Politics Desk

For years after her sister Polly Klaas was murdered and the killer incarcerated on death row at San Quentin, Annie Nichol viewed the prison with dread, a place that contained the living embodiment of her unimaginable pain and fear.

“Every time I drove by San Quentin, I would kind of get a chill,” Nichol told me Sunday. “It felt scary.”

Last week, Nichol found herself not just inside that prison, but inside the death row unit where Polly’s killer once lived, inside a cell that had not long ago housed other murderers — sitting with her sister Jess Nichol and Gov. Gavin Newsom during an impromptu meeting that the women had never imagined would happen there.

Despite the unease of the setting, the conversation would lead Newsom to last week’s controversial decision to grant clemency to the 548 Californians sentenced to capital punishment, changing their terms instead to life without parole (the state Supreme Court still needs to weigh in on the majority of cases).

For all the public discussions about Newsom’s move, the roughly 25 private minutes he spent with the Nichol sisters was the final piece of a moral puzzle he’s been working on since he was 10, he told me — an unlikely journey that involves a mafia hit, a member of Polly’s family who opposes his decision, and warm socks.

Yes, socks.

But first, the cell.

In 2019, Newsom put a moratorium on the death penalty and began remaking San Quentin following a European model of incarceration that stresses rehabilitation. Death row, a cavernous hull of a building with multiple stories of concrete cells reaching up toward a ceiling so decrepit that birds roosted inside, was transformed.

Annie and Jess found themselves sitting inside a space that was once two cells, and now has a chess board and giant green plastic chairs. Fluorescent lights seeped everything in a cold blue glow.

“It did not feel good in there,” Annie said. “It still felt like dark and dank and creepy.”

The sisters had never met Newsom, and Newsom didn’t know anything about their opposition to the death penalty, he said. He did know Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, however. Klaas does not like Newsom.

Before Newsom announced his moratorium, he met with Klaas and a group of crime survivors. Klaas said then that he felt blindsided and outraged, and became “viscerally angry” during the meeting.

Monday, Klaas told me he’s angry all over again and can’t sleep.

“I don’t appreciate my daughter being regurgitated any time somebody wants to make a new unilateral change to the California Penal Code,” he said.

Newsom has spoken about his meeting with Klaas in the intervening years. Monday, he called it an “indelible conversation” that has held him back from taking further action on the death penalty.

“His pain is real,” Newsom said. “I have an abundance of respect for his point of view.”

And then he met Jess and Annie Nichol. The sisters had listened to a podcast that Newsom did with civil rights lawyer and anti-death-penalty advocate Bryan Stevenson months earlier and reached out to his office to ask if they could meet. They didn’t hear back until last week, when all three were planning to be in town for the San Quentin Film Festival.

The decision to gather in a cell was made on the fly, they said. But once inside, they found the governor to be “surprisingly emotionally available and curious and interested,” Jess said. “It felt like he wasn’t wearing his governor’s mask. Actually, it felt like a real moment of humanity.”

Newsom asked if they had always been against the death penalty, and Jess told him that in the beginning, after Polly’s death in 1993, they wanted the killer executed. “We thought that was justice,” she said. “Because f— that guy. And that’s what I said, for real.”

Newsom’s reponse? “Yeah, f— that guy,” she recalls him saying.

“It felt important that he understand that we haven’t forgiven the man who killed Polly,” Jess said. “We still feel anger and grief, but we just believe that those feelings, however understandable, shouldn’t determine public policy.”

But as the meeting wound down, the sisters realized they had forgotten the most important part — the ask.

“I said, OK, governor, I want to be direct here,” recalled Jess. “We are explicitly asking you to commute all death sentences in California.”

Newsom said that request, hearing it from Polly’s sisters, along with the plea that he give it equal weight to anything else that had been said by other crime survivors, was an intense moment for him — providing an unexpected emancipation from the emotions he had been carrying from his interaction with Marc Klaas.

“If there was any residual doubt left in terms of doing this, it was eliminated in that moment,” Newsom said.

Jess said it was clear to her that Newsom has been “wrestling with this for a long time, even since his childhood.”

When Newsom was about 10, he told me, he remembers sitting inside North Beach Restaurant in San Francisco. It’s an old-school, white tablecloth joint his father — a judge and a lion in Newsom’s memories — frequented. This day, Newsom recalls being joined by Pete Pianezzi, a former bank robber wrongly convicted of a 1937 Los Angeles double homicide.

Newsom’s grandfather, William Newsom II, and later his father, William Newsom III, were convinced of Pianezzi’s innocence and fought for years to help him gain a pardon and an exoneration (which he eventually did, from Gov. Pat Brown and then Gov. Jerry Brown, respectively). The Newsoms were right — a gangster-turned-informant confirmed Pianezzi had been framed by the mob.

Newsom said Pianezzi’s tale is what started him thinking about the death penalty — Pianezzi had escaped a capital sentence because a single juror refused it on moral grounds.

Pianezzi’s story was turned into a book, “The Bum Rap Kid,” and Newsom keeps a copy of it, along with the executive order pausing the death penalty, in the top drawer of his desk — “a reminder of why I’m here,” he said.

He sees the issue of the death penalty as part of a “deeper narrative” about criminal justice that has been central to his time in office.

Which brings us to the socks.

On the same day Newsom met the Nichol sisters, he spoke with an inmate who lives a few cells away from where they met. The guy had washed his clothes that day and called his father to tell him how it felt to have on fresh, warm socks for the first time in almost 20 years — the laundry facilities are new, part of that remodel of space and ideas that Newsom has championed. That conversation stuck with Newsom, too.

Newsom has been remaking our prison system to acknowledge the reality that the vast majority of people in prison are getting out one day. They will be in your communities, maybe even be your neighbors. Ask yourself this — what makes you safer? A rage-filled neighbor with no job or social skills, or an employed guy who knows how to take care of himself?

Appreciating warm socks is a little dose of civilization. Teaching people how to be civilized, one sock at a time, makes us all safer.

For the Nichol sisters, that vision of public safety — one that invests in survivors over punishment, and one that prioritizes changing outcomes for those inside and outside of prison — is ultimately what their opposition to the death penalty is about.

Knowing that their conversation with Newsom was so pivotal in his decision was shocking, they both said, and the entire event seems “surreal,” Jess said. But the result is what they see as a new legacy for Polly.

Her death became the impetus for California’s harsh three-strikes laws, which led to the over-incarceration of Black and brown people, often for minor crimes. The clemency, the Nichol sisters said, changes that.

“Annie and I will never forget that meeting for the rest of our lives,” Jess said.

For Newsom, the commutations seem, to me anyway, like the final act of his criminal justice reform, an overlooked and misunderstood legacy whose effectiveness won’t be known for years to come. But one he’s willing to take a risk on.

Newsom told me one of the worst moments of his political career — when he got caught during the COVID-19 pandemic at a fancy Napa Valley restaurant — was actually “the best thing that ever happened” to him because it reminded him of the responsibility he has to his power, and how fleeting that power is.

That’s the lesson he learned in North Beach, at a table with a felon and his father. And when it comes to how he feels about the fallout from this decision, whatever it may be, a text from his sister summed up what he’ll carry as its legacy: “Dad would be proud.”

THERE ARE TIMES WHEN A PANTY GIRDLE can be a girl’s best friend. For Julie Williamson, the moment came one afternoon in 1969, not long after the smart, ambitious, 29-year-old legal secretary had gone to work for Bob Packwood in the freshman senator’s Portland office. She was alone talking on the telephone when her 36-year-old employer strode in and kissed her on the back of the neck.

The senator had given Williamson, married and the mother of two, a gratuitous smooch once before, at a bar, she says, while her husband was in the men’s room. She had passed it off as a drunken aberration, but this time she spoke up. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said sternly.

Her words had no effect. Williamson says Packwood followed her into the back room, where he grabbed her by her ponytail, stood on her toes and tried to remove her clothing. The weirdest thing of all, she remembers, was that he didn’t say anything, not a word. The assault was passionless and oddly mechanical. When he couldn’t get her panty girdle off, Williamson says, Packwood abruptly gave up, saying, “Not today, but someday,” as he hurriedly departed. (The senator has repeatedly declined comment on Williamson’s charges, and he declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Williamson’s then-husband, Doug Myers, didn’t believe her. And two male colleagues, she remembers, told her she should be embarrassed about even mentioning the incident. “That’s just the way Bob is,” they said. About a week later, still angry and hurt, Williamson confronted Packwood on the way to a Girl Scout cookie drive. “What was supposed to happen next? Were we just going to lie down on the rug? Like animals in the zoo?”

“I suppose you’re one of the ones who want a motel room,” she says he replied.

Williamson resigned.

THERE WAS A TIME NOT SO LONG AGO WHEN BOB PACKWOOD appeared invincible. As ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, his championing of the use of tax incentives to achieve legislative goals had made him a darling of Wall Street. But Packwood’s appeal was not limited to this traditionally Republican stronghold. Over the years, his support for progressive causes had endeared him to abortion-rights and wilderness advocates, environmentalists, the pro-Israel lobby, the ACLU, the building trades and feminists–interest groups not always found in the campaign ledgers of Republicans.

Packwood’s war chests were so huge and his electoral support so widely distributed that few Oregon Democrats had the courage to challenge him. Longtime Congressman Les AuCoin, gambling on a Democratic sweep, mounted a $2-million effort in 1992, only to find himself outspent 4 to 1 and hammered relentlessly by negative TV ads. Packwood won by three percentage points. Off to Washington for a fifth term, he seemed secure in the title bestowed on him by a regional magazine 14 years ago: “Senator for Life.”

Politically, at least, he often used his power well. But there had long been rumors that Packwood had a “zipper problem.” Ken Rinke, a retired Oregon lobbyist now living in Riverside, remembers that when he was first introduced to Packwood in the late ‘50s, he was warned that the ambitious young lawyer was an inveterate womanizer. Rinke, then lobbying for the railroads, gave Packwood some advice in the form of a joke about a dog that gets its tail cut off by an engine in the switching yard. Angry, the dog turns around and snaps at the train, only to be beheaded by the caboose. The moral? “Don’t lose your head over a piece of tail,” Rinke said.

For years, the rumors went largely unexamined, and stories such as Rinke’s were recounted for their amusement value. In the all-male Senate, such masculine “indulgences” were once deemed acceptable.

But perhaps no longer. Eighteen days after last November’s election, a startling story in the Washington Post accused Packwood of habitual sexual misconduct, citing 10 specific instances. Democratic Party activists and even some Republicans demanded Packwood’s resignation. The senator disappeared for 18 days, spending part of the time at the Hazelden Foundation, an alcohol treatment center in Minnesota. Finally, in a nationally televised press conference on Dec. 10, he issued a formal apology. Without going into detail, he said his past behavior was “just plain wrong” and that, perhaps because of the times he was raised in, he “just didn’t get it.”

“I do now,” he added.

Packwood loyalists expressed satisfaction with the apology, but his critics dismissed it as a ploy to stay in office. “He still doesn’t get it,” says Betty Roberts, a former Oregon Supreme Court justice who ran against Packwood in 1974 and who is a leading member of a newly constituted anti-Packwood coalition called Oregonians for Ethical Representation. Outraged by allegations in the press that Packwood had lied to the Oregon media about the Post investigation and had pressured Post editors not to run the story until after the election, citizens’ groups brought charges of election fraud before the Senate Rules Committee. Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred filed a formal complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee. In March, leaders from a half dozen feminists groups met in Washington to hammer out a uniform strategy on the Packwood issue.

Now Packwood and his opponents are girding for what promises to be a sensational refocusing of the national consciousness on the issue of sexual harassment, raised more than a year ago by Anita Hill. With a parade of witnesses and a Senate that is hungry to show it will give as much weight to the views of working women as to one of its own, Packwood can’t expect the protection of senatorial prerogative. “This is an unprecedented situation,” Allred says, “and it calls for an unprecedented remedy.”

Ironically, for years Packwood had been feminism’s good friend in the Senate. Long before it became fashionable, he was putting women in charge of his campaigns, appointing them to important positions on his staff and paying them well, and he had been a consistent and courageous advocate of reproductive rights. He championed women’s issues, says Gary McMurray, a Portland lawyer and Packwood’s former law partner, “because he believed women are the guardians of liberty, but they are never given any.”

Such was his importance to the women’s movement that Ms. editor Gloria Steinem personally contributed to his 1980 campaign and once wrote a fund-raising letter for him that brought in hundreds of thousands of feminist dollars. Steinem’s first reaction to the Post story was to suggest cutting Packwood some slack. “For some of us, our issue was more important than personal rights,” Allred says. “And about our friends, we discount negative messages. That’s human nature.” But as more stories surfaced, old attitudes changed. After hearing that one of Packwood’s accusers was inspired to work for him by her endorsement, Steinem sent a contribution to Oregonians for Ethical Representation. “I support the women, I believe the women–just as I believed Anita Hill,” she declared at a Portland press conference.

The sense of betrayal has been overwhelming. Packwood’s Washington office received so many nasty fax messages that he had the machine unplugged. On a late January swing through Oregon, demonstrators wearing “I Get It” buttons and shouting “Resign! Resign!” confronted him at every stop. In Portland, where he was greeted by a life-size dummy identified as “Senator Peckerwood,” aides fearing violence refused to disclose the location of his appearances.

Faced with the fact that his mea culpa stance had gotten him nowhere, Packwood abruptly changed course, declaring that his Dec. 10 apology was not an admission of guilt. He had a right to defend himself, he said, and he put his accusers on notice that they can expect a tough grilling.

Packwood’s bravado only served to fan the flames of feminist indignation. “He duped us, used us,” Diane Linn, executive director of the Oregon chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), told a cheering anti-Packwood rally, “but we’re not going to take it anymore!” Meanwhile, Julie Williamson sought and obtained a promise from the Ethics Committee to follow the rape shield law in questioning witnesses. Evidence of past sexual activity not involving Sen. Packwood will not be admissible.

Follow-ups in the press have brought the tally of accusers to as many as 24. The Ethics Committee–Democrats Barbara A. Mikulski and Thomas A. Daschle, Republicans Mitch McConnell, Ted Stevens and Robert C. Smith–is chaired by Sen. Richard H. Bryan, a Democrat and a former Nevada prosecutor renowned for his toughness in rape cases; Bryan has announced that the committee is investigating not only sexual misconduct charges but Packwood’s alleged attempts to intimidate potential witnesses. Preliminary investigations are now well under way, with action by both committees possible anytime between now and the end of the year.

