This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump wants to deport a member of Congress. 

What’s happening? On Monday, Homeland Security officers raided the Washington, DC, home of US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in an investigation reportedly tied to immigration paperwork filled out by her father when she was a minor.

That was, at the time, more than enough cause for alarm. Trump’s animosity toward Omar, who is Somali-American and an outspoken critic of the administration, is well-known, and the raid is an extraordinary violation of the Justice Department’s usual rule to avoid taking visible action around politically sensitive cases within 60 days of an election. 

On Wednesday evening, however, we learned more about the raid from the Wall Street Journal. The Omar investigation, the Journal reported, is explicitly aimed at stripping Omar of her citizenship — and thus her ability to hold office — and deporting her. 

How would they do that? Omar came to the US as a refugee when she was 12 and became a US citizen when she was 17. The Trump administration’s investigation is said to focus on whether she or her family misrecorded her age in order to more easily gain citizenship. 

The government cannot unilaterally denaturalize a citizen, however; it would have to ask a court to do so.

What’s the context? Historically, it’s rare for the US to strip citizenship from naturalized US citizens. But doing so at volume has been a major, if less visible, priority for the second Trump administration. 

As of earlier this year, NBC News reported, DOJ was targeting hundreds of people for possible denaturalization, and has reportedly hoped to put forward hundreds of new cases per month (though successfully stripping them of citizenship is another matter).

Why does this matter? Trump’s campaign to bend the traditionally nonpartisan DOJ into a tool to punish and harass his enemies has been one of the major stories of his second term. 

Even if it never advances beyond Monday’s raid, an investigation targeting Omar’s citizenship with the eventual goal of deporting her from the US represents a new and even more dangerous evolution of that effort — and it threatens to move the US to a far darker place, where citizenship and the rights it guarantees are predicated on the president’s goodwill.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — if you’ll allow me to depart a little from my normal approach to this section, I have a story about politics to share. It’s not, however, about the politics we’re currently dealing with, but about what could be: Democrats’ plan for a quietly ambitious “Project 2029” should they win the White House in 2028. You can read it with a gift link here.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to just log off, here’s an adorable snow leopard cub with massive paws. Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

When life gives you lemons, make it rain. Or…something like that! On Tuesday morning, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar launched a fundraising drive in response to the Trump administration’s unusual predawn raid of her Washington, DC, residence.

The raid, which went down Monday, is reportedly part of a criminal investigation into Omar’s immigration history. The Democratic Congress member was born in Somalia and came to the US as a child, becoming a naturalized citizen in 2000 at age 17.

Omar has since become one of the most prominent progressive voices in Congress and a regular thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, who on Monday called her “terrible” and “totally crooked.” Vice President JD Vance has similarly claimed, without evidence, that Omar “committed immigration fraud.” On Monday, the New York Post reported that the investigation may have sprung from mistakes Omar’s late father made while filling out her citizenship application roughly 30 years ago. 

Needless to say, decades-old citizenship paperwork is not the kind of threat to public safety that typically commands the resources of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigations branch. (That same branch is charged with investigating transnational gangs and terrorists.)

And the raid is unusual for another reason, too: By longstanding practice, the Justice Department avoids taking any public steps in investigations involving political candidates within 60 days of an election. The midterms are just three weeks from now. 

This investigation is unlikely to affect Omar in the midterms, however. In the words of her longshot Republican challenger, John Nagel, Minnesota’s Fifth District is among “the ‘bluest’…in the country.” The raid may have even galvanized Omar’s supporters, dozens of whom rallied at a Minneapolis park on Monday afternoon. Some held banners that read “we stand with Ilhan.” Another sign read, simply, “see you at the polls.”

Go a little deeper

Omar now belongs to an unenviable and surprisingly populous club: political opponents of Trump whom his administration has threatened with criminal indictments and investigations. 

I initially planned to list them out for you here, but then realized that list would be perilously long. By my back-of-the-envelope count, there are at least 30 Democratic politicians, public officials, and Trump-world defectors who have been accused of, investigated for, or charged with crimes during the second Trump administration. 

It’s easy to forget the scale of that campaign, however, because many of these efforts have (thus far!) stalled out or collapsed. In several cases, the administration opened much-publicized and thinly supported investigations that have yet to yield charges. (See, for instance, the criminal probe into writer E. Jean Carroll or former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.) 

In at least two cases — that of then-Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and several Minnesota officials — federal judges tossed out subpoenas for lack of evidence. And in one high-profile instance earlier this year, a grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress who released a video reminding soldiers to refuse illegal orders. The legal bar for issuing such an indictment is actually pretty low — which makes this grand jury’s refusal a telling rebuke of the administration. 

But these judicial setbacks aren’t exactly reason for optimism. The federal court system is becoming increasingly partisan, and as long as Republicans hold the Senate, they’ll be able to stack it with ever-more conservative and deferential judges. And several of the most partisan judges already on the bench are “openly auditioning” for Supreme Court slots, as my colleague Ian Millhiser recently put it. 

In other words, in the not-so-distant future, the court system may provide a weaker check on presidential overreach. And that’s bad news not only for the Ilhan Omars of the world…but also for American democracy. 

One link for later

➨ Turn off your sleep tracker. If your sleep hygiene and underlying health are both good, but you still struggle to catch enough ZZs, then you might actually want to tone down your quest for better sleep. “What you see in people with insomnia is that they’re trying too hard,” one sleep scientist told Vox. Analyzing your sleep scores and timing your naps can create anxiety that further fuels insomnia. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper were all invented by 19th-century pharmacists? At the time, it was widely believed that carbonated water could cure illnesses. And sugary syrups made said water vastly more delicious. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the 2025 Pixar film set in the “Communiverse”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the three-letter successor of tube TVs. That would be LCD, which stands for liquid crystal display.

Barring a catastrophic midterm polling miss, Democrats are on track to win a majority in the House of Representatives next month. Come the new Congress in January, that will mean a new House speaker — and if all goes to plan, that will be current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

If elected, Jeffries, from New York, will be the first Black speaker of the House. Though Jeffries has been in Congress for nearly 14 years now — and many of those years have been spent in Democratic leadership — he also remains something of an enigma. 

The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle profiled Jeffries back in May. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who Jeffries really is, his path to what would be a historic speakership, and what he really stands for.  

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In your profile of potential future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, you start with a story that people might find surprising. And I was wondering if you could tell us said story.

[Jeffries] was in Florida, raising money, which is one of his central responsibilities as a minority leader. And he was being driven to a Democratic donor’s house in Palm Beach. And while he was being driven there, he got an alert on his phone letting him know that Donald Trump had posted a message to Truth Social in which he rehashed a bunch of the 2020 election conspiracies. More significantly, [Trump] had included a depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. 

Jeffries has this reputation for being a very calm, deliberate, not angry person, oftentimes to his detriment. I think a lot of Democratic partisans wish he would be more angry. But the way he told me the story, he was legitimately pissed off. And he realized that he needed to respond in some way. And he didn’t think that a tweet would be sufficient. 

He wanted to do an Instagram post, and he looked into his aide’s iPhone, and he said, “Fuck Donald Trump.” And as soon as he was done recording the video, I think he started to have second thoughts. And they sent the video up to Washington for a social media team to edit, and he told them, “Let’s bleep out the word fuck.” And for him, it was a smashing social media success.

I was in his office in the Capitol six days later, and he was telling me this story and basking in some of the reflected glory and talking about all the social media love and talking about the real-world love. But then he kind of paused, and he said something like, “You know, but I still haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m a little worried about that.” Which I thought captured him pretty well.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before.”

Why did you want to start your profile of him with that story? What does it tell us about who this individual is?

I thought it captured the dilemma he faces in some ways, just in the sense that he is this very deliberate, calculated political figure, very conventional. And he is operating in a political space these days that doesn’t really reward or appreciate that approach. 

Oftentimes that approach is not successful. I think he’s trying to adapt to the new rules of the road, and he’s kind of doing it in fits and starts, and sometimes he’s more successful than others. But I still think, even when he is successful, he has some qualms about it. 

How long has Hakeem Jeffries wanted to be speaker of the House?

When he got to Congress, in 2012, he definitely wanted to become a player. He wanted to be in leadership, chair a committee, whatever. He was someone who had his eye on that. 

But at the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus had started to think a little bit differently about what they could achieve in Congress. For a long time, they wanted their members to get chairmanships and things like that, or maybe be majority whip. But by the time Jeffries got there, they started to think that we could actually get a speaker. And his arrival kind of coincided with this realization on the part of the CBC. And I think a lot of CBC members viewed Jeffries as a potential future speaker, and they started to groom him for that. 

Pretty soon after that, Nancy Pelosi started to think of him as someone who would be a good member of her leadership team. And I think by 2018, that’s when it really became apparent that he was going to be someone who could potentially be speaker. 

What does he actually stand for as the most powerful Democrat in the House?

I think, quite intentionally, he doesn’t stand for anything. I think that in some ways has been key to his success. He has managed for the most part to avoid being kind of pigeonholed or put anywhere on the ideological spectrum. He is very critical of the far left of the party, especially the DSA. He views the DSA as college-educated young white people who are coming to Brooklyn and displacing older Black working-class people. 

I was talking to this former Democratic congressional aide and basically asking this person the question you’re asking me: What does he stand for? And this person was trying to explain it and finally just was sort of exasperated, and he said he’s intentionally trying not to stand for anything. He’s sort of like hotel art. He just is, and it’s satisfactory.

We don’t have a lot of case studies for how he manages his caucus because they haven’t been in power. But I think maybe one of the most telling examples was the shutdown, because Democrats were, in a way, the power brokers there. Tell us how Hakeem Jeffries managed that.

