Missouri Republicans have been transparent about their strategy to drag out the response to a challenge to their new 7-1 congressional map, with state Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) saying publicly during a radio interview earlier this year that “delay works in our favor.”
While most of the reflecting pool coverage focuses on the reality TV-style palace intrigue among the ridiculous personas of Donald Trump, Jeanine Pirro, and Doug Burgum, pay attention to how hard the former criminal defendants in the now-dismissed “vandalism” cases push for court-ordered consequences for the misbegotten prosecutions.
As a first step, attorneys for David Hearn are asking a judge to dismiss the case with prejudice, which would keep Pirro from recharging him later. Pirro has sought to dismiss the charges without prejudice and keep her options open.
They take particular exception to Pirro’s claims that prosecutors were not aware of the fatal flaws in their case until shortly before they moved to dismiss the case. They provide a timeline of what prosecutors learned as the case unfolded that challenges the sequence of events Pirro provided the court in her motion to dismiss.
As Empty Wheel’s Marcy Wheeler notes, Hearn’s counsel also suggested to the judge in the latest filing that the court could still revisit their pending request for the grand jury materials — or review them in chambers.
There are also three other similar cases Pirro is trying to dismiss, as she tries to point the finger at Burgum and the Interior Department, save her job, and avoid court-ordered sanctions or ethics reviews.
And yet … I realize the palace intrigue has some appeal, so here you go:
U.S. District Judge John McConnell, the chief judge in Rhode Island, goes on the record about the numerous threats he’s faced after issuing several important rulings adverse to the Trump administration.
McConnell was among the judges to have received unrequested pizza deliveries, as a way a warning “We know where you live.” In his case, the name on the pizza order was Daniel Anderl, the slain son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, who was killed by a disgruntled lawyer in an attack at the judge’s New Jersey home.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, reluctantly granting the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy indictment against eight members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, including Stewart Rhodes, all of whom were convicted but later had their sentences commuted by President Trump:
This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed. Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle. The court cannot write a different ending.
Facing a tough re-election in a key Senate race, Maine Sen. Susan Collins is being given cover by Senate Republicans to vote against the nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general. She didn’t announce her opposition until after Blanche cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. With two senators still officially undecided, there remains some faux drama around the confirmation, but Collins getting a get-out-of-jail-free card confirms where this is headed.
🤯 Rep. Max Miller's interview with Jake Tapper was one of the most self-destructive things I've ever witnessed on cable news. Here's the whole thing:
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-04T21:42:31.941Z
TPM’s Hunter Walker: Colorado Republicans Attack Jewish Gov Candidate With AI ‘Cartoon Devil Horns’ Graphic
From a NYT Mag profile of Dr. Sean O’Mara, whose dietary recommendations have been embraced by Vice President JD Vance, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy:
“When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”
“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”
I just can’t with this.
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Three Republicans were running in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District primary. Trump in June endorsed Amir Hassan, a Navy Veteran, former Guantánamo guard, and Department of Homeland Security official. Hassan was up against Thomas Smith, a retired engineer, and Al Lemmo, an anti-abortion activist. In July, Smith suspended his campaign and endorsed Lemmo, who had decried Hassan as a “possible Trojan Horse candidate and lifelong Democrat.”
On Tuesday, Smith, who was no longer running, won a pretty clean victory over his Trump-endorsed former opponent.
Progressive Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), the pick of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Though the AP called Abdul El-Sayed the winner of the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan as I went to publish this post, this race turned out to be much, much closer than people expected or what polls predicted. The margin ended up being just under 1% or about 15,000 votes. We become so entranced by polls that we often fall into thinking that a candidate like El-Sayed bobbled the race at the end or Stevens mounted a comeback. There may have been some late movement. But it’s important to remember that our narrative of the race was built around polls that were simply wrong. Very wrong. It was probably always much closer than people realized. Indeed, the margin is close enough that those polls might actually have shifted the outcome of the race by depressing Stevens’ turnout or juicing El-Sayed’s. It’s a good reminder that whether you’re a volunteer, a voter, an activist, or a campaign worker you play these things out till the very end. Polls are usually right. And they’re a good guide. Except when they’re not. And this was a big “except.”
Two Republican representatives under scrutiny for allegations against them have made different decisions over the last 24 hours.
Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) is dropping his bid for reelection. The congressman was accused of sexual harassment, and an investigation by the House Ethics Committee found he made repeated, aggressive and cringe-inducing advances toward two subordinates, including sending one more than 30 cartons of ice cream on one occasion. In another case, Kate Riga wrote, he printed out his text messages with one of the women and drew hearts on them.
After much prayer and reflection, I’ve decided to withdraw from my re-election campaign. I will complete my current term. Serving Western North Carolina has been the honor of my life. Thank you for your trust, prayers, and support. God bless WNC and America.
— Congressman Chuck Edwards (@RepChuckEdwards) August 5, 2026
Edwards is a staunch Trump supporter and gave the president a “French Fries Certification” pin as he toured damage from Hurricane Helene, seemingly a reference to Edwards’ past as a McDonalds executive. Edwards also got into a confrontation with a constituent in a bizarre incident covered by TPM last year.
Ohio congressman Max Miller is a different story. Facing a deadline today to drop out, he has seemingly been trying to shore up voters’ and/or Trump’s faith in him, demanding the House Ethics Committee investigate allegations of domestic abuse and violence lodged against him and going on CNN last night in an attempt to rebut various allegations. (He claimed, for example, he had not used illegal drugs in “several years,” and that needles seen by his bed were for testosterone replacement therapy, something he noted Pete Hegseth approves of for “our entire military who are males.”) Nicole Lafond covered that bizarre cable appearance here.
Both are in tight races. Election prognosticators had in recent days given Democrats a better chance in Edwards’ NC-11, the district covering most of Western North Carolina. His exit may give Republicans time to replace him on the ballot with a stronger opponent to face Democrat Jamie Ager, a farmer.
Republicans have the opposite problem in Miller’s district, OH-7. Though Trump won it by 11, a June poll showed him leading Democrat Brian Poindexter, an iron worker, by just one point.
While we don’t yet have results in the most closely-watched race of the evening — the Michigan Democratic primary — an important theme emerged far down the ballot on Tuesday: Voters in red states rejecting ballot measures designed to give conservatives more control.
The final margins on those two GOP amendments in Missouri are really wild. Better than 4 to 1 against for both!
— The Downballot (@the-downballot.com) 2026-08-05T04:42:28.823Z
It’s Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who has concerns about Todd Blanche and will not be voting for him. Blanche needs one of two still-undecided Republicans — Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — in order to have enough votes for confirmation. The whole thing with Collins is that she usually only votes “no” on Trump administration priorities when there are enough “yes” votes that hers isn’t needed. We’ll see if, in this tough election year, anything is different this time around.
Yes, as we run out of defensive weapons.
Tighter than we expected based on the polls, at least!
NBC has called the Democratic Senate primary for Abdul El-Sayed. TPM tends to go with the AP for calls, or wait for multiple networks to call it.
Seemingly based on the NBC call, Mallory McMorrow, a third Democratic primary candidate who sought to occupy the middle ground between El-Sayed and Haley Stevens before dropping out, congratulated and endorsed El-Sayed early this morning.
Update, 6:41 a.m.: With the vast majority of the votes now in, El-Sayed and Stevens are separated by less than 20,000. El-Sayed still leads by roughly a percentage point.
The group behind an effort to force a statewide vote on Missouri Republicans’ 7-1 gerrymander filed a new lawsuit Tuesday night challenging the Secretary of State’s finding earlier in the day that its petition is “insufficient.”
Kansas voters foiled state Republicans’ latest scheme to snatch back their abortion rights Tuesday, as they voted down a constitutional amendment to change how state Supreme Court justices are chosen.
I break down some of the details in tonight’s edition of Where Things Stand here. It’s the third item in tonight’s newsletter, so just wanted to flag it. It was strange.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and a handful of women’s rights and reproductive freedom groups are sounding the alarm over recent reporting that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has vowed to use the Justice Department to roll back abortion access nationwide — a break with both President Trump’s own campaign promises that places him much further out on a limb on abortion than other Trump admin officials have been willing to go.
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) announced Tuesday — Missouri’s primary day, the latest he could legally push the decision — that he will not certify a petition that would’ve challenged Republicans’ new 7-1 gerrymander.
