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Foreign It's Thursday, April 30, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. All right. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a Louisiana measure that had basically been forced on the state as a part of a court ruling related to the Voting Rights act of 1965. The bottom line in the Supreme Court decision, which was handed down 6, 3. A victory for the cons side in the Supreme Court. The decision came down stating that the state of Louisiana, in terms of its congressional districting, had violated constitutionally acceptable bounds in setting voting districts for Congress representation in the House of Representatives. And in particular by using a false application of racial data in order to gerrymander. You've heard that term before. That is artificially constructed another congressional district that would likely lead to a minority representative. Okay, so looking at this, there's some huge worldview issues here and they've been building for decades. So let's just take them apart. Let's just understand that, number one, we're talking about the fact that every state is allotted a certain number of seats in the House of Representatives based upon the most recent census undertaken by the US government. There are 435 seats. They are apportioned over according to population, state by state. And so even as the Senate is made up of two senators from every single state, there are 50 states, so there are 100 senators. The state of Wyoming, with a very small population relative to California, has two senators, but California only has two senators. But when it comes to the representation in the House of Representatives intended to be more representative of the population, you have the apportionment by state based upon population. And so this is a big red hot issue at the national level. It has a lot to do with why there is so much attention given to the census, because the census becomes the data from which you have these apportionments made. But there are also fierce fights within the states having to do with congressional districting. And that's been on the front line. In fact, it's been on the headlines of so many recent states. We just need to think about this for a moment because before we get to Louisiana, we've got to think about the state of California, we have to think about the state of Texas, we have to think about the state of Virginia, and as of this week, the state of Florida. So let's just pause there for a moment. There are huge issues at stake in terms of representation. Which party is likely to gain which party is likely to lose. And so as you're thinking about the responsibility of a state to set congressional districts, one of the things you have to think about is that that's a political process. And by the way, we live in a political society and in a constitutional order where there are very few aspects of life which are not political. This is something really important for Christians to consider. We'd like to think that politics can somehow be absolutely separate from some other, say, endeavor or realm of life. And in terms of ultimate authority. Well, yes, but when it comes to politics, in terms of the necessary negotiation of parties in order to achieve aims and a common purpose, well, all life's political. And what takes place at the dinner table in the average family is to some degree political. Political. Now the polis there is the family, not a city or a state or a nation. But nonetheless, it's political in the sense you're talking about things that will come down to the establishment of policy. But let's just remind ourselves again, we're talking about a process that many Americans think just shouldn't be political. It shouldn't be political. That you would have, say, the map drawing of congressional districts. Well, okay, so some states have tried to say they're going to make it non partisan, they're going to put together an independent commission to make these decisions. But you know, that in itself has been controversial because all those decisions are laden with all kinds of political value judgments, all kinds of political priorities. The Civil Rights act of 1965. And of course we're talking about something now that's more than 50 years old. The Civil Rights act of 1965 came about, of course, as a part of the civil rights movement, saying that minority representation had basically been too small, there had been discrimination against racial minorities. And thus in order to address that problem, you had national legislation again, the Civil Rights act of 1965 that stated that race would now be a part of the political calculation concerning how districts are to be drawn. And so you have court decisions that have made the same point, that the attempt would be to achieve the largest minority representation possible. But that in itself has led to all kinds of ridiculous maps. And so you can look at these maps and you can see these congressional districts seem to make almost no sense. But it's because every single line at every single block, not to say just mile, every single block in terms of city space, all this is drawn to maximize something. None of these are simply drawn by geometric patterns. All of these decisions are political. And every part of these decisions turns out to be political as well. So now you look at this. The Supreme Court yesterday, 6, 3 ruling had to do with the state of Louisiana. And just to say what happened, the Washington Post reports it this way. Quote, the Supreme Court on Wednesday sharply weakened a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act, a ruling that limits the consideration of race in drawing voting maps and could usher in Republican gains in the House, end quote. Okay, now hold on just a moment. I just want to point out that is a very ideologically heavy lead for this article. Number one, it says that what the Supreme Court did was, quote, sharply weaken a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Well, is that true or is it false? Well, it's true, but I think what the majority of the justices here that voted in the six justices who voted to strike down that Louisiana map, I think they would say they're doing so in the name of the Constitution of the United States, in the name of equal representation and the proportional drawing of districts. I think they would say, no, this