SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE MIDTERMS, seats in the House of Representatives are already, in effect, changing hands. It’s not happening in primaries or special elections. It’s happening in partisan redistricting.

Republicans started the latest round of gerrymandering last year. They grabbed five seats in Texas, one more in Missouri, and another in North Carolina. Then came the Democratic counterattacks, taking five districts in California in November and another four in Virginia last week.

This week, the GOP struck back, making a move for four more seats in Florida. And on Wednesday, in a ruling that upended the previous rules about factoring race into congressional maps, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to redistricting in other states. Seven states could, in theory, redraw their maps in time for this year’s election. Even if only one or two seize the chance—and Louisiana’s governor announced on Wednesday that he would—Republicans will benefit.

It’s dizzying. But even more dizzying are the somersaults politicians are turning as they try to justify these maneuvers. Without apparent shame over their inconsistency, they gyrate from defending their own gerrymanders to condemning the other party’s.

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GERRYMANDERING HAS ALWAYS BEEN CREATIVE. You sit down with maps and voter data and figure out how to draw lines so that the other party’s voters get packed into a few congressional districts. Meanwhile, you parcel out your party’s voters to form majorities in all the other districts. Some of the resulting shapes—Texas 35, New York 24, and Illinois 13, for example—are artistic masterpieces.

Last year, Donald Trump introduced an innovation: mid-decade redistricting. Politicians used to agree that redistricting was reserved for the beginning of each decade, after the congressional reapportionment process that follows each census. But Trump decided that this rule, like others, didn’t apply to him. He prodded Republicans in Texas and other red states to change their maps to give the GOP more seats. Eventually, through ballot measures, Democrats in blue states responded in kind.

Why did Trump launch this war? Because, thanks to Republican control of the Texas legislature and governorship, he could. “We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” he told CNBC last August.

But the president wanted a grievance to justify his theft. So, a few seconds later, he concocted a moral argument. “I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas,” he said. “And we are entitled to five more seats.”

This pitch—We won the state, so we earned the seats—is a standard excuse for gerrymandering. But the math doesn’t add up. In 2024, Trump won 56 percent of the vote in Texas. At that time, the state’s congressional map gave Republicans 25 of its 38 seats. That’s 66 percent. Under the new Texas gerrymander, Republicans are expected to get 30 of the state’s 38 seats. That’s 79 percent. Trump is claiming that his vote share of 56 percent entitles his party to nearly 80 percent of the seats.

When Virginia struck back last week, passing a referendum that would give Democrats 10 of its 11 seats, Trump suddenly discovered proportionality. On Truth Social, he objected that the ratio was unfair. He’s right. But the point of the Virginia referendum was to counter the unfair ratio in Texas.

Normally, Trump complains that activist judges are blocking his executive orders. But since the Virginia referendum, he has learned the wisdom of judicial intervention. “The language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive,” he protested in his post. “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

IT’S EASY TO LAUGH at Trump’s hypocrisy. But Republican leaders in the House are just as brazen. Last July on Fox News, Brian Kilmeade asked House Speaker Mike Johnson about the GOP’s redistricting scheme in Texas. “Look, we have to fight for every inch of ground in the country,” Johnson argued. “I’m convinced the red states will, and we will probably have a few more seats out of that. And of course, that’s good news for me.”

But when the news isn’t good for Johnson, he develops scruples. Last week, when Democrats retaliated in Virginia, he decided that fighting for every inch of ground was ruthless and indecent. “It’s a hyperpartisan gerrymandering boondoggle,” he fumed.

Johnson, like Trump, abandoned his usual rhetoric about judicial restraint and urged the courts to step in. “We are confident and calling upon the Virginia Supreme Court to do the obvious and right result, and that is to strike this thing down,” he said.

When red states gerrymander, House Republican leaders profess innocence. Usually, they decline to comment, or they defend the state’s authority to draw maps as it sees fit. But when blue states gerrymander, they cry foul.

In August, when House Majority Whip Tom Emmer was asked about the GOP’s move in Texas, he replied, “I’ll leave that to Gov. [Greg] Abbott and Texans to determine what they want to do.” Emmer said whatever decision the Texas leaders made was “their right.”

But when Virginia responded by letting its voters make the decision—not just the governor and his allies in the legislature, as Texas had done—Emmer denounced the Virginia ballot question as “very dishonest.” He joined Trump and Johnson in calling for “some type of court involvement that corrects a very unjust result.”

Richard Hudson, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, applies the same double standard. In August, he said of the Texas maneuver, “It’s up to the states. I mean, I have nothing to do with it.” But last week, Hudson called Virginia’s referendum an “embarrassment” and urged the Virginia Supreme Court to nullify it as “a clear violation of the Constitution.”

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SOME REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS in red states worry that by spreading GOP voters across more districts, gerrymandering might thin their margins and cost them their seats. But others are gung-ho. In August, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) applauded Trump for demanding “a better map” to increase Republican dominance in Texas. “Frankly, we could probably be even more aggressive,” said Roy.

Last week on Fox News, Roy gloated again. “We took matters in our hands to say that Texas, a very solidly Republican state, should be sending more Republican representatives to Washington,” he explained. “That’s a reasonable thing for Texas to do.”

But in his next breath, Roy accused Virginia of letting “a million Karens in Arlington and Alexandria represent two-thirds of the commonwealth.” The idea that a state’s dominant party should increase its representation in Washington—which Roy was happy to promote in Texas—suddenly seemed less vital than ensuring adequate representation for the minority party.

Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican who’s in line to become the state’s next governor, smiled in August when he was asked about the power grab in Texas. He declined to comment, claiming, “I do not engage in redistricting conversations.”

But last Thursday, Donalds decried the Virginia referendum. “Democrats have a history of doing these radical gerrymanders just to make sure that they have seats and they preserve power,” he huffed.

Then, on Friday, Donalds turned around and endorsed the GOP’s redistricting scheme in Florida. “I support the governor and what he’s going to try to accomplish,” said Donalds. “We want to make sure that the ethos of our state is being reflected in our districts.”

Speaker Johnson executed the same pirouette. Last Wednesday, even as he lambasted Virginia for its gamesmanship, he welcomed the gerrymandering in Florida. “Florida has the right and the intention to do it,” he declared. “And my view is that they should.”

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REPUBLICANS AREN’T ALONE in these contortions. Democrats often do the same thing, as their GOP colleagues are quick to point out.

On Tuesday, Rep. Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, was asked about the new proposed map in her state. “Democrats are already calling this gerrymandering,” a Newsmax anchor told Cammack. “How do you respond to those attacks, especially when you compare it to what just happened in Virginia?”

Cammack laughed. “The cognitive dissonance with that group is incredible,” she replied.

She was speaking, of course, about the other party.

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CHIP ROY, THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN running for attorney general of Texas, is at it again. When we last heard from Roy, he was pushing legislation that would persecute Muslims in the name of fending off sharia. Now he’s using the same tactics to go after socialists. Roy has introduced legislation that would, in effect, allow any immigrant who advocates economic equality—even immigrants who have become citizens—to be kicked out of the country.

On Monday, in a press release announcing the bill, Roy declared that he was “targeting the Red-Green Alliance.” That’s his term for a putative conspiracy between Muslims and Marxists. To spell out his point, literally, he has titled his bill the “Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists (MAMDANI) Act of 2026”—a dig at Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim, socialist mayor of New York City.

Roy is late to the MAMDANI game. Last July, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) introduced the “Measuring Adverse Market Disruption And National Impact Act,” aimed at Mamdani’s proposal to create city-run grocery stores. In November, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) filed the “Moving American Money Distant from Anti-National Interests Act,” which would have barred federal funds from going to New York City during Mamdani’s term.

But what Roy lacks in originality, he makes up for in chutzpah. His bill is a frontal assault on political freedom. It would authorize a purge of progressive citizens from the United States.

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CURRENT U.S. LAW prohibits the admission of “any immigrant who is or has been a member of or affiliated with the Communist or any other totalitarian party.” Roy’s bill would change that phrase to include anyone who has been affiliated with “a socialist party.”

The bill would also deny admission to anyone who has “advocated for, or who is or was affiliated with, any organization that advocates or advocated for the economic, international, or governmental doctrines of socialism. . . .”

That last clause is significant. Current law focuses on communism as a political ideology. It bars the admission of people who want to overthrow our government. Roy would add an exclusion for people who advocate “economic” socialism, even if they don’t support “governmental” socialism. His language would prohibit the immigration of a democratic socialist such as Mamdani or Bernie Sanders.

In fact, you don’t have to call yourself a socialist. Under this bill, you can be denied entry to the United States just for advocating economic equality.

The bill defines “socialism” to include any movement in which “political power is sought or used, through violent or other means,” to “restructure or advocate the restructuring of economic and social relations to reduce class distinctions.”

The phrase “other means,” in this context, clearly refers to nonviolent means. That pretty much covers anyone who peacefully advocates reducing the gap between rich and poor.

Furthermore, the bill explicitly defines “socialist party” to include the Democratic Socialists of America and any of its branches or affiliates. Among the DSA’s members are many current officeholders, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

THESE PROHIBITIONS ON SOCIALIST ADVOCACY don’t apply just to prospective immigrants. Under the bill, they’re also grounds to expel people from the United States.

Current law lists several categories of “deportable aliens” who “shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed” from the country. Roy’s bill would extend this list to include anyone who has engaged in “advocacy” for socialism—or, for that matter, anyone who is found to be “possessing” material that promotes socialism. The bill says such a person “is deportable and shall be removed from the United States.”

If you’re an immigrant who has already become a citizen, that won’t protect you. The bill would strip you of your citizenship so you can be deported.

Under current law, if you were naturalized as a citizen within the last five years, and during that time you’ve affiliated with an organization that would have disqualified you from getting naturalized in the first place—i.e., you’ve joined an organization that advocates the violent overthrow of our government—that affiliation is “prima facie evidence” that you were “not attached to the principles of the Constitution” and were “not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization.” Therefore, “in the absence of countervailing evidence,” your citizenship can be revoked.

Roy’s bill would extend that provision to anyone affiliated with socialism. In addition, it would remove the five-year limit, so you could be stripped of your citizenship at any time. And it would remove the clause about an “absence of countervailing evidence.” In other words, even if you have evidence that you are, in fact, “attached to the principles of the Constitution” and “well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States,” that wouldn’t save you. Your affiliation with socialism would be sufficient to get you kicked out of the country.

The bill’s removal of the “countervailing evidence” clause is just one part of its wholesale assault on civil liberties. In three separate places, it stipulates that orders to bar or expel people from the United States, under its provisions, “shall be final and shall not be subject to review by any court.’’ For good measure, it rolls back the age of forgivable past socialism from 16 to 14. If you had a pinko poster on your wall at 15, you’re out of here.

And even if you’ve never breathed a word about economics, you can be denaturalized and expelled under this bill. Alongside its prohibitions of “socialism,” it includes parallel rules against “Marxism.” It defines Marxism to include efforts—again, through violent or “other means”—to “establish or advocate for an atheistic society or government prohibitions on private religious practices.” The “or” makes it clear that you can be disqualified even if you’re against prohibiting religious practices. Promoting an “atheistic society” is enough to get you expelled.

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AS AN ELECTORAL MATTER, Roy’s bill would empower a right-wing government—the Trump administration, for instance—to strip naturalized Americans of their voting rights. In 2024, these people made up 9 percent of the electorate. By selectively purging progressives from this population, the GOP could tighten its grip on power.

As a constitutional matter, the bill would gut America’s promise of political freedom. In his press release, Roy quotes an endorsement from a right-wing immigration watchdog group: “We have absolutely no obligation to open our doors to aliens who seek to undermine the Constitution, dismantle our republic, or champion ideologies fundamentally opposed to American liberties.”

That’s true. But in this case, the guy who’s undermining our Constitution and dismantling our liberties is the guy who wrote this bill.