That was probably his greatest success as minority leader.  When Trump took office for the second time, especially for those first few months, I think all of the congressional Democrats, and Jeffries especially, were really on their heels. They could not figure out how to deal with this guy and what they were going to do to stop him. Jeffries was even complaining that he didn’t have any leverage. But then he eventually realized that a shutdown would be at least a little bit of leverage. 

The real question was, what was the shutdown going to be about? And there were a lot of Democratic members of Congress who wanted it to be about authoritarianism or corruption. They wanted it to be at all these different issues. And Jeffries was really insistent that we need to make this about one issue, and we need to make it about healthcare. 

The Democrats were the ones who caused the shutdown. And normally, the way shutdowns have worked in the past, it’s the party that causes the shutdown that gets the heat from the public. But this time around, I think because Democrats were so consistent in saying that this is about healthcare, and Republicans were so scattered in their own messaging and their own explanations of what was going on, Democrats’ polling numbers went up, Trump’s and Republicans’ went down, and that was a real victory for Jeffries.

Did that whole incident put Jeffries on the president’s radar in a way that he wasn’t? 

It comes, and it goes. For a long time, he wouldn’t mention Jeffries at all. 

I guess the way to tell if Trump is thinking about you is if he posts about you on Truth Social, and he started to post about Jeffries a lot — all the usual kind of insults he lobs, especially at Black politicians, that Jeffries was low IQ and a thug. But yeah, he does seem to be paying a little bit more to Jeffries now than he was before.

And do we think Jeffries is ready to go toe to toe with the president of the United States if that’s what voters decide he’s to do this November?

In his mind, he’s ready. And I think in his own stilted, rehearsed, steady fashion, he will go toe to toe with Donald Trump. He will talk about affordability, and he’ll talk about corruption, and he’ll talk about the “so-called president.” 

I don’t think it will necessarily be satisfying for a lot of Democratic voters out there and Democratic partisans, but I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before. But I think it’s going to take him a little while to figure out how to do the job.

President Donald Trump has in recent weeks unveiled multiple schemes to send checks to millions of Americans, adding letters explaining that funds are meant to help with healthcare costs. The move — unveiled weeks ahead of the midterm election — suggests an effort to encourage voters to forget Republicans’ recent destructive actions making healthcare harder to access and afford, experts told TPM.

Several experts also described at least one of the two check-mailing schemes as based on a “legally dubious” interpretation of how the executive branch may use the pool of funding it’s tapping into.  

We’ve spent our entire political careers in different camps. One of us was a Democratic governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The other served as a conservative Republican in Congress for over a decade, representing a deep-red district in the Indiana heartland that President Donald Trump won in each of his three presidential elections by over 30 points.

But before we got into politics, we were both physicians in internal medicine and cardiothoracic surgery, respectively. We’ve seen firsthand how crucial it is for the patient-provider relationship to guide and determine the right care. And that’s why we’re so alarmed that nearly half of Americans, according to a recent survey by KFF, the independent health organization, now report that their health insurers have delayed or denied coverage for a doctor-recommended treatment within the past two years.

Corporate insurers should not be at the forefront of patient care. Delays and denials put patients’ health at risk. And they often lead to preventable complications and higher long-term spending.

We both believe reforming the health insurance system is a moral and an economic imperative, as do many of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Even in a bitterly divided Congress, we have seen encouraging signs that reform is possible.

In recent months, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to hold insurers accountable — especially when it comes to “prior authorization,” the notorious and widely despised insurer practice of denying certain procedures and treatments unless doctors and patients first obtain permission. In a recent American Medical Association survey, 95% of physicians said they’ve seen prior authorization requirements delay necessary care. Nearly four in five have witnessed patients abandon treatment because of problems with the process.

Leaders in both parties already agree that improvements to the American insurance model are necessary. The bipartisan Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act would move Medicare Advantage prior authorizations to an electronic system and require quicker response times and greater transparency from insurers. Significantly, over 300 House members and 70 senators have cosponsored the legislation. This summer, it cleared two House committees unanimously.

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Lawmakers are also finding common ground on transparency. In July the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced a bipartisan bill that would require health insurers to publicly report how often they deny claims.

That scrutiny is overdue. Medicare Advantage insurers denied more than four million prior authorization requests in 2024.

When patients and their doctors appealed those denials, insurance companies reversed roughly 80% of their initial decisions. That high reversal rate suggests insurers are denying lots of medically appropriate procedures, tests and treatments — and hoping that doctors and patients will be too busy, sick and frustrated to follow through with an appeal.

That’s often a safe, albeit callous, bet. For too many Americans, fighting insurance companies can feel like a battle they cannot win. It often requires tremendous mental and emotional fortitude at a time when they are simply trying to get well. That is why Congress must take on that fight for them. Families already pay extraordinary sums for health coverage — by some measures, the monthly cost of employer-sponsored family health coverage now rivals the typical monthly mortgage payment. And still, these families face denials, delays and difficulty accessing the care and medicines they need.

As physicians, we know that time matters when someone is sick. As a Democrat and a Republican, we also recognize how rare genuine consensus is in Washington. That’s why we’re cautiously hopeful that after the midterms, Congress will seize the opportunity to make prior authorization and broader insurance marketplace reforms a priority.

The post A health reform both parties can get behind appeared first on Salon.com.

With 28 days until the midterms, polling suggests that Democrats have an excellent chance of taking back the House in November. Flipping the Senate, once considered a long shot, is starting to look realistic. Come November, the party may have majorities in both chambers that will give it far more leverage than in the first half of this Donald Trump presidency. 

If voters entrust them with power, though, how will Democrats use it? Their legislative options will be limited, with Trump still in the White House, but party leadership has gestured at a platform focusing on affordability, healthcare, and investigations into the Trump administration. 

Still, many of the particulars are missing — which Puck News congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor says is by design. As Sotomayor explains, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the likely next speaker of the House, will want to present a unified front ahead of the election, which means no infighting over the messy details of policy. The real work can start after they take the House.

To break it all down, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Sotomayor about how Democrats are feeling ahead of the midterms, the prospect of a Speaker Jeffries, and the Democratic to-do list.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?

The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. If anything, it’s mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, “Don’t oversell how amazing of a night we’re going to have.” Genuinely, in the number of conversations that I’ve been having with strategists, lawmakers, those seeking office themselves, the question isn’t, “Will Democrats flip the House majority?” anymore. It’s “Democrats will flip the House majority. How big is that majority going to be?”

They want to play in deep Trump districts, and they’ve been doing that in Trump +5, Trump +10 districts that he won in ’24. Now they’re like, “What about Trump +21 districts?” And some people are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, let’s not get too overly excited” because everybody kind of has some PTSD from the ’22 midterms — that’s when Republicans ended up taking up the House. 

[In 2022], Republicans were in the same place around this time where they were like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to flip 30-plus seats.” And then they only gained a five-seat majority. And we saw how difficult that [majority] was for Republicans, and frankly, it continues to be.

You would think that the Democrats would be trying to sell themselves based on, “Here’s what we’re going to do if we flip the House and the Senate.” But I don’t hear a ton of that. What are this party’s priorities if they take back the House?

You’re totally spot-on. It’s more or less vague. I’m sure Democrats would argue, no, we’re being really specific. And sure, we do know that if they take the majority, there’s three planks, and this is what Jeffries outlined even a year ago, and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, to some extent, has also adopted these planks. They want to tackle affordability, healthcare, and corruption.

Affordability means a number of different things. And the way that Jeffries is looking at it is you have your first 100 hours, your 100 days, and then your first year. And we don’t really know what is going to come up in those 100 days and in the first year, but within those 100 hours, he’s starting to give us some hints. 

There are some issues where they could easily, probably very quickly, pass. Those Medicaid tax credits that are going to expire just in the next couple of months because of the one Big Beautiful Bill, [for example].

You also have the corruption part of this where a number of committee Democrats have been taking notes. It’s like, oh, the Trump admin did that? Okay, going to write that down so I can remember to circle back when we have the majority. 

I’ve been told to expect subpoenas to start being sent out to administration officials, to Cabinet officials, to potential corporations that have cozied up too close to the Trump administration, pretty much after the House majority is declared.

Is it all but certain that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker if the Democrats win?

From inside of the Capitol, all that I’ve heard is that he is going to be speaker.

That being said, a number of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez, a number of those members are already talking to a number of the progressives who are coming in, who are kind of being a little coy with whether they’re going to vote for Jeffries. 

Their message has been, look, Democrats need to stay united. We have differences of opinions on a number of fronts, but we need to be united, we need to govern, and we can’t get to any of that until we elect a speaker.

I remember Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want to spend the years of Trump’s first term investigating and impeaching, but the nature of Trump forced her to ultimately do that. Do you think Jeffries has learned anything from how his predecessor approached the president? 

To your question about impeachment, it is fascinating to see where House Democrats are right now versus where they were back then. I do not hear “let’s impeach Trump” that much from the 200 and something Democrats that are currently in office. And the reason why is because, one, there is the thinking that, okay, the Constitution says he can only be a two-term president, and probably the Supreme Court’s going to rule that he can’t run again [if he tries]. So let’s not get into that. 

But because Democrats are already thinking, planning, strategizing all of their investigations, I think we should expect possible impeachments against Cabinet officials. [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is a name I keep hearing a lot, because there’s a number of Republicans who are incredibly upset with him. 

Democrats are thinking a little bit more strategically in terms of if we are going to impeach, or if we’re really going to try to subpoena or hold people in contempt of Congress, will we have Republicans backing us up in those certain cases? 

These three planks — affordability, healthcare, and holding the crooks accountable — those could have been the planks in month one or month two of the second Trump term. 

