First, this: “House, Senate Postpone Piracy Bills Under Pressure”:

Capping a dramatic week of protests and legislative maneuvering, leaders in the Senate and the House announced on Friday that they are backing off efforts to pass a pair of controversial bills to crack down on foreign websites that use pirated content.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced that he will postpone a cloture vote on the Senate’s Protect IP Act, originally scheduled for Tuesday. And in the House, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said he will postpone consideration of the House version until more agreement can be found.

Congress backed off the legislation after an unprecedented online protest on Wednesday by an estimated 115,000 websites and 13 million Internet users that catapulted the debate onto the national stage. At least eight former cosponsors of the Protect IP Act have defected, and support is waning for the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, which aims to give U.S. officials more tools for combating international piracy and copyright infringement.

[…]

Wikipedia, Craigslist, and other high-profile websites went so far as to black out their entire sites in protest against the legislation. Critics say the measures would limit free speech and harm the open nature of the Internet.

Now that dramatic show of force by Internet companies large and small seems to have paid off.

SOPA has yet to clear the House Judiciary Committee, despite ardent work by Smith. And the Senate bill, which had been on a relatively fast track after the Judiciary Committee unanimously approved it in May, looks equally doomed.

Just as the Web protests were roundly dismissed and disparaged by the bills’ supporters, Reid’s decision to back off sparked sharp reaction from Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who sponsored the Protect IP Act.

“I understand and respect Majority Leader Reid’s decision to seek consent to vitiate cloture on the motion to proceed to the Protect IP Act,” Leahy said in a statement. “But the day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.”

Smith, meanwhile, said that it is “clear that we need to revisit the approach” on combating piracy.

The decision marks a failure for many in the traditionally strong entertainment lobby, which had pushed hard for the legislation.

Takeaway: a strong showing by a pissed-off, motivated electorate can still, in some instances, beat back the bought legislation drafted on behalf of monied special interest groups.

If the protest gets enough media attention — meaning, if the protests are bi-partisan, and the push from the left is so significant in scope that the activist media rethinks its knee-jerk support of increased federal power.

Then there’s this: “Supreme Court Ruling Favors Texas in Redistricting”:

The Supreme Court today threw out interim redistricting maps drawn by a federal court in Texas saying the court had not paid enough deference to maps drawn by the Republican dominated state legislature.

The unsigned unanimous decision will clarify a controversy in the state that has already lead to a delay in the Texas primary.

At issue are two sets of maps for the state’s congressional districts, which had to be redrawn after Texas gained four new seats in the 2010 census reapportionment. One map, drawn by the GOP-controlled legislature, favors Republicans lawmakers and is is currently being challenged by Latino groups. Another congressional map was drawn by a federal court in Texas and meant to be used on an interim basis for the next election. The court drawn map had favored Democrats.

The state of Texas had challenged the court drawn interim maps arguing that the court should have deferred at least in part to the maps drawn by the legislature.

But Latino groups and Democrats had argued that the legislature drawn maps did not reflect the Latino population growth in Texas since the 2010 census.

While it does not compel the use of the maps drawn by the legislature, the Supreme Court decision said the federal court has to go back to the drawing board.

Evidently, some rank attempts to destroy the separation of powers are so blatantly political that not even the liberal SCOTUS justices could find a way to justify the judicial overstep at the federal court level. Too, the anti-American idea that districts need to be drawn so as to ensure a particular ethnic group is empowered (a move that redounds to the identity politics players on the left and in the Democrat party, a move that is merely a disguised form of quota representation) will not be given the cover of a court-sanctioned camouflage. That is, the Latino groups challenging the legislature will have to do so using the identity politics argument, the jurisdictional argument of the federal courts having been (temporarily, at least) rebuked.

So maybe all is not yet lost: we live to fight another day.