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Mosque-off Moment

The GOP needs a bogeyman in the midterms. The border crisis is over, DEI has been purged, and the panic over transgender bathrooms is getting old. What can House Republicans run against?

Many are turning to a familiar answer: Muslims.

Four months ago, two Texas Republicans, Rep. Keith Self and Rep. Chip Roy, founded the Sharia-Free America Caucus. Since then, the group has swelled to more than 60 members, including Majority Whip Tom Emmer. That’s more than a quarter of the House GOP.

Officially, the caucus opposes the imposition of Sharia—Islamic law—in America. It claims to have no problem with Muslims per se. But the more its members talk, the more obvious their bigotry becomes.

The caucus says certain nefarious Muslims are doing scary things in our country. That’s true if you just look at terrorist attacks. But only a few people commit acts of terrorism, which means they’re not enough to justify the broad crackdown the caucus wants. So caucus members argue that whole Muslim communities are up to no good.

To illustrate this alleged nefariousness, they point to Islamic community centers. On March 26, the caucus staged an hour of speeches on the House floor. In his closing remarks, Self decried a “pattern of Islamic centers being built next to police training facilities.” He gave all the examples he had: two.

If Muslims were planning mischief at these centers, it’s hard to imagine a more foolish place to put them. But Self found a way to portray it as sinister. He called the centers “fortresses overlooking our police academies” and insisted that “intimidation is clearly the intent.”

Another insidious trend, according to the caucus, is Muslims publicly praying on rugs. Caucus members are particularly upset that some of the prayers have happened in New York near the memorial to victims of 9/11. “People are just, you know, sick to their stomach of watching these, you know, people down on prayer rugs . . . right next to the 9/11 memorial,” Roy fumed two weeks ago on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

It’s misguided to treat the area around the memorial as a no-go zone for Muslims, since that would support Osama bin Laden’s lie that the 9/11 attack broadly represented Islam. But the larger problem is that the Sharia-Free America Caucus doesn’t just oppose displays of Islamic belief and practice near the memorial. It opposes them generally.

Take Muslim prayer calls, for instance. On February 3, the caucus held a press conference to outline its grievances. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican who was instrumental in founding the caucus, denounced the prayer calls as part of a plot:

Woke cities like Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey [sic] are replacing American civic norms with radical Islamic policies. Minneapolis became the first major U.S. city to allow amplified Islamic calls to prayer year-round. . . . Why do they do it here? They want to be seen and heard. They want to be on television. They want to rally the troops.

Two weeks later, Rep. Randy Fine (R–Flor.), a member of the caucus, followed up on that complaint. In an interview on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing network, he declared, “The call to prayer is a call for submission. And I’m not okay with that. They need to cut it out.”1

In his interview, Fine said Muslims could “do whatever they want in their mosques.” But the caucus’s founders, Self and Roy, routinely object to the number of mosques in the United States. On March 17, Roy told Bannon, “There’s 300-plus mosques and growing in Texas—more being built in Texas every year than any other state in the union. That’s a real problem.” A week later, Roy told Newsmax, “There are 330 mosques in Texas. This is a real war. . . . They are trying to wage jihad against our way of life. And we’ve got to stand up against it.”

Republicans used to distinguish radical Muslims from mainstream Muslims. The caucus is abandoning that distinction. “We have to stop the term of ‘radical Islam,’” Fine argued at the press conference in February. “It is mainstream Islam,” he said, that “want[s] to kill us.” Roy reinforced that point in his March 30 interview with Bannon:

Stop blaming this on “radical Islam” or, you know, some subset of folks. This is an overarching theme for the Muslims coming to the United States, to wage jihad against the West, take over the West, undermine our Christian heritage, our Judeo-Christian founding principles.

The caucus doesn’t deny that good Muslims exist. But its members argue that once the bad Muslims take power, the formerly good Muslims will join them. “When the jihadists take control,” Self predicted last week, most “moderate Muslims . . . will submit and begin to exercise the more radical elements of Sharia.”

The truth is that many of these Republicans just don’t like Islam. They can’t even hide it. On February 15, responding to a comment that Muslims didn’t think dogs should be indoor pets, Fine tweeted, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Later, a Newsmax host asked Fine, “Do you see how your original post, Congressman, could be offensive to some?” Fine replied, “Not at all. I’d choose dogs.”

On March 9, another member of the caucus, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), tweeted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Three days later, Fine tweeted, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” On March 17, Roy declared, “Islam is not compatible with the West.” And on Sunday, Roy told Fox News that he was running for attorney general of Texas “to defend us from this march of Islam across the state of Texas and our country.”

Some members flatly deny that religious freedom in America should extend to Muslims. At the press conference, Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas asserted,

Islam is largely alien to American history. It certainly didn’t come into the United States on the Mayflower. It’s something that we deliberately imported as a matter of immigration policy into our country, and it’s going to destroy us just like it’s destroying Europe right now.

Speaking to Newsmax on March 20, Ogles added:

The first Muslim prayer rooms didn’t start popping up into this country until about 1920. The first mosque . . . was built in Iowa in the early 1930s. And so, when the Founding Fathers were talking about freedom of religion, they were talking about Judeo-Christian values.2

Sometimes the caucus cites polls showing that many American Muslims support Islamic influence in government. At a hearing on February 10, Gill paraphrased findings from a Heritage Foundation survey. “Thirty-nine percent of Muslims in the United States want Sharia law implemented in the next 20 years,” he warned, and 33 percent “believe that Islam should be declared as our national religion.” Roy, at the same hearing, said those numbers “should be troubling to every American.”

But nobody in the caucus mentions the much higher numbers among American Christians responding to similar questions. In a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of all American Christians agreed that “the United States should be a Christian nation,” and 38 percent said that “when the Bible and the will of the people conflict with each other,” the Bible “should have more influence on the laws of the United States” than the people’s will should. Among white evangelicals, 81 percent said the United States should be a Christian nation, and 65 percent said the Bible should override the people’s will.

The caucus is especially hypocritical in its condemnation of Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim mayor of New York City. On March 12, Tuberville quote-tweeted a post that featured a picture of Mamdani on a prayer rug next to a picture of the 9/11 attack. The senator wrote, “The enemy is inside the gates.” His tweet, offering no other context, implied that a Muslim mayor was inherently dangerous.

Tuberville didn’t mention where the Sharia-Free America Caucus originated. It came from a conversation he had with Rep. Self in December. The conversation didn’t happen on Capitol Hill. It happened at the White House Christmas party. To these men, religious observance in political office is perfectly innocent, as long as the observance is Christian.

The Sharia-Free America Caucus isn’t just a fraud. It’s the opposite of what it pretends to be. Its founders and members avidly support religious control of government. “The press can call me an Islamophobe all they want. I don’t care,” Tuberville huffed at the press conference on February 3. “I love this country. I love what it stands for. I love that it’s a Christian nation, and it’s going to stay that way.” Speaking after Tuberville, Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona protested that “Sharia rejects America’s foundational roots, the Judeo-Christian ethic.” Another member, Rep. Russ Fulcher of Idaho, called Sharia a threat to “our Christian values.”

During the caucus’s hour of speeches on March 26, Self quoted John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” He denounced Islam as an assault on “our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Another member, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, argued that “the separation of church and state . . . cannot be found in the United States Constitution.”

That same day, appearing on Washington Watch, a conservative Christian show, Roy started with his anti-Sharia message but segued to his real agenda. First he decried “the March of Islam across Europe.” Then he said the real question was, “Are we going to defend our Judeo-Christian culture?” Then he warned, “We will lose the West if we do not re-center our entire existence on our biblical values.” Then he claimed that Americans had won World War II because we were “united . . . as a country predominantly if not almost entirely Christian.”

All of this might be amusing, as a display of hypocrisy, if the stakes weren’t so serious. The caucus is pushing its agenda in several bills, one of which would suspend all immigration until a series of right-wing demands are met. The bill’s author, Roy, says he’s trying to halt the “massive wave of Muslims” coming to America.

Self, the caucus’s other co-founder, might go further. A month ago, he told Newsmax, “We have got to make sure that now the people of Muslim—uh, uh, the Muslim law—are deported.”

The Sharia-Free America Caucus isn’t wrong that there’s a dangerous movement afoot to impose religious law in the United States. They’re just wrong about which religion it is.

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Mike and Yikes

Public confidence in elections is a foundational requirement for a constitutional republic. Now, more than ever, we must have confidence and trust in Utah’s elections. . . .

The election systems we built here in Utah work well because of a core tenant [sic] of the U.S. Constitution: federalism. When appropriately applied, the division of power between the federal and state governments means decisions that directly impact us are made by people closest to us in state and local government.

United States Senator Mike Lee coauthored the above for Deseret News on October 5, 2022.

I agree wholeheartedly with the senator’s argument: Utah has reasonable election laws and competent election officials, and the public can trust its election results. Mass interference in Utah’s vote is indeed “virtually impossible,” as Lee put it a bit lower in the piece. And if you don’t like the results of a particular election, you can always work harder to win the next one.

But Lee is now making somewhat different arguments than he did in 2022. He regularly posts that non-citizens will steal our elections if we don’t require voters to provide documented proof of citizenship—something Utah didn’t require for Lee’s 2010, 2016, or 2022 elections.1 He also now says that secure elections require photo identification—but the vast majority of Utah ballots are verified by signature matching, not photo ID. He tells us to be suspicious of mail ballots. But Utah is an all-mail state. And he is suspicious of states that don’t finish counting ballots within forty-eight hours of Election Day—a deadline that Utah failed to hit in 2024.

There’s nothing novel about a flip-flopping politician. Lee is already famous for making a habit of turnabout, including on Trump’s morals (“If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person”), Trump’s lies (“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK”), and Trump’s disregard for basic law (“I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution”).

But Lee hasn’t simply flip-flopped on whether this or that aspect of Trump’s character should be open to criticism; he’s belly-flopped into the deep end of the pool of Trump-style election conspiracism. Since March 16, Lee has posted or reposted content about elections and election-related legislation on his personal X account at least 300 times, including 31 times on March 20 alone. God might rest on Sundays, but Mike Lee spent Sunday, March 29, encouraging you to “ask your senators why the SAVE America Act hasn’t passed yet.”

As for the SAVE America Act—which the Bipartisan Policy Center summarizes as a bill that would require “voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a photo ID at the time of voting”—Lee is an obsessive. He has explicitly framed the legislation as the only hope Republicans have of maintaining control of Congress. And recently, he warned that if the SAVE America Act isn’t passed, Gavin Newsom could become president, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his VP and Michelle Obama (???) as his secretary of state. The AI-generated image (the man loves few things more than spreading AI-generated content around) labels Zohran Mamdani as Newsom’s attorney general, though the picture clearly does not depict the New York City mayor, and it warned that this would be the “2028 White House Administration” even though the next president won’t take office until January 2029. But accuracy isn’t really a concern when sharing stuff like this.

These posts and the obsessions they signal are bad enough coming from a sitting U.S. senator. But they could soon become even more alarmingly consequential, because Trump is reportedly considering Lee to step into the just-vacated role of attorney general.

Lee has shrugged off the idea of running the Justice Department. But that’s just the sort of thing politicians are trained to do right up until they stop shrugging and take the job.

Should Lee end up becoming AG, the implications for how we conduct our midterm elections could be serious. Federal law enforcement resources could be diverted away from national security, financial fraud, or drug trafficking to instead once again investigate the widely dismissed allegations of outcome-altering fraud in the 2020 election—the same allegations that couldn’t be corroborated by Bondi, Trump’s first-term AG Bill Barr, Trump’s private investigators, Dinesh D’Souza, MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, or any of the other fraud hunters.

