WASHINGTON — A trio of Senate Democrats is calling for the government to start refunding roughly $175 billion in tariff revenues that the Supreme Court ruled were collected because of an illegal set of orders by President Trump.
Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire are unveiling a bill on Monday that would require U.S. Customs and Border Protection to issue refunds over the course of 180 days and pay interest on the refunded amount.
The measure would prioritize refunds to small businesses and encourages importers, wholesalers and large companies to pass the refunds on to their customers.
“Trump’s illegal tax scheme has already done lasting damage to American families, small businesses and manufacturers who have been hammered by wave after wave of new Trump tariffs,” said Wyden, stressing that the “crucial first step” to fixing the problem begins with “putting money back in the pockets of small businesses and manufacturers as soon as possible.”
The bill is unlikely to become law, but it reveals how Democrats are starting to apply public pressure on a Trump administration that has shown little interest in trying to return tariff revenues after the Supreme Court announced its 6-3 ruling on Friday.
Because of the ruling, going into November’s midterm elections for control of Congress, Democrats have begun telling the public that Trump illegally raised taxes and now refuses to repay the money back to the American people.
Shaheen said that repairing any of the damage caused by the tariffs in the form of higher prices starts with “President Trump refunding the illegally collected tariff taxes that Americans were forced to pay.” Markey stressed that small business tend to have ”little to no resources” and a “refund process can be extremely difficult and time consuming” for companies.
The Trump administration has asserted that its hands are tied, because any refunds should be the responsibility of further litigation in court.
That message could put Republicans on the defensive as they try to explain why the government isn’t proactively seeking to return the money. GOP lawmakers had planned to try to preserve their House and Senate majorities by running on the income tax cuts that Trump signed into law last year, saying that tax refunds this year would help families.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN on Sunday that it’s “bad framing” to raise the question of refunds because the Supreme Court ruling did not address the issue. The administration’s position is that any refunds will be decided by lawsuits winding their way through the legal system, rather than by a president who has repeatedly stressed to voters that he has the ability to act with speed and resolve.
“It is not up to the administration — it is up to the lower court,” Bessent said, stressing that rather than offer any guidance he would “wait” for a court opinion on refunds.
Trump has defended his use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad tariffs on almost every U.S. trading partner, saying that his ability to levy taxes on imports had helped to end military conflicts, bring in new federal revenues and apply pressure for negotiating trade frameworks.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model released estimates that the refunds would total $175 billion. That’s the equivalent of an average of $1,300 per U.S. household. But determining how to structure reimbursements would be tricky, as the costs of the tariffs flowed through the economy in the form of customers paying the taxes directly as well as importers passing along the cost either indirectly or absorbing them.
The president has previously claimed that refunds would drive up U.S. government debt and hurt the economy. On Friday, he told reporters at a briefing that the refund process could be finished after he leaves the White House.
“I guess it has to get litigated for the next two years,” Trump said, later amending his timeline by saying: “We’ll end up being in court for the next five years.”
SAN FRANCISCO — While united against a common political enemy in the White House, the California Democratic Party remains deeply divided over how to address the state’s affordability crisis and who is best suited to lead the state in this turbulent era of President Trump.
Those fractures revealed themselves during the party’s annual convention in California’s liberal epicenter, San Francisco, where a slate of Democrats running to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom pitched very different visions for the state.
Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter and wealthy financier Tom Steyer were among the top candidates who swung left, with Porter vowing to enact free childcare and tuition-free college and Steyer backing a proposed new tax on billionaires. Both candidates also support universal healthcare.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, the newest major candidate to enter the race, hewed toward partisan middle ground, chastising leaders in Sacramento for allowing the state budget to balloon without tangible improvements to housing affordability, homelessness and public schools.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), a vociferous critic and constant target of the Trump administration, emerged from the convention with the greatest momentum after receiving the most votes for the California Democratic Party’s endorsement, with 24% of delegates backing him.
“The next governor has two jobs: one, to keep Donald Trump and ICE out of our streets and out of our lives, and two, to lower your costs on healthcare, on housing, on utilities,” Swalwell said. “Californians need a fighter and protector, and for the last 10 years, I’ve gone on offense against the worst president ever.”
Still, none of the top Democrats running for governor received the 60% vote needed to capture the endorsement, indicating just how uncertain the race remains just months away from the June primary.
Betty Yee, a former state controller and party vice chair, placed second in the endorsement vote with 17%; former U.S. Health and Human Services Sec. Xavier Becerra had 14%; and Steyer had 13%. The remaining candidates had single-digit levels of support from among the more than 2,300 delegates who cast endorsement votes.
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) takes a selfie with supporters during the California Democratic Party’s annual convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Saturday.
“We’re going to win the House. There’s absolutely no question we will win the House,” said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) at a Young Dems event on Friday evening. “We’re going to protect the election, we’re going to win the election, and we’re going to tell people the difference that we will make.”
Thousands of delegates, party allies and guests attended the weekend California Democratic Party convention at Moscone Center in the South of Market neighborhood. The gathering included a tribute to Pelosi as she serves her final term.
Party leaders did coalesce behind one of the Democrats running to replace Pelosi, Scott Wiener, a liberal state senator who is vying be the first openly gay person to represent San Francisco in Congress.
The convention comes as party members and leaders continue to soul search after Trump’s second election. California remains a stronghold of opposition to the president, but its next governor will also have to face a growing cost-of-living crisis in a state where utility costs keep climbing and the median single-family home price is more than double what it is nationally.
Under growing pressure, the candidates for governor went on the offensive at the party gathering. Candidates sniped at each other — though rarely by name — for being too rich, too beholden to special interests or for voting in the past in support of ICE and border wall funding.
While largely panned by delegates who tend to lean further left than the typical California Democratic voter, Mahan has jolted the race by quickly raising millions from tech industry leaders and targeting moderate voters with a message of getting the state “back to basics.”
“We are at risk of losing the trust of the people of California if we don’t hold ourselves accountable for delivering better results on public education, home building, public safety,” Mahan said. “We’re not getting the outcomes we need for the dollars we’re spending.”
Mahan has raised more than $7.3 million since entering the contest in late January, according to campaign finance disclosures of large contributions. Many of the donors are tied to the tech industry, such as Y Combinator, Doordash, Amazon and Thumbtack. Billionaire Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso has also contributed the maximum allowed to Mahan’s campaign.
Technology businessman Dennis Bress, from Newport Beach, wears a pin supporting Planned Parenthood and a Yes on Proposition 50 shirt at the California Democratic Party convention at the Moscone Center on Friday in San Francisco.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Other candidates have raised concerns about the cash infusion, particularly Steyer, who has already dropped more than $37 million into his self-funded campaign and is pitching himself as a “billionaire who will take on the billionaires.”
“Here’s the thing about big donors: If you take their money, you have to take their calls,” Steyer said during his floor speech.
Delegates and party leaders said California’s next governor will have to continue leading the state’s aggressive opposition to Trump while dealing with the issues at home.
“I think people want a fighter,” said Rep. Dave Min (D-Irvine), who represents Porter’s former congressional district and has endorsed her in the governor’s race. “They want someone who’s going to stand up to Donald Trump but also fight to help average people who feel like they’re getting a raw deal in today’s America.”
Several of the candidates made the case that they could do both.
During her speech, Porter held up a whiteboard — her signature prop when grilling CEOs and Trump administration officials while she served in Congress — with “F— Trump” written on it.
“I’ll stand up to Trump and his cronies just like I did in Congress,” she said. “But this election for governor is about far more than defeating Trump.”
Porter, a law professor at UC Irvine, called on Democrats to “send a message about democracy by rejecting billionaires and corporate-backed candidates.” She also rolled out a long list of “true affordability measures” including free child care, free tuition at public universities, and single-payer healthcare, though she did not specify how she would pay for them.
Fighting back against Trump is “the floor,” said 29-year-old Gregory Hutchins, an academic labor researcher from Riverside. “We need to go higher than the floor — what can you do for the people of California? We all recognize that this is a beautiful and wonderful state, but it is very difficult to afford living here.”
Even some delegates — often the most politically active members of a party — have yet to make up their minds in the governor’s race. Nearly 9% opted not to endorse a particular candidate at the convention.
“You want that perfect candidate. You want that like, yes, this is the person,” said Sean Frame, a school labor organizer from Sacramento who is running for state Senate. “And I don’t feel like there is one candidate for me that fits all that.”
For all the focus on affordability, there were undertones of growing frustration from even reliable Democratic allies over a lack of tangible results in a state where the median home price is more than $823,000. SEIU California president David Huerta said workers have “been deferring our power to elected leadership” for too long.
“I think we need to be the ones who set the agenda and hold them accountable to that agenda,” Huerta said. “And they need to be leading from the direction of working people.”
It’s a constant battle with Democrats at state and local levels to get fair pay, said Mary Grace Barrios, who left a career in insurance to take care of her disabled adult daughter.
Barrios makes $19 an hour as an in-home caregiver to other clients in Los Angeles County. When Newsom signed a law to raise wages for most healthcare workers to $25 an hour by 2030, in-home support staff like Barrios were not included.
“It’s so important that we be given the respect and pay we need to live because we can’t live on that amount,” she said, adding that it feels like a “constant attack by people in our own party that we supported, that forgot us.”
“As citizens, you get what you vote for, right? So we have to do it. We have to make the change.”
NEW YORK — The Transportation Security Administration said Sunday that its PreCheck program would remain operational despite an earlier announcement from the Department of Homeland Security that the airport security service was being suspended because of the partial government shutdown.
“As staffing constraints arise, TSA will evaluate on a case by case basis and adjust operations accordingly,” the agency said in a statement.
Airport lines seemed largely unaffected through midday Sunday, with security check line wait times listed as under 15 minutes for most international airports, according to TSA’s mobile app.
Amy Wainscott, 42, flew from the Destin-Fort Walton Beach airport in Florida to Dallas Love Field on Sunday and said she didn’t hear about the announced suspension until she had already gone through TSA’s PreCheck.
“When we got to the airport this morning everything was working like usual,” she said. “It didn’t seem like anything had changed.”
Jean Fay, 54, said she had no issues going through TSA PreCheck at the Baltimore airport for her 6 a.m. Sunday flight back home to Texas. She didn’t hear about the suspension announcment until she was changing planes in Austin on her way to Dallas Love Field.
“When I landed in Austin I started getting the alerts,” she said.
It was not immediately clear whether Global Entry, another airport service, would be affected. PreCheck and Global Entry are designed to help speed registered travelers through security lines, and suspensions would probably cause headaches and delays.
Since starting in 2013, more than 20 million Americans have signed up for TSA PreCheck, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and millions of those Americans also have overlapping Global Entry memberships. Global Entry is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection program that allows preapproved, low-risk travelers to use expedited kiosks when entering the United States from abroad.
The turmoil is tied to a partial government shutdown that began Feb. 14 after Democrats and the White House were unable to reach a deal on legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats have been demanding changes to aggressive federal immigration operations, central to President Trump’s deportation campaign, which have been widely criticized since the shooting deaths of two people in Minneapolis last month.
The security disruptions come as a major winter storm hit the East Coast from Sunday into Monday. Nine out of 10 flights going out of John F. Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia Airport and Boston Logan Airport on Monday have been canceled.
Homeland Security previously said it was taking “emergency measures to preserve limited funds.” Among the steps listed were “ending Transportation Security Administration (TSA) PreCheck lanes and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Global Entry service, to refocus Department personnel on the majority of travelers.”
“We are glad that DHS has decided to keep PreCheck operational and avoid a crisis of its own making,” said Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Assn.
Before announcing the PreCheck shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement Saturday night that “shutdowns have serious real world consequences.”
One group of fliers will definitely be affected, according to TSA.
“Courtesy escorts, such as those for Members of Congress, have been suspended to allow officers to focus on the mission of securing America’s skies,” the agency said.
