DL Open Thread: Thursday, November 12, 2026

Delaware Voters Sue For Increased Representation In Congress.  Could it lead to expansion of the House Of Representatives?:

Delaware only has one representative in the U.S. House, but a new lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks to change that.

Two registered voters in the state are suing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the director of the Census Bureau and the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., for another seat in the chamber.

The lawsuit seeks to overturn a century-old law that capped the U.S. House of Representatives at 435 members, which the petitioners argue is depriving Delaware of adequate representation. A victory could open the door to expanding the size of Congress’ lower chamber for the first time since 1911.

“Delaware voters have far less representation per person in the United States House of Representatives than voters in any other State—barely half that of Montana voters, a State of nearly the same size,” they argue. “Delaware’s 990,837 people have one Representative. Montana’s 1,085,407 people have two. Delaware voters also receive 23.2% less representation per person than the national average.”

The voters, David Redlawsk and Kevin Price, want a three-judge court to declare the limitation unconstitutional and give Congress a chance to “cure the violation.” If Congress doesn’t act by a certain deadline, they say the court should award Delaware another U.S. House member.

“The judgment would establish a House of 436 Members, allot two seats to Delaware, and preserve every other State’s existing allocation,” they argue.

That, of course, wouldn’t happen.  But what could happen, were the lawsuit to succeed, is an increase in the number of US Representatives.

As many of you know, David Redlawsk is not only a UD Professor of Political Science, he is a newly-elected State Rep.  I had the good fortune to talk with him at a recent political event.  If you haven’t had the pleasure, try to meet him.  He’s enjoyable and really smart.

The More You Know About Scott Colom, The More You’ll Like Him:

Colom’s victory is the exclamation mark on the most dramatic Democratic electoral victory since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, and by the numbers perhaps an even more lopsided win. Across the U.S., voters rejected Republican officeholders as the Trump administration faced backlash over inflation, tariffs, a violent deportation regime, rampant allegations of corruption, the historically unpopular U.S.-Israel war against Iran and continued U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Colom, who launched his campaign after Sen. Hyde-Smith used a Senate procedure to block then-President Biden’s nomination of him to the federal bench, defeated her with just over 49% of the vote.

Scott Colom is a seventh-generation Mississippian from Columbus, Mississippi. He is the child of Dorothy Winston Colom, a retired Chancery Court judge who was the first Black judge in the history of her district’s court, and Wilbur Colom, an attorney and former Republican campaigner. Wilbur Colom was once a member of the transition team for President Ronald Reagan and was part of the first Senate campaign for former Sen. Thad Cochran, who in 1977 became the first Republican from Mississippi to claim a U.S. Senate seat in 100 years.

Colom, a Millsaps College graduate with a law degree from the University of Wisconsin, spent a significant portion of his university career abroad, including a 16-month stint in rural Guyana, teaching English in a village through the World Teach Program. Colom relates the story of a pupil’s mother dying young, leaving their child an orphan, as a formative experience in his development. This, he told the Mississippi Free Press, helped him decide to return to Mississippi: a state familiar indeed with the sting of maternal mortality, to contribute to the community he came from.

From there, Colom completed an internship with the prosecutorial office of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, later working for the Mississippi Center for Justice and then returning to his family’s law firm in his home county.

In this period, Colom’s career in public service took shape, including roles as an interim Justice Court Judge in Lowndes County, a municipal judgeship in Aberdeen and city prosecutor for his hometown, Columbus.

In 2015, Colom was elected to serve as District Attorney for the 16th Circuit Court District of Mississippi, which includes Oktibbeha, Lowndes, Noxubee and Clay counties, a role in which he served until his election as senator. His tenure as district attorney helped propel him to statewide significance.

Colom’s office reports a personal 94% conviction rate, but the senator-elect has also made headlines for expansion of pretrial diversion, in which nonviolent defendants were given the option of charge dismissal in exchange for participation in rehabilitative programs. He also led the implementation of restorative justice initiatives that brought together offenders and their victims after conviction. 