is righting a wrong. But the Washington Post, it really does kind of load the issue up front by saying that the intent was to weaken a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Now, I guess from one side that it could be argued that that's what has happened. Quote, a ruling that limits the consideration of race in drawing voting maps and could usher in Republican gains in the House. Well, okay. Could this lead to Republican gains in the House? Yes, it could. In some states, that isn't automatically what is likely to be drawn. There are a couple of just huge issues here that some people don't even think about. So number one, we are talking about issues of justice and righteousness and fairness in society. We're talking about elections. And in a constitutional order, we want those to represent, to the greatest extent possible, the fairness and representation, justice and righteousness that is in our constitutional order. The House of Representatives. Well, just to state the obvious, we want the House to be representative. That's a very complex equation. However, for one thing, you have the variances among the 50 states. The big issue here, however, has to do with variances inside the 50 states. It's the lines drawn inside the 50 states. No one here is arguing at the borders of Virginia. They are arguing about the drawing of congressional districts in Virginia. Now, this is a very old controversy in the United States, and it is so politically loaded, it's very hard to have an honest conversation. But let's just draw a line in the sand and say, okay, let's talk about what's happened in the last, say, year. Okay, so in the last year, the state of Texas has redrawn its congressional maps in order to maximize the possibility of picking up Republican seats. Okay. So in response, the state of California, Governor Gavin Newsom went before the people and presented the voters of California with a vote, saying that in response to what was done in Texas, the Democratic majority there in California should reverse the pattern. Then you had the state of Virginia get in on it as well. And in the state of Virginia, it was presented to the people as a vote, and it was a very narrow decision, but still it was an electoral decision. And you hear again, you had a new governor in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, who had run as a moderate but has governed significantly to the left. All right, so just looking at it in terms of the net impact on the House of Representatives and apportionment state by state, and who would gain which party? Texas moves, Apparently a Republican win, California responds, Apparently a Democratic win, Virginia responds, another Democratic win. Now, Florida is in the mix. Just this week, the state of Florida, the state legislature, with encouragement from Governor Ron DeSantis, is moving again to reapportionment, to redrawing those congressional maps. And at least over time, all of this is going to happen, have an effect upon congressional representation. So in California, you have Republicans saying, we've been cheated. You have Democrats saying the same thing in Texas, and you have some people saying, you know, this just needs to be taken out of the hands of politicians. The state of New York, for example, is one state that has tried that in the past. The problem there is that even when you have some kind of commission making the recommendation, eventually this is going to have to be accepted by the political class. You just can't fully escape politics. There's just no way around it. And that's something I think it's important for Christians to recognize. We are, in this sense, political creatures, and at every single level, it is political. Now, we could want to make it, we could desire to make it less political, but politicians are going to have to be in charge of making it less political. And I'll just say I think you get the point. You do the math. All right, so in the decision handed down by the Supreme Court today, again, I don't think the Washington Post is wrong when they say it weakened a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights act, and it has to do with the responsibility of states to maximize minority representation. Okay, well, that's highly contested. And one of the questions is, to what extent would you draw these congressional districts? Because in some cases, in order to achieve either this or that end, sometimes under the imposition of federal courts, you have lines that don't make any sense. There's no coherence to these districts at all. It's hard to imagine how that actually serves the cause of representative democracy. But there's another major issue here, very much a part of the United States right now, and that is that in an increasingly multiethnic America and an increasingly multi ethnic project here you're looking at the fact that now you have other groups, you have Hispanic voters, you have Asian voters, you've got. Well, you just go down the list and it becomes extremely difficult. That's an underestimation. So let's just state it. Rightly, it becomes nearly impossible to know how you could adjudicate all of this with math on a map. By the way, there seem to be people who are surprised that political parties would seek to do what is in the party's best interest. That's the way politics works. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be rules, but it is to say we shouldn't be shocked at that motivation. Also the fact that politics is involved in every single step and every single inch, every single dimension of this question. We can't as Christians be surprised about that. Because when it comes to the polis, just the governance, the fact is everything is political and we're the last people who should be shocked. One final consideration here is that of course we should seek justice and righteousness. But it isn't easy or non controversial to try to describe exactly how that would work out in drawing congressional districts. But in the real world, the districts are going to have to be drawn. At least what the Supreme Court did yesterday in terms of the ruling handed down, is that it made it less likely that federal courts would just add another level of complication to every single one of these decisions. Okay, while we're talking about fascinating things in the law, perhaps some of you have picked up on the fact that two of the titans of