I wonder how much motivation there is in the caucus to take on some of the issues that have come up in the last year or so. ICE comes to mind, Iran, spending billions of dollars on vanity projects around DC, making billions of dollars off of his own name and brand while in office. How much are Democrats pushing for the issues that maybe have struck a chord more recently?

Behind the scenes, actually, they’ve been pushing those things a lot. But my understanding is that Jeffries doesn’t necessarily want to broadcast anything that could show any divisions among Democrats right now. He really just wants to project that Democrats are united on these three issues. 

Everybody else is like, okay, but there’s so many more things that we have to prove, and we should get done and we should show contrast with Republicans moving forward. And my understanding is his idea of it is we will get to those issues after the election. They’re not even worth debating pre-election because first we have to win.

No one is trying to sugarcoat how hard it is going to be to tackle a number of these issues where Democrats aren’t united. And there’s conversations about how the size of the majority affects that, right? Because if you have a bigger majority, that means Democrats flip seats in districts that Trump won by a whole lot. So you’re going to get a lot more centrist Democrats in the caucus. If it’s a smaller majority, that’s really going to help a number of those Democratic socialist candidates coming in have a much stronger voice. 

All of those dynamics are going to be on full display and it all, again, is determinative on what happens in November.

It’s hard to know what to say about former Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, whose death at the age of 84 was reported this morning. Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).

What stands out in my mind are two moments, one from his moment of ascent to power and another at the denouement but certainly not the nadir of career. Go back to 1998. The so-called Lewinsky scandal had been trundling forward for most of the year. Republicans are giddy about the Red Tsunami that was about to supercharge the existing GOP majority. Predictions of a 30- or 40-seat pick up were common and assumed. (I was one of few people I knew to basically predict no wave at all; it was simply a matter of watching the polls rather than the bipartisan hype.) When Democrats ended up gaining five seats, House Speaker New Gingrich was summarily tossed overboard — a mix of the failure of his wild overpromising and slowly building frustrations with his erratic and high drama leadership style.

There’s no place like Kansas, a state whose howling winds are so fierce that in the 1800s, the roaring soundscape drove local farmers into madness. It is so windy in Kansas that every so often, trains get swept off their tracks or trampolines get hurled into the air and flung into neighbors’ trees. 

But today, the same gusts that whisked away Dorothy’s home have made Kansas the third-most wind-powered place in the country, its great plains dotted with thousands of twirling turbines responsible for generating over half of the state’s energy. 

And for years, Kansas has been trying to share. 

But that’s easier said than done in the US, where building power lines across state borders can be an onerous, litigious, and bureaucratic slog. The Grain Belt Express, a proposed 800-mile high-voltage line carrying Kansas’s windy riches across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, has been trying to get built for the past 16 years. When completed, it will allow Kansas to pump five times as much wind power into Missouri as it does now. But though the project received its first approval in 2013, it will likely not open until 2029 at the earliest, beset by regulatory hurdles across multiple jurisdictions and an endless stream of legal challenges that immediately halt progress every time a new injunction is filed. Alas, the express — which only broke ground this year — was forced to run oh so local. 

But other projects like it might soon enjoy far more reasonable timelines. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA — an acronym that’s led to a slew of cringeworthy euphoric Baja Blast references from abundance Democrats, clean energy advocates, and oil industry lobbyists alike. If passed, it would significantly curtail Americans’ ability to endlessly litigate against energy projects they don’t like, and empower the federal government to push critical multistate projects forward even if one state or municipality drags its feet. That could remake the way the nation’s energy infrastructure gets built, including its interstate transmission lines, for decades to come. 

But the bill also suggests that easing the way for clean energy in the US may require simultaneously creating the conditions for more oil and gas infrastructure in a country that already has a lot of it. It would also mean defanging some of the landmark regulatory norms that for decades have, for example, given Americans a say over developments that could contaminate their drinking water and helped tribes protect sacred heritage sites. These laws were necessary in the first place because prior to the 1970s, American communities frequently found themselves both literally and figuratively steamrolled  by developers singularly focused on building things quickly with little regard for the oil spills, river fires, and bifurcated neighborhoods they left in their wake.

And yet today, half a century later, that same dilemma has, in some ways, turned on its head. America builds things too slowly, and in particular, it builds the kind of infrastructure desperately needed to usher in a transition to clean energy with little of the urgency you’d expect from a world in the throes of climate change-related disaster. Exasperatingly, some of the same protections that have played a critical role in making this nation safer may also be standing in the way of building a nation that is more affordable and sustainable in the long run.

There are still plenty of reasons to feel hopeful about the world’s transition away from fossil fuels, even in the US, which has lagged behind our peers while still building an extraordinary number of solar and wind farms, particularly in Republican-led states like Kansas and Texas. And yet, many of these projects have languished in never-ending Ticketmaster-esque queues to connect to the nation’s decrepit power grid, a direct result of the permitting hellscape that prevents much-needed high-voltage cables like the Grain Belt Express from coming online.      

This new bill aims to ease many of the bottlenecks that stymie clean energy, but it also throws a bone to fossil fuels, which, like renewables, would benefit from less onerous environmental reviews and quicker permissions. This is, after all, a bipartisan bill in a Congress that, at least for now, remains Republican-led, under the tutelage of an aggrieved president who has sabotaged some of the nation’s most promising clean energy projects with an often petty and relentless fervor. Some Democrats in Congress, along with other environmentalists, have raised serious concerns about the bill. Those initial objections may prophesize an uphill battle for it when it comes to a vote, likely after the November midterms. 

Even so, with American electricity bills spiking to frightening new heights, and a data center buildout that could all but snap the power grid in half, this ambitious deal is, at the very least, an indication that some of the nation’s representatives are finally listening. And if it passes into law in the months to come, it could very well remake how Americans get their energy for a generation. 

So why are environmentalists mad?

By most accounts, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act almost didn’t happen. 

For months, the proposed permitting deal has been stalled by the Trump administration’s failure to assure Democrats that the president would lay off his attacks on “windmills” and other clean energy projects. But in recent days, lawmakers appear to have come close to a fragile détente on the back of a “very reasonable opening proposal” from the White House, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. 

If the BAAJA is passed, it will codify new protections that legally prevent presidents like Trump from meddling with already-permitted energy projects or singling out specific forms of energy, a prohibition that will also apply if a Democratic president attempts to halt an approved gas line or a petroleum refinery. The Biden administration’s freeze on approvals for new natural gas export plants, for example, would not be allowed. 

It’s this element of the proposed bill that worries many environmentalists most. According to a transcript obtained by Punchbowl News, during a coalition call on Thursday, dozens of advocates from prominent environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Law & Policy Center — expressed their misgivings about the bill and strategized about how to lobby Democrats against it.

Most environmentalists acknowledge, however, that we need to spruce up the power grid and fix how permitting works for clean energy projects and transmission lines. As clean energy advocates know all too well, the projects they support are, paradoxically, more likely to be hampered by environmental reviews than fossil fuel projects are, because renewables usually require more space and represent the bulk of new energy developments. But many advocates understandably take issue with the idea that reforming this overcomplicated process may require weakening the right to challenge other projects, a right affirmed by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. 

The bill’s fate may ultimately depend on whether this trade-off is worth it. The BAAJA still does leave some room for court challenges if they’re filed within 150 days of an approval. But it will still place a much larger burden for determining these damage thresholds on federal agencies, which are, of course, currently controlled by Trump.

“The question’s not whether that would be a good idea — it’s one of the basic building blocks for converting more of our energy system to renewables,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote of grid expansion and permitting reform on his Substack this week. “It’s how many pounds of flesh the fossil fuel industry would demand in return, and how close to vital organs that flesh would be located.”

The problem is, no matter how many Congressional seats Democrats seem poised to scoop up in November, they will still need to get Republicans on board if they want Americans to be able to really see the benefits of solar, the cheapest energy source of all time, reflected on their power bill. And for most of the nation, if not Earth itself, that transition can’t come soon enough. 

Following a failed bid by Senate Democrats to block it, President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought have, once again, run roughshod over Congress’ power of the purse.

It seems like a million years ago now, but there was a moment back in 2024, in the heat of that weird presidential campaign, when everyone was talking about the radical blueprint for Donald Trump’s restoration. Project 2025 was so extreme, in fact, that his campaign had Trump disavow it publicly. He usually said that he hadn’t read the plan and didn’t intend to, but at times he went further. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump said, “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25 . . . They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right, and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25 . . . and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”

Trump probably wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t read it, but his advisers obviously believed he should keep his distance from the plan, which didn’t poll well, and when people found out what was in it, they were appalled. Project 2025 was a far-right manifesto, filled with the kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that denizens of conservative think-tanks had been churning out for decades in the hopes of influencing Republican administrations. 

One such organization, the Heritage Foundation, had been publishing “Mandate for Leadership,” its so-called policy guide, since 1981 and updating it as necessary. But Project 2025 was different from the group’s previous effort. This time, the Heritage Foundation had organized a formal transition operation, created training sessions, personnel lists and a day-one playbook for Trump to hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders and personnel changes. 

This effort was largely guided by its co-author, Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump administration as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Having worked for years for the Republican Study Committee in the House, a group of far-right members dedicated to social conservatism, tax cuts and the destruction of the federal safety net, Vought was an experienced bureaucrat with a specific vision: to shrink the federal workforce and bring as much power under the direct auspices of the president as possible. As a self-described Christian nationalist, he also believed that the U.S. should espouse fundamentalist Christianity, and that the country has no obligation to engage in global initiatives that do not directly benefit its own people.

