Transcript of Major SCOTUS Rulings & Elon Takes Altman To Court | 4.30.26

The Supreme Court reshapes how congressional districts are drawn and delivers a unanimous win for a Christian pregnancy center.

First Choices' First Amendment rights were burdened. The court clearly says that.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley. It's Thursday, April 30th, and this is Morning Wire.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman face off in court as new questions emerge about the future of AI and who controls it.

These are tech entrepreneurs, but even those people are often in the position of saying that somebody has to have some oversight over it.

And how will this week's massive shakeup in the global oil industry impact Americans?

Can the UAE put more oil barrels on the market without the constraints of OPEC?

Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned, we have the news you need to know.

The state of Colorado is at it again, trying to silence free speech. A law in Colorado forces businesses to use customers' preferred pronouns even if they're biologically inaccurate, and even if using those incorrect pronouns would violate a person's religious beliefs or conscience. That's a violation of free speech, but as Colorado has proven time and again, it has little concern for the First Amendment. Alliance Defending Freedom is challenging the law on behalf of a Christian bookstore and a Colorado-based sports apparel company, but a court recently ruled against them. With ADF's help, they appealed the ruling, and they'll continue fighting to ensure Colorado doesn't get away with this next attempt to skirt the First Amendment. Your gift helps protect free speech in cases like this all over the country. And for a limited time, your first gift to ADF is doubled by a special matching grant while funds last. Text WIRE, W-I-R-E, to 83848, or go to joinadf.com/wire to have your gift doubled.

The Supreme Court handed down two major rulings yesterday. One could have nationwide consequences for congressional redistricting, and the other gave a unanimous win to a Christian pregnancy center fighting a blue state subpoena.

Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham is here now with the details. So Megan, the higher-profile decision here is the one on redistricting, so let's start there. The court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana's second majority Black congressional district was unconstitutional. So can you just walk us through that majority's rationale?

Yeah, so what happened here, Georgia, is that Democrats in Louisiana argued that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is a civil rights law that was intended to prevent disenfranchisement of Black voters, required the state to draw a new congressional map back in 2020. And what it did was add a second majority Black district. So essentially, it secured another House seat for Democrats. But challengers argued that this new district itself was unconstitutional because race was the key factor in just how that district was redrawn. So in a nutshell, the Supreme Court agreed, and because race was used so heavily, that the map could not survive strict scrutiny.

Now, what kind of broader impact could this have for precedent? So I'm thinking particularly about states like Virginia, Texas, Indiana, um, and some of those states that have recently engaged in very heavy redistricting.

Yeah, so that's actually where this gets really interesting, because the ruling, of course, doesn't automatically redraw those maps, but it does rewrite the rules for redrawing them. So legal scholars are right now now debating whether this decision is going to have a lot of bearing on the midterms, where we know Republicans are facing an uphill battle to hold on to the House. Erin Hawley of Alliance Defending Freedom told Morning Wire that this ruling could have a pretty broad impact.

The Supreme Court held that you can't in fact expressly consider race when drawing these sort of districts, um, and it could have a major impact, um, in other cases. And I think it's a good extension of the Supreme Court's sort of principles that we want elections, as much as we want anything else to be based on neutral principles.

Some analysts say that the ruling could influence as many as 19 congressional districts nationwide, depending on how states redraw those maps. So the battle over the midterms is likely going to start with a battle over maps.

We just saw the state of Florida pass a new congressional map yesterday afternoon, just hours after this decision came down, and the GOP could pick up 4 more seats there. Now, turning to the second big ruling yesterday that involved pro-life pregnancy centers, uh, what did that ruling find?

Yeah, so this case was First Choice Women's Resource Centers versus Davenport, and First Choice is a Christian pregnancy center network. It had never had any complaints, but New Jersey issued subpoenas seeking years of documents, things like donor information, saying that it was necessary as part of a consumer protection investigation. Well, First Choice felt that then-New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Plotkin, who is pro-abortion, was trying to politically target them and chill their First Amendment rights. Now, as to why this could be important to the broader public, Holly weighed in on that too.

So this ruling, we think, directly impacts really any American that's ever wanted to donate to a cause or support an organization, perhaps one with an unpopular viewpoint. In this case, the attorney general demanded not only names phone numbers, but as well places of employment. And he actually represented that he wanted to call up those donors and quiz them about their donation to First Choice. You know, what could possibly be more chilling?