Airlines for America, a trade group representing major carriers, said Saturday night that “it’s past time for Congress to get to the table and get a deal done.” It also criticized the announcement, saying it was “issued with extremely short notice to travelers, giving them little time to plan accordingly.”
“A4A is deeply concerned that TSA PreCheck and Global Entry programs are being suspended and that the traveling public will be, once again, used as a political football amid another government shutdown,” the organization said.
Democrats on the House Committee on Homeland Security criticized the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of airport security after the initial announcement Saturday night. They accused the administration of “kneecapping the programs that make travel smoother and secure.”
Sen. Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, said Noem’s actions are part of an administration strategy to distract from other issues and shift responsibility.
“This administration is trying to weaponize our government, trying to make things intentionally more difficult for the American people as a political leverage,” he said Sunday on CNN. “And the American people see that.”
SAN FRANCISCO — It was speed dating: Eight suitors with less than four minutes each, pitching the woo to thousands of Democratic Party faithful.
The race for California governor has been a low-boil, late-developing affair, noteworthy mostly for its lack of a whole lot that has been noteworthy.
That changed a bit on a sunny Saturday in San Francisco, the contest assuming a smidgen of campaign heat — chanting crowds, sign-waving supporters, call-and-response from the audience — as the state party held its annual convention in this bluest of cities.
No candidate came remotely close to winning the required 60% support.
That left the contestants, sans Mahan, to offer their best distillation of the whys and wherefore of their campaigns, before one of the most important and influential audiences they will face between now and the June 2 primary.
Former state Controller Betty Yee told how she shared a bedroom with four siblings. Katie Porter, the single mom of three kids, said she knows what it’s like to push a grocery cart and fuel her minivan and watch helplessly as prices “go up and up” while dollars don’t stretch far enough.
Michele Reed of Los Angeles cheers at the state Democratic Party convention.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
When it came to lambasting Trump, the competition was equally fierce.
“His attacks on our schools, our healthcare and his politics of fear and bullying has to stop now,” Villaraigosa said.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) called him “the worst president ever” and boasted of the anti-Trump battles he’s fought in Congress and the courts. Xavier Becerra, a former California attorney general, spoke of his success suing the Trump administration.
Porter may have outdone them all, at least in the use of profanity and props, by holding up one of her famous whiteboards and urging the crowd to join her in a chant of its inscription: “F—- Trump.”
Porter was also the most extravagant in her promises, pledging to deliver universal healthcare to California — a years-old Democratic ambition — free childcare, zero tuition at the state’s public universities and elimination of the state income tax for those earning less than $100,000.
Unstated was how, precisely, the cash-strapped state would pay for such a bounty.
Former Assemblyman Ian Calderon offered a more modest promise to provide free child care to families earning less than $100,000 annually and to break up PG&E, California’s largest utility, “and literally take California’s power back.” (Another improbability.)
Becerra, in short order, said he was “not running on inflated promises” but rather his record as a congressman, former attorney general and health secretary in President Biden’s cabinet.
Rachel Pickering, right, vice chair of the San Luis Obispo County Democratic Party, stands with others wearing pins supporting Democratic causes at the party’s state convention.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
It was one of several jabs that could be heard if one listened closely enough. (No candidate called out any other by name.) “You’re not going to vote for a Democrat who voted for the border wall, are you?” Thurmond demanded, a jab at Porter who supported a major funding bill that included money for Trump’s pet project.
“You’re not going to vote for a Democrat who praises ICE, are you?” Thurmond asked, a poke at Swalwell, who thanked the department for its work last year in a case of domestic terrorism.
“You’re not going to vote for a Democrat who made money off ICE detention centers,” Thurmond went on, targeting Tom Steyer and his former investment firm, which had holdings in the private prison industry.
Yee seemed to take aim at Mahan and his rich Silicon Valley backers, suggesting grassroots Democrats “will not be pushed aside by the billionaire boys club that wants to rule California.”
“Here’s the thing about big donors,” Steyer said. “If you take their money, you have to take their calls. And I don’t owe them a thing. In a world where politicians serve special interests, I can’t be bought.”
There were no breakout moments Saturday. Nothing was said or done in the roughly 35 minutes the candidates devoted to themselves that seemed likely to change the dynamic or trajectory of a race that remains stubbornly ill-defined and, to an unprecedented degree in modern times, wide open.
And there was certainly no sign any of the gubernatorial candidates plan to give up, bowing to concerns their large number could divide the Democratic vote and allow a pair of Republicans to slip through and emerge from California’s top-two primary.
But for at least a little while, within the confines of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, there was a glimmer of a life in a contest that has seemed largely inert. That seemed a portent of more to come as the June primary inches ever closer.
WASHINGTON — For a few hours on Friday, congressional Republicans seemed to get some relief from one of the largest points of friction they have had with the Trump administration. It didn’t last.
The Supreme Court struck down a significant portion of President Trump’s global tariff regime, ruling that the power to impose taxes lies with Congress. Many Republicans greeted the Friday morning decision with measured statements, some even praising it, and GOP leaders said they would work with Trump on tariffs going forward.
But by the afternoon, the president made clear he had no intention of working with Congress and would continue to go it alone by imposing a new global import tax. He set the new tax at 10% in an executive order, announcing Saturday he planned to hike it to 15%.
Trump is enacting the new tariff under a law that restricts the import taxes to 150 days and has never been invoked this way before. Though that decision is likely to have major implications for the global economy, it might also ensure that Republicans will have to keep answering for Trump’s tariffs for months to come, especially as the midterm elections near. Opinion polls have shown most Americans oppose Trump’s tariff policy.
“I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs,” Trump said at a news conference Friday, contending that he doesn’t need Congress’ approval.
Tariffs have been one of the only areas where the Republican-controlled Congress has broken with Trump. Both the House and Senate at various points had passed resolutions intended to rein in the tariffs imposed on key trade partners such as Canada. It’s also one of the few issues about which Republican lawmakers, who came of age in a party that largely championed free trade, have voiced criticism of Trump’s economic policies.
“The empty merits of sweeping trade wars with America’s friends were evident long before today’s decision,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the former longtime Senate Republican leader, said in a statement Friday, noting that tariffs raise the prices of homes and disrupt other industries important to his home state.
Democrats’ approach
Democrats, looking to win back control of Congress, intend to make McConnell’s point their own. At a news conference Friday, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s new tariffs “will still raise people’s costs and they will hurt the American people as much as his old tariffs did.”
Schumer challenged Republicans to stop Trump from imposing the new global tariff. Democrats on Friday also called for refunds to be sent to U.S. consumers for the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court.
“The American people paid for these tariffs and the American people should get their money back,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said on social media.
The remarks underscored one of the Democrats’ central messages for the midterm campaign: that Trump has failed to make the cost of living more affordable and has inflamed prices with tariffs.
Small and midsize U.S. businesses have had to absorb the import taxes by passing them along to customers in the form of higher prices, employing fewer workers or accepting lower profits, according to an analysis by the JPMorganChase Institute.
Will Congress act?
The Supreme Court decision Friday made it clear that a majority of justices believe that Congress alone is granted authority under the Constitution to levy tariffs. Yet Trump quickly signed an executive order citing the Trade Act of 1974, which grants the president the power to impose temporary import taxes when there are “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” or other international payment problems.
The law limits the tax to 150 days without congressional approval to extend it. The authority has never been used and therefore never tested in court.
Republicans at times have warned Trump about the potential economic fallout of his tariff plans. Yet before his “Liberation Day” of global tariffs last April, GOP congressional leaders declined to directly defy the president.
Some GOP lawmakers cheered on the new tariff policy, highlighting a generational divide among Republicans, with a mostly younger group fiercely backing Trump’s strategy. Rather than heed traditional free trade doctrine, they argue for “America First” protectionism, which they argue will revive U.S. manufacturing.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio freshman, slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday and called for GOP lawmakers to “codify the tariffs that had made our country the hottest country on Earth!”
A few Republican opponents of the tariffs, meanwhile, openly cheered the Supreme Court’s decision. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a critic of the administration who is not seeking reelection, said on social media that “Congress must stand on its own two feet, take tough votes and defend its authorities.”
Bacon predicted there would be more Republican resistance coming. He and a few other GOP members were instrumental this month in forcing a House vote on Trump’s tariffs on Canada. As that measure passed, Trump vowed political retribution for any Republican who voted to oppose his tariff plans.
Groves writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Matt Brown, Joey Cappelletti and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
SAN FRANCISCO — Leaders of the California Democratic Party, along with liberal activists and loyal power brokers, are openly expressing fear that their crowded field of candidates running for governor may splinter the vote and open the door to a surprise Republican victory in November.
Because of those concerns, the Democrats lagging at the bottom of the pack are being urged to drop out of the race to ensure the party’s political dominance in statewide elections survives the 2026 election.
“California Democrats are prepared to do what’s required,” state party chairman Rusty Hicks told reporters at the California Democratic Party’s annual convention on Friday. “We are ready and willing and able to do what’s required … to ensure we have a strong candidate coming out of the primary to do what’s required in November.”
Nine prominent Democrats are running to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom, compared to two top GOP candidates, and could divide the Democratic electorate enough that the two Republicans could receive the most votes in the June primary and advance to the November election. Under California’s “jungle primary” system, the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.
Hicks was deferential to the Democratic candidates who have long-served in public office, and have compelling personal tales and the experience to take the helm of the state. But he said there is the harsh political reality that a viable candidate needs to raise an enormous amount of money to have a winning campaign in a state of 23.1 million registered voters and some of the most expensive media markets in the nation.
The party, its allies and the candidates themselves have a “collective commitment to ensuring we do not see a Republican elected [for governor],” Hicks said.
While Hicks and other party leaders did not publicly name the candidates who ought to leave the race, among the candidates lagging in the polls are state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, former state Controller Betty Yee, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon.
Democratic voters vastly outnumber the number of registered Republicans in the state, and no Republican has been elected to statewide office since 2006.
But given the sprawling field of gubernatorial candidates, the lack of a clear front-runner and the state’s unique primary system, the race appears up for grabs. According to an average of the most recent opinion polls, conservative commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — both Republicans — are tied for first place, according to Real Clear Politics. Each received the support of 15.5% of voters. The top Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell of Dublin, Calif., was backed by 12.5%.
In 2012, Republicans finished in first and second place in the race for a San Bernardino County congressional district — despite Democrats having a solid edge in voter registration. The four Democrats running for the seat split the vote, opening the door for a victory by GOP Rep. Gary Miller. Pete Aguilar, one of the Democrats who lost in the primary, went on to win that seat in 2014 and has served in Congress ever since.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) on Friday pushed back at the fears that two Republicans will win the top two gubernatorial spots in June.
“That’s not going to happen,” she said in an interview after speaking at a young Democrats’ reception. “And everything that you should know about the Democrats this year is we are unified. As I say, our diversity is our strength, our unity is our power. And everybody knows that there’s too much at stake.”
However, the scenario has prompted a cross section of the typically fractious party to unite behind the belief the field must shrink, whether by candidates’ choice or through pressure.
Jodi Hicks, the leader of Planned Parenthood’s California operations, said that the organization is laser-focused on congressional races, but having two Republican gubernatorial candidates “would be nothing short of devastating.”
“We have not weighed in on the governor’s race but we are paying close attention to whether this comes to play, and whether or not we do decide to weigh in and make sure that doesn’t happen,” she said.
Newsom and legislative Democrats have tried to buffer the massive federal funding cuts to reproductive care. A November election with two Republicans on the gubernatorial ballot would eliminate a key partner in Sacramento, and could impact turnout in down-ballot congressional and legislative races.
“A top-two Republican [race] would certainly have dire consequences for the midterm battle and to the governor’s office,” Jodi Hicks said.
Lorena Gonzalez, the leader of California Federation of Labor Unions, noted that her organization’s endorsement process begins on Tuesday.
