The Texas State Board of Education on Friday approved a new required reading list that contains Bible passages, thus making Texas the first state in America where […]
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has sparked anger with his decision to veto voter ID for mail-in ballots. The Republican governor struck down a bill that aimed to […]
MS NOW host and former GOP lawmaker Joe Scarborough sharply rebuked House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday, accusing him of hypocrisy after the speaker claimed Democrats were trying to "steal" elections.The exchange stemmed from Johnson's appearance on Fox Business's "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo," where, according to a clip shared by the anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark, the speaker framed an election fight in stark partisan terms."We can't allow big blue states and crooked Democrat governors to try to steal elections away from us," Johnson said.Scarborough was unsparing in his response, calling on the speaker to drop the rhetoric and pointing to the circumstances of Johnson's own path to power."Stop lying, Mike. You're embarrassing yourself," Scarborough wrote.The host then zeroed in on what he characterized as Johnson's selective outrage, noting that the speaker had no objection to California Republicans when their votes helped install him in his leadership post."You were fine becoming Speaker with the help of California congressmen elected the same way," Scarborough wrote, before posing a pointed challenge: "Will you surrender the Speaker's gavel and not allow California Republicans to be seated in January?"He closed with a dismissive flourish: "I didn't think so."The clash comes amid escalating tensions over election administration and redistricting, with both parties accusing the other of attempting to tilt the electoral map ahead of the November midterms. Johnson's comments, delivered in a segment nominally focused on the defense budget, reflected the increasingly combative posture Republican leaders have taken toward Democratic-run states.For Scarborough, a former Republican congressman turned vocal critic of the party's current direction, the speaker's framing presented an opening to highlight what he portrayed as a glaring inconsistency in the official position.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Sunday knocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after an outbreak of influenza infected several service members at an Air Force base in Texas. Cassidy, a licensed gastroenterologist and the first physician to chair the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation”…
Disturbing new claims of how a New York City public school teacher silenced and abused a third-grade student decades ago have emerged — a week after a jury awarded the victim a staggering $18 million verdict. The victim’s lawyer detailed the sickening way the now-dead teacher held the poor child’s mouth closed while he molested...
Democratic socialists are setting their sights on Colorado, Wisconsin and beyond after a romp of victories in New York added fuel to the progressive movement. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) burst into the spotlight with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election last year and expanded its influence with a pair of wins this past week [...]
The Trump White House waged a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign on the obscure federal board responsible for shielding government workers from unfair firings, ultimately securing a ruling that could hand the president sweeping power to purge the civil service and install loyalists throughout the government, according to a New York Times investigation.The report centers on the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency whose job is to act as a neutral arbiter between federal agencies and dismissed workers. In a March ruling the Times described as landing "like a thunderbolt" in legal circles, the board broke with decades of precedent and embraced the White House's argument that Article II of the Constitution gives President Donald Trump the power to fire officials without due process.According to the Times, the decision came after a concerted pressure campaign waged both publicly and privately — an effort the paper likened to "calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule." That private push, the report said, was led by James Sherk, a special assistant to the president who has spent years focused on making it easier to quickly fire federal workers.At the center of the account is a late-November meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, after which the board's acting chair, Henry Kerner, gathered a small group of staff and appeared "shaken and unsure how to proceed," per the Times. Kerner reportedly recounted that administration officials had conveyed their belief that the board was bound to follow the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel opinion on the Article II cases.The White House disputed that characterization. Officials said the meeting's primary purpose was to interview Kerner for a possible nomination as permanent chair and insisted he was not told how to rule — which a White House official said showed the idea of a pressure campaign was "categorically false."A White House spokeswoman, Allison Schuster, defended the underlying philosophy in stark terms."There can constitutionally be no independent executive branch agencies because independence from the president would mean independence from the voters who elected him," Schuster told the Times.Legal experts saw the ruling very differently. Nicholas Bednar, a University of Minnesota law professor who studies the federal civil service, said the revelation of White House involvement undermines the decision's legitimacy."Knowing that it was made with influence from the White House means the decision was not based on positions of law," Bednar told the Times, adding that it "reflects the same ideological considerations that is driving the evisceration of the federal civil service."The Times noted the striking internal logic of the ruling: for the first time in its history, the board embraced a constitutional argument that, taken to its conclusion, would invalidate its own existence — since the board itself is a product of the same Civil Service Reform Act that Article II theory would override.Former board members underscored the magnitude. Raymond Limon, who left the board in February of last year, called it "a monumental decision, reversing years of board law and determining who and who does not get board protections." He added: "It is seismic."Some federal employment specialists, the Times reported, equated the ruling to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The full Federal Circuit has since agreed to review the case, an unusual step that highlights its significance.The report closed on a telling scene from this month, when Sherk stood in the Oval Office as Trump signed an executive order stripping job protections from nearly 8,000 workers in policy-making roles. Told the order was Sherk's idea, Trump summoned him to the Resolute Desk.Sherk explained that the order treated policymakers like private-sector workers: "If they're messing up, they can be removed quickly.""That's great," Trump replied, according to the Times. "And you were very much involved in this?""I was, sir," Sherk said, according to the reporting.
President Donald Trump unleashed a lengthy attack on journalist Maggie Haberman at midnight Saturday over a new book about him, dismissing the work as fiction and hurling insults at the New York Times reporter who has covered him for years.In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he had been briefed on the book and was unimpressed, deriding both the project and its author — whose name he mangled throughout the post."Based on a very quick and boring briefing concerning the Magot Hagerman book about me, it is mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things she has written about me for so many years," Trump wrote.He went on to belittle Haberman personally while taking credit for her career."She is a third rate writer and intellect, who has made a first rate income because of your favorite President, ME," Trump wrote.The president then ran through a familiar list of grievances, claiming Haberman had been "wrong about me on the Elections," wrong about "the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax," and "wrong about me on just about everything else." He complained that she "continues to spew out garbage, and people continue to buy it."Trump also disputed a specific element of the reporting, insisting that the book's authors lack evidence they have suggested they possess."And they don't have the audio tapes that they imply they have," he wrote. "Just another Margot Con Job!"He closed the post by restating his 2020-and-beyond election claims in all caps — asserting he won "ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, THE POPULAR VOTE, 86% of the Counties" — before pivoting abruptly to a foreign policy declaration amid the ongoing strikes on Iran: "And Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon!!!"Haberman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and longtime chronicler of Trump, has been a frequent target of the president's ire, a dynamic that has persisted across his time in and out of office.