So Hawley argued on First Choice's behalf that making donors public could make people understandably not want to donate. And Justice Thomas zeroed in on exactly these issues. He grilled the lawyer for New Jersey about why they launched an investigation if no one complained.

Did you have complaints that formed the basis of your concern about the fundraising activities here?

We certainly had complaints about crisis pregnancy centers.

No, about this crisis pregnancy center.

So I think we've been clear from the outset that we haven't had complaints about this specific—

so you had no basis to think that they were deceiving any of their contributors?

Now, New Jersey had argued that First Choice lacked standing, and two lower courts agreed and dismissed case, but the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. So two very different cases, but both likely to have some, uh, pretty big ripple effects.

Well, a lot to keep track of. Megan, thank you so much for reporting.

Yeah, my pleasure, Georgia.

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Elon Musk is in court this week in a highly publicized showdown with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Their battle over the company's controversial conversion from nonprofit to for-profit comes as 7 Canadian families are suing over OpenAI's failure to report concerning conversations with ChatGPT ahead of a tragic mass shooting.

Here to discuss is journalist Andrew Marantz, who wrote a piece for The New Yorker with Ronan Farrow. Its title: Sam Altman May Control Our Future, But Can He Be Trusted? Andrew, great to have you on.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

So the title of your piece alone is pretty striking. You're giving a more nuanced portrayal of, you know, a real messy human being here. But what's the single most important thing that the public should understand about Sam Altman after all the reporting you've done?

So there are really fundamental things. So, so the trial that's getting underway now in Oakland largely hinges on this fact that OpenAI was started as a nonprofit and then through a variety of sort of corporate restructuring maneuvers, which ultimately took a decade, um, only culminating last year, was it converted fully to a for-profit. And a lot of people, including Elon Musk, say that this was a kind of long con, that this this was, you know, um, Sam Altman kind of conning him, Elon Musk, out of his money. But these basic questions of what OpenAI is, is it a nonprofit or a for-profit? Is it, as it was originally proposed to be, a safety-focused AI research lab, or is it now one of the biggest hyperscalers in the world, kind of pushing forward the envelope of how quickly this technology can race to potentially superhuman intelligence, right? These are fundamental changes that can't really be reconciled as just matters of gradual opinion shifting. So to take the AI safety question, you know, this company was premised on some very, very scary-sounding rhetoric about how AI, either through becoming sentient or not becoming sentient, but just through developing more and more kind of power on its own accord, could pose a literally existential threat to humanity.

This was the rhetoric that Sam Altman among other co-founders, used repeatedly, again, internally, externally, with regulators, with potential employees. Now, when you listen to Sam Altman talk about it, he basically talks about that kind of doomerist rhetoric as like hype and sort of, you know, uh, why is everyone so freaked out? And to the extent that people are freaked out by that stuff, it's because people like Sam Altman were pushing that rhetoric in the first place.

Now, some people have summarized this lawsuit as really sort of a personal vendetta, Elon Musk versus Sam Altman. How do you see it? Is there a real disagreement here that's fundamental and important at the heart of this lawsuit, or is this more personal?

There are definitely, uh, personal egos at play for sure. It seems like Sam and Elon cannot get along. It seems like Sam Altman and Dario Amadei, who runs Anthropic, it seems like they have such a hard time getting along that even when they were standing next to each other on a stage in India, they couldn't bring themselves to clutch hands together for a second, you know, and they kind of awkwardly held their hands next to each other. So there's definitely personal animus among a lot of these people. It's a very small world. There are really only a few scientists who understand this technology well enough to push the envelope forward. They all interact with each other. A lot of them have worked together, and a lot of them have had very deep personal fallings out with each other. So yes, there's a personal layer, but there is also a substantive structural layer. Look, I mean, I think ultimately the last thing we would want is for someone to come away from this story thinking, oh, I now have these doubts and skepticisms about Sam Altman being the AGI dictator, so I think Elon should be the AGI dictator, or I think Dario should be the AGI dictator, right?

Obviously, the personal stuff only matters insofar as it gets to this larger structural question, which is why are we talking about anyone being AGI dictator? Isn't that crazy. And the fact is, these guys know it sounds crazy, and yet they're kind of racing toward that precipice anyway.

