When Boxer retired in 2017, after serving 24 years in the Senate, she walked away from one of the most powerful and privileged positions in American politics, a job many have clung to until their last, rattling breath.
(Boxer tried to gently nudge her fellow Democrat and former Senate colleague, Dianne Feinstein, whose mental and physical decline were widely chronicled during her final, difficult years in office. Ignoring calls to step aside, Feinstein died at age 90, hours after voting on a procedural matter on the Senate floor.)
Last week, she drew a second significant challenger to her reelection, state Sen. Scott Wiener, who jumped into the contest alongside tech millionaire Saikat Chakrabarti, who’s been campaigning against the incumbent for the better part of a year.
Boxer, who turns 85 next month, offered no counsel to Pelosi, though she pushed back against the notion that age necessarily equates with infirmity, or political obsolescence. She pointed to Ted Kennedy and John McCain, two of the senators she served with, who remained vital and influential in Congress well into their 70s.
On the other hand, Boxer said, “Some people don’t deserve to be there for five minutes, let alone five years … They’re 50. Does that make it good? No. There are people who are old and out of ideas at 60.”
There is, Boxer said, “no one-size-fits-all” measure of when a lawmaker has passed his or her expiration date. Better, she suggested, for voters to look at what’s motivating someone to stay in office. Are they driven by purpose — and still capable of doing the job — “or is it a personal ego thing or psychological thing?”
“My last six years were my most prolific,” said Boxer, who opposes both term limits and a mandatory retirement age for members of Congress. “And if they’d said 65 and out, I wouldn’t have been there.”
Art Agnos didn’t choose to leave office.
He was 53 — in the blush of youth, compared to some of today’s Democratic elders — when he lost his reelection bid after a single term as San Francisco mayor.
“I was in the middle of my prime, which is why I ran for reelection,” he said. “And, frankly,” he added with a laugh, “I still feel like I’m in my prime at 87.”
A friend and longtime Pelosi ally, Agnos bristled at the ageism he sees aimed at lawmakers of a certain vintage. Why, he asked, is that acceptable in politics when it’s deplored in just about every other field of endeavor?
“What profession do we say we want bright young people who have never done this before to take over because they’re bright, young and say the right things?” Agnos asked rhetorically. “Would you go and say, ‘Let me find a brain surgeon who’s never done this before, but he’s bright and young and has great promise.’ We don’t do that. Do we?
“Give me somebody who’s got experience, “ Agnos said, “who’s been through this and knows how to handle a crisis, or a particular issue.”
“I thought that I had done a good job … and a number of people said, ‘Gee, it’s a pity that you can’t run for a third term,’ ” Wilson said as he headed to New Haven, Conn., for his college reunion, Yale class of ’55. “As a matter of fact, I agreed with them.”
Still, unlike Boxer, Wilson supports term limits, as a way to infuse fresh blood into the political system and prevent too many over-the-hill incumbents from heedlessly overstaying their time in office.
Not that he’s blind to the impetus to hang on. The power. The perks. And, perhaps above all, the desire to get things done.
At age 92, Wilson maintains an active law practice in Century City and didn’t hesitate — “Yes!” he exclaimed — when asked if he considered himself capable of serving today as governor, even as he wends his way through a tenth decade on Earth.
His wife, Gayle, could be heard chuckling in the background.
“She’s laughing,” Wilson said dryly, “because she knows she’s not in any danger of my doing so.”
CHICAGO — Hoan Huynh was going door to door informing businesses of ramped-up immigration enforcement on Chicago’s North Side when the Democratic state lawmaker got an activist notification of federal agents nearby.
He followed agents’ vehicles and then honked to warn others when he was pulled over. Masked federal officers pointed a gun at him and a staffer, attempted to break his car window and took photos of their faces before issuing a warning, he recounted.
“We were nonviolent,” Huynh said of Tuesday’s incident, part of which was captured on video. “We identified ourselves as an elected official and my hands were visible.”
As the Trump administration intensifies an immigration crackdown across the nation’s third-largest city and its suburbs, elected officials in the Democratic stronghold have been increasingly caught in tense encounters with federal agents. Members of the Chicago City Council and their staffers as well as state legislators and congressional candidates report being threatened, handcuffed and detained in recent days.
The tense political atmosphere comes as President Trump has vowed to expand military deployments and jail Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson — both Democrats — over immigration policies the Republican claims protect criminals.
Illinois Democrats deem the actions to be scare tactics and a calculated acceleration. The clashes, amid constant arrests of immigrants and protesters, have emerged as a top campaign issue in the state’s March primary, where an unusually high number of congressional seats are open.
“This is an escalation with the interests of creating fear and intimidation in my community and in all of Chicago,” said Alderman Mike Rodriguez, whose ward includes heavily immigrant and Latino neighborhoods.
During an enforcement operation Wednesday in the city’s Mexican enclave of Little Village and adjacent suburb of Cicero, at least eight people, including four U.S. citizens, were detained, he said.
Two of those citizens work in his office, including Chief of Staff Elianne Bahena, and were held for hours, he said. Bahena also serves on an elected police accountability council. Rodriguez said they did nothing wrong but didn’t offer details.
“Trump sent his goons to my neighborhood to intimidate, and in the process of helping people out, my staff got detained,” he said Thursday amid continued federal presence in Little Village. Among other things, agents deployed chemical agents and detained a 16-year-old, activists and elected officials said.