Vought was an active member of a group formed after the 2012 election called Groundswell, which included an eclectic group of influencers and activists such as Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and far-right political operative Steve Bannon, who had come to believe that Republicans needed to be much more radical in their methods and their goals. Seeing the federal workforce as nothing more than sinecures for dangerous liberals, Vought and his comrades planned mass firings under new rules such as Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of federal workers as at-will employees, making them exempt from civil service protections. And if they could not be fired, he would make their lives so difficult that they would quit. As Vought famously explained:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

Vought believed that the way to secure a mandate for this agenda, even under Democratic presidents, was to cut the federal workforce so massively that the government would be unable to function beyond the most basic services. We will have to see just how well that works out for them in the future. But the destruction is already monumental.

In the months after Trump returned to the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wreaked havoc on the federal government. Thousands were fired and departments were shuttered, leaving chaos everywhere. That’s the tech-bro style. 

But Vought is a different breed. He is a patient and methodical destroyer. Vought believes that we are living in a “post-constitutional” time in which the “precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years” must be thrown off. And even while Trump’s presidency appears to be on the verge of collapsing from the weight of historically low poll numbers, Vought is quietly accomplishing his mission of comprehensive deregulation mostly under the radar. 

On Tuesday, the administration ended Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, effectively allowing them to be bullied and discriminated against in America’s schools. But since this is a man who joyfully prescribes “trauma” as a political tactic, it’s not entirely surprising that his crusade would eventually reach schoolchildren.

Vought’s influence is also being felt on Capitol Hill. As the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has made her role a centerpiece of her reelection campaign. For years, she has argued to Mainers that her value lies in the seniority and influence she yields. But Collins should think again: One of Vought’s primary strategies for securing the unitary executive is through confrontation with the legislative and judicial branches. That conflict is currently playing out in the courts. But under a supine GOP congressional majority that has been willing to cede the powers granted to them by the Constitution, he is winning — and making more moves. 

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According to the New York Times, an Oval Office meeting grew heated when Vought attempted to have the president rescind National Institutes of Health grants to universities that did not align with the MAGA agenda. Trump was on board with the idea, since it would have targeted Harvard University, an institution he sees as his enemy. After fierce pushback from members of both parties, the pair pulled back. But that reprieve could be temporary; conventional wisdom says they are likely to try again after the November midterms are over, when Vought’s new initiative to confront Congress begins in earnest.

Then, on Wednesday, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., blocked a Democratic bill that would have stopped Vought’s recent pocket rescission of $810 million in domestic spending previously approved by Congress. (In a statement released days before the vote, Collins decried the move.) The money had been earmarked for programs focused on immigrants, refugees, civil rights, climate change and children. Johnson said the issue will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court, which approved Vought’s rescissions in 2025 because they pertained to national security. These funds do not, but it won’t be surprising if the Court’s conservative majority, which has been largely sympathetic to the unitary executive theory, finds another reason to allow it.

If Vought and the administration were to win at the Supreme Court, Congress might as well just go part-time to approve presidential appointments, name post-offices and pass one big pile of money for the presidential monarch to spend as he pleases. Article I of the Constitution will be effectively dead.

Under Vought’s leadership, the damage to the federal government is already overwhelming, and it’s unclear if a Democratic congressional majority or administration will be able to fix it. But then, that’s part of the plan too. Trump’s presidency may be faltering, but Vought’s dream is being realized every single day.

The post Trump’s failure hides Project 2025 success appeared first on Salon.com.

Is the best shot Democrats have at defeating safe-seat Republican senators…not running candidates at all?

That’s the theory behind the party’s approach to several Senate races in deep red territory this year — races in which they hope independent candidates might manage to take down Republican incumbents, if only the Democratic Party would get out of the way.

In Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho, the candidate who won the Democratic primary has since quit the race — often with some “urging” from the party establishment — to pave the way for a two-way matchup between a Republican incumbent and an independent. (Democrats tried to similarly clear the way for an independent in Montana, but the party’s nominee refused to quit the race.)

The theory is that the Democratic brand is so toxic to so many voters in these states that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win there nowadays — but that there’s no great love for the Republican establishment either, and dissatisfaction with the political status quo more generally. So perhaps a fresh-faced independent could capture essentially all of a red state’s Democratic voters and peel away enough Republicans and independents to win.

It’s a bold bet and, most believe, unlikely to succeed — but polls do show surprisingly close races in some of these contests. And it’s not an entirely new strategy. In several red-state Senate contests dating back to 2014, Democrats concluded that the only way to win is not to play, even as all the independents they cleared the way for have lost.

But this year’s crop of independents stands out. For one, they’re running in a national environment that seems much more hostile to the GOP, making it more plausible that one or more makes it to Washington. For another, they’ve formed a loose alliance over group text, and they have something of a shared platform — a focus on economic populism and taking on corporate power, while downplaying cultural issues. 

Brian Bengs, the independent running in South Dakota, told me: “I think I can speak for the others when I say our collective efforts are based on the idea that the left-right social issues are what is being used to keep us at each other’s throats. The real fight that we need to have is big money versus little folks — the regular folks.”

They also have some specific plans for how, if elected, they’d get together to shake up how the Senate works.

“If a couple of us, maybe just as few as two independents, get across the line, we can deny a majority to either party. We can create a Fulcrum Caucus,” Todd Achilles, the independent in Idaho, told me. “Both parties would have to negotiate with us to get stuff done.”

Whether these candidates win or lose, their stronger-than-expected candidacies have made Republican incumbents take notice, and are an intriguing model of how to bring at least some competition to states that seem very solidly red — or even, potentially, very solidly blue. Should they perform well in November, their shared message could end up influencing candidates across the partisan spectrum. 

Furthermore, if they do reach critical mass in the Senate, it could mean the rise of an informal third party, one that can advance its own agenda in Washington. Yet it should also be noted that the more of them win, the harder the math for a Republican majority specifically gets, since they’d be knocking Republican incumbents — and only Republican incumbents — out of power.

Amidst rising dissatisfaction with both parties, there would seem to be an opening for a different approach. But busting up the two-party system is easier said than done — particularly when all these candidates have past ties or present coziness with Democrats that, their opponents argue, call their supposed independence into question.

The Dan Osborn model

Democrats have tried this strategy of clearing the field for independents in red-state Senate races before — in 2014, when entrepreneur Greg Orman (I) challenged Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS); in 2020, when orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisher Al Gross (I) challenged Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK); and in 2022, when former CIA officer Evan McMullin (I) challenged Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Yet all those independents lost by double digits.

But the current model of an independent challenger was inspired by a different candidate — Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, who came surprisingly close to unseating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024, and is now challenging the state’s other GOP senator, Pete Ricketts, this cycle.

Osborn has a background as an industrial mechanic, labor leader, and Navy veteran with a plain-spoken affect. He did not graduate from college, he’s said he didn’t own a suit, and he has forearm tattoos. He had led a strike at a Kellogg’s plant in 2021 that won concessions in the company, but he was later fired. 

Union figures helped recruit him to challenge Fischer; the consultant Daniel Moraff (who later coaxed Graham Platner to run for office in Maine) also became involved in Osborn’s campaign. Osborn’s admaker Tommy McDonald later co-founded the consulting firm Fight Agency, which is now semi-famous for challenging the Democratic Party establishment by backing Zohran Mamdani and Platner’s campaigns.

Dating back to his initial campaign launch, Osborn’s messaging focused heavily on criticizing “monopolistic corporations,” aligning him with a faction on the left that believes the Democratic Party doesn’t do enough to challenge big money and concentrated corporate power. Osborn also took moderate or conservative stances on some cultural issues, supporting gun rights and President Donald Trump’s border wall. (“If Trump needs help building a wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” he said in one ad.) The Democratic Party stood aside; no Democrats filed to run in the primary.

The result was that in 2024, when Trump won Nebraska by 20 points, Osborn lost his race by just 6.7 percentage points. That closer-than-expected outcome in a disappointing cycle for Democrats made many in the political world take notice, spurring polls and research projects about whether it could be replicated elsewhere — and whether, amidst more favorable national conditions, it could actually succeed.

A squad of independents?

So this cycle, in addition to Osborn himself running again, there are several other candidates trying their luck as independents with similar platforms. 

In South Dakota, Brian Bengs, a Navy and Air Force veteran, had previously run for Senate as a Democrat in 2022 and lost in a landslide. Working as a park ranger in 2025, Bengs told me that he became dispirited by DOGE cuts to the National Park Service, and got in touch with Osborn to discuss whether he should run again — this time as an independent against South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Mike Rounds. 

“Our economic system and our political system have the same problem, which is too much concentration of money and not enough competition,” Bengs told me. “And it is producing poor results for regular folks in both systems for the same reason.” 

The winner of South Dakota’s Democratic primary, Julian Beaudion, quit the race in August, saying he’d faced “intimidating threats to drop out,” setting up a two-way face-off between Bengs and Rounds.

In Idaho, meanwhile, Army veteran, former corporate executive, and former Democratic state legislator Todd Achilles is running as an independent against 83-year-old Sen. Jim Risch.

Before running for office, Achilles had written for the American Economic Liberties Project, the left’s leading anti-monopoly think tank. He told me that “toxic concentrated corporate power,” brought on by “wave after wave of mergers and consolidation,” was destroying free markets in the US, as well as corrupting the political system. 

“You can’t tell the difference between a corporatist Republican and a corporatist Democrat anymore,” Achilles said. “They’re both checks from the same organizations, the same special interests.” 

In the Idaho race, too, the winner of the Democratic primary dropped out after state party leaders withheld their support.