As attorney general, Lee would also have a far bigger audience for his steady stream of election lies. On March 22, 2026, for argumentative purposes, he seemed to imagine a scenario in which all “Red States” had gleefully given their complete voter registration databases to the Department of Homeland Security to help them sniff out illegal voters on their rolls.2 But no states have directly shared voter information with DHS. Some states have agreed to share (or already shared) voter information with the Department of Justice, but this is true of only a dozen states—and it is not true of Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, or, yes, Lee’s own Utah. DOJ has sued thirty states for detailed voter rolls, red states included. So far, the federal government has not won any of these cases, and a number of them have already been dismissed.

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On March 23, Lee posted that Democrats “have NO IDEA how common or rare [non-citizen voting is] because the status quo makes knowing that impossible.” But it is possible to know. Two months earlier, election officials in Utah (again, Lee’s home state) thoroughly searched the state’s 2.1 million registered voters. They found one non-citizen on the voter rolls (and not for nothing, but that one non-citizen had never voted). Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Georgia, Montana, and others have also recently searched for non-citizens, yielding similarly minuscule numbers of illegitimate voters.

In January, Lee suggested that Virginia doesn’t use paper ballots (it does). And he previously claimed that it’s “illegal to show your ID at a voting location in California” (it’s not).

Those are just a sampling of the ravings to which I responded online when he wrote them. I felt obligated to try and do so because I voted for Lee in his first U.S. Senate run in 2010 and because I admired his dad, former solicitor general Rex Lee, who died in the 1990s. And, dang it, I’ve always just thought that Mormons are less inclined to lie than the rest of us, so if I just gave Sen. Lee the facts, perhaps I could disabuse him of his baseless notions about the security of our elections.

But now I realize correcting the falsehoods I see in Lee’s timeline is a pointless task. I can’t keep up with even a fraction of his lies.

I do take some solace in knowing that his posts now seem as pathetic as they do nefarious. It seems unlikely that the SAVE America Act will pass, and according to reporting from Politico, Lee’s tactics have made him highly unpopular with his Republican colleagues who see his hyper-online activism as “a self-serving attempt” at juicing his own celebrity. As one unnamed Republican senator put it, Lee’s goal is simply “the clicks.” They added that “he has almost no self-awareness.”

Right now, Lee is Congress’s election-obsessed iPad kid, the enfant terrible of the upper chamber whose real power is limited. But if you put the same guy in charge of 9,200 attorneys at the Department of Justice, the election lies of “@BasedMikeLee” start to look a lot scarier.

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Stephen Richer is the former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona. He is now CEO of Republic Affairs and a fellow of the Cato Institute.

Red light districts

Lately, you may have noticed red and green graphic cards from an organization called Track AIPAC1 making the rounds on social media. As is often the case with viral political content online, the cards do not make much sense. The problems should be obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of how to read campaign finance data.

You might expect an organization called “Track AIPAC” to have a laser focus on, well, following and publicizing the activities and political donations of the pro-Israel lobbying organization. But Democratic candidates who have been red-carded by the group aren’t always recipients of AIPAC money. Some have gotten money from other “pro-Israel” organizations or lobbyists. Some have voting records or have made decisions about sponsoring (or not sponsoring) bills that have earned Track AIPAC’s ire. And some appear to have caught Track AIPAC’s heat on account of vibes alone.2

In Maryland, for instance, Track AIPAC backs Chris Van Hollen while shaming his fellow Senate Democrat Angela Alsobrooks. In the description below Alsobrooks on her Track AIPAC profile, the organization notes the contributions she’s received from J Street, a left-leaning Zionist group, but it doesn’t do this for Van Hollen, even though his are much more extensive. (This FEC page will show you all the individual J Street contributions each candidate has received this cycle.)

The group’s misleading and confusing graphics have become hot commodities on the left. In one instance, Track AIPAC disavowed a green graphic someone had mocked up for an Ohio gubernatorial candidate to resemble one of theirs. After making clear that the graphic was a counterfeit, the group explained that AIPAC does not give to state and local candidates. Presumably, then, Track AIPAC wouldn’t either support or oppose state and local candidates. Well, see what your presuming got you: The group gave Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey a red graphic and endorsed his challenger during the leadup to last fall’s election. Frey’s graphic did not even mention any donations. It just said, “This candidate is pro-Israel.”

Track AIPAC has also changed its scoring system without explanation. In 2024, the group hit Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) with one of its signature red cards. A year later, Khanna tagged Track AIPAC in a post on X where he made clear he does not take money from AIPAC. He now appears on a list of lawmakers on the Track AIPAC website without the ominous red filter, but with the line the group appears to apply to every lawmaker about whom it is ambivalent rather than hostile: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.”

In some cases, candidates who have gotten red cards from the group were AIPAC targets in previous election cycles. Red-carded Rep. Dave Min (D-Calif.), for example, won his race despite AIPAC spending $4.5 million on attack ads to make his constituents aware of his DUI arrest.

The ex cathedra judgements from Track AIPAC about which candidates are free of pro-Israeli influence and which are not seem even more questionable when you examine the group’s stated methodology.

In a recent detailed explanation of changes to its formula, Track AIPAC indicated that its goals are a bit broader than, well, just tracking AIPAC. Here is how the group characterizes two of its basic directional commitments:

2. While we selected the name Track AIPAC as a public education tool, we have always tracked and reported on the entire pro-Israel lobby.

3. We track the lobby money wherever it goes, regardless of party identity or any personal feelings about a given lawmaker or candidate.

Scroll a bit more, and you will find the group admitting the “key ingredient” of the color-card recipe has virtually nothing to do with AIPAC itself. Instead, the most important consideration is the policy preferences of the candidate in question versus those of the individuals who run Track AIPAC.

The finance record alone is not enough to land a member of Congress (or a candidate) with a red graphic. Our scorecards represent a nexus of lobby spending and the candidate’s policy record.

Red graphics are assigned when we evaluate a candidate’s policy as pro-Israel based on their voting record (if one exists), any published policy positions, any public statements, and any credible reporting verifying that the candidate is seeking AIPAC’s support—often by circulating secret position papers favorable to Israel.

If a candidate is identified as being pro-Israel based on these public records, and campaign finance data is not yet available, we will assign a “WARNING!” label to their graphic.

The group then acknowledges that its judgments are largely sourced from the Congressional Democrat Palestine Tracker, which assigns letter grades to lawmakers based on a public spreadsheet maintained by volunteers with the Democratic Socialists of America.

But even here, Track AIPAC appears to be thumbing the scales. Have a look at three lawmakers with middling scores in the DSA-maintained spreadsheet. At 72 percent, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) has a higher “total Palestine score” than both Reps. Maxwell Frost of Florida (68 percent) and Vermont’s Becca Balint (66 percent). All three receive a grade of “C” on the “Congress Scorecard” that Track AIPAC cites as informing its judgments. But while Dexter gets a red badge from the group, Frost and Balint not only get green ones; they have each received a Track AIPAC endorsement.

And while Balint has received money from J Street, Track AIPAC doesn’t list the organization as a Balint donor even though J Street shows up in the citations for dozens of her red-carded colleagues. On the Track AIPAC landing page containing blurbs for every member of Congress, the group simply claims Balint “rejects AIPAC and champions a foreign policy based on human rights and international law.”

If this all sounds confusing, don’t worry: Track AIPAC gets it. At the bottom of the methodology page, they have added this note: “Recent feedback on our methods has made it clear to us that our graphics do not fully represent the data points that go into the process—especially the legislative and public policy record.”

“While we have always published receipts justifying the policy record when posting our red and green graphics, that context gets lost quickly when the graphics are reposted in other contexts later,” the note continues. “Our forthcoming graphic design will clearly incorporate specific policy points that factor into our analysis.”

Track AIPAC did not respond to a request for comment on its methodology and coming changes. Perhaps the group will adopt a broader spectrum of color coding to make clear just how badly a candidate has fared with its occult calculus.

Snake eyes

As I noted in my newsletter detailing Polymarket’s dud of a pop-up bar in Washington earlier this month, the big prediction-market companies are engaged in a major marketing and influence campaign to ensure they will not be scrutinized, regulated, or banned outright. Their efforts include spending more and more on lobbying elected officials and regulators, and working to sway public opinion through advertising, events, and social media.

Notwithstanding all that, their fears of the party ending early could be coming true. Since early March, lawmakers in both the House and Senate have introduced six separate bills to prohibit prediction market uses in various forms:

• The STOP Corrupt Bets Act, which would ban prediction-market gambling in a number of areas, including on government activity.

• The BETS OFF Act, which would ban wagers on government activity and other markets that can be easily manipulated.

• The End Prediction Market Corruption Act, to ban the president, vice president, members of Congress, and other high-level federal officials from insider trading on prediction markets.

• The Event Contract Enforcement Act, to strengthen the regulatory power of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over prediction markets and forcing the commission to ban contracts on things like terrorism or assassinations.

• The PREDICT Act, which would ban members of Congress and federal officials from insider trading on prediction markets.

• The Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act, which would ban CFTC-registered entities from listing prediction contracts that resemble gambling activities.

Perhaps in response to this flurry of bills that would proscribe aspects of its business, Kalshi, one of the prediction-market companies under scrutiny for its high volume of suspiciously timed trades on U.S. foreign policy decisions, has added yet another component to its frantic PR operation. On Monday, the company blanketed Washington, D.C. with advertisements that make much of its self-chosen rules.

Kalshi’s PR operation is unlikely to satisfy Congress, though. While both chambers are often ineffective and uninterested in passing any kind of regulation for emerging technologies, lawmakers are quickly growing impatient with the prediction markets, perhaps in part because they have become such an obvious vector of corruption. Even the more libertarian-leaning lawmakers are considering Congress’s options for regulating them.

“I think there should be rules against that,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told me when I asked about whether lawmakers and federal officials should be allowed to continue gambling on prediction markets. “But I’m not sure where the rules originate—if they need to be a law—some of the things are regulated by personnel regulations and they ought to be.”

“It definitely needs to be looked at,” Paul added.

It’s rare to find such broad bipartisan interest in regulating a single industry. And Republicans would normally balk at addressing a problem if addressing it could be viewed as a direct attack on the president or his family. But so far that narrative hasn’t developed, despite some initial concerns that it might.

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Man of the steeple

Vice President JD Vance announced that he is releasing another book in June. The former hillbilly elegist’s forthcoming conversion memoir is titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

The cover of the book, which will be published by Harper, the flagship imprint of HarperCollins, is decorated with a striking pastoral photo of a very Appalachia-coded countryside church. However, while Vance’s way back to faith led him to embrace Catholicism specifically, the church on his book is not a Catholic one. The building in the cover photo is Mount Zion Church in Elk Creek, Virginia—a United Methodist house of worship.

Mount Zion is undeniably photogenic, which is why it’s also a popular stock image. It’s previously been used to illustrate a satirical Babylon Bee article about how “evangelical churchgoers in the Raleigh area have begun to notice that there is a sorry excuse for a church in town that only has one service.”

Vance’s choice of photo struck me as odd, given that the vice president has been outspoken about his Catholic faith. And according to the book’s description on Amazon, Communion is pretty explicitly about Vance’s journey on the road to Rome:

Communion is a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian in all the seasons of life JD Vance has experienced—as a child, a young man, a husband, a father, and a leader.

Picking up in some ways where Hillbilly Elegy left off, Communion recounts how Vance’s pursuit of material privileges ultimately led him into a secular wilderness.

Communion reveals how Vance regained his faith and discusses his conversion to Catholicism, how his faith guides his work in public life, and how it shapes his thoughts about the future.

A spokesperson for Vance told me to reach out to the publisher instead of inquiring with the VP’s team. A spokesperson for HarperCollins did not respond to a request for comment.

Since Trump and Vance assumed control of the federal government in January 2025, the White House has often found itself at odds with the Catholic Church. Vance has also not publicly attended Mass as frequently as he said he used to before becoming vice president.

Both Pope Leo XIV and Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, have criticized the Trump administration, sometimes directly.