Though the operation’s focus has been concentrated in Latino neighborhoods and suburbs, federal agents have been spotted all over the city of 2.7 million and its many suburbs. Word of pedestrian and traffic stops outside schools, stores, courts and an O’Hare International Airport parking lot used by rideshare drivers have triggered waves of frustration amid the city’s active immigrant rights network and residents who follow vehicles, blow warning whistles and take videos.
The Department of Homeland Security has defended its operations, including the detention of U.S. citizens, saying they are temporarily held for safety. The agency, which didn’t answer questions about Rodriguez’s staff, accused Huynh of “stalking” agents.
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said agents had to assess whether he was a threat.
“This behavior is unbecoming of a public servant and is just another example of sanctuary politicians putting our officers at risk,” she said in a statement.
Also this week, City Council member Jessie Fuentes filed a federal tort claim seeking $100,000 in damages after agents grabbed and handcuffed her this month at a hospital. She said she was checking on a person who was injured while being pursued by immigration agents and asked for a signed judicial warrant on the person’s behalf. She was handcuffed and let go outside the hospital. She wasn’t charged.
“It is indeed a frightening time when unidentified federal agents shove, grab, handcuff and detain an elected official in the exercise of her duties,” said Jan Susler, Fuentes’ attorney.
Huynh, who was elected to the Illinois House in 2022, is running for Congress to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schawkosky, among four open House seats in safely Democratic territory. Other candidates in the crowded primary have also publicized their opposition outside a federal immigration processing center, including Kat Abughazaleh, who was thrown on the ground by federal agents as she protested.
For Huynh, who came to the U.S. in the 1990s from Vietnam and was granted political asylum, the feeling is familiar.
“My family came as refugees from the Vietnam War, where people were being picked up by the secret police all the time. We believed in the American ideal of due process,” he said. “It is very concerning that in this country right now and very disturbing right now that we are living under this authoritarian regime.”
The ongoing government shutdown continues to disrupt flights at times and put pressure on air traffic controllers, who are working without pay.
On Friday evening, airports in Phoenix, Houston and San Diego were reporting delays because of staffing issues, and the Federal Aviation Administration warned that staffing problems were also possible at airports in the New York area, Dallas and Philadelphia.
A day earlier, flights were delayed at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, New Jersey’s Newark airport and Washington’s Reagan National Airport because of air traffic controller shortages. The number of flight delays for any reason nationwide surged to 6,158 Thursday after hovering around 4,000 a day earlier in the week, according to FlightAware.com.
Many FAA facilities are so critically short on controllers that just a few absences can cause disruptions, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said that more air traffic controllers have been calling in sick since the shutdown began. Early on in the shutdown, there were a number of disruptions at airports across the country, but for the last couple of weeks there haven’t been as many problems.
Duffy said the disruptions and delays will only get worse next week after Tuesday’s payday arrives and “their paycheck is going to be a big fat zero.” He said controllers are telling him they are worried about how to pay their bills and frustrated with the shutdown.
“The stress level that our controllers are under right now, I think is unacceptable,” he said at a news conference Friday at Philadelphia International Airport.
The shutdown is having real consequences, as some students at the controller academy have decided to abandon the profession because they don’t want to work in a job they won’t be paid for, Duffy said.
That will only make it harder for the FAA to hire enough controllers to eliminate the shortage, since training takes years. He said that the government is only a week or two away from running out of money to pay students at the academy.
“We’re getting word back right now from our academy in Oklahoma City that some of our young controllers in the academy and some who have been given spots in the next class of the academy are bailing. They’re walking away,” Duffy said. “They’re asking themselves, ‘Why do I want to go into a profession where I could work hard and have the potential of not being paid for my services?’ ”
The head of the air traffic controllers union, Nick Daniels, joined Duffy. He said that some controllers have taken on second jobs delivering for DoorDash or driving for Uber to help them pay their bills.
“As this shutdown continues, and air traffic controllers are not paid for the vital work that they do day in and day out, that leads to an unnecessary distraction,” Daniels said. “They cannot be 100% focused on their jobs, which makes this system less safe. Every day that this shutdown continues, tomorrow we’ll be less safe than today.”
Airlines and airports across the country have started buying controllers meals and helping them connect with food banks and other services to get through the shutdown.
The greatest concern is for new controllers who might make less than $50,000, but even experienced controllers who make well over six figures while working six days a week may be living paycheck to paycheck without much cushion in their budgets. Daniels said it’s not fair that controllers are facing impossible choices about whether to pay for rent or child care or groceries.
Duffy has said that air traffic controllers who abuse their sick time during the shutdown could be fired.
Republicans and Democrats have been unable to reach an agreement to end the shutdown that began on Oct. 1. Democrats are demanding steps be taken to avoid soaring healthcare premiums for many Americans set to take effect under the GOP spending law adopted this summer. Republicans have said they will negotiate only after ending the shutdown.
The airlines and major unions across the industry have urged Congress to make a deal to end the shutdown.
Air Line Pilots Assn. President Capt. Jason Ambrosi said in a message to his members that he’s concerned about air traffic controllers and other federal employees.
“The safety of millions of passengers and tens of thousands of tons of cargo is in the hands of these workers. Worrying about how they’ll make their mortgage payment or pay for day care is an added stress they do not need,” Ambrosi said.