“I think we are going to have some pretty honest discussions with candidates about their individual paths and where they are,” she said. “They’re all great candidates, so many of them are really good folks. But it’s starting to get to be that time.”
She expects the field to begin to thin in the coming days and weeks.
The conversation went beyond party leaders, taking place among delegates such as Gregory Hutchins, an academic labor researcher from Riverside.
“My goal at the convention, it’s not necessarily that the party coalesces around one particular candidate, but more, this is a test to see what candidates have a level of support that they can mount a successful campaign,” said the 29-year-old, who said he hopes to see some candidates drop out after the weekend.
“Am I concerned long term that [a top-two Republican runoff] could be a thing? Yes and no,” he said “I’m not concerned that we’re not going to solve this problem before the primary, but I do think we need to start getting serious about, ‘We need to solve this problem soon.’”
Not everyone agreed.
Tim Paulson, a San Francisco Democrat who supports Yee, called efforts to push people out of the race “preemptive disqualification.”
“This is nothing but scare tactics to get people out of the race,” he said. “This is still a vibrant primary. Nobody knows who the front-runner is yet.”
Bob Galemmo, 71, countered that many people did not believe Donald Trump would be elected president in 2016 and fears two Republicans could advance to the general election.
“You should never say never,” he said. “If we could get down to like four or five [candidates], that would be helpful.”
The efforts had already began.
RL Miller, the chair of the state Democratic Party’s environmental caucus, said Yee ought to drop out.
Yee, “who is at the bottom of the polls, needs to be taking a good long look at whether she is serving the party or being selfish by staying in the race,” Miller said.
Yee, a former state party vice chair, pushed back forcefully, saying pressure to drop out of the race “would just be undemocratic.”
“First of all, I’ve served this party for a long time. I don’t do it out of selfishness, by any means,” she said at a Saturday gathering where she provided breakfast burritos to delegates. “But I’ll just say this — the race is wide open.”
Yee‘s campaign manager noted that 40% of voters are undecided, and the candidate said no one has asked her directly to exit the race, but that someone started a rumor a month or two ago that she was going to drop out and run for insurance commissioner instead.
“I’m not dropping out, and I don’t think any candidate should go out,” Yee said.
Calderon said Swalwell had urged him to get out of the race.
Calderon noted the largest group of voters is still undecided and defended staying in the race to try to reach those voters after speaking at a gubernatorial forum at the Commonwealth Club on Friday
“I stay very consistent in that 1 to 3% range,” he joked. “But my challenge is access to resources and visibility, which is something that could change within a day with the right backing and support.”
Swalwell and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
RICHMOND, Va. — Democrats passed a new congressional map through the Virginia legislature on Friday that aims to help their party win four more seats in the national redistricting battle. It’s a flex of state Democrats’ political power, however hurdles remain before they can benefit from friendlier U.S. House district boundaries in this year’s midterm elections.
A judge in Tazewell, a conservative area in Southwest Virginia, has effectively blocked a voter referendum on the redrawn maps from happening on April 21 by granting a temporary restraining order, issued Thursday.
Democrats are appealing that decision and another by the same judge, who ruled last month that Democrats illegally rushed the planned voter referendum on their constitutional amendment to allow the remapping. The state’s Supreme Court picked up the party’s appeal of the earlier ruling.
The judge’s order prohibits officials from preparing for the referendum through March 18. But early voting for it was slated to start March 6, meaning Democrats would have to get a favorable court ruling within two weeks to stick with that timeline.
If Democrats get to carry out a referendum, voters will choose whether to temporarily adopt new congressional districts and then return to Virginia’s standard process after the 2030 census. Democrats wanted to publish the new map ahead of the April vote.
President Trump launched an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle last year by pushing Republican officials in Texas to redraw districts to help his party win more seats. The goal was for the GOP to hold on to a narrow House majority in the face of political headwinds that typically favor the party out of power in midterms.
Instead, it created a burst of redistricting efforts nationwide. So far, Republicans believe they can win nine more House seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Democrats think they can win six more seats in California and Utah, and are hoping to fully or partially make up the remaining three-seat margin in Virginia.
Democratic lawmakers in Virginia have sought to portray their redistricting push as a response to Trump’s overreach.
“The president of the United States, who apparently only one half of this chamber knows how to stand up to, basically directed states to grab power,” Virginia’s Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell said in February. “To basically maintain his power indefinitely — to rig the game, rig the system.”
Republicans have sounded aghast. House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore described the remap as a way for liberals in northern Virginia’s Arlington, Fairfax and Prince William counties to commandeer the rest of the state.
“In southwest Virginia, we have this saying … They say, ‘Terry, you do a good job up there, but you know, Virginia stops at Roanoke,” Kilgore previously said, referring to how some people across Virginia’s Appalachian region feel unrepresented in state politics. “That’s not going to be the same saying anymore, because Virginia is now going to stop just a little bit west of Prince William County.”
Virginia is currently represented in the U.S. House by six Democrats and five Republicans who ran in districts imposed by a court after a bipartisan legislative commission failed to agree on a map after the 2020 census.
Legislation that would put the Democrats’ more gerrymandered map into effect if voters approve the referendum now awaits the signature of Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who has indicated that she would support it.
“Virginia has the opportunity and responsibility to be responsive in the face of efforts across the country to change maps,” Spanberger said as she approved the referendum.
Democratic candidates are already lining up in anticipation. “Dopesick” author Beth Macy and former U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello launched campaigns in red areas that would be moved into districts with more registered Democrats.
Virginia Del. Dan Helmer and former federal prosecutor J.P. Cooney, who helped investigate Trump and was fired by him, have launched campaigns in a formerly rural district that would now mostly include voters just outside the nation’s capital. And former Democratic congresswoman Elaine Luria is mounting a comeback against Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, who ousted her in 2022, in a competitive district that the map has made slightly more favorable to Democrats.
WASHINGTON — President Trump can’t seem to stop talking about Maryland Gov. Wes Moore.
He refused to invite him to a White House dinner later this week with state leaders from both parties, saying he was “not worthy” of the event. And he has castigated Moore for a sewage spill that has spoiled the Potomac River, even though the faulty pipe is part of a federally regulated utility.
There could soon be more reasons for Trump to complain about Moore, the nation’s only Black governor currently in office. Moore is trying to redraw Maryland’s congressional map to boost Democrats, part of a nationwide redistricting battle that Trump started to help Republicans in the midterm elections.
If Moore can overcome resistance from a key member of his own party in the state legislature, the tide could continue to shift in Democrats’ favor.
Moore, who is frequently floated as a potential Democratic presidential candidate, is the vice chair of the National Governors Assn., which is meeting in Washington this week for its annual conference. He sat down with the Associated Press on Wednesday at the start of his visit. Here is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity.
Redistricting
Q: You met with Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries to talk about redistricting. Can you tell me what your understanding was leaving that meeting and whether there will be an up-and-down vote in the Maryland legislature?
A: All we’re asking for is a vote. And however the vote goes, however the vote goes. But that’s democracy.
Q: What do you see as your role in the party?
A: I don’t look at it as I’m doing it because I’m trying to help a party per se. I’m doing it because I think we have an unchecked executive and right now Congress does not seem interested in actually doing its job and establishing real checks and balances.
And I’m watching what Donald Trump is doing. This would not be an issue had it not been for Donald Trump saying, you know what, let me come up with every creative way I can think of to make this pain permanent. And one of the ways he did was he said, let’s just start calling states — the states I choose — to say let’s have a redistricting conversation mid-decade.
This would not even be an issue had Donald Trump not brought this up and introduced this into the ecosystem.
Trump relationship
Q: Speaking of the president, do you have thoughts on why he’s been stepping up his criticism of you on everything from not inviting you to the dinner to his criticism of the Potomac River sewage spill?
A: This one would actually be comical if it weren’t so serious. This is a Washington, D.C., pipe that exists on federal land. How this has anything to do with Maryland, I have no idea. I think he just woke up and just said, I hate Maryland so I’m just going to introduce them into a conversation. This literally has nothing to do with us, with the exception of the fact that when we first heard about what happened, that I ordered our team to assist Washington, D.C.
The short answer is I don’t know. I cannot get into the president’s psyche.
Q: Do you think it’s personal?
A: I know it’s not for me. I have no desire to have beef with the president of the United States. I didn’t run for governor like, man, I can’t wait so me and the president can go toe to toe. I have no desire on that. But the fact that he is waking up in the middle of the night and tweeting about me, I just, I pray for him and I just feel bad for him because that has just got to be a really, really hard existence.
Trump and Black History Month
Q: The White House is holding an event right now commemorating Black History Month. Could you share your thoughts on the president’s relationship with the Black community?
A: Listen, I think the president has long had a very complicated history with the Black community. We’re talking about a person who has been sued from his earliest days from his treatment of Black tenants. We’re talking about a person who is one of the originators of birtherism. We’re talking about a person who has now spent his time trying to ban books about Black history, a person who has spent his time now doing the greatest assault on unemployment of Black women in our nation’s history. You know, so, I’m not sure what anyone is going to gain from an event by Donald Trump about Black history.
2028
Q: Do you think the next presidential nominee on both sides might come from this group of governors?
A: I see the governors as in many ways the final line of defense because I think it’s never mattered more who your governor is.
Q: The country is so polarized. How do we break the fever?
A: You stay consistent with who you are. I think if you’re a polarizing person or polarizing personality, then that’s just who you are. That’s just never been me.
Cappelletti and Sloan write for the Associated Press.
ATLANTA — He is weighing military action against Iran, leading an aggressive immigration crackdown, and teasing a federal takeover of state elections.
But on Thursday, President Trump’s team insists he will focus on the economy when he visits battleground Georgia in a trip designed to help boost Republicans’ political standing heading into the high-stakes midterm elections.
“Georgia is obviously a very important state to the president and to the Republican Party,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on the eve of his visit. Trump’s remarks in Georgia, she said, will highlight “his efforts to make life affordable for working people.”
Trump’s destination in Georgia suggests he has something else on his mind too. He’s heading to a congressional district previously represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former supporter who resigned in January after feuding with Trump. There’s a special election to replace her on March 10.
The White House has long said Trump would focus more on the economy, and he frequently complains that he doesn’t get enough credit for it. But recent months have been dominated by other issues, including deadly clashes during deportation efforts in Minneapolis.
As a reminder of his divided attention, Trump is scheduled to begin Thursday with one of his passion projects. He’s gathering representatives from some of the more than two dozen countries that have joined his Board of Peace, a diplomatic initiative to supplant the United Nations.
False claims of voter fraud
The Georgia visit comes less than a month after federal agents seized voting records and ballots from Fulton County, home to the state’s largest collection of Democrats.
Trump has long seen Georgia as central to his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats and President Biden, a fabrication that he reiterated Wednesday during a White House reception on Black History Month.
“We won by millions of votes but they cheated,” Trump said.
Audits, state officials, courts and Trump’s own former attorney general have all rejected the idea of widespread problems that could have altered the election.
Some Republicans are now pushing for Georgia’s State Election Board, which has a Trump-aligned majority, to take control of elections in Fulton County, a step enabled by a controversial state law passed in 2021. But it’s unclear if or when the board will act.
Leavitt, in the White House, said Wednesday that Trump was “exploring his options” when it comes to a potential executive order he teased on social media over the weekend designed to address voter fraud.
Trump described Democrats as “horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS” in the post, which is pinned to the top of his social media account. He also said that Republicans should feature such claims “at the top of every speech.”
Leavitt, meanwhile, insisted Trump would be focusing on affordability and the economy.
Greene has not gone quiet
Trump may be distracted by fresh attacks from Greene, once among the president’s most vocal allies in Congress and now one of his loudest conservative critics.
In a social media post ahead of Trump’s visit, Greene noted that the White House and Republican leaders met earlier in the week to develop an effective midterm message. She suggested they were “on the struggle bus” and blamed them for health insurance costs that ballooned this year.
