlled by Republicans The bill passed 224 to 204 Republicans hold a 217 to 214 majority in the house

But the Republicans do control the House of Representatives by a couple of seats which means that you probably had about seven Republicans who broke with the party and voted to extend temporary protected status for Haitians in the United States through 2029. So this is a multi-year extension to temporary protected status. And if signed into law, it will bring us to about 20 full years of temporary protected status for Haitians in the United States since the original designation began. Now, I think the timing of this bill is particularly interesting. The bill was introduced in early 2025 and was assigned to committee, but it was not brought up to the House floor until this week. Obviously, most bills take some time in committee and take some time to garner support and hear lobbyists and all that kind of stuff, but most bills

aren't sitting on the shelf for a year. The Democratic sponsor of this bill, who's Lauren Gillen of New York, knows that the situation Trump is in is a difficult one as far as immigration policy goes. He's in a very tough spot because of the optics of the ice raids of the last several months of 2025 because of the optics of the Department of Homeland Security right now with the firing of Christy Noem and the horrible situation that's been going on with her recently. That's put the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration generally into kind of a vulnerable situation. But also, the new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Mark Wayne Mullen, has a little bit more favorable of a view of immigration generally than his predecessor, Christine Ome did.

We want immigration. We want legal immigration, people that want to make the country stronger. We're a nation of immigrants. We understand that. The right kind of immigrants. But the right kind of immigrants. That's right. We want mass deportations, Mr. Secretary. That's what the American people voted for. We want to deport all those individuals that came in illegally. Here's the catcher. How much does it cost to deporting illegally? Yes, I was going to say $18,225 on average to go through the prosecution to deport individuals. Now, if you think about it, underneath the Biden administration, 20 million individuals came here illegally. If we go through the process on every single one of those, do the math on that at 18,000.

$225 per person. Why is it cost that much? Well, because of the way the laws are written. That was new DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News. And you can tell that's a very different type of rhetoric about immigration than his predecessor, Christy Noem, or then President Trump has used even. And it seems like the Trump administration in appointing Mark Wayne Mullen to this spot is taking a step back on immigration. They must have some internal polling that they're seeing for 2026 or even 2028 that shows that they're the bad optics that we've all seen from DHS and from ICE over the last year has really

reflected poorly on Republicans, and so they've sort of backed down on the immigration issue. As soon as that happens, a bill is introduced into the House of Representatives to extend temporary protected status for Haitians through the end of 2029. It's a smart political play for Democrats to recognize that President Trump is on his heels on the immigration issue and to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak. So to recap this week, we covered an insider scoop on a Supreme Court case that could challenge the Voting Rights Act. We cover Trump's use of emergency powers to expand energy and infrastructure production that may be necessary for national defense, and we covered a bill that would extend TPS for Haitians in the U.S. through 2029. Tune in next week

for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell under the radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller, here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.