Democrats have called on Republicans to negotiate an end to the shutdown. Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, put the onus on Democrats.
“Our aviation system has operated safely throughout the shutdown, but it’s putting an incredible and unnecessary strain on the system, and on our air traffic controllers, flight crews, and many other aviation professionals,” Graves said.
Funk writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Rio Yamat contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris isn’t ruling out another run for the White House.
In an interview with the BBC posted Saturday, Harris said she expects a woman will be president in the coming years, and it could “possibly” be her.
“I am not done,” she said.
The former vice president said she hasn’t decided whether to mount a 2028 presidential campaign. But she dismissed the suggestion that she’d face long odds.
“I have lived my entire career a life of service, and it’s in my bones. And there are many ways to serve,” she said. “I’ve never listened to polls.”
Harris has recently given a series of interviews accompanying the September release of her book “107 Days.” It looks back on her experience replacing then-President Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee after he dropped out of the race, in an election she lost to Republican Donald Trump.
In an interview with the Associated Press this month, Harris, 60, also made clear that running again in 2028 is still on the table. She said she sees herself as a leader of the party, including in countering Trump and preparing for the 2026 midterms.
Meanwhile, political jockeying among Democrats for the 2028 presidential contest appears to be playing out even earlier than usual.
Several potential candidates are already taking steps to get to know voters in key states, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. Potentially 30 high-profile Democrats could ultimately enter the primary.
WASHINGTON — The Republican snarled that his opponent was a big-spending liberal. The Democrat huffed about the Republican’s loyalty to an incumbent President. The Republican tried against the odds to attract black and Latino voters. The Democrat sought to lasso conservative Democrats tempted to stray over the political line.
This is not George Bush vs. Michael S. Dukakis, 1988. It was George Bush vs. Lloyd Bentsen, 1970, battling for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, in a race that helps explain why Bentsen was tapped as Dukakis’ vice presidential nominee 18 years later.
For one thing, Bentsen won. For another, he fought off appeals by Republican Bush to curry favor with conservative swing Democrats, the same sort who are expected to make the difference this time around.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Those who look at the 1970 race as a key to the candidates’ likely behavior this year will find few surprises. It was, the wags said, a face-off between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The candidates themselves, neither a master of charisma, projected remarkably similar positions on the issues.
“They’re not too different,” said Robert Mosbacher, Bush’s current national finance chairman, who held the corresponding position in the Senate campaign.
Pressed as the 1970 race began to come up with one difference between him and Bush, Bentsen found one: “I am a Democrat and he’s a Republican.”
But there were some distinguishing quirks: Bentsen, worried that he would lose some conservatives to Bush, gained some ground by convincing voters that he was actually more conservative than the pre-Reaganite Bush.
And while the race was nominally between Bentsen and Bush, it seemed at times to be a battle of presidents. On Bentsen’s side was Texas native Lyndon B. Johnson, in the second year of his retirement. On Bush’s was Richard M. Nixon, in the middle of his first term, unspoiled as yet by the ravages of Watergate.
Not a Vitriolic Battle
Surprisingly, given the lack of discord on issues, the race did not degenerate into a sassy or vitriolic personal battle.
“It was really competitive, but there wasn’t any dirty politics or name-calling,” Mosbacher said.
That was reserved for the Democratic primary, a bitter, divisive affair in which Bentsen upset the incumbent, liberal Democrat Ralph W. Yarborough. The primary gave Bentsen a boost of publicity and was the beginning of the end for Bush, who had entered the race assuming he would battle an ideological opposite in the general election.
When he came face-to-face with Bentsen, “it was a whole new ballgame,” said Peter Roussell, Bush’s 1970 press spokesman.
Bush told voters that he, as a Republican senator under the Nixon Administration, could deliver more for Texas, and he accused Bentsen of being the “machine” candidate, groomed by Texas’ powerful Democratic hierarchy.
In a line that would be resurrected in 1988, Bush warned voters against the “big spenders” in Congress, who “recklessly spend the taxpayers’ hard-earned money.” He called for programs to battle air pollution and made forays into the traditionally Democratic Latino and black neighborhoods to corral votes.
Had Better Firepower
But Bentsen was armed with more piercing ammunition.
He criticized Bush’s support of a Nixon Administration welfare proposal, calling the package a “guaranteed annual income.” He also attacked Bush’s support of a 1968 gun-control measure that required dealers to keep records of the sale of guns and ammunition. He called the measure “the first step toward registration of law-abiding citizens’ guns,” a conscience-tweaking issue in Texas. Bush countered that he had voted against every floor amendment that dealt with gun registration.
Johnson entered the fray and told voters that he would vote for Bush for senator–if he lived in Connecticut, the state in which Bush was reared. Added former Texas Gov. John B. Connally–now a Republican–”Texas doesn’t need a Connecticut Yankee like Bush, just a good sound conservative boy like Lloyd.”
Even Bentsen’s campaign slogan–”A courageous Texan with fresh ideas”–reinforced the notion of carpetbagging, although Bush had by then lived in Texas for 22 years. Bush countered with the vague, “He can do more.”
Amid Bentsen’s criticism of the incumbent Administration, Bush stayed loyal to Nixon, calling him “stronger than horseradish in Texas.” The President paid back the favor by flying in for one campaign swing and sending then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew in for another. But the trips only exaggerated the sense of Bush as an outsider.