Silicon Valley are now going to be facing off in an Oakland, California federal courtroom. It is going to be hot. We're talking about Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Elon Musk, of course, the chief executive of Tesla, the richest man on the planet, according to most calculations. On the other side of this case, Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of ChatGPT's host company known as OpenAI. Why are these two Silicon Valley titans facing off in a courtroom? It is because Elon Musk is charging that Sam Altman, with whom he had started this entire project that became known as OpenAI. That Sam Altman has acted wrongly in creating and capitalizing on a for profit transformation of what was intended to be, argues Elon Musk, an entirely non profit operation. But we're not only talking about something philosophical. Is it nonprofit or is it for profit? We're talking about a current for profit reality, the value of which is calculated in the multiple billions of dollars, billions with a B. We're talking about vast sums of money here. Now, is this a legitimate disagreement? Is this a legitimate case in which constitutional and statutory interpretation is going to play a part? Yes, it could be. It could be. And so you have Elon Musk charging that in a way that should be recognized as illegal, the intellectual capital and what was intended to be the core purpose of OpenAI as a nonprofit. Again, the word OpenAI is an indication there. It was intended to be for the public, a nonprofit. And instead Elon Musk is charging that Sam Altman and others hijacked it, turning it into a for profit, or at least transforming much of the intelligent capital into a for profit company, which of course now is vastly valuable. I mean, so valuable, it's one of the most valuable corporate entities that has ever existed in all of human history. How's that? Okay, so you also have two personalities and wow, wow, you're talking about Silicon Valley at its most. Silicon Valley. You're talking about Elon Musk. Okay, so some of the things that are coming up in this trial is the fact that Shivon Zelis, who is a longtime ally of Musk, is heavily involved in this. And the Washington Post says he is also the mother of four of Elon Musk's children. Okay, you think this is complicated. You also have the ChatGPT side, the OpenAI side, Sam Altman side, making the argument that Elon Musk basically isn't all there in terms of making some of these claims. Elon Musk says, look, this was established as a not for profit for basically the service to the public. It was to be without private ownership and capitalization, but it's been turned into something it was never supposed to be. Sam Altman, through his lawyers, responds, well, you tried to do this yourself. And actually Elon Musk is now the CEO also of a vast AI artificial intelligence enterprise. And so Sam Altman says this is basically about Elon Musk putting money in in the beginning, and then when he didn't get total control, backing out. Elon Musk is arguing that it's a hijacking of A not for profit, turning it into a profit. He's demanding that it be returned to its nonprofit status, that all of the technology and all the investment and everything be made available to the public, and that Sam Altman be fired. Okay, so what is likely to come out of this? I can just tell you a lot of stories, a lot of very sensational headlines. What doesn't necessarily come out of this is a lot of insight into the huge moral dimensions of artificial intelligence, the entire business of AI. However, it could be that a lot of that is exposed one way or another, and we'll be tracking that because I think the artificial intelligence challenge is one of the most significant moral and worldview and theological challenges that Christians are going to face in this generation. And so there's so much to talk about there. And we'll be coming back to this, of course. But right now, it is interesting that a lot of this is going to come out in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California. Elon Musk testimony has already begun. It is already fascinating, but the sparks are just beginning to fly, by the way, we are talking about the concentration of money, the concentration of capital in very few hands, and they all show up in the same place. It's getting really messy in this trial. Just listen to this paragraph. Hundreds of court filings have revealed cringy texts in emails or private diary entries of Musk, Altman, other OpenAI founders, and other public figures. They include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg privately offering to use his social platforms to help Musk's interests, Musk insulting Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos twice, and a journal in which a big maga donor muses about becoming a billionaire. Okay, then listen to this. Because the Washington Post had to put this in parenthesis. You think we live in a complicated world? Listen to this. This is an acknowledgment in parenthesis. Bezos owns the Washington Post. OpenAI has a content partnership with the Post. In other words, the Post is deeply in this story, even as it is reporting on it. I'll give them the credit and the honesty of telling us that one other's a strange word. In the midst of all of this, you think, well, this is all about people. It's far away from me. This is Silicon Valley, the trials in Oakland, California. What does that have to do with me? Well, it has to do with the fact that Maybe in your 401k plan, maybe in your teacher's retirement fund, you actually are heavily invested in one or the other or both, without you making any decision at all. Well, all right, while we're talking about issues of huge significance and a lot of worldview significance, let me talk about a leaked conversation. This has to do with the fact that of course, there are huge headlines about the royal visit, the British royal visit to the United States. You have the UK's King Charles III and Britain's Queen Camilla here in the United States. We talked about the background to that, the diplomatic context for that. But now we're also talking about other headlines that have come out, and one of the most interesting of them has to do with the leaked conversation that was released at the expense of the Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States, that is Sir Christian Turner. And to his great chagrin, someone