POLITICS

California and a coalition of other states sued the Trump administration Monday over its efforts to roll back fair housing rules that bar certain types of discrimination by landlords, including against LGBTQ+ people.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rule change threatening funding for states that offer housing protections for LGBTQ+ and other marginalized individuals who are not explicitly covered by federal law is illegal, undermines state efforts to combat discrimination and would push vulnerable people onto the streets.

“In effect, the Trump administration is attempting to roll back civil rights enforcement in housing at the federal level, and pressure states to weaken their own protections as well,” Bonta said during a news conference Monday. “That’s not just bad policy, it’s unlawful.”

Representatives from HUD and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The federal Fair Housing Act explicitly bans discrimination based on seven traits: race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status and disability. Under rules set forth during the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has for years interpreted the law as banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Many states, including California, also have adopted laws explicitly banning discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups not mentioned in the federal law, with California also banning discrimination based on marital status, ancestry, source of income and veteran or military status.

In September, HUD issued new guidance threatening to decertify state housing agencies — stripping their federal funding and ability to investigate discrimination claims — if they provide anti-discrimination protections other than those spelled out in the Fair Housing Act. The guidance also barred state agencies from using federal funds to “promote gender ideology,” “fund or promote elective abortions” or promote illegal immigration, according to the lawsuit.

The guidance followed that of HUD Secretary Scott Turner, a former NFL player and Trump loyalist, who announced last year that HUD would no longer adhere to a 2016 Obama-era rule protecting transgender people from housing discrimination, which Turner said “tied housing programs, shelters and other facilities funded by HUD to far-left gender ideology.”

“We, at this agency, are carrying out the mission laid out by President Trump on January 20th [2025] when he signed an executive order to restore biological truth to the federal government,” Turner said in a statement, referring to Trump’s order calling on federal agencies across the government to rescind protections for transgender Americans.

“This means recognizing there are only two sexes: male and female,” Turner said. “It means getting government out of the way of what the Lord established from the beginning when he created man in His own image.”

Among other things, the administration said rules barring discrimination against transgender people allowed “biological men to enter shelters intended for women impacted by trauma, domestic abuse and violence.”

LGBTQ+ advocacy groups condemned the move, noting that transgender Americans face heightened discrimination in a slate of areas — including housing — and need protections. They also contended that HUD’s new policies violate a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring employment discrimination based on gender or gender identity.

Bonta said the Fair Housing Act “set a floor, not a ceiling, for protections against discrimination,” which means that states “have the authority to go further and protect more people,” as California has endeavored to do.

He said HUD has supported the state’s anti-discrimination work for decades through the Fair Housing Assistance Program, which provides funding to state and local agencies to investigate and enforce laws against housing discrimination. HUD’s new guidance “threatens to undermine that system” by demanding an end to state protections not just for LGBTQ+ people, but for military veterans, immigrants as well as women receiving abortions and other reproductive healthcare, he said.

“Families across California are already struggling to find homes they can afford, and the last thing they need is for the federal government to make it harder,” Bonta said. “At its core, this lawsuit is about protecting a fundamental civil right: the right to rent, buy, or live in housing without discrimination.”

Bonta said California interprets the Fair Housing Act’s ban on sex discrimination as protecting LGBTQ+ people, but the Trump administration doesn’t agree — making the state’s more explicit protections important.

He said about $3 million in federal funding is currently at stake for California, with millions more at stake in other states.

Illinois Atty. Gen. Kwame Raoul, who is helping lead the lawsuit and spoke alongside Bonta Monday, said states with robust antidiscrimination laws “will not go backwards and we will not give in to threats” from the Trump administration.

“These actions are part of a broader, ongoing pattern by this administration to subvert the legal protections our country has put in place to combat discrimination, and to tear down the hard fought progress we have made for civil rights,” Raoul said. “It is also just the latest page in the president’s illegal playbook to use funding and programs created by Congress to try to strong arm states into adopting Trump’s preferred policies.”

The states allege that HUD’s targeting of state antidiscrimination policies comes after it downsized its own workforce and significantly reduced its ability to investigate housing discrimination complaints and enforce fair housing laws. They say the new guidance violates multiple federal laws, including laws that govern federal spending and rule changes, and are asking the federal court to immediately invalidate the guidance as unlawful.

Bonta and Raoul are joined in the lawsuit by the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration likes to promote its immigration enforcement agenda through numbers, with ambitious goals to deport 1 million people, report zero releases at the U.S.-Mexico border and arrest thousands of alleged gang members.

For all the boasting, the administration has been releasing less reliable, carefully vetted data than its predecessors on a signature policy that has become one of the most contentious of Trump’s second term.

The gap in information and a loss of figures from an office that has tracked immigration data back to the 1800s have left researchers, advocates, lawyers and journalists without important statistics to hold the Republican administration to account.

“They aren’t publishing the data,” said Mike Howell, who heads the conservative Oversight Project, an advocacy group pushing for more deportations. Instead, Howell said, the Department of Homeland Security has put out numbers in news releases “that purport to be statistics with no statistical backup and the numbers have jumped all over the place.”

With mass deportations a priority, new restrictions and increased enforcement have led to a surge in immigration arrests, detentions and deportations.

But finding the metrics that once measured those changes can be hard. It is an extension of earlier administration moves to limit the flow of government information by scrubbing or removing federal datasets or by the firing last year of the top official overseeing jobs data.

Important data is no longer publicly available

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics is responsible for publishing figures from Homeland Security agencies, including removals and the nationalities of those deported, to provide a comprehensive picture of immigration trends at the border and inside the United States.

Originally known as the Office of Immigration Statistics, it tracked such data since 1872. In its current form, created under the Biden administration, it also started publishing monthly reports that allowed researchers to track developments almost in real time.

But key enforcement metrics on its website have not been updated since early last year. A note on the page where the monthly reports were says it “is delayed while it is under review.”

“It’s the most timely data. It’s the most reliable data,” Austin Kocher, research professor at Syracuse University who closely follows immigration data trends, said about the monthly reports. “It has the most omniscient view of immigration enforcement across the entire agency.”

An interactive dashboard launched by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2023 once let users examine whom the agency was arresting, their nationalities, criminal histories and removal numbers. ICE called it a “new era in transparency.”

Though intended for quarterly updates, the latest data is from January 2025. The agency’s annual report, typically released in December, had not been published as of mid-March.

Other agencies also publish data that touches on immigration, and parts of it do continue to roll out, such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics detailing border encounters or data from the Department of Justice’s immigration courts.

But experts say other data has slowed.

The State Department’s most recent visa issuance data is from August. Key statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have not been updated since October.

The now-missing data had helped researchers study the effects of different policies. Lawyers could cite the figures to support their litigation. Journalists saw in them a powerful tool to hold the government to account on public claims or to report on important trends.

“We’re all a little bit in the dark about exactly how immigration enforcement is operating at a time when it’s taking new and unprecedented forms,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.

DHS did not respond to detailed questions about why it was no longer releasing specific data.

“This is the most transparent Administration in history, we release new data multiple times a week and upon reporter request,” the department said in a statement.

Researchers contend with a patchwork of numbers

Figures the administration has released are inconsistent and unverifiable.

In a Jan. 20 news release, DHS said it had deported more than 675,000 people since Trump returned to the White House. A day later, in a second release, the department put the figure at 622,000. In congressional testimony March 4, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the figure was 700,000.

But ICE, an agency within DHS, also releases figures on how many people it has removed from the country, part of a large data release mandated by Congress. An Associated Press analysis of the figures put that number at roughly 400,000 over Trump’s first year.

DHS has said 2.2 million people who were in the U.S. illegally have gone home on their own, but the department has given no explanation for the count. Experts have questioned the source of that figure, saying this was not something that DHS historically has tracked.

The department did not respond to questions about where that data came from.

With key sources of data halted, researchers, advocates and others have had to rely on information the administration is obliged to report or that has come to light through legal action.

The publication of ICE detention figures — how many people are detained, for how long and whether they have committed a crime — is required by Congress and is generally released every two weeks. But the figures’ release has faced some delays and its data gets overwritten with every new publication, complicating the work of people who need access to it.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, a research initiative, successfully sued through the Freedom of Information Act to access data about ICE arrests including nationalities, conviction status and whether arrests occurred at jails or in the community.

Graeme Blair, co-director of the project, said every administration has struggled with transparency in immigration enforcement, and given the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement goals, the team wanted to secure and verify information that the government might not publicly release.

“Given the scale of what they were talking about doing, it seemed really important to be able to understand, to be able to double check those numbers,” he said.

But there are limitations, he said. The data obtained through the lawsuit only runs through Oct. 15. It does not cover recent operations such as the Minneapolis enforcement surge, when federal immigration officers fatally shot two protesters, leading to widespread demonstrations and scrutiny of enforcement tactics.

The absence of data is one of the few issues that has drawn bipartisan criticism.

“We deserve to know the numbers, just like we deserve to know who’s in our country and who needs to leave,” Howell said.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

LONDON — The BBC filed a motion Monday asking a U.S. court to dismiss President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against it.

The British national broadcaster said that the Florida court where the case is expected to be heard does not have jurisdiction over it. It also argued that Trump could not show that it intended to misrepresent him.

Trump filed a lawsuit in December over the way a BBC documentary edited a speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2021. The claim seeks $5 billion in damages for defamation and a further $5 billion for unfair trade practices.

Last month a judge at the federal court for the Southern District of Florida provisionally set a trial date for February 2027.

The BBC argued that the case should be thrown out because the documentary was never aired in Florida or the U.S.

“We have therefore challenged jurisdiction of the Florida court and filed a motion to dismiss the president’s claim,” the corporation said in a statement.

In a 34-page document, the BBC also argued that Trump failed to “plausibly allege facts showing that defendants knowingly intended to create a false impression.”

Trump’s case “falls well short of the high bar of actual malice,” it added.

The documentary — titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” — was aired days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The program spliced together three quotes from two sections of a speech Trump made on Jan. 6, 2021, into what appeared to be one quote, in which Trump appeared to explicitly encourage his supporters to storm the Capitol building.

Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

The broadcaster’s chairman has apologized to Trump over the edit of the speech, admitting that it gave “the impression of a direct call for violent action.” But the BBC rejects claims it defamed him. The furor triggered the resignations of the BBC’s top executive and its head of news last year.

WASHINGTON — White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer but will continue working during her treatment, President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Monday.

Trump said Wiles’ prognosis is “excellent” and described her as “one of the strongest people I know.” He said Wiles plans to begin treatment immediately but made no suggestion she was pulling back on her work as one of his closest advisers.

“During the treatment period, she will be spending virtually full time at the White House, which makes me, as President, very happy!” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “She will soon be better than ever!”

It comes as the Republican president confronts mounting challenges on global and national fronts, from the war in Iran and soaring oil prices to this fall’s midterm elections and American’s concerns over affordability.

Wiles, 68, is a longtime Trump ally who rose from his campaign co-chair to his closest adviser and counsel. The first woman to become White House chief of staff, Wiles spent decades as a lobbyist and political operative in Florida and led Trump’s 2016 effort in the state.

Binkley writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Murder is considered the worst crime out there, but for my money, it’s child rapists who are the worst of the worst — especially the serial ones who destroy one life after another.

That’s wholly subjective on my part, but I doubt I’m alone. Which is why I was far from surprised at the outrage that accompanied two recent, successful parole hearings for convicted serial child predators in Sacramento.

Gregory Lee Vogelsang, 57, and David Funston, 64, both attacked children and were granted parole through California’s elderly parole program — though both remain behind bars for now.