Finally, in Montana, Seth Bodnar, an army veteran and former president of the University of Montana, is running as an independent for an open seat contest against Republican Kurt Alme. But Democrats’ high hopes that Bodnar could take on Alme untrammeled went awry when the winner of the Democratic primary, Alani Bankhead, refused the entreaties of practically the entire state party establishment to drop out. As a result, polls suggest, Bodnar and Bankhead will split the anti-Republican vote and likely let Alme cruise to victory.

The independents’ big plans for exercising leverage in the Senate

These various independents running have a lot in common — they all have military backgrounds and roughly similar platforms. They’re also all on a group text, per the New York Times — and they’ve started to think about how they could shake up the Senate if they win.

The few independents elected to the Senate in recent decades — centrist Joe Lieberman in Connecticut (after he lost the 2006 Democratic primary), socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and center-left Angus King in Maine — had little in common with each other, but all ended up deciding to caucus with the Democratic Party after they won, believing that’s the best way to score their preferred committee assignments and help advance their priorities.

But Bengs, Achilles, and Bodnar have vowed that they would not do this. They’ve all said they wouldn’t caucus with either party if they win, and that they’d instead caucus with any other independents, making what Achilles calls the “Fulcrum Caucus.”

Achilles told me that, if these independents stick together, they could demand major reforms to the political system such as term limits and age limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, restrictions on dark money spending on elections, and bans on gerrymandering. “I think we’re all aligned on this,” he said. (Several of these ideas would likely be shot down by the current Supreme Court as unconstitutional.)

“The goal is to deny the majority,” Bengs told me. “So neither Team Red or Team Blue gets to impose their will on the other side, without either going through us or working together — which would be a win unto itself, if they would work together.”

With the Senate growing more fiercely partisan in recent years, many have wondered why centrists on both sides don’t get together and try to seize control of the agenda. 

Yet the unity of this hypothetical new independent bloc already seems a bit shaky — in part because Osborn hasn’t committed to this strategy. In fact, Osborn has recently begun offering a new answer to the “caucus question” that has dogged him throughout two campaign cycles.

“I’ve given that a lot of thought and completely done a 180 on that,” Osborn told me. “Caucusing with nobody, you wouldn’t get anything done. I’m gonna caucus with everybody.” 

That meant, he said, he’d try to caucus with both parties at once. When I asked him whether that was possible and how it would work in practice, he told me, “Nobody really knows, and nobody’s been able to tell me that I can or can’t.”

While Osborn is an underdog, he is generally believed to be the independent candidate with the best shot at winning — several recent polls have shown his race to be tight. Since he has a shot of actually being in the Senate and having to follow through on his promises, he may feel less eager to box himself in.

But are they actually just Democrats?

When I asked the independents why they weren’t Democrats, they offered varying answers. Osborn said that “Biden and Harris failed on our border,” and that “if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.” He also said Democrats weren’t fighting hard enough for guardrails on the artificial intelligence industry, and complained that “Chuck Schumer’s daughter just got a job at OpenAI.”

Bengs said “the open borders of Biden” were disastrous, called defunding the police and abolishing the police “stupid ideas,” and said he condemned socialism. Achilles criticized “the dangerous decision to put President Biden forward for a second term” and the “corporatist” lean of the party generally.

But the reality is that prominent Democrats have implicitly or explicitly backed all their candidacies — and some of the candidates themselves were registered Democrats very recently.

Bengs told me he was a registered independent for his entire life, until he wanted to run for Senate in the 2022 cycle, to prevent Sen. John Thune from winning reelection unopposed. When it was too difficult for him to get on the ballot as an independent, he sought the Democratic nomination instead. And when he learned that state law required a party nominee to be a member of that party, he registered as a Democrat. When he lost, he swiftly became an independent again.

“My biggest weakness in this race is the fact that I ran as a Democrat in 2022, and that I was a registered Democrat for 13 months,” Bengs said.

Achilles, for his part, said he was a registered Republican for most of his life — but that, in 2024, state Democrats wanted to appoint him to an open state legislature seat, so he joined the party.

Then, in June 2025, he resigned from the legislature, announced he had switched his party registration to unaffiliated, and launched his Senate campaign against Risch, saying “the two-party system is just fundamentally broken right now.”

“It makes it a lot easier to tag you as a secret Democrat if you’re a former Democratic officeholder or a former Democratic Senate candidate,” Jacob Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, told me.

Osborn’s version of the problem is a series of leaks that have come out in recent weeks, in which he addressed Democrats privately and struck a very different tone than he typically does in public.

The Trump border wall he’d publicly backed was “a symbol of racism,” Osborn privately told a group of Latino and Black Democrats last year. “It’s a joke,” he added. “It does nothing, you know.”

Another recording, from a private campaign-related event, featured Osborn discussing how “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska” waves the Trump flag because he wants to be “on the winning team.” He added: “That’s all they care about because their lives probably suck.” (Osborn apologized for those comments after they were leaked, and said: “My life sucks too.”)

“When you’re funded by Democrats, hold the same policies as Democrats, and let your campaigns be run by Democrat consultants with ties to Chuck Schumer and Zohran Mamdani, you’re a Democrat,” Bernadette Breslin, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told me in a statement.

That’s the message that Republicans will be broadcasting to voters in these red states. Whether it will work will depend on each particular state and matchup. In Montana, Bodnar has the additional problem of the Democratic candidate staying in the race to split the vote.

But Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, argued to me that Bengs and Achilles have the toughest road — in 2024 Trump won their states, South Dakota and Idaho, by the overwhelming margins of 30 and 36 points, respectively. “It is just hard to find the votes in those states,” he said. But he pointed out that Rounds is up on the airwaves in South Dakota, and said Risch appears to be “taking the race seriously” and “running a real campaign” — so, at the very least, these runs mean the incumbents won’t take another term totally for granted.

Osborn, in contrast, has “the proof point” of coming within 7 points of winning in 2024, Rubashkin said, and this is now a more unfavorable national environment for the GOP. The question is whether his own behavior and comments will have damaged his prior reputation for independence, particularly once they’re amplified by millions in spending from his opponent Pete Ricketts, the self-funding scion of a billionaire family, and the super PAC backing Ricketts.

Still, if Osborn pulls it off, it will be seismic — as the candidate himself mused on one leaked recording. 

“If I beat Pete Ricketts, if a shop floor mechanic — independent mechanic — beats an entrenched Republican billionaire in a state like Nebraska, I will be one of the most popular politicians overnight, right?” he said. “And people are going to want to listen to what I have to say.”

By now, I assume you’ve read about what happened. Maybe you’ve seen the video. But yesterday was one of those rare days we used to have often maybe 15 years ago, when the political media world, and social media sites — even the site formerly known as Twitter — were all having fun with the same thing. That thing, in this case, was the way in which Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt (R) totally and thoroughly beclowned himself.

So, before we return to our reality of third-country removals and executive branch power grabs and billionaires spouting race science, let’s hang out with Schmitt a little longer.

Let’s start with a recap of what happened.

Schmitt, during a Tuesday Senate hearing set up by Senate Judiciary Republicans so they could yell at Jack Smith, lobbed an accusation of perjury at the former special counsel. Schmitt accused Smith of attending an Atlanta Hawks game, where, he suggested, Smith met with Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who was pursuing her own investigation into Trump. This, for Schmitt, would be evidence of … something.

Smith was bemused. He had never seen the Atlanta Hawks play, he said. Schmitt accused him of committing perjury and called him a “dirtbag.” But after Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) intervened, it gradually became clear what might be going on. Smith had gone to an Iowa Hawkeyes game to see Caitlin Clark play. He had not gone to any sporting event in Atlanta.

And indeed that seemed to be the explanation. Schmitt had as evidence shown texts from Smith’s colleagues saying the special counsel would be sitting in seat “109 Row 1.” TPM’s Hunter Walker noticed that the venue where the Hawks played did not have such a seat, but the venue where the Hawkeyes played did. Soon, a video surfaced of a man that appeared to be Smith at the Hawkeyes game.

Here's footage of Jack Smith at the Iowa vs. Maryland game on February 3rd, 2024 btw pic.twitter.com/yItxkEbbTz

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) September 29, 2026

Was this all part of a coordinated media moment for Schmitt?

Immediately after Schmitt exited the hearing, Benny Johnson, an omnipresent right-wing poster who is part of the Turning Point USA world, wrote on X that Schmitt had “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself on the stand in his testimony.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, posted on X celebrating how Schmitt had put Smith “on the spot.” Neither man apparently caught what happened moments later, when those claims began to fall apart.

As Hunter noted, Schmitt was soon on a Turning Point USA broadcast where the host declared, “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game … in Atlanta … It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

Schmitt, for his part, seemed to be aware by this point that things had not gone to plan.

“I don’t — you know here’s the thing — my job is to ask the questions. He’s already — and if that’s what his answer is — then that’s what his answer is,” he said. Hard to argue with that.

Schmitt’s icarus moment also came on the same day Axios ran a piece headlined “Sen. Eric Schmitt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028,” written by the site’s co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei.

Schmitt’s staff may have set their boss up for a big day around his big moment. But, to echo another famous conspiracy theorist, the intel on this wasn’t 100%.

Republicans tried to capitalize on our siloed media ecosystem.

Johnson and Hannity eventually deleted their tweets about Schmitt’s failed effort to do a gotcha, but only after they garnered many thousands of impressions. Their feeds remain full of other, similar posts about the hearing. Many pivoted to posting about questioning of Smith by Schmitt’s Missouri colleague, Senator Josh Hawley (R). Hawley, for his part, found his own reasons to accuse Smith of perjury.

I'd charge Jack Smith with perjury.

He should certainly be disbarred.

This must never happen again in the United States of America pic.twitter.com/TINIcH2Bdv

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 29, 2026

There’s something very of this moment — and of the right-wing media in particular — in how these figures swung into action to celebrate Schmitt’s new conspiracy theory, without noticing or caring that it had fallen apart within minutes of it being floated.

