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John Thune drops hammer on Trump's push to rewrite Senate rules: 'Facts don't change'

18 hours agoFar Left

Senate Majority Leader John Thune issued a reality check to President Donald Trump on Monday, as the president continues to demand that senators rewrite their own rules.Trump has been demanding several changes to force his agenda through, including the elimination of the legislative filibuster, which has been a consistent obstacle to his SAVE America Act package of voting restrictions, as well as eliminating "blue slips" that allow senators to unilaterally reject certain executive and judicial nominees from their home states.These rules have often frustrated presidents in both parties, although ironically, the filibuster has historically benefited Republicans more than Democrats, since a greater percentage of their agenda can be passed through federal courts and budget bills.There's still not the appetite to make those changes, said Thune — even on the GOP side.According to Semafor's Burgess Everett, Thune told reporters he has "sat down with about 20 Republicans, and on getting rid of the legislative filibuster, getting rid of blue slips, and there were 15 nos. So I mean, this is not an open question. It's just a fact, and the facts don't change."Thune added that if Trump wants these changes in the Senate to be on the table, he would have to do the heavy lifting of getting those senators to change their minds."If [Trump] can change the facts and start moving some of those senators who are no's into yeses, then we have a different conversation,” Thune told Everett.Trump's most recent rant against the filibuster came earlier in the day, when he proclaimed on his Truth Social account that Thune shouldn't allow the Senate to adjourn until the changes are made, because "the Dumocrats will do it on day one, and can’t believe how lucky they got with this Senate leadership. Remember, stupidity always brings LOSING & DEATH!"

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Eye-watering cost of Trump’s Canada feud revealed

Alternet.org

17 minutes ago

Eye-watering cost of Trump’s Canada feud revealed

Tariffs aren't the major reason that Canadians aren't buying American goods. They're angry about Donald Trump. The Daily Beast noticed the new data showing a sharp decline as much as $12.8 billion. It's even lower than in 2025, when Trump claimed he wanted to take over Canada. That year it fell about 25 percent to $15.6 billion. "The decline in Canadian travel to the U.S. marked an unprecedented shift, with return trips falling year over year for 11 straight months in 2025 — the longest sustained drop outside the pandemic era since records began in 1972," the report said. It only adds to Trump's embarrassment over his trade war. Not only have his tariffs failed to bring in the money promised, but they've also added higher costs to goods and groceries for Americans. The anti-America boycotts in Canada are making things worse for the economy as visitors don't want to travel to the U.S. "Following the change in the U.S. administration in early 2025 and the implementation of America First policies, Canadian travel sentiment shifted abruptly,” the report said. "Canadians are opting to travel domestically or to go to other countries outside of the U.S, taking roughly 5 million more domestic trips within Canada and 1.3 million additional trips overseas."Trump put new tariffs on Canadian-made goods and increased more immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Canadian border. For most of his first year in office, Trump was championing a policy that would make Canada America's 51st state. Canada has responded by reducing travel and not buying American products. Even if stores were to put them on the shelves, Canadians simply will not buy.Further data from the University of Toronto, released in May, shows that tourism crashed by an alarming 42 percent during Trump's second term. The Canadian boycotts have hit major cities like San Francisco, Houston, Grand Rapids and even Las Vegas. Canadians make up about 17 percent of international travel into Las Vegas, but that has now dropped to 7.5 percent, said Politico.The attack on immigrants is making tourism slump too when it comes to international visitors. There has been a 5.5 percent decline in overseas tourism. The cut in foreign visitor tourism means a loss of about $8 billion. It's the largest decline since the pandemic lockdown and only the second dip over 20 years. Meanwhile, Americans don't want to travel in the U.S. much either. There has been an 80 percent increase in Americans traveling abroad compared to the year before. “We used to be a country that others wanted to emulate. That narrative no longer exists,” said Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School when speaking on CNN. “The long-term harm is that the world will not know America ... the narrative of the United States is now a country that is at best, not to be respected, and at worst, a democracy that is floundering.”

Left

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Politics

27 minutes ago

Trump: New tariffs 'doing the same thing' as the ones struck down by Supreme Court

Trump dismissed fears that his tariffs could hurt the economy — especially as affordability concerns have become a key issue of the upcoming midterm elections.