GOP Heavily Outnumbered
Ultimately, according to a 1970 aide, Bush was simply unable to persuade Texas Democrats to switch. And a switch was mandatory–in the primaries those years, only 110,000 people voted Republican, while 1.5 million cast Democratic ballots.
The U.S. Department of Justice will monitor polling sites in five California counties as voters decide on Proposition 50 on Nov. 4, it said Friday, after being asked to do so by state GOP officials.
Monitoring, which is routinely conducted by the Justice Department, will occur across Southern California and in the Central Valley, in Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, the Justice Department said.
Proposition 50 — one of November’s most hotly-watched electoral issues, with national political implications — asks California voters whether the state should redraw its congressional districts to better favor Democrats. It is a response to President Trump’s pressure campaign on Texas and other red states to redraw their lines in favor of Republicans, and is considered a must-pass measure if Democrats hope to regain control of the House in next year’s midterms.
The Justice Department said its monitors would work to “ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law,” including the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act, Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, and the Civil Rights Act.
“Transparency at the polls translates into faith in the electoral process, and this Department of Justice is committed to upholding the highest standards of election integrity,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said. “We will commit the resources necessary to ensure the American people get the fair, free, and transparent elections they deserve.”
“Our democracy depends on free and fair elections,” said acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in the L.A. region, who will be helping to coordinate the monitoring effort. “We will work tirelessly to uphold and protect the integrity of the election process.”
The Justice Department also announced monitors will be stationed in Passaic County, N.J. That state is holding a consequential gubernatorial election.
While federal monitoring is routine, it has been viewed with heightened skepticism from both parties in recent years. When the Justice Department under President Biden announced monitoring in 86 jurisdictions across 27 states during last November’s presidential election, some Republican-led states balked and sought to block the effort.
Democrats have been highly skeptical of the Trump administration’s plans for monitoring elections, in part because of Trump’s relentless denial of past election losses — including his own to Biden in 2020 — and his appointment of fellow election deniers to high-ranking positions in his administration, including in the Justice Department.
Corrin Rankin, chair of the California Republican Party, had specifically asked the Justice Department to send monitors to the five counties in a letter to the Justice Department on Monday.
Rankin wrote that the party had “received reports of irregularities” in each of the counties during recent elections, which they feared could “undermine either the willingness of voters to participate in the election or their confidence in the announced results of the election” this November.
Rankin called Proposition 50 a “politically charged question,” and said it was “imperative to have robust voter participation and public confidence in the results regardless of the outcome.”
Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, declined to comment on the letter Friday.
California officials, including Secretary of State Shirley Weber and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, have promised safe and fair elections and said their teams will also be out in the field enforcing California’s election laws in November.
“Our election laws provide the backbone for a free and fair election, and as California’s top law enforcement officer, I will do everything in my power to protect your right to vote,” Bonta recently said. “In the lead-up to the election and on Election Day, my office will be on call to provide assistance to the Secretary of State’s Office in enforcing California’s election laws, as needed, through a team of attorneys and administrative staff located across the state.”
Dean Logan, elections chief for Los Angeles County, said in a statement Friday that federal election monitors are welcome to view election activities and that the state has “clear laws and guidelines that support observation and prohibit election interference.”
“The presence of election observers is not unusual and is a standard practice across the country,” Logan said.
Logan didn’t directly address the California GOP’s specific statements about Los Angeles County, but said that the county regularly updates and verifies voter records in coordination with state and federal agencies and protects the integrity of the election process.
“Voters can have confidence their ballot is handled securely and counted accurately,” he said.
WASHINGTON — The government shutdown has reopened debate on what has been a central issue for both major political parties in the last 15 years: the future of health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Tax credits for people who get health insurance through the marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, expire at the end of the year.
Democrats say they won’t vote to reopen the government until Republicans negotiate an extension of the expanded subsidies. Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Democrats vote to reopen the government. Lawmakers in both parties have been working on potential solutions behind the scenes, hoping that leaders will eventually start to talk, but it’s unclear if the two sides could find compromise.
As Congress circles the issue, a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about their health costs going up in the next year. Those worries extend across age groups and include people with and without health insurance, the poll found.
A look at the subsidies that are expiring, the politics of the ACA and what Congress might do:
Enhanced premium help during the pandemic
Passed in 2010, the ACA was meant to decrease the number of uninsured people in the country and make coverage more affordable for those who don’t have private insurance. The law created state by state exchanges, some of which are run by the individual states, to try to increase the pool of the insured and bring down rates.
In 2021, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House during the COVID-19 pandemic, they expanded premium help that was already in the law. The changes included eliminating premiums for some lower-income enrollees, ensuring that higher earners paid no more than 8.5% of their income and expanding eligibility for middle-class earners.
The expanded subsidies pushed enrollment to new levels and drove the rate of uninsured people to a historic low. This year, a record 24 million people have signed up for insurance coverage through the ACA, in large part because billions of dollars in subsidies have made the plans more affordable for many people.
If the tax credits expire, annual out-of-pocket premiums are estimated to increase by 114% — an average of $1,016 — next year, according to an analysis from KFF.
Democrats push to extend subsidies
Democrats extended those tax credits in 2022 for another three years but were not able to make them permanent. The credits are set to expire Jan. 1, with Republicans now in full control.