The 2006 midterm is often viewed today as the ur-wave election. Indeed, it’s part of the only example in recent decades of two successive wave elections, something that just 20 years later seems almost inconceivable. What’s less remembered is that almost to the very end of the cycle it was considered a very uncertain thing whether Democrats would be able to retake control of the House of Representatives, which they hadn’t controlled since the 1994 blowout. In fact, if you looked at the numbers — polls, special elections, etc. — it had been pretty clear what was coming for months. To explain this discrepancy — how official D.C. had missed what was coming — many focused on the Foley Scandal which broke in September 2006. (Mark Foley, a lightly closeted House Republican got in trouble for what we’d now call sexting with underage male pages in the House page program and was forced to resign.)
Colorado Republicans are using an image showing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Weiser with “devil horns” to mock him on social media. While a top Democrat blasted the move as a “plainly antisemitic” attack, the GOPer who created the graphic doubled down on Tuesday.
On Facebook, Sean Pond, a Republican county commissioner and former Senate candidate who posted the image, dismissed the furor and called it a “silly picture” of “two cartoon devil horns.”
“Sometimes devil horns just mean the devil. That’s why they show up in cartoons, church lessons, haunted houses, Halloween costumes, emojis, and every costume aisle in America,” Pond wrote in a post on Tuesday afternoon.
Pond’s graphics, which were posted on both X and Facebook on Sunday and Monday, showed Weiser, who is Jewish, standing in front of fiery skies with red horns atop his head. Depictions of Jews with horns are widely recognized as one of the most common types of antisemitic imagery. They have been used to associate Jews with evil and the devil since the Middle Ages. Pond used them to promote Colorado’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Victor Marx.
Pond’s pictures featured all caps text declaring Weiser “THE NEXT THREAT TO COLORADO.” One of Pond’s images touted the GOP candidate and said: “COLORADO NEEDS STRENGTH. COLORADO NEEDS FAITH. COLORADO NEEDS VICTOR MARX.”
Marx, a self-described “high-risk missionary and evangelist” who has made questionable claims about having performed exorcisms by phone and having saved as many as 45,000 women and children from abusive situations, responded positively to one of Pond’s posts on X that featured the “devil horns” graphic. He said Pond’s point about Colorado Republicans needing to unite against the “THREAT” of Weiser was “exactly right.”
“We do have to remember what’s at stake. Colorado can’t afford more division. It’s time to unite, stay focused, and win,” wrote Marx on Monday.
Pond’s Facebook defending the graphics was directed at Kyle Clark, a journalist with 9NEWS in Denver who had raised alarms about the images and noted “Weiser is outspoken about his mother’s birth in a Nazi concentration camp, his family members killed in the Holocaust, and the threat posed by antisemitism today.”
“Depicting Jewish people with horns is a centuries-old, dehumanizing, antisemitic trope,” Clark wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday.
Pond had made an earlier Facebook post in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, announcing that Clark had asked him about the graphics and sharing a lengthy statement. In it, Pond said he made the images “using AI” with a “direction … to portray Phil Weiser as evil and as the next threat to Colorado.” Pond also insisted he was unaware that Weiser, who has been Colorado’s attorney general since 2019, was Jewish.
“His religion was never considered because I did not know it,” wrote Pond. “There was no reference to Jewish people, no religious message, no dog whistle, and no hidden meaning.”
Pond further argued “Jewish politicians are subject to the same fierce political criticism as Christian politicians, Muslim politicians, atheist politicians, and everyone else seeking public power.”
“Phil Weiser does not receive immunity from political satire because of a personal fact I did not even know,” Pond added. “I will not apologize for opposing him.”
Both Marx and Pond did not immediately respond to requests for comment. TPM also reached out to Weiser’s campaign and received a statement from Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib.
“This is absolutely disgusting from Victor Marx,” Murib said. “That he calls this plainly antisemitic imagery ‘satire’ makes him an even bigger fool than everyone thinks.”
During a Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Friday, President Donald Trump touted growing “investment” into the U.S. since he took office.
“There’s never been anything like it from the standpoint of investment into our country,” Trump told reporters and members of his administration. “It’s five to six times higher than anybody has ever seen, than any other country, not just us, has ever had.”