But the fury over the possibility of their freedom has put the state’s controversial elderly parole program under scrutiny — again — and led to a flurry of legislation to add new restrictions. Should sex offenders be excluded? Especially heinous murderers? Everyone under the age of 75?

It’s easy to answer “yes” to all of the above.

“Part of the problem we have is we shouldn’t be making policy decisions based on speculation and on scary rhetoric that’s disconnected from the facts,” Keith Wattley told me. He’s the founder and director of UnCommon Law, a nonprofit that provides legal services and parole advocacy.

“That’s how politicians make people afraid, but it shouldn’t be how we make law,” he said.

And he’s right, as grotesque as these headline-grabbing cases are. In 2024, there were 3,580 elderly parole hearings and 606 people were granted that relief. Most have remained law-abiding. In the 2019-20 year, the most recent recidivism statistics available from CDCR, 221 people were granted elderly parole. Within three years, only four had been convicted of new crimes, and only one of those was a felony for a crime against a person. That tracks with lots of data that shows men generally age out of violent crimes.

But Funston and Vogelsang are the worst of what we fear when we talk about parole, and their cases rightfully make us wonder what the heck the parole board is doing. Though Gov. Gavin Newsom sent both of these decisions back for review, it’s easy to imagine the attack ads should he run for president: Under Newsom’s watch, child rapists walked free.

“Elder parole has gone too far,” Thien Ho, the Sacramento district attorney whose office prosecuted both men, told me. “I support the opportunity of people to be rehabilitated. But I think that certain individuals, in my opinion, and in my experience, cannot be rehabilitated.”

Here’s where I’m going to make a lot of folks mad on both sides of this issue. I agree with Ho, but also, I agree with Wattley. I don’t think we can pass laws based on our grimmest view of humanity. Removing hope from the system turns our prisons into dungeons and does not ultimately serve public safety.

But then, neither does releasing child molesters into our communities.

Lost in all the wrath about these two cases is the difficult business of justice that led to the early release law in 2014, and any interest in the hard and nuanced conversation that we need to have around terrible crimes. It’s easy and popular to say no violent criminal should ever be released, but we can’t just lock up everyone with no possibility of ever getting out because the “R” in CDCR stands for “rehabilitation,” and also — we just can’t afford the forever scenario, morally or fiscally.

California tried the throw-away-the-key model in the 1980s and ‘90s and ended up with prisons so overcrowded that the federal courts stepped in. The original elderly parole effort came through a 2014 court decision on overcrowding that gave inmates 60 or older who had served at least 25 years a chance to go before the parole board. A chance — no guaranteed freedom, and usually it takes multiple hearings years apart before the board approves it.

Later, the Legislature expanded elderly parole to inmates 50 or older who had served 20 years, but excluded those sentenced under the “three strikes” law or those who had murdered peace officers.

The reality is California has a lot of old, aging and sick people behind bars — at great expense. As we grapple with the idea of universal healthcare, there’s one place in California where it already exists — our prisons and jails. We currently pay more than $41,000 in healthcare costs per inmate per year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

I’m not going to tell you it’s the best healthcare, but it’s taxpayer-funded, and includes even long-term dementia care. And yes, we do have incarcerated dementia patients.

“This is about reducing our prison population and our liability to cover housing and healthcare for an aging prison population, and we have to balance that with the safety of the community and the rights of victims,” state Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D-Sacramento) told me. She’s sponsoring a bill that would create an additional layer of safety around sex crimes by referring these possible parolees to the civil system that evaluates sexually violent predators for confinement in mental facilities after their prison terms.

“Under some circumstances, it is worth considering paroling some of these defendants,” she said, with the kind of thoughtful rationality sure to offend many. “But the cases that you’re seeing right now are completely egregious, and those defendants should not be released.”

Vogelsang was convicted of almost 30 counts of kidnapping and sex crimes, against kids as young as 5. He’s served 27 years of a 355-year sentence.

David Allen Funston, a Sacramento County child predator convicted in 1999 of multiple counts of kidnapping and child molestation. Funston was granted parole suitability under California’s Elderly Parole Program after serving more than two decades in prison.

(Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office)

David Allen Funston was convicted in 1999 of 16 counts of kidnapping and child molestation for kids as young as toddlers. He was sentenced to three consecutive 25-to-life prison sentences. Newsom bounced his first successful parole bid back to the parole board for a review, and on Feb. 18, it affirmed its decision.

But Placer County prosecutors quickly charged him with an old crime that had never been filed due to the Sacramento case, and he remains incarcerated awaiting trial on those charges.

Vogelsang’s case particularly raised a red flag for me. He told the parole board he’s been working successfully for about five years to control his thoughts about children.

“I don’t want to become aroused, but I know it’s always going to be there,” he said during the hearing.

Newsom also sent Vogelsang’s case back for review, and he will go before the board again on March 18. Vogelsang’s testimony was concerning enough that if I had a vote in this, I’d probably ask him to come back again in a few years, but we’ll see what the board does.

I’ll admit my decision would be emotional, and these cases do make me wonder. But Wattley is right that condemning elderly parole based on the monstrous deeds of these child predators is shortsighted. There is likely little to no public safety benefit in raising the overall age for elderly parole, and certainly no fiscal benefit.

“When you’re paying for older, sicker people to be incarcerated, and they don’t pose a risk to public safety, what are we actually getting for that? We’re not getting anything that supports survivors. We’re not getting anything that prevents crime. We’re just spending taxpayer dollars on something that doesn’t correlate with the public safety risk,” Wattley pointed out.

As hard as it is to wrap our minds around, it’s best for public safety to allow even the worst of the worst their chance in front of the parole board. It may even make sense for some who have committed truly terrible crimes decades ago to be released, if there is strong evidence of change and a low risk to public safety. That’s the kind of fair and realistic justice that no one on either side of the issue wants to talk about.

I’m not convinced Vogelsang and Funston have met those bars. But that doesn’t mean we should throw out the bars.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: USC and ABC7 criticized for exclusion of all candidates of color in upcoming gubernatorial debate
Money, it’s a gas: Poison-pill effort to cancel proposed billionaire tax hits voters’ mailboxes
The L.A. Times Special: China-backed Big Pork wants to override 63% of California voters. Even conservatives are mad

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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Pity the person with a hard act to follow, particularly if it’s his own. George W. Bush is such a person. For three months, he has shone as the take-charge leader of a powerful nation reeling from an unexpected blow. A quiet sense of triumph now pervades Washington’s inner circles.

But here’s the hard-act-to-follow part, and the irony of President Bush’s situation: In declaring a war on terrorism and the states that harbor terrorists, Bush’s policy of rooting out terrorism wherever it thrives plunks his administration smack into the middle of the world’s trouble spots.

Merely to list the breeding grounds for terrorism is to suggest the scope of the challenge: Sudan, Somalia, Colombia, Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran, Pakistan, Chechnya and, yes, Saudi Arabia. Here is the underbelly of globalization: countries rendered unstable by the absence of power or its autocratic concentration

The speed with which success has come to the American campaign in Afghanistan exacerbates the problem. Had the conflict there dragged on, people might have forgotten Bush’s pledge to root out terrorism. Today, still fresh in mind, it attracts world attention.

The havens of terrorists are either dysfunctional countries in need of nation-building or autocratic regimes sowing the seeds of despair that sprout fanatics.

Turning these retrograde states into open, self-sustaining communities will require a generosity of spirit and patience for study that Bush’s go-go team has yet to demonstrate.

Worse, the expense of promoting economic growth, public schooling and human rights in failing states will run athwart the Bush administration’s priority to cut taxes. Bringing poor countries into the global economy will require opening our doors to their goods. Yet low-wage commodity exporters seeking American buyers are sure to mobilize calls from Congress for protection against unfair competition.

Complicating these demands is the arena of power from which Bush will have to lead. While fighting the war in Afghanistan, he makes decisions as commander in chief. The George Bush who must fashion a successful foreign policy to eradicate terrorism acts as head of the executive branch of a three-part government designed by the U.S. Constitution to operate through checks and balances.

The Bush people have emphasized that we are in this fight for the long haul. The “long haul” they have in mind may be strictly military, but their words have nurtured hopes of a sustained effort to get at the stubborn causes of poverty and fanaticism.

Nation-building, as candidate Bush well knew, is a messy business where trial and error–the only possible approach–consumes endless months and billions of dollars.

The bright side of the picture is that many of America’s allies have also been singed by terrorism, either from dissidents inside their country or on their borders. Spain has problems with its Basque separatists, Turkey with the Kurds, Russia with Chechnya and China with its Muslim Uighurs calling for an “Eastern Turkey.” Their national self-interest inclines them to cooperate with the United States.

At the end of the Gulf War, the elder George Bush, enjoying similarly high approval ratings, declared victory after routing Saddam Hussein’s army. He then precipitately announced the arrival of a new world order.

Within months, that phrase had become a term of derision and his ratings plummeted.

But if George W. Bush stays the course and builds from the ground up, he could usher in a new world order and secure for himself the greatness that eluded his father.

*

Joyce Appleby is a professor emeritus from UCLA and past president of the American Historical Assn.

Former L.A. mayor and current candidate for governor Antonio Villaraigosa wants voters to know that he navigated billion-dollar budgets, cracked down on violent crime and championed the expansion of bus and rail lines.

The onetime state Assembly speaker argues he’s the only Democratic candidate with the experience to do the complicated job of running California.

But Villaraigosa left City Hall in 2013 — eons ago in the world of politics. President Obama was still in office, singer Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was atop the charts and Apple Watches weren’t yet a thing.

Because of his distance from elected office, combined with a decent but overshadowed fundraising effort, Villaraigosa lacks a high-profile platform to attract attention in today’s fractured media universe, an essential ingredient he needs to remind voters about his experience and accomplishments as mayor and a state lawmaker.

Antonio Villaraigosa gets his photo taken with students from Hazeltine Avenue Elementary School while visiting Placita Olvera in 2013.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Recent polls show Villaraigosa, 73, wallowing at the bottom of the field, though none of the major Democratic candidates have an overwhelming edge.

Villaraigosa also ran for governor in 2018, coming in third in the primary election behind Democratic rival Gavin Newsom, who went on to win and is now serving his second term, and little-known Republican businessman John Cox.

Political strategist Mike Madrid, who worked for Villaraigosa on that campaign, said the former mayor’s absence from politics in recent years is a major liability in this race.

“He’s a dogged, determined candidate,” Madrid said. “But there are pretty stiff headwinds.”

Villaraigosa got a boost last week when the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California pledged $1 million to an outside committee supporting him.

His allies argue voters aren’t paying attention to the governor’s race because eyes are on President Trump, immigration raids and the Iran war.

But the new funding is a pittance compared to some of his rivals. Billionaire Tom Steyer is tapping tens of millions of his own money to pump out ads. Tech companies and billionaire Rick Caruso are supporting Matt Mahan, the mayor of San José, with millions.

Another contender, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), has the power of incumbency. Swalwell launched his campaign on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and is a regular on cable news shows, while former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, who is also running, recently served in Congress and campaigned for the U.S. Senate two years ago.

With the June primary looming, Villaraigosa’s campaign risks sputtering out.

Angeleno Celine Mares holds a copy of Newsweek featuring newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as he is sworn into office on the steps of City Hall July 1, 2005.

(David McNew / Getty Images)

Leaving a Compton church earlier this month, he reacted to Mahan’s support from technology companies, and the billionaire money in the race.

“When you have overwhelming sums of money influencing elections, there’s a great deal of concern for those of us who care about our democracy,” said Villaraigosa. “As much as they say it’s about free speech, it actually drowns out speech.”