The district attorney also assisted with the dismissal of wrongful convictions in some high-profile cases, including that of Eddie Lee Howard, whose 1994 conviction on faulty bite mark evidence left him on death row for 26 years; and Tameshia Shelton, whose 2009 murder conviction was thrown out in 2025.

Will Nvidia Do To Trump What Epstein Hasn’t?:

There appears to be no serious question that Alice Huang was working on behalf of the Chinese government, working as a spy. We know her relationship with Jensen Huang was sexual; he has admitted that. We know that the president of the United States knew of this relationship and Alice Huang’s identity as a presumed spy for a year and took no action against Huang, either to press him to end the relationship, to distance himself from Huang, or anything else.

We also know that Jensen Huang was successfully lobbying Trump to make it easier to sell NVIDIA chips to China — that’s what China wanted but it was also in the business interests of NVIDIA. Finally, a Commerce Department investigation into Alice Huang’s company, Megaspeed, was abruptly halted earlier this year and transferred to the Justice Department after what appeared to be an irregular intervention by NVIDIA’s general counsel.

Given all these data points, it seems very hard for me to see how Jensen Huang can come out of these various investigations unscathed even if there’s no major wrongdoing. The same applies to Trump — the reporting is crystal clear that he knew about this major security problem and did nothing. What makes this so potent as a scandal is that the key elements are all known. So reporters, politicians, everybody knows the overall story is bad. It’s just the details that remain unknown. That gives everyone huge incentives to keep digging and not let up.

BTW, while the NVIDIA Board tries to determine Huang’s fate, they have a problem–for all intents and purposes, Huang IS NVIDIA.  Which, come to think of it, is an ever-present hazard in this world of tech bros who, in fact, are their companies:

One thing we all know about the tech billionaires is they are super-smart. We know this largely because they never stop telling us. The “cognitive elite”, to use their favoured phrase, are entitled to shape our future without our say-so. When Elon Musk goes hiring, he wants “super-high-IQ small-government revolutionaries”. Long before they got private jets, what fuelled these boys was faith in their own brainpower. As a teenager, Jensen Huang wooed his future wife, Lori, thus: “If you do homework with me every Sunday, I promise you you’ll get straight A’s.”

Which raises the question: if you’re that clever, why act so dumb? At last week’s midterms, it was Musk who backed Team Trump to the tune of $446m. With unhedged bets like that, why wouldn’t you want him gambling with your livelihood? This week, it is 63-year-old Huang and his affair with a much younger woman, who the US government strongly suspects is a Chinese spy. That scandal wiped more than $400bn off the value of his company in just two days, making it the costliest fling in human history. But who knows? Perhaps she loved the centibillionaire for his mind.

Forget Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: no one is more central to the future of technology than Huang. He runs Nvidia, which makes the chips powering AI. Previous generations of chips have been compared to kitchen knives: however sharp, they only chop one vegetable at a time. But the graphics-processing units made by Huang’s business are more like food blenders – they can blitz an entire veg patch. That’s what makes Nvidia the foundational infrastructure company of AI and one of the most valuable businesses in the world.

In the everyday world, a CEO who gets into both a sex scandal and a national-security imbroglio wouldn’t stay CEO for more than a minute. At Nvidia, the board has moved with incredible sloth. It declared on Sunday that it “has no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised” – before any independent investigation. It finally met on Wednesday evening after further revelations of a separate extramarital affair with an Nvidia executive. Huang’s fate now reportedly hangs in the balance, but the company board, it may surprise you to know, includes several of his longstanding business associates. You’ll also be gobsmacked to learn that several members of his family are serving in senior positions at Nvidia.

One of the protections for Huang, like Musk and Zuckerberg and Altman, is that there appears to be no succession plan in place should any of those men fall under a self-driving automobile. A suggestion doing the rounds is that the father may now be replaced by one of his children.

In other words, were NVIDIA incorporated in Delaware, Bryan Townsend would be crafting legislation to protect Huang as we speak.

What do you want to talk about?