This story was originally reported by Sara Luterman of The 19th. Meet Sara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

More than 25 years ago, Lois Curtis called a lawyer with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society from a pay phone in a hospital hallway. She had an intellectual disability and wanted help to get out of the state hospitals where she had lived for most of her life. Instead of spending her days heavily sedated and shuffling between the day room and the place where she slept, she wanted to be in her own apartment, to make her own decisions about what to do with her days. 

“She’d say, ‘Get me out of here. Would you please get me out of here? When am I getting out of here?’” recalled the lawyer, Sue Jamieson, in an oral history for the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.

With representation from the legal aid group, Curtis and her co-plaintiff, fellow Georgia resident Elaine Wilson, brought a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor in 1999. In Olmstead v. L.C., which stands for Lois Curtis, the majority held that the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act guarantees that people with disabilities have a right to live outside the walls of asylums, state hospitals and nursing homes. 

More than two decades later, that right is under threat. In June, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice published a memo stating that the federal government has no obligation to enforce Olmstead. In August, the DOJ began withdrawing from cases where it had previously been defending people with disabilities (and their families) who wanted to receive care in their own homes.

A Calculated Delay

The Trump Justice Department has mapped out its coming attack on mifepristone — much thirsted for by anti-abortion advocates, but deliberately delayed to avoid midterm backlash — in a new court filing. 

The first step to imposing new restrictions (or reimposing ones previously lifted) is to conduct a “safety review.” Experts often point out that there are few drugs that have been studied and scrutinized as much as mifepristone, making the pretense of discovering some heretofore unknown risk factor fairly absurd.  

“FDA is on track to obtain study results by mid-December 2026,” DOJ wrote of its review. “FDA will then need to review and evaluate/interpret the results and draft a report. FDA expects to complete that process not later than March 2027.” 

The agency will then use those “findings” to justify a change to mifepristone’s REMS — Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy — or restrictions meant to police the use of highly dangerous drugs. Mifepristone’s safety profile has never justified these restrictions, but the anti-abortion movement’s decades of smearing the drug as unsafe has successfully made it harder to get under Republican and Democratic FDAs alike. 

The Biden administration took the largest strides yet in removing some of these barriers. Most importantly, it lifted the in-person dispensing requirement, which has allowed patients even in red states to be prescribed the medicine over telehealth by doctors in blue ones, and receive it in the mail. So far, blue state shield laws have protected those providers from prosecution by red states, though a massive legal reckoning on these state jurisdictional issues is certainly coming. 

That Biden-era REMS change is the crux of a Louisiana lawsuit against the FDA seeking to restrict mifepristone, with the state arguing that allowing the drug to be remotely prescribed and mailed undermines its abortion ban and forces it to expend money on Medicaid patients that have mifepristone-related complications. This week’s filing is part of that lawsuit. Historically, these lawsuits have struggled to amass legitimate examples of such mifepristone-related injuries, and Louisiana’s complaint leans heavily on state sovereignty. 

The DOJ filing stated that the FDA is looking at the in-person dispensing requirement in particular. 

“Following completion of its study and review, FDA will decide whether changes to the Mifepristone REMS Program are necessary and, if applicable, initiate any such changes in accordance with established processes,” it said. “FDA anticipates that it will be able to provide an update to its estimated date of completion as more information becomes known, particularly in March 2027 when it expects to complete its report on the final study results.” 

This filing is as much a signal to the anti-abortion movement as it is an attempt to get Louisiana to cool it until the midterms are safely finished and the FDA can do the dirty work itself. Activists have been outraged at the lack of movement in President Donald Trump’s second term, though they were somewhat assuaged when he nominated Heidi Overton — who has called mifepristone “dangerous to women” and celebrated Dobbs — as the new FDA commissioner. She has not yet received a confirmation vote. 

Programming Note

I’ve been gone for two days! I forgot to say on Thursday’s edition that I’d be taking a long weekend to hike Mount Marcy, New York’s highest peak, with friends. More on that further down. For now, I’m back, and pretty much here through the election. Which is in … just 35 days.