In September, McElroy called the administration’s mass deportation policy “a comprehensive governmental assault,” adding, “this campaign relies on fear and terror at its core, for the government knows that it cannot succeed in its efforts except by bringing new dimensions of fear and terror to our nation’s history and life.”

And in an apparent response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly praying for “overwhelming violence” against Iran, Pope Leo said during Palm Sunday Mass, “[God] does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.’”

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Respect

A little anecdote to close out today’s long edition: On June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump first announced he would be running for president, I was the first reporter in the building to check in at the press table.3 The second outlet to show up that day was TMZ.

Fast forward to Anno Domini 2026, and I like to think that The Bulwark and TMZ are equally aggressive in our reporting on the president. And I do have to hand it to TMZ: Amid the ongoing partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, the celeb gossip outlet has been working overtime to find embarrassing photos of elected officials lounging on the job.

Violet Jira writes at NOTUS:

Over the past few months, TMZ staff has questioned lawmakers on things ranging from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show to what it’s like to work on the Hill. For the most part, lawmakers told NOTUS they don’t mind a celebrity-centric outlet covering the halls of Congress.

Recently, the outlet has devoted particular attention to how members of Congress are behaving during the funding lapse at the Department of Homeland Security. TMZ requested tips on Thursday about sightings of lawmakers who left D.C. without reaching a funding deal, leaving many DHS employees to miss paychecks for at least two more weeks.

If you read this morning’s Morning Shots newsletter, you’ll remember Andrew Egger’s wry recap of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) bubble wand–wielding vacation at Disney World—a story TMZ brought to everyone’s attention.

Read the whole piece at NOTUS.

One ballot after another

The SAVE Act and its slightly altered variations—the SAVE America Act and the MEGA Act—all seek to accomplish the same goal: to protect “election integrity” by suppressing voting. For its Republican advocates, the president foremost among them, the legislation is urgently necessary to ensure that Democrats—whose supposed “electoral victories” in recent years are all totally fake and fraudulent—do not win again.

But the prospect of passing some iteration of the SAVE Act is diminishing by the day. Despite a concerted effort to bend or break the Senate’s filibuster rules, not enough GOP members are on board to do that. And if they’re not, then the bill is not going to secure nearly enough votes to make it to President Donald Trump’s desk.

In fact, it’s unlikely it will even get all of the Republican votes.

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Monitoring the monitoring of the situation

For some time now, the prediction-market companies, which allow users to gamble on everything from sports to the weather to the military activities of the U.S. government to the timing of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, have been energetically campaigning to win over the public to their vision of the good life, which centers on gambling on everything from sports to the weather to the military activities of the U.S. government to the timing of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Much of the PR effort has taken familiar shapes: The emerging industry’s major players have spent more and more on lobbying, media partnerships, and sports-league deals. But the accelerating public relations blitz has started to include riskier and more unusual ventures, including, most recently, a D.C.-area attraction meant to woo the Washington press corps.

It was a complete disaster.

Polymarket, one of top prediction-market companies, hosted a pop-up bar over the weekend a few blocks from The Bulwark’s office. The company billed the “Situation Room” as a place to grab a drink and “monitor the situation”—a meme expression intended as a gentle dig at guys who follow the news as a hobby but talk about it as though it’s much more than that, even if they don’t play a role in the policy process.

The bar was set to open at 5:30 p.m. for members of the media, and I gathered from the composition of the crowd that the term “media” was meant loosely: Both reporters and influencers were queued up, as were a few Capitol Hill staffers. I had mistakenly signed up for the general entrance list, meaning I wasn’t meant to be allowed in until 8 p.m. When I showed up at 5:30, the bouncer couldn’t find my name on the media list, but he waved me in anyway. That blithe gesture was a sign of things to come.

Neal Kumar, the chief legal officer of Polymarket, asked reporters to gather round for a brief gaggle.

“We view this as our real coming-out party in D.C. We spent much of our livelihood at Polymarket fighting to stay alive, being super scrappy. We’ve proven that the concept of prediction markets exists,1 and we’ve proven that the concept is here to stay,” Kumar said. “And we want to be a part of the conversations in D.C.—and where best to have a conversation than in a bar?”

Not long after Kumar went back inside, the pop-up team started having to deal with problems. As reporters gathered on the covered patio to get out of the rain that was just starting, a light fixture illuminating the Polymarket sign flickered on and off. A staffer set a ladder and climbed up to fix it. Moments later, one of the bouncers knocked over a fake plant, spilling its gravel soil near the entrance and breaking the planter in half. As so often happens in life, things started to unpredictably cascade.

The venue’s WiFi did not work, the rain got worse, and the roughly four dozen reporters and influencers forced to wait on the bar’s patio started to get antsy. As an NBC News reporter did a live hit from outside (instead of inside as he’d planned), waitresses approached the crowd to take drink orders. These were delivered and consumed outside. For now, we remained barred from the Room part of the Situation Room, and we were forced to monitor the situation in the old-fashioned way, using our phones.

As the patio became crowded, the line of vehicles waiting to drop off VIP attendees continued to grow. After a few black Chevy Tahoes began clogging up the street, the driver of a Jeep covered in rubber ducks became irate, laying on the horn for a bit before deciding to squeal their tires to get around the car-service parade. As the duck-covered Jeep whined by, I noticed that in the window of an Audi SUV with diplomatic plates a child was pressing his whole face against the inside glass. It was all very D.C., if you know what I mean.

As we kept waiting, I listened as a young man who claimed he works in the Senate but would not give his name told me that he regularly bets on Kalshi, Polymarket’s competitor. “Only on politics,” he said. “But I mostly just lose money.”2

After forty-plus minutes of keeping the media out, the Polymarket staffer managing the event gave up. The press would finally get to monitor the situation in the building’s interior. Inside the pop-up, however, what we found was yet another standard D.C. happy hour: A live band played chamber jazz while Washington journos and politicos networked.

The internet issues had not been resolved, but a Polymarket staffer assured us they would be at some point over the weekend. The bar featured nearly a dozen blank TV screens, which loomed like monoliths amid the room’s encroaching darkness. At least two features were working, though: a large glowing globe, and a long tabletop touch screen displaying market odds. Users could scroll this interface but not place any bets. Situation, monitored.

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There were also fake newspapers strewn about whose front pages featured political cartoons. One depicted an adviser telling the president, “Sir, the latest intelligence.” Another showed a woman at work browsing Polymarket for odds on the winner of the 2028 presidential election. A third cartoon depicted an individual gambling on her phone at a baseball game and saying, “America’s greatest pastime.”

The crowd provided a visual exercise in D.C. taxonomy. People around here often fall into wardrobe tropes that allow for quick political identification. Democratic men wear navy suits, white shirts, and no tie, to look like Obama. Republicans wear cobalt blue suits and red satin ties, to look like Trump. The reporters look tired.

Uncategorizable, you could say, is cryptocurrency influencer Nick O’Neill, who bobbed around while his friends (or employees; it can be hard to tell) took photos of him and sipped drinks. O’Neill’s presence during the press hour was curious. He’s not a reporter or even a normal influencer (they often have product-related beats) but a hype man for, well, himself. His shtick includes posting about his lack of children and the yachts, money, young women, and Labubus he has acquired instead.

When O’Neill eventually posted a recap of the evening, I was surprised to see that the WiFi and TV screens appeared to be operational. His video, which was a paid promotion, made the Situation Room seem like a great time, which it was not. He also posed while being adorned with a glittery Polymarket chain he received for winning a “top trader award.”

Public relations is a vital component of any legitimacy and sanitization effort. Since last spring, Polymarket has been spending $90,000 per quarter to establish relationships with key players in government through David Urban, a former Trump campaign adviser. Polymarket’s advisory board features the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. And the White House’s employees and allies are gaming and manipulating prediction markets to make substantial profit, according to Democrats.3

The Monday after the pop-up bar’s lackluster weekend, Polymarket updated their rules to supposedly prevent insider trading. In addition, Kalshi said that they would ban athletes from betting on their teams or leagues and political candidates from staking money on their own campaigns. The companies’ rule changes are a clear attempt to use self-imposed restrictions to take the wind out of the sails of potential future legislation that would further restrict prediction-market users and gambling topics.

Congress isn’t known for swift action, nor are members of Congress particularly experienced in regulating new and emerging technologies. But it’s obvious that the prediction-market companies are worried this might be the one area where lawmakers finally feel compelled to act. Polymarket’s dud of a party was a real sign of panic.

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Men at work

Regular Press Pass readers probably know more on average about the trials and tribulations of Australian-American and “alpha male” conservative influencer Nick Adams than any other group of political news readers do. Over the past year, this newsletter has documented Adams’s nomination to serve as U.S. ambassador to Malaysia, his efforts to tone down his online persona, his inability to keep it toned down for long, and ultimately, the Trump administration’s withdrawal of the opportunity they offered him to become a full-fledged diplomat.

Losing out on the nomination may have hit Adams hard, but Trump softened the blow by offering him a new gig. Unfortunately for us all, it’s one that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation.

Adams announced Tuesday morning that Trump has selected him to be Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values.

“I am beyond honored to serve my country, the American people and the greatest President and Secretary of State we have ever had,” Adams said in a statement.

I look forward to serving as America’s brand Ambassador, bringing the message of America’s excellence to the entire world. With America 250, the FIFA World Cup, and the Olympics coming up, the world needs to be reminded of all we have to offer. I will be a tireless spokesman for American greatness, at home and abroad.

Presidents can create or terminate special envoys with the stroke of a pen, making this a much better fit for Adams than any role that would entail a grueling Senate confirmation process. Following the many delays that affected his last appointment, too, it must be nice to be offered a job on a fast timeline: Adams already has a bio up on the State Department website touting the new gig.

What Adams is going to be doing in this role isn’t entirely clear. But you can rely on Press Pass to find out what that is, eventually.

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The war of northern depression

Conservative regions of liberal states like to flirt with intrastate secession. It’s often how they vent frustration about their unpopularity and general political impotence.

In New York City, Staten Islanders who desire to secede from the Empire State have given their cause a new head of steam after many dormant years. Naaman Zhou writes in the New Yorker:

Lately, the fever to secede has descended again. Shortly before Christmas, Sam Pirozzolo, a Republican state assemblyman who represents parts of western and central Staten Island, wrote a declaration of independence for the island—modelled after the national one—and read it out loud at the former site of a tavern where, in 1776, British soldiers first heard the original. Andrew Lanza, a Republican state senator, has also drafted legislation that would make secession possible.

Notionally, this push was prompted by the election of Zohran Mamdani, whom Pirozzolo has said epitomizes the way that New York City doesn’t reflect Staten Island’s values. But the discontent runs deeper. Staten Islanders have tried to secede from the rest of the city at least a half-dozen times. In 1900, two years after the modern City of New York was consolidated, two hundred Staten Islanders gathered at a public hearing to say they were “ready to cede.” (Staten Island, one man told the New York bureau of the Chicago Tribune, “is the Ireland of Greater New York. We want home rule.”)

The island is richer, more suburban, more conservative, more car-dependent, less dense, and cut off from the rest of the city by the deep water of New York Harbor. There is a sense on the island that the rest of the city doesn’t listen to them, and that they pay for city initiatives they don’t want.

Read the whole article.

Gas, break, dip

The skyrocketing price of gas is one of the most ubiquitous and easy-to-grasp financial difficulties that Americans across the country have to deal with. It makes every little stop at the pump harder, and everyone who notices it tends to cast it on to the greater economy. Even people who don’t buy gas see the prices displayed in giant, neon lights all over the place.

Fluctuations in gas prices typically result from complex policy decisions, global events, and supply-and-demand issues. But after the average national gas price jumped from under $3 per gallon to almost $4 in just a couple of weeks, it became clear that the most recent changes at the pump have a very simple cause: President Donald J. Trump and his war of choice in Iran.

The causal picture here is clear enough that even members of the president’s party don’t disagree with the basic outline. The Senate Republicans I caught up with on the Hill over the past few days acknowledged to me that the rapid rise in gas prices is Trump’s doing.

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Boy, George.

If you live in a major American city, particularly New York or Washington, D.C., you’ve probably seen a young man (or several) wearing a backwards Kangol flat cap lately.1 It’s not a sudden Samuel L. Jackson infatuation or even Date Mike cosplay. It’s the renewed cultural influence of the late John F. Kennedy Jr., thanks to the popular FX miniseries Love Story, which details the political scion’s romance with and marriage to Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in the years before their tragic deaths.

But JFK Jr.’s style choices, which are great but hard to replicate, are not the only part of his legacy that’s coming back. George magazine, the political and lifestyle publication that he launched in 1996 and that shut down in 2001, is also operating again.

Unfortunately, the new George only vestigially resembles the original magazine, looking instead like an AI-powered MAGA slop factory.2

The publication’s comeback actually antedates the FX miniseries by several years: It re-emerged in 2022 with Gene Ho, who had been Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign photographer, as its owner and editor-in-chief.

Ho had previously attempted to run for mayor of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, only to encounter some political trouble because of his QAnon beliefs. But that was hardly a speed bump for an aspiring MAGA-coded publisher. And in 2023, he scored Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the George cover, after Kennedy—the family’s black sheep and current health and human services secretary—announced his presidential run.

Yet somehow RFK Jr. appears to be the least-weird thing about the new incarnation of the magazine. The George website features a section on cryptocurrency, a special project about time travel, and an e-book about “the cost of knowing too much.”

The magazine’s covers are no longer graced by A-list celebrities like Cindy Crawford, Robert De Niro, and George Clooney. They frequently feature strange graphics like, well, this:

The magazine also has an online store, where shoppers can buy ties featuring Jesus overseeing a man who looks eerily similar to Nathan Drake with a glowing chest, a mousepad featuring AI-generated steampunk cats named Cogsworth and Whiskerbolt, and a hat that “proclaims your preference for mountains and trees over Wi-Fi and trending posts.” (Don’t tell Tim Miller, but this is going to be his holiday gift.)

Now, with the success of the FX miniseries, the magazine is naturally fielding a lot of requests. Ho posted on his Facebook account that he will not be commenting on the show out of respect to the Kennedys. Along with an AI image of random people at a dining table, none of whom look like Ho, he wrote:

Be careful of those who pretend to speak on behalf of JFK, Jr. THAT IS... those who weigh in on every JFK, Jr. issue or show as if they have a connection. We are George Magazine and the mission is the same... that is: Not Just Politics as Usual. That is the trademark we hold as well.

However, when the Love Story show came out... major news sources wanted us to comment. We did NOT. And we will NOT review or comment on that show because they did NOT contact the Kennedy family members and the Kennedy’s did NOT weigh in.

So, what does it tell you about those who try to make a connection by being an expert on the family. George Magazine was the magazine that interviewed RFK, Jr. and we HIGHLY respect ALL the Kennedy’s.

Maybe Ho’s version of George is a perfect fit for this moment. JFK Jr. was the most prominent member of his generation of the Kennedy dynasty, and he wanted to turn politics into a lifestyle brand. RFK Jr. is now the most prominent Kennedy, and he and his MAHA movement have blended public policy with vibes and cultural identity better than JFK Jr. ever did.

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The House sometimes wins

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced a bill Tuesday to ban prediction market gambling on government actions and other events deemed easy to manipulate. The Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions (BETS OFF) Act would prohibit Americans from gambling on government actions, war, and “events where an individual knows or controls the outcome.”

Murphy introduced the bill with Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who is leading the House effort. Murphy said Tuesday that the corruption that prediction markets have spawned isn’t just bad for our government—it’s bad for our souls.

“What happens to us spiritually when every moral question in this country just becomes a market? Don’t we lose something? Don’t we rot a little bit inside when the question of famine in Gaza isn’t a question of what’s right and what’s wrong, but whether you can make money or lose money?” he asked. “I think it’s really important that there are certain matters that are not monetized by prediction markets.”

Murphy told me that while his bill only addresses the manipulation component, Democrats are exploring broader restrictions on prediction markets in the United States.

“I think there’ll be a suite of pieces of legislation that will allow us to take a more comprehensive look,” he said. “For my part, this bill doesn’t cover the waterfront in terms of what is concerning in these markets. But this seems to be the most urgent problem right now because there is such obvious deep corruption happening inside this White House.”

There are no online betting odds currently listed on the chances of this bill getting passed. But if we had to wager, we’d say it faces an uphill battle in Congress. Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic adviser to and investor in Polymarket, one of the biggest online betting markets. And there is continuous speculation that bettors with inside information are moving to profit off of Trump administration actions. All of which would make it uncomfortable for Republicans to attach themselves to a piece of legislation like this—lest they look like they’re acknowledging a problem with Trump-related corruption.

“Listen, I think that this is really hard issue for Republicans right now,” Murphy said. “There’s not a lot of evidence that Republicans are willing to stand up to President Trump when he’s making money corruptly.”

Regular Press Pass readers will recognize the basic contours of this story. Another straightforward anti-corruption measure, a ban on congressional stock-trading, has already died on the vine. Anyone who took civics in high school could have predicted that Congress wouldn’t want to limit its own ability to be corrupt. And anyone who’s seen American politics for the past decade could have predicted that Republicans would not do anything to prevent corruption in the Trump administration. It’s just as the Founders intended.

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Kash for clunkers

FBI Director Kash Patel is hard at work these days. Between drinking and partying at the Olympics, jetting to his girlfriend’s concerts on the taxpayer’s dime, and meeting his childhood heroes, Patel deserves a little something extra, like a custom pair of Nikes.

The shoes feature a large “9” around the mudguard (Patel is the ninth director of the FBI), his personal “K$H” logo on the tongue, Marvel’s Punisher skull on the left heel, and the FBI motto, “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity” on the right heel. The color scheme gives a hint of saddle shoe, or maybe Pittsburgh Steelers fandom.

Aesthetically speaking, the shoes are a catastrophe. This often happens when someone without good taste receives carte blanche for unlimited customizations.

Unfortunately for any Patel superfans out there, these appear to be one-of-ones. You won’t be able to get them unless you have too much time to spend on the Nike ID website. I suppose you could always get the original ugly MAGA sneakers.

Bootlickers on the ground

Senate Republicans have been careful to avoid getting over their skis when it comes to the Trump administration’s war in Iran.

While President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have at times referred to the operation as a “war,”1 GOP lawmakers have been fastidious about calling it anything else. “Boots on the ground” is the other phrase they mincingly dance around, since at that point it becomes pretty much impossible to insist this is an “excursion,” as Trump likes to say, clearly confusing that word for “incursion.” But it’s getting harder for them.

That’s because it seems evident that boots being put on the ground in Iran is where this thing is heading. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) emerged from a classified briefing about the Iran operation on Tuesday and told reporters he now had “more questions than answers, especially about the cost of the war.” He also said the administration’s stated goals suggest that American troops will be deployed into Iran soon, which would be a significant change from the ongoing air mission.

“I emerged from this briefing dissatisfied and angry, frankly, that I have for any past briefing in my fifteen years in the Senate,” Blumenthal said. “I am most concerned about the threat to American lives of potentially deploying our sons and daughters on the ground in Iran. We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran to accomplish any of the potential objectives.”

With the exception of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has openly bragged about his role in coaching the Israelis to better convince Trump of the military campaign’s necessity, Republicans senators are nervous about a longer-term conflict that could include American troops in Iran.

“I don’t believe that,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told me of Blumenthal’s assessment. “I’m on the Intelligence Committee, and I haven’t heard any discussion of [troops on the ground in Iran].”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who also serves on the Intelligence Committee, told me the idea that the administration is moving towards a troop deployment “was not my impression at all.”

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Following a ten-year period that featured two Republican-led, inequitable, deficit-ballooning tax cut bills, some Democrats are attempting to create a new narrative about which party knows what’s best for Americans’ taxes.

In just the past week, Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) have each unveiled a tax reform plan they claim would leave the average worker better off while forcing the ultra-wealthy to pay more into the system. While their proposals differ on a number of points, both call for cutting taxes for a large share of the population—something Democrats have not been historically known for advocating. The proposals enraged progressives who are eager to enter an aggressive rebuilding mode if Democrats regain power in the 2026 and 2028 elections.

“I think just taking the proposals at face value is important at this point,” Will Raderman, a senior policy advisor at the Searchlight Institute, told me in an interview. “And knowing that there’s only so much spending that you can do on new kinds of reforms, I think the attention and effort would be much better suited on other proposals.”

While Raderman praised part of Booker’s plan that would significantly expand the child tax credit, he said there’s likely room for it to be even larger if much of the proposal’s costs weren’t weighed down by such a large standard deduction—that is, the base amount that all taxpayers would be able to earn untaxed under the proposal.

“Could you actually do an even more robust CTC [Child Tax Credit] if you didn’t do the standard deduction components? Could you expand health care and improve health care in a lot of key ways? Could you fix the unemployment system? Could you improve job training pathways?” Raderman added. “I think what’s important to keep in mind is, if part of the proposal costs trillions and trillions of dollars, the ability to actually focus on and do a whole bunch of really important agenda items gets that much harder, and probably means we can’t do those.”

I spoke with Booker about his proposal, which features a $75,000 standard deduction1 as well as expanded tax credits for low-income earners and Americans with children. When I asked about the holes in his plan like the ones Raderman pointed out, Booker pushed back, arguing that overall, “the median earner is gonna see an eighty-five percent cut on their taxes, which is significant.”

He added that his plan “is equitable in the sense that you’re making sure that working people get to keep more of their money . . . a significant amount.”

“The Democratic party has got to get its act together and stop thinking that when a bold idea comes forward, it means that all the other important things don’t get done,” Booker said. “This is the biggest unrigging of our tax system that there is.”

However, neither Van Hollen’s nor Booker’s plan is meant to be ready for the legislative process right out of the box. When a prospective presidential candidate introduces a proposal—particularly a tax code overhaul—of this magnitude, their deeper goal is to advance a narrative about fairness and the dignity of work for the sorts of people whose votes the candidate might need to win someday. The proposal itself is not expected to also receive a committee mark up, floor vote, and due consideration in the House while Republicans control the government. Amplify, not codify, is the key verb.

In the lead-up to the 2016 elections,2 Republican presidential hopefuls floated all kinds of ideas that were poorly received or made little practical sense. Former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal proposed the elimination of the standard deduction and a two percent tax rate for the lowest earners in order to be able to use the tagline that “every American has some skin in this game.” Reality television celebrity Donald Trump wanted to eliminate the Head of Household filing status. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made his proposal into spectacle by printing out physical copies of the U.S. tax code and then shredding the stacks of paper with a chainsaw and a woodchipper. Later, Paul would continue to ply this theme by shooting the tax code with a rifle.

The Republican proposals did succeed. They were eventually cobbled together into a single plan that became law through the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed corporate tax rates and redefined the brackets and standard deductions. Excluding Paul’s paper mutilation fetish videos, the TCJA took a little bit from most of the primary candidates’ proposals.

Booker, Van Hollen, and likely many other potential 2028 Democratic hopefuls are proposing these plans to make it known that they are eager to address the tax system. It’s obvious that the guiding ideas are stricter enforcement for the wealthy and greater lenience for the middle class. Like all drafts, these current plans might not be ready for prime time. But they indicate a direction, and it’s one that will probably poll better than last summer’s Republican tax cut law.

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Open bigotry

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) posted a bigoted statement on X Monday, adding his name in ink to the growing list of Islamophobic members in the House.

“The burqas and hijabs have no place in this country,” Ogles posted over the weekend. “Let’s make America look like America again.”

Ogles is hardly the first congressional Republican to declare that all Muslims are unwelcome in this country and a threat to the United States. But he is the most recent to say so out loud.

While the House has been out, Ogles’s tweets have not received any condemnation from the chamber’s Republican leaders. Neither, for that matter, have similar comments from Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.). Both men have made remarks about Muslims that run exactly counter to American values, but because Republicans are so afraid of losing their razor-thin majority, Speaker Mike Johnson has downplayed the egregiousness of their comments. While they used different language than Johnson would, the speaker said this morning, they were voicing legitimate concerns, because of “popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law on America is a serious problem.”

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Shoegazing

Trump is obsessed with aesthetics, and more often than not, his preferences are garish or downright obscene. But lately, he’s developed a new interest in deciding what shoes his top staffers will wear in and around the White House—and in all honesty, his choices in this area are not bad.

The Wall Street Journal’s Alex Leary reports:

Trump has been gifting footwear to agency heads, lawmakers, White House advisers and VIPs. “Did you get the shoes?” he asks at cabinet meetings. Some people have laced up in the Oval Office. During a lunch meeting in January, Trump suddenly pivoted to his “incredible” new shoes and gave Tucker Carlson a pair of brown wingtips.

“All the boys have them,” said a female White House official. Another joked, “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” The shoe-salesman-in-chief is paying attention.

Trump has fallen in love with Florsheim, the American brand that’s been pairing comfort and style for more than a century. They’re also affordable: many cost $145.

Look, I’ve never hesitated to criticize the footwear choices of the MAGA movement. But Florsheim is a quality American maker of Goodyear-welted shoes, which can be resoled, as well as cheaper models that have cemented soles; you can find high-quality vintage pairs on eBay for even less.3 (If you want to spend a little bit more money to get a pair of new, reasonably priced, high-quality shoes, though, I’d recommend checking out Meermin.)

Trump’s decision to clad his staff in polished Florsheims is an objectively good thing. The scourge of dress sneakers has lingered in Washington for far too long. It’s also good that they’re uniformly black—there’s minimal room for error with a clean black oxford.

Read the whole article.

The [White] House always wins

Prediction markets have taken the country by storm over the past year, allowing Americans to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” as Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour candidly put it. Among those monetizable differences of opinion are American foreign policy decisions. The chaos the Trump administration has generated in that domain in recent weeks has given rise to concerns that people with secret knowledge of unannounced policy are using their access to enrich themselves through novel forms of market manipulation and insider trading.

Like dogfighting, gambling on war is the sort of hobby that is best described in simple, direct moral terms. (“Satanic” was the one that came to my mind.) But I wanted to pose the question about regulating or banning this industry to some of the lawmakers who are familiar with prediction markets. In all honesty, it’s a small crowd. The answers I got revealed that members of Congress are mulling legislation to ban the practice outright.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) emphasized the corrupting nature of these markets, which enable individuals with a direct role in policy to place wagers on outcomes that they can ensure will come to pass—textbook insider trading, but with an extra dimension of ghoulishness when violence and destruction are the result.

“To me, it’s pretty clear there were people inside the White House who were making bets on Friday that war would start on Saturday,” Murphy told me. “That particular bet—that war will occur within twenty-four hours—was not a normal bet that was being made on Polymarket. It was made on one day, Friday, by an unusually high number of people.”

“Unquestionably, that is people at the White House or friends of the White House,” he added. “So the Iran war is a disaster on its merits, but it is facilitating a new kind of corruption in the White House in which people are making money through Polymarket and Kalshi on war.”

Murphy said he is in the process of drafting a ban on gambling on government activity through prediction markets, with “some exceptions for bond markets and financial markets.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told me the concept is

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IRAQN

How are senators approaching the Trump administration’s unilateral military action in Iran? To gain some perspective, I found it useful to speak with some of the lawmakers who were around in 2003 when Capitol Hill was enveloped in debate over the Bush administration’s actions toward Iraq.

I spoke to two senators—one who supported that war and one who opposed it—about how it compares to the one they’re being asked to support now.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was in his second term when he cast his vote against the Iraq War authorization in 2003.

“The Constitution states very clearly that the initiation of war requires the approval of the Congress and this is a war—they said it themselves,” Reed said. “We’re at war, and they haven’t even made serious attempts to brief us beforehand and to get our permission.”

Contrast Reed’s clear assessment with the murky response I received from Iraq War supporter Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) when I asked her to compare the two wars.

“That’s a very open-ended question,” she said, demurring. When I then asked if we are now at war, Collins said, “I’ve just had a classified briefing and I’m not gonna . . .” before cutting herself off to step into an elevator. It’s not clear to me whether Collins feels ambivalent about the military campaign or she just found herself at a loss for words about it.

The senior senator from Maine is up again for re-election this campaign cycle, but she has a lot less political momentum this time around. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, just 27 percent of respondents said they approve of the strikes on Iran, with most expressing concerns about Trump’s eagerness to use military force and possibility of American casualties. Contrast this with the polling leading up to the Iraq War in 2003, when a majority of Americans supported removing Saddam Hussein.

Most of the senators serving today were not around during the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but I hope they know that history. They will have to deal with significant political consequences if they repeat it.

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What is a war?

President Donald Trump and Republican leaders have been all over the place in defining the nature of their military actions in Iran. That’s left many GOP lawmakers at a loss for how to discuss the specifics of what is happening, fearful that any misstatement could be viewed as intentional dissent.

Trump himself called it war while discussing the recent American deaths as a result of the conflict.

“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties,” Trump said. “That often happens in war.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also called it war, although perhaps inadvertently, since the word is built into a cliché he was using to give his remarks some extra gravity: “As the president warned, an effort of this scope will include casualties. War is hell and always will be.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the president’s national security advisor, told reporters in the Capitol Monday that we are bombing Iran purely as a defensive action, albeit one premised on an offensive action the Israeli government had decided to take.

“The assessment . . . was made that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties. And so the president made the very wise decision,” he said. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties. . . . And then we would be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson parroted Rubio’s narrative, saying, “Israel was determined to act on their own defense here with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deemed to be an existential threat.”

“The president was acting well within his authority,” Johnson added. “What I just told you is the scope of what happened here and the situational awareness that they had at the time to make this decision. It was not—it’s not a declaration of war. . . . It’s defensive in nature and design.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), whose War Powers resolution constraining the president’s ability to continue this military engagement is slated for a vote this week, dismissed Rubio’s assessment as a bastardization of American foreign policy.

“Wait, the imminent threat was that Israel was gonna attack Iran? Yeah, that is what’s called a pretext, not an imminent threat,” he said.

“If we could just get Iran or Israel or some other nation to attack anyone we want . . . suddenly everything’s an imminent threat, right?” he continued. “Our foreign policy is not determined by what some other nation does. It should be determined by our own national interest.”

But much like Collins, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, chuckled and refused to answer my question of how he would define this conflict and whether it should be characterized as a war.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, expressed a great deal of confidence despite the paucity of information made public.

“We did not declare—the president did not declare war,” Hagerty told me. “What he’s done is a very targeted operation to take out the ballistic missile manufacturing capacity and the launch capacity of Iran. The mission is ahead of schedule. I think it’s been very successful.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) was candid about the confusing nature of the military operation. Whether it counts as a war is, to him, an open question.

“Uh, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the briefing [on Tuesday] so that we can get an idea.”

“A lot of that has to do with the idea with whether or not it’s long-term,” Tillis added. “If it’s regime change, that doesn’t happen in a month, particularly in a part of the world as complex as Iran. So we just need to hear what the—if there is—I think there was a little bit of an adjustment of language in terms of the objective being regime change. So we just need to see that.”

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Ice skating

Here’s an interesting story about a Russian man who finds and prepares spots to skateboard along the frozen rivers a few hours outside of Moscow.

In an interview with Jenkem magazine, Ilya Batrakov explained some of the challenges of skating in subzero temperatures over obstacles with an organic geometry. The list of hazards can even include falling through the ice.

How do you get used to skateboarding in such an extreme climate?
It’s a battle every time. It’s almost like Mission Impossible. But I like that it’s a battle with myself. I compete with myself, and over time I’ve gotten used to it.

There is a special thing about this type of skateboarding. Some of these spots exist only as long as two or three days. Depending on the weather conditions, sometimes spots can break with your own body from a slam. With a normal spot you can go back, find a better moment, wait for better conditions, but here something is going to be different if you wait. The water level might be different or the structure will change. Everything only exists for a very limited period of time.

What can you do to make a spot easier to skate?
Almost all of them need to be cleaned up, but that’s the easy part. Sometimes I shape them with a chainsaw, and sometimes I use water. You can spill water on the runup, and it gets frozen and becomes ice. You can also use ash from a fireplace for better grip.

Why don’t you just try snowboarding instead of going through all this trouble?
For snowboarding you need real mountains, and we don’t really have mountains around Moscow. I’ve snow skated a little bit, but it’s not as interesting as normal skateboarding. . . .

Have you ever been in a scary situation where you needed help out on the river?

The craziest thing is falling through the ice. It happened twice. One time it was negative 28 degrees celsius. That’s super cold. I was doing a spot check that was really far away. I took a bus, and then took a half day hike to get there. When I fell through I did some quick analyses about what I should do, and I came to the conclusion that it was safer to try and start a fire and dry up before trying to get home. Luckily I was able to start a fire and I semi-burned my clothes and dried them.

Read the whole interview and check out the amazing pictures. There’s no paywall.

Weird War Tales

As President Donald Trump amasses the largest U.S. military presence in the Middle East since the onset of the Iraq War, he’s done very little to convince Congress or the public why it’s necessary—or, for that matter, what it’s even for.

After ordering strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last July, Trump declared the country’s production capabilities to have been “completely and totally obliterated.” In an interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law on Fox News last Saturday, though, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.” Clearly, Trump’s assessment of last summer’s strike was his typical poppycock, or Witkoff’s is (or both), but does that mean we’re simply back to where the Iran hawks, Benjamin Netanyahu, and others have been saying we are for the last three decades? Needless to say, lawmakers aren’t convinced the administration is being forthcoming about the true state of play.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Wednesday that he has not seen any evidence to back up Witkoff’s nuclear enrichment claims. Asked what his questions were for the White House regarding our expanded military presence in the region, Reed replied broadly, “What’s the purpose? What’s the objective?”

Other top lawmakers are similarly alarmed.

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Join me inside the State of the Union

It’s time for another State of the Union address from President Donald Trump. (Please excuse my over-the-top enthusiasm.) If you’ve taken a high school government class, you’ll know that the State of the Union was submitted in writing for much of American history, but nowadays it’s conducted in a primetime address before a joint session of Congress.1 This gives the president an opportunity to brag about his accomplishments and admonish his political adversaries.

Trump has promised that his speech will be unusually long. If you still want to tune in, please join The Bulwark’s livestream beginning at 8:50 p.m. EST. If you’d prefer not to have to listen to Trump’s voice for that long but do want to stay engaged, then I have another option for you.

At The Bulwark, we like to do things a bit differently. That’s why during tonight’s SOTU I’m going to try something that I don’t think has been done before: host an AMA on Reddit from inside the House chamber. Up in the press gallery, the demands of decorum are fairly strict: You must remain quiet, show no signs of approval or disapproval, and (officially permitted videographers and photographers excepted), you are not allowed to take any photos. But posting to social media or filing an article would be totally within bounds. So tonight, hit me up with your questions, and I’ll give you a perspective from behind the cameras in the most packed room in Washington.

We’ll get started when Trump does. Keep an eye out for our post in the r/politics subreddit to join in.

Majority report

The scandal involving Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) keeps getting worse. The Texas lawmaker is alleged to have had an affair with a congressional staffer who later ended her life by self-immolation. Newly released text messages show the Republican lawmaker repeatedly pressured the staffer to send him explicit photos.

In more normal times, Gonzales’s behavior would prompt a swift resignation and condemnatory statements from party leadership. But the Republican majority in the House is in dire straits: With the balance of power in the chamber resting at 218–214, the GOP can afford only two defections2 with full attendance before they lose their ability to pass legislation.