“Approximately 75,000 households in my former district had their health insurance double or more on January 1st of this year because the ACA tax credits expired and Republicans have absolutely failed to fix our health insurance system that was destroyed by Obamacare,” she said. “And you can call me all the petty names you want, I don’t worship a man. I’m not in a cult.”
Early voting has already begun in the special election to replace Greene, and the leading Republican candidates have fully embraced Trump.
Trump recently endorsed Clay Fuller, a district attorney who prosecutes crimes in four counties. Fuller described Trump’s endorsement as “rocket fuel” for his candidacy in a weekend interview and vowed to maintain an America First agenda even if he remains in Congress after Trump is no longer president.
Other candidates include Republican former state Sen. Colton Moore, who made a name for himself with a vociferous attack on Trump’s prosecution in Georgia. Moore, the favorite of many far-right activists, said he’s been in communication with Trump even after Trump endorsed Fuller, calling the choice “unfortunate.”
“I think he’s the greatest president of our lifetimes,” Moore said.
The top Democrat in the race is Shawn Harris, who unsuccessfully ran against Greene in 2024. Democrats voice hope for an upset, but the district is rated as the most Republican district in Georgia by the Cook Political Report.
WASHINGTON — As progressives seek to place a new tax on billionaires on California’s November ballot, a Republican congressman is moving in the opposite direction — proposing federal legislation that would block states from taxing the assets of former residents.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), who faces a tough re-election challenge under California’s redrawn congressional maps, says he will introduce the “Keep Jobs in California Act of 2026” on Friday. The measure would prohibit any state from levying taxes retroactively on individuals who no longer live there.
The proposed legislation adds another layer to what has already been a fiery debate over California’s approach to taxing the ultra-wealthy. It has created divisions among Democrats and has placed Los Angeles at the center of a broader political fight, with Bernie Sanders set to hold a rally on Wednesday night in support of the wealth tax.
Kiley said he drafted the bill in reaction to reports that several of California’s most prominent billionaires — including Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — are planning to leave the state in anticipation of the wealth tax being enacted.
“California’s proposed wealth tax is an unprecedented attempt to chase down people who have already left as a result of the state’s poor policies,” Kiley said in a statement Wednesday. “Many of our state’s leading job creators are leaving preemptively.”
Kiley said it would be “fundamentally unfair” to retroactively impose taxes on former residents.
“California already has the highest income tax of any state in the country, the highest gas tax, the highest overall tax burden,” Kiley said in a House floor speech earlier this month. “But a wealth tax is something unique because a wealth tax is not merely the taxation of earned income, it is the confiscation of assets.”
The fate of Kiley’s proposal is just as uncertain as his future in Congress. His 5th Congressional District, which hugs the Nevada border, has been sliced up into six districts under California’s voter-approved Proposition 50, and he has not yet picked one to run in for re-election.
The Billionaire Tax Act, which backers are pushing to get on the November ballot, would charge California’s 200-plus billionaires a onetime 5% tax on their net worth in order to backfill billions of dollars in Republican-led cuts to federal healthcare funding for middle-class and low-income residents. It is being proposed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West.
In his floor speech, Kiley worried that the tax, if approved, could cause the state’s economy to collapse.
“What’s especially threatening about this is that our state’s tax structure is essentially a house of cards,” Kiley said. “You have a system that is incredibly volatile, where top 1% of earners account for 50% of the tax revenue.”
But supporters of the wealth tax argue the measure is one of the few ways that can help the state seek new revenue as it faces economic uncertainty.
Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, is urging Californians to back the measure, which he says would “provide the necessary funding to prevent more than 3 million working-class Californians from losing the healthcare they currently have — and would help prevent the closures of California hospitals and emergency rooms.”
“It should be common sense that the billionaires pay just slightly more so that entire communities can preserve access to life-saving medical care,” Sanders said in a statement earlier this month. “Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires.”
Other Democrats are not so sure.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is eyeing a presidential bid in 2028, has opposed the measure. He has warned a state-by-state approach to taxing the wealthy could stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
Some of he wealthiest people in the world are also taking steps to defeat the measure.
Brin is donating $20 million to a California political drive to prevent the wealth tax from becoming law, according to a disclosure reviewed by the New York Times. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and the chairman of Palantir, has also donated millions to a committee working to defeat the proposed measure, the New York Times reported.
New York has confirmed that the federal government released another $77m for new tunnels and bridges connecting the state to its neighbour New Jersey, amid a feud with United States President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul appeared at a construction site alongside union leaders to push for the release of the remaining funds, which were frozen in October amid a record-breaking government shutdown.
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“It cannot continue like this,” Hochul, a Democrat, told workers at the site.
“The workers need to know that that job is going to be there: the one they signed up for, the one they trained for, the one they’re so proud of. It has to be there year after year, until this project is done.”
At stake is the fate of the Northeast Corridor project, a central part of the Gateway Program, an interstate initiative to expand and renovate the aging tunnels that the link metropolitan hubs between New York and New Jersey.
The federal government had pledged billions in support for the project, considered to be vital for transportation and safety reasons.
But on October 1, one day into a historically long government shutdown, the Trump administration announced it would suspend $18bn in funding for the project that had already been granted.
The move was designed to pressure Democrats — and Democrat-aligned jurisdictions — to comply with Republican demands to end the shutdown.
But Trump hinted at the time that some of the programming cuts could be permanent. The shutdown ended after 43 days in November, and still, the funding for the New York City tunnel project remained frozen.
Democrats decried the freeze an act of political revenge. “It should concern every American that the Trump Administration is willing to harm working families and our nation’s economy to punish Democrats,” Representative Jerry Nadler of New York said in response to the funding suspension.
But Trump has continued to withhold the funds. On February 3, the states of New York and New Jersey announced they were suing the Trump administration to release the funds.
“After four months of covering costs with limited operating funds, the states warn that construction will be forced to completely shut down as soon as February 6 unless federal funding resumes,” attorneys general Letitia James of New York and Jennifer Davenport of New Jersey said in a statement at the time.
Three days later, as the states hit that February 6 deadline, a US district judge ordered the funds to be released, citing the potential for irreparable harm to the project.
The ruling required more than $200m in reimbursement funds to be paid out to the states.
Over the last week, the federal government responded by releasing $30m, in addition to the $77m announced on Tuesday. But officials said it was still not enough.
At Tuesday’s news conference, union leader Gary LaBarbera emphasised that new construction was a necessity.
“Let me tell you: The existing tunnels, the trans-Hudson tunnels, are over a hundred years old. Their structural integrity has failed,” he said.
He added that the issue of maintaining safe transportation should be nonpartisan
“This isn’t a Republican tunnel or a Democratic tunnel, right? This should not be a political tug of war,” he said.
Governor Hochul, meanwhile, used part of her speech to address the president. “ Let’s stop the chaos. Let’s stop the insanity. Let them work, Mr President,” she said, in a gesture to the workers around her.
But this week, on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump doubled down on his opposition to the project.
“I am opposed to the future boondoggle known as ‘Gateway,’ in New York/New Jersey, because it will cost many BILLIONS OF DOLLARS more than projected or anticipated,” Trump wrote.
“It is a disaster! Gateway will likewise be financially catastrophic for the region, unless hard work and proper planning is done, NOW, to avoid insurmountable future cost overruns.”
He also denounced reports that he would un-freeze the funding in exchange for renaming New York’s Penn Station after him, as well as Washington’s Dulles airport.
“IT IS JUST MORE FAKE NEWS,” Trump wrote, adding that such a proposal was “brought up by certain politicians and construction union heads”, not him.
Still, his White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to confirm the reports last week during a news briefing.
“Why not?” she told a reporter. “It was something the president floated in his conversation with [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer.”
On Tuesday, reports emerged that the Trump Organization had filed trademark claims for any airports bearing the president’s name.
Republicans in Florida’s legislature have already sought to rename the international airport in Palm Beach for Trump, citing his nearby golf courses and residence at Mar-a-Lago.
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidates are stepping up their assault on President Bush’s handling of Iraq, increasingly faulting the White House for failing to anticipate or avert the tumult that has engulfed the war-torn nation.
The Democrats have urged Bush to rely more on allies to help stabilize Iraq, reviving past criticism that the administration is too reluctant to work with the international community. And they have questioned Bush’s credibility after White House officials conceded this week that part of his case for going to war was based on incomplete intelligence.
The escalating attacks signal a sense among the Democratic campaigns that Bush may be vulnerable on a front that has been his strength — national security.
Bush couched the conflict with Iraq as crucial to America’s war on terrorism and basked in the quick overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Violence Continues
But since Bush triumphantly flew aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln off San Diego and declared the end of major conflict in Iraq, U.S. occupational forces have been plagued by continuing violence.
Since Bush’s May 1 speech, 31 Americans have died as a result of hostile fire.
On Thursday, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. Tommy Franks said U.S. troops are facing 10 to 25 attacks a day by Iraqi insurgents.
Franks, the commander of the war, was grilled by lawmakers about problems — and rising costs — confronting the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq. He warned that American troops could be there for years.
Franks’ remarks followed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s estimate on Wednesday that monthly military costs in Iraq total about $3.9 billion — almost double the administration’s projection in April.
These developments — along with the White House’s acknowledgment on Monday that there was insufficient support for Bush’s claim in January that Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Niger for use in a nuclear weapons program — have fueled the growing Democratic criticism of the president on Iraq.
“We lack sufficient forces to do the job” of restoring order in Iraq, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts said Thursday. “It is time for the president to step forward and tell the truth: The war is con- tinuing and so are the casual- ties.”
Kerry, who like several other Democratic presidential candidates supported the congressional resolution last fall that authorized Bush to use force against Iraq, released his own four-point plan for reconstructing the country.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, campaigning in New Hampshire on Thursday, berated Bush for making the claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.
Resignations Sought
Dean, whose rise in the Democratic race has been based largely on his opposition to the war, called for the resignation of any administration official responsible for the mistake.
“Anyone who deliberately misled the president about a matter as serious as sending our troops to war should resign — whoever that might be,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee sent an e-mail to activists seeking donations to pay for a television ad questioning Bush’s credibility on Iraq.
Democrats in Congress joined in the criticism of Bush’s postwar policy.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, backed by other Democrats, sponsored a measure that urged Bush to seek military support from NATO and the United Nations in the occupation of Iraq.
The measure passed 97 to 0; because it was nonbinding, few saw it as an accurate measure of likely divisions among lawmakers over how far Bush should go in seeking international aid.
But Biden said there was broad bipartisan anxiety about the rockiness of the postwar period.
“Find me somebody on the floor who says, ‘This is going great,’ ” Biden said.
The barbs from Democrats have intensified as a recent poll indicated that the pub- lic has an increasingly nega- tive view of the situation in Iraq.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found fewer than one-quarter of those surveyed in June and July thought that the U.S. effort was going “very well” — down from 61% in mid-April.
Still, the poll found little sign that those anxieties had seriously hurt Bush’s political position — 63% of those surveyed said there was a “good” chance or “some” chance they would vote for him in 2004.
The Democrats “need a lot more than some screwed-up intelligence report to really be able to peck at the president on foreign policy,” said a Republican political consul- tant close to the Bush cam- paign.
But he added: “If three months from now things aren’t any better [in Iraq], people are going to be asking: ‘What’s the plan, Stan?’ ”
The more pointed Democratic criticism of Bush stands in contrast to the wartime posture of most candidates.
Among the party’s major candidates, only Dean and Sen. Bob Graham of Florida opposed the decision to attack Iraq.
Along with Kerry, those supporting the war were Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Sens. Joe Lieb- erman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Caro- lina.
Coalition Urged
The emerging critique among the candidates of Bush’s handling of Iraq echoes the argument some used against him before the war: that he has been too reluctant to build a coalition of allies to share cost and responsibilities.