Now, OpenAI is featured in a few lawsuits now, some pretty serious ones, including its failure to report the shooter's alarming conversation with ChatGPT ahead of this mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, that Georgia referenced. 7 families suing over that. There are major concerns now about these applications in general about how they're used. Does that figure into the legal arguments on either side of this case?

Definitely. Um, there are many, many ongoing lawsuits. Some of them are about how liable should these companies be when somebody gets hurt, whether it's a murder, a suicide, a mass shooting. There are other issues that have to do with copyright, plagiarism. The New York Times is suing OpenAI. So they're, they're fighting these battles on many fronts. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that, like And like a lot of tech companies, a lot of these AI companies seem to pursue the strategy of kind of, you know, act first and ask permission later. So Anthropic and OpenAI, you know, mulched a lot of books into their training data and are now being sued by publishers over this. I'm actually part of a class action suit of authors who are suing Anthropic over this. And when it comes to the liability stuff, it raises really interesting questions, right? On the one hand, we have legal regimes that are clear that a tech platform can't be held liable if somebody issues, you know, bad opinions or dangerous opinions on that platform. On the other hand, these things are tailored using your data to your own preferences in a way that does seem different, right?

ChatGPT guiding you through how to do something dangerous is a little different than, you know, reading something on Facebook or Twitter about how to do something dangerous because it is reading signals. It's being sycophantic to your needs and desires. So we have yet to see how juries and judges will sort all that out. It's kind of a, a very scary Wild West, and the people at these companies know it's a Wild West, and again, they're sort of forging ahead anyway.

Well, we'll see if these cases force more oversight on this industry. Andrew, thank you so much for talking with us.

I really appreciate it. Have a good one.

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As gas prices hit a new high in the US, the UAE has shaken up the global oil markets by announcing that they're leaving OPEC.

Joining us now is E.J. Antoni, Chief Economist at the Heritage Foundation. E.J., first, thanks for coming on.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

So we have this major news from the UAE bowing out of OPEC. This comes at a time when everyone's minds are on oil prices. So we wanted to get your perspective on just how significant this is. Can you unpack a bit of the context for us? And then how much does this actually affect the oil market?

Certainly. So OPEC is essentially an oil cartel that was founded decades ago, uh, and they exist to try to put artificial upward pressure on oil prices by restricting how much their member nations can pump. And so by reducing supply, you put upward pressure on prices, and it's a way to essentially give them a kind of artificial monopoly power on the global oil market. I'd say the biggest piece of context actually isn't even that recent. It's, uh, the fracking boom here in the United States. And with technologies like hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, etc., that really weakened, uh, the hold that OPEC had, and it really weakened the benefits of being a member nation in OPEC or OPEC+. And I think you're going to probably continue to see that cartel fall apart as time goes on here. And essentially it has a snowball effect because every time a member leaves the cartel, it reduces the benefits that other member nations have of, of staying there. And again, context here is that once the Iran War finally concludes, which we hope and pray is very soon, and the strait reopens, there's going to be a huge surge in demand as nations around the world try to refill their depleted petroleum reserves.

And being outside of OPEC gives a nation like the UAE much more flexibility in terms of how much they're going to increase production and therefore reap more profits as they cash in on, again, these nations trying to refill their reserves. Right now, uh, they're producing a little more than 4 million barrels a day. They can very likely get over 5 million, so a 25% increase just within the next year or two.

What is being done by the Trump administration right now to mitigate the impact on Americans at the pump?

Well, we've seen a couple of measures that will have some, some temporary relief at least, like, uh, tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, although that is getting dangerously low. Uh, we've seen winter blends of gasoline be allowed to continue to be used during the summer despite some vapor pressure concerns there. Basically, what that means is we're going to continue to have things like 15% ethanol instead of 10% ethanol for the foreseeable future. So we're trying to stretch out that gasoline supply essentially by diluting it with corn-based ethanol.

Now, the Trump administration has said there's a long-term benefit play here for the US as far as the value of US oil to the world. Do we see movement in that direction?

I, I do, but I don't think it actually has anything to do with the war. I think it simply has to do with the fact that the American government is finally taking its boot off the neck of American producers, contrary to what we saw, uh, during the Biden years. And so as the US gets more excess capacity in its oil and gas industry, that allows us to meet supply crises very, very easily and be the marginal producer around the world.

Got it. So this positive movement, more an effect of Trump's pro-energy agenda than this conflict. E.J., thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

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