EYDER PERALTA, HOST:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is under scrutiny this week over two different strikes, one against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, the other against Houthi militants in Yemen - what's become known as Signalgate. NPR's senior contributor Ron Elving joins us now. Hey, Ron.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Hey. Good to be with you, Eyder.
PERALTA: So, Ron, on the alleged drug boats, members of Congress saw video of the September 2 strike, and Republicans and Democrats came away with very different versions of what they saw when two survivors were killed. How do you make sense of that?
ELVING: It takes some effort to make any sense of it at all. There's a lot we don't know about these boats, but let's just say it was hit as part of the U.S. war on drugs. If so, then these men in question, back on September 2, might qualify as enemy combatants left wounded on the battlefield, which puts us in war crime territory. Yet, the first Republican senator emerging from that closed-door hearing on Thursday, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, himself a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, quote, "we killed them, and we were right to kill them." He said both strikes on the boat were "righteous," unquote, and reports in the media were a lie and defamatory.
So there is broad disagreement about the facts that goes well beyond grudging loyalty to Hegseth. It may even go beyond loyalty to Trump himself. And we see something similar in regard to so-called Signalgate. That was where the Defense Department's only - own, rather, inspector general this week released a report saying that by discussing the mission details of that strike over an insecure chat app. Hegseth endangered the mission and the lives of American service members. The White House called the same inspector general report, quote, "a total exoneration." So here again we see an us-versus-them mentality that overrides all other considerations.
PERALTA: Yeah. And speaking of Signal, we should mention NPR's CEO, Katherine Maher, also chairs the board of the Signal Foundation. Its subsidiary makes the messaging app. But let's talk about the Supreme Court. This week, justices weighed in on the gerrymandered voting maps in Texas. They sided with Republicans. This could mean five more GOP seats in Congress next year. Where do things stand nationally in this redistricting arms race?
ELVING: Well, there are still some states fighting the map wars, including Missouri and Indiana, and more states may get drawn into the fray by court rulings, so the national outcome is unclear. The Texas Map could add five Republican seats, but that's not guaranteed - might be only three. And meanwhile, the gerrymanders adopted in retaliation to Texas by Democrats in California and Virginia could yield more. In the long run, it could be a wash or a marginal gain for the GOP, and two or three seats may not matter much come next November. Right now, polls are indicating Democrats are in for a strong showing in those midterm elections in November coming. History tells us presidents have lost seats in the midterms nine times out of 10 since World War II. And the lower a president's public approval, the more seats are lost. And right now, Trump's at 36% in the Gallup poll, lower than any president they've been measured - that they have measured at Gallup, other than Richard Nixon.
PERALTA: So, Ron, the Supreme Court also announced yesterday it will hear another case over President Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship. It seems the court has shown a lot of deference to the president so far this term. Do you think that's going to hold true here?
ELVING: Birthright citizenship goes back to the 14th Amendment in the aftermath of the Civil War. There's always been some debate over whether it applied only to the formerly enslaved or to new arrivals in the country who have babies here. Should those babies automatically become citizens, even if their parents aren't? The longstanding answer has been yes, but there has also been a body of opinion opposed to that. We had anti-immigration surges in the mid-1800s and in the 1920s, and Trump's broad-scale assault on immigration has, in effect, closed the southern border and unleashed aggressive deportation efforts. But this birthright citizenship case, seeking to change the way we have long understood the Constitution, would be his biggest trophy yet.
PERALTA: That's NPR's Ron Elving. Ron, thank you.
ELVING: Thank you, Eyder. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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