A New Reason for Susan Collins to Show ‘Concern’

I wrote earlier this month about the White House scheme to subject National Institutes of Health grants to a panel of political appointees who would ensure that each had been scrubbed of all wokeness. That plan seems to be on ice for now (though I expect it to be revived in some form after the midterms, depending in part on how the midterms go). Now White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has a new scheme to mess with Congress’ ability to appropriate funds. It’s one he tried exactly a year ago: “pocket rescissions.”

A “pocket rescission” is a maneuver in which the White House notifies Congress that the fiscal year is ending without it spending funds Congress told it to spend. It is styled as a request for Congress to “rescind” the funds — a term that usually applies to a congressional vote to undo a previous spending law. But in the case of a pocket rescission, the White House is submitting its rescission request without leaving Congress time to vote on it before the funds expire at the end of the fiscal year. Thus, the year ends without the executive branch spending the funds the legislature told it to spend, and without Congress having a say in it.

“Pocket rescissions,” embraced by this White House, are widely considered to be illegal. The Government Accountability Office, a legislative watchdog agency that vets how congressional appropriations are or are not spent, has said so multiple times. But so far, that issue has not been extensively litigated.

Vought’s most recent “pocket rescission” details nearly $1 billion in funding that the White House did not spend, including money for refugees and immigrants and other programs that the reactionaries around Trump have deemed to be too “woke.” Some Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in squealing about Vought’s move. It’s particularly painful for Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which writes the spending bills the White House is now flouting. “We’re already looking at whether there’s language we can put in the next set of appropriations bills that would prohibit this from happening,” she said yesterday. “But it’s going to take some legal work.”

These dust-ups between Congress and the White House allow Collins, who is fighting for reelection, to make a show of taking a stand. But this has all happened before, and the Republican-led Senate did not do much to prevent the White House from repeating the maneuver. Vought even brazenly told Democrats in Congress in June he “had no plans” to engineer another “pocket rescission.” And yet, right on schedule, with the end of the fiscal year days away, he did again.

This stuff is a bit in the weeds, but we cover it because it’s a small piece of the larger Article I crisis in which we find ourselves. The White House continues to take actions, particularly when it comes to spending, that stomp on Congress’ powers under the Constitution. The sprawling war in Iran, which Congress has yet to approve in any form, is the most dramatic example. But in ways large and small, the White House is steamrolling Congress’ power of the purse — its constitutional power to decide how taxpayer money is spent — zeroing out programs that legislators wrote into law while pouring money into airing Trump campaign ads on television. Congress could reassert its power in myriad ways, but does not.

As a coda to that point, here’s Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), hemming and hawing his way to a non-answer on what the legislative body he leads will do here: “Whether you agree in substance or not with what they did, you can argue that they be good stewards, and some of these things may be things many of us agree with, but the process by which they did it is gonna be, I assume, subject to a lot of discussion and probably some litigation.”

Two Key Figures in Georgia Ballots Probe Leave Administration

Andrew Bailey, the deputy director of the FBI, and Kurt Olsen, who once worked as Trump’s director of election security and integrity, have reportedly left their roles. Both were key figures in the raid on Fulton County, Georgia’s election office earlier this year.

• Bailey was at the raid.
• Olsen, a temporary government employee, made the referral to prosecutors that led to the raid.
• Both are staunch conservative warriors. Bailey was the attorney general of Missouri — an office that tends to spearhead lawsuits that engage in various culture war issues — when he was tapped to become co-deputy director of the FBI, helping out Dan Bongino.
• The New York Times reports that Bailey and FBI Director Kash Patel did not get along. His work in Georgia was one of his most visible moments as deputy director.
• Olsen, a prominent 2020 election denier and former attorney for Kari Lake, has also reportedly left the DOJ, where he had worked for months on the “grand conspiracy” case against Trump’s enemies. Olsen faced issues obtaining a security clearance, the Times reports.
• That case appears to have been an attempt to paint an overarching narrative that rolled together the many first term investigations into Trump’s misdeeds into one investigation of the investigators. But the wheels seem to be coming off: You’ll recall the lead prosecutor, conservative warrior Joseph diGenova, quit earlier this month, telling the New York Post, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”

Here is a short update on the so-called Broadview Six case — one of the high-profile prosecutorial abuse cases coming out of ICE/CBP Midway Blitz occupation of Chicago in the fall and winter of 2025-26. To catch everyone back up, this was a case involving four candidates or elected officials, one campaign staffer and one activist. It was tied to ongoing protests outside the ICE Broadview facility outside Chicago. Federal prosecutors took a situation that involved protestors briefly making contact with a vehicle unexpectedly trying to drive through a protest line and jacked it up to a felony case. As one of the lawyers on the case told me at the time, the facts supported at best a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, and even that would been a wild overreaction to what actually happened.