As we know from years of experience, if a claim doesn’t implode quite as spectacularly as this one did, it’s easy enough for these influencers to brazen it out for audiences who may never make contact with reality. Initially, that seemed to be the plan.

Did Schmitt just forget women’s sports exist?

One provocative question I saw raised: was this whole thing the product of Schmitt totally overlooking a topic about which the GOP professes to care quite a bit, women’s sports? “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt confusedly told the Turning Point broadcast. The possibility of WNBA or NCAA women’s games went unmentioned.

Relatedly, enjoy Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-AL) stunned expression as Smith explained he attended a Hawkeyes, not Hawks’, game.

The moment Sen. Katie Britt realized Schmitt’s mistake.

pic.twitter.com/9Fb1CHyBE8 pic.twitter.com/4DVJBhS2lz

— Adam Wren (@adamwren) September 29, 2026

Don’t miss Schmitt’s attempt to laugh the whole thing off last night

Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) September 29, 2026

Tabs

• You heard it here first: The Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog agency within the legislative branch, has found Russ Vought’s latest “pocket rescissions” scheme to be illegal.
• The U.S. has joined Russia and Belarus, the only three countries to withdraw from Group of States against Corruption, a European anti-corruption body, the AP reports.
• As AI bosses beg government to make them stop doing what they’re doing, Trump has responded with a rebranding exercise, changing government descriptions of “artificial intelligence” to refer to “super intelligence,” a shift that I am not sure does anything for anyone. The executives also committed to self-regulating, which wasn’t what they had asked for. Mike Johnson, meanwhile, will support some regulations on these companies, he said, but only if they are voluntary.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), seen here on the right with a sly grin as he assists Schmitt in floating his conspiracy theory by gripping the corner of this posterboard Schmitt’s staff seems to have made.

The House has already left town. The Senate is heading home this week. With the midterms just around the corner, GOP lawmakers are giving up on doing any more legislating and skipping town to try to mobilize their demoralized voters.

TPM’s congressional reporter Emine Yücel has chronicled all the drama for us. Emine joined publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube Live at 2 p.m. ET to talk through what Congress has actually done — and failed to do — this session.

Check it out:

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. This decision should surprise no one because, about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election.

That second decision, moreover, followed an even earlier one by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. In that matter, Kavanaugh acted alone under a process that allows a single justice to dispose of a case — a process that the justices rarely invoke unless they view a case as so one-sided that there’s no need to formally refer it to their colleagues.

So, for those keeping track at home, that’s three times that the Supreme Court needed to decide the same exact question in less than three weeks. 

This happened because of an extraordinary round of defiance by Republican judges in the lower courts. Just minutes after Kavanaugh determined (for the first time) that Missouri cannot use the Republican gerrymander, a Trump-appointed judge in Missouri tried to countermand Kavanaugh’s decision. Then, after the full Court reaffirmed Kavanaugh’s decision, a panel of three Republican appellate judges again tried to reinstate the new maps that the Supreme Court had already twice rejected.

These judges’ behavior is disturbing. But it is also potentially a window into the future of the Supreme Court — at least if Republicans keep winning elections that allow them to fill seats on the federal judiciary.

The lower federal courts are gravid with ambitious Republican judges who reach conclusions that are either too extreme or too partisan for the current Supreme Court — such as the ones they reached in this case. These courts are also full of plausible candidates for a Supreme Court nomination who have shown unwavering loyalty to Trump, the MAGA movement, or the Republican Party — regardless of whether there are legal arguments supporting the GOP’s preferred outcomes.

Indeed, one lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, now functions as a kind of think tank for MAGA legal theories that less partisan judges would scoff at in disgust. This is the same court, for example, that attempted to pull the abortion medication mifepristone from the market. It’s a court that declares entire federal agencies unconstitutional. Or that orders thousands of lawfully cast ballots thrown in the trash after the Republican Party asks them to do so. The Fifth Circuit is also frequently reversed from the left by the Supreme Court.

That means that, if Republicans hold onto the Senate after the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, Trump will be able to easily identify and confirm Supreme Court nominees who make Justice Samuel Alito, the most partisan member of the current Court, look like an icon of disinterested fairness. And many of these ultra-partisan judges are young enough that they will remain viable Supreme Court candidates in future Republican administrations.

Eliminating judicial filibusters transformed who gets nominated to federal judgeships

About 13 years ago, the Senate fundamentally changed how federal judges are confirmed. Prior to late 2013, senators in the minority party could use the filibuster to block any judicial nominee who couldn’t find 60 senators who would support their confirmation. But the Senate voted in November of 2013 to allow judges to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.

Both parties have their own narratives blaming the other for this development. Republicans often claim that Democrats’ decision to filibuster a handful of President George W. Bush’s lower court nominees — before the second Bush administration, judicial filibusters were rare — was a major escalation in the partisan war over judicial confirmations. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Republicans for a significant uptick in judicial filibusters under President Barack Obama.

In any event, Senate Democrats eventually decided to allow judges to be confirmed by a majority vote after Republicans filibustered all of Obama’s nominees to three vacant seats on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. That broke a logjam that otherwise would have prevented Obama from filling any of these seats, but it also created a new world where lawyers who wished to become federal judges or justices no longer needed to worry about winning votes from senators in the other party.

This new world was apparent immediately after Trump took office the first time in 2017. There was a vacant seat on the Supreme Court, largely because Senate Republicans had held it open for a year until Trump could fill it. 

During his first term, Trump largely delegated the task of picking judges to the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers. And the Federalist Society was obsessively focused on weakening the power of federal agencies to regulate private business. 

Trump’s eventual nominee for the open seat, now-Justice Neil Gorsuch, secured his new job by advertising his eagerness to advance the conservative legal movement’s top priority. Shortly before his nomination, Gorsuch wrote a pair of opinions laying out his plan to make federal agencies subservient to the judges. And one of these opinions, according to the journalist David Kaplan, “proved decisive in clinching” the nomination for Gorsuch.

In the pre-2013 world, judges with Supreme Court ambitions often avoided making their most controversial views public out of fear that doing so would antagonize other-party senators who they might need to support their confirmation to a higher court. In 2011, for example, Kavanaugh, then a judge, was assigned to a panel considering the constitutionality of Obamacare. But he dodged the key issue in the case, instead claiming that he lacked jurisdiction to rule on whether Obamacare is lawful.

After Gorsuch’s anti-regulatory opinions scored him a Supreme Court seat, however, lower court judges took notice. And the most ambitious Republican judges started looking for opportunities to prove their conservative bona fides to the Trump White House. Before 2017, for example, Kavanaugh had avoided taking a public position on abortion. Months after Gorsuch’s confirmation, however, Kavanaugh gave a speech to a conservative think tank signaling that he would be a vote to overrule Roe v. Wade if he were given a promotion.

The confirmation process, in other words, now favors candidates who audition for judicial jobs by demonstrating that they are dependable votes on issues that drive their political party. This is especially true for Republican judicial candidates, because the Trump White House has shown such favor toward candidates who are personally loyal to Trump. But Democrats who want a judicial appointment also have similar incentives. 

Gorsuch got his seat because Republicans, who controlled the Senate in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia’s death opened a vacancy on the Supreme Court, refused to confirm anyone that Obama nominated to fill this seat. It now appears, in other words, that no Democrat can get confirmed to the Supreme Court unless their party controls the Senate. So Democrats with Supreme Court ambitions also have no incentive to make nice with Republicans.

The way to get a high-powered judgeship is to convince your own political party that you will use that judgeship to advance its goals.

Republican judges are openly auditioning for the Supreme Court

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are hardly the only judges who started advertising their ideological and partisan loyalty in an apparent effort to get ahead. The lower courts are now full of judges who write extreme and often needlessly provocative opinions that seem designed to catch the eye of someone in the White House.

The Ninth Circuit’s Lawrence VanDyke, for example, is a particularly vulgar judge who was reportedly on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court during his first term. He’s best known for opinions mocking his colleagues and left-leaning litigants in a tone more often found on MAGA podcasts than in judicial opinions. VanDyke began an opinion about transgender women last March, for example, with the line “this is a case about swinging dicks.”

Or consider Andrew Oldham, a Fifth Circuit judge known for his opinions undercutting the First Amendment, attacking voting by mail, and standing up for vaping companies’ ability to sell bubblegum-flavored nicotine products — among other things. Oldham’s chambers is a factory pumping out decisions that even cause many of the Supreme Court’s Republicans to cringe — his vaping opinion was tossed out in a unanimous decision by Alito — but that also align perfectly with the Trump administration’s preferred policy outcomes.

The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

Or take Judge James Ho, Oldham’s colleague on the Fifth Circuit, who is also known for his trolly opinions attacking liberal shibboleths. Rather than attempt to summarize Ho’s jurisprudence, I will simply refer readers to my 2023 profile of him: “The edgelord of the federal judiciary.”

I could name more judges who behave similarly — I bring up these three largely because they’ve been discussed in the national media as potential Supreme Court candidates if Trump gets to appoint another justice. But there’s no need to belabor the point. The bottom line is that, if a vacancy does open up on the Supreme Court, Trump will have no shortage of judges who appear to have spent their judicial careers looking for opportunities to demonstrate just how eager they are to advance a MAGA agenda, even when that means moving several steps to the right of a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans.

Indeed, the Missouri incident reveals just how widespread these sorts of judicial partisans are within the lower courts. None of the Republican judges who tried to reinstate the Missouri gerrymander after it was rejected by the Supreme Court, for example, have received the same attention that VanDyke, Oldham, and Ho have received as possible Supreme Court candidates. One of them, Judge James Loken, is an 86-year-old George H.W. Bush nominee with no prospects whatsoever of getting promoted.

