But Will Lawmakers Finally Act to Rein Vought In?

Top appropriators in Congress responded yesterday to White House OMB Director Russ Vought’s latest attempt to install political appointees as the final arbiters of congressionally appropriated grant money for scientific research.

“Republicans need to join us to put a stop to any effort by this administration to politicize what groundbreaking new treatments and cures we decide as a country to invest in,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the top Democratic appropriator, said.

“The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should not be involved in agency decisions on the awards of grants,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the Republican chair of the appropriations committee, said.

The most recent scheme, as I wrote yesterday, involves an executive order — which is, reportedly, currently being drafted, to give political appointees control over spending on research by the National Institutes of Health. Vought, per the Washington Post, contends that NIH’s work remains too “woke.” Trump and Vought are both also annoyed, per Politico and the New York Times, that funding continues to flow from the agency to Harvard.

TPM’s interest in this story isn’t only about the fact that a politicization of NIH grants would be an authoritarian disaster — though it would be. It’s also that it is the latest chapter in a theme that has defined the Trump administration: expanding executive branch power, and marginalizing Congress — a campaign by Trump and his advisors to which the Republican-controlled legislature has largely acquiesced.

While Democrats denounced Vought’s power grab, the senator who really matters here is Collins, the top Republican on the appropriations committee. Collins, of course, is fighting for reelection in Maine, and her statement was relatively strong.

“Any attempt to politicize grantmaking at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or any other agency, by another means — whether an Executive Order or guidance — is contrary to congressional intent,” she said.

“The Continuing Resolution — which passed the Senate, House, and was signed into law on September 2 – blocks OMB’s proposed rule or any substantially similar one,” she also noted.

Words, however, are cheap. As I wrote yesterday, the continuing resolution to fund the government, passed earlier this month, blocks the Trump administration from installing Trump’s political appointees to oversee research, but only does so until after the midterms. Republicans, Murray said last month, rejected a permanent block on the White House injecting itself into grantmaking.

This question will surface again after the midterms — and, likely, sooner, if this executive order sees the light of day, posing a direct challenge to Collins. We’ll see then if she, and Congress more generally, are willing to reassert their power of the purse in a lasting way.

Missouri Map Heads Back to the Supreme Court Yet Again

The Supreme Court has already twice weighed in on a fight that has been playing out in recent weeks in Missouri, after the state’s secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, chose the route of chaos by effectively ignoring a petition by voters to choose which map the state votes under. At issue are two maps — a 2022 one and a deeply gerrymandered one the state legislature passed in 2025 at Trump’s urging.

• The Supreme Court has twice effectively required the midterm elections to go forward under the 2022 map, and the state Supreme Court blocked the 2025 map. Many experts believed the issue was settled, at least until after the election.
• But an appeals court Monday night ruled that the state must use the 2025 map, opening a new chapter of this chaotic story. The state, Democracy Docket notes, has already distributed ballots.
• The appeals court reasoned that requiring voters to cast ballots in different maps in the primary and general elections — the outcome of Hoskins’ scheme to plow forward with primaries under the new map, despite the voter challenge to it — would violate the Constitution.
• An activist group that has been fighting the 2025 map for a year, People Not Politicians, is seeking emergency review from the Supreme Court.
• Big picture, the fight is over one congressional seat, focused on Kansas City, and the shape of others in the state. The 2025 map would likely flip that Kansas City seat, currently held by Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, from Democratic to Republican.

Tabs

• Speaking of Susan Collins … an FBI probe of a defense contractor bribery scheme was on the cusp of investigating politicians of both parties who had accepted donations from the company in question — including, prominently, Susan Collins, ProPublica reports. Then Trump returned to the White House, and ended nearly all public corruption work at the DOJ.
• Trump and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani met yesterday and emerged before reporters with almost nothing but praise for each other, Politico reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. John Cornyn, who continues to create some drama — now by headlining a fundraiser in Dallas that will raise money for Republican Senate candidates in Maine, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire and Minnesota. But not Texas, the state where Cornyn and his co-headliner, George W. Bush, are from, and where the fundraiser is being held. The Senate candidate there is Ken Paxton who — of course — beat Cornyn in the primary.

Are We at War?