Lacking in power and sensing a political opportunity, Democrats used some of their only leverage and forced a government shutdown over the issue when federal funding ran out on Oct. 1. They say they won’t vote for a House-passed bill to reopen the government until Republicans give them some certainty that the subsidies will be extended.
Democrats introduced legislation in September to permanently extend the premium tax credits, but they have suggested that they are open to a shorter period.
“We need a serious negotiation,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly said.
Republicans try to scale the ACA back, again
The Democratic demands on health care have reignited longstanding Republican complaints about the ACA, which they have campaigned against for years and tried and failed to repeal in 2017. Many in the party say that if Congress is going to act, they want to scrap the expanded subsidies and overhaul the entire law.
The problem is not the expiring subsidies but “the cost of health care,” Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said Tuesday.
In a virtual briefing Tuesday, the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Paragon Health Institute branded the subsidies as President Joe Biden’s “COVID credits” and claimed they’ve enabled fraudsters to sign people up for fully subsidized plans without their knowledge.
Others have pitched more modest proposals that could potentially win over some Democrats. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has said he is open to extending the subsidies with changes, including lower income limits and a stop to auto-enrollment that may sign up people who don’t need the coverage.
The ACA is “in desperate need of reform,” Thune has said.
House Republicans are considering their own ideas for reforming the ACA, including proposals for phasing out the subsidies for new enrollees. And they have begun to discuss whether to combine health care reforms with a new government funding bill and send it to the Senate for consideration once they return to Washington.
“We will probably negotiate some off-ramp” to ease the transition back to pre-COVID-19 levels, said Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, the head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, during a virtual town hall Tuesday.
Is compromise possible?
A number of Republicans want to extend the subsidies. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said most people who are using the exchanges created by the ACA “don’t really have another option, and it’s already really, really expensive. So I think there are things we can do to reform the program.”
Hawley said he had been having conversations with other senators about what those changes could be, including proposals for income limits, which he said he sees as a “very reasonable.”
Bipartisan groups of lawmakers have been discussing the income limits and other ideas, including making the lowest-income people pay very low premiums instead of nothing. Some Republicans have advocated for that change to ensure that all enrollees are aware they have coverage and need it. Other proposals would extend the subsidies for a year or two or slowly phase them out.
It’s unclear if any of those ideas could gain traction on both sides — or any interest from the White House, where President Donald Trump has remained mostly disengaged. Despite the public stalemate, though, lawmakers are feeling increased urgency to find a solution as the Nov. 1 open enrollment date approaches.
Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire has been talking to lawmakers since the shutdown began, trying to find areas of compromise. On Tuesday, she suggested that Congress could also look at extending the enrollment dates for the ACA since Congress is stalled on the subsidies.
“These costs are going to affect all of us, and it’s going to affect our health care system,” she said.
Jalonick writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Joey Cappelletti in Washington and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.
Early voter turnout is exceeding expectations in California’s Nov. 4 special election over redrawing the state’s congressional districts, a Democratic-led effort to counter Republican attempts to keep Congress under GOP control.
“We’re seeing some pretty extraordinary numbers of early votes that have already been cast, people sending back in their ballots,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a livestream with former President Obama on Wednesday.
More than 3.4 million mail ballots have been returned as of Wednesday, with votes from Democrats outpacing ballots from Republicans and Californians registered as not having a party preference, according to a ballot tracker run by Democratic strategist Paul Mitchell. Mitchell is deeply involved in the Democratic effort, and drafted the proposed congressional districts on the Nov. 4 special election ballot.
That’s roughly the same number of ballots returned by this time in the White House contest between then-Vice President Kamala Harris and then-former President Trump in 2024, notable because turnout during presidential elections is higher than in other years.
About a million more ballots had been turned in by this point in the unsuccessful 2021 attempt to recall Newsom, but that was during the COVID pandemic.
This year’s turnout is also especially significant because Proposition 50 is about the esoteric topic of redistricting. Redrawing congressional districts is usually a once-a-decade process that takes place after the U.S. census to account for population shifts.
California’s 52 congressional districts currently are crafted by a voter-approved independent commission, but Newsom and other California Democrats decided to ask voters to allow a rare mid-decade partisan gerrymandering to blunt Trump’s efforts in GOP-led states to boost his party’s numbers in the House.
Obama, who has endorsed Proposition 50 and stars in a television ad supporting the effort, on Wednesday said the ballot measure will affect the entire country.
“There’s a broader principle at stake that has to do with whether or not our democracy can be manipulated by those who are already in power to entrench themselves further,” Obama said. “Or, whether we’re going to have a system that allows the people to decide who’s going to represent them.”
About 51% of the ballots that have been returned to date are from registered Democrats, while 28% are from registered Republicans and 21% are from voters who do not express a party preference.
It’s unknown how these voters cast their ballots, but the Democratic advantage appears to give an edge to supporters of Proposition 50, which needs to be passed by a simple majority to be enacted. About 19.6 million ballots — roughly 85% of those mailed to California voters — are outstanding, though not all are expected to be returned.
The current trend of returned ballots at this point shows Democrats having a small edge over Republicans compared with their share of the California electorate. According to the latest state voter registration report, Democrats account for 45% of California’s registered voters, while Republicans total 25% and “no party preference” voters make up 23%. Californians belonging to other parties make up the remainder.