More is at stake than the political future of one incumbent senator, says Kate Michelman, NARAL’s national coordinator and a former Packwood ally. In Hawaii, 10 women recently accused Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of sexual harassment. Minnesota Republican Sen. Dave Durenberger is facing a rape-paternity suit. For feminists, Packwood is a symbol of an order that must go, a boozy, power-addicted, testosterone-poisoned environment in which mashing is mistaken for manliness. They see Packwood’s fall as just one step in a revolution to abolish the old boys’ club that Congress has been.

Thus the battle lines are drawn. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal, rising to Packwood’s defense, called the scandal a Democratic vendetta conceived and orchestrated by the senator’s enemies. Why should Packwood have to resign, loyalists ask, when Ted Kennedy was allowed to stay in office after his performances at Chappaquiddick and Palm Beach?

Is Packwood the victim of mass feminist hysteria, of what one supporter calls “McCarthyism in drag”? Or is he, as NARAL’s Diane Linn has charged, a “sexual predator” and an abuser of power, his behavior beyond the pale even for Capitol Hill? And if that’s the case, why has it taken so long–24 years, if you believe Julie Williamson–for the truth to come out?

AFTER 32 YEARS IN POLITICS, PACKWOOD’S DEEP, MEASURED VOICE IS PRACTICED; his grave, distant expression studied. Only his smile seems unrehearsed, a sudden grin that contorts the left side of his face while the right remains composed. He is moody and tense, a man whose pursuit of senatorial power has become his whole life. His 24-year marriage to Georgie Packwood, a tall, articulate brunette with whom he raised two adopted children–Shyla, now 22, and William, 26–ended in bitter divorce two years ago, and Packwood now lives alone in a two-room basement apartment. “His Senate office is now his real home,” Georgie Packwood says.

In 1968, when Packwood first won election to the Senate, Dan Rather was a dashing young White House correspondent, Packwood the political boy wonder who had cut incumbent liberal Wayne Morse down like an old Douglas fir. Rather liked Packwood’s intelligence, wit, and his willingness to listen to another point of view, but Packwood’s competitiveness was something else. Packwood drove himself and everyone around him unmercifully, barking commands into the Dictabelt he carried with him and constantly racing against time. He has always been, says Harry Boivin, a former Oregon state representative, “150% political. No one works as hard at it.”

Packwood’s decision to tough out the charges against him does not surprise those who know him well. He once had an office softball team and did the pitching, always playing to win. Associates describe him as hyper-competitive, and many refuse to play cards or games with him, says Mark Kirchmeier, University of Portland media director, who is writing a book about Packwood. “You see,” CBS anchor Rather told me when we discussed Packwood for an article I wrote in 1979, “Bob detests losing.”

Packwood has been breathing politics for a long time. His father, Fred, who died in 1965, was a lobbyist for Oregon industry (and later for organized labor), and it was not unusual for legislators to appear at the Packwoods’ Portland dinner table.

Brilliant and aloof, Fred Packwood “did not know how to make people laugh, but when he spoke, everyone else would stop talking and listen,” Georgie Packwood says. On long drives, Fred would pass the time grilling his son on politics, history and philosophy, testing him to the point that Bob would burst into tears. Shy and so nearsighted he had to wear Coke-bottle lenses, Packwood committed himself early on to hard work, often locking himself in his room to study.

It was a matter of survival, family friends say, in a home where the atmosphere became tumultuous after the adults had had a few drinks. Fred and Packwood’s mother, Gladys, fought frequently. In one indelible incident, Bob saw Gladys go to a kitchen drawer and pull out a butcher knife and attack Fred with it. It was not a defensive move, as Bob told the story. Gladys was definitely the aggressor.

Packwood’s parents were parsimonious with affection. At best, Fred would pat Bob on the head sometimes and comment on his physical dimensions (“Say, haven’t you lost weight?”). Gladys hardly ever had a kind word for her son. “He always was a bratty boy,” she once told a reporter. Bob eventually found an escape in the hectic pace of politics.

Though Fred had tried to push him into engineering, Packwood bolted from CalTech after one term, winding up at Willamette University in Salem, where he studied political science. Then came law school at New York University, a job in a Portland law firm and volunteer precinct work in the Republican Party. In no time, he was party chairman in Oregon’s most populous county, Multnomah, and in 1962, he won a seat in the Statehouse.

Even at that early date he was so determined to go to Washington that he undercut a rival Republican’s challenge of Sen. Morse by advising party money men not to invest in his campaign. He was, Portland journalist Mark Kirchmeier noted in a story, saving Morse’s seat for himself.

Packwood proved an indifferent legislator but was a genius at political organizing. “Bob was always into the process, the mechanics of politics, though I never detected any keen interest in substance,” says John Mosser, a former Oregon state senator who is now a Portland holding workshops on how to get elected, and engineering the 1964 GOP takeover of the Statehouse. Fifteen years later, he would do the same thing on the national level, taking charge of the Republican Senatorial Committee, introducing direct-mail fund raising and, thanks also to his ability to influence tax questions in the Finance Committee, increasing Republican campaign revenues twentyfold. As early as 1974, a columnist was touting him as presidential material.

When his party emerged from the 1980 election with its first Senate majority in two decades, Packwood was hailed as one of the brightest Republicans to come along in years.

But Packwood, who in 1970 had introduced the first bill in Congress to legalize abortion, was on a collision course with the Reagan Administration over that issue. In 1982, after other Senate liberals had demurred, he led a filibuster to thwart his Republican President’s attempt to make abortion the equivalent of murder. “You cannot write working women off, and the blacks off, and the Hispanics off, and the Jews off,” he told an Associated Press reporter, “and assume you’re going to build a party on white Anglo-Saxon males over 40. There aren’t enough of us left.”

It wasn’t the first time that Packwood, one of the first Republicans to demand President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in ‘73, had broken party ranks, but this time he had more to lose. The filibuster was a grand gesture, but it cost him the chairmanship of the Republican Senatorial Committee.

When he was still living with Georgie in their suburban Washington home, Packwood often retreated to a basement study equipped with a sound system to listen to classical music through a headset. “He looked like Snoopy pretending to be the Red Baron,” she says. In his typical loner style, during the current scandal he came out for a freeze on Social Security benefits, staking out a leadership position on the Republican side of the budget debate.

But is there another Bob who forces kisses on women, chases them around his desk and lures them into motel rooms? Is Packwood, as Gloria Steinem suspects, equipped with “two sets of blood vessels”?

GEORGIE PACKWOOD SAYS THAT Bob was the first man she’d ever met who did not know how to flirt and didn’t even try. After many years of marriage, she still didn’t feel she knew him completely. It was difficult for him to shed his formal manners and his obsession with politics and talk about intimate things. For a time, Georgie thought he was mellowing–she had taught him that it was all right for a grown man to cry–but up to the end of the marriage, conversation at home tended to focus on the logistics of life.

Real closeness and communication were often clouded by a fog of alcohol: The son had come to resemble the father. “Bob does have a problem with alcohol,” Georgie says over a cup of coffee at a deli in Lake Oswego, the Portland suburb she moved to in December. “He is a binge drinker who honestly can’t remember what he does during his blackouts.” At Kelly’s Irish Times, his favorite Capitol Hill bar, he is reportedly known for his habit of ordering two drinks at a time and for his ability to consume quantities of alcohol without visible effect. At least some of the unwanted advances he is accused of allegedly took place when he was drinking. On one occasion, his verbal abuse of Georgie broke up a Washington dinner party. “Bob’s problem with alcohol was a major factor in our divorce,” Georgie says.

Packwood’s explanation of why he didn’t remain at Hazelden for the full 28-day program–that the program directors didn’t think he needed to–was revealing to Georgie. Like most alcohol-treatment centers that follow the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, Hazelden demands that applicants admit they are alcoholics and acknowledge that there is a “higher power.” “Evidently, Bob had not reached the point in his life where he could do that,” Georgie says.

Although he says he is seeking counsel from friends in AA, Packwood insists that he is not an alcoholic, pointing out that he has always showed up for work on time. His father, Fred, liked to make the same claim–even though contemporaries remember that he sometimes had to be carried home from the drunk tank by fellow lobbyists.

As early as 1974, during Bob Packwood’s first Senate reelection campaign, Georgie tried to get him to deal with the problem, asking his lawyer, friend and adviser, Jack Faust of Portland, to persuade Packwood to get help. Faust (who at the senator’s request is refusing all comment on the scandal) assured her that he would take care of it.

Georgie renewed the effort in 1980 and 1986, to no avail. In 1984, Packwood had begun to think seriously about a run at the presidency, and he held a meeting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to discuss the possibility with his supporters. Georgie belonged to a generation of women who sought professional fulfillment vicariously, through their husbands. She could see herself as First Lady, working in partnership with Bob on women’s rights and other causes that are important to her. And yet when asked what she thought of Bob running, she could scarcely disguise her displeasure. “I guess I can get used to the idea,” she said. In private, she firmly told her husband that it was out of the question unless he quit drinking first.

Packwood began to refer to her as his “albatross.” He spent more and more time away from home, speaking to the groups that funded his campaigns and ignoring his family. In the past, he had often taken Georgie along on his trips back to Oregon. Outgoing by nature, she enjoyed helping him work the crowds. But Georgie began to fade out of the picture. She had contracted “Potomac fever,” the gossips said, and didn’t care about her home state anymore. “The truth is,” Georgie says, “I was no longer invited.”

Georgie had noticed how Packwood’s new administrative assistant, Elaine Franklin, managed to find hot-tub time alone with Bob in her skimpy bikini during a campaign swing through Oregon. (“The senator is fond of hot tubs, and he does a lot of thinking in them,” Franklin says. “On many occasions he’d suggest that someone get their bathing suit on and meet him in the hot tub, me included.”) It came as no surprise to Georgie when, in the fall of 1986, Franklin’s husband, Andrew, a Portland engineering executive, had Elaine served with divorce papers at an Oregon motel.

Packwood was in a rage over it when he got back to Washington. Why couldn’t Andy Franklin have waited until after the election? he fumed.

When Georgie pressed him on the subject, Packwood swore that there was nothing to the rumors about him and Elaine. (Franklin calls such allegations “outrageous.”)

When his mother died in 1988, Packwood “went a little crazy,” Georgie says, and their home life completely fell apart. Georgie tried to be understanding. Fred had long since died, and Packwood’s sister, Pat, had perished in an auto accident some years earlier. “Bob was alone, confronting his own mortality,” she says, “and in his subconscious, he must have realized that he was now forever without that mothering he had missed as a child.” She asked him not to run again for the Senate, to spend more time with his children. “You’ll only be 60; you’ll have had 24 successful years. Why not quit while you’re ahead?” she said.

Packwood ignored her advice but did go to marriage counseling, where, Georgie says, he acted as if the problems were hers, not his. Trapped into agreeing to bring Elaine Franklin in on the discussions, he reneged at the last minute. A year later, Georgie filed for divorce.

The proceeding, which took place in 1990, lasted two days. Bob leafed through court documents making notes as though it were just another day at the office, and when it was over, he offered his ex-wife his hand as though concluding the successful mark-up of a bill. “I was so numb with grief that I couldn’t speak or think clearly,” Georgie says, “but a little voice in the back of my head was saying, ‘This is not the man I married. This man lost something on his way to the Senate.’ ”

JULIE WILLIAMSON REMAINED active in politics after leaving Packwood’s employ, serving as a volunteer to local causes and candidates and running Congressman AuCoin’s Oregon office in the early ‘80s. In that position, she heard rumors of continuing hanky-panky in the Packwood camp. Reportedly, those Packwood staffers who complained were told to shut up. “If you ever talk, you will have Bob for an enemy, and you will never get another job in Washington,” one woman allegedly was warned.

Early in March of 1992, the Seattle Times broke the story of former Washington Sen. Brock Adams, accused of harassing and even drugging women in order to have sex with them. Shortly after, Williamson spoke with Oregonian political columnist Steve Duin, who was seeking perspective on the Adams affair. Was Adams’ behavior typical in her experience? Williamson said no, she had had only one such problem over the years. She told him about the panty-girdle incident. Duin said he wanted to write it up.

Williamson hesitated. Anita Hill’s televised ordeal had given her an idea of the flak she could expect if she went public. She agreed to talk, but only on background.

Duin wrote a column about Williamson’s allegations, but since she did not want her identity disclosed, he did not name her–or Packwood. The paper ran no other stories on the subject; two months later, Packwood defeated his chief opponent. AuCoin won the Democratic primary, and a tough general election battle loomed ahead. “I wondered why the Oregonian was not following up on the story,” Williamson says. She thought no one cared about what happened years ago.

But the Oregonian was not ignoring her story. A police reporter, Holley Gilbert, who had recently completed a prizewinning series on rape, spent several weeks on the phone to some of the more than 800 people Packwood has employed over the years, but no one was willing to go public.

Gilbert had never heard the story of Roberta Ulrich, the paper’s 64-year-old Washington correspondent. In early March, 1992, when Ulrich had gone to Packwood’s office for a routine chat, Packwood offered her a drink from the box wine he kept in his office cooler, and as it was late in the day, she accepted. The senator drank two or three glasses himself, and when Ulrich got up to leave, he came around his desk and kissed her on the lips, she says. Ulrich considered the kiss improper, she says, and reported it to her editor, but word of the incident did not reach the paper’s top editors.

The search was taken up by Florence Graves, a former editor of Common Cause magazine, who was doing a story for Vanity Fair about sexual harassment in Congress. Graves interviewed Williamson in April and began to focus on Packwood and to look for a new publisher after Vanity Fair proved unwilling to indemnify her against possible legal costs. It wasn’t until late September, when Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie teamed her with investigative reporter Charles Shepard, that she was given a green light. One reason the Post took Graves seriously was that one of its own reporters had told her editors about a similar experience with Packwood.

With the election little more than a month away, Graves and Shepard tracked down and interviewed nine more women who related personal incidents of sexual harassment or misconduct by Packwood. The women, all former Packwood employees, campaign volunteers or lobbyists, told of being grabbed, fondled and kissed by Packwood in his office, in Capitol corridors and in motel rooms to which he had invited them on false pretenses. All said they had resisted the advances and did not formally complain or report him because they were embarrassed and feared damage to their careers or causes.

“It’s very dismaying,” says abortion-rights activist Mary Heffernan, one of Packwood’s accusers. “You think you have one kind of relationship with a man, based on your work, and then you realize it’s about sex.”

Ten days before the election, Packwood got wind of the Post story and complained to publisher Katharine Graham, who passed on his concerns to Downie. Downie suggested that Packwood talk to the Post’s reporters.

Packwood put Graves and Shepard off for a week, finally meeting them five days before the election. Told that the Post was planning to run its story Nov. 1 (a bluff, Downie now says), Packwood denied the charges and demanded more time to respond.

On Oct. 30, he launched his counterattack, peppering the Post’s downtown office as well as Downie’s home with faxes suggesting that several of his accusers were either deranged, carrying grudges or had invited his advances. The Post postponed the story until after the election.

Meanwhile, the Oregon media were rife with rumors of the Post investigation, which both Packwood and Franklin denied knowing about. (Those successful attempts to forestall a breaking news story became the basis of several petitions to the Senate Rules Committee to have Packwood’s election victory thrown out.)

On Saturday, Oct. 31, after hearing that the Post story was delayed, Julie Williamson pondered how to get the issue before the voters in time for the Tuesday election. Charles Williamson, a Portland attorney she had married after her divorce from Doug Myers, impulsively wrote the copy for a full-page ad in the Sunday Oregonian on his computer. But when he called the newspaper, he was told it was too late–the advertising deadline had passed. And so, on Nov. 3, Oregon voters reelected a United States senator, unaware of the cloud of suspicion hanging over him.

GEORGIE PACKWOOD HAD been vacationing in Copenhagen and didn’t get back to Washington until after the election. Penny Durenberger, the estranged wife of Sen. Dave Durenberger, picked her up at the Baltimore airport. “While you’ve been gone, what have you heard?” Durenberger asked.

She’d heard everything. A reporter had contacted her and in the course of an interview had filled her in on the scandal that was about to break. Georgie was not surprised, she says. She was only sad that tragedy had engulfed the man she had loved–and overtaken her friend’s life, in the form of the rape-paternity suit against Dave Durenberger, as well. “Now how,” she asked ruefully, “did a couple of nice old ladies like us get involved in a mess like this?”

Georgie didn’t know how badly her husband was faring until January, when she saw him on TV. There was Bob on his first visit to Oregon since the election, surrounded by screaming demonstrators in Eugene. “I could see the fear in his eyes; he looked like a treed animal,” she says. She turned the set off.

The usually sure-footed senator is sliding in this new territory, and it’s clear he realizes the depth of his troubles. At Christmas, Packwood had told his son that he still hoped to run one more time. In late March, however, he quietly took steps to sell his only Oregon property, 20 acres with a trailer south of Portland. For Oregon politicians, lack of legal residence is often viewed as a fatal defect, even for the most powerful. “It’s a sure sign,” says a friend, “that Bob knows his political career is over.”

Another prominent longtime friend, though, isn’t so sure. “I would bet anything,” says the friend, “that he will not quit.”

Packwood now finds himself in the odd position of having to scramble for allies. Abandoned by the women’s movement, he recently reversed himself on a couple of issues important to Republicans, voting against a job-benefits extension and the “motor-voter” bill in an apparent attempt to strengthen his GOP ties. It is Republican support he must count on in the showdown that lies ahead. He has retained attorney James Fitzpatrick, an intelligent and engaging veteran of Capitol Hill battles, to represent him.

Only 15 senators have ever been expelled, all because of felony convictions or charges of treason; most were senators who sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Many observers of the Packwood battle consider expulsion unlikely. Nor does it seem likely that the Senate Rules Committee will unseat a senator because he misled reporters. Realistically, censure by the full Senate, with possible loss of seniority, is the harshest penalty Packwood faces. He might receive a reprimand, or, in the event the Ethics Committee chooses not to believe almost two dozen women, many of them Republicans, he might be found innocent.

In an odd way, Packwood is more important to the women’s movement now, in flagrante delicto, than he ever was in the past. If a senator can be made to toe the line, feminists believe, it will set a standard for the whole country.

Bracing for what may be the Capitol’s most dramatic witnessing since Anita Hill’s, Julie Williamson is feeling the stress. “I thought I was tough,” says the 53-year-old political consultant. “I had no idea how difficult it would be.” What keeps her in the fight is the belief that she is not alone, that others had their toes stepped on, that no one was immune.

It isn’t flirting or office romance that Williamson and company want to end, but abuse of power, the sexual harassment of subordinates that continues to plague the world of work. “This is bigger than Packwood,” Williamson says. “It’s an opportunity for the Senate to show the people of this country that they get it.”

California voters have rejected the controversial billionaire tax.

Proposition 40 sought to impose a one-time 5% tax on California billionaires’ assets to try to offset federal healthcare funding cuts.

Despite the blue wave in the midterm elections, the novel tax on the ultra-wealthy had trailed from the first day of vote counting and was officially rejected on Monday.

Roughly 53% of Californians voted against the measure, while 47% supported it, the Associated Press said when it declared that the proposition had failed.

Although the billionaire tax was rejected in the vast majority of counties, the late tally showed major pockets of support in Los Angeles and San Francisco — home to the lion’s share of the state’s 200 billionaires. Orange County, however, voted no by a wide margin.

The political battle over the ballot measure and two competing proposals divided the state and was among the most expensive in California history. More than $400 million had been spent on the three intertwined ballot measures, with more than 90% spent opposing the billionaire tax, according to fundraising disclosures filed with the secretary of state’s office.

Billionaires, notably Google co-founder Sergey Brin, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into groups that funded ads to kill the billionaire tax. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Teachers Assn. and Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California are among the powerful Democrats and other Democrat-aligned groups that expressed fears that billionaires would flee the state. Some, including Brin and fellow Google co-founder Larry Page, moved out of California because of the proposal.

An onslaught of advertisements against the billionaire tax argued it could impact all Californians, not just the ultra-wealthy. Teachers, firefighters and other middle-class Californians became the face of their campaigns, fueling growing opposition ahead of election day.

Opponents of Proposition 40 said Californians made the “right decision,” calling Proposition 40 a “reckless experiment” that would hurt the state’s economy. The group included the California Medical Assn., California Primary Care Assn. and the California School Boards Assn.

“Proposition 40 risked California’s economic competitiveness and fiscal stability, as well as the revenue we rely on to fund our top priorities — from education and healthcare to public safety and infrastructure,” the group said.

Leaders of the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, which sponsored the proposition, vowed to put a billionaire tax proposal on the 2028 ballot if Sacramento leaders don’t find a way to better support the public health sector. Given California’s volatile budget, which is expected to be particularly problematic next year, it appears unlikely that state lawmakers will find a way to backfill an estimated $100 billion of federal healthcare funding cuts.

Supporters said the proposed tax on more than 200 California billionaires aimed to raise that amount, with 90% funding healthcare, and the remainder going to schools and food assistance.

“Billionaire-funded propaganda may have influenced the outcome of this election, but as hospitals reduce services, emergency rooms close and families lose access to care, the truth will become increasingly difficult to hide,” said Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff for the SEIU-UHW. “Californians will see for themselves what was at stake.”

This will not be the end of the debate about taxing the rich. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), who both backed Proposition 40, are pushing for the passage of a federal 5% tax on American billionaires.

Earlier this year, they introduced the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act.” Despite Democrats winning control of the House and Senate last week, the legislation will probably face constitutional challenges if it passes.

Longtime Rep. Ken Calvert has survived a fierce reelection battle against fellow Republican Rep. Young Kim to represent a newly drawn Southern California congressional district.

The Associated Press on Monday evening declared Calvert the winner in the narrowly divided race, a week after the Nov. 3 election. Calvert had declared victory on Thursday, though Kim did not concede.

The two fought over one of the state’s last “safe” Republican areas, a red district spanning Orange and Riverside counties. Both supporters of President Trump, the two were viewed as friendly allies before the race.

The district was redrawn under Proposition 50, the voter-backed initiative to boost the Democratic Party’s numbers in the U.S. House of Representatives after Trump cajoled Texas into carving out districts more favorable to Republicans. The reconfigured congressional districts under Proposition 50, placed on the ballot by the Democratic-led state Legislature, put both Calvert and Kim in the same district, ensuring one would be knocked off. Calvert is from Corona and Kim from Anaheim Hills.

Calvert, 73, retained about half of his constituents in the redrawn district, giving him an edge. Kim, 64, kept about a third of hers.

Calvert was first elected to Congress in 1992, making him the longest-serving GOP member of California’s congressional delegation. He serves as a senior member of the House Committee on Appropriations and is chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Kim, a prolific fundraiser who defeated Democratic Rep. Gil Cisneros in 2020 after losing to him two years earlier, outspent Calvert in the race, amassing a massive war chest of $10 million to Calvert’s $7 million.

Americans 4 Security PAC spent more than $6 million to get Calvert reelected, including by sending out fliers to Democratic voters linking Kim and Trump. Though both candidates back Trump, the fliers sought to dissuade Democrats from backing Kim.

The PAC’s donors include two executives from Miami-based Palantir, whose software is used by the U.S. military, among its donors.

The 40th District reaches from Mission Viejo in Orange County into Woodcrest, Menifee and Murrieta in Riverside County.

Registered Republicans make up less than 40% of registered voters in the redrawn district. An additional 21% are no-party-preference voters, according to statistics from the California secretary of state’s office. Democratic voters account for about 31% of the district.

California voters have passed Proposition 38, authorizing the state to issue $8.4 billion in bonds to fund immunology and immunotherapy research aimed at curing and preventing certain chronic diseases.

The measure, which the Associated Press called on Monday evening, requires at least $4.2 billion of the funds to be used for immunology research on cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. It also authorizes the state to enter into a partnership with an unnamed immunology and immunotherapy research institute selected by the California Department of Public Health, and to allocate half of the bond revenue to it.

Opponents argued that the measure would saddle taxpayers with decades of debt and that the requirements to qualify for grants created such a narrow pool of candidates that only one research institute in California, the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, currently meets the criteria to receive half the bond revenue. Gary K. Michelson, a wealthy philanthropist who wrote the proposition, co-founded the institute. He was also the proposition’s largest supporter, pouring $45 million into the campaign, according to state data.

Remaining funds will be used for competitive research grants that focus on immunology and immunotherapy. Those grants would be awarded by a council of representatives from University of California campuses, universities and nonprofit research institutions.

Supporters celebrated the passage on Monday saying in a press release that it “comes as federal research funding cuts have disrupted clinical trials and delayed medical discoveries nationwide.”

“This victory belongs to the patients and families who have spent years fighting devastating diseases and waiting for the next medical breakthrough,” Chris Tarver, a nurse and president of the American Nurses Association\California, said in a prepared statement.

Californians will take on an increased cost of $500 million to $600 million annually to repay the bond for an anticipated 20 years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Some or all of the cost could be offset if any funded research generates revenue. However, it’s difficult to predict how many, if any, research projects would lead to marketable treatments.

Times staff writer Hannah Fry contributed to this report.

Democrats’ midterm sweep is poised to give scientists, disaster officials and weather forecasters new allies in Washington after nearly two years of upheaval under President Trump.

For the weather and climate world, which has flipped between grief and rage over Trump’s science policies, the results reopen fights over funding, staffing and federal oversight. Democratic control of Congress beginning in January will give lawmakers greater power over federal spending and oversight, setting up new fights over science funding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Weather Service.

The political shift hit close to home at a Vaisala Xweather conference in South Carolina, where physician Annie Andrews had just won a Senate seat.

“We can be optimistic,” meteorologist Jeff Freedman, who leads a University at Albany renewable energy lab, said during the conference’s cocktail hour. He added: “Hey — you can say ‘climate change’ again!”

The most immediate fight is likely to be over money, especially for scientific research. Trump’s attempts to slash funding for climate-change research have had a big effect on science labs in the U.S., which have stalled hiring for postdoctoral researchers and other personnel as they scramble to find new grants.

Experts say Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are likely to zero in on the National Science Foundation. The NSF has long supported basic science research that the private sector can build on. Trump has tried to cut NSF budgets, shrink its staff and redirect resources to American researchers, versus scientists from outside the U.S.

Freedman said grantmaking has slowed dramatically, but Congress still has “the power of the purse” and oversight powers that lawmakers can use to push for changes.

Democratic control will also give lawmakers more power to investigate how the administration has handled disasters and federal agencies.

Expect far more scrutiny of FEMA, including hearings and demands for information from lawmakers representing disaster-stricken districts, according to former FEMA Deputy Administrator for Resilience Daniel Kaniewski, who served during Trump’s first term.

Under federal law, the president ultimately decides whether to unlock FEMA recovery funds after a disaster strikes. Trump has denied requests from blue-state governors. Lawmakers who opposed FEMA job cuts, program cancellations and proposals to dismantle the agency will have far more leverage once Democrats take control of Congress in January.

“I would argue that it would be incumbent upon members of Congress to question a decision like a disaster not being declared in their district,” Kaniewski said, but Trump won’t be legally obligated to provide an answer.

Despite new oversight, the Trump administration may choose to press ahead with big restructuring plans that were already in the works. Staff from the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were expected to meet this week to discuss a “realignment” effort, according to the Washington Post.

At the National Weather Service, attention is likely to turn to staffing and funding after two years of cuts and departures.

The weather service has bipartisan support in Congress. But Ronald Morales, a former agency meteorologist in Charleston, S.C., said its budget of $1.46 billion barely kept pace with inflation during his 33-year career, which ended in the last winter.

Hundreds of weather service employees left in 2025 through layoffs, retirements and exit incentives aimed at shrinking the federal workforce. The losses ran so deep that the agency later began hiring again to rebuild depleted offices. Budgets remain severely squeezed.

With Democrats leading Congress, the weather service is more likely to get a cash infusion. “We are very much a political animal,” Morales said last week. “We shouldn’t be, but we are.”

Rosenthal writes for Bloomberg.