But the culture in the lower courts has grown so open to partisan decisionmaking that he, along with two younger colleagues, literally tried to give the Republican Party an extra US House seat after the Supreme Court had told them not to do it twice.

Which isn’t to say that every Republican federal judge, or even every Trump appointee, is a partisan hack. One of the most pointed opinions rejecting Trump’s attempt to overthrow former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, for example, was authored by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee. But, while Bibas’s opinion in Donald J. Trump for President v. Secretary (2020) was excellent, it also almost certainly guaranteed that he will never become a justice. And it absolutely guaranteed that he will never be nominated by Trump.

There’s no good solution to this problem

The biggest reason why America is stuck in this mess is that its two major parties have polarized on the proper role of judges. Even setting aside the youngest generation of hyperpartisan judges, it’s long been the case that any Republican nominated to the Supreme Court will be a reliable vote against causes like abortion rights, affirmative action, and the Voting Rights Act, and an equally reliable vote in favor of the “unitary executive” and for religious conservatives who seek exemptions from state and federal laws. Any Democrat, meanwhile, will take the opposite position on these, and a whole array of other issues where the two parties have consistent positions.

This is why restoring the old filibuster rules that existed prior to 2013 will not succeed in moderating the judiciary. If anything, allowing the minority party to filibuster judges again would mean that no one would ever be confirmed to the Supreme Court, because any nominee who is acceptable to one party would be radioactive in the other party.

Ultimately, the only effective way to keep people like Oldham, Ho, or VanDyke off the Supreme Court is to elect senators and presidents who do not want them on the Supreme Court. The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

There may only be one person in the world who thinks that a Democratic majority in Congress could actually roll back all of Trumpism in a matter of months. 

That’s Donald Trump.

“We gotta win this election,” he told the audience at a rally in North Carolina on Sept. 16. “If we don’t, all of those things that we got you . . . they’re all gonna go away. All of the things that we’ve done, the strongest border in the history of our country, it’s all gonna go away. If we lose, you’re going to lose your border, you’re going to lose your tax cuts, you’re going to lose your wealth, and our country is going to go through hell, and we’re going to be a laughingstock all over the world, just as we were two years ago.”

It’s almost like he doesn’t know he has a veto.

Back here in the real world, Democrats will likely flip the House in November, and maybe the Senate too. But if they want to have something to show for it two years from now, they’re going to have to find a way to get around Trump’s veto power. 

That will require the kind of aggression — the kind of fight — the current crop of Democratic party leaders has never shown.

Imagine, instead, a Democratic leadership with a to-do list in one hand — starting with a compelling affordability agenda — and a how-to list in the other hand, something like this:

• No more cowering from veto threats. Democrats should dare Trump to veto popular legislation and make him own the consequences if he does.
• Demand major concessions from Trump in return for passing a new debt limit and a defense spending bill, and shut down the government if necessary.
• Drive a wedge between Republican legislators and their increasingly unpopular and irrational leader.
• No more protecting “centrist” Democrats from tough votes.
• Tell the lobbyists to take a hike.
• Impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for malfeasance.
• Impeach Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought for violating congressional spending directives.
• Order the Capitol Police to arrest and jail administration officials if they refuse to honor congressional subpoenas.

Democrats in leadership and on the campaign trail talk a lot about their lofty legislative goals. But some of those goals are unattainable as long as Trump has the veto — and even more so if Republicans keep the Senate. Democrats need to be thinking and talking about what they can practically achieve — and how. And they need to have a battle plan so they can hit the ground running in January.

I raised questions about how they could do that in a Sept. 2 op-ed for MS NOW. As part of my hunt for answers, I turned to some wise left-leaning Washington veterans for their thoughts.

“This is going to be really tricky business,” Norman Ornstein, the longtime congressional analyst, told me.

“It would require a wholesale change in the DNA of House and Senate Democrats,” said Jim Manley, a political strategist who spent more than 20 years working in the Senate, including six years as spokesman for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Triumphant congressional Democrats “are going to be feeling feisty, they’re going to feel vindicated, and they’re going to feel like fighting like hell,” said Robert Kuttner, who co-founded the Economic Policy Institute and the American Prospect.

“If they aren’t assertive,” Ornstein warned, “they may not hold their majority for very long.” 

Each of these experts, with decades of experience between them, all agreed that whether Democrats control one of both chambers, they need to pass lots of popular bills and make it painful for Trump and Republicans to oppose them. If the legislation becomes law, it’s a huge victory. If it’s blocked, the public will know who to blame. 

“The old playbook says you’ve got to be concerned about the threat of a veto,” Manley said. “Why go through that exercise if it can’t get through the Senate and/or is going to be subject to the president’s veto? You’ve got to husband your resources.” 

But now, he said, “If the president wants to veto it, that’s fine. We’ve got to adopt a strategy that you never know until you try. You never know until you apply pressure. You never know until you force a vote. Trump is incredibly weakened already. He’s going to be even weaker next year. He’s losing juice on Capitol Hill. He’s losing altitude with the American people.”

Democrats are in general agreement about one starting point: an affordability agenda recently outlined by House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. It calls for bringing down the cost of healthcare, groceries, gas and housing. Of those four areas, healthcare is approaching a major crisis, which sets the Democrats up for their first major battle: Restoring the devastating Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that Republicans in 2025 intentionally postponed until after the 2026 midterms.

“Very few people appreciate the fact — except for the authors of the bill that did it — how much healthcare spending is going to be cut, and how many people are going to be hurt in the next year,” said Manley.

As Ornstein explained, “Medicaid money doesn’t go to the 10 million people who are going to lose their health insurance because they impose these new onerous work and reporting requirements. It goes to the providers.”

Hospitals and nursing homes will lose money and some will close, putting even more pressure on those that remain.

“So first,” Ornstein said, “you’re going to hold hearings pointing out why this is happening, and that it was the Big Beautiful Bill that did it. Two, you are going to pass bills that restore funding. And if Trump vetoes them then you’re going to hold a bunch of hearings on why he is undermining health care in America.”

Legislation to restore Medicaid cuts— and to restore the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act that Trump cut last year, throwing three million people off their insurance plans — “those are the kinds of things that are just very, very popular that are going to be hard for Republicans to oppose,” Kuttner said.

“There will be negotiations,” he said. “And the more Republicans [that] Democrats have siding with them, then the more pressure there is on Trump.”

Fissures are sure to keep growing between Trump and Republicans in Congress, Kuttner said. “If the Republicans have a wipeout in both houses — and it’s increasingly looking like that could well happen — and Trump is in his last two years and is a crazier and crazier lame duck, a lot of the loyalty starts dissipating.”

“It’s not like they’ll suddenly recover backbone or principle,” he said. “This is just a simple calculation of self-interest.”

“Will there be ways to try and exploit that and try and get stuff done?” Manley asked. “It’s possible, yes.”

When it comes to demanding that Trump do — or stop doing — something in particular, Democrats don’t have a lot of leverage. But they’ve got some.

“Trump’s got two things that he needs to do next year,” Manley said. “He needs to figure out a way to fund defense spending, and he needs to be a part of an effort to pass a debt limit increase. Beyond that, he doesn’t really need anything legislatively.”

That gives Democrats two big chances to refuse to go along with the president until their demands are met. “They should go to the mat,” Ornstein said, “and that might include government shutdowns, maybe even having extended government shutdowns.” 

While Manley cautioned that any leverage Democrats earn after the midterms “only goes so far,” he pointed out that “doesn’t mean they can’t try to use it.” Democratic leadership is also going to have to start getting tougher with the caucus, he said. 

Manley pointed out that two conservative Democrats cast the decisive votes on Sept. 1 advancing a Republican legislative package. “I just find that highly objectionable. The leadership’s going to have to figure out a strategy to not have people defect on key votes.”

Manley invoked his own history as a Senate staffer as evidence. “The old Jim — the guy who worked for Harry Reid — always looked out for the caucus as a whole, trying to protect the centrists. I get this. But there’s going to have to be some changes.”

Democrats will need to do a better job of resisting lobbyists. “You know, former members — and let’s be honest, there’s going to be former members, former staffers — they’re going to go up to the Hill and they’re going to try and plead with Democrats to cut their clients some slack,” Manley said. “And the leadership and the committee chairs are just simply going to have to say no.”

Oversight will be another important way to put Trump and Republicans on the defensive. Once Democrats have the power to hold hearings and issue subpoenas that comes with being in the majority, there will be “so many incredible opportunities for investigation,” Kuttner said.

There will also be one major obstacle: Ever since 2019, shortly after the midterm elections during his first term that gave Democrats a majority in the House, Trump has simply refused to honor congressional subpoenas.

During Trump’s first administration, Democratic House members voted to issue criminal contempt citations to two Cabinet officials — Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — who denied them documents. But it didn’t work: Criminal contempt enforcement is up to the Department of Justice, and with Barr in charge, the department balked.

There is, however, a way Democrats can escalate: They can brush off their “inherent contempt” power, and enforce it themselves.

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“How far are you willing to go?” asked Ornstein. “Are you actually going to use your power, set up a little jail in the Capitol, and have the Capitol Police arrest them?” 

Ornstein’s answer: Yes. “I’d like to see that. If people are going to defy Congress, hold them accountable, knowing that this Justice Department won’t do so.”

If they win a majority in the Senate, of course, Democrats will also have the ability to confirm or reject Trump appointees, including judges. “You would hope that they would basically say: ‘no more radical lunatic judges, no more rattle radical lunatic Cabinet members or sub-Cabinet members,’” Ornstein said.