Center

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'Seriously?' Ex-Russia ambassador laughs off Trump's plan for Putin

Raw Story

38 minutes ago

'Seriously?' Ex-Russia ambassador laughs off Trump's plan for Putin

President Donald Trump’s proposal to ask Vladimir Putin to come clean on Russian involvement in Iran drew a smirk and an incredulous reaction from the former US Ambassador to Russia.Appearing on MS NOW with host Stephanie Ruhle to discuss Trump’s meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday, the “Money Power Politics” host Michael McFaul asked why Trump continues to turn to Putin for news and advice. Referring to reports that Russia may be giving backdoor help to Iran after Trump attacked the Middle Eastern country, McFaul remarked, “Well, first, Russia and Iran are allies; they coordinate, they sell weapons together. There's — I can't imagine that there's not intelligence sharing. I don't have privy to secret information anymore. That's first.” “Number two: What is he saying?” he asked rhetorically. “ We'll find out. How come he doesn't know? You know, maybe we should be increasing our intelligence community and strengthening it, rather than gutting it in some kind of purge that's going on now.”“And then third, ‘I'm going to ask Putin’ — seriously?” he exclaimed. “Putin's never going to tell him the truth on that. And the very notion that he sets it up, that that's how he's going to find out whether it's truth or not, it's just shocking to me that he continues to say things like that.”“And I think it's embarrassing for him,” he pointed out. “I think it's such a weak look that he says things like that. I don't understand why his team doesn't explain to him: Mr. President, you look weak when you make statements like that.” - YouTube youtu.be

Far Left

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Trump obsesses over his own mortality after Lindsey Graham's death: report

Raw Story

59 minutes ago

Trump obsesses over his own mortality after Lindsey Graham's death: report

Sen. Lindsey Graham's sudden death earlier this month sent President Donald Trump reeling and sunk him into an obsession with his own mortality.Graham, at 71, was nearly a decade younger than the president and had remained visibly active — traveling, campaigning and working — right up until his death, and that contrast has clearly unsettled Trump, reported the Washington Post. In public remarks, he's repeatedly expressed disbelief that someone so energetic could be gone so quickly, telling NBC he "thought he was just going to live forever."“A lot of people can’t do it at all," Trump told “Fox & Friends” on July 13. "A lot of people, when the camera goes on, they’re terrible. I see it all the time. I watch people. Most people aren’t very good, and he did it and he did it with pride and he did it because he loved our country."Privately, according to people familiar with his comments, the 80-year-old Trump has pressed aides on whether Graham's grueling travel schedule — including a return trip from Ukraine shortly before his death — might have played a role, and has turned to genetics and family history for explanations, invoking what he called a "racehorse theory" of inherited strength and stamina.“His father died just about at the same age,” Trump told Newsmax on July 13. The introspection comes at a moment when Trump's own mortality has already been unusually present in his mind. Graham's death fell just before the second anniversary of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, an event Trump says he still revisits by watching footage of it repeatedly, describing his survival as a "miracle."He has also faced more recent threats, including a reported Iranian-linked threat this month that prompted him to switch planes, and an attempted shooting near a White House correspondents' event in the spring.“Because of the position I’m in, I’ve done quite a bit of research into the word ‘assassination,’ Terrible word. And they go after consequential presidents,” Trump told CBS in April, after an attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “I wasn’t worried. I understand life. We live in a crazy world.”Those around Trump describe him as subdued in the days following Graham's death — a notable shift for a president known for near-constant motion and activity.Even so, he hasn't fully stepped back from politics: He's called on the Senate to pass a cryptocurrency bill "in honor of" Graham, despite the senator not having sponsored it.

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With the Saudi Deal, Trump Risks Aiding and Abetting a Nuclear Arms Race

The Dispatch

1 hour ago

With the Saudi Deal, Trump Risks Aiding and Abetting a Nuclear Arms Race

The agreement appears poised to upend Washington’s decades-long nonproliferation strategy.

Center Right

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Trump administration selects five states as candidates for radioactive nuclear waste storage

Washington Examiner

1 hour ago

Trump administration selects five states as candidates for radioactive nuclear waste storage

The Trump administration has selected five states as candidate locations to take atomic waste, in the latest attempt to solve the United States’s decadeslong deadlock over long-term storage for spent nuclear fuel. As President Donald Trump has pushed to quadruple domestic nuclear capacity by 2050 and rapidly expand the development of small advanced reactors and […]

Center Right

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Republicans have to ‘counter’ Democratic narrative of Trump family profiting while Americans suffer: Bob Cusack

Washington Examiner

1 hour ago

Republicans have to ‘counter’ Democratic narrative of Trump family profiting while Americans suffer: Bob Cusack

Washington Examiner executive editor Bob Cusack said Republicans must effectively counter Democrats’ argument that President Donald Trump and his family have financially benefited while ordinary Americans continue to struggle with high costs. Cusack’s comments come after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) argued that Republicans have failed to deliver on campaign promises to lower costs, […]

Center Right

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Trump DOJ's conduct called 'unlawful,' 'unethical' and 'unseemly' by federal judges

Raw Story

1 hour ago

Trump DOJ's conduct called 'unlawful,' 'unethical' and 'unseemly' by federal judges

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.” Former federal Judge John E. Jones, a George W. Bush appointeeFederal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Department in their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.”“The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old.“This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers.

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John Thune drops hammer on Trump's push to rewrite Senate rules: 'Facts don't change'

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John Thune drops hammer on Trump's push to rewrite Senate rules: 'Facts don't change'

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