Just as the Trump administration is trying to quiet the Iran war down before the midterms, Iran, per an MS NOW report, is trying to do the opposite: ramp it up, and drive oil prices as high as possible.

Trump Asserts (Without Evidence, of Course) That the Biden Administration Tried to Murder Him

One thing I would not have expected President Donald J. Trump to be spending his time on with just weeks to go until Election Day is creating new conspiracy theories about Tom Crooks, who shot at him in the summer of 2024 from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania. But here we are.

The president yesterday asserted on Truth Social that Butler “was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed.”

That the assassination attempt was the work of Trump’s political enemies is a baseless claim that the White House has leaned into for some time. In early January, the White House published a revisionist history of Jan. 6 that, TPM’s Hunter Walker noted at the time, included the following line: “Despite relentless Deep State efforts to imprison, bankrupt, and assassinate him … President Trump emerges triumphant.”

The website suggested, without any shred of evidence, that what happened in Butler was the work of the “Deep State” — the catch-all term for any government bureaucrat who might be behaving in a disfavored way, from slowing deregulation to, apparently, plotting a presidential candidate’s murder.

But Trump himself blaming it directly on a “Democrat Plot” takes the claim to another level. He then went on to castigate former FBI Director Chris Wray, claiming materials about the assassination were “missing, altered, corrupted or gone” and declaring Wray should “pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt.”

It’s unclear what Trump is gesturing toward here, if anything. The New York Post reported yesterday that “a trove of documents” was provided by law enforcement to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as part of his investigation into the assassination attempt. But the documents sound like they simply add details to what we already knew: Crooks was really into guns, and didn’t talk to people much.

Grassley himself seemed to tell NBC yesterday that there wasn’t new information about a plot. “We don’t know anything about the motivation [of] why [Crooks] wanted to kill Trump,” he said.

FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday also seemed to throw cold water on the idea of any plot. “We found no evidence that [Crooks] was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents who he resided with,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Among the few things we do know about Crooks, in fact, was that his desire to create a spectacle appeared nonpartisan. He went to the gun range a lot, and didn’t talk very much. He googled the dates of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He researched school shooters, and Lee Harvey Oswald, to whom he is now often compared.

“Neither Oswald nor Crooks were the kind of people who make history, not like Kennedy and Trump,” wrote Mike Rothschild, who writes about conspiracy theories for TPM, around Butler’s second anniversary. “But somehow, these two losers found a way to write their names into the fabric of American lore. Something greater had to be at work. There had to be a conspiracy — who was behind it and why would have to be filled in later.”

A significant portion — 24% — of Americans now believe Butler was staged, polls suggest. An additional 32% don’t know what to think. These conspiracy theorists, however, tend not to believe it was the work of Democrats. Rather, they think it was a plot orchestrated by Trump himself.

Bigotry and Corruption

As Republican senators lost their primaries to Trump-backed opponents or opted not to run again, some reporters at news outlets that cover Capitol Hill closely rubbed their hands together, predicting that now Trump would really have a problem on his hands. The results have been … underwhelming. Honestly kind of lame. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) red lines are confusing, shifting, and often meaningless. Same — but even more so — for Bill Cassidy (R-LA). John Cornyn (R-TX) too.

But, despite the lack of a substantive shift in GOP legislating, it has been interesting to see these senators critique their own party with insiders’ knowledge.

• Here’s John Cornyn, speaking to veteran Hill reporter Igor Bobic about racist tweets by Texas candidate Bo French and all the Nazi staffers in the GOP: “I think too many people are tolerating conduct that in the past would have been disqualifying when it comes to politics, and what’s happened, I think people’s sort of public standards have eroded to where a lot of things that, like I said, that would not have been tolerated before, or normalized.”
• He continues: “Some of the anti-Semitism, some of the bigotry like Bo French’s comments, and some of the corruption, and I think those are those are the death knell for a political party.” Sounds right! Except for the “death knell” part — plenty of political movements worldwide (and through U.S. history) have built their ascendancy on hate.
• Josh Kovensky has a look at the imbroglio around French’s racist and anti-immigrant posts, which is somewhat confusing, as he’s been doing this for months. More broadly, the Texas GOP has built its midterm strategy around fear-mongering about Indian-Americans and Muslim immigrants.