Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced that the House will vote Thursday morning on extending the nation’s foreign spy powers through July 2, a move that comes amid a partisan clash over President Trump naming Bill Pulte to be the acting director of national intelligence (DNI). The expected vote comes after Democrats in the Senate largely…
Rep. Terri Sewell claims the GOP probe into ActBlue and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones is part of a pattern of Trump DOJ harassment of Black women in power.
Doctors are demanding that the American Medical Association step up and take a true offensive posture against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.According to Politico, "members of the group’s House of Delegates are sending a clear message to their leaders: Call out Kennedy, even if it costs us in the pocketbook," and spoke up intensely at the AMA annual meeting.Since Trump took office, the AMA has offered some criticism of Kennedy as he dismantles vaccine approval bodies and fails to act in the face of deadly disease outbreaks around the world — but the group has balanced this with praise of his stated mission to encourage Americans to live healthier lifestyles, as laid out in the controversial Make America Healthy Again movement.However, said the report, this is likely to change due to "the election of Sandra Fryhofer, an internist from Atlanta and uncompromising Kennedy critic, as AMA president-elect. She beat Michael Suk, who as AMA board chair in 2024 and 2025 prioritized doctors’ Medicare fees and promised continued pragmatism in dealing with Kennedy."Fryhofer has pledged to take a more aggressive posture, vowing to hold the administration accountable for “measles running rampant, public health destroyed, a trillion dollars ripped from Medicaid, inadequate physician payment, [and] stupid immigration rules.”Speaking to Politico in interviews, "AMA doctors described an advocacy organization at its wit’s end with Kennedy ... Long a Republican-leaning constituency, doctors began shifting left during the battles over managed care three decades ago." For several holdouts, the report continued, "President Donald Trump’s alliance with Kennedy, a longtime skeptic of vaccine safety and critic of the medical establishment, was the last straw."This also comes as Kennedy and his allies have come under increasing criticism for obstructing new potentially lifesaving research under the guise of requiring stricter safety standards in clinical trials.
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday said he wants “complete transparency” if he testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as part of its probe into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The committee’s chair, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), said earlier in the day that he would like to have Dershowitz and Acting Attorney General…
In 2018, David Tyson Jr., an African American, sued Richardson Independent School District in Texas for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In the district’s 164-year history, Tyson was the only person of color ever to serve on the school board. Yet, at the time of the lawsuit, white students made up less than 30 percent of the district while Black and Hispanic students made up nearly 60 percent.When Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it gave communities the tools to combat these kinds of racial harms. Section 2 of the act outlaws state and local governments from enacting voting rules that result in racial discrimination. One of the undersung aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais—for which there has been much hue and cry over the way it’s paved the path for right-wing state governments to draw majority-minority federal districts out of existence—is that it cuts away at this protection for local governments, as well, rendering it “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Kagan laments in her dissent.While the media has focused on Callais’s impact on Congress in the 2026 midterms, its darkest mark will be on local governments. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been most frequently applied to address and remedy local electoral practices, not state ones. Its use heralded diverse school boards and city councils where national minorities, by virtue of being local majorities, can govern.Through this phenomenon, diversity develops twice over. First, through representational diversity and second, through institutional diversity. Minorities can see themselves represented on school boards, county commissions, and city councils. And they can harness that representation to institute local governments that do not look like state or national government. These more representative governments are more likely to become local laboratories willing to conduct policy experiments or try alternative governance approaches that the broader polity dismisses or ignores. This is why diversity at the level of individuals and institutions cultivates a rich democracy. Callais endangers these sites of local democracy by hollowing out Section 2 protections.But back in 2018 when Tyson filed his lawsuit, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was still intact. We can look back in time to see its salutary effects. Tyson told a “tale of two districts,” where—unsurprisingly—a ceaselessly homogeneous school board had harmful consequences for the Richardson school district. Elementary schools where at least 70 percent of the students met grade level in two or more subjects were two-thirds white—and the vast majority were not economically disadvantaged. By contrast, the lowest-performing elementary schools were predominantly made up of Black, Latino, and economically disadvantaged students. Atop the startling peak of disparity was the 60-point achievement gap between the district’s highest-performing school, which was predominantly white, and its lowest-performing school, which was predominantly Latino.These racial inequities did not go unnoticed by the Black and Latino voters of Richardson. And yet, Richardson’s school board remained persistently white for one reason: the district’s voting practices. While white students constituted a minority in the district’s schools, white voters still comprised a majority of the district’s population. These demographics, combined with an at-large, district-wide voting scheme where every voter in the district voted in every school board election, meant that minority voters would never succeed in electing a candidate of their choice. The minority vote would always be diluted against the white vote. The school board—whether under the threat of ongoing litigation or by a genuine change of heart—agreed to end this pernicious status quo. In 2019, Richardson Independent School District settled. As part of the settlement, the district moved toward a single-member district voting model. Specifically, it instituted an electoral scheme that allows voters within a predefined border to elect a board member to represent them—similar to congressional districting. Two of the five single-member districts in Richardson were drawn to ensure that Black and Latino voters were the majority. Voters from these districts later elected Regina Harris, the first Black woman, and Debbie Rentería, the first Hispanic person, to serve on the school board.Richardson was not alone in making this kind of change. In response to immigration and changing racial demographics, the late 2010s saw a spate of lawsuits across school boards in North Texas alleging violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Many of these districts settled and moved to electoral systems that gave voters of color greater voice in their representation.
Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), a member of the House Oversight Committee, joins Meet the Press NOW to discuss what he heard from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates during a congressional hearing over his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Alastair Campbell and Jacob Rees-Moog share little common ground on Britain’s decision to leave the European Union a decade ago — except both agree a second vote to join is unlikely in the near future.
Republican who chairs House panel says he based decision on testimony from Epstein’s longtime assistant Lesley GroffRepresentative James Comer, the Republican who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, announced that he would be asking Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein’s former attorney, to appear before the panel as part of its investigation into the late sex offender.“I am going to ask Alan Dershowitz to come in, we will have questions for him and we will give him an opportunity to come in,” Comer said on Wednesday morning, adding that the decision was based on the testimony of Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime assistant, who testified before the committee on Tuesday, as well as “a meeting that I had afterwards with several of the Epstein survivors”. Continue reading...
The Trump administration's legal arguments for why federal courts should not interfere in the controversial UFC fight set to take place on the White House lawn were derided as ridiculous by former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen on MS NOW's "Deadline: White House" Wednesday.The match, part of Trump's series of events ostensibly celebrating America's 250th anniversary, has come under fire as an event that Trump has a personal financial stake in and stands to profit massively from. Veterans in Washington, D.C. are currently suing to stop it.Anchor Nicolle Wallace cited the key argument from Justice Department lawyers that "final weight cutting is already underway" for 14 fighters, and a delay "could jeopardize the health of the 14 professional athletes involved in the event."Eisen wasn't having it."First of all, the arguments that they're making are so ludicrous," said Eisen, who also worked on Trump impeachment litigation. "Why is the United States Department of Justice making arguments about these fighters? Would they be healthier if, after losing all that weight, they didn't get into that ring?"Ultimately, he said, the arena being erected next to the White House is "a symbol of the way he's defaced Washington, D.C. It's like a graffiti artist run amok in our city," similar to Trump illegally putting his name on the Kennedy Center. "The ring has to come down the same way.""Donald Trump is in a steel cage match with the American people," Eisen added. "He is battering them in the pocketbook because, as you pointed out, this stuff is not free. When he does his $1.8 billion slush fund, it comes out of all of our pockets. It's the same with all of these outrageous projects, and I think the people are sick of it." - YouTube www.youtube.com