“The United Nations, European Union, NATO — all have to be involved,” Ed- wards said at a recent town hall meeting in New Hamp- shire.
“We should welcome their involvement. It gives us a chance to re-engage in the international community.”
Kerry, in the plan he unveiled, called on the administration to increase troop strength in Iraq by adding coalition soldiers.
He also proposed more rapid training of Iraqi troops for security functions, development of a clear plan for transferring power to Iraqis and increased efforts to improve basic services such as electricity and water.
“The administration went to war without a thorough plan to win the peace,” said Kerry.
“It’s time to face that truth and change course.”
This week Lieberman mounted a similar attack in an opinion article in the Washington Post.
“Enough time has passed to conclude that what we are doing is not working,” said Lieberman. “The administration has … mishandled the efforts to get key allies on board….”
Erik Smith, a spokesman for Gephardt, said the congressman and other candidates have been arguing for some time that the presi- dent had not adequately pre- pared a postwar strategy for Iraq.
The criticism “takes on a new urgency in light of unfolding events,” said Smith.
“Voters are increasingly concerned about it.”
*
Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak and Ronald Brownstein contributed to this report.
Voter trust in the upcoming midterm elections, meanwhile, has dropped off sharply, and across party lines, according to new research by the UC San Diego Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections.
Out of 11,406 eligible voters surveyed between mid-December and mid-January, just 60% said they were confident that midterm votes will be counted fairly — down from 77% who held such confidence in vote counting shortly after the 2024 presidential election.
Shifts in voter confidence are common after elections, with voters in winning parties generally expressing more confidence and voters in losing parties expressing less, said Thad Kousser, one of the center’s co-directors. However, the new survey found double-digit, across-the-board declines in confidence in the last year, he said.
According to voting experts, such drops in confidence and fears about voter intimidation are alarming — and raise serious questions about voter turnout in a pivotal midterm election that could radically reshape American politics.
While 82% of Republicans expressed at least some confidence in vote counting after Trump’s 2024 win, just 65% said they felt that way in the latest survey. Among Democrats, confidence dropped from 77% to 64%, and among independents from 73% to 57%, the survey found.
“Everyone — Democrats, Republicans, independents alike — have become less trusting of elections over the last year,” Kousser said, calling it a “parallel movement in this polarized era.”
Of course, what is causing those declines differs greatly by party, said Kousser’s co-director Lauren Prather, with distrust of mail ballots and noncitizens voting cited by half of Republicans, and concerns about eligible voters being unable to cast ballots because of fear or intimidation cited by nearly a quarter of Democrats.
Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly alleged that mail ballots contribute to widespread fraud and that noncitizen voting is a major problem in U.S. elections, despite neither claim being supported by evidence.
Dean C. Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, oversees the registering of voters, maintaining voter files, administering federal, state, local and special elections and verifying initiatives, referenda and recall petitions.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
Many Democratic leaders and voting experts have raised concerns about disenfranchisement and intimidation of eligible voters, in part based on Republican efforts to enforce stricter voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements, and Trump suggesting his party should “take over” elections nationwide.
Others in Trump’s orbit have suggested Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be deployed to polling stations, and the FBI recently raided and seized ballots from Fulton County, Ga., long a target of Trump’s baseless claims of 2020 election fraud.
Prather said that research has long showed that “elite cues” — or messaging from political leaders — matter in shaping public perception of election security and integrity, so it is no surprise that the concerns being raised by Trump and other party elites are being echoed by voters.
But the survey also identified more bipartisan concerns, she said.
Voters of all backgrounds — including 51% of Democrats, 48% of independents and 34% of Republicans — said they do not trust that congressional districts are drawn to fairly reflect what voters want. They primarily blamed the opposing party for the problem, but nearly a quarter of both Democrats and Republicans also expressed dissatisfaction with their own party leaders, the survey found.
Various states have engaged in unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to win more congressional seats for their party, with Republicans seizing advantage in states such as Texas and Democrats seizing it in states such as California.
Voters of all backgrounds — including 44% of Democrats, 34% of independents and 30% of Republicans — also said they believe it is likely that ICE agents will be present at voting locations in their area, though they did not all agree on the implications.
Half of Democrats said such a presence would make them feel less confident that votes in their area would be counted accurately, compared with fewer than 14% who said it would make them more confident. Among Republicans, 48% said it would make them more confident, and about 8% less confident. Among independents, 19% said more confident, 32% less confident.
Perceptions of ICE at polling locations also varied by race, with 42% of Asian American voters, 38% of Hispanic voters, 29% of white voters and 28% of Black voters saying it would make them feel less confident, while 18% of Asian American voters, 24% of Hispanic voters, 27% of white voters and 21% of Black voters said it would make them feel more confident.
Among both Black and Hispanic voters, 46% said they expect to face intimidation while voting, compared with 35% of Asian American voters and just 10% of white voters. Meanwhile, 31% of Hispanic and Asian American voters, 21% of Black voters and 8% of white voters said they are specifically worried about being questioned by ICE agents at the polls.
A man waits in line to vote at Compton College in November.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
Kousser said voters’ lack of confidence this cycle reflects a remarkable moment in American politics, when political rhetoric has caused widespread distrust not just in the outcome of elections, but in the basic structure and fairness of how votes are collected and counted — despite those structures being tested and proven.
“We’re at this moment now where there are people on both sides who are questioning what the objective conditions will be of the election — whether people will be able to freely make it to the polls, what the vote counting mechanisms will be — and that’s true sort of left, right, and center in American politics today,” he said.
Prather said research in other countries has shown that distrust in elections over time can cause voters to stop voting, particularly if they think their vote won’t be fairly counted. She does not think the U.S. has reached that point, as high turnout in recent elections has shown, but it is a longer-term risk.
What could have a more immediate effect are ICE deployments, “especially among groups that have worries about what turning out could mean for them if they expect ICE or federal agents to be there,” Prather said.
Election experts said voters with concerns should take steps to ensure their vote counts, including by double-checking they are registered and making a plan to vote early, by mail or with family and friends if they are worried about intimidation.
What voters should not do if they are worried about election integrity is decide to not vote, they said.
“The No. 1 thing on my list is and always will be: Vote,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law. “That sounds maybe trite or simple, but the only way we hold on to our democracy is if people continue to participate and continue to trust it and put their faith in it.”
Registrar voter staff members process ballots at the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana in November.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“Now is the time to buckle down and figure out how to fortify our protections for fair elections, and not to give into the chaos and believe it’s somehow overwhelming,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law.
“I don’t want people to feel like nothing is working, it’s all overwhelming and they are just being paralyzed by all the news of these attacks, these threats,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. “There are a huge range of folks who are working to ensure that these elections go as smoothly as possible, and that if anything comes up, we are ready to respond.”
Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant in California, said the erosion of confidence in U.S. elections was “a deliberate strategy” pushed by Trump for years to explain away legitimate election losses that embarrassed him, and facilitated by Republicans in Congress unwilling to check Trump’s lies to defend U.S. election integrity.
However, Democrats have added to the problem and become “the monster they are fighting” by gerrymandering blue states through redistricting measures such as California’s Proposition 50, which have further eroded American trust in elections, Madrid said.
Madrid said that he nonetheless expects high turnout in the midterms, because many voters have “the sense that the crisis is existential for the future, that literally everything is on the line,” but that the loss of trust is a serious issue.
“Without that trust, a form of government like democracy — at least the American form of democracy — doesn’t work,” he said.
Trump — who in a post Friday called Democrats “horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS” for opposing voter ID laws that most Americans support — has long called on his supporters to turn out and vote in massive numbers to give him the largest possible margin of victory, as a buffer against any election cheating against him. One of his 2024 campaign slogans was “Too Big to Rig.”
In recent days, some of Trump’s fiercest critics — including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — have made a similar pitch to Democrats.
In an interview with The Times, Schiff said that he is “deeply concerned” about the midterms given all of Trump’s threats, but that voters should understand that “the remedy here is to become more involved, not less.”
“The very best protection we’ll have is the most massive voter turnout we’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s going to be those with the most important title in our system — the voters — who end up saving this country.”
WASHINGTON — A dispute over whether federal immigration agents should be allowed to wear masks during enforcement operations has become one of the biggest obstacles to keeping the Department of Homeland Security funded, pushing the government toward a partial shutdown early Saturday.
Democrats have described the practice as corrosive to public trust, arguing that masked agents create the appearance of a “secret police” force. Republican lawmakers, President Trump and his top advisors, meanwhile, have drawn a hard line against requiring officers to remove their face coverings, insisting that doing so would expose them to harassment, threats and online doxxing.
“They want our law enforcement to be totally vulnerable and put them in a lot of danger,” Trump said at a White House event Thursday. He added that it would be “very, very hard to approve” Democrats’ demands, such as unmasking federal officers.
The standoff over masking stalled negotiations as lawmakers raced to meet a funding deadline for the Department of Homeland Security at midnight Friday. Without a deal, key agency functions — from airport security to disaster relief coordination — could be affected if the shutdown drags on.
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) rides the Senate subway Thursday ahead of the latest partial government shutdown.
(Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As with every shutdown, the agency’s essential functions will continue to operate, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant Homeland Security secretary for public affairs, said in a statement. But employees performing those functions at agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Transportation Security Administration could go without pay if the shutdown stretches for weeks.
The heads of those agencies told the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday that the shutdown is expected to create severe and lasting challenges.
Vice Adm. Thomas Allan, the acting vice commandant of the Coast Guard, said a shutdown would delay maintenance for boats and aircraft, and halt pay for 56,000 active-duty reserve and civilian personnel. Ha Nguyen McNeill, acting administrator of TSA, recounted how the last government shutdown affected her workers and spiked wait times at airports.
“We heard reports of officers sleeping in their cars at airports to save money on gas, selling their blood and plasma and taking on second jobs to make ends meet,” she said, adding that some are still recovering from the financial impact.
Operations within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — the agencies that are central to the budget impasse — are likely to be the least affected. That’s because both agencies still have access to $75 billion in funding approved last year as part of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
By midday Friday, it remained unclear when the partial shutdown would end, as lawmakers left Washington for a security conference in Munich and progress between Democratic and White House negotiators remained nebulous.
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters on Friday when asked about cutting a deal. “We always have to protect our law enforcement.”
The partial government shutdown comes at a moment of acute public anger at the agency’s approach to immigration enforcement, which has included the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.
But Democrats maintain that they need reforms written into law. Among their demands is requiring officers to wear and turn on body cameras, banning them from wearing masks, and ending the practice of “roving patrols” and instead requiring that they carry out only targeted operations.
“We will not support an extension of the status quo, a status quo that permits masked secret police to barge into people’s homes without warrants, no guardrails and zero oversight from independent authorities,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Thursday.
Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE, told a Senate panel Thursday that he does not want to see federal agents masked either, but said he is hesitant to bar face coverings because the threats to agents are too severe.
“I would work with this committee and any committee to work with holding individuals accountable that doxx ICE agents, because ICE agents don’t want to be masked,” Lyons said. “They’re honorable men and women, but the threats against their family are real.”
Federal immigration officials are more supportive of body cameras.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott told a House committee on Tuesday that he supports expanding the use of body cameras, but said more funding is needed to hire personnel to oversee the rollout.
“Fund the entire program so that we can be transparent and that we can make sure America knows what we’re doing, because that trust is critically important,” he said.
Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said that while the White House has made some “tweaks around oversight,” its actions continue to fall short.
The association, which represents 18,000 immigration attorneys, has urged Congress to refuse more funding for ICE and CBP before implementing reforms.
“The American public wants and deserves real, meaningful guardrails that are written into law that ensure this administration — and, quite frankly, any administration — will abide by the Constitution and respect fundamental principles of due process,” Johnson said Wednesday on a call with reporters.