(During his 2018 bid for governor, though, Villaraigosa was a major beneficiary of Californians using their wealth to wield political influence. Charter school backers, including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and philanthropist Eli Broad, spent around $23 million on efforts to boost his campaign. )

Earlier in the morning, he rallied runners at a 10K road race in L.A.’s Chinatown, lighting firecrackers, posing for photos and looking as energetic as when he was mayor and would dart into the street to personally fill potholes.

Villaraigosa flitted around the racers’ VIP tent, spotted a bowl of fortune cookies and made a beeline. “You have an active mind and a keen imagination,” he read aloud.

“Antonio V.!” a middle-aged man called out as the former mayor passed.

Minutes later, Villaraigosa swapped his black and white Veja sneakers and jeans for dress shoes and a suit for the church service in Compton, at which an overwhelmingly Black audience gave him a warm reception.

Building a coalition of Black and Latino voters helped him win the 2005 L.A. mayor’s race in a dramatic upset of then-Mayor Jim Hahn, and brought wide attention to the one-time high school dropout, who was raised by a single mother on Los Angeles’ eastside.

Newsweek magazine featured Villaraigosa on its cover with the headline, “Latino Power: L.A.’s New Mayor and How Hispanics will change American Politics.”

But national acclaim can be fleeting. Today, voters aren’t as interested in identity-based politics, said Fernando Guerra, a professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University who has known Villaraigosa for decades.

Guerra said Villaraigosa is struggling to differentiate himself in the race because his pitch to voters is not unlike the moderate path taken by Mahan. Another contender, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, overlaps with Villaraigosa when it comes to biographical details: Both are from the L.A. area, Latino and relatively close in age.

“What’s made it so difficult is that [Villaraigosa said], ‘Here’s my path,’” said Guerra. “Well, guess what, there are one to two more candidates who are also on that path.”

Strategist Madrid questioned whether voters even want to hear about a candidate’s experience at a time when anti-Trump messages rally Californians. “They want a fighter,” he said.

Since leaving the mayor’s office, Villaraigosa has enjoyed success in the lucrative private sector. He purchased a $3.3 million home in the L.A. neighborhood of Beverly Hills Post Office in 2020. . A recent campaign filing shows he’s spent the last few years advising companies including the health company AltaMed, financial lender Change Company and crypto currency exchange Coinbase Global.

Then mayor Antonio Villaraigosa holds a news conference at the Department of Water and Power on Hope Street July 22, 2005, urging all of Los Angeles to conserve energy in an effort to ensure Southern California avoids blackouts.

(Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

He also worked for a few years for consulting firm Actum and briefly advised the Newsom administration on infrastructure projects.

“It’s not that I didn’t like the public sector,” said Villaraigosa, explaining his decision to run again. As he talked about his desire to serve, he cast a gauzy image of the aughts in Los Angeles, taking credit for the downtown resurgence, skyline full of construction cranes and fewer homeless people on the streets during that period.

“Most people look back on those years and say they were some of the best years we’ve had in the last 25 — at least,” said Villaraigosa.

Stuart Waldman, president of the business group Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., argues Villaraigosa’s experience in the private sector and distance from elected office is a good thing.

“Look at what the economy was like, look at what the city was like” under Villaraigosa, said Waldman. “That’s what he’s going to be judged on.”

Villaraigosa started his career working for labor and civil rights groups before entering politics. Elected to the state Assembly in 1994, he pushed legislation that banned assault weapons and created healthcare coverage for children. His outgoing personality established him as a coveted fundraiser for Democrats in Sacramento and paved the way for him to be chosen as Assembly speaker.

As L.A. mayor, he brought down gang crime through a program that used former gang members to broker truces. Voters backed his ballot measure to expand L.A.’s transit system through new sales tax money in the middle of the Great Recession. He drove down pension costs after a bruising battle with city unions. At the same time, he established himself as a national leader on climate issues and education.

His reputation took a hit after an affair with a television reporter led to the breakup of his marriage.

The media scene that covered Villaraigosa back then is vastly diminished, with young people now getting news from TikTok videos, message boards or Instagram posts.

Weighing in on recent TV news layoffs in Los Angeles, Villaraigosa called himself “lucky” that there were plenty of newspaper and television reporters covering him as mayor, recalling that he’d get a dozen cameras to his press conferences.

Asked to compare his 2018 campaign for governor with this one, he said, “I didn’t have to reintroduce myself last time in quite the way I’ve had to this time.”

Villaraigosa spent a significant time in Mexico in recent years to see his now ex-wife Patricia Govea, a clothing designer. “She was in Mexico 80% of the time, the last six years. So I` went to Mexico a lot.” The pair’s divorce was finalized last year.

During a debate in front of Jewish voters on L.A.’s westside last month, Villaraigosa appeared to seize on the fact that he was the sole Angeleno on the stage, introducing himself by saying, “It’s good to be home.”

He told the crowd about his work as president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and criticized UCLA — his alma matter — for its handling of incidents targeting Jewish students on its campus.

It remains to be seen if he’ll have a hometown advantage. In the 2018 race for governor, Newsom won more votes than Villaraigosa in Los Angeles County. While Villaraigosa did well in Latino communities in central L.A. and on the Eastside, Newsom captured more votes in wealthier, whiter areas.

But at the Compton church, a security guard approached Villaraigosa and told him she’d worked on his 2005 campaign, while others promised to vote for him.

“I know he has a track record,” said Valerie Bland, a 63-year-old former port worker from Long Beach, as she watched Villaraigosa work the pews. “I haven’t even looked at anyone else.”

Former Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez, a longtime friend of Villaraigosa and managing partner at Actum, hopes voters dig into Villaraigosa’s record.

“We have short-term memories in this country,” said Núñez.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, left state service with two things: a federal corruption investigation and more than $50,000 in pay for vacation time she accrued but never took.

State payroll records reviewed by The Times show Williamson used approximately $30,000 in unused vacation time to remain on California’s payroll through Jan. 31 — seven weeks after Newsom’s office indicated she had departed — before collecting an additional $22,000 lump-sum payout for the hours she had left.

Large cash-outs for departing state workers with hundreds of hours of time off on the books have been a recurring issue in California. The state’s unfunded liability for vacation and other leave owed to employees has ballooned in recent years to $5.6 billion, fueled by generous time-off provisions and a long-standing failure to enforce policies that cap most employees’ vacation balances at 640 hours.

Many state workers accumulate large balances of unused vacation after decades of being on the government payroll. The typical public employee retires with more than two decades in public service, according the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Their unused time off is paid when they leave state employment at their final rate of pay.

Williamson, however, amassed 462 hours of unused leave in less than two years on the job. She earned $19,612 a month as the governor’s chief of staff.

John Moorlach, director at the conservative think tank the Center for Public Accountability at the California Policy Center, said that a job like Williamson had probably involved incredibly long workdays but that the pace in which employees accumulate days off is a major financial burden.

“A normal blue-collar worker would say, ‘Really? Really?“” said Moorlach, a former Republican state senator from Orange County. “You don’t find this perk in the private sector.”

Williamson notified Newsom in November 2024 that she was under federal investigation and was put on paid administrative leave through Dec. 16, the governor’s office said.

Federal charges against Williamson, which were filed in November 2025, allege she siphoned $225,000 out of a dormant state campaign account belonging to gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra and illegally claimed $1 million in luxury handbags and travel as business expenses on her tax returns. She pleaded not guilty to the charges.

A status conference in Williamson’s case was moved to April 16 after she recently underwent a successful liver transplant and due to the large volume of discovery — more than 280,000 pages so far — according to court records filed last month.

Williamson’s attorney, McGregor Scott, did not respond to a request for comment.

State payroll records show Williamson earned $40,000 in regular pay in 2025, which the state controller’s office said included her December 2024 and January 2025 paychecks. The governor’s office said Williamson’s December 2024 paycheck included 11 days of paid administrative leave, and the remainder of both paychecks was covered by her unused leave.

With her final cash-out of $22,000 in remaining time off, she made a total of $62,000 last year — all tied to administrative leave and unused vacation time rather than time worked.

“That’s shocking, honestly,” said Assemblyman Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), adding that stockpiled vacation time overall is something the state Legislature should look into.

The state paid $453 million in unused leave benefits to state workers in 2025. That was an average of more than $20,000 to the 21,000 employees who received a lump-sum check. The amount paid to departing or retiring state workers has steadily increased each year. In 2024, the state paid $413 million for unused time off.

“Obviously, employees are an important part of our state and they accrue vacation time,” Hoover said. “But, if this is something being used to pad people’s salaries … we need to look into that and possibly reform that.”

Last year, 80 state employees took home at least $250,000 in unused time off, and 1,081 employees were paid more than $100,000. Those numbers have been increasing each year. For example, the state paid 16 state workers more than $250,000 for unused time off in 2010, and 309 employees were paid more than $100,000.

In 2024, the state paid out a record $1.2 million to a prison supervising dentist for unused time off. Last year, the top amount paid for unused leave was about $650,000 to an assistant fire chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The state owed nearly $5.6 billion to state workers for unused vacation and other leave benefits in 2024, according to the most recent financial accounting report issued by the state controller’s office. Although that unfunded liability held steady when compared with 2023, it has risen sharply from pre-pandemic amounts.

In 2019, the state owed $3.9 billion for employees’ unused time off before COVID-19 curtailed travel and work-from-home policies resulted in fewer workers taking time off. State employees have argued that under-staffing at state agencies can make it difficult to take vacations.

Nick Schroeder, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office, said the state has plans to reduce unfunded liabilities for pensions and retiree healthcare, but that isn’t the case with unused time off.

“There isn’t a plan to address it,” Schroeder said.

When an employee retires with a large leave balance, the department where that person worked last is on the hook for the amount.

“It can be a big effect on that individual department’s budget,” Schroeder said.

During budget deficits — including in the current fiscal year — the state has cut employee pay or deferred annual raises in exchange for additional days off, a strategy that helps balance budgets but also adds to workers’ growing vacation balances.

In Newsom’s January budget proposal, which estimated a $3-billion deficit, the governor recommended providing $91 million in ongoing funding to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to help the prison system pay departing employees for their unused time off. The department said that from 2020 to 2025, it paid about $130 million annually on average to employees leaving state service, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report.

When employees cash out banked leave, the state pays them not only for the hours they have accumulated, but also for the additional vacation and holidays they would have earned had they taken that time off.

That means a person with 640 hours of vacation would also be paid for all of the vacation and holidays they would have earned had they taken those 80 days off. Each hour of leave is paid based on an employee’s final salary — not what they were earning when the time was accrued.

Most private-sector employers cap vacation accrual between 40 and 400 hours and stop employees from earning additional time once they reach those limits. Some companies have moved in the opposite direction, adopting “unlimited paid time off” policies. Under those systems, employees do not accumulate vacation days that can be banked or cashed out, but critics say the policies can lead to workers taking less time off because there is no guaranteed number of days and employees may feel pressure not to appear absent.

Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said there appears to be little appetite in the state Capitol to address California’s burgeoning vacation liability.

“This problem is systemic within California government and no one seems willing to take it on,” Coupal said. “At the same time, they are clamoring that there is a budget crisis. I suspect they will continue to kick the can down the road.”

DES MOINES — A new poll found support for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton among Iowa Democrats on the upswing as the state’s residents prepare for their presidential caucuses Monday night.

Clinton was backed by 16% of the likely Democratic caucus-goers surveyed by the Des Moines Register. That is more than triple the support he received in the newspaper’s last survey in December.

The poll, published Saturday, also found support for native-son Sen. Tom Harkin dropping to 54%–down 14 percentage points since December.

Clinton was second in the new poll, ahead of Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who dropped two points to 8%. Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas both had 5%.

“We’re amazed,” said Craig Smith, Clinton’s deputy campaign manager. “If the result from Iowa is different from the conventional wisdom, it will have an impact on the race.”