Trump could counter by putting those appointees — or even worse choices — in acting roles. But, as Ornstein put it, “You’re not going to have an opportunity to put in lifetime appointments — and you certainly will not have the opportunity with the Supreme Court.”

Finally, there’s impeachment. On the one hand, launching impeachment proceedings in the House is unlikely to result in removal, which requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate. But they’re great for focusing the public’s attention. 

Ornstein supports the impeachment of some Trump Cabinet members — starting with Hegseth. Republicans are already so terrified of having to take a stand on Hegseth that after renegade Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie introduced articles of impeachment against him on Sept. 16 and demanded a vote, Speaker Mike Johnson chose to call an early recess instead.

“For the vast majority of Americans who have no clue what horrors have been inflicted upon the country by these monstrous people, you’re going to actually be able to shine a light on them,” Ornstein said. “You can shine a light on what Pete Hagseth has done to get us into this disastrous war, to hollow out the military, to undermine American national security.” 

And, Ornstein said, “I would also, at minimum, make clear that there’s no statute of limitations for this” and that “we can promise you that [he] will be charged in 2029.”

Next on his list would be Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Collins, which would create yet more heartache for Republicans. “Are you going to side with people undermining food safety, people taking away Alzheimer’s research, and causing measles outbreaks and deaths? Or are you going to do the right thing?” Ornstein said.

If the administration keeps ignoring congressional budget appropriations, Manley said, “then Russell Vought goes to the top of the impeachment list.”

Impeachment hearings also force the media to pay attention. “You’re going to embarrass them and you’re going to highlight the fact that the terrible things happening to people are being caused by the Trump administration,” Ornstein said. “Which, mind you, the press should have been telling them very clearly over the last several years, but they haven’t, and with the hook of the Democrats conducting these hearings, they will.”

Ornstein said the future for a Democratic congressional majority is uncertain. “They’ve made these promises. But they don’t have the power to implement them. They’re on the firing line and people may blame them. And Trump and billionaires will put a lot of money into blaming them for everything bad that happens. And then the question becomes: Are they able to use tough leadership over the power of the purse to bring about some changes? And I don’t know the answer to that.”

The post After Democrats beat Trump in the midterms, here’s how they finish him appeared first on Salon.com.

With the midterms just under six weeks away, more Republican candidates are coming to the belated realization that, if they want to save their seats, they could perhaps use some distance from the very unpopular president whose approval is reaching new lows.

Now, after a decade in which President Donald Trump has demanded — and increasingly received — near-total loyalty from his parties’ candidates and congressional delegation, and used his bully pulpit to launch harsh personal attacks on Republicans who don’t provide it, such distancing attempts remain cautious and limited.

But they are growing more common. And this isn’t just in the toughest blue territory — even Republicans in states or districts Trump won overwhelmingly are now rushing to emphasize how they don’t agree with the president on some of his most controversial and unpopular agenda items. 

“It’s only natural that candidates would seek to create distance from Trump, especially on issues — like the Iran war — that are unpopular,” GOP strategist Douglas Heye told me. “That doesn’t guarantee success, and can be a hard needle to thread, but it’s the natural play.”

For now, the primary motivator is political. But today’s election-year cracks could be signs of larger breaks later, especially as Republicans look toward life without the singular figure who’s dominated the last decade-plus of party politics. 

A party running away from major parts of the lame-duck president’s agenda today might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow — with potentially major implications for governance. And if Trump’s record is truly deemed a failure by Republicans, the GOP’s future will be wide open.

Where the general election cracks are starting to show

The boldest break in recent weeks has been from Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida, who represents a heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County district that Trump won solidly in 2024. 

Last week, Salazar released a campaign ad in which she spoke directly to the camera and addressed Trump, saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” She added: “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

The ad was the most dramatic sign yet that Trump’s ongoing polling collapse with Latino voters — a critical component of his 2024 coalition — is showing up for Republican campaigns as well. As Salazar’s ad suggested, many swing voters interpreted Trump’s “mass deportation” talk as a promise to clamp down on border crossings and remove dangerous criminals — not to patrol the streets with militarized operations going after otherwise law-abiding migrants, many of whom have established ties to the community. If the backlash proves real in places like Florida and Texas, it could affect how future Republicans approach the issue.

That same week, two incumbent House members in Iowa in tough races decided to let their votes tell the tale. Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn both voted for a resolution to end Trump’s war in Iran, and each posted on social media that they opposed an “open-ended war.”  

Vice President JD Vance, who reports suggest was privately opposed to the decision to launch the military operation, mentioned at the Republican convention in Dallas that slain conservative activists Charlie Kirk “hated war,” but stuck with Trump even when he disagreed — an apparent plea to wavering Trump voters to do the same.

Polls show strong opposition to the war among the public, and if it continues to be a drag on GOP candidates, that could strengthen the currently embattled faction of the GOP that urges caution about foreign entanglements. On Tuesday, two more Republicans — Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor of Wisconsin, and Sen. Jon Husted, running for Senate in Ohio — publicly said it was time to bring the war to an end. (Husted caveated this by saying that ending the conflict would require a deal with Iran, and that he wouldn’t vote for the congressional resolution to end the war.)

Wisconsin GOP candidate for governor Rep. Tom Tiffany today on rising gas prices and Iran: "I just believe we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on … Time to come home, take care of business here in America." pic.twitter.com/oHo1QjiGDr

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) September 22, 2026

Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa, has also been cautiously seeking a bit more distance from Trump by, for instance, opposing his plan to cut tariffs on foreign beef imports since it would increase competition for local cattle ranchers, the New York Times recently reported.

Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, facing a reelection race that polls suggest is surprisingly competitive, has publicly criticized Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, saying they hurt businesses in his state.

Even two members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who are both running for governor — Tiffany in Wisconsin and Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida — are making similar rhetorical adjustments. 

Tiffany disagreed with Trump renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” an action taken as part of Trump’s overwhelmingly unpopular trade war with Canada. And Donalds removed many mentions and pictures of the president from his website this week, the Miami Herald reported (replacing a pledge to “Enact the Trump Agenda” with one to focus on “affordability”).

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Some Republicans in blue states or districts — like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — have long tried to play up their disagreements with Trump, to position themselves as independent voices. 

But many other candidates are still clinging tightly to Trump. “I am still with that guy,” Michael Whatley, the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina, said at a rally with Trump last week. Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, is similarly sticking by Trump (despite Trump’s constant digs at how Paxton dresses). It doesn’t hurt that Trump’s super PAC could be a critical player in theirs, and others’, races.

And when GOP candidates do try to stress their independence, it typically comes in the form of saying they disagree with the president on a particular issue that’s going over poorly in their state or district — most often either tariffs, the Iran war, or immigration.

The GOP candidates’ double bind

Through much of the Trump era, Republicans have faced a powerful incentive to minimize openly breaking with the president — because they feared Trump would be vindictive enough to use his bully pulpit against them, as he has against his GOP critics in the past.

Strategically, candidates face a double bind, as stressing their independence from Trump can theoretically help with swing voters who have soured on the president, but it also could hurt turnout among the Trump-loyal base.

“It’s a fine line to walk,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. “You don’t want to look like you’re being disloyal to a Republican president, because you could end up with a Truth Social tweet that would destroy the support of Republicans who like Donald Trump for your campaign.”

For Republicans in redder states or districts, Trump’s engagement could still be their candidates’ greatest asset — he could help spur them to go to the polls and help frame the midterm contest in purely partisan terms.

“Motivation in midterm cycles matters a lot,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster at Echelon Insights, recently posted on X. Ruffini’s argument is that, due to the Senate map and gerrymandering in the House, many more competitive seats this cycle are in states Trump won big. So, he argued, “raising Republicans’ motivation to vote will go further than it did in 2018 because of the political terrain this election is being fought on.”

But if Trump’s approval is reaching new lows, that calculus could change — even in redder areas. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval at 32 percent, the worst result in that poll since Trump entered politics.

That could explain the new round of distancing we’ve been seeing in recent weeks. And if the polling bears out and the party does end up suffering substantial losses, it could potentially hasten that trend, as Republicans grow more wary of tying themselves tightly to an 80-year-old who won’t be on the ballot again. 

Should Democrats regain control of the House, Senate, or both, there would be no shortage of votes they could call to test just how far Republicans are willing to break with Trump on issues like immigration, tariffs, and the war. It could also create a difficult position for the next Republican presidential nominee — especially if it’s Trump’s own vice president — as they seek to incorporate lessons from the backlash without offending Trump.

For his part, Trump has been relatively restrained in response to all this, perhaps recognizing what a difficult political situation his party is in. Asked by reporters about Salazar’s ad Friday, he called her “a nice person” but “a little bit softer on the border.” 

But he couldn’t resist adding: “Without me, she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”

Longtime election analyst Charlie Cook has a piece up on his Substack looking at the fast-approaching midterms. It’s an interesting piece, an artifact of the moment, not simply because of what it predicts but because of the nature of the writing in which Cook seems to be grasping for metaphors about just how bad a situation Republicans face — a bit more stream of consciousness and performance art than one is used to in election analysis.

Let’s start with the lede …

With 64 days before Election Day (although the first mail-in ballots will go out in a matter of days), Republicans should brace themselves: The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible. 

A few sentences later he describes what he considers the most likely scenario.

Let’s start with the most likely scenario: that this is a “really bad” election for Republicans, losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate. 

He then describes a less drastic and merely “bad” scenario in which aggressive gerrymandering on both sides keeps House losses in the 15 to 25 range. But he thinks that this scenario still nets Democrats four to five Senate seats. He calls the GOP’s worst-case scenario the same 26 to 35 House seats lost but “at least six” Senate seats gone too.