“Congress has a critical opportunity right now to meet that demand,” he added.
Republican Sens. James Lankford of Oklahoma, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky talk during a hearing Thursday on oversight of federal immigration agencies.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
So far, Democrats maintain they will continue to bock funding bills without accountability measures in place.
California’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, were among the Senate Democrats who helped block passage of funding bills Thursday that would have averted a shutdown because they lacked accountability measures.
“I will not support more funding for ICE until there are new guardrails to rein in its lawless conduct,” Schiff wrote on X. “I’m a no on anything but real reform.”
Padilla said he would be a “firm no” until lawmakers agree that federal immigration officers need to be held accountable.
“Donald Trump and Republicans want Americans to forget about their lawless immigration roundup, but we won’t,” Padilla said.
Some of the biggest names behind the artificial intelligence boom are looking to stack Congress with allies who support lighter regulation of the emerging technology by drawing on the crypto industry’s 2024 election success.
Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman are among tech leaders who’ve poured $50 million into a new super political action committee to help AI-friendly candidates prevail in November’s congressional races. Known as Leading the Future, the super PAC has taken center stage as voters grow increasingly concerned that AI risks driving up energy costs and taking away jobs.
As it launches operations, Leading the Future is deploying a strategy that worked two years ago for crypto advocates: talk about what’s likely to resonate with voters, not the industry or its interests and controversies. For AI, that means its ads won’t tout the technology but instead discuss core issues including economic opportunity and immigration — even if that means not mentioning AI at all.
“They’re trying to be helpful in a campaign rather than talking about their own issue all the time,” said Craig Murphy, a Republican political consultant in Texas, where Leading the Future has backed Chris Gober, an ally of President Trump, in the state’s hotly contested 10th congressional district.
This year, the group plans to spend up to $125 million on candidates who favor a single, national approach to AI regulation, regardless of party affiliation. The election comes at a crucial moment for the industry as it invests hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure that will put fresh strains on resources, with new data centers already blamed for driving up utility bills.
Leading the Future faces a growing challenge from AI safety advocates, who’ve started their own super PAC called Public First with a goal of raising $50 million for candidates who favor stricter oversight. On Thursday, Public First landed a $20-million pledge from Anthropic PBC, a rival to OpenAI that has set itself apart from other AI companies by supporting tougher rules.
Polls show deepening public concern over AI’s impact on everything from jobs to education to the environment. Sixty-two percent of US adults say they interact with AI at least several times a week, and 58% are concerned the government will not go far enough in regulating it, according to the Pew Research Center.
Jesse Hunt, a Leading the Future spokesman, said the group is “committed to supporting policymakers who want a smart national regulatory framework for AI,” one that boosts US employment while winning the race against China. Hunt said the super PAC backs ways to protect consumers “without ceding America’s technological future to extreme ideological gatekeepers.”
The political and economic stakes are enormous for OpenAI and others behind Leading the Future, including venture capitalists Andreessen and Horowitz. Their firm, a16z, is the richest in Silicon Valley with billions of dollars invested in AI upstarts including coding startup Cursor and AI leaderboard platform LM Arena.
For now, their super PAC is doing most of the talking for the AI industry in the midterm races. Meta Platforms Inc. has announced plans for AI-related political spending on state-level contests, with $20 million for its California-based super PAC and $45 million for its American Technology Excellence Project, according to Politico.
Other companies with massive AI investment plans — Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. — have their own corporate PACs to dole out bipartisan federal campaign donations. Nvidia Corp., the chip giant driving AI policy in Washington, doesn’t have its own PAC.
Bipartisan push
To ensure consistent messaging across party lines, Leading the Future has created two affiliated super PACs — one spending on Republicans and another on Democrats. The aim is to build a bipartisan coalition that can be effective in Washington regardless of which party is in power.
Texas, home of OpenAI’s massive Stargate project, is one of the states where Leading the Future has already jumped in. Its Republican arm, American Mission, has spent nearly $750,000 on ads touting Gober, a political lawyer who’s previously worked for Elon Musk’s super PAC and is in a crowded GOP primary field for an open House seat.
The ads hail Gober as a “MAGA warrior” who “will fight for Texas families, lowering everyday costs.” Gober’s campaign website lists “ensuring America’s AI dominance” as one of his top campaign priorities. Gober’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In New York, Leading the Future’s Democratic arm, Think Big, has spent $1.1 million on television ads and messages attacking Alex Bores, a New York state assemblyman who has called for tougher AI safety protocols and is now running for an open congressional seat encompassing much of central Manhattan.
The ads seize on Democrats’ revulsion over Trump’s immigration crackdown and target Bores for his work at Palantir Technologies Inc., which contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Think Big has circulated mailings and text messages citing Bores’ work with Palantir, urging voters to “Reject Bores’ hypocrisy on ICE.”
In an interview, Bores called the claims in the ads false, explaining that he left Palantir because of its work with ICE. He pointed out the irony that Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder who’s backed the administration’s border crackdown, is a donor to Leading the Future.
“They’re not being ideologically consistent,” Bores said. “The fact that they have been so transparent and said, ‘Hey, we’re the AI industry and Alex Bores will regulate AI and that scares us,’ has been nothing but a benefit so far.”
Leading the Future’s Democratic arm also plans to spend seven figures to support Democrats in two Illinois congressional races: former Illinois Representatives Jesse Jackson Jr. and Melissa Bean.
Following crypto’s path
Leading the Future is following the path carved by Fairshake, a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC that joined affiliates in putting $133 million into congressional races in 2024. Fairshake made an early mark by spending $10 million to attack progressive Katie Porter in the California Democratic Senate primary, helping knock her out of the race in favor of Adam Schiff, the eventual winner who’s seen as more friendly to digital currency.
The group also backed successful primary challengers against House incumbents, including Democrats Cori Bush in Missouri and Jamaal Bowman in New York. Both were rated among the harshest critics of digital assets by the Stand With Crypto Alliance, an industry group.
In its highest-profile 2024 win, Fairshake spent $40 million to help Republican Bernie Moreno defeat incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, a crypto skeptic who led the Senate Banking Committee. Overall, it backed winners in 52 of the 61 races where it spent at least $100,000, including victories in three Senate and nine House battlegrounds.
Fairshake and Leading the Future share more than a strategy. Josh Vlasto, one of Leading the Future’s political strategists, does communications work for Fairshake. Andreessen and Horowitz are also among Fairshake’s biggest donors, combining to give $23.8 million last year.
But Leading the Future occasionally conflicts with Fairshake’s past spending. The AI group said Wednesday it plans to spend half a million dollars on an ad campaign for Laurie Buckhout, a former Pentagon official who’s seeking a congressional seat in North Carolina with calls to slash rules “strangling American innovation.” In 2024, during Buckhout’s unsuccessful run for the post, Fairshake spent $2.3 million supporting her opponent and eventual winner, Democratic Rep. Donald Davis.
Regulation proponents
“The fact that they tried to replay the crypto battle means that we have to engage,” said Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman from Texas who helped launch Public First. “I’d say Leading the Future was the forcing function.”
Unlike crypto, proponents of stricter AI regulations have backers within the industry. Even before its contribution to Public First, Anthropic had pressed for “responsible AI” with sturdier regulations for the fast-moving technology and opposed efforts to preempt state laws.
Anthropic employees have also contributed to candidates targeted by Leading the Future, including a total of $168,500 for Bores, Federal Election Commission records show. A super PAC Dream NYC, whose only donor in 2025 was an Anthropic machine learning researcher who gave $50,000, is backing Bores as well.
Carson, who’s co-leading the super PAC with former Republican Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah, cites public polling that more than 80% of US adults believe the government should maintain rules for AI safety and data security, and says voter sentiment is on Public First’s side.
Public First didn’t disclose receiving any donations last year, according to FEC filings. But one of the group’s affiliated super PACs, Defend our Values PAC, reported receiving $50,000 from Public First Action Inc., the group’s advocacy arm. The PAC hasn’t yet spent any of that money on candidates.
Crypto’s clout looms large in lawmakers’ memory, casting a shadow over any effort to regulate the big tech companies, said Doug Calidas, head of government affairs for AI safety group Americans for Responsible Innovation.
“Fairshake was just so effective,” said Calidas, whose group has called for tougher AI regulations. “Democrats and Republicans are scared they’re going to replicate that model.”
President Trump’s aura of invincibility is starting to vanish. Three new polls — including the usually Trump-hospitable Rasmussen — suggest that Joe Biden did a better job as president.
Worse still (for Trump), he’s underwater on immigration, foreign policy and the economy — the very trifecta that powered his return. An incumbent taking on water like that is no longer steering the ship of state, he’s bobbing in the deep end, reaching for a Mar-a-Lago pool noodle.
To be fair, Democrats have a proud tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But suppose — purely hypothetically — that this sticks. Suppose Democrats win the midterms. And suppose a Democrat captures the White House in 2028.
Then what?
Trumpism isn’t a political movement so much as a recurring event. You don’t defeat it; you board up the windows and wait.
Even if Trump does not attempt a third term (a gambit the Constitution frowns upon), he will remain the dominant gravitational force in Republican politics for as long as he is sentient and within Wi-Fi range.
Which means any Democratic administration that follows would be well-advised to consider it is governing on borrowed time. In American politics, you are always one scandal, one recession or one deepfake video away from packing your belongings into a cardboard box.
Trump’s MAGA successor (whoever he or she might be) will inherit millions of ardent believers, now seasoned by experience, backed by tech billionaires and steeped in an authoritarian worldview.
So how exactly does the country “move on” when a sizable slice of its elite class appears to regard liberal democracy as more of an anachronism than a governing philosophy?
This is not an entirely new dilemma. After the Civil War, Americans had to decide whether to reconcile with the rebels or punish them or some mix of the two — and the path chosen by federal leaders shaped the next century through Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the long struggle for civil rights.
At Nuremberg, the Allies opted for trials instead of firing squads. Later, South Africa’s post-apartheid government attempted to achieve reconciliation via truth.
Each moment wrestled with the same problem: How do you impose consequences without becoming the very thing you were fighting in the first place — possibly sparking a never-ending cycle of revenge?
Which brings us to even more specific questions, such as where does Trumpism fit into this historical context — and should there be any accountability after MAGA?
Start with Trump himself. Even if he is legally immune regarding official acts, what about allegations of corruption? Trump and his family have amassed billions since returning to office.
It is difficult to picture a future Democratic administration hauling him into court, especially if Trump grants himself broad pardons and preemptive clemency on his way out of office.
So if accountability comes, it would probably target figures in his orbit — lieutenants, enablers, assorted capos not covered by pardons. But is even this level of accountability wise?
On one hand, it is about incentives and deterrence. If bad actors get to keep the money and their freedom, despite committing crimes, they (and imitators) will absolutely return for an encore.
On the other hand, a Democratic president might reasonably decide that voters would prefer lower grocery bills to more drama.
Trump himself offers a cautionary tale. He devoted enormous energy to retribution, grievance and settling scores. It is at least conceivable that he might have been in stronger political shape had he devoted comparable attention to, say, affordability.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that the past Trump indictments strengthened him politically. Nothing energizes a base like the words “They’re coming for me,” especially when followed by the words “and you’ll be next,” next to a fundraising link. Do Democrats want to create new martyrs and make rank-and-file Americans feel like “deplorables” who are being persecuted for their political beliefs?
So perhaps the answer is surgical. Focus on ringleaders. Spare the small fry. Proceed in sober legal tones. Make it about the law, not the spectacle.
Even this compromise would invite a backlash. Democrats, it seems, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Unfortunately, there is no tidy answer. Too much punishment risks looking like vengeance. Too little risks sparking another sequel.
It may sound melodramatic to say this might be the most important question of our time. But while this republic has endured a lot, it might not survive the extremes of amnesia or revenge.
Choosing the narrow path in between will require something rarer than a landslide victory: justice with restraint.