Despite the large margin Harkin maintained in the poll against his rivals, his Iowa race is more against high expectations than other candidates. His own campaign had said he would exceed Jimmy Carter’s record score of 59% in 1980.

Except for Harkin, who launched a three-day campaign blitz in Iowa on Saturday, the other candidates have ignored the state because of his native-son candidacy.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio had some explaining to do when he arrived on Capitol Hill for a classified briefing with lawmakers in early March.

Members of Congress wanted to know why, two days earlier on Feb. 28, the United States and Israel had attacked Iran and killed its supreme leader — without notifying them first. After the briefing, Rubio told reporters the U.S. preemptively struck Iran to get ahead of an Israeli attack. A day later, he tried to clarify his remarks.

“The bottom line is this: The president determined we were not going to get hit first,” Rubio said. “It’s that simple, guys.”

For members of Congress, the moment underscored how marginal a role Congress has been able to play in a war that, two weeks in, has spread into more than a dozen neighboring countries, led to the deaths of at least 13 American service members and cost billions of dollars.

In the two weeks since the war began, Congress has largely been sidelined. Lawmakers have cycled through classified briefings, TV interviews and hallway scrums with reporters, but have taken little formal action related to Trump’s war efforts — just two unsuccessful votes aimed at limiting the conflict.

Most of the debate has taken place online, where some GOP lawmakers have drawn rebukes from colleagues for saying America “needs more Islamophobia” and other Islamophobic rhetoric about Iran and its people.

At the same time, Trump has pressed Congress to focus instead on a controversial voting law, signaling to the Republican-led Congress that he wants their focus on the election rather than a historic moment abroad. The president, meanwhile, has offered shifting explanations on how much longer he intends to be at war in the Middle East, telling Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade on Friday that he will conclude the hostilities when “I feel it in my bones.”

Taking Trump’s statements at face value, Democrats and some Republicans have begun to worry that more American troops could be deployed inside Iran to complete the mission — and lawmakers are still trying to understand the war’s threat to the global energy markets as fighting encroaches on the Strait of Hormuz and Americans face soaring gas prices.

The Republican majorities have for the most part rallied behind President Trump, and have blocked measures in both the House and Senate that would have halted the war against Iran and forced him to seek congressional approval for additional hostilities.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) likened efforts to rein in Trump’s war efforts to siding “with the enemy.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was even more effusive, arguing there is a precedent for presidents using military force without congressional authority.

“The norm in this country is not to declare war by Congress, but for the military to be used by the commander in chief. Sometimes authorization from the Congress is requested, sometimes it is not,” Graham said during a Senate floor speech. “More than not, it is not requested.”

Presidents have frequently used military force without a formal declaration of war — including in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq — but experts argue there is a difference between bypassing a formal declaration and sidelining Congress altogether.

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who served under President Obama, pointed to the 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as an example of how the process once worked.

Even though it was a covert Special Forces operation, Panetta said, he personally briefed key congressional leaders before Bin Laden’s killing took place.

That kind of consultation, he said, no longer happens. Instead, lawmakers learn about military operations the same way ordinary Americans do — by watching the news — and then demand to be briefed, he said.

“By that time, the country is pretty much committed to war,” Panetta said.

Presidents of both parties have expanded their power to wage war unilaterally, but Panetta said he believes Trump has crossed a new threshold by dispensing not just with congressional approval but with the courtesy of a briefing.

“It’s not good for our democracy. It’s not a good process,” he said. “It’s not what our forefathers would have wanted.”

Rubio, however, has argued the administration has kept congressional leaders apprised. He told reporters there is no legal requirement to notify all members of Congress and that he briefed the Gang of Eight — a group made up of the top Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate, as well as the leaders of the respective intelligence committees — within 48 hours of the attack against Iran.

“We notified congressional leadership,” Rubio said. “The law says we have to notify them 48 hours after beginning hostilities. We’ve done that.”

In the statement issued Friday, the White House defended the president’s approach to the war in relation to how its involved Congress, adding that Trump and administration officials “continue to keep bipartisan lawmakers in Congress apprised of the operation as the United States continues to dominate.”

“Past presidents have talked about this for 47 years — but only President Trump has had the courage to do something about it,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said.

Democrats say they’re ‘flying blind’

Democratic lawmakers, including some who have been included in classified briefings, have accused administration officials of keeping them “in the dark” and are beginning to demand public congressional hearings.

“I want this administration to testify in public, under oath, regarding a bunch of questions we have in order for the American people to see for themselves,” said Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles). “I do believe this administration has lied to the American public and Congress.”

Gomez, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he never expected that he would have to spend so much time trying to discern if the administration is lying to lawmakers.

“I think it’s that’s what makes the job harder,” he said.

Democrats, who are in the minority, have limited power to call those briefings, but have continued to put pressure on the administration in a public way.

Senate Democrats last week sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, demanding answers by Wednesday about reports that a U.S. airstrike hit an Iranian elementary school.

Iranian officials said the explosion killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The U.S. has not taken responsibility for the attack, and Hegseth has said the matter is under investigation. Trump, without providing evidence, has claimed Iran was responsible for the attack.

Seeking answers has been a common theme among Democrats since the start of the war. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), for instance, said after a classified briefing last week that he had “left with more questions than answers” and a real concern about the possibility of deploying American troops to Iran.

Power of the purse

If the war continues, Congress still retains some leverage.

Under the War Powers Resolution passed by Congress in 1973, unauthorized deployments into hostile situations must end after 60 days unless Congress votes to declare war or passes legislation authorizing the use of the military.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he has told Hegseth and Rubio that if they violate that provision it will be like “stealing money” for actions that are not approved by Congress and warned they could be held civilly liable.

The 60-day deadline will be a key moment for Congress to step in, Sherman said; otherwise there will be growing concern about Trump having “unchecked power.”

So far, he thinks Republicans in control view their job as “butler to the president,” and that the Constitution already gives Trump “too much power over the military.”

“If Congress is controlled by people who want to be servants to the president, it’s going to do an incredibly bad job of being a check on the president,” he said.

Beyond the War Powers Resolution, lawmakers also have power over the appropriations process and could deny the administration’s request to boost military funding.

“The Congress can stop military action by cutting off funding. If you don’t like the war in Iran, say we won’t pay for it. We have the constitutional power of the purse,” Graham said in a Senate floor speech early in March.

The Trump administration’s war with Iran cost $11.3 billion during its first six days, according to the Associated Press.

But Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Diego), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, says he is aware of the figure only because of news reports — not because the Pentagon has been transparent.

“We are flying blind in the sense that we just don’t know. We don’t know how much is being spent or what it’s being spent on,” Levin said.

Levin says the military will probably need to bolster its munitions stockpile at the rate the conflict is going.

If the Pentagon does request more money, Levin said, he would try to ensure that “not one more dollar goes toward any of this without clear answers and a clear plan.”

WHITE SALMON, Wash. — Seth McBride’s life was forever changed on a snowy mountainside in British Columbia.

McBride was — and is — a thrill-seeker. Growing up in Juneau, Ala., with the untamed outdoors as his stomping ground, he loved to rock climb, mountain bike and, especially, strap on his skis and fly, soaring headlong off heart-pounding cliffs, crags and cornices.

A few months before his senior year in high school, McBride was at a terrain park at Whistler Blackcomb resort. He was 17. He launched a maneuver he’d completed many times before, a back flip off a steep jump. Only this time, he over-accelerated, over-rotated and came down on his neck. Right away he knew something was wrong.

“As soon as I landed,” McBride recalled more than 25 years later, “I lost all sensation in my legs and my lower back.”

The prognosis was grim; doctors told McBride he probably would never walk again, and he hasn’t.

But that’s scarcely slowed him down.

Views of the 47th president, from the ground up

Before they had kids, McBride and his wife biked 6,500 miles — McBride using a special, hand-cranked cycle — from Portland, Ore., to the southern tip of Argentina. He’s traveled the world as a wheelchair rugby player, winning gold, silver and bronze medals at Paralympic Games in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro and London.

McBride — adventurer, daredevil — appears unflappable. Until it comes to air travel.

It’s not the hassles and aggravation that most people put up with. Every trip requires McBride, 43, to undergo a special regimen, dehydrating himself so he won’t have to use the bathroom in flight. Every excursion includes the likelihood of being uncomfortably jostled or, worse, dropped as he’s being transferred to his seat. He can never be certain his wheelchair, his lifeline, won’t be damaged or missing once his plane lands.

“There are very few places or in my life that I feel less independent” than an airport, said McBride, who still plays competitive rugby at the club level. “None of the systems are set up for wheelchair users to be able to manage things on their own.”

Wheelchairs at Portland International Airport. The all-purpose equipment can’t serve the various needs of disabled travelers.

(Will Matsuda / For The Times)

For a time, as the Biden administration was winding down, it looked as though that was about to change somewhat. The federal government issued a set of regulations that would require airlines, among other things, to assume liability for damaged and delayed wheelchairs and improve training for staff working with passengers facing mobility issues.

But the Trump administration, which has made deregulation one of its highest imperatives, put those requirements on hold while a trade association and several major airlines sue to keep the changes from taking effect.

For McBride and others like him, it’s a disappointing setback that follows years of pressing Washington to make air transit just a bit more decent and humane.

“It sucks,” McBride said of the dignity-deflating status of a wheelchair traveler. “I know quite a few people who simply won’t fly anymore.”

::

When the Biden administration published new airline regulations in the Federal Register, it spelled out its reasoning.

Passengers forced to surrender their wheelchairs “must rely on airline staff and contractors to properly handle a wheelchair or scooter and return it in a timely manner in the condition it was received. Advocates have stressed … that, when an individual’s wheelchair or scooter is damaged by an airline, the individual’s mobility, health and freedom are impacted until the device can be returned, repaired or replaced.”

What’s more, “Advocates note that wheelchairs are often custom fitted to meet the needs and shapes of each user. Spending time in an ill-fitting chair can cause serious injury, such as pressure sores, and even death because of a subsequent infection.”

The Department of Transportation estimated that, in 2024, 1 of every 100 wheelchairs or scooters placed on a domestic flight was lost, damaged or delayed. Which may not seem like a terribly large number, unless you’re the person whose well-being, and even survival, depends on their wheelchair or scooter being at the ready and operational upon arrival.

Mia Ives-Rublee directs the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. She said airlines, which cater to luxury travelers and treat everyone else like sardines, have long put profit and expedience ahead of the needs of their disabled passengers.

“We’ve seen this tension continue to build as disabled people become more active and the world becomes more accessible. They want to travel, or have jobs that require travel,” said Ives-Rublee. While discrimination is plainly illegal, “Airlines aren’t doing enough to protect our devices,” which has the effect of making it “very difficult for disabled people to travel.”

Ives-Rublee has had nearly a half dozen wheelchairs broken by airlines in the last 20 years, which can be costly as well as life-threatening. A manually operated wheelchair can run as much as $2,000, Ives-Rublee said. A mechanized wheelchair can cost as much as a used car.

McBride mainly travels from Portland’s airport. “There are few places in my life” he feels less independent.

(Will Matsuda / For The Times)

(McBride said he’s suffered nicks and scrapes on his “everyday chair.” Worse, was the damage done to wheelchairs he uses in rugby competition, which “is obviously a big deal” when he’s traveling for a match.)

In their lawsuit opposing the rules change, airlines and their trade group said the Biden administration overstepped its authority and the new requirements were too burdensome. Strict liability for wheelchair damage also could expose air carriers to “unreasonable financial risk,” the suit claimed.

The wheelchair rules were supposed to take effect just before Biden left office. The Trump administration postponed them until March 2025, then pushed implementation to August 2025. Now, the Department of Transportation says it will issue a new rule this coming August, with a 60-day comment period to follow — meaning no change will come until at least 2027.

Ives-Rublee hasn’t much hope for relief.

“Given the nature of the administration right now, I doubt they’re putting much effort into protecting” the Biden-era regulations, she said

::

The last thing McBride wants is anyone feeling sorry for him. He’s no victim.

“It was something s— that happened to me,” he said of the accident that left him paralyzed. “But s— stuff happens to people all the time. What matters is how you move forward and what you can do with your life after that happens.”

McBride was seated at the kitchen table of his custom-built home, two miles above the Columbia River in rural Washington state. The house — one level, bright and airy, with concrete floors to smooth the path of his wheelchair — perches at the end of a steep dirt road. A forest in the backyard gives his children, ages 4 and 8, the same freedom to romp through nature he enjoyed growing up in Alaska. There’s also a climbing wall in his son’s bedroom.

Working remotely, McBride writes for New Mobility, a magazine for wheelchair users, and heads communications and marketing for the United Spinal Assn., a nonprofit advocacy group.

His politics run to the left side of the spectrum. (On a cold, drizzly morning, McBride wore a black Oregon Ducks hoodie, honoring his alma mater, the University of Oregon, and its home in liberal Eugene.) Yet while he’s no Trump fan, McBride doesn’t consider making life easier for wheelchair users to be a partisan issue. After all, he pointed out, it was a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, who signed into law the landmark Americans
With Disabilities Act.

“We’ve made a lot of progress as a community working with Republicans, working with Democrats,” he said, as the sun made a brief appearance, illuminating the Douglas firs outside his door. “The basic issues of people being able to access the same services and the same experiences as everyone else shouldn’t be political. … It’s a safety thing.”

He’s not unalterably opposed to deregulation, per se.

“I think it’s a huge issue within systems when it’s overly complex for companies or people to do anything,” McBride said. “But lots of time regulations are there for a reason. It’s when private companies aren’t necessarily doing a good enough job protecting the safety or the rights of all people within a society.”

Given a chance to address Trump or the head of his Transportation Department, Sean Duffy, McBride would say this: Come, let’s take a plane ride.

“Go on a trip with my rugby team and see what it’s like when you have multiple wheelchair users on the same plane,” he said, “and how difficult it is and why we feel like regulations are needed so we can have a modicum of safety and dignity when we’re flying.”

The cost of accommodation might take away some from the airlines’ bottom line. But certain things can’t be priced in dollars and cents.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is stepping up its ambitious effort to replace about $1.6 trillion in lost tariff revenue that was eliminated by the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a range of the president’s import taxes.

Recovering that lost revenue, which the White House was counting on to help offset the steep, multitrillion-dollar cost of its tax cuts, is possible but will be challenging, experts say. The administration has to use different legal provisions to impose new import taxes, and those provisions require longer, complex processes that U.S. companies can use to seek exemptions. It could be months or more before it is clear how much revenue the replacement tariffs will yield.

“I wouldn’t bet against this administration being able to get back on paper the same effective tariff rate they had before,” said Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. But the new approach will “make it easier for people to contest the tariffs, which is going to put a big asterisk on the revenue until all that is settled.”

On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the administration will investigate 16 economies — including the European Union — over whether their governments are subsidizing excessive factory capacity in a way that disadvantages U.S. manufacturing. The investigation will also cover China, South Korea and Japan, Greer said.

In addition, he said, there would be a second investigation of dozens of countries to see whether their failure to ban goods made by forced labor amounts to an unfair trade practice that harms the United States. That investigation will also cover the EU and China, as well as Mexico, Canada, Australia and Brazil.

Both investigations are being conducted under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which requires the administration to consult with the targeted countries, as well as hold public hearings and allow affected U.S. industries to comment. A hearing as part of the factory capacity investigation will be held May 5, while a hearing on the forced labor investigation will occur April 28.

It’s a far cry from the emergency law that President Trump relied on in his first year in office, which allowed him to immediately impose tariffs on any country, at nearly any level, simply by issuing an executive order.

Moments after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on all imports under a separate legal authority, but that duty can only last for 150 days. The president has said he would raise it to 15%, the maximum allowed, but has yet to do so. Some two dozen states have already challenged the new taxes. The administration is aiming to complete its Section 301 investigations before the 10% duties expire.

The effort underscores the importance that the Trump White House has placed on tariffs as a revenue-raiser at a time when the federal government is facing huge annual budget deficits for decades into the future. Previous administrations, by contrast, used tariffs more sparingly to narrowly protect specific industries.

Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, noted that the first investigation covers roughly 70% of imports, while the second would cover nearly all of them.

“That breadth suggests the goal isn’t to address the issues at hand, but instead to re-create a sweeping tariff tool,” she said.

Trump portrays tariffs as a way to force foreign countries to essentially help pay the cost of U.S. government services, even though all recent economic studies find that American companies and consumers are paying the duties, including analyses by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and economists at Harvard University. In his State of the Union address last month, Trump even touted his tariffs as a potential replacement for the income tax, which would return the United States’ tax regime to the late 19th century.

Trump also wants tariffs to help pay for the tax cuts he extended in key legislation last year. The tax cut legislation is expected, according to the most recent estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, to add $4.7 trillion to the national debt over a decade, while all Trump’s import taxes, including ones not struck down by the court, were projected to offset about $3 trillion — or two-thirds of that cost.

The high court’s ruling Feb. 20 that he could no longer impose emergency tariffs eliminated about $1.6 trillion in expected revenue over the next decade, according to the CBO.

Some of Trump’s import taxes remain place, including previous tariffs on China and Canada that were imposed after earlier 301 investigations. The administration has also imposed tariffs on some specific products, including steel, lumber and cars. Those, combined with the 10% tariff for part of this year, should yield about $668 billion over the next decade, the Tax Foundation estimates.

“It’s going to take a really big patchwork of these other investigations to make up for the [lost] tariffs,” York said.

The administration’s efforts are also unusual because they reflect an overreliance on tariffs to bring in more government revenue. Trump has also said the import taxes are intended to return manufacturing to the United States — manufacturing jobs, however, are down since he returned to office — and he has used the tariffs to leverage trade deals.

“What makes this really different,” said Kent Smetters, executive director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, “it is really the first time tariffs have been mainly used as a revenue raiser.”

Patel, meanwhile, argues that raising revenue can be done more reliably and straightforwardly by Congress. Laws like Section 301 are traditionally intended to be used to address specific trade policy concerns in particular countries.

“It’s not supposed to be there to raise revenue,” she said. “If we want to raise revenue through tariffs, then Congress should impose a broad based tariff.”

Rugaber writes for the Associated Press.

In one of his latest missives on social media, President Trump complained that he wasn’t getting enough credit for “totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise.”

“We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time,” he wrote of a war that has crippled the global supply of oil, sharply increased gas prices, cost U.S. taxpayers billions, left thousands dead and wounded, and so far defied Trump’s own “short term” timetable.

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” Trump added. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”

Again and again in recent days, Trump and other top officials in his administration — notably Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — have projected confidence and power in Iran in a coarse and triumphant tone that is unprecedented for U.S. wartime presidents and their Cabinet members, according to experts in presidential rhetoric and propaganda.

They have consistently described the war in terms of how hard the U.S. is hitting Iran, rather than why it must do so. They’ve talked of destroying the Iranian navy and air force, wiping out its leadership and making the U.S. “more respected” globally than it has ever been, including by showing no mercy.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be,” Hegseth said.

Missing is the solemnity of past wartime leaders facing dead U.S. soldiers, a recalcitrant enemy and a precarious tactical position, replaced by a message of U.S. mercilessness — of contempt for Iran rather than concern for its civilians or a focus on the American ideals that U.S. presidents have long tried to rally the world around, especially in times of war.

“At a time when people can see the effects of the war when they fill up their gas tank, and when there have been American casualties, the triumphalist tone is just not something a president normally does,” said Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of the book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”

“Many presidents wouldn’t have that tone for personal moral reasons,” Rowland said, “but they also know that it can backfire when things don’t go well.”

James J. Kimble, a communication professor and propaganda historian at Seton Hall University, said U.S. presidents have “by and large” struck a respectful tone in wartime, though there are some exceptions. President Truman, justifying dropping atomic bombs on Japan, wrote that “when you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast,” while the U.S. produced World War II posters designed to “demonize and dehumanize the German enemy,” he noted.

Still, Trump’s messaging — including his “expressing glee at the death of foreign combatants” — has been “much coarser,” Kimble said.

“It’s moving beyond the idea of defeating the enemy on the field of battle, and more into a kind of defeat as humiliation — intentional humiliation,” he said. “It’s schoolyard bullying, along with the physical violence.”

Asked about Trump’s rhetoric, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said Trump “will always be proud to recognize the incredible accomplishments of our brave service members.”

“Under the decisive leadership of President Trump, America’s heroic war fighters are meeting or surpassing all of their goals under Operation Epic Fury,” she said. “The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States military’s incredible success, but the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time.”

Trump has built his political career around blunt rhetoric, and his messaging on Iran has drawn applause from his supporters. Polling has shown the public is heavily divided on the war — drawing far less public support than past wars, but broad support from Republicans.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has accused the media of ignoring “clear” objectives that the president and others have set for the war effort, including wiping out Iran’s missile systems, preventing it from developing a nuclear weapon and stopping what Trump had a “feeling” was a coming attack on the U.S.

However, Trump and Hegseth have themselves strayed from that framework with their brash rhetoric, and their focus on the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian leaders.

Trump has dismissed reports that the U.S. bombed an Iranian school full of children by suggesting that Iran may actually have been responsible, despite reported findings by U.S. intelligence that it was an American attack.

Hegseth has added to concerns about careless U.S. bombing by expressing disdain for wartime rules designed to limit civilian casualties, calling them “stupid rules of engagement.”

“Our war fighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly,” Hegseth said. “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.”

The White House has also pushed out a wave of wartime propaganda on social media, often striking the same irreverent, bullish tone, experts noted.

One video interspersed movie clips of superheroes and soldiers with real footage of Iranian targets getting blown up, under the words, “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” The clip drew condemnation, including from the actor Ben Stiller, who objected to the inclusion of footage from his film “Tropic Thunder,” saying, “War is not a movie.”

Hegseth’s bravado has also been caricatured on “Saturday Night Live,” which opened two weeks in a row with a satirical portrayal of him as angry, dimwitted and hyped up on the violence of war.

All of it has come against a backdrop of Islamophobic remarks from members of Congress on X, with Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) writing that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) posting a picture of the 9/11 terrorist attack next to an image of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, and writing “the enemy is inside the gates.”

Certainly Iranian leaders have expressed similar contempt for the U.S. for years. Khamenei, killed at the start of the war, was known for stoking anti-American sentiment, speaking to crowds amid chants of “death to America.”

However, U.S. presidents have traditionally spoken with more reserve. They have slammed U.S. enemies, but often by drawing a contrast between them, the U.S. and the values the U.S. purports to defend globally. They have expressed confidence in past U.S. missions, but been wary of taking a celebratory or triumphant tone — especially at the start of a war, amid intense fighting, as American troops are still dying.

Not so with Trump, who on Wednesday said, “You never like to say too early you won. We won. We won … . In the first hour, it was over.”

He also said, “Over the past 11 days, our military has virtually destroyed Iran,” and “they don’t have anything.”

On Thursday, six U.S. service members were killed when a refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq. On Friday, the U.S. military announced it was sending 2,500 Marines and an additional U.S. warship to the conflict.