has leaked a conversation recording of a conversation between the British Ambassador and a group of British teenagers who were visiting the United States. These are teenagers, young people, age 16, 17 years old. They were asking questions, the British Ambassador was answering questions. He probably almost assuredly assumed no one was recording this, which is almost assuredly a very wrong presumption for someone with that rank to make. But nonetheless, he was leaked, saying that he didn't think the United States and Great Britain actually had the so called special relationship any longer. Speaking of the special relationship, that's a statement coined by Sir Winston Churchill describing the special relationship between the United States and Britain. He also said that if the United States has such a special relationship right now, it's probably with Israel. Clearly he didn't intend for those statements ever to become public, not to mention during a royal visit by the British King to the United States. But there's more to it than that because the UK's ambassador to the United States also went on to tell the teenagers that he thought the current British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, of course, a Labour government, that Keir Starmer is in trouble because of the fact that there is scandal over the truth that he basically appointed Peter Mandelson to the role of British Ambassador to the United States after it was already known and after British authorities had already informed the Prime Minister and certainly the government that there was reason to believe that Peter Mandelson had been deeply implicated in very embarrassing situations, if not illegal situations, related to Jeffrey Epstein. And so now this is a huge scandal and it threatens the continuation of Keir Starmer as the Prime Minister of Britain. And the British Ambassador referred to that, acknowledging that indeed that the British Prime Minister is kind of hanging on by a thread and, well, let's just say he went on to explain that he's a civil servant, not a political Appointee. In other words, if the prime minister goes and there's a new prime minister, even a new government, perhaps even under certain situations, a new party, he is a career diplomat. Now, that just reminds us of something. When it comes to the history of the ambassadorial role, and of course, when it comes to international diplomacy, we're talking about going all the way back to the time of the Bible, all the way back to ancient times where kings and emperors and all kinds of leaders would send emissaries to a foreign land. And eventually that became made official. Official roles came to be assigned. By the time you get to the medieval age, you have a very formalized process of the exchange of ambassadors. By the time you get to the modern age, this has become something that is nearly global. Certainly by the end of the 20th century, it was nearly global in its reach and precedence. But there is, in the United States and also to a lesser extent in other places, there's a distinction between political appointees who serve as ambassador and career Foreign Service personnel who serve as ambassadors. And Keir Starmer went on to say he's career foreign service. So it doesn't really matter who's the Prime Minister in the United States. It sometimes does and it sometimes doesn't. But when it comes to the most high value, high visibility posts in terms of the US Foreign Service, when it comes to ambassadorial roles, a lot of those roles are served by politicals. That is to say, they're political appointees by the President of the United States. And when it comes to the American system, that might have to do with someone of stellar experience in terms of foreign policy and foreign affairs, it could be someone who's a retired, say, member of the U.S. senate, or somewhat of a similar kind of stature. It could also be someone who's a major donor to a presidential campaign. You know, there's so many different issues here, but one of them is we just need to assume that in a context like this, if you are the British Ambassador to the United States, even if you are talking to a group of 16 and 17 year olds, you better assume, maybe especially if you're talking to a group of 16 and 17 year olds, that someone knows how to record the conversation and leak it at the least opportune moment. Meanwhile, speaking of Great Britain and huge Christian worldview issues, we've talked about the movement there to legislate assisted suicide, sometimes referred to as medical assistance in dying. It now appears that the effort to legalize in what I think is a very radical piece of legislation to support assisted suicide it appears that it's going to run out of time in the House of Lords and kind of deliberately left to die. And so the point is, it is going to come back. It's just a reminder to Christians that a poisonous, toxic idea like this in which you repackage death in terms of legalizing assisted suicide in the name you say persons who are critically ill. As a matter of fact, the legislation was supposed to be for those who had a terminal diagnosis. The reality is we see the logic of the culture of death spread and spread and spread and spread. This doesn't mean that this is over. Not at all. As a matter of fact, the headline in the New York Times in Britain, seven Unelected Lords Helped to Block an Assisted Dying Bill. But even as this article makes very clear, the new legislative session starts in just a matter of weeks and the bill is going to come back for Christians. Yet another affirmation of the fact that the culture of death marches on and it is never actually just turned back. It's going to come back again and again and again, and it's going to seek every opportunity it can. And thus the only answer to this is constant vigilance in terms of defending human dignity and the sanctity of human life. And we as Christians understand this is a battle that is looming large everywhere. And so as we're looking at this in the United Kingdom, we dare not think this will not come to the United States. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com youm can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmoeller for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu for information on Boyce College, just go to Boyce College college.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the brief.