Mitchell added that another interesting data point is that the mail ballots continue to flow in.
“Usually you see a lull after the first wave — if you don’t mail in your ballot in the first week, it’s going to be sitting on the counter for a while,” Mitchell said. But ballots continue to arrive, possibly encouraged by the “No Kings” protests on Saturday, he said.
A spokesperson for the pro-Proposition 50 campaign said they are taking nothing for granted.
“With millions of ballots still to be cast, we will keep pushing to make sure every Californian understands what’s at stake and turns out to vote yes on Nov. 4th to stop Trump’s power grab,” said spokesperson Hannah Milgrom.
Some Republican leaders have expressed concerns that the GOP early vote may be suppressed by Trump’s past criticism about mail balloting, inaccuracies in the voter guide sent to the state’s 23 million voters and conspiracy theories about the ballot envelope design.
“While ballot initiatives are nonpartisan, many Republicans tend to hold on to their ballots until in-person voting begins,” said Ellie Hockenbury, an advisor to the “No on Prop 50 — Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab” campaign committee. “As this next phase starts — and with nearly two weeks until Election Day — we expect already high turnout to continue rising to defeat Proposition 50 and stop Gavin Newsom’s partisan power grab.”
Amy Thoma, a spokesperson for the other major group opposing the proposition, said the data show that the voters who have returned ballots so far are not representative of the California electorate.
“Special elections tend to be more partisan, older and whiter than general elections, which is one of the reasons we’ve been concerned about the speed with which the politicians pushed this through,” she said.
BATON ROUGE, La. — Women taken into custody by U.S. immigration agents while pregnant say they received inadequate care in a letter Wednesday that calls on the Trump administration to stop holding expectant mothers in federal detention facilities.
The letter to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is part of a broader campaign in recent months by Democrats and immigrant rights groups to draw attention to what they say is the mistreatment of pregnant detainees.
The Department of Homeland Security has defended its care, saying pregnant detainees get regular prenatal visits, mental health services, nutritional support and accommodations “aligned with community standards of care.”
In addition, Homeland Security Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a written statement Wednesday that such detentions are “rare” and involve “elevated oversight and review.” The agency didn’t provide figures on the number of pregnant women in detention, a number Democrats have sought for months.
The letter sent by the American Civil Liberties Union cites accounts from pregnant women who say they were shackled while being transported, placed in solitary confinement for multiple days and given insufficient food and water while detained in Louisiana and Georgia.
The ACLU said that over the last five months it has met with more than a dozen females who were pregnant while in ICE custody — including some who had a miscarriage while detained. The women reported “gravely troubling experiences,” the letter states, including lack of translation during medical encounters and medical neglect. One suffered a “severe” infection after her miscarriage.
In an interview with the Associated Press, one of the women said she was kept in handcuffs while being transported to Louisiana — a journey that lasted five hours and spanned two plane rides. The woman, who has since been released from custody and given birth, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of facing retaliation during her ongoing case.
An officer told her he considered taking off the handcuffs but worried she would escape. “How am I going to escape if I’m pregnant?” the woman said she responded.
She said she felt as if she’d been kidnapped and experienced dizziness, nausea and vaginal bleeding. During her time in detention, she said pregnant women were not offered special diets and described the food as horrible. She alleged that detainees had to “beg” for water and toilet paper.
The ACLU’s letter is the latest call for an investigation into the arrests and treatment of pregnant detainees.
Senate Democrats wrote Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in September, expressing concerns about the “prevalence and treatment” of pregnant, postpartum and nursing women in ICE custody. They demanded that the agency stop detaining such people unless there are “exceptional circumstances.”
“Proper care for pregnancy is a basic human right, regardless of whether you are incarcerated or not and regardless of your immigration status,” said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a California Democrat. She signed on to a Democratic Women’s Caucus letter to Homeland Security officials in July sharing concerns about the “treatment of women” and demanding answers — including how many have given birth while detained.
Kamlager-Dove said she’s working on legislation that would “severely restrict the use of restraints on pregnant, laboring and postpartum women who are in federal custody.”
ICE guidelines already say that agents “should not detain, arrest, or take into custody for an administrative violation of the immigration laws” people “known to be pregnant, postpartum or nursing,” based on a policy sent to the AP by Homeland Security. But the document does state that such people may be detained and held in custody under “exceptional circumstances” or if their release is prohibited by law.
The policy also prohibits using restraints on pregnant detainees, but here too there are exceptions — including if there is a serious threat that the detainee will hurt herself or others, or if “an immediate and credible risk” of escape cannot be “reasonably minimized” through other methods.
Cline and Gonzalez write for the Associated Press. Gonzalez reported from McAllen, Texas.
RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Republican legislative leaders completed their remapping of the state’s U.S. House districts on Wednesday, intent on picking up one more seat to help President Trump’s efforts to retain GOP control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
The new boundaries approved by the state House could thwart the reelection of Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis, who currently represents more than 20 northeastern counties. The state Senate already approved the plan in a party-line vote on Tuesday.
Republicans hold majorities in both General Assembly chambers, and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein is unable under state law to use his veto stamp on redistricting maps. So the GOP’s proposal can now be implemented unless likely litigation by Democrats or voting rights advocates stops it. Candidate filing for 2026 is scheduled to begin Dec. 1.