WASHINGTON — U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi repeatedly sparred with lawmakers on Wednesday as she was pressed over the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and faced demands for greater transparency in the high-profile case.
Bondi accused Democrats and at least one Republican on the House Judiciary Committee of engaging in “theatrics” as she fielded questions about redaction errors made by the Justice Department when it released millions of files related to the Epstein case last month.
The attorney general at one point acknowledged that mistakes had been made as the Justice Department tried to comply with a federal law that required it to review, redact and publicize millions of files within a 30-day period. Given the tremendous task at hand, she said the “error rate was very low” and that fixes were made when issues were encountered.
Her testimony on the Epstein files, however, was mostly punctuated by dramatic clashes with lawmakers — exchanges that occurred as eight Epstein survivors attended the hearing.
In one instance, Bondi refused to apologize to Epstein victims in the room, saying she would not “get into the gutter” with partisan requests from Democrats.
In another exchange, Bondi declined to say how many perpetrators tied to the Epstein case are being investigated by the Justice Department. And at one point, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said the Trump administration was engaging in a “cover-up,” prompting Bondi to tell him that he was suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.”
The episodes underscore the extent to which the Epstein saga has roiled members of Congress. It has long been a political cudgel for Democrats, but after millions of files were released last month, offering the most detail yet of Epstein’s crimes, Republicans once unwilling to criticize Trump administration officials are growing more testy, as was put on full display during Wednesday’s hearing.
Among the details uncovered in the files is information that showed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had closer ties to Epstein than he had initially led on.
Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) asked Bondi if federal prosecutors have talked to Lutnick about Epstein. Bondi said only that he has “addressed those ties himself.”
Lutnick said at a congressional hearing Tuesday that he visited Epstein’s island, an admission that is at odds with previous statements in which he said he had cut off contact with the disgraced financier after initially meeting him in 2005.
“I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick told a Senate panel about a trip he took to the island in 2012.
As Balint peppered Bondi about senior administration officials’ ties to Epstein, the back and forth between them got increasingly heated as Bondi declined to answer her questions.
“This is not a game, secretary,” Balint told Bondi.
“I’m attorney general,” Bondi responded.
“My apologies,” Balint said. “I couldn’t tell.”
In another testy exchange, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) pressed Bondi on whether the Justice Department has evidence tying Donald Trump to the sex-trafficking crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.
Bondi dismissed the line of questioning as politically motivated and said there was “no evidence” Trump committed a crime.
Lieu then accused her of misleading Congress, citing a witness statement to the FBI alleging that Trump attended Epstein gatherings with underage girls and describing secondhand claims from a limo driver who claimed that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl who committed suicide shortly after.
He demanded Bondi’s resignation for failing to interview the witness or hold co-conspirators to account. Other Democrats have floated the possibility of impeaching Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files.
Beyond the Epstein files, Democrats raised broad concerns about the Justice Department increasingly investigating and prosecuting the president’s political foes.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Bondi has turned the agency into “Trump’s instrument of revenge.”
“Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza and you deliver every time,” Raskin said.
As an example, Raskin pointed to the Justice Department’s failed attempt to indict six Democratic lawmakers who urged service members to not comply with unlawful orders in a video posted in November.
“You tried to get a grand jury to indict six members of Congress who are veterans of our armed forces on charges of seditious conspiracy, simply for exercising their 1st Amendment rights,” he said.
During the hearing, Democrats criticized the Justice Department’s prosecution of journalist Don Lemon, who was arrested by federal agents last month after he covered an anti-immigration enforcement protest at a Minnesota church.
Bondi defended Lemon’s prosecution, and called him a “blogger.”
“They were gearing for a resistance,” Bondi testified. “They met in a parking lot and they caravanned to a church on a Sunday morning when people were worshipping.”
The protest took place after federal immigration agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.
Six federal prosecutors resigned last month after Bondi directed them to investigate Good’s widow. Bondi later stated on Fox News that she “fired them all” for being part of the “resistance.” Lemon then hired one of those prosecutors, former U.S. Atty. Joe Thompson, to represent him in the case.
Bondi also faced questions about a Justice Department memo that directed the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” by Jan. 30, and to establish a “cash reward system” that incentivizes individuals to report on their fellow Americans.
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, (D-Pa.) asked Bondi if the list of groups had been compiled yet.
“I’m not going to answer it yes or no, but I will say, I know that Antifa is part of that,” Bondi said.
Asked by Scanlon if she would share such a list with Congress, Bondi said she “not going to commit anything to you because you won’t let me answer questions.”
Scanlon said she worried that if such a list exists, there is no way for individuals or groups who are included in it to dispute any charge of being a domestic terrorists — and warned Bondi that this was a dangerous move by the federal government.
“Americans have never tolerated political demagogues who use the government to punish people on an enemy’s list,” Scanlon said. “It brought down McCarthy, Nixon and it will bring down this administration as well.”
The five-term Louisiana congressman earned a law degree and maneuvered his way to become speaker of the House. That requires a certain mental aptitude.
But maybe Johnson isn’t stupid. Maybe he’s just willfully ignorant, or uninformed. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know any better.
How else to explain his persistent claim there’s something sinister and nefarious about the way California casts and counts its election ballots?
Just last week, Johnson once again repeated one of the sophistries the president uses to dump all over the country’s elections system and explain away his oft-verified loss in the 2020 presidential campaign.
With an apparent eye toward rigging the 2026 midterm election, Trump suggested Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places,” which, presumably, would all be Democratic strongholds. Johnson — bowing, scraping — echoed Trump’s phony claims of corruption to justify the president’s latest treachery.
“In some of the states, like in California, for example. I mean, they hold the elections open for weeks after election day,” Johnson told reporters. “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. … It looks on its face to be fraudulent.”
Fact check: There was no hocus-pocus. No “holding open” of elections to allow for manipulation of the result. No voting or any other kind of fraud.
California does take awhile to count its ballots and finalize its elections. If people want a quicker count, then push lawmakers in Sacramento to spend more on the consistently underfunded election offices that tally the results in California’s 58 counties.
That said, there are plenty of reasons — none involving any kind of partisan chicanery — that explain why California elections seems to drag on and vote totals shift as ballots are steadily counted.
For starters, there are a lot of ballots to count. Over the last several decades, California has worked to encourage as many eligible citizens as possible to invest in the state and its future by engaging at election time and voting.
That’s a good thing. Participatory democracy, and all that.
Once votes are cast, California takes great care to make sure they’re legitimate and counted properly. (Which is exactly what Trump and Johnson want, right? Right?)
That diligence takes time. It may require looking up an individual’s address or verifying his or her signature. Or routing a ballot dropped off at the wrong polling location to its appropriate county for processing.
In recent years, California has shifted to conducting its elections predominantly by mail. That’s further extended the counting process. The state allows those ballots to arrive and be counted up to seven days after the election, so long as they are postmarked on or before election day. Once received, each mail ballot has to be verified and processed before it can be counted. That prolongs the process.
County elections officials have 30 days to tally each valid ballot and conduct a required postelection audit. That’s been the time frame under state law for quite some time.
“For that reason, we get an outsized amount of criticism for our long vote count, because everyone’s impatient,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.
As for why the vote in congressional races has tended to shift in Democrats’ favor, there’s a simple, non-diabolical explanation.
Republican voters have generally preferred to cast their ballots in person, on election day. Democrats are more likely to mail their ballots, meaning they arrive — and get counted — later. As those votes were tallied, several close contests in 2024 moved in Democrats’ direction.
There are plenty of reasons to bash California, if one is so inclined.
The exorbitant cost of housing. Nightmarish traffic. High rates of poverty and homelessness.
But on the plus side, a comprehensive study — the 2024 Cost of Voting Index, published in the Election Law Journal — ranked California seventh in the nation in the ease of casting a ballot. That’s something to be proud of.
As for Johnson, the evidence suggests the speaker is neither dumb nor uninformed when it comes to California and its elections. Rather, he’s scheming and cynical, sowing unwarranted and corrosive doubts about election integrity to mollify Trump and thwart a free and fair election in November.
WASHINGTON — The White House’s TrumpRx website went live Thursday with a promise to instantly deliver prescription drugs at “the lowest price anywhere in the world.”
“This launch represents the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history by many, many times, and it’s not even close,” President Trump said at a news conference announcing the launch of the platform.
Drug policy experts say the jury is still out on whether the platform will provide the significant savings Trump promises, though it will probably help people who need drugs not commonly covered by insurance.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called the site a “vanity project” and questioned whether the program presents a possible conflict of interest involving the pharmaceutical industry and the Trump family.
What is TrumpRx, really?
The new platform, trumprx.gov, is designed to help uninsured Americans find discounted prices for high-cost, brand-name prescriptions, including fertility, obesity and diabetes treatments.
The site does not directly sell drugs. Instead, consumers browse a list of discounted medicines, and select one for purchase. From there, they either receive a coupon accepted at certain pharmacies or are routed directly to a drug manufacturer’s website to purchase the prescription.
The White House said the reduced prices are possible after the administration negotiated voluntary “most favored nation” agreements with 16 major drugmakers including Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
Under these deals, manufacturers have agreed to set certain U.S. drug prices no higher than those paid in other wealthy nations in exchange for three-year tariff exemptions. However, the full legal and financial details of the deals have not been made public, leaving lawmakers to speculate how TrumpRx’s pricing model works.
What does it accomplish?
Though the White House has framed TrumpRx as a historic reset for prescription drug costs, economists said the platform offers limited new savings.
But it does move the needle on the issue of drug pricing transparency, away from the hidden mechanisms behind how prescription drugs are priced, rebated and distributed, according to Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
“This has been a murky world, a terrible, obscure, opaque marketplace where drug prices have been inconsistently priced to different consumers,” Joyce said, “So this is a little step in the right direction, but it’s mostly performative from my perspective, which is kind of Trump in a nutshell.”
Still, for the uninsured or people seeking “lifestyle drugs” — like those for fertility or weight loss that insurers have historically declined to cover — TrumpRx could become a useful option, Joyce said.
“It’s kind of a win for Trump and a win for Pfizer,” Joyce said. “They get to say, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re lowering prices. We’re keeping Trump happy, but it’s on our low-volume drugs, and drugs that we were discounting big time anyway.’”
Where does it fall short?
Early analyses by drug policy experts suggest many of the discounted medications listed on the TrumpRx site were already on offer through other drug databases before the platform launched.
For example, Pfizer’s Duavee menopause treatment is listed at $30.30 on TrumpRx, but it is also available for the same price at some pharmacies via GoodRx.
Weight management drug Wegovy starts at $199 on TrumpRx. Manufacturers were already selling the same discounted rates through its NovoCare Pharmacy program before the portal’s launch.
“[TrumpRx] uses data from GoodRx, an existing price-search database for prescription drugs,” said Darius N. Lakdawalla, a senior health policy researcher at USC. “It seems to provide prices that are essentially the same as the lowest price GoodRx reports on its website.”
Compared to GoodRx, TrumpRx covers a modest subset of drugs: 43 in all.
“Uninsured consumers, who do not use or know about GoodRx and need one of the specific drugs covered by the site, might benefit from TrumpRx. That seems like a very specific set of people,” Lakdawalla said.
Where do Democrats stand?
Democrats slammed the program this week, saying it would not provide substantial discounts for patients, and called for greater transparency around the administration’s dealings with drugmakers. To date, the administration has not disclosed the terms of the pricing agreements with manufacturers such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
In the lead-up to the TrumpRx launch, Democratic members of Congress questioned its usefulness and urged federal health regulators to delay its debut.
“This is just another Donald Trump pet project to rebrand something that already exists, take credit for it, and do nothing to actually lower healthcare prices,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Friday. “Democrats will continue fighting to lower healthcare costs and push Republicans to stop giving handouts to billionaires at the expense of working-class Americans.”
Three other Democratic senators — Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren and Peter Welch — raised another concern in a Jan. 29 letter to Thomas March Bell, inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.
The three senators pointed to potential conflicts of interest between TrumpRx and an online dispensing company, BlinkRx.
Months before, he became a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that holds a significant stake in BlinkRx and led the startup’s $140-million funding round in 2024. After his appointment, BlinkRx launched a service to help pharmaceutical companies build direct-to-patient sales platforms quickly.
“The timing of the BlinkRx announcement so closely following the administration’s outreach to the largest drug companies, and the involvement of President Trump’s immediate family, raises questions about potential coordination, influence and self-dealing,” according to an October 2025 statement by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Both BlinkRx and Donald Trump Jr. have denied any coordination.
What’s next?
The rollout of TrumpRx fits into a suite of White House programs designed to address rising costs, an area of vulnerability for Republicans ahead of the November midterms.
The White House issued a statement Friday urging support for the president’s healthcare initiative, dubbed “the great healthcare plan,” which it said will further reduce drug prices and lower insurance premiums.
For the roughly 8% of Americans without health insurance, TrumpRx’s website promises that more high-cost, brand-name drugs will be discounted on the platform in the future.
“It’s possible the benefits will become broader in the future,” Lakdawalla said. “I would say that the jury remains out on its long-run structure and its long-run pricing effects.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is facing the possibility it could run out of funding next week, as Democrats press for reforms to its immigration enforcement tactics.
But Republican leaders on Thursday pushed back against the Democratic proposals, rejecting them as moot.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for instance, called the demands “unrealistic and unserious”.
“This is not a blank check situation where Republicans just do agree to a list of Democrat demands,” Thune said, adding that the two parties appeared to be at an impasse.
“We aren’t anywhere close to having any sort of an agreement.”
Congress needs to pass funding legislation for the DHS by February 13, or else its programmes could be temporarily shuttered.
Demonstrators protest against immigration enforcement operations on February 4 in Nogales, Arizona [Ross D Franklin/AP Photo]
Ten demands from Democrats
Currently, Democrats are focused on changes to DHS’s immigration operations, particularly through programmes like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
But any funding shortfall stands to affect other Homeland Security functions as well, including the services offered by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which conducts security screenings at airports.
Top Democrats, however, have argued that a Homeland Security shutdown is necessary, given the abuses that have unfolded under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Just last month, two US citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, were killed at the hands of immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in incidents that were caught on bystander video.
Their shooting deaths have since gone viral, prompting international outrage. Other footage shows masked agents deploying chemical agents and beating civilians who were documenting their activities or protesting – activities protected under the US Constitution.
To protect civil liberties and avoid further bloodshed, Democrats on Wednesday night released a series of 10 demands.
Many pertain to agent transparency. One of the demands was a ban on immigration agents wearing face masks, and another would require them to prominently display their identification number and agency.
Body cameras would also be mandated, though the Democrats clarified that the footage obtained through such devices should only be used for accountability, not to track protesters.
Other proposed rules would codify use-of-force policies in the Homeland Security Department and prohibit entry into households without a judicial warrant, as has been common practice under US law. They would also outlaw racial profiling as a metric for conducting immigration stops and arrests.
Political battle over funding
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he was “astounded to hear” that Republicans considered the demands to be unreasonable.
“It’s about people’s basic rights. It’s about people’s safety,” Schumer said. He called on Republicans to “explain why” they objected to such standards.
In a joint statement with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer appealed to members of both parties to coalesce around what he described as common-sense guardrails.
“Federal immigration agents cannot continue to cause chaos in our cities while using taxpayer money that should be used to make life more affordable for working families,” Schumer and Jeffries wrote.
“It is critical that we come together to impose common sense reforms and accountability measures that the American people are demanding.”
Already, Democrats succeeded in separating Homeland Security funding from a spending bill passed on Tuesday to prevent a partial government shutdown.
Some Democrats and Republicans have pushed for a second split in order to vote on funding for ICE and CBP separately from FEMA and TSA spending.
But Republican leaders have opposed holding separate votes on those agencies, with Thune arguing it would amount to giving Democrats the ability to “defund law enforcement”.
Thune added that he would encourage Democrats to submit their reforms in legislation separate from Homeland Security funding.
It remains to be seen whether the two parties can agree to a compromise before the February 13 deadline. Democrats, meanwhile, have continued to push for other measures, including the removal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
WASHINGTON — Senate Republican Leader John Thune warned Thursday that Congress is not close to an agreement to fund the Department of Homeland Security, signaling that another short-term extension may be the only way to avoid a shutdown as Democrats demand “nonnegotiable” ICE reforms ahead of the Feb. 13 deadline.
The Republicans are increasingly looking to punt the full funding package a second time if negotiations collapse. Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Thune said that such a move would not include any reforms lawmakers had previously negotiated, including body cameras for immigration agents.
“As of right now, we aren’t anywhere close to having any sort of an agreement that would enable us to fund the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. “If [Democrats] are coming to the table demanding a blank check or refusing to consider any measures but their own, they’re likely to end up with nothing.”
He spoke hours after House and Senate Democrats announced they were aligned behind a list of 10 demands they say must be passed before approving the Homeland Security funding package through September.
Democrats are pressing for statutory limits on immigration raids, new judicial warrant requirements, body-worn cameras, identification rules for agents and enhanced oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — reforms they say are necessary to rein in what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called an agency “out of control.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats are planning to propose the legislation as soon as possible.
“We want our Republican colleagues to finally get serious about this, because this is turning America inside out in a way we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Schumer said.
The coordinated demands signal unity among House and Senate Democrats after a rocky week on Capitol Hill. In a slim vote, 21 House Democrats joined Republicans on Tuesday to end a partial government shutdown by temporarily extending Homeland Security funding through Feb. 13.
The two-week stopgap, called a “continuing resolution,” was meant to leave time for the two parties to debate how to rein in ICE after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
But that truce has quickly unraveled. Republican leaders have little appetite for the full slate of reforms. Some have indicated openness to narrower changes, such as expanding body camera programs and training, but reject mask bans and the removal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has already ruled out warrant requirements, which would limit immigration agents from entering private property without a court order. In remarks to reporters Wednesday, he also hinted at some interest in attaching voter ID and anti-sanctuary city policies to negotiations.
“It will be part of the discussion over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll see how that shakes out. But I suspect that some of the changes — the procedural modifications with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will be codified,” he said.
Johnson was confident the two sides could make a deal without further delays, adding that negotiations are largely between “the White House, Schumer and Senate Democrats.”
President Trump has privately supported the short-term extension to cool tensions while publicly defending immigration agents and expressing skepticism toward Democrats’ reform push, according to House leadership.
White House border policy advisor Tom Homan also announced a drawdown of 700 federal agents from Minneapolis this week as what officials framed as a goodwill gesture amid negotiations.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that the administration is willing to consider some of the demands Democrats have made, but said some of their requests are not “grounded in any common sense and they are nonstarters for this administration.”
Leavitt did not specify which reforms the administration was willing to consider. She did, however, say the president is committed to keeping the government open and supporting “immigration enforcement efforts in this country.”
The White House did not respond when asked if the president would support a short-term spending measure should negotiations stall.
Republicans continue to warn that a failure to reach a deal would jeopardize disaster response funding, airport security operations, maritime patrols, and increased security assistance for major national events, including the upcoming World Cup in Los Angeles.
“If we don’t do it by the middle of next week, we should consider a continuing resolution for the rest of the year and just put this all behind us,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
Democrats, however, remain adamant that verbal assurances are no longer enough.
“These are just some of the commonsense proposals that the American people clearly would like to see in terms of the dramatic changes that are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before there is a full-year appropriations bill,” Jeffries said.
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is refusing to voluntarily comply with a Justice Department investigation into a video she organized urging U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders” — escalating a dispute that President Trump has publicly pushed.
In letters first obtained by the Associated Press, Slotkin’s lawyer informed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro that the senator would not agree to a voluntary interview about the video. Slotkin’s legal team also requested that Pirro preserve all documents related to the matter for “anticipated litigation.”
Slotkin’s lawyer separately wrote to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, declining to sit for an FBI interview about the video and urging her to immediately terminate any inquiry.
The refusal marks a potential turning point in the standoff, shifting the burden onto the Justice Department to decide whether it will escalate an investigation into sitting members of Congress or retreat from an inquiry now being openly challenged.
“I did this to go on offense,” Slotkin said in an interview Wednesday. “And to put them in a position where they’re tap dancing. To put them in a position where they have to own their choices of using a U.S. attorney’s office to come after a senator.”
‘It’s not gonna stop unless I fight back’
Last November, Slotkin joined five other Democratic lawmakers — all of whom previously served in the military or at intelligence agencies — in posting a 90-second video urging U.S. service members to follow established military protocols and reject orders they believe to be unlawful.
The lawmakers said Trump’s Republican administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens” and called on troops to “stand up for our laws.”
The video sparked a firestorm in Republican circles and soon drew the attention of Trump, who accused the lawmakers of sedition and said their actions were “punishable by death.”
The Pentagon later announced it had opened an investigation into Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot who appeared in the video. The FBI then contacted the lawmakers seeking interviews, signaling a broader Justice Department inquiry.
Slotkin said multiple legal advisers initially urged caution.
“Maybe if you keep quiet, this will all go away over Christmas,” Slotkin said she was told.
But in January, the matter flared again, with the lawmakers saying they were contacted by the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.
Meanwhile, security threats mounted. Slotkin said her farm in Michigan received a bomb threat, her brother was assigned a police detail due to threats and her parents were swatted in the middle of the night.
Her father, who died in January after a long battle with cancer, “could barely walk and he’s dealing with the cops in his home,” she said.
Slotkin said a “switch went off” in her and she became angry: “And I said, ‘It’s not gonna stop unless I fight back.’”
Democratic senators draw a line
The requests from the FBI and the Justice Department have been voluntary. Slotkin said that her legal team had communicated with prosecutors but that officials “keep asking for a personal interview.”
Slotkin’s lawyer, Preet Bharara, in the letter to Pirro declined the interview request and asked that she “immediately terminate any open investigation and cease any further inquiry concerning the video.” In the other letter, Bharara urged Bondi to use her authority to direct Pirro to close the inquiry.
Bharara wrote that Slotkin’s constitutional rights had been infringed and said litigation is being considered.
“All options are most definitely on the table,” Slotkin said. Asked whether she would comply with a subpoena, she paused before responding: “I’d take a hard look at it.”
Bharara, who’s representing Slotkin in the case, is a former U.S. attorney in New York who was fired by Trump in 2017 during his first administration. He’s also representing Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California in a separate case involving the Justice Department.
Kelly has similarly pushed back, suing the Pentagon last month over attempts to punish him for the video. On Tuesday, a federal judge said that he knows of no U.S. Supreme Court precedent to justify the Pentagon’s censuring of Kelly as he weighed whether to intervene.
Slotkin said she’s in contact with the other lawmakers who appeared in the video, but she wouldn’t say what their plans were in the investigations.
A rising profile
Trump has frequently and consistently targeted his political opponents. In some cases, those attacks have had the unintended consequence of elevating their national standing.
In Kelly’s case, he raised more than $12.5 million in the final months of 2025 following the “illegal orders” video controversy, according to campaign finance filings.
Slotkin, like Kelly, has been mentioned among Democrats who could emerge as presidential contenders in 2028.
She previously represented one of the nation’s most competitive House districts before winning a Senate seat in Michigan in 2024, even as Trump carried the state.
Slotkin delivered the Democratic response to Trump’s address to Congress last year and has since urged her party to confront him more aggressively, saying Democrats had lost their “alpha energy” and calling on them to “go nuclear” against Trump’s redistricting push.
“If I’m encouraging other people to take risk, how can I not then accept risk myself?” Slotkin said. “I think you’ve got to show people that we’re not going to lay down and take it.”