Kimble said there are several ways to view Trump’s war rhetoric. One is “through the lens of PSYOPS, or psychological operations” — or intentional messaging aimed at discouraging the enemy, akin to the U.S. dropping leaflets in World War II telling foreign combatants that they must surrender or die. In that view, Trump is speaking directly to the Iranians, trying to get them to “perceive victory as impossible.”

Another is to view Trump and Hegseth as projecting a tough image for their MAGA base, their Democratic rivals and any other nations they might be preparing to challenge, such as Cuba.

Rowland said Trump “always has to be the big dog in the room,” and his war messaging should be viewed in that context.

“A lot of the rhetoric is performative cruelty,” Rowland said. “It’s more about him coming across as dominant than it is about making a case that the war has been good for the U.S. and the region and the West and the world.”

WASHINGTON — After two weeks of war with Iran, the Trump administration is being forced to temper its expectations of a swift end to the conflict, with U.S. intelligence and defense officials expressing doubt it can achieve the overthrow of Iran’s government and the destruction of its nuclear program through military means.

It was an outcome forewarned by analysts at the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon, who together alerted the administration to the pitfalls full-scale war with Iran would bring before President Trump decided to proceed, two U.S. officials told The Times, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Certain military goals of Operation Epic Fury laid out at the start of the war are still seen as achievable at the Pentagon, with U.S. and Israeli strikes making steady progress degrading Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure, its drone program and its navy.

But a prewar U.S. intelligence assessment, that an air assault was unlikely to topple the Islamic Republic, still holds, with the intelligence community now casting doubt the assault had any more political effect than to radicalize a government already devoted to the destruction of Israel and harming the United States.

A military procession in Tehran carries the casket of Ali Shamkhani, political advisor to Iran’s last Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was also killed in U.S.-Israeli attacks.

(Atta Kenare / AFP/Getty Images)

Concern has only grown that Iran’s new government will make the fateful strategic decision to build a bomb after the war, unless Trump decides to escalate the conflict with a perilous ground invasion. And the White House now contends with a new mission imperative, created by its decision to launch the war itself, of reopening the Strait of Hormuz to vital shipping traffic that carries 20% of the world’s daily oil and liquid natural gas supply.

The foreign policy strategy Trump publicly laid out as his playbook for the conflict — to come down hard on the government, decapitating its leadership, and hope the remnants would seek mercy — has not worked, with Tehran looking for new ways to expand the war and maximize pain for the U.S. administration.

Trump has minimized the conflict as an “excursion” that would end “very soon,” while also calling it a war, vowing to take the time he needs to “finish the job.” He says it will conclude whenever he decides to end it.

It remains possible that a declaration from Trump that the fighting is over results in a ceasefire, as it did in June of last year, when Trump demanded an end to 12 days of war between Iran and Israel. But the Iranians have a vote, too — and senior leadership in the Islamic Republic have made plain they plan to continue fighting this time whether Trump likes it or not.

On Friday, the Pentagon announced that an additional expeditionary unit of 2,500 Marines was being deployed to the region to support the effort.

“Starting wars is an easy matter,” Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, wrote on social media. “Ending them does not happen with a few tweets.

“We will not leave you until you admit your mistake and pay its price,” he added.

It is a sore lesson for a president whose decade in public life has been distinguished by an exceptional ability to warp reality to his liking.

“The White House has created a dilemma for America: If it declares victory and ends the war, it leaves in place a weakened Iranian government with the means and renewed motivation to pursue nuclear weapons,” said Reid Pauly, a professor of nuclear security and policy at Brown University.

“If it presses on with the war,” Pauly added, “it risks the kind of mission creep that may eventually find American boots on the ground.”

In a news release last week, the White House said that, “from the opening hours of this historic campaign, the objectives were clear: obliterate Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and production capacity, annihilate its navy, sever its support for terrorist proxies, and ensure the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism will never acquire a nuclear weapon.”

Yet, at the start of the operation, Trump issued a promise to the people of Iran that, at the end of the U.S.-Israeli campaign, Iran’s military and paramilitary infrastructure would be so badly hobbled that a rare, generational opportunity would emerge for them to take their government back.

“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump said. “Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Trump said in the days that followed he would need to have a say over the next ruler, after assassinating the country’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the Iranian system of clerics and militants defied the president, selecting in Khamenei’s son a man viewed as even more hostile to the West than his father was.

Israeli leadership, too, set out regime change as a goal of the war. Yet even their officials now say that a substantial leadership change in Tehran is an unlikely result.

Trump would go on to insist on the “unconditional surrender” from the Iranian government, a demand that he later said would be satisfied by the incapacitation of Iran’s military.

Repeating his conviction that the war will end soon, Trump told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade in an interview Friday that he would order an end to the fighting “when I feel it. When I feel it in my bones.”

“The problem with the administration’s approach is that it has constantly shifted its goals. Some are achievable, such as degrading Iran’s conventional force. Others are not, such as picking the next leader of Iran,” said Ray Takeyh, a scholar on Iran at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The mixed messages have led to confusion at home,” Takeyh added, “and lack of planning for oil shortages and getting the Americans out of the region shows that process and personnel can actually matter.”

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign was always designed to unfold in three phases: degrading Iran’s ability to wage war, reducing Iran’s ability to repress democratic forces inside the country, and finally, encouraging the Iranian people to rise up.

“The president controls the strategy, but no president fully controls the endgame because the regime gets a vote,” Dubowitz said. “The endgame is not a scripted political transition directed from Washington. It is a regime under simultaneous military, economic, and internal pressure — to strip of its war-making and repression capabilities — and whether that produces succession, fracture, or collapse will ultimately be decided in Tehran.”

Whether the conflict will achieve the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program is an equally grave question in Washington, where officials are debating over a list of stark options on how to physically destroy, bury or retrieve the fissile material that Tehran could use to build a nuclear weapon — a threat seen as only more grave under the stewardship of an angry and vengeful government.

“The war was publicly justified, to the extent it was justified at all, in terms of destroying Iran’s nuclear program. Very few strikes have been directed against nuclear-related targets, however — almost certainly because those that survived last June’s attacks are invulnerable to air attack,” said James Acton, co‑director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Unless the U.S. and Israel attempt high-risk special forces operations or a ground incursion,” he added, “Iran will end the war with its surviving nuclear infrastructure largely intact and greater incentives to build the bomb.”

Pauly agreed it is unrealistic to expect the United States and Israel can destroy Iran’s nuclear program through air power alone. The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency believes Iran has roughly 440 kilograms — about 970 pounds — of 60% highly enriched uranium, possibly spread across multiple facilities.

“Securing this material will require either U.S. ground troops or, after some coercive bargain is reached, international inspectors,” Pauly said.

In an exchange with reporters last week at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had few details to offer on what U.S. options were to remove or eliminate an accessible uranium stockpile, enriched to near weapons grade, that had been buried in a U.S. operation last year intended on obliterating the nuclear threat.

Diplomacy, he suggested, might be required to secure the material.

“I will say we have a range of options, up to and including Iran deciding that they will give those up,” he told reporters, “which of course we would welcome.”

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The state Senate has passed a bill that says women cannot be charged with indecent exposure or lewd behavior for breast-feeding in public. The House had earlier approved the measure. The bill passed Tuesday now goes to Gov. Lawton Chiles, who is expected to give his approval.

Don’t blame the beleaguered voter for the record-low statewide turnout of 34% of registered voters in Tuesday’s primary election. Don’t call the stay-at-homes lazy or berate them for failing to do their duty. Don’t wonder why the patriotism stirred by Sept. 11 didn’t translate into an energized electorate.

The truth is, for many Californians, there were just too many reasons not to vote. The lack of hot contests on the Democratic ballot resulted in dismal turnouts of 23% in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County and 27% in San Francisco. The confusing rules of the primary had been changed again as to who could vote for which slate of candidates.

The campaign was overshadowed first by the Super Bowl and then by the Winter Olympic Games. When the political ads finally got the public’s attention, their constant carping and attacks surely turned off many voters. On election day some locales, including Los Angeles, were plagued with the failure of some polling places to open on time, ballots that weren’t delivered and voting locations that were changed or yanked.

The real culprit, however, was the ridiculously early primary date, more than eight months before the Nov. 5 general election. Many Californians didn’t even realize an election was coming up.

The Legislature and governor should make sure this doesn’t happen again. Lawmakers need to take a close look at SB 1975, by Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine), a bill that would move the primary for state and local candidates to the second Tuesday in September every election year while maintaining a separate presidential primary in March.

The idea is to enable California to have a rational primary date while retaining some clout in the choosing of the presidential candidates. More discussion is in order about whether September balloting would allow enough time for an informative general election campaign. However, nine states have August primaries, and 10, including New York, vote on the second Tuesday in September, the day Johnson has proposed. A cheaper proposal would be for the state to stop playing presidential primary leapfrog for ever-earlier dates and move all primaries back to June.

Election officials struggle to make it convenient for Californians to vote, but the process remains complex and confusing. “It felt more like doing your taxes,” one expert said. The first step toward rationality is getting rid of this March madness.

WASHINGTON — Anti-Muslim rhetoric from some Republicans in Congress intensified this week against the backdrop of the Iran war, with several lawmakers — including one who said that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” — drawing condemnation from Democrats but little response from GOP leaders.

The derogatory language has been percolating among Republican officials for months, often prominent when criticizing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim. But against the backdrop of the Iran war, a country with an overwhelmingly Muslim population, and attacks at a synagogue in Michigan and a college in Virginia, the tone sharpened this week.

“The enemy is inside our gates,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama wrote Thursday in response to a photo of Mamdani sitting on the ground during an iftar dinner at New York City Hall. The photo was juxtaposed with a picture of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hours later, Tuberville added: “To be clear, I didn’t ‘suggest’ Islamists are the enemy. I said it plainly.”

The rhetoric intensified Friday as GOP lawmakers responded to the attacks in Michigan and Virginia by urging a halt to all immigration into the United States. Some singled out Muslims specifically.

For many Muslims, it’s a political moment that carries echoes from the early 2000s, when the Sept. 11 attacks and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars generated hostility toward Muslim communities in the United States, often accompanied by discrimination and racist violence.

“When members of Congress speak, it’s not just words,” said Iman Awad, the national director for policy and advocacy for the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action. “It shapes public perception. It legitimizes prejudice.”

GOP rhetoric targeting Muslims spreads online

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) in his social media post stated flatly that Muslims don’t belong in the United States. He stood behind it after criticism mounted, later writing that “paperwork doesn’t magically make you American” and that “Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.”

Asked about Ogles’ post Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he had spoken to members “about our tone and our message and what we say.” He said Ogles used “different language than I would use,” but added that he believes the issue raised by the comments is “serious.”

“There’s a lot of energy in the country, and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose sharia law in America is a serious problem,” Johnson said. “That’s what animates this.”

Sharia is a religious framework that guides many Muslims’ moral and spiritual conduct. References to “sharia law” have often been invoked by officials to suggest Muslims are attempting to impose religious practices on communities in the United States.

Many Republicans point to a Muslim-centered planned community near Dallas as proof of “sharia law” — though the developers have denied the allegations and said they are being targeted only because they are Muslim.

With Johnson not condemning Ogles’ remarks — or recent comments from Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one” — the anti-Muslim rhetoric grew louder. After the photo circulated of Mamdani at the iftar dinner, several Republicans responded with critical posts.

Democrats broadly condemned the Republican messages. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the leader of Senate Democrats, called Tuberville’s post “mindless hate.”

“Islamophobic hate like this is fundamentally un-American and we must confront and overcome it whenever it rears its ugly head,” Schumer said.

Mamdani — in response to Tuberville’s post that “the enemy is inside our gates” — said: “Let there be as much outrage from politicians in Washington when kids go hungry as there is when I break bread with New Yorkers.”

Attacks in Michigan and Virginia spark more rhetoric

Federal officials identified a man who rammed his vehicle into a hallway at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., this week as a naturalized citizen born in Lebanon. Officials have said that the man — who was killed by security guards at the temple — had lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon during the ongoing war in the Middle East, just after sunset as they were having their fast-breaking meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

In Virginia, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh opened fire in a classroom at Old Dominion University before ROTC students subdued and killed him. Court documents showed that he had served time for attempting to aid the militant group Islamic State and was released less than two years ago.

Some Republican lawmakers claimed vindication for their views. Others pushed for legislation. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the House Republican whip, said that “the security of our nation hinges on our ability to denaturalize and deport terrorists.”

Rep. Riley M. Moore (R-W.Va.) said he would introduce a bill to denaturalize and deport any naturalized citizen who “commits an act of terrorism, plots to commit an act of terrorism, joins a terrorist organization or otherwise aids and abets terrorism against the American people.”

Similar rhetoric and policy efforts have surfaced before and stoked controversy. Protesters connected to demonstrations in recent years over the Israel-Hamas war were arrested and targeted by authorities, including former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist the government has sought to detain and deport.

Mamdani responds

Middle East conflicts bringing domestic tensions is nothing new. With the war in Gaza, both Muslim and Jewish communities have faced faith-based discrimination and attacks.

Mamdani said the posts invoking the 9/11 attacks are problematic not just because of the words, but because of “the actions that often accompany them.”

“I think too of the smaller indignities, the indignities that many New Yorkers face, but that Muslims are expected to face in silence,” the mayor said. “Of the exhaustion of having to explain yourself to those who are not interested in understanding. Of the men who introduce themselves by their given name only to be called Muhammad for years on end.”

The stark silence from Republican leaders, including President Trump, reflects a broader change in the party. After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Republican President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington to explicitly warn against Muslim discrimination.

“America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country,” Bush said during the visit, adding: “They need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.

“Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior,” Bush said.

Cappelletti writes for the Associated Press.

BOSTON — A U.S. court ruling in Massachusetts has temporarily paused the looming termination of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Somalia.

U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ ruling Friday said there would be “weighty” consequences if Somalia’s TPS designation were allowed to expire Tuesday. Advocates filed an emergency motion in federal court seeking to pause the termination after the Trump administration promised to end the designation last month during an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, where many Somalis live.

“Over one thousand people will face ‘a myriad of grave risks,’ including detention and deportation, physical violence if removed to Somalia, and forced separation from family members,” the ruling said.

Burroughs said implementing an administrative stay and deferring ruling on the postponement gives both sides time to file briefs on the emergency motion.

“While the stay is in effect, the termination shall be null, void, and of no legal effect,” the ruling said, noting that those with TPS status or pending applications will retain rights including eligibility for work authorization and protection against deportation and detention.

In a statement, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the ruling is the latest example of a judge preventing Trump from “restoring integrity” to the U.S. immigration system.

“Temporary means temporary,” the statement said. “Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status. Allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interests. The Trump administration is putting Americans first.”

Representatives of the plaintiffs fighting the termination said in a statement that even though the order is temporary and “many battles lie ahead,” they are “heartened by the interim protection today’s order affords all Somali people in the U.S. who have TPS or pending TPS applications.”

DALLAS — A federal jury Friday convicted nine people — eight on terrorism charges — over a shooting at a Texas immigration facility that federal prosecutors tied to antifa, the decentralized far-left movement that has become a target of the Trump administration.

One person was also found guilty of attempted murder after prosecutors say he opened fire last summer outside the Prairieland Detention Center outside Fort Worth, wounding a police officer. The Justice Department called the violence an attack plotted by antifa operatives, but attorneys for the accused denied that characterization, saying there were no antifa associations and that there was merely a demonstration with fireworks before gunshots broke out.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of President Trump, presided over the nearly three-week trial in Fort Worth. It was closely followed by legal experts and critics who called the proceedings a test of the lengths the government can go to punish protesters.

FBI Director Kash Patel had said the case was the first time charges of providing material support to terrorists had targeted people accused of being antifa members.

“Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets,” U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a statement.

Short for “anti-fascists,” antifa is not an organization but rather an umbrella term for far-left militant groups that confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.

Protesters denied having antifa ties

Defense attorneys told jurors that there was no plan for violence on July 4 outside the facility in Alvarado.

Of the nine defendants on trial, eight faced the charge of providing material support to terrorists, among other charges. The ninth defendant, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, was charged with corruptly concealing a document and conspiracy to conceal documents. He was found guilty of both.

Sanchez Estrada’s attorney, Christopher Weinbel, said he can’t believe jurors “came to this conclusion.” Weinbel said his client had deployed as a member of the U.S. Army several times and he’d hoped what he sacrificed for the country “meant something.”

“But I feel like it turned its back on justice with this. … The U.S. lost today with this verdict,” Weinbel said.

Prosecutor Shawn Smith told jurors during closing arguments that the group’s actions — including bringing firearms and first aid kits and wearing body armor — were all signs of nefarious intent. He said they practiced “antifa tactics” and were “obsessed with operational security.”

Attorneys for the defendants have said that there was no planned ambush and that protesters who brought firearms did so for their own protection — in a state with very lenient gun laws.

A test of 1st Amendment rights

The terrorism charges followed Trump’s order last fall to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Those charges did not require a tie to any organization, and there is no domestic equivalent to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. That’s in part because organizations operating within the United States are protected by broad 1st Amendment rights.

Critics of the Justice Department’s case have said the outcome could have wide-reaching effects on protests.

“That opposition is something that the government wants to squash, so a case like this helps the government kind of see how far they can go in criminalizing constitutionally protected protests and also helps them kind of intimidate, increase the fear, hoping that folks in other cities then will think twice over protesting,” said Suzanne Adely, interim president of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive legal group.

Trial focused on shots fired

Attorneys for the defendants have said most protesters began leaving when two guards from the center came outside. That was before any shots were fired.

Prosecutors said Benjamin Song, a former Marine Corps reservist, yelled, “Get to the rifles,” and opened fire, striking one police officer who had just pulled up to the center.

Though it was Song who opened fire, prosecutors charged several other protesters with attempted murder of an officer and discharging a firearm, but they were found not guilty. The prosecution had argued that from the group’s planning, it was foreseeable to those others that a shooting could happen.

The officer who was shot, Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross, testified that when responding to the scene he saw a person clad in all-black with their face covered and carrying a rifle. He told jurors he was shot with a round that went into his shoulder and out of his neck.

Song’s attorney, Phillip Hayes, told jurors during closing arguments that there wasn’t a call to arms before Gross arrived on the scene and “aggressively” pulled out his firearm. Hayes suggested that Song’s shots were “suppressive fire” and that a ricochet bullet hit the officer.

Leading up to the trial, several people pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists after being accused of supporting antifa. They face up to 15 years in prison at sentencing.

Some of them testified for the prosecution, including Seth Sikes, who said he went to the detention center because he wanted to bring some joy to those held inside.

“I felt like I was doing the right thing,” he said.

Stengle writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Joshua Bogdan was born and raised in the United States. The only time the New Hampshire resident has left the country was for a day and a half in seventh grade, when he went to Canada to see Niagara Falls.

Even so, that did not mean proving his U.S. citizenship in last fall’s local elections was easy.

The 31-year-old arrived at his voting place in Portsmouth and handed the poll worker his driver’s license, just as he had done in other towns when arriving to vote. She said that would no longer do.

The poll worker said that under the state’s new proof-of-citizenship law, which took effect for the first time during town elections in 2025, Bogdan would need a passport or his birth certificate because he had moved and needed to re-register at his new address. A scramble ensued, turning the voting process that he had always found fun and invigorating into a nerve-racking game of beat the clock.

“I didn’t know that anything had officially changed walking in there,” he said. “And then being told that I had to provide a passport that I’ve never had or a birth certificate that’s usually tucked away somewhere safe just to cast my vote — which I’ve done before — it was frustrating.”

Noncitizen voting is rare

Bogdan’s experience in New Hampshire is a glimpse into the future for potentially millions of voters across the country. That is if Republican voting legislation being pushed aggressively by President Trump passes Congress and a “show your papers” law is put in place in time for the November midterm elections.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America Act, cleared the House last month on a mostly party-line basis. Republicans say it would improve election integrity. Trump has called its safeguards common sense. Democrats and voting rights advocates call it a clear act of voter suppression. The bill is scheduled to come up for debate and voting in the Senate next week.

Republican messaging has mostly highlighted a less divisive provision in the bill that would require voters to show a photo ID. But the mandate for people to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections is likely to have the most wide-ranging consequences. Noncitizens already are prohibited from voting in federal elections, and it is not allowed by any state. Cases where it occurs are rare and harshly punished.

Obtaining the necessary documents under the SAVE Act is not as easy as it might sound. A similar effort was tried in Kansas a decade ago and turned into a debacle that eventually was blocked by the courts after more than 30,000 eligible citizens were prevented from registering.

Qualifying documents, with caveats

Rebekah Caruthers, president and chief executive at the Fair Elections Center, said the legislation’s strict documentation requirements could move the U.S. “in the opposite direction” of representative democracy.

“If this bill passes, it would deny millions of eligible Americans their fundamental freedom to vote,” she said in an email. “This includes millions of people who make up your communities, including married women, people of color and voters who live in rural areas.”

The list of qualifying documents in the SAVE Act for proving citizenship appears long, but many of them come with qualifiers.

Under the bill, a Real ID-compliant driver’s license would have to indicate that “the applicant is a citizen,” but not all do. Only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer the type of enhanced Real IDs that explicitly indicate U.S. citizenship.

Standard driver’s licenses, generally available to both citizens and noncitizens, often do not include a citizenship indicator. Some states, including Ohio, have recently added them.

The stipulations continue, buried in the fine print.

While military ID cards are listed as qualifying documents under the act, they will not suffice on their own. The bill says a military ID must be accompanied by a military “record of service” that indicates the person’s birthplace was in the U.S.

A DD214, the current standard-issue certificate of release or discharge for all military service branches, does not fulfill that requirement. According to the Pentagon, that document lists only where someone lived at points of entry and discharge and a person’s current home of record. It does not list where someone was born.

Passport requires time and money

For most provisions, the SAVE Act contains no phase-in period that would give voters and local election offices time to adjust. If passed by Congress and signed by Trump, its documentary proof-of-citizenship mandate would apply immediately, meaning it would be in place for this year’s midterm elections.

That could lead to a rush to obtain documents by those who want to register or need to reregister. A 2025 University of Maryland study estimates that 21.3 million Americans who are eligible to vote do not possess or have easy access to documents to prove their citizenship, including nearly 10% of Democrats, 7% of Republicans and 14% of people unaffiliated with either major party.

A passport would most effectively meet the requirement, but only about half of American adults have one, according to the State Department. The SAVE Act requires the passport to be current; an expired one does not count.

Obtaining a passport in time for a looming voter registration deadline is another potential hurdle.

Workers who process passports had layoffs at the State Department reversed, but just last month the department forbid passport processing at certain public libraries that had long helped relieve pressure at the department. Government libraries, post offices, county clerks and others still provide the service.

It takes four weeks to six weeks to get a passport, according to the department’s website, excluding mailing time. A new passport costs $165 for adults and renewals cost $130, while the photo costs $10 or $20 more. The turnaround time can be sped up to two weeks or three weeks for an additional $60 — and for even faster processing, add $22 more. The fully expedited process for a new passport would cost at least $257, a significant burden for many voters.

Birth and marriage certificates

A birth certificate may be a quicker and cheaper choice for most people, but there are twists.

