By Sarah Ferris, CNN

(CNN) — A small bloc of GOP lawmakers defied their leadership — and President Donald Trump — by forcing the House to soon take up a major bill to deliver US military support to Ukraine while imposing steep sanctions on Russia.

The GOP-led House is now on track to vote in early June on Congress’ first major pro-Ukraine measure of Trump’s second term, in a rebuke of his handling of the conflict there.

With Trump’s foreign policy focus squarely on Iran in recent months, Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine has continued with little US involvement. Trump has made no tangible progress in his vow to quickly end the conflict upon taking office. And in one recent instance, the president aggravated some members of his party by loosening restrictions on Russian oil to lessen the global price impact of the US war in Iran.

The vote on new Russian sanctions, expected shortly after the House’s Memorial Day recess, is likely to be a major headache for Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team in an already difficult political environment where vulnerable lawmakers are eager for the party to address prices at home, rather than weigh in on another global conflict.

It’s not yet clear, however, if GOP leaders will whip against the bill nor whether the White House will attempt to quash the effort, which comes as party leaders are separately attempting to pass a major immigration funding package with little room for error on the floor.

Multiple GOP and Democratic sources predicted the Ukraine bill would pass in the House, but added its fate is uncertain in the Senate. (Several Republicans there have been vocal Ukraine supporters in the past, but it’s not clear if there are enough senators to reach the critical 60-vote threshold.) If Congress does pass the measure, it would stand as lawmakers’ first big move on the Russia-Ukraine war since a contentious supplemental funding bill dating to Joe Biden’s presidency.

But even if the bill fails, GOP supporters say it would send a powerful message to Trump and their party leaders.

California Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent who frequently votes with the GOP, was the final signature needed on a discharge petition — a procedural tool used to circumvent leadership – to force the vote. He signed on after an intense lobbying effort by his colleagues.

“I’ve been looking at it for quite a while now. I’ve had lots of conversations with folks here, folks in my district and I think the time is right now, given the recent gains you’ve seen by Ukraine, the weakening of Russia’s position – but then also the fact that the ceasefire fell apart and we have renewed hostilities,” Kiley said Wednesday afternoon.

“For diplomacy to work here, we need additional leverage. Congress has the ability to provide that leverage, and this is the way,” he continued.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a GOP centrist and co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, spent months working with Rep. Greg Meeks, a Democrat from New York, to land the necessary 218 signatures to fast-track the bill to the floor without Johnson’s approval.

“A message to our Ukrainian friends: Help is on the way,” Fitzpatrick told CNN on Wednesday, just after Kiley formally signed on.

The measure includes strict sanctions on Russian leaders and institutions, including top banks, oil and mining companies. It also includes 500% tariffs on all Russian goods imported to the US and a ban on imported Russian crude oil.

There’s also new military support for Ukraine, including authorizing $8 billion for arms sales, and an extension of the Biden-era military lend-lease program.

Top lawmakers have agreed to send

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By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Virginia’s Supreme Court dealt a blow to Democrats last week in the tit-for-tat redistricting war playing out ahead of the midterms.

In a 4-3 ruling, justices nullified a new congressional map that could have given the Democrats four additional seats in the House of Representatives. Their argument centered on whether state lawmakers had followed proper procedure when they put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to allow for the redistricting. The procedural question hinged on a linguistic technicality: What constitutes an “election”?

Traditionally — and in Virginia’s case, under the requirements of the state constitution — states have redrawn their congressional districts every 10 years, when a new census comes out and the 435 members of the House are reapportioned according to the states’ new shares of the population. But President Donald Trump, facing dismal polls and the risk of losing his party’s already tenuous House majority, has urged Republican-controlled states to launch an aggressive mid-decade round of redistricting, in the hopes of gerrymandering Democratic seats off the map.

Democratic-controlled states like California and Virginia have set out to draw gerrymanders of their own, aiming to wipe out Republican seats. Virginia voters, in a referendum last month, agreed to amend the state constitution to “temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections,” then to revert to the old rules after 2030.

That vote was meant to be the final part of the multistep process for amending the Virginia constitution. Before an amendment can go to a public referendum, it needs to be approved by the state legislature on two separate occasions: once before “the next general election,” and again after that election, under the newly chosen legislature.

The previous Virginia legislature passed the amendment on October 31, 2025. Election Day followed on November 4. The newly elected legislature then re-passed the amendment on January 16, 2026, to send it to the voters on April 21.

But four Virginia Supreme Court judges, three of them confirmed under Republican-controlled legislatures, ruled that the April voting was invalid. Although two successive legislatures had approved the amendment, the court argued that the first vote, back in October, had come too late — rather than voting before the election, as the constitutional timetable required, the legislature had voted after the 2025 general election was already happening.

In doing so, the court defined the “election” as having come into existence when early voting commenced on September 19, and not as merely taking place on Election Day. By the time Virginia’s General Assembly approved the amendment on October 31, the court argued, more than 1.3 million Virginians had already cast their ballots and therefore could not use their votes to express their approval or disapproval of the proposal.

“The definition of ‘election’ has always broadly denoted the ‘act of choosing,’” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority opinion.

Citing early dictionaries from lexicographers Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, as well as legal dictionaries such as Black’s Law Dictionary, Kelsey devoted several pages of the opinion to parsing the meaning of an “election.” He argued that average citizens who cast their ballots early would likely understand themselves to be voting in the election. “This lexical sense of the noun ‘election’ must be distinguished from the noun

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