Republican lawmakers made the intent of their proposed changes crystal clear — it’s an attempt to satisfy Trump’s call for GOP-led states to secure more seats for the party nationwide, so that Congress can continue advancing his agenda. Democrats have responded with rival moves in blue states. A president’s party historically loses seats in midterm elections, and Democrats currently need just three more seats to flip House control.
“The new congressional map improves Republican political strength in eastern North Carolina and will bring in an additional Republican seat to North Carolina’s congressional delegation,” GOP Rep. Brenden Jones said during a debate that Republicans cut off after an hour.
Democratic state Rep. Gloristine Brown, an African American who represents an eastern North Carolina county, made an impassioned floor speech in opposition, saying “You are silencing Black voices and are going against the will of your constituents.”
“North Carolina is a testing ground for the new era of Jim Crow laws,” Brown said.
Republican-led Texas and Missouri already have revised their U.S. House districts to try to help Republicans win additional seats. Democratic-led California reciprocated by asking the state’s voters to approve a map revised to elect more Democrats, and Jones accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of ramping up the redistricting fight.
“We will not let outsiders tell us how to govern, and we will never apologize for doing exactly what the people of this state has elected us to do,” Jones said.
North Carolina’s replacement map would exchange several counties in Davis’ current 1st District with another coastal district. Statewide election data suggests this would favor Republicans winning 11 of 14 House seats, up from the 10 they now hold, in a state where Trump got 51% of the popular vote in 2024.
Davis is one of North Carolina’s three Black representatives. Map critics suggested this latest GOP map could be challenged as an illegal racial gerrymander in a district that has included several majority Black counties, electing African Americans to the U.S. House continuously since 1992.
Davis is already vulnerable — he won his second term by less than 2 percentage points, and the 1st District was one of 13 nationwide where both Trump and a Democratic House member was elected last year, according to the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
Davis on Tuesday called the proposed map “beyond the pale.”
Hundreds of Democratic and liberal activists swarmed the legislative complex this week, blasting GOP legislators for doing Trump’s bidding with what they called a power grab through a speedy and unfair redistricting process.
“If you pass this, your legacy will be shredding the Constitution, destroying democracy,” Karen Ziegler with the grassroots group Democracy Out Loud, told senators this week. She accused the state GOP of “letting Donald Trump decide who represents the people of North Carolina.”
Democrats said this map is a racial gerrymander that will dismantle decades of voting rights progress in North Carolina’s “Black Belt” region. Republicans counter that no racial data was used in forming the districts, and the redrawing was based on political parties, not race.
Based on last week’s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a Louisiana redistricting case, the Democrats may lose this line of attack. A majority of justices appears willing to neuter a key tool of the Voting Rights Act that has protected political boundaries created to help Black and Latino residents elect favored candidates, who have tended to be Democrats.
State GOP leaders say Trump won North Carolina all three times that he’s run for president — albeit narrowly last year — and thus merits more GOP support in Congress. Senate leader Phil Berger called it appropriate “under the law and in conjunction with basically listening to the will of the people.”
SAN FRANCISCO — State Sen. Scott Wiener couldn’t wait any longer. The once-in-a-generation political opening he’d eyed for years had arrived, he decided — whether the grand dame of San Francisco politics agreed or not.
On Wednesday, Wiener, 55, a prolific and ambitious lawmaker, formally announced his candidacy for the San Francisco congressional seat held for nearly four decades by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 85, who remains one of the party’s most powerful leaders and has yet to reveal her own intentions for the 2026 race.
“The world is changing, the Democratic Party is changing, and it’s time,” Wiener said in an interview with The Times. “I know San Francisco, I have worked tirelessly to represent this community — delivering housing, health care, clean energy, LGBTQ and immigrant rights — and I have a fortitude and backbone to be able to deliver for San Francisco in Congress.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) announced Wednesdat that he will run for the congressional seat currently held by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
(Josh Edelson/For The Times)
Wiener’s announcement — which leaked in part last week — caught some political observers off guard, given Wiener had for years seemed resigned to run for Pelosi’s seat only once she stepped aside. But it stunned few, given how squarely it fit within the broader political moment facing the Democratic Party.
In recent years, a long-simmering reckoning over generational power has exploded into the political forefront as members of the party’s old guard have increasingly been accused of holding on too long, and to their party’s detriment.
Long-serving liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruffled many Democratic feathers by declining to step down during Barack Obama’s presidency despite being in her 80s. She subsequently died while still on the court at the age of 87 in 2020, handing President Trump his third appointment to the high court.
Visitors walk past a bust of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein at San Francisco City Hall. The former mayor of San Francisco served in the Senate until she died in 2023 at age 90.
(Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
As a result, age has become an unavoidable tension point for Democrats heading into next year’s midterm elections.
It has also been an issue for Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), 83, the former Senate majority leader who has faced health issues in recent years and is retiring in 2026 after more than 40 years in the Senate. Other older Republicans are facing primary challenges for being perceived as too traditional or insufficiently loyal to Trump or the MAGA movement — including Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), 73 and in office since 2002, and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), 68 and in the Senate since 2015.
For decades, many conservatives have called for congressional term limits in opposition to “career politicians” who cling to power for too long. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and David Trone, a Maryland Democrat, renewed those calls on Wednesday, announcing in an op-ed published in the New York Times that they would co-chair a national campaign to push for term limits.