ATLANTA — Former President Biden writes in his White House memoir that Donald Trump, at once his predecessor and successor, has deeply damaged the country and world with an administration determined to “tear down institutions and inflame hatreds.”

And the 83-year-old Democrat said the 80-year-old Trump’s years of lies about his 2020 defeat to Biden and the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol should “follow him to his grave.”

Biden’s sweeping indictment comes in the first excerpt of “Promise Me, America,” published Monday by the Atlantic. The 46th president’s full memoir is set for a Nov. 17 release. Biden said that while doctors are encouraged by his response to cancer treatment, his activities promoting the book will be limited because of his health.

“Donald Trump led an insurrection,” Biden wrote of the attack by Trump supporters as Congress met to certify the 2020 election won by the Democrat. “His goal was to remain in power after the American people had voted him out of office.

“The rioters weren’t ‘peaceful protesters,” he wrote. “They came armed to stop the official certification of a legitimate election.” He chided Trump for later issuing more than 1,500 pardons of the offenders.

“To this day, Trump and his supporters continue to preen and posture like they’re supporters of law enforcement,” Biden wrote. “Here’s my view: You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalized and call yourself a friend of law enforcement. What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave.”

Biden also laments Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and his aggressive reversal of many of his policies, especially those intended to address climate change.

“All presidents must confront a feeling that their legacy is vulnerable to the pendulum of politics and the whims of their successors,” Biden wrote. “In my case, that feeling was magnified by the dismissive and destructive nature of Donald Trump, who seemed unable to tolerate the idea that someone else’s accomplishments might be worth building on rather than tearing down.”

The memoir’s release comes on the heels of Biden’s fellow Democrats trouncing Republicans in the midterm elections, securing stunningly broad House and Senate majorities and flipping control of several statehouses in a comprehensive rebuke of Trump’s second presidency. But Trump’s return to power two years earlier was itself a rejection of Biden’s one White House term, and many voters still harbor skeptical views of his presidency and his party.

In a lengthy social media post on Sunday, Biden pitched his memoir as the best way he can explain his presidency, “the challenges we faced, the decisions I made and why I made them.”

During his four years in office, Biden confronted the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, and he worked to restore global alliances that Trump frayed. But he faced widespread concerns about his age, and he abandoned his reelection bid after a disastrous June 2024 debate with Trump. Dogged by lingering inflation and other concerns, Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, lost to Trump that November.

Months after leaving office, Biden announced that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He opened up about his condition in his Sunday social media post, saying he “won’t be able to do as many conversations about my book as I’d hoped” and urging people to let the book speak for him.

Biden said his doctors “continue to be encouraged by how I’ve responded to treatment.” But, he acknowledged, “Some days are better than others. It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down.”

In the excerpt, Biden recounts an unusual Oval Office meeting with Trump days after the 2020 election — well before the Jan. 6 riots.

“‘You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends,’” Trump said, according to Biden.

Trump even commented “that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me,” Biden added.

Public polling at the time Biden dropped his reelection bid showed him trailing Trump, and Democrats pushed for him to yield out of fear that he could not win.

Biden said he used the meeting to give Trump “a tour of the world,” including the Ukraine-Russia war, NATO alliances, Israel and Gaza and China-U.S. relations. Biden said Trump “focused on the personalities” of world leaders rather than the substance of international relations.

He said that two-hour meeting left him worried Trump would indeed dismantle much of his presidency. He wrote that Trump’s opening weeks — his Day One executive orders and everything that followed — confirmed his worries about a “crueler government” that “tried to tear down institutions and inflame hatreds” and a president who “took a wrecking ball to our traditions.”

The memoir’s title echoes an earlier Biden book, “Promise Me, Dad,” that he wrote about his son Beau’s cancer and death — a parallel that implicitly acknowledges the former president’s age, condition and the reality that he may not have a long post-presidency to see the direction of the country and the evolution of his legacy.

In that first book, released between Biden’s vice presidency and his 2020 presidential bid, he explained that the title came directly from a father-son conversation around Thanksgiving in 2014.

“Promise me, Dad. Give me your word that no matter what happens, you’re going to be all right,” Biden recalled Beau saying. Beau Biden died six months later.

In his Sunday post, Biden repeated an argument he made often when campaigning and during his presidency, saying the U.S. is unique because it was “built on an idea” that “all of us are created equal.”

“Promise me, America,” he concluded, that “we’ll never forget it.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

Voters have sent a strong election-year message to the new Democratic congressional majority and President Trump: Repair the damage inflation has done to the economy.

Trump, who campaigned on the idea that a Democratic victory in the midterms would trigger a 1929-style economic depression, has maintained that the economy is booming. Since his party lost in Tuesday’s voting, he has claimed he is willing to work with Democrats in the House and Senate, though that’s not something he has done much of in the past.

“I’ll get along, probably, with the Democrats, unless they want to be destructive,” Trump told reporters last week.

After Friday’s strong jobs report showed employers adding 165,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dipping to 4.1%, Trump was defiant. “Democrats may control Congress, but I will NEVER stop fighting for you, and I will VETO anything that hurts America,” he said in a text message to his supporters.

Democrats are seeking to check Trump’s power and are preparing for early fights on government spending. Other challenges include chronic budget deficits, tariffs, artificial intelligence and difficult choices about a Social Security system that could run short of money in as little as six years.

But as long as rising prices keep making middle-class lives less affordable, Democrats and Republicans alike face the risk of angering and alienating voters in the next election cycle.

“Until inflation and interest rates are under control, the likelihood of change elections is going to be high on an ongoing basis,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Americans want lower prices

Trump’s tariffs and the war against Iran that he launched in February contributed to the consumer price index climbing to 3.7% annually. The president also tried to bully the Federal Reserve, an independent body tasked with keeping inflation low, to slash its benchmark interest rate in ways that could have worsened inflation.

The gridlock of a Republican White House and Democratic Congress gives the Fed more room to maneuver, possibly smoothing the central bank’s ability to return inflation to the 2% target it has failed to reach for nearly six years.

“I think that one of the surprise winners Tuesday was the Fed,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and president of the center-right American Action Forum.

The Democratic Senate could block Trump’s ability to fill potentially open spots on the Fed board, Holtz-Eakin said, removing “Trump’s incentives to meddle with the Fed” and clearing a path for Fed Chair Kevin Warsh “to follow his instincts and aggressively reduce inflation.”

Trump has maintained that the costs of oil, gasoline and diesel will all plummet once the Iran war ends. The problem is he refuses to say when or how the war will come to a conclusion.

John Cochrane, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, stressed that the Fed’s efforts to combat inflation would be helped if the federal government reduced budget deficits.

“It takes monetary and fiscal restraint,” he said.

Federal government keeps borrowing

The U.S. government keeps amassing debt as tax revenues fall short of burgeoning spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other programs. Paying the interest on the national debt now tops $1 trillion annually and exceeds spending on the military. The problem could spiral because investors have pushed up the interest rates charged on government debt over the past year.

Neither the White House nor Democrats ran on spending cuts. The president wants an additional $500 billion a year for the military, while some Democratic candidates have pushed for restoring Affordable Care Act subsidies that lapsed under Trump.

Since August, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly said the administration would put forward a plan to trim the roughly $2-trillion annual budget deficit. Bessent is working with White House budget director Russell Vought on cuts they’re branding as a “fiscal consolidation plan,” to be released after the election.

Deficit reduction would likely require some combination of tax increases and spending cuts, Goldwein said. But he said that the lowest hanging fruit would be to trim Medicare expenditures in ways that save money for both the government and patients.

“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “The most important thing you can do is reduce healthcare costs and find policies that lower the costs of Medicare, which will reduce deficits and interest rates.”

AI poses a dilemma for economy

When Harvard University economist Jason Furman thinks about the most important economic issues facing the United States, AI is at the top of his list.

“It’s the most screamingly obvious investment boom this country has ever had, or, possibly, second to railroads” in the late 19th century, Furman said.

Using AI, Furman has built an economic analysis tool called Econvitals that replicates some of the work done when he was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in Democratic President Obama’s administration.

Econvitals parsed construction spending data on Tuesday and found an 80.6% increase in data center construction over the past year, while spending on building homes, schools, factories and offices had fallen.

The stock market sold off last week on concerns that Democrats could restrict the construction of data centers and impose guardrails on AI. But the American economy still needs the technology to keep fueling growth now and into the future.

Trump has been vociferous in promoting the sector and has taken a hands-off stance on regulating AI, insisting that existing laws and voluntary agreements signed by tech companies are enough. He has shrugged off public concerns about the risks of job losses and large-scale cyberattacks, but a majority in the AP Voter Poll, a sweeping survey of the American electorate conducted in all 50 states, say AI does more harm than good for the economy.

The dilemma is that AI is helping to propel demand in the economy and sustain the stock market. If those slipped, there could be less consumer spending, lower growth and many in the U.S. feeling even worse off financially.

“Every time you have a single strength in an economy you are also having a big vulnerability,” Furman said.

Social Security needs to be rescued

Senators who won six-year terms last week will face the politically fraught challenge of working with Trump’s successor to find ways to save Social Security, which is projected to be unable to pay full benefits at the end of 2032.

Removing the cap on payroll taxes and increasing the retirement age are among the possible lifelines for sustaining the program that provides income to older Americans and those with disabilities. But any changes would likely need to be bipartisan to get enough votes to clear the Senate because Social Security overhauls cannot be made by party-line votes through the reconciliation process.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said she saw an opening earlier this year to fix Social Security when she overheard Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, talk about the need to lift the cap on payroll taxes. “I reached out to him in a matter of days,” she said in an interview this summer. The two senators went public with a plan that is still being formulated as legislation.

Warren, who worked with the Republicans on a law this year to encourage the construction of more homes, said other bipartisan efforts had failed because Republican lawmakers had been afraid to cross Trump.

But with Social Security, there is a need to act now. Experts say “the checks that go out to seniors will drop by nearly a quarter” after 2032, Warren said.

“Think what that means, literally, to millions and millions of Americans, who depend on those Social Security checks, or who have parents who depend on them. And Congress is doing nothing,” she said.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

A bipartisan plan to speed the federal approval process for major energy and infrastructure projects received the endorsement of President Trump on the eve of a key Senate vote on the bill.

“This Landmark Permitting Reform Legislation will codify our America First Energy Agenda, and ensure that we can build Pipelines, Mines, and Power Plants faster than ever before, lowering Energy Costs for American Families, and creating High Paying American Jobs,” Trump said in a social media post Sunday that urged senators to vote for the bill.

On Monday, the Senate is slated to take a procedural vote on the measure, seen as a once-in-a-generation chance to overhaul the byzantine system for approving projects needed to modernize power grids, build artificial-intelligence data centers and revitalize clean energy development.

The legislation is supported from groups including oil companies and renewable energy developers, but faces hurdles to passage in the two remaining months Congress is in session. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is opposing the bill in its current form, arguing it hasn’t received enough input from House Democrats. Other progressive Democrats say they should use their newfound control of Congress next year to negotiate a better deal.

Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, as well as Republican Sens. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Mike Lee of Utah, unveiled a new version of the bill Saturday, but several environmental groups still opposed it.

“After closely evaluating the full bill and the newly released substitute amendment alongside our state and territorial affiliates, Tribal partners, environmental justice partners, hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation partners, water coalition partners, and other conservation partners, we have concluded we cannot support the legislation in its current form,” Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, said in a statement Sunday.

Natter writes for Bloomberg.

After initially congratulating Democrats on their midterm wins, which he said he was “absolutely willing to accept,” President Trump posted a baseless missive to social media about not trusting early ballot totals or voting machines.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” he wrote.

The post was a return to the unsubstantiated election denial that has animated his political career since its inception. It was also the latest swing in public messaging from the president and his administration since Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress and key governorships across the country last week.

Trump — notoriously hard to pin down and prone to meandering tangents — has waffled for nearly a week now on several key policy positions. Other leaders in his administration have split on the same issues, further confusing the public.

On Friday, Trump named Stephen Miller — chief architect of his administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown — as his new chief of staff, which many took as an unambiguous sign that Trump intends to double down on those policies through the second half of his term.

In a “60 Minutes” interview taped the same day and aired Sunday, Trump said that some of those same policies were “too tough,” and that he was open to working with Democrats to find a pathway for undocumented but law-abiding immigrants to remain in the country legally.

On Monday, Trump said he hadn’t told Miller to change his approach, that his administration has a “very strong deportation policy” and that there would be “no amnesty, no anything” for undocumented immigrants, though the administration will be focusing on “the worst of the worst.”

“My policy hasn’t changed,” he said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted, “If you are here illegally, we will find you, arrest you, and DEPORT you.”

After Vice President JD Vance last week blamed the party’s stunning losses squarely on the Iran war, Trump acknowledged that the war — and the spiking gas prices it caused — probably hurt his party at the polls.

But he has since dismissed growing calls from both sides of the aisle for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be fired, claimed the war has already been “won,” and suggested Americans’ displeasure with the economy was based on little more than bad messaging on the nation’s economic “numbers,” which he claimed are strong.

Hegseth said he wasn’t going to get into a “finger pointing exercise” over Vance’s remarks, but that the war “doesn’t have to be necessarily popular” to be necessary.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s shifting postelection messaging.

Leading Democrats, smelling political blood and preparing to take control in Washington, have seized on Trump’s vacillations and doubling down on unpopular positions to paint him as badly out of touch and stubbornly resistant to the will of the American people.

After his Friday appointment of Miller, for example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote, “The American people just delivered Donald Trump a historic rejection. So naturally, he hands keys to the architect of his most cruel and inhumane policies. Absolutely disgraceful.”

After Trump’s post Monday about voting machines, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote, “Donald Trump’s pathetic return to election denialism was inevitable. He can whine all he wants, but nothing will stop this inescapable truth: For the last two years of his presidency, Trump will face the largest Democratic congressional majorities in decades, all because he has been an unprecedented failure.”

Experts who have long studied the president’s rhetoric said it should come as no surprise, as it is perfectly in line with his mantra of never admitting defeat, never accepting blame and never showing weakness — even in the face of an overwhelming defeat.

“He is caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.” “He’s seen the anger of the country, but he’s trying desperately to blame someone else — when all of the data says that this was mostly about him and the results or failures of his policies.”

After Republicans suffered substantial midterm losses in 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged his party got a “thumping” and immediately fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was closely tied to the unpopular Iraq war. After Democrats suffered losses in 2010, President Obama acknowledged what he called a “shellacking” and also recalibrated, becoming less “post-partisan” in his messaging and more pragmatic, Rowland said.

Trump’s message about working with Democrats on certain issues could be seen as his own attempt to pivot, if only slightly, Rowland said, but it has been completely undermined by his moves to elevate Miller and reject accountability from Hegseth and others tied to the Iran war.

More than anything, Rowland said Trump’s baseline instinct is to project masculine power and deny culpability for any political failings, in part to hold on to his MAGA base, which is “pretty much all he has left,” and in part to resist any move by Republican moderates to reclaim power in the party.

“He doesn’t want to send any messages of weakness that would allow the remaining Reagan Republicans to kind of stick their heads back up and try to become involved again in conservative politics,” and is loath to “fire any of the men who screw up for him” lest he undercut his message of masculine power, Rowland said.

Trump is ultimately desperate to leave a mark — as evidenced by his ballroom and other vanity projects in Washington — and cares less about substantial policy accomplishments than “his name being in lights in historical terms,” Rowland said.

In his “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, Trump repeatedly avoided accepting blame. Instead, he suggested those who disagreed with him were wrong or misunderstand the reality before them.

He said the American people’s displeasure with the economy, for instance, was due to “bad messaging,” which he blamed in part on the press not covering “positive news for Republicans.”

Others in his administration have also dug in on pre-midterm messaging about the Trump administration being on the side of the American people, ignoring the fact that the electorate clearly and resoundingly rejected its policies last week.

Miller took an immediately combative tone after his promotion to chief of staff was announced, writing on X that Trump has saved the nation “from those who would destroy it,” and that the “mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our President and defend this magnificent Republic.”

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote on X, “While Americans enjoyed their weekend, the patriots of [ICE] worked around the clock to arrest and remove dangerous criminals from our communities, including murderers, pedophiles, and sexual predators.”

Over the weekend, Hegseth posted a video to U.S. military troops, telling them, “Don’t blink. Ignore the noise. Never hesitate.”

“You see, all this is politics. You do real things. 
You stay the course. And as always, President Trump leads the way. And I’ll assure you, we have only just begun to fight,” Hegseth said.

Whether such bravado will hold is unclear.

On Monday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth, calling for his ouster on eight charges, including for “waging the Iran war despite no declaration of war, statutory authorization, attack on the United States, or imminent threat”; for launching “extrajudicial killings” against alleged drug smugglers in offshore boats; and for the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” a reference to the U.S. capture of now-former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

About the same time, Trump posted an AI-generated video of Ultimate Fighting Championship Chief Executive Dana White serving as White House press secretary, telling reporters to “sit down and shut up.”

Hours later, he and White were actually in the White House briefing room — where Trump defended the Iran war as “won” by the U.S., called Massie a “loser” and said he will “stand by” Hegseth even if he’s impeached.

“He won two wars,” Trump said.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has briefed top lawmakers on a growing national security crisis around the world’s leading chipmaker, Nvidia, after its chief executive, Jensen Huang, admitted over the weekend to an extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials briefed the Gang of Eight — congressional leaders from both parties, and the chairs and vice chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees — on the matter, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Monday.

Congressional Republicans have called on Huang himself to provide an update, warning the incident raised “significant national security concerns” that could have compromised cutting-edge American technology at a critical moment in the race with China for supremacy in artificial intelligence.

Huang admitted Sunday to having an affair with Alice Huang, who was identified as a Chinese intelligence asset by U.S. authorities, after the New York Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had raised concerns within the administration about his potential compromise.

President Trump is scheduled to visit China next week.

“I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” Jensen Huang said in a statement Sunday.

“Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports,” he added, “NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company, and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.”

Debate over export controls for the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips, produced by Nvidia, has raged over the last eight years in Washington, with lawmakers across party lines expressing concern that Chinese access to the chips could strengthen their hand in the development of the most powerful AI models.

Huang has been one of the most vocal opponents of the U.S. export controls, calling them a “mistake” and saying they were hurting American businesses more than they were constricting Chinese government efforts.

The executive was successful in lobbying the Trump administration to ease export restrictions on some of Nvidia’s most advanced chips over the past year.

Jeffries said he would be calling for greater export controls on chips after the incident. The New York congressman is expected to become the next speaker of the House after Democrats swept into power in this month’s midterm elections.

“We’re going to need a full briefing specifically as it relates to the Nvidia issue,” Jeffries said, adding that “real concerns” have arisen from the case that will need to be addressed.

U.S. intelligence unmasked the Chinese intelligence operation after intercepting the communications of Alice Huang, a former journalist with Chinese state media who later became a senior executive at Megaspeed International. The Singaporean data center firm was already under the microscope for allegedly funneling restricted AI chips to Beijing.

Trump was reportedly made aware of the Chinese espionage effort targeting Huang, but chose not to act, according to the New York Times.

Nvidia’s stock dropped more than 4% Monday, after the board said it would open an investigation into its chief executive being the “target of a foreign intelligence effort.”

The company “prioritizes U.S. national and economic security, which is paramount to the interests of NVIDIA and its shareholders,” it said in the statement.

“While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board’s inquiry will examine all available information,” it continued. “The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide further updates as appropriate.”

Rubio declined to address questions from reporters on the matter Monday.

“It’s an internal corporate matter for them, so I’m just not going to comment on that topic,” the secretary of State and national security advisor said.

But the administration could face increased calls to investigate Jensen Huang, a Trump ally, who traveled with Trump to Beijing in May and attended a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping in September held at the White House.

Republicans have also formally requested Huang appear before the House on Nov. 18 — when Trump will be in China — to brief them on what happened.

Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, head of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who leads the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the issue of Chinese infiltration and access to cutting-edge U.S. technology “is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress.”

“It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk,” they wrote.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to build a border wall through the scenic and rugged Big Bend sector of west Texas.

The justices on Monday granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside a judge’s order that had paused further construction along a 517-mile section of the Rio Grande.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone and without an explanation.

In an unsigned opinion, the court said federal courts did not have the authority to stand in the way and block efforts along the border.

“The balance of the equities also favors the government,” the court said. “Construction in the Big Bend Sector will diminish the [plaintiffs’] ability to use and enjoy the area. But Congress’s enactment of [the special law] — which permits the Secretary to waive the requirements of environmental protection and other conservation laws — reflects a clear preference for expeditious border construction over the very harms” cited by the opponents.

A broad coalition of environmentalists, cattle ranchers, farmers, river boat guides, outdoor activists and church leaders had gone to court in El Paso seeking to stop the construction.

“The Trump administration and its contractors are hellbent on destroying one of America’s greatest national parks, and the Supreme Court just gave them the green light,” said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This horrific decision clears the way for contractors to bulldoze pristine desert and dynamite canyon walls before the courts have even decided whether this destruction is legal.”

But Trump’s lawyers pointed to unusual measures adopted by Congress that gave the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to construct border barriers “to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry.” One provision authorized the department’s secretary to “waive all legal requirements” that stood in the way, including environmental protection measures.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it does not plan to build a border wall in the Big Bend National Park, with its steep canyons, but said new patrol roads and vehicle barriers would be added.

However, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, an appointee of President George W. Bush, issued a preliminary injunction on Oct. 2 to halt further work on the border barriers. She said the government’s own evidence showed illegal entries and drug smuggling were much less common in the Big Bend sector.

“For ‘high illegal entry’ to impose any limit, it must at least mean, not ‘the lowest rate of illegal entry,’” she said. “The Bend Sector has the lowest rate of illegal entry along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.”

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed a fast-track appeal at the Supreme Court and urged the justices to set aside her order and to rule on the underlying legal question. He cited evidence that over four years, there were 89,000 apprehensions of illegal migrants in the Big Bend sector which covers nearly one-fourth of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The Sinaloa and Juarez cartels operate south of this sector across the Mexico border and seek to exploit any vulnerabilities in United States border protection to traffic humans, drugs and weapons across the border and infiltrate the United States,” he told the court. “Leaving a 300-plus-mile gap in border defenses would act as a dangerous magnet for cartels and other bad actors to exploit as other routes close off.”

WASHINGTON  — The Constitution protects the rights of Americans but normally does not allow them to sue federal agents for violating those rights.

This rights vs. remedies dispute has divided the Supreme Court for nearly 50 years.

It did so again Monday when the justices heard arguments on whether to throw out a lawsuit brought by a federal prison inmate in Hawaii who suffered a broken tailbone in a gang fight.

Kekai Watanabe said he told prison nurse Francis Nielsen he was in intense pain. He was given only an over-the-counter pain medication. Seven months later, an X-ray finally revealed the damage from the fracture and the source of his continuing agony.

Acting on his own, Watanabe sued Nielsen for cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment.

A federal judge dismissed his suit, citing the Supreme Court’s decades of skepticism over such lawsuits. However, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived his claim and pointed to a 1980 ruling that allowed a similar suit brought by a mother whose son died of an asthma attack in a federal prison.

It was the last time the high court had upheld a lawsuit for money damages against a federal agent for violating a constitutional right.

But the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in Nielsen vs. Watanabe. And during Monday’s arguments, the justices debated whether to further narrow such lawsuits or to reject them entirely.

The court’s conservatives say only Congress can authorize lawsuits for money damages against federal agents and employees. And they noted that in the Federal Tort Claims Act, Congress authorized damage suits against the United States for such claims.

“The power to create damages remedies belongs to Congress, not federal courts,” said Lucas Walker, an attorney for the prison nurse. “It’s time to end the Bivens experiment.”

He was referring to a 1971 decision in which the Supreme Court for the first time authorized such a constitutional claim for money damages against federal agent. In that case, known as Bivens, the suit was against several FBI agents for an unreasonable search during a drug raid in violation of the 4th Amendment.

Walker argued the court should overturn the Bivens case as well as the later ruling allowing a suit involving gross medical negligence.

But Joshua Wesneski, an attorney for Watanabe, said the prospect of being sued for wrongdoing “has a powerful deterrent effect.”

This issue has taken on new significance because of the aggressive and sometimes violent actions of federal immigration agents. They may be charged with a crime but they are not subject to being sued for damages by victims or their families.

After the Civil War, Congress passed an enforcement law that authorized suits against state and local officials acting under color of law who violated constitutional rights. But there is no comparably broad law for federal officers and agents.

That’s why a Los Angeles police officer who uses excessive force can be sued in a federal court, but the same is not true of a federal immigration agent.

Democrats in the Senate may try to change that in the year ahead.

Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have proposed an “Accountability for Federal Law Enforcement Act” to allow victims to sue for “damages for constitutional and civil rights violations committed by federal law enforcement agents.”

They said Congress needs to extend the same legal accountability to federal agents that has long applied to police and other state and local officials.

“Recent incidents — from violent ICE and CBP raids to abuses by federal task forces — have underscored this gap in accountability,” Padilla said. “These events have eroded public trust and shown how federal officers can act with impunity even when their conduct clearly violates constitutional protections.”

WASHINGTON — Facing an expected impeachment resolution in Congress, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he’s eager to litigate the policy choices that he and President Trump have made in Iran and Venezuela.

“If you want to take issue with what we did in Epic Fury or Rough Rider or nabbing Nicolás Maduro, you’re taking issue with the troops and what they accomplished, which is historic,” Hegseth told reporters Monday.

He also announced that he would hold a news conference on Tuesday — his first in over 180 days — on the looming impeachment threat.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has pushed the impeachment resolution forward over the objections of House GOP leadership as momentum grows to hold Hegseth accountable for the Iran war, which many Republicans blame for the party’s midterm election wipeout.

Hegseth argued that starting the war with Iran was a “bold move” by Trump “and as the president points out so clearly — you can’t let crazy Islamists have a nuclear bomb.”

“The choice was don’t act and wish it away or take a bold move, which the president did with Midnight Hammer, which we’ve done with Epic Fury,” Hegseth said, referring to the names for the strike on Iranian nuclear facilities and the larger war.

Hegseth’s public defense of the war comes after voters last week overwhelmingly showed the unpopularity of the conflict.

According to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters in the United States, about 6 in 10 said the U.S. made the “wrong decision” in taking military action against Iran, though the survey suggested the Iran war was not the top issue for most voters.

Only about one-third of voters said the war in Iran was “crucial” to shaping how they voted for Congress. That was well below the roughly half who said that about the cost of living or government corruption.

Toropin writes for the Associated Press.

Democrats have taken control of the state House in Georgia after also gaining the governor’s office in last week’s midterm election, giving the party control of each for the first time in more than 20 years.

The flip gives Democrats control of at least 12 new legislative chambers across the U.S. after their major gains at all levels.

It’s the biggest gain for either party in a single election since the Republicans took the majority in 20 chambers in 2010 amid the Great Recession and the rise of the conservative tea party movement.

After officials are sworn in later this year and in early 2027, Democrats will have trifectas — control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s office — in at least six states where they’re currently sharing power with Republicans.

The party running a state government can have a major impact on issues including tax bills, how data center development goes and who qualifies for Medicaid health insurance.

The Associated Press, which has been calling elections since 1848, on Monday determined the outcome of enough Georgia races to declare Democrats had won the lower chamber.

The news organization has not yet determined who will control the state Senate in North Carolina or either chamber in Alaska.

Republicans have controlled the House in Georgia since 2005 and both the Senate and governor’s office since 2003.

Democrats have made gains. In 2020, for instance, Joe Biden narrowly won a plurality in the presidential election there and Democrats prevailed in both U.S. Senate elections. Donald Trump won there in both 2016 and 2024.

This year, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms won the governorship and Democrats took a House in which Republicans had a comfortable 99-80 majority heading into the election.

As of Monday, Democrats had won 91 House seats and Republicans 86. Three had not been called — including one where the state’s secretary of state is investigating the late upload of a memory card containing nearly 400 votes.

Republicans kept control of the Senate.

Currently, there are Republican governors in 26 states and Democratic governors in 24.

Democrats will have at least 28 of those jobs next year, with the race in Kansas also remaining to be called.

Democrats gained control of four more state Senates in Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, bringing the total they lead to 24. They’ll have the majority in at least 27 lower chambers, up from 19, after flips in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin.

Election gains in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will give Democrats trifectas in all those states.

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press.

PARIS — Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized democracies began two days of talks in Paris on Monday as they grapple with multiple unresolved global crises amid questions about how President Trump will approach foreign policy after his Republican Party’s heavy losses in the midterm elections.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is likely to face questions about whether the administration will shift its positions on the Russia-Ukraine war, the Iran conflict, energy security and artificial intelligence. Those issues will dominate discussions among top diplomats from the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan on Monday and Tuesday.

It is Rubio’s first overseas trip since last week’s midterm elections that dealt Republicans severe losses and cost them control of Congress, partly because of deeply unpopular policies such as the Iran war. The talks also come amid major protests across Europe, including in the French capital.

U.S. politics likely to surface at allies’ meeting

Asked about allies wanting to know what comes next after the elections, Rubio told reporters that the countries he is meeting with this week understand American politics and “they, too, have experienced divisions in government and divisions in their own system.”

Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand, whose country has faced withering criticism and insults from Trump, said it remains an open question as to how Washington will proceed.

“In terms of the U.S. and its approach I will say that the president has executive powers,” she told reporters in Paris. “The House and the Senate have changed leadership so it’s very much a question of what the approach will be.”

Yet there has been little sign that the Democrats’ gains will affect Trump’s strategy, and his first major personnel decision has installed Stephen Miller, a hard-line supporter who has advocated extreme positions on both domestic and foreign policy, as chief of staff.

America’s top diplomat is seen by many as presenting a gentler side to Trump’s often brusque approach to both friends and foes, but there has been speculation — that he has denied — that he might choose to leave the administration early to prepare for a 2028 presidential run.

Wars in Iran and Ukraine will be major topics

Trump has floated the idea of a partnership with Europe to bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to an end. The president’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, are set to meet both Ukrainian and Russian officials in the United Arab Emirates starting Tuesday to discuss potential compromises.

Rubio said postwar security guarantees for Ukraine and the rest of Europe have been a top concern for allies.

“There’s been some advances made in what that architecture could look like post-conflict,” Rubio said. “Nothing’s been finalized yet, and maybe some progress can be made in Abu Dhabi.”

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, who met separately with Rubio on Monday, said he welcomed the Abu Dhabi talks but stressed that Europe must be part of any resolution.

“I am still very grateful to the United States of America for making every effort to get the parties to the conflict to the table,” Wadephul said. “But I made clear again here that Europe belongs at this table. There can be no solution without Europe, only with Europe.”

Anand also said the Abu Dhabi discussions could yield results.

“I want to underline the importance of the talks,” she said. “It has been some months since the parties have met … and I would like to underscore the importance of this discussion in Abu Dhabi,” she said, adding that it would be critical to get “specific aspects” of a peace proposal clarified.

At the same time, Qatari and other mediators have proposed an interim solution to end the deadlock over the conflict with Iran that has sent fuel prices soaring amid instability in key shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

Rubio said the sides are not on “the verge of a breakthrough,” while reiterating that Trump prefers a diplomatic solution. But he noted of diplomacy that “right now, it hasn’t been very productive because the Iranian demands are simply not just unacceptable but, in some cases, outrageous and ridiculous and really not realistic.”

He said he expects allies to have a lot of questions about the conflict and next steps.

Uncertainty about consensus, even among allies

France has invited Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine to participate in some discussions. Its other priorities include Africa, China, Cuba and Haiti. The French Foreign Ministry said there will be a meeting on artificial intelligence and a separate session on support for Ukraine.

Shortly after arriving in Paris on Monday, Rubio posted on X that one of his priorities would be “pushing for real accountability at the U.N.” The comment suggested the administration would maintain its demands for reform at the United Nations. It has already withdrawn from several U.N. and other multilateral bodies.

Trump and his administration have unsettled America’s G7 partners over issues including support for Ukraine and NATO and opposition to the International Criminal Court. All G7 members except Japan, which has a separate treaty alliance with the U.S., belong to NATO.

The administration is pushing to dismantle the ICC, an international war crimes court to which all G7 members except the U.S. belong. It has imposed severe sanctions on the court and several of its employees, saying the ICC is trying to investigate Americans.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Billions of words have been regurgitated analyzing how Democrats flipped so many Republican seats last week. But all that’s really needed are five: Americans flipped off the president.

My quick in-depth elaboration:

Sure, voters were fed up with a botched war that raised gas prices to an intolerable level. And they were stung financially by nonsense tariffs that jacked up costs for farming, food, manufacturing and household necessities, including Halloween candy. But there was much more.

Americans were disgusted by the bullying, vindictiveness, ICE thuggery, self-enrichment and the president’s vain focus on monuments to himself, including a silly medieval ballroom, a hideous arch and an algae-laden reflecting pool.

Beyond that, they’d lost respect for the Republican lemmings in Congress who were too cowardly to back away from President Trump and chart their own path instead of sheepishly trailing him to the fatal cliff.

OK, enough of that.

These are other observations from the election:

First, as it turns out, one additional proposition should have been placed on the California ballot: a referendum on the death penalty.

Gov. Gavin Newsom should have shown respect for voters and asked them whether they wanted to abolish capital punishment. Especially since he promised while initially running for governor to “be accountable to the will of the voters. … I would not [put] my personal opinions in the way of the public’s right to make a determination [on] the death penalty.”

Voters rejected death penalty repeals in 2012 and 2016. In fact, they voted to expedite executions in 2016.

But soon after taking office in 2019, Newsom declared a moratorium on capital punishment. And his successor-elect, Xavier Becerra, has promised to maintain the policy. OK.

But last week, Newsom took an unprecedented extra step by announcing he will commute the death sentences of all 548 convicted murderers awaiting execution, reducing their punishments to life in prison without parole.

“I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California values,” Newsom declared. That’s his opinion. But he should have asked Californians about their values.

Back to the actual election:

Trump’s and the GOP’s self-immolation was sparked in Texas and that’s where they ultimately perished so dramatically.

The president last year strong-armed Gov. Greg Abbott into gerrymandering Texas’ U.S. House seats so Republicans could pick up five. And that triggered a national gerrymandering war that the GOP lost spectacularly.

Newsom and California smartly countered Trump and Texas by gerrymandering our House districts. Voters agreed by approving Proposition 50. Last week, Democrats gained five redrawn seats in California, while Republicans were losing many in Texas and all over America. Abbott was ousted as governor, and Texas even elected its first Democratic U.S. senator since 1988.

Not even Sam Houston could have saved Texas Republicans on Nov. 3.

Another observation:

Look at the vote count in any California statewide race where a Democrat and Republican competed — whether it was Becerra versus Steve Hilton or some other partisan constitutional office. The voting percentages are the same: roughly 65% Democrat, 35% Republican — landslide numbers in all six races mimicking each other.

What does that tell us? The campaigns and the candidates didn’t matter. All that mattered was whether the candidate was a “D” or an “R.” This is how polarized we’ve become.

Most of us are voting a straight party ticket — a far cry from my parents’ proud boast in the 1950s that they voted “for the candidate, not the party.” That was healthy. This is not, although last week’s blowout in congressional elections was certainly justified.

The blue wave also swept over state elections like an El Niño storm washing away an entire beach front.

Democrats increased their supermajorities in both California legislative chambers, very likely leaving Republicans with their fewest Senate and Assembly seats since the 1880s, according to veteran political analyst Tony Quinn.

Another watershed, of course, was California’s first election of a Latino governor.

There wasn’t even one Latino legislator when I first began covering the state Capitol as a twirp reporter in 1961. Now, the governor-elect and the top leader of each legislative chamber are Latinos. And California’s senior U.S. senator is a Latino.

For decades, California was a purple state that alternately elected Democrats and Republicans to high office. That changed after 1994 when the GOP aggressively backed the infamous Proposition 187 to deny public services, including education, to undocumented immigrants. The measure was ruled unconstitutional. But 187 awakened Latinos politically in California. And the GOP slid into the abyss.

Proposition “187 is where it started. And the party really has never gotten out from under it,” says Quinn, a former Republican redistricting guru.

Trump failed to learn from the California GOP’s fatal attraction to immigration politics. Instead, he angered Latino voters everywhere by brutally corralling brown-skinned people for deportation without cause.

Mike Madrid, a former Republican strategist who wrote a book on Latino politics, says Trump’s “ICE raids terror” was “no question a big part” of what turned Latinos against the GOP after they moved toward the party in 2024.

And in California and Texas, Madrid notes, Latinos jumped at the chance to “elect one of their own” as governor.

“Let me make something crystal clear,” Becerra said in his election night victory speech, “I didn’t run to make history. I ran to make a difference. … California is exceptional, but it is far from perfect. We have a lot of work to do.”

He’ll have no excuse not to make a substantial difference with a record legislative supermajority to help, a friendly Congress and a weakened White House enemy.

In America, we rebel against tyrants. Reread the Declaration of Independence, whose 250th anniversary we’re fittingly celebrating this historic election year.

Across the country, voters chose to rebel against the despot president and Make America Great Again.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: With death sentence clemency, Newsom takes another big political risk
California vs. Trump: Feds move to dismiss case over 20,000 ballots after Supreme Court denied appeal
The L.A. Times Special: What Becerra’s historic win says about Latino political power in California

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

WEST ORANGE, N.J.  — America’s film industry flickered to life in this state with a chip on its shoulder.

In 1888, inventor Thomas A. Edison began developing a motion picture camera at his West Orange laboratory. His crew built an odd-shaped soundstage — giving birth to moviemaking. But soon, New Jersey lost the action to flashier New York and, then, the industry famously moved west to sunny Los Angeles, where it prospered for a century.

But filmmakers are back in New Jersey, and production is booming again.

Film activity in Los Angeles has plummeted to historic lows, with devastating consequences for crews and vendors. This series examines how L.A. lost its dominant perch as a film and TV destination and what can be done to bring Hollywood back home.

At a time when filming in Los Angeles has plunged to historic lows, New Jersey has soared, becoming one of the nation’s hottest film destinations and squeezing into the limelight of its bigger neighbor across the Hudson River.

State leaders have rolled out the red carpet. They have adopted aggressive tax credits and awarded up to $387 million to Netflix to build a $1-billion studio complex at Ft. Monmouth, a former U.S. Army base near the Jersey Shore. More than 80 buildings have been bulldozed, and on a recent afternoon, towering yellow cranes dotted the loam as soundstages, mills and office space began to take shape.

Less than 10 years ago, total movie and TV production spending in New Jersey was a mere $67 million, according to the state’s Economic Development Authority. By 2025, industry spending in the Garden State had reached $1.2 billion, as reported by production data firm ProdPro, behind only California, New York and Georgia.

Lionsgate Studios is developing six soundstages on the site of a former housing complex in Newark, N.J.

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

Meanwhile, California’s film spending declined 37% to $5.2 billion from 2021 to 2025.

Nearly three dozen major films and TV projects were produced in New Jersey in 2025, double the count of five years ago, ProdPro said.

Adam Sandler and Chris Rock have been shooting a comedy sequel, “Grown Ups 3,” for Netflix. Actor-director Dan Levy and his crew turned a Metuchen video arcade into a yarn-and-crafts store for their Netflix series “Big Mistakes.” Last month, George Clooney and Annette Bening were spotted at Baron’s Drug Store in Westfield, filming scenes for an upcoming movie.

Fox’s “The Masked Singer” struck a chord this past summer when it left Los Angeles after 14 seasons and settled into an old sports complex, the Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford.

Prolific TV showrunners Michelle and Robert King are making their new CBS drama, “Cupertino,” in a converted warehouse in Kearny, on the banks of the Hackensack River.

“We are welcome here. … The governor of New Jersey came to our set,” Robert King said in an interview. “They really want the talent coming in and all of the infrastructure that gets built up around it.”

Jon Crowley, former director of New Jersey’s Motion Picture & Television Commission, noted the irony of how the state was winning back a business that had shifted more than a century ago to Hollywood. Then, industry pioneers balked at paying the steep licensing fees to Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Co. for use of cameras, projectors and Kodak film stock.

“Taxes drove the filmmakers away and now, tax incentives are bringing them back again,” Crowley said.

How New Jersey became a Hollywood player

New Jersey’s Hollywood revival was years in the making.

There were early stumbling blocks. Former Gov. Chris Christie vetoed bills to reinstate tax credits and, in 2011, he blocked a $420,000 credit for MTV’s loud and boozy reality show “Jersey Shore,” saying taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill for a “project which does nothing more than perpetuate misconceptions about the State and its citizens.”

Another problem was that New Jersey had been somewhat typecast as run-down. HBO audiences had come to view the state that produced Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Jon Bon Jovi and Joe Pesci through a lens of a particular mob family.

“Most people, when they think of Jersey, they think of the rusty-bridge opening from ‘The Sopranos,’” Crowley said. “They don’t have a picture in their mind of our beaches, our snow-capped mountains, our small towns, our big cities — and the open farmland.”

Michael Imperioli, left, James Gandolfini and Tony Sirico star in Season 2 of “The Sopranos,” the popular HBO series set in New Jersey.

(HBO)

Former Gov. Phil Murphy, first elected in 2017, thought the state was leaving money on the table. At the time, TV and movie production was surging in New York, California’s biggest rival.

The Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet, was one of New Jersey’s most significant projects for 2024, with 60 filming days in the state.

(Macall Polay / Searchlight Pictures)

“We felt, you know what, we’ve got as much talent as anybody,” Murphy told The Times. “We’ve got the best location that money could buy.”

New Jersey could pull New York’s Broadway, film and TV talent for union shoots within the city’s Thirty-Mile Zone, beyond which producers must pay extra costs for hotels and other travel expenses.

What’s more, an estimated 20% of New York-area film crews live in New Jersey.

“We’re a big pro-union state and … this is a big union industry,” Murphy said. “There was no reason why we couldn’t be claiming a big slice.”

His team got to work by prioritizing economic incentives that would attract private sector investment.

“Putting Jersey back on the map was a big part of our administration’s energies,” said Murphy, who left office in January after two terms. “Film, television and digital led the way.”

He and Tim Sullivan, then the state’s economic development chief, flew to Los Angeles, toured major studios and met with top executives to size up the needs of the fast-changing business. They wanted to duplicate a modern studio complex — Great Point Studios — that had just opened in Yonkers, N.Y.

Great Point Studios founder Robert Halmi, a New York movie producer — who worked alongside his late father to create hundreds of TV shows, movies and miniseries, including “Lonesome Dove,” “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Alice in Wonderland” — recalled his early interactions with Murphy.

“His pitch was: ‘What would it take to get you guys to come to New Jersey?’” Halmi said in a recent interview.

Halmi got to the point.

“Shows follow the money, and the money in this instance is tax incentives,” Halmi said.

Robert Halmi, founder and CEO of Great Point Studios, is leading the construction of six soundstages for Lionsgate Studios in Newark, N.J.

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

With Murphy’s backing, New Jersey in 2018 adopted transferable tax credits of up to 35% for companies that film in the state.

The state has since bolstered its program, allowing a portion of salaries of actors and other big wage earners to be included in the tax credit calculation unlike California, which excludes these above-the-line costs and also has per-project caps. And unlike with neighbor New York, producers do not need to shoot in a certified film stage to qualify.

The state became a canvas two years ago for the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” from Walt Disney’s Searchlight Pictures. The Oscar-nominated movie, starring Timothée Chalamet, filmed over 60 days in dozens of locations, including Jersey City, which stood in for 1960s Greenwich Village.

Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller “Disclosure Day,” from Universal Pictures, also shot across New Jersey and New York last year. So did the just-released Sylvester Stallone underdog biopic, “I Play Rocky.”

To spur long-term growth, New Jersey also gave three major entertainment companies preferential status as “studio partners”: Netflix, Paramount and Lionsgate, the Santa Monica-based studio that Halmi has worked with for years.

Those companies get a 40% base tax credit for qualified expenses, in return for making a 10-year commitment in the state, and access to an additional tax incentive pool of $150 million annually.

“Putting Jersey back on the map was a big part of our administration’s energies,” former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said. “Film, television and digital led the way.”

(Seth Wenig / Associated Press)

New Jersey last year extended its tax incentive program to 2049. The film commission also worked with dozens of municipalities to streamline on-location permitting.

Leaders set a goal of building a sustainable industry.

“It’s not just dump-trucking money to create something out of nothing and then, as soon as the incentives dry up, it’s bye-bye,” said Evan Weiss, who became chief executive of the state’s Economic Development Authority this year.

But New Jersey lacked the infrastructure — production campuses, soundstages and nearby businesses that feed the industry, such as camera equipment rentals, lumber mills and wardrobe suppliers.

“Everyone gets excited when Timothée Chalamet is in town, but the program is about job creation: below-the-line jobs in things like trucking, carpentry, set design, hair and makeup, and catering,” Sullivan said.

So the state incentivized companies to build studio complexes.

“For bricks-and-mortar [projects] to work, you really need three key ingredients: the local crew base … local government support … and the third thing is tax incentives,” Halmi said. “New Jersey brought all those things to us basically on a silver platter.”

Great Point Studios is building six soundstages for Lionsgate at the site of the former Seth Boyden housing complex in Newark, N.J.

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

Halmi’s company, Great Point Studios, is building a $200-million, 270,000-square-foot complex in south Newark with Lionsgate Films as its anchor tenant. The location is strategic — minutes from Newark’s airport and 12 miles from Manhattan.

The 12-acre site is designed to support six soundstages, a mill, storage and office space. Construction has been in high gear to complete the project’s first phase by June.

On a recent morning, a parade of tractors hauling precast 12-inch-thick concrete slabs rumbled onto the property. Workers welded trusses to support 10,000- to 30,000-square-foot stages.

Local officials hope the project breathes life into a decayed district.

The development replaced a Depression-era public housing project, a notorious cluster of brick high-rises that were condemned because of crime and safety concerns. The buildings sat hollow for a decade. A nearby Anheuser-Busch brewery shut down in January after 75 years, leaving a hodgepodge of storefronts — a Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, McDonald’s, an auto parts store and Focus On Jesus Bible Church.

Leon Lee grew up in Newark. The construction foreman surveyed the transformation with pride — and relief.

“It will give this area a nice facelift,” Lee said. “Businesses and stores will follow.”

Netflix takes over Ft. Monmouth

The biggest bet is about 40 miles away in bucolic Monmouth County.

Netflix is creating a massive compound on 292 acres at Ft. Monmouth, with significant help — up to $387 million — from state taxpayers.

For 94 years, Ft. Monmouth was home to the Army’s communications branch, the Signal Corps. The base served as test grounds for radio-equipped weather balloons and radar technology. Army homing pigeons once roosted here.

The base closed as part of a nationwide realignment.

“Ft. Monmouth was left for dead,” Murphy said.

The fallow 1,100-acre tract became a signature project of Murphy’s revitalization campaign. In 2022, Netflix agreed to pay $55 million for nearly a third of the real estate that straddles two boroughs, Eatontown and Oceanport. The acquisition was finalized late last year, and Netflix brought in crews to raze dozens of old military buildings.

Ft. Monmouth was the Signal Corps’ home for 94 years.

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

The Netflix project was part of the state’s Aspire economic development program, which has also been used to build housing and renovate hospitals.

The streamer plans to spend about $850 million to create a leafy campus with 12 soundstages to bring 500,000-square feet of studio space into central Jersey for Netflix productions.

A few historic Army structures, including soldier memorials, will remain on the grounds, which is a few miles from the seaside city of Long Branch, where Netflix co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos was born.

The construction, and eventual studios, will create thousands of jobs and anchor what some have dubbed “Hollywood East.” The ambition is to erect a more modern and more spacious version of a Burbank movie lot, right off the Garden State Parkway.

“We are leveraging state resources to attract private investment, create good-paying jobs, support small businesses, and generate economic activity in communities across the state,” Gov. Mikie Sherrill said in a statement. “This remarkable growth demonstrates what is possible when government serves as a strategic partner in economic development.”

More than 80 buildings have been bulldozed at the former Ft. Monmouth to make room for new studios.

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

The first phase should be complete by next fall, bringing more capacity for Netflix, which already is the state’s largest producer. Last year, the streamer said it filmed nearly 20 productions in the state. It has received enhanced New Jersey tax credits since 2024.

“Everyone wants us to succeed: the governor’s office, the mayor of the 6,000-person town of Eatontown and the labor unions,” said Will Castleberry, Netflix’s head of state regulatory and production policy. “We have gone into a place where we’re all working together to do something pretty cool.”

Netflix’s comedy series “Big Mistakes,” with Dan Levy, Boran Kuzum and Taylor Ortega, films in New Jersey.

(Spencer Pazer / Netflix)

Netflix is building 12 soundstages at the former Ft. Monmouth in Eatontown, N.J.

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

New Jersey’s film industry was among the fastest growing in the country last year, gaining nearly 2,000 jobs. Officials expect another surge once the Lionsgate, Netflix and other studios open, easing a shortage of studio space that has prompted some projects to film in New York.

“We’re looking at new studio stage space right now to help fulfill that demand,” said Scott Levy, owner of Eastern Effects, which converted the warehouse in Kearny into a cavernous stage, which CBS leased for “Cupertino.”

“But you’re talking a very expensive real estate market, and a very costly conversion,” he said.

Scott Levy’s Eastern Effects converted a warehouse in Kearny, N.J., into a soundstage that is now home to CBS’ legal drama “Cupertino.”

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

Lenders have been rattled by the misfortunes of some independent studio owners, including Culver City-based Hackman Capital Partners, which defaulted on loans to purchase the former CBS-Radford lot in Studio City and Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York — Paramount Pictures’ original home — after a nationwide production contraction.

“Nobody wants to over-commit and then get stuck: doing the right thing for the industry, but then being left with a problem,” Levy said.

The most ambitious studio project remains a dream at the foot of the Bayonne Bridge.

This is where French hedge fund manager and investor Arpad “Arki” Busson plans to build 1888 Studios, a $1.2-billion film and TV complex on the site of a former Chevron oil field and refinery.

Busson drew inspiration from L.A.’s historic studio lots. Architecture giant Gensler designed the 58-acre project to feature 17 buildings with an Art Deco aesthetic, as well as a water tower, bungalows, commissaries and a public promenade along the waterfront.

“We want to really create a home for content makers, a place where they feel that creativity is bursting,” Busson said on a recent afternoon as he walked the perimeter of the vacant parcel as winds whipped in from Newark Bay.

His firm, New York-based Togus Urban Renewal, controls an additional 20 acres of water, where he plans to park barges to be used as floating back lots.

“We want to offer the best facility,” Busson said. “A place where crews feel that it is a welcoming place to work.”

A rendering of 1888 Studios’ New Jersey production facility, which is in development.

(Togus Urban Renewal)

It took more than two years to prepare the land, a brownfield site. More than 1 million cubic yards of fill was trucked in to elevate the property by 16 feet.

New Jersey has promised a 10-year Aspire Program tax credit of up to $400 million for the construction.

After an introduction by state officials, Paramount signed on to become 1888 Studios’ anchor tenant, committing to lease nearly 300,000 square feet.

The arrangement allows Paramount and CBS productions, now owned by David Ellison’s Skydance, to qualify for the enhanced 40% transferable tax credit.

December’s groundbreaking ceremony was a headline-making event, drawing Murphy and other luminaries, including model-businessperson Elle Macpherson, who shares two sons with Busson. One is a studios’ project manager.

The family is seeking financing to begin construction next spring and open in 2029.

The 1888 Studios project is located next to New Jersey’s Bayonne Bridge.

(Aristide Economopoulos / For The Times)

Busson plans to name structures after notable New Jersey residents, including rocker Bon Jovi.

The studios’ name is a nod to the year Edison applied for a patent for the first movie camera.

“This was the place of birth of the industry, and clearly, the idea is to bring it back to Jersey,” Busson said.

Kearny playing Cupertino

Robert and Michelle King, both California natives, didn’t consider filming “Cupertino” in their home state, even though the legal drama is ostensibly set in the heart of Silicon Valley.

They’ve long produced their shows in New York, including “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight.” Their CBS crime solver, “Elsbeth,” is set in the city, and they’d envisioned producing their latest legal drama near the same complex.

But CBS executives suggested they check out New Jersey for “Cupertino.”

“We had a scout go out, going: ‘Oh, dear God, what are we going to find?’” Robert King said. “My memory of San José is [of] low-slung architecture — not skyscrapers.”

The CBS legal drama “Cupertino” is being filmed around New Jersey, including a converted warehouse in Kearny.

(Elizabeth Fisher / CBS)

But they quickly warmed to the new location.

“There were some distinctive buildings where we felt: ‘OK, that is a California look,’” King said. “We started shooting in March, so we had to scrape snow out from around an International House of Pancakes … but after that, it’s been pretty easygoing.”

Actors who live in Manhattan can travel to the 36,000-square-foot stage in Kearny in about 30 minutes. The Broadway performers whom the Kings like to cast as courtroom judges can make it to the city in time for their evening curtain calls.

“So far, so good,” Michelle King said. “It was a little bit easier to find some of the locations, weirdly, to match for Northern California in New Jersey than it might have been in New York.”

That’s a point of pride for officials in New Jersey.

“We are always happy to beat New York,” said Weiss, the Economic Development Authority chief. “We’re on our way to do that … but at the same time, we are very connected.”

DELANO, Calif. — While cutting men’s hair in his barbershop, Jorge Navarro has been hearing the same concerns over and over: The prices of gas, food and housing are going up. Immigration agents are lurking outside stores and schools. And President Trump and the Republicans are to blame.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the decisions being made in Washington, he said, helped Democrat Randy Villegas trounce Republican incumbent David Valadao to take his congressional seat in Tuesday’s election.

“We want a change,” Navarro said, speaking in Spanish. “We hope for a change.”

Villegas won in a region of the San Joaquin Valley that has been dominated by Republicans for two decades. The majority Latino district stretches from western Fresno to Bakersfield, an agricultural area with dairy farms, grapevines and vast orchards of almonds, pistachios and oranges.

That Valadao lost to Villegas, a community college professor who ran on a populist message, was not a major surprise, given the gains Democrats made nationwide. But Villegas’ margin of victory left both Republican and Democratic leaders and operatives stunned. The progressive challenger has maintained a lead of roughly 30 percentage points since election night. Although votes still are being counted, the Associated Press has declared Villegas the winner.

“It was remarkable,” said Christian Romo, chair of the Kern County Democratic Party. “I knew we would win but didn’t expect this margin, and I didn’t think that we would have the turnout we did.”

Jorge Navarro cuts Victor Salazar’s hair at Jorge’s Barber Shop in Delano. Navarro supported Randy Villegas in the congressional election.

(Tomas Ovalle/For The Times)

Even Paul Mitchell, the redistricting and election data consultant who drew the reconfigured map to favor Democrats, was surprised by Villegas’ performance.

“We drew the district to be three points more effective for Democrats, and I was off by a factor of 12,” he said.

Though Democrats had a registration advantage even before voters approved the new congressional lines via Proposition 50, Valadao continually frustrated the party by winning over enough independent voters in what historically has been a low-turnout district.

This year voters turned out in droves, especially young Latinos, the district’s largest voting group. Though mail-in ballots still are being processed, turnout may have doubled compared with the last midterm election in 2022.

Villegas, who will turn 32 this week, credits an army of volunteer canvassers, who prioritized reaching out to people who did not have a history of voting.

“So often we have this catch-22 cycle where young people, low-income communities, renters never vote because campaigns don’t talk to them, and campaigns don’t talk to them because they never vote,” he said.

He focused on the cost of living, healthcare and fighting back against moneyed interests in Washington, issues he said resonated with residents who so often feel ignored by those in power.

It’s not “about left versus right; it’s really us versus them,” Villegas said. “Working families in the Central Valley and across this country who’ve been left behind by politicians who care more about power than people and who care more about catering to corporations than our communities.”

His populist and anti-establishment message apparently appealed to voters who felt squeezed by fuel prices and the effect tariffs have had on farms in the area. Many of Villegas’ supporters also were energized by outrage over how Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been pursuing immigrants and terrorizing their community.

“People who used to support Trump don’t trust him anymore,” Navarro said in his Delano barbershop, adding that some of his relatives who previously backed Republicans switched sides to vote for Democrats.

Navarro, a 67-year-old Mexican-born U.S. citizen, said Valadao has done a poor job in office.

The sun sets over Highway 99 in Delano, a city in the congressional district where Central Valley voters ousted Republican Rep. David Valadao.

(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

One of Valadao’s biggest vulnerabilities in the race was his vote in favor of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included steep cuts to Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor, known in California as Medi-Cal. The district has the highest proportion of Medi-Cal recipients in the state, with 67% of residents enrolled as of last year, according to the California Health Care Foundation.

Many residents also are worried, Navarro said, about the squads of ICE agents that have been appearing in the community to detain people. He said even American citizens and other legal U.S. residents with documents are afraid of being hauled away to detention centers.

He said one ICE team was spotted last week outside a Target store, and another by a high school.

“The streets are sometimes very empty because people are afraid to go out,” Navarro said. Since the raids began, he said, business at his shop has dropped about 50%.

Victor Salazar, a 46-year-old farmworker who was getting a haircut, agreed that ICE agents are liable to seize anyone “if they see you look Hispanic.” Despite being an American citizen, he fears being detained and will not go out if immigration agents are in the area.

Salazar works picking grapes, but lately his hours have been cut back. He says Trump’s tariffs, which have led to retaliatory measures by Canada and other countries, are hurting the farming business.

On top of that, Salazar said, high food prices are a struggle.

“We go to the store and everything is expensive,” he said. “Because of political decisions, we are the ones paying.”

Neftali Trinidad sells flowers on a street corner in Delano.

(Tomas Ovalle/For The Times)

Along with the strong head winds the party faced nationally, Republicans blame the loss on Proposition 50, which rejiggered the district lines to pick up more Democratic voters in response to Trump-ordered GOP gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere.

“It’s pretty bad,” said Clayton Campbell, chair of the Kern County Republican Party. “There’s so many reasons that it was a tough environment for Republicans this time around, and Valadao was one of the victims.”

Villegas’ victory appears to rebuff the past strategy by Democrats of putting up moderate candidates to challenge Valadao. Earlier this year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee backed Jasmeet Bains, a moderate Assembly member and family doctor, over Villegas. She finished third in the primary.

Valadao was first elected to Congress in 2012 and reclaimed his seat in 2020 after losing in 2018. Because of redistricting, he served his last two terms in a different district. While in Congress, he has pushed for more water for large farms in the San Joaquin Valley, in line with Trump’s agenda.

But he also split from hard-line Republicans and Trump’s MAGA base with his support for providing a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally. He was one of the last two House Republicans remaining in Congress who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Valadao has not commented publicly since the election. Some voters said the Republican dairy farmer, who lives in Hanford, had a strong record of delivering for the community.

“You’d talk to him and he’d get down to it. … A lot of people like him,” said Arthur Rodriguez, a 75-year-old retiree who worked at an ice cream plant and supports Trump.

Arturo Vitela of Bakersfield stopped for tacos during a ride through Delano on his Harley-Davidson.

(Tomas Ovalle/For The Times)

But others said any Republican associated with Trump was an extremely hard sell here, especially with the state of the economy and how ICE has been targeting Latinos.

“The kids that were brought up from immigrant parents came out and voted, tipped the elections,” said Arturo Vitela, a 64-year-old retired medical lab technician from Bakersfield who was out riding his Harley-Davidson with a friend.

Alexa Lopez, a 23-year-old in Delano who works at a clothing store renting dresses and tuxedos, said she was glad to see that young voters turned out in large numbers. On election night, she texted with friends as they celebrated the sweeping Democratic victories in Congress.

Alexa Lopez, at JFW Formal Wear in Delano, says young voters turned out in high numbers.

(Tomas Ovalle/For The Times)

She said Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown was a top concern and she wouldn’t vote for anyone perceived as linked to the president.

“The ICE activity has had everyone scared, scared to leave their homes,” Lopez said.

She said people in the area have been feeling both afraid and angry, “knowing that we can’t let it go on like this, and we have to do something about it.”

Lopez said her father, who previously supported Trump, called her days before the election and asked: “We shouldn’t vote Republican, right?”

James reported from Delano and Nixon from Sacramento.

WASHINGTON — As it became clear on election day that Republicans would lose the House of Representatives, House Homeland Security Committee Democrats posted a three-word message on social media to Markwayne Mullin, who leads the agency: “clear your calendar.”

The next day, Mullin posted a three-word message of his own: “Deportations will continue.”

After affordability and the Iran war, immigration was a defining issue in the midterm elections, and now that Democrats won majorities in the House and Senate, they plan to increase agency oversight and attempt to rein in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies.

Come January, Democrats will control every House seat along the U.S.-Mexico border. But while they will have wider leeway to investigate alleged wrongdoings of the last two years, how much they can advance their immigration agenda will likely depend on how much Republicans will collaborate with them. Any advances would also require the approval of President Trump, who on Friday appointed Stephen Miller, the architect of many of his administration’s most stringent immigration policies, as his new chief of staff.

Democrats have already started outlining their goals for next year and preparing to staff up. Job listings posted last week seek investigators, lawyers and law clerks whose duties would include immigration.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), who is poised to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said one of his major focus areas would be the Department of Homeland Security and abuses by immigration agents. Garcia specifically named former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski, saying they would face accountability and justice.

“When people are being kidnapped and detained, thrown to the ground, arms broken, people snatched up on their way to immigration appointments that we the government gave them, that’s inhumane, it’s wrong, and I think the American public — regardless of party — are sick of it,” Garcia said Wednesday at a news conference in Huntington Beach.

Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to Mullin the same day demanding that his department preserve all documents, including emails and contracts, and prepare to hand them over.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the investigations subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, made a similar request. Blumenthal said he has written Homeland Security leaders more than a dozen times and received no records.

But that was when Republicans controlled the subcommittee. Last week, he wrote, “Please also note that failure to voluntarily produce the requested records and information by January 4, 2027, will leave the Subcommittee with no choice but to consider alternative measures to obtain compliance.”

Republicans, too, have begun preparing for the coming power shift. House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) told GOP committee chairs to identify possible targets of Democratic scrutiny and to consider how recent Supreme Court decisions will factor into oversight moving forward.

“They will use their oversight authorities to harass the President, his family, cabinet officials, and they will seek to destroy our allies,” Scalise said in a letter Thursday. “You will all be a key line of defense in this fight, and we must maximize our remaining days in power to prepare for what is coming.”

Planning by companies that operate immigrant detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement is already factoring in Democratic control of Congress. During a call with investors on Thursday, Lucibeth Mayberry, the chief executive of CoreCivic, was asked whether election results will affect future sales of privately run detention facilities to Homeland Security.

“We would urge the ICE administration to move quickly,” she said, adding that “there’s no reason to wait.”

Asked if the election results would affect ICE activity, Mayberry did not anticipate any immediate change, noting that ICE has already increased enforcement and expanded the number of detainees, currently around 69,000.

While immigration enforcement is unlikely to change, the administration signaled an openness to modifying some tactics. In a statement on social media the day after the election, Vice President JD Vance said he’s “open to the idea that we should change enforcement — by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance.”

Trump, speaking to reporters Friday in Florida, said that immigration is one Democratic-led initiative he could get behind.

But in tapping Miller as his chief of staff, Trump signals a desire to continue the aggressive tactics of the last two years, said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).

“Voters demand lower costs, an end to the chaos, and a government that works for them,” he wrote in a statement Friday. “I know Trump heard them, but sadly and predictably, he’s choosing to double down, handing the keys of the West Wing to the man most responsible for this Administration’s failures and most harmful policies.”

A majority of voters support a path to citizenship for longtime immigrants, banning immigration agents from wearing masks, mandating use of body cameras and limiting use of force, according to a poll by the Los Angeles-based analytics firm BSP Research of more than 10,000 midterm voters.

Most poll respondents also support redirecting billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for immigration enforcement to other government programs.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement, acknowledged Trump may not sign a comprehensive immigration reform bill. But she said Trump would be going against the will of American voters.

“Especially now that Stephen Miller has become the chief of staff, we will have to pass our comprehensive reforms on immigration and send it to Trump’s desk,” she said. “If he and Stephen Miller want to veto it and continue their cruel sweep, we can hold them accountable, not give them any money for it and show them what a real solution looks like.”

Blumenthal said the investigations subcommittee will focus not just on enforcement, but alleged corruption, such as the airplanes reportedly purchased at inflated prices from a political donor to Noem when she was Homeland Security secretary.

Blumenthal said he’s hopeful that a handful of Republican senators up for reelection in 2028 will work with Democrats on legislation that would require immigration agents to wear badges and identify themselves, bar them from wearing masks, and hold them to account when they kill people.

“We don’t have 60 Democratic votes,” he said, referring to the threshold needed to stop a filibuster, “but I’m hopeful Republicans will insist on decency and humanity.”

Chris Tausanovitch, a political science professor who studies Congress and the federal government, said it’s very unlikely Democrats can overcome a presidential veto, which requires two-thirds votes in both chambers.

That leaves the budget process as their main vehicle for change, Tausanovitch said. Trump could veto a budget passed through a simple majority, but he’d face the prospect of a government shutdown.

Similar budget negotiations have taken place in the second half of the second term of recent presidents, he said. The party that won the midterms usually got something they wanted by making a narrow change in the budget. But Trump is unlikely to give ground on immigration.

“Part of the problem is that, unlike before the Biden administration, when there were a lot of proposals to pair citizenship for undocumented people with border security in some sort of grand compromise, the Republicans have gotten a lot of what they wanted on immigration,” he said. “There’s not an opportunity for a bargain like that, because the enforcement part of the bargain is already done.”

Instead, Tausanovitch said, Democrats will probably focus their political capital on healthcare and affordability — issues where they have the greatest popularity and can create a winning message for 2028.

LOS ANGELES — A U.S. deportation flight of Iranian nationals bound for Iran by way of Pakistan was abruptly canceled Sunday morning, according to an attorney who spoke to some of the detainees scheduled for repatriation.

At least eight Iranians were loaded onto a plane Sunday morning in Mesa, Ariz., for a deportation flight headed to the Caucasus nation of Georgia, then on to Pakistan, according to Ali Rahnama, an attorney with the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund who filed emergency motions on behalf of some of the Iranian detainees. The flight was canceled without explanation, he said.

Court documents unsealed days ago in a civil lawsuit filed by the fund showed the Trump administration as recently as mid-October said it had plans to deport the Iranians to Iran, even as the war there drags on, via an unnamed third country. The lawsuit was filed in July and alleges that the U.S. government illegally shared confidential information with Iranian officials about Iranians seeking asylum in the U.S.

There were three deportation flights to Iran between September 2025 and January 2026, with more than 100 Iranian nationals deported. But the administration’s confirmation of the new plans amid the war that began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February highlights its resolve in carrying out its hard-line immigration crackdown, which has involved ramping up removals, including to places that critics say could endanger the lives of the returnees.

Homeland Security response

In response to questions Sunday from the Associated Press, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not comment on “prospective removal operations, including flight schedules, passenger manifests, destinations, or individual case details,” nor would the agency confirm future removal operations.

“As promised, the Trump Administration is employing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history,” the statement said.

The administration did not specify in the October court records when the deportations would be carried out. But in the last week, roughly a dozen Iranian nationals in immigration detention said they were notified that they were scheduled for an upcoming deportation flight to Pakistan and then to Iran, according to numerous attorneys who have since confirmed those plans with Homeland Security.

Iranian government contacts reported

According to Rahnama, the eight detainees who boarded the flight on Sunday were visited by a senior official with the Iranian Interests Section — an Iranian representative office in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington that handles consular affairs — and were told that the Iranian government would transport them from Pakistan to Iran.

In the litigation brought by the Iranian immigrant advocacy group, at least a dozen Iranian detainees have said they’ve been contacted by Iranian officials who had knowledge of sensitive information on their asylum claims.

U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a nominee of President Biden, has not ruled on the claims but ordered the U.S. government to give the court 24-hour notice of any finalized plans to deport Iranians to Iran or to any other country, and five days’ written notice before any such deportation is carried out.

In a court filing Sunday, the defense fund laid out what it had learned about plans for a removal flight Sunday and argued that the administration may have violated the judge’s directive to give advance notice of deportation plans.

Later Sunday, the government filed court documents in the case, but they were sealed and inaccessible to the public.

Group says individuals could face persecution

The Iranian American Legal Defense Fund has called for a halt to the removal flights, saying in a news release that they would “reportedly mark the first deportation of Iranians to Iran since the U.S.-Iran war began.”

The group’s executive director, Yasmine Chubin, said in a statement Sunday that it was difficult to comprehend why the U.S. would forcibly deport Iranians, including asylum seekers, to Iran, amid ongoing military hostilities.

The consequences of removal, Chubin said, “could be irreversible and individuals may face persecution, torture, or death.”

At least one person who had been part of the scuttled flight volunteered to go back to Iran after nearly two years of detention, Rahnama said, out of desperation to leave what he described as inhumane imprisonment. It’s not clear how many other of the deportees may have volunteered to leave.

Riddle writes for the Associated Press. AP reporter Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

President Trump in his first major interview since his party lost control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections said he thinks his administration was too aggressive on deportations and that he believes he can work with Democrats in the new Congress on some kind of immigration deal.

Trump said his deportation policy was part of the reason Republicans lost, telling CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired Sunday: “I think it might be too tough, yeah.”

He added that he thinks he could reach an agreement with the new Democratic majority. “The deal would be we would work something out. And I think it’s something — I think that’s something that’s actually doable,” he said in the interview.

Trump did not give specifics about what that deal would look like — and shortly after taping the interview Friday, Trump named the key architect of his hard-line immigration agenda, Stephen Miller, as his new chief of staff.

“Trump says his immigration crackdown went too far,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer scoffed on social media Sunday after the interview aired. “Apparently, his solution was to put the man responsible for it in charge of the White House. That’s not a course correction. That’s a promotion.”

The president’s immigration crackdown has been a prominent feature of his second term with major operations in Los Angeles and other cities sending arrests soaring. Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were killed by federal officers during protests against the operations.

Democrats have said oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security is a priority for the new Congress.

Trump said he believes that “killers” and “drug dealers” in the country illegally should be deported, but suggested he was open to the idea of a deal that would let others stay “if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes.”

Catalini writes for the Associated Press.