House Speaker Mike Johnson knows all about the hazards of his shrunken majority; it’s a problem he’s at grips with week in and week out. It’s only natural, then, that he would be reluctant to do anything that could further shrink his majority. In the Capitol Monday, Johnson made a very high-minded–sounding statement to a gaggle of reporters that he wants the investigations into Gonzales to play out before making any kind of judgment.

These are serious accusations, and it must be taken seriously, and I’ve told him he’s got to address that with his constituents and he’s in the process of doing that. My understanding, there’s an investigation in the state of Texas on these matters and has been going for some time, and the Office of Congressional Conduct has also—it’s been reported—they’ve been looking at it. All of that was news to me. But I think, as in every case, that you have to allow the investigations to play out and all the facts to come out. I’ve been intellectually consistent about this, whether you’re talking about Republicans or Democrats. You have to let the system play out.

Johnson added that he opposed the 2023 expulsion of former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) “because he had been accused of a crime, been indicted, but not found guilty.”

“If the accusation of something is going to be a litmus test for someone being able to continue to serve in the House, you’ll have a lot of people who’d have to resign or be removed or expelled from Congress,” Johnson said. “So I think you gotta allow this to play out.”

Johnson’s comparison of Gonzales to Santos isn’t quite fair. Santos had been indicted for fraud and was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 87 months in prison, a sentence he started to serve before a pardon from Trump got him out. His was a classic case of corruption, and appropriate redress ultimately belonged to the courts.

Gonzales is accused of something quite different. His wrongdoing might not be as straightforwardly prosecutable as Santos’s by-the-book crimes, but it does speak profoundly to his character in a way that would normally be summarily disqualifying.

Regardless of these differences, Johnson didn’t believe either lawmaker’s scandal warranted a clear condemnation. But many House Republicans have already called for Gonzales to step aside, their party’s tenuous majority be damned.

Reps. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) posted that Gonzales should forgo his re-election campaign.

“America deserves better,” wrote Gill. “Tony should drop out of the race.”

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) stopped short of calling for a resignation, but said Gonzales’s behavior “brings dishonor on the House of Representatives.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) went further, writing, “The allegations against Congressman Tony Gonzales are deeply disturbing: a sitting Member of Congress accused of soliciting explicit photos from a staffer and subjecting her to graphic sexual texts. This is an abuse of power.”

“Congressional staff serve their country,” Mace added. “They should never have to endure predatory behavior from the people they work for. Congressman Gonzales must address these allegations and resign.”

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Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) called for Gonzales to step down immediately. She also tagged the National Republican Congressional Committee in a tweet with a directive to fund the campaign of Brandon Herrera, one of Gonzales’s challengers in the GOP primary for Texas’s 23rd district.

The House Freedom Caucus’s campaign arm also capitalized on Gonzales’s troubles, endorsing Herrera Monday afternoon. Don’t mistake that for a real moral stand. The Freedom Caucus has plenty of degenerates and bad husbands in their club. But they are keen to back primary challenges to lawmakers they deem insufficiently MAGA, especially when those lawmakers enjoy the backing of House leadership.

Asked by CNN on Tuesday whether he would step down, Gonzales said, “I am not gonna resign. I work every day for the people of Texas.”

“What you’ve seen is not all the facts,” he added.

For now, Gonzales does not feel obligated to step down, and Republican leadership continues to refrain from asking him to do so. This is not just because of the math of the current House majority. It is also a result of the party’s moral decay. In the past, even thin majorities with tough votes ahead have proven capable of ridding themselves of scumbags and criminals when their wrongdoing came to light. Past speakers, including Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, and Kevin McCarthy,3 all dealt with colleagues who had sex scandals, and each pursued resignations and investigations as appropriate. Johnson appears to have laid down that torch.

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Bullying works

It’s been well documented here at Press Pass that Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has a problem with the computer. He seems to consume an endless amount of online swill while compulsively posting weird, dishonest, or downright cruel takes on whatever catches his attention in his feed. But over the weekend, there was an unexpected development in the Sen. iPad Kid file: Lee seemed to show regret over one of his posts.

Amid the news that cartel members across Mexico went on a murderous rampage in retaliation for a military operation that killed their leader, Lee found a bizarre way to make the conversation about the domestic policy preferences of American Democrats:

I don’t think he thought this one through before posting. It’s almost as though he is criticizing Dems for not behaving the way they might in a political cartoon by Ben Garrison.

Lee’s Democratic colleagues started windmill-dunking on him in the quote-tweets.

“Oh dear Mike. I literally couldn’t make our argument better than you do,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn). “The bad guys wear masks. The good guys don’t.”

“Mike, I would like ICE to have the same standards as a local police department, not cartel hitmen,” added Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

Lee ultimately deleted the post. Is he learning something at last? Probably not. But isn’t it nice to think so?

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Judge dread

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN your colleagues are targeted in an obviously political investigation to stifle their right to freedom of expression? On Capitol Hill, not much, apparently. Democrats are furious at Republicans for supporting or ignoring the Trump administration’s failed attempt (possibly the first of several) to indict six Democratic House members and senators—all military or intelligence community veterans—for making a video telling U.S. service members that they have a legal and moral duty not to follow unlawful orders.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro, who reportedly enlisted an inexperienced dance photographer/lawyer to prosecute the case, was unsuccessful in her attempt to convince a grand jury to indict the six Democrats.1 (Not only did she not convince the grand jury: She reportedly failed to convince even a single member there was probable cause.)

A couple of Republicans did manage to publicly speak out against the attempted indictment. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), whose journey towards retirement has coincided with his renewed interest in making occasional breaks with Republican orthodoxy, said, “Political lawfare waged by either side undermines America’s criminal justice system, which is the gold standard of the world. Thankfully in this instance, a jury saw the attempted indictments for what they really were. Political lawfare is not normal, not acceptable, and needs to stop.”

“I think our law enforcement people ought to be spending their time on making our community safe and going after real law-breakers,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, quipped to reporters.

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Howard hunt

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick clearly wasn’t forthright about the extent of his relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker.

In a New York Post podcast interview in October, Lutnick claimed he visited Epstein’s home in New York City only once, prior to the latter’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a prostitute and soliciting a minor. Lutnick said that he was so put off by “that disgusting person” that he had no contact with him after that. “That’s my story,” Lutnick added, “a one-and-absolutely-done.”

That was a lie.

According to documents included in the Justice Department’s latest legally mandated release of Epstein files, the largest batch to date, Lutnick regularly communicated with “that disgusting person” for years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. He went into business with him. He even visited Epstein’s notorious island where many crimes allegedly took place.

Even the culture-warring Republican commentator Erick Erickson, who is cynical about whether anyone in politics or media has an authentic desire for justice when it comes to Epstein’s crimes, wrote that Lutnick “clearly lied about his relationship with Epstein, which turned out to be much deeper and lasted much longer than Lutnick said.”

The Commerce Department and the Trump White House both spent yesterday defending Lutnick by casting blame on the media instead of explaining the secretary’s dishonest statements to the New York Post. But on Tuesday, Lutnick was left to defend himself when he appeared on Capitol Hill for a hearing on funding for broadband. He took the moment to downplay his relationship with Epstein, saying:

Probably the total—and you’ve seen all of these documents, of these millions and millions of documents—there may be ten emails connecting me with [Epstein], probably about ten emails connecting me with him over a fourteen-year period. I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person, OK?

Lutnick also admitted to visiting Epstein’s island for lunch while on a boat trip with his family. He said he did not interact on the island with Epstein’s longtime collaborator, the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

Prior to the hearing, there were already bipartisan calls for Lutnick to step down over his Epstein lies. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told CNN in an interview that Lutnick has “a lot to answer for, but really, he should make life easier on the president, frankly, and just resign.”

“Lutnick’s lies about his business dealings with a convicted child sex offender . . . raise serious concerns about his judgement and ethics,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Lutnick has no business being our Commerce Secretary, and he should resign immediately.”

In a different country, this might be enough to move the needle. Government officials overseas have already stepped down over Epstein revelations.

But in the second Trump administration, one doesn’t succumb to scandal, one endures it. Lutnick gave no indication on Tuesday that he was thinking of leaving his post. And Republicans in Congress beyond Massie didn’t seem particularly inclined to demand he do so.

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a member of the Commerce Committee that oversaw Lutnick’s confirmation, told me he didn’t know much about the secretary’s longstanding relationship with Epstein. But what he did know is that the Obama administration deserves blame for failing to go after Epstein in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

“I mean, obviously you got to separate between people that are just mentioned, meaning that they were copied on an email or an email sent that had nothing to do with that, versus the people who actively participated in the grotesque behavior. I mean, those are two different categories, right?” Moreno said. “But ultimately, this is really old stuff that I wish that Obama and his Justice Department had really gone after.”

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Leaving aside the fact that Epstein’s plea deal came together during the George W. Bush administration under future Trump 1.0 cabinet member Alex Acosta, I noted to Moreno that some of Lutnick’s correspondence with Epstein happened as recently as 2018. Obama had been out of the White House for some time by then, and Trump was in the Oval.

“Right, well, again, if Biden and Obama’s Justice Department had really gone after him in a substantial way, you know, President Trump didn’t take office until ’18,” Moreno said, wrongly (it was 2017). “So it’s a shame because a lot of this stuff gets lost with time, right? Because now time goes by, you can’t interview people, etcetera.”

“But I would be careful saying somebody’s mentioned because they were copied on an email or ‘Hey, are you going to a party?’ that has nothing to do with anything other than a White House event or ‘I saw you at this breakfast’ and that has nothing to do with the terrible behavior,” Moreno added.

Asked if Lutnick’s later correspondence with Epstein at least demonstrated a lack of character judgment, Moreno’s loquaciousness started to ebb. He averred that he had “not followed [it] that closely.”

As of now, it remains unlikely that the new revelations of the true extent of Lutnick’s relationship with Epstein will prompt the GOP-run House Oversight Committee to rope him into their Epstein investigation. They are actively pursuing testimony from a wide range of Epstein associates, including former President Bill Clinton. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) told me on Monday that Democrats on Oversight will be strategizing about next steps. But they won’t be the ones making decisions about whether to subpoena Lutnick. That call will come from Big Jim.

“We’ve got a lot of very important people we’re trying to bring in to answer questions,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the Oversight Committee, told reporters Monday. “We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the five that we have on the books. So we’ll see what happens here and we’ll move forward.”

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Icelandic influence

As President Trump, during his speech at Davos last month, discussed his wish for the United States to take over Greenland—by military means, if necessary—he repeatedly seemed to swap the name of the country with that of Iceland, its smaller neighbor to the south. In light of the potentially alarming implications of the flub, the government of Iceland did what any reasonable governing entity would do: It turned to K Street.

In a filing initiated February 1 but dated a few days later, Iceland’s ambassador to the United States, Svanhildur Hólm Valsdóttir, contracted Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a major K Street law firm and lobby shop, to “provide strategic advice on navigating engagements with the United States government.”

The mundane language on the Icelandic government’s Foreign Agents Registration Act filing should not be misconstrued as a sign that they are hiring the firm to provide run-of-the-mill service. In FARA and lobbying disclosures, the stated purpose of the contract is often much more serious than it appears on paper. (For instance, “DOJ related issues” can often mean something closer to “seeking a presidential pardon.”)

Under the contract, Iceland’s government is paying Brownstein et al. $25,000 per month for at least the next six months.

The timing of the deal is the biggest tell, however. Not only did it come just a week after Trump’s repeated apparent substitution of Iceland for Greenland in his belligerent Davos speech, but earlier in January, Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Iceland, Billy Long, joked to his former House colleagues that the country would become America’s 52nd state with himself installed as its governor.

Long later apologized, and his nomination remains in limbo.

“There was nothing serious about that, I was with some people, who I hadn’t met for three years, and they were kidding about Jeff Landry being governor of Greenland and they started joking about me and if anyone took offense to it, then I apologize,” he said.

But the scary—even if unserious—behavior was clearly enough to leave a bad taste in the mouths of Iceland’s political leaders. The Trump administration’s obsession with the Arctic has Europe in a panic, and seeking expert counsel in Washington is usually the first step in navigating (or avoiding) a crisis such as a hostile takeover by a foreign power.

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Whoops

The New York Times editorial board rarely admits when they’ve gotten something wrong. But the paper’s readers were treated to the once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence on Monday when the board shared some very stark realizations they had come to about the failures of widespread marijuana legalization.

According to the Times editorial:

This editorial board has long supported marijuana legalization. In 2014, we published a six-part series that compared the federal marijuana ban to alcohol prohibition and argued for repeal. Much of what we wrote then holds up — but not all of it does.

At the time, supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use.

It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong. Legalization has led to much more use. Surveys suggest that about 18 million people in the United States have used marijuana almost daily (or about five times a week) in recent years. That was up from around six million in 2012 and less than one million in 1992. More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol.

This wider use has caused a rise in addiction and other problems. Each year, nearly 2.8 million people in the United States suffer from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which causes severe vomiting and stomach pain. More people have also ended up in hospitals with marijuana-linked paranoia and chronic psychotic disorders. Bystanders have also been hurt, including by people driving under the influence of pot.

The Times stops short of endorsing a return to the national prohibition the United States had for decades. But the board does argue that many serious reforms are needed to prevent or mitigate the problems that have quickly emerged as a result of unfettered access.

While reporting on Capitol Hill, I’ve noticed how many elected officials now embrace recreational marijuana policies, in no small part because of the increased business interests that sprang up in response to legalization. But it’s clearly causing a lot more problems than its original advocates envisioned.

Read the whole editorial, and let me know how you feel in the comments.

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Comer’s odyssey

Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) accomplished another feat this week by successfully compelling former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testify in the committee’s ongoing investigation of all things related to Jeffrey Epstein. The Democratic power couple had initially rebuffed their subpoenas, but after some back and forth and a bipartisan contempt markup, the Clintons agreed to the committee’s demands.

“Once it became clear that the House of Representatives would hold them in contempt, the Clintons completely caved and will appear for transcribed, filmed depositions this month,” Comer gushed in a statement Tuesday.

But it turns out that the most important member of Comer’s audience, President Donald Trump, might not be so pleased with the move.

“I think it’s a shame, to be honest,” Trump said Tuesday in the Oval Office after a question about Clinton appearing before the committee. “I hate to see it in many ways. I hate to see it, but, you know, then I look at me, they went after me—like, you know, they wanted me to go to jail for the rest of my life. Then it turned out I was innocent.”

It was a rare and revealing moment for the president in that he seemed to show an understanding of the bigger picture. To make clear what I think he realized: House Republicans have just created a precedent that allows Congress to compel former presidents to testify under threat of contempt, which can result in charges that may lead to jail time. And Trump could be the next person to be targeted in this way if circumstances change on Capitol Hill.

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The Lobster Roll-back

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) proudly announced on Thursday that ICE was ceasing special operations in Maine. The Pine Tree State, with its relatively large Somali population, had been targeted by the agency as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort, which in other states has resulted in harassment of U.S. citizens, family separations, and death. Before Collins intervened, Maine had come in for its share of anxiety and state violence: During the operation, many students stayed home from school out of fear, and in one particularly egregious episode, agents shattered the window of a car with a month-old baby in it. But just days after it began, the operation was over.

ICE’s short Maine stay illustrates a pattern that has emerged since Trump began his second stint in the White House: The administration will implement its signature policies in the state, but only temporarily or provisionally. That seems due to Collins.

The senator appears to consistently win exemptions for Maine—those Lobster Roll-backs—because the administration appears to be intent on preserving her political career.

To wit: Immediately upon entering office last year, Trump initiated a hiring freeze across federal agencies. The Russell Vought–led Office of Personnel Management, DOGE, and others in the administration would soon after begin their work of cutting whatever they could out of the federal workforce, including by offering deferred resignations. A few weeks later, however, Collins joined Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) in sending a letter to the acting secretary of the Navy requesting that the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard be made exempt from these workforce reduction policies. In March, Collins secured the exemption.

She wasn’t done there. Panic about DOGE’s activities began setting in across Republican circles in the House and Senate within weeks of Trump’s swearing-in. Last March, as Trump started ramping up his campaign of belligerence against prominent universities, the United States Department of Agriculture suspended $30 million in federal funding for the University of Maine. The administration claimed the hold was related to a review to ensure compliance with Title IX policies (in modern GOP parlance, that means keeping MEN out of WOMEN’s sports). A couple of days after the news broke, however, Collins announced the funding had been restored:

This USDA funding is critically important not only to the University of Maine, but to our farmers and loggers, as well as to the many people who work in Maine’s agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry industries. Now that funding has been restored, the work that the University does in partnership with the many people and communities who depend on these programs can continue.

This was a short-lived victory. In April, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made good on the promise to freeze the USDA funding once again.

“Your defiance of federal law has cost your state, which is bound by Title IX in educational programming,” Rollins wrote to Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills. “Today, I am freezing Maine’s federal funds for certain administrative and technological functions in schools. This is only the beginning, though you are free to end it at any time by protecting women and girls in compliance with federal law.”

This resulted in a back-and-forth that continued throughout the year. In a May hearing, Collins questioned Rollins about the status of USDA funding in Maine, saying the administration’s mixed messaging “creates a lot of uncertainty.” After a legal fight, the administration settled with the state and the funding was restored.

In April, Collins raced to get funding restored for Maine’s Sea Grant program from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; it had been abruptly canceled the month prior following a hostile interaction between Trump and Mills on the subject of trans athletes. Collins succeeded in getting the money back after pleading with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to “renegotiate” the funding.

Collins has quite the advantage over her Republican Senate colleagues on these fronts. Because she is the most vulnerable GOP incumbent in the Senate, she can get MAGA credit for voting for and actively facilitating the rollout of Trump’s least-popular policies across the country while at the same time being given an exemption from them that protects her own constituents from their effects. It’s discomfiting to imagine what some of her GOP colleagues might do to gain similarly special treatment from Trump.

But while Collins has managed to call in enough favors to soften the blow of Trump 2.0 on her own voters, it hasn’t been without potentially incurring some political damage. Mills, one of Collins’s possible opponents this fall, foregrounded ICE’s presence in her first television campaign ad.

Depending on who you ask, Collins’s ability to protect Maine from ICE, hiring freezes, revoked funding, and DOGE could provide grounds for describing her in multiple contradictory ways: as an invaluable asset to her state; an obstacle to a Democratic majority; or a good, old-fashioned RINO. She’s certainly a political survivor. Will she be in 2026 is the multi-million dollar question.

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House Folding Caucus

The Senate closed out last week by passing a funding package for most of the government. Lawmakers paired that with a two-week continuing resolution specifically for the Department of Homeland Security, which is meant to provide them with extra time to negotiate a compromise on new restrictions for the agencies tasked with carrying out the main part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. Naturally, media critics and reporters were skeptical that the House would be able to band together and advance the package in this way without causing a tantrum from conservatives on the floor.

I did not doubt that the package would advance.

“Based on our discussion, we’re moving towards [voting for it],” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), one of the initial “holdouts,” told reporters in the Capitol Monday night after a meeting at the White House. “We got assurances on the standing filibuster, which is incredibly important.”

Luna and others had been toying with the prospect of tanking a rule vote today in order to force action on priorities they believe leadership has neglected. In exchange for not sabotaging the rule vote, the rascal caucus wanted a commitment from Senate Majority Leader John Thune that he would utilize the standing filibuster—a rare procedure forcing an objecting senator to literally stand and talk in order to stop consideration of a bill—to bypass the traditional filibuster on Republicans’ voter ID legislation.

“As of right now, we feel very comfortable where we’re at based on what we are discussing,” Luna added.

Feeling somewhat less comfortable, however, was Thune, who told reporters that while he did discuss the standing filibuster with Luna and others, “there weren’t any commitments made.”

Somehow this ambiguity—and, to be clear, it appears unlikely that Thune will change the Senate procedures to implement a standing filibuster—did not prevent the funding package from going ahead. After some arm-twisting by GOP leadership, a handful of angry Republicans folded and the House passed a rule vote to allow consideration for the funding bill by a vote of 217–215 on Tuesday afternoon. An hour or so later, the package passed the full House in a bipartisan vote, 217-214. It now heads to Trump’s desk for signature.

Threatening to tank the rule vote to extract commitments from leadership has become Republicans’ preferred technique in recent years. Given the razor-thin GOP majority (currently a two-vote margin of error!), rule-vote shenanigans are a strong option for doing so, although there are also other methods available to the enterprising in-house bomb-thrower. As of publication time, it was unclear whether the brief holdouts extracted the commitments they were seeking in exchange for their votes, or if they were simply bending the knee.

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Best in show

The champion show dogs you see when you watch the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show1 are not divas. (Thanks to selective breeding techniques, some are no doubt nepo-puppies—but that’s another discussion.)

It turns out that many of these dogs hold important jobs, ones they could presumably be fired from, that require more than just looking pristine on gameday. As Sarah Lyall writes in the New York Times:

In his professional life as a champion show dog, Nick the Tibetan spaniel is meant to embody the particular handsomeness of his breed: the cunning little face, the silken fur, the tail of Seussian floofiness that curls up and cascades down his back. This week he will compete for the second time at the pinnacle of canine contests, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary. (Best in show will be decided on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden.)

But Nick, who is 4 years old and formally known as Ch. Torrey’s The Price Is Right, is not just another egotistical overachiever with a fancy tail. In his private life, he works as a therapy dog at the memory care unit of a Brookdale Senior Living center in Vancouver, Wash. His job there is essentially to be himself, a 14-pound bundle of furry empathy.

With his kind eyes, enthusiastic yet respectful manner and love of being the center of attention, Nick is an excellent volunteer. Mimi Galindo, the program manager of the memory-care unit, said he had an instinct for knowing how to behave with the residents who needed him the most. “He brings joy to them in the moment,” she said. “Dogs don’t see age, just the connection.”

Many dogs are bred to perform specific tasks—retrievers to fetch birds for their owners while hunting, for instance, and Portuguese water dogs to herd fish into nets (yes, that is apparently a thing). But the most serious show dogs, who go to multiple shows a week and compete for the top national spots in their breed rankings, have little time to perform even the jobs they were born to do, let alone take on extra work.

Read the whole piece.

The ask is in

Senate Democrats made their first major stand against ICE on Thursday by voting to derail a government funding package that included taxpayer dollars for the Department of Homeland Security as well as several other areas of the federal budget. They were joined by a handful of other Republicans to defeat the measure by a vote of 45–55.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had announced Democrats’ demands to reform immigration enforcement agency and the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort a day before the package came to the floor, telling reporters on Wednesday that “our caucus is unified” on these goals. Thursday’s vote means that lawmakers will now have to negotiate a new funding package with precious little time to spare before Friday night’s shutdown deadline.

Should that deadline pass without a resolution, it would only paralyze part of the federal budget. But that isn’t to say the effects wouldn’t be felt by the American people. DHS has a larger portfolio than you might expect. In addition to immigration enforcement, its budget also includes air travel security, disaster aid, the Coast Guard, and more. The package that failed in the Senate also affects other areas of government; it includes funding for defense, education, labor, health, housing, and transportation. Decoupling DHS from the rest of the package would allow the Senate to swiftly get the rest of the government funded by sending it to the president’s desk, leaving negotiations on reining in ICE and CBP as the sole issue before the Senate.

But that’s not the only demand Democrats are making. Before they are willing to support a funding package that includes DHS, they expect three specific reforms to ICE. Schumer listed them in order:

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