Throughout the case, it was clear that the case was part of the Trump administration’s larger strategy of targeting peaceful protestors with wildly excessive charges. Eventually the case fell apart when major prosecutorial misconduct was uncovered on the part of the prosecutors in the case. All charges were eventually dropped in May with prejudice, just before the trial was to take place. The remaining mystery was tied to the original prosecutor in the case, who committed the misconduct securing the indictment the previous fall. (There was other misconduct tied to turning off doctored transcripts of that grand jury session.) That prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg, had a generally apolitical reputation and certainly was no right-winger. Defense attorneys had the impression she didn’t have a lot of confidence in the government’s position. She left the case with little explanation for a DOJ assignment working on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) in February. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois — Andrew Boutros — and Mecklenburg’s replacement — William Hogan — were both known to be strongly onboard with the Trump/ICE program. (Hogan also had a tattered reputation on the professional ethics front.)

This story was originally published by ProPublica,  a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.

For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.

FBI At the Polls Bc I’m Annoyed

FBI Director Kash Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and seemed, at least initially, interested in following federal laws against deploying armed federal law enforcement to polling places this fall.

Under federal law, armed federal agents or members of the military cannot be deployed to “any place where a general or special election is held.” That’s established. The reason that Democrats are routinely pressing Patel, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, the head of the Defense Department and other Trump administration officials about whether federal law enforcement officers — whether it’s FBI agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers or others — might be deployed to the polls this fall is because President Trump has been agitating around the idea for some time.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump was vocal about his interest in deploying the military domestically to seize voting machines in counties he thought he should have won. Since then, and in the wake of his second term’s nationwide immigration crackdown — the lethality of which has prompted widespread backlash and protests — his allies outside of the administration have been pushing the White House to send ICE officers to the polls in the midterms. Trump’s allies, like podcaster Steve Bannon, have promoted the line that Democrats win elections only when they cheat and have noncitizen voters cast ballots in federal elections for them. The conspiracy theory has been debunked repeatedly over the years, but Trump’s belief in it has formed the basis of most of his legislative agenda for his second term — and has animated all of his Justice Department’s efforts to seize the constitutionally-protected right to administer elections from the states.

‘Don’t Know That We Can’t Legally Do It’

While Patel initially stuck to boilerplate lines about how he has done nothing but follow the law during his tenure as FBI chief, he also suggested that he thinks it is not necessarily illegal for FBI agents to be sent to polling places. It appears he may have been arguing that agents are allowed to follow up on violations of law, a line that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has used when asked if ICE agents might be sent to the polls. (“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” Mullin said earlier this month. “If we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.”)

“I don’t know that we can’t legally do it,” Patel said in response to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asking him to commit to not sending FBI agents to the polls in November. Patel said that he would follow the law and keep agents and intelligence analysts stationed at FBI field offices in case there were any election security-related issues to address.

“The FBI will follow the law,” Patel said. “If there’s a reason to go there, because there’s been a violation of law, we will, otherwise we won’t.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) questioned him about Justice Department policy that restricts federal law enforcement activities or investigations at polling places on Election Day.

“Are you aware of the Justice Department’s long-standing guidance that states that FBI agents cannot conduct investigations inside polling places on Election Day, and that federal prosecutors have no authority to send FBI special agents or deploy U.S. Marshals to polling places?” Klobuchar asked.

“I’m aware,” Patel replied.

“Will you commit to following clear federal law and DOJ policy and not deploy federal agents to polling places?” she asked.

“We will always follow the law and the guidelines,” he said.

But when Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) began questioning Patel about the matter, Patel started wildly obfuscating.