Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner dodges reporter questions amid sexual misconduct allegations and controversy over resurfaced posts.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee Wednesday morning on President Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request for DHS. The White House is asking for $63 billion in budget authority for the department in 2027, a $2.2 billion decrease from 2026 enacted levels — just over a…
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is heading back to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for his second day of back-to-back testimonies before House and Senate committees. Rubio will testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee at 10 a.m. about the State Department’s budget for fiscal 2027, which requested 30% less discretionary spending funds than last year. RUBIO TAKES ISSUE WITH ROSEN SAYING IT’S ‘EMBARRASSING’ […]
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin is testifying before Congress for the second day in a row regarding his department’s budget request for the upcoming fiscal year. The Department of Homeland Security is requesting $118.4 billion in overall funding for fiscal 2027, starting Oct. 1, as proposed by the White House. Nearly $23 billion of […]
Sen. Van Hollen and DHS Secretary Mullin clashed over alleged immigration enforcement abuse patterns during a heated Senate Appropriations hearing.
Democrats haven't yet learned that their abuses of power can be used against them by their opposition. It's just a matter of time.
The US Supreme Court late Tuesday gave Alabama a green light to use an aggressively gerrymandered congressional map that a lower court said was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”The unsigned decision, from which the high court’s three liberal justices dissented, enables Alabama’s Republican-dominated government to replace its current congressional map, which has two majority-Black districts, with a map that the US Supreme Court struck down in 2023. That map has just one majority-Black district.In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the court today doubles down on chaos.”“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” wrote Sotomayor. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”The liberal justice noted that in order to switch to the map previously struck down by the high court, Alabama election officials “will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the state to new congressional districts.”“Three of Alabama’s counties will be particularly hard hit because they are split across two congressional districts,” Sotomayor noted. “These counties have about 600,000 registered voters between them (roughly 15% of the state’s total number of registered voters).”Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, postponed US House primary elections in the wake of the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which severely narrowed the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination and paved the way for Alabama and other states to impose new maps ahead of the 2026 midterms. “The Supreme Court’s shameful ruling allowing Alabama to move forward with a gerrymander that was drawn with the explicit intent to dilute Black voting power—as found by a panel of judges that included two Trump appointees—is an absolute affront to the founding principles of our democracy, and wipes out whatever was left of the court’s credibility,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation. “This country deserves better, and we must continue to work toward federal legislation that not only bans partisan and racial gerrymandering but also ensures that our rights cannot be undermined by captured courts.”The ruling drew condemnation from the two Democrats in Alabama’s US congressional delegation. Rep. Shomari Figures, who was elected to the US House under the independently drawn map that Alabama Republicans are working to replace, said in a statement that “the Supreme Court has now confirmed that there is no longer a Voting Rights Act in America, and states are essentially free to discriminate against minority voters with no consequences.”“This is a dangerous ruling that sets the state and this nation back decades,” said Figures.Rep. Terri Sewell called the ruling “just the latest in a pattern of outrageous Supreme Court decisions that help Republicans desperately cling to power ahead of the midterm elections while diluting Black voices and erasing decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.”“No matter how hard Alabama state officials may try, they will not succeed in silencing our voices,” said Sewell. “We will not go back to the Jim Crow era. The fight for fair representation continues.”
Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the exact kind of Democrat I usually criticize. She’s been in Congress for more than 20 years, done nothing particularly remarkable or courageous during that time, did a disastrous job of running the Democratic National Committee in 2016 by pouring gasoline on the Hillary-versus-Bernie fire, and disingenuously suggested that Joe Biden was a strong candidate even after his horrible debate performance two years ago. I never imagined writing a piece in defense of her. Yet here I am. Democrats and Black Americans desperately need to rethink our approach to racial politics, and Wasserman Schultz has accidentally ended up on the right side of some critical questions.Here’s the story. Wasserman Schultz’s political life was upended a few weeks ago when Florida Republicans further gerrymandered the state. The GOP is aiming to win 24 of Florida’s 28 U.S. House seats, four more than they have now. So they shifted the South Florida communities that comprise the 25th district that Wasserman Schultz represents in a way that turns the electorate from one that Kamala Harris won by about five percentage points in 2024 to one Harris lost by nine. The elections website Planscore estimates that a Democrat has about a 20 percent chance of winning the new version of the 25th district. Such a victory would be particularly hard for Wasserman Schultz, a sharp-elbowed partisan who has done little to appeal to centrist voters. So Wasserman Schultz, 59, has opted to run in Florida’s 20th district. Under the new maps, Harris won that district by around 37 points in 2024, according to estimates from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. PlanScore puts the odds of a Democrat winning there at over 99 percent. So whoever wins the Democratic primary on August 18 will almost certainly head to Capitol Hill. Here’s the conundrum. Both the old and new versions of the 20th district have sizable Black populations. Many of these communities were long represented by Alcee Hastings, who is Black and served in the House from 1993 to 2021. Hastings was succeeded by another Black politician, Shelia Cherfilus-McCormick. The congresswoman held the seat until this April, when she resigned from the House because she was likely to be expelled after being indicted for allegedly stealing federal disaster relief funds and using them for her campaign. The 20th district seat is currently vacant. Many Democrats in Florida say that at a time when Republicans are using the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling to eliminate majority-Black districts and effectively expel African Americans from Congress, a white pol like Wasserman Schultz shouldn’t be running in a seat that has traditionally been held by a Black politician. The Black Caucus in Florida’s state legislature called Wasserman Schultz’s decision to run in the 20th district “disheartening.” A group of 10 Florida DNC members, some Black and some not, released a letter blasting Wasserman Schultz in fiery terms. They said her district choice “reinforces the same message Republicans have pushed for years: that Black representation does not matter.” “Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of Black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida’s few remaining majority-Black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat,” they added. “We cannot claim to defend voting rights, racial justice, and representation while undermining Black political power when it becomes politically convenient.” Wasserman Schultz has argued that she can bring more money home to the 20th district than a newly elected member because of her seniority. And she emphasizes her long-standing relationships with Black leaders and support of Black organizations in Southern Florida. That’s all true. Let’s not ignore the obvious, though: She isn’t running in the 20th district on some altruistic mission to help Black people in South Florida, but rather because it’s the easiest way to continue her political career. That said, I don’t want the congresswoman to stand down. Wasserman Schultz’s candidacy embodies two important principles worth defending. First, Black voters should get the chance to choose the candidate who they feel best represents them, whatever that person’s race. The new 20th district is about 40 percent Black. So it’s likely that the Democratic primary electorate is majority Black. A successful candidate will have to convince Black voters that they will advance the interests of African Americans on Capitol Hill. What’s happening in Florida’s 20th district is much different than in Louisiana and Tennessee, where heavily Democratic, majority-Black districts are being replaced by ones that have Republican majorities.
President Donald Trump 's hand-picked candidate for Iowa Governor, Congressman Randy Feenstra, narrowly lost his primary Tuesday night.