The SAVE Act requires a certified birth certificate issued by a state, local government or tribal government. What does not appear to qualify is the certificate signed by the doctor that many new parents are given in the hospital when their child is born. It provides information similar to a certified birth certificate, but would not meet the letter of the federal legislation.

Like passports, birth certificates can sometimes take weeks to obtain. Those who live near their birthplaces can visit the local vital statistics office, but staffing shortages and escalating demand for Real IDs have caused significant backlogs in some states. In New York, the waiting period for certified copies is four months, the state said. Average processing times for online certificate requests vary widely by state, from as few as three days to 12 weeks or longer.

People whose birth certificates don’t match their current IDs — mostly women who changed their names when they married — would probably need additional documentation to register to vote under the bill. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found about 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the U.S. take their husband’s last name.

Notably, the SAVE Act does not provide any money to help states and local governments implement the changes or promote them to voters.

For Bogdan, that was part of the problem when New Hampshire’s proof-of-citizenship law took effect. People who have voted elsewhere in the state are not required to show proof of citizenship in their new towns if poll workers confirm their registration history. But Bogdan said workers at his polling place did not seem to know that or try to look up the information.

He eventually was able to cast his ballot because, by luck, he had recently retrieved his birth certificate from his parents’ house more than an hour away so he could apply for a Real ID. But he said government notices to voters would help prevent possible disenfranchisement.

“Young voters like myself don’t always carry around our birth certificate, Social Security card, all that important stuff, because it’s not used ever or very often,” he said. “And so all those young kids who are going to go out and try and vote will be held back from that.”

Smyth writes for the Associated Press.

It’s a political gambit that President Trump seems to think will pay off: Let the federal government grind to a halt.

“Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess,” he tweeted last week.

The unconventional proclamation from the unconventional president raised concern from both sides of the aisle.

His comments came as lawmakers agreed to a $1-trillion bipartisan budget bill that funds the federal government through September, which means another battle and potential government shutdown looms this fall.

Under a shutdown, thousands of federal employees would go without pay and national parks would close, among other things. In short: It will upset a lot of people.

Here’s a look at the key players and fallout from recent government shutdowns.

October 2013

How it happened

It’s simple — the battle over healthcare closed the government.

That year, House Republicans, angered by President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, repeatedly offered resolutions during budget negotiations that would have defunded the healthcare law. These resolutions were rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate, which led to a budget impasse.

The government shut down for more than two weeks after Congress was unable to agree on a budget for the new fiscal year, leaving nearly 800,000 federal employees out of work without pay.

On the political front, the ramifications went both ways.

Members of the bipartisan budget conference Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) speak to the media the day after Congress voted to ending a 16-day government shutdown. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

(Win McNamee / Getty Images)

Winners

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

The then-Senate majority leader was a vocal Democratic critic of Republican-led efforts to defund President Obama’s healthcare bill. He relentlessly castigated Republicans for their tactics to defund Obamacare, which ultimately led to the shutdown.

“You know with a bully you cannot let them slap you around, because they slap you around today, they slap you five or six times tomorrow. We are not going to be bullied,” Reid told reporters.

In the end, Reid came out of the shutdown with a bolstered reputation as a fighter of Democratic causes and earned plaudits from Obama.

Obamacare

(Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times)

At the time, the botched rollout of the healthcare law drew daily headlines. Web sites for healthcare exchanges didn’t work and the administration had few answers. Still, the healthcare law was able to remain intact and public scorn focused on Republicans as the government remained shuttered for 16 days and federal employees nationwide stayed home. Republicans thought their efforts would prove fruitful.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

(T.J. Kirkpatrick / Getty Images)

In the months and weeks leading to the shutdown, McCain served as a voice of reason for the Republicans. He insisted that it would be unwise for the party to allow a shutdown over Obamacare.

“I campaigned in 2012 all over this country for months: ‘Repeal and replace Obamacare.’ That was not the mandate of the voters. If they wanted to repeal Obamacare, the 2012 election would have been probably significantly different,” he said at the time.

Ultimately, his efforts faltered as Republicans charged ahead with efforts to defund Obamacare and the government shutdown.

Losers

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio)

(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

He failed to rein in the most conservative grassroots wing of his party. Boehner was the middle man of sorts in negotiations between Democrats, moderate Republicans and conservative activists. Two years later, he resigned because of the strong opposition he faced from the Republican caucus.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

(Andrew Burton / Getty Images)

While Cruz raised his national profile as a staunch critic of Obamacare, he also made a lot of enemies. Weeks before the shutdown he delivered a 21-hour talkathon on the Senate floor, assailing the health care law — a move that drew scorn from Democrats and Republicans alike. Cruz’s vocal opposition to the law helped establish him as a force within the GOP grassroots and set him up for a presidential run in 2016.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)

(Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)

(Carolyn Kaster / AP)

Public opinion polls consistently showed that Republicans were blamed for the government shutdown. Even so, the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman was unable to turn that into victory in the 2014 midterm. Many Democrats fault her leadership as a factor in the party’s sweeping losses in the midterm election.

November/ December 1995 and January 1996

How it happened

This battle over funding Medicare, public education and environmental initiatives pitted President Clinton against Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It turned into the longest government shutdown in the country’s history. The shutdown came in two phases, with government services being shuttered from Nov. 14-19, 1995; then from Dec. 16 until Jan. 6, 1996. In total, the government closed for 27 days.

President Clinton and bipartisan leaders meet at the White House on Dec. 30, 1995, for talks on the federal budget. (Greg Gibson / Associated Press)

(GREG GIBSON / AP)

Winner

President Clinton

(Marcy Nighswander / Associated Press)

(Marcy Nighswander / AP)

He stood firm in his battle with the Republican-controlled Congress. Clinton wanted a budget that increased expenditures on, among other things, Medicare and public education, but Republicans wanted to slow government spending. This led to months of negotiations — the government closing, opening, then closing again — and through it all, Clinton’s public approval ratings dipped only slightly. He easily won reelection in November 1996.

Loser

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

(J.SCOTT APPLEWHITE / AP)

After sweeping gains in the 1994 midterm election, Republicans were emboldened and ready for a showdown.

“He can run the parts of the government that are left, or he can run no government,” Gingrich told reporters weeks before the first shutdown. “Which of the two of us do you think worries more about the government not showing up?”

News reports at the time also noted that Gingrich was open to a shutdown after Clinton made him exit the rear of Air Force One after the two attended the funeral of slain Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. The comments made the Republican leader appear petty. In the end, after weeks of a shutdown, Republicans ultimately conceded to Clinton and Democrats.

May 2017

What’s happening now

Last week Congress passed a $1-trillion budget that funds the federal government through September. However, the budget bill does not allocate funds for Trump’s much-promised border wall. It’s the first bipartisan piece of legislation of the Trump presidency and funding for his signature proposal is nowhere to be found. The bill, however, does have funding for border security and increases to defense spending — both of which were touted as wins by the Trump administration.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), flanked by Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), speaks to the media about the recent spending bill that averted a government shutdown. (Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images)

(Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images)

Key players

President Trump

It’s clear Trump does not like to lose and does not like bad headlines. By all accounts, Trump and his policies did not come out on top in the budget deal.

Trump blamed the Senate rules, which require 60 votes to pass most legislation, for the exclusion of key priorities from the spending bill.

This has in turn led some conservatives to push for Trump to support a government shutdown if Congress does not heed his policies this fall. Trump has always trusted his gut instinct in politics — so far it’s seemed to benefit him — and his comments will be closely watched this fall.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

He’s often had to stake out a position when Trump tweets. Indeed, this time was no different. Ryan alluded to Trump’s qualms with Senate rules.

“Look, we’ve got a long ways to go between now and September, but I share the president’s frustration,” Ryan told reporters. “What a lot of people in America don’t realize is appropriations bills, they take 60 votes to pass. They can be filibustered. So, all appropriations bills therefore have to be bipartisan because Democrats can always filibuster an appropriations bill. Having said all that, I feel very good about the wins that we got with the administration in this bill.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

He’s Trump’s chief critic in Congress and warned the president that a government shutdown is not wise.

“The president’s threat to shut down the government in September is just a very, very bad idea because it would hurt so many average folks,” Schumer said recently. “I strongly urge my colleagues, and they have already … said they have no desire to shut down the government. That is not the way to govern. That is not the way to come up with bipartisan compromise.”

Voters

Public opinion is not on Trump’s side when it comes to talk about a government shutdown.

In a Politico/Morning Consult poll released in April, 65% of voters said that Congress should “take all necessary steps to avoid a government shutdown.”

Other polls show similar disapproval among voters toward a government shutdown.

kurtis.lee@latimes.com

Twitter: @kurtisalee

ABOUT THE BEST THING to be said about this year’s special election campaign is that it will soon be over. No one will really win, except for the political consultants who will walk away with pockets full of cash for raising and spending more than $200 million of other people’s money, and no one will really lose, at least not literally, because there are no candidates on the statewide ballot. The safest prediction is that, on the day after the election, California politics will be just as dysfunctional as today.

So why are we having this election? And why should anyone vote? The immediate answer to the first question is clear enough: Because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted it. The answer to the second question is that not voting would leave government to the special interests that finance these initiatives. The choices offered on the ballot require voter decisions, not a boycott.

All eight propositions on the ballot were put there by initiative petitions circulated by paid signature gatherers. The governor embraced four of them as elements of his reform of state government, including Proposition 76 to restrict state spending and Proposition 77 to take the job of drawing legislative and congressional districts away from the Legislature and give it to a panel of retired judges.

Schwarzenegger called a special election this year even though all the proposed reforms easily could have waited until the regular primary election in June. A majority of voters opposed this election, in part because of the estimated $50-million cost to the state and in part out of sheer exhaustion — six statewide elections, including primaries, in the last four years. No one is quite certain why Schwarzenegger insisted on this, although he claimed his reforms were too urgent to wait six months.

The irony is that, according to opinion polls, the more the governor campaigned for his measures, the less voters liked them. So if he called this election primarily to give his 2006 gubernatorial campaign a head start, he may be disappointed. One recent poll showed his approval rating at a meager 33%.

As for reforming state government, only Proposition 77 promises to bring about fundamental, beneficial change in how state government operates, ultimately resulting in a more moderate Legislature that is not deadlocked in partisan battle the way it is now. Propositions 74 and 75 offer some hope for modest improvements in education and Sacramento politics.

But it’s not just the governor’s misguided intentions that make this election objectionable. It has carried abuse of the ballot initiative to an unprecedented extreme (at least until the next election). All the measures were written by a variety of special interests and put on the ballot because those interests were able to spend the necessary money. If they all pass, the state’s overburdened Constitution will be weighed down by even more details about what state government can or cannot do.

This would all be unbearably depressing were it not for one fact: The people of California do want change in Sacramento.

That’s why they kicked out Gray Davis and elected Schwarzenegger in the 2003 special election. And that’s why, even as they question the wisdom of this special election, they remain supportive of the initiative process. The perfect initiative has yet to be written. (Although the two-sentence proposition proposed by San Francisco State professor Jules Tygiel in these pages last Sunday comes pretty close: “There shall be no further initiatives. All previous initiatives may be modified by a majority vote of the Legislature.”) But initiatives do succeed in forcing debate, if often clumsy or distorted, on important issues.

What Californians do not want is political gridlock. They want strong leaders who can get results without resorting to the ballot, much as Schwarzenegger did in working with the Legislature in 2004. It’s alarming that now Schwarzenegger is promising to produce even more ballot measures next year regardless of Tuesday’s outcome.

For all its faults, Tuesday’s election presents voters with choices. These choices may be unsatisfying. But by staying home, voters would only further exclude themselves from the governing process. See you at the polls on Tuesday.