Part of a diatribe about the economy which included a segment about his tariffs, the president was likely referring at least in part to the several trillions of dollars in foreign investment commitments his White House announced beginning last year after Trump leveraged threats of historically high tariffs as a bargaining chip with various countries. (The president employed equally aggressive tactics to elicit financial commitments and expensive gifts from U.S. companies including tech giants Apple and Nvidia.) There’s even a whole page on the White House website titled, simply, “Investments,” touting $10.7 billion in U.S. and foreign investment commitments beneath pulsating text that reads “The Trump Effect.”
The webpage frames the numbers as if they’re dollars already spent. But in many cases, they aren’t.
“The Trump approach remains to be seen,” Ryan Mulholland, a senior international economic policy fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, told TPM.
A year ago, international trade experts and economists told TPM that many foreign governments were playing Trump. Today, some investment agreements are already underway, while others have virtually no mechanism to be executed at all. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s stick approach to foreign economic relations will send real dollars flowing to U.S. companies and workers — or whether it’s just one more way for Trump to enrich himself, his family and companies allied with the president.
New money coming from foreign governments to the U.S. is up compared to last year, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And commitments for 2026 made in 2025 are much higher than those made in 2024. But they’re not the highest in history. New foreign investment commitments were nearly $20 billion higher under former President Joe Biden in 2022. And their impact on U.S. prosperity is much more of a mixed bag.
There’s no indication that new foreign investment in the U.S. stems from Trump’s trade deals, according to available federal data. And most deal-related boosts won’t show up in the most recent figures from the BEA. What is apparent in the data, though, are high-tech investments into the AI industry — new investments that are separate from Trump’s trade policy agreements, a late June research paper from the Federal Reserve showed.
The economic hallmark of Trump’s second presidential term are his tariffs, which his administration has said are aimed at correcting long-running imbalances between the U.S. and its trading partners. One of his attempts at correction — to levy blanket tariffs using a 1970s era law — was struck down by the Supreme Court. A second tariff scheme using a different provision was blocked by a lower court, too. Small businesses are suing Trump right now to overturn his administration’s third attempt at reordering global trade through tariffs, which SCOTUS ruled were a tax on the American people. All the while, Trump and his officials are hammering home the idea that the president’s savvy salesmanship has saved a failing American economy.
“I think other countries have largely figured out that they can give Trump a sort of headline that he likes, and in exchange win all of the details of a trade deal,” Mulholland said.
“Where do these deals leave us? Are we in a better position to create prosperity for everyday people? Are we in a position to work with our partners and allies around the world to solve the challenges that impact people’s lives? I think on both of those scores,” Mulholland continued, “Trump’s very sort of short-term, zero sum kind of view of trade relationships has hurt us.”
Trump is prepared to act if foreign governments fail to uphold their agreement terms, White House spokesman Kush Desai told TPM in an email.
“President Trump means what he says, and he has never hesitated to leverage the might of the American economy to hold trading partners accountable to their agreed-upon commitments,” Desai said.
Japan agreed to invest $550 billion in U.S. manufacturing sectors including semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and the shipbuilding industry with special financing provisions that mean Japan will pay for the projects at little cost to America. That deal, along with commitments on U.S. tech and manufacturing investments from Taiwan and shipbuilding from South Korea, has progressed the most.
“I guess the only place where we’ve seen some action is really on Japan’s commitments. “The conditions are [once] the project is approved, the Japanese government is obligated to provide financing for it,” Greg Auclair, a statistician and researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told TPM. “That’s a very small list right now.”
Already, Japan and Taiwan have poured about $75 billion into the U.S., Auclair said, though he noted that opaque commitment terms and novel financing mechanisms make it harder to know whether those investments are one-to-one correlations with the trade deals.
Auclair co-published a report suggesting foreign governments will have a hard time financing their commitments to the U.S. Auclair showed that even if some countries with commitments to Trump tap significant portions of their investment capacities and turn them toward the U.S., those nations would still struggle to fulfill their pledges over a 10-year timeline.
“I don’t think they will all be fulfilled,” Auclair’s co-author Adnan Mazarei told Politico in January.
Countries would essentially have to rob Peter to pay Paul — reallocating import schema to benefit the U.S. at the expense of other trading partners, selling foreign assets to purchase more American ones, and bumping up against their own debt capacities.
“Putting everything together,” Auclair told TPM, “it would be possible for them to meet the pledges but very difficult.”
An update to Auclair’s January report will show that the first year of Trump’s presidency saw foreign investment in the U.S. align with the long-run average, he said, pushing back on Trump’s narrative of historic inflows of foreign cash.
In some cases, Trump’s overbearing tactics have pushed countries to take the opposite tack, reducing exposure to the U.S. economy while creating historic trade agreements with other countries.
The European Union in January closed a deal with several South American countries that’d been more than two decades in the making. The bloc of 27 European countries also closed a “landmark” free trade deal with India in January to protect against growing U.S. trade volatility. A bloc of South American countries are now in talks with Japan, and Canada is diversifying its economy away from the U.S. as evidenced by a recent electric vehicle deal with China.
“So there are a lot of instances where governments are seeking to reduce their exposure to the United States, and that is a direct result of Trump’s belligerence on the world stage,” Mulholland said.
Future U.S. presidential administrations, he added, will be limited as a result.
“[Other countries’] ability to negotiate kind of new things with the United States,” Mulholland said, “is going to be hamstrung by commitments that they’ve already made to each other in the deals they did to reduce their exposure to the Trump administration.”
This article has been updated to include a statement from the White House.
This article has been updated to correct the amount of new and planned investment from Japan and Taiwan. It is $75 billion. TPM regrets the error.
About a month ago, it emerged from upstate New York that the Department of Homeland Security was targeting online critics of ICE by trying to force them to sign a heretofore unheard of “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.
Now the Wall Street Journal reports that those cases are just the tip of the iceberg of a larger DHS surveillance program targeting social media users nationwide. As with the previously reported cases, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility is taking the lead — a dramatic departure from its previous role as internal affairs bureau investigating wrongdoing by ICE agents.
DHS has used, with varying degrees of success, administrative subpoenas and grand jury subpoenas to unmask social media posters, according to the new report.
There are, of course, some actually concerning threats online — and some subsequent convictions — but the scope of DHS surveillance program seems to go well beyond true threats. The WSJ attempts to put some numbers to it (emphases added):
Funding is another tell.
A WSJ analysis found that ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants surged by 57% year over year to $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in office.
Lawyers told the newspaper that the spike in subpoenas for information on online critics began to spike in September, which coincided with when a new $8 million contract took effect between OPR and a software development firm called Amivero, which subcontracted the work to the global consulting firm Guidehouse.
Both of the previously reported upstate New York cases are apparently products of OPR’s new surveillance program. As Morning Memo noted last month, one of the targets in those two cases, David Streever, filed a lawsuit in D.C. with help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home in June and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” for a non-threatening but critical email opposing Operation Metro Surge that he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons.
Streever refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”
After a few days of delay, Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general looks likely to make it through the Senate Judiciary Committee today, which will stand for all time as a ratification by Senate Republicans of President Trump’s evisceration of the Justice Department and of Blanche’s lawless award of IRS immunity to Trump personally.
One more footnote on the IRS immunity, via the NYT: While the retroactive immunity is limited to the parties to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — himself, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — the lawsuit defines the Trump Organization as the Trump Organization, LLC, and 418 other entities that are not specifically identified. Let that sink in.
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose job is in jeopardy for dismissing the highest profile of the bogus Reflecting Pool “vandalism” cases, has also moved to dismiss three other similar cases related to the peeling liner from what she now admits was a “hasty and botched” renovation job.
The Trump administration has now taken ownership stakes in at least 30 corporations, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, which is closely tracking the new practice:
What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute.
Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.
As CATO notes, the Biden administration awarded funds to private companies under the same CHIPS and Science Act provisions that the Trump administration is using but without taking equity interests in the companies.
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I‘ll stop posting timelapses of the aurora from the @Space_Station when I’m tired of looking at them . . . so basically never! Another unforgettable display of this ethereal phenomenon as it danced beneath us last night, this one even more special as it was shared with… pic.twitter.com/zwVRUHAYzq
— Jessica Meir (@Astro_Jessica) August 3, 2026
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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.
This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead.
Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment.
The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.
Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.”
For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.
Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.
Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout.
Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.
Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public.
“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.”
To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.
The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.
President Trump is now demanding that Iran reach a deal with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz as soon as today or face devastating attacks from the United States. On its face, you can put this in the same bucket of Trump’s last six months: threats about ending Iranian civilization or committing various war crimes or whatever. But this is actually an example of how deep a hole the U.S. is now in, and how rapidly it’s sliding into conceding a system of post-war Iranian tolls on the Strait as a given.
What Iran and Oman are negotiating is an interim agreement in which they will jointly manage a system of tolls (calling them “service fees”) over what is an international waterway. The White House would certainly point out that this is a temporary rather than a permanent deal. But something so fundamental conceded in a provisional or temporary agreement is seldom withdrawn in a final accord. The mix of control and revenue this provides to Iran amounts to a massive strategic gain from the war Trump began back in February. But it seems well on the way to becoming a given in U.S. post-war plans.
In response to last week’s post about AI data centers, I got this fascinating response from TPM Reader RK. Very interesting details and nuanced. But mostly I find it fascinating because it complicates the storyline by placing the data center rebellion in a line of continuity with earlier opposition, in the same or similar communities, to efforts to build wind turbines or solar arrays — stuff liberals obviously think is great.
Intrigued by this post, as I’ve spent the past 2+ years lurking at township halls in Michigan, working on a book about the rising backlash against big companies with big plans to transform how land is used in rural communities.
It didn’t start with data centers. I was originally interested in how rural communities are pushing back hard against solar and wind farms. In Michigan, you have Gov Whitmer pushing a clean energy agenda, which requires vast swaths of open land. It takes a lot of real estate to replace an oil or gas plant with a solar or wind farm, and that much open space is not available in cities or suburbs. So you wind up in rural areas where voters lean conservative, are skeptical about climate change, and would prefer to see their pleasant landscape left alone. Lots of yelling, recall elections, angry rhetoric as formerly sleepy town halls turn into sights of intense conflict.
One critique of Democrats that has stuck with me — lodged by fellow Democrats against their colleagues and themselves — is that they vote in primaries not for who they want to elect, but for who they think their neighbors will elect.
In the face of crushing increases in the cost of living and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, left-of-center voters’ desire to engage in such mental gymnastics has stated to fray in recent years. Today is the key one for the biggest such experiment this year.
As you’re no doubt aware, public health official Abdul El-Sayed will face Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate. Stevens has many of the party’s endorsements, but, as Josh Marshall noted last night, the energy in the primary appears to be with El-Sayed. Polls show he may well trounce Stevens this evening.
The outcome then sets up a test for the general election, the result of which, Kate Riga wrote last week, we’re going to be hearing about for years. Mike Rodgers, the Republican candidate, is a fairly run-of-the-mill figure in Trump’s Republican Party, and he’s lost this race before, in 2024. (He of course baselessly claims it was stolen from him.) If El-Sayed wins tonight, and Rodgers wins in November, cable news pundits will harangue Michigan’s Democratic primary voters about their choice until the next such test emerges. If Stevens pulls off an unlikely upset tonight only to lose to Rodgers, the left’s ascendancy in the Democratic Party will, no doubt prematurely, be declared all but assured.
At the end of the day, the voters pick who they pick. It’s then the campaign’s and the party’s job to consolidate the electorate and win.
Tuesday will also see primaries in Virginia, Missouri, Kansas, and Washington State.
We’ll have our eye on a Republican-backed ballot referendum to switch Kansas to judicial elections, the first of what both supporters and opponents see as a growing conservative push nationwide to remake courts so that they are more likely to support Republican policies. Its the latest effort by right-wing operatives in the state to undo a 2019 decision by the state Supreme Court protecting abortion — a wall they’ve been banging their heads against in various ways ever since.
Trump on Tuesday declined to publicly call for his staffer-turned-member of Congress Max Miller (R-OH) to resign in the face of multiple allegations of abuse and violence, including domestic violence against his wife and two-year-old daughter. But on Monday night, according to an Axios report, Trump called him to share the insight that things “aren’t looking good.”
It’s Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), who, in a Congress full of men accused of doing awful things, has become the first in years for whom the House Ethics Committee has recommended censure. That’s in part due to the extensive evidence of sexual harassment mustered against him, including odd gifts and reams and reams of corny messages documenting what appear to be attempts at romance with his subordinates. Kate sifts through it here.
Trump called off strikes this weekend claiming their will be new negotiations, but both sides now say none are planned.
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