However, perhaps because they are in power, the calls for a generational shake-up in 2026 have not been nearly as loud on the Republican side.
Democratic Party activists have sounded the alarm about a quickening slide into gerontocracy on the political left, blamed it for their party’s inability to mount an energetic and effective response to Trump and his MAGA movement, and called for younger candidates to take the reins — while congressional leaders in their 70s and 80s have increasingly begun weighing their options in the face of primary challenges.
“It’s fair to say the political appetite for octogenarians is not high,” said Eric Jaye, a veteran Democratic strategist in San Francisco.
“The choice in front of people is not just age,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a 39-year-old tech millionaire and Democratic political operative who is also running for Pelosi’s seat. “We need a whole different approach and different candidates.”
“There’s like this unspoken rule that you don’t do what we’re doing in this moment. You sit out and wait your turn,” said Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang, 40, who has launched a primary challenge to Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento), who is 81 and has been in Congress since 2005. “But I’m not going to wait on the sidelines, because there is an urgency of now.”
A national trend
The generational shift promises to reshape Congress by replacing Democrats across the country, including some who are leaving without a fight.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, 78 and a senator representing New Hampshire since 2009, said in March that it was “time” to step aside.
In Illinois, Sen. Richard Durbin, 80 and a senator since 1997, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, 81 and in the House since 1999, both announced in May that they would not run again. Durbin said it was time “to pass the torch,” while Schakowsky praised younger “voices” in the party as “so sharp.”
Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, 78 and in the House since 1992, announced his retirement last month, saying that “watching the Biden thing really said something about the necessity for generational change in the party.”
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks at a news conference.
(Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Other older Democrats, meanwhile, have shown no intention of stepping aside, or are seeking out new roles in power.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills, 77, recently announced she is running to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is 72 and has been in the Senate since 1997. Mills has tried to soften concerns about her age by promising to serve just one term if elected.
Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, 79 and in the Senate since 2013, has stiffly rebuffed a primary challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton, 46, accusing Moulton of springing a challenge on him amid a shutdown and while he is busy resisting Trump’s agenda.
In Connecticut, Rep. John Larson, 77, who has been in office since 1999 and suffered a complex partial seizure on the House floor in February, has mocked his primary challengers’ message of generational change, telling Axios, “Generational change is fine, but you’ve got to earn it.”
David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., speaks at the 2022 March for Our Lives.
(Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for March For Our Lives)
David Hogg, a 25-year-old liberal activist who was thrust into politics by the 2018 mass shooting at his Parkland, Fla., high school, is among the party’s younger leaders pushing for new blood. He recently declined to seek reelection as the co-vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to bring primary challenges to older Democratic incumbents with his group Leaders We Deserve.
When he announced that decision in June, Hogg called the idea that Democratic leaders can stay in power until they die even if they don’t do a good job an “existential threat to the future of this party and nation.” His group fundraises and disperses money to young candidates it backs.
When asked by The Times about Pelosi and her primary challengers, however, Hogg was circumspect, calling Pelosi “one of the most effective and consequential leaders in the history of the Democratic Party.”
A shift in California
Pelosi is not the only older California incumbent facing a primary challenge. In addition to Matsui, the list also includes Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Porter Ranch), who is 70 and has been in office since 1997, and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), who is 74 and has been in office since 1999.
But Pelosi’s challenges have attracted more attention, perhaps in part because her departure from Congress would be the clearest sign yet that the generational shift sought by younger party activists is fully underway.
Nancy Pelosi is sworn in as House speaker in 2007, surrounded by her grandchildren and children of other members of Congress.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
A trailblazer as the first female speaker of the House, Pelosi presided over two Trump impeachments. While no longer in leadership, she remains incredibly influential as an arm-twister and strategist.
She played a central role in sidelining Biden after his debate meltdown, and for the last couple months has been raising big money — a special skill of hers — in support of California’s Proposition 50. The measure seeks voter approval to redraw California’s congressional districts to better favor Democrats in response to Trump’s pressure campaign on Texas and other red states to redraw their lines in favor of Republicans.
Pelosi has used Prop. 50 in recent days to deflect questions about her primary challengers and her plans for 2026, with her spokesman Ian Krager saying she “is fully focused” on the Prop 50 fight and will be through Nov. 4.
Chakrabarti, who helped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) unseat a longtime Democratic incumbent in 2019, said he sees even more “appetite for change” among the party’s base today — as evidenced by “mainstream Democrats who have voted for Nancy Pelosi their whole life” showing up to his events.
And it makes sense, he said.
For decades, Americans have watched the cost of essentials skyrocket while their wages have remained relatively flat, Chakrabarti said, and that has made them desperate to support messages of “bold, sweeping economic change” — whether from Obama or Trump — even as long-serving, mainstream Democrats backed by corporate money have worked to maintain the status quo.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leaves a news conference at the Capitol in 2019. At left is Saikat Chakrabarti, who was her chief of staff and is now a candidate for the congressional seat held by Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag)
He said it is time for Democrats to once again push bold, big ideas, which he plans to do — including Medicare for all, universal child care, free college tuition, millions of new units of affordable housing, a new economy built around climate action, and higher taxes on billionaires and mega-millionaires like him.
Wiener, who also backs Prop. 50 and would be the first out gay person to represent San Francisco in Congress, said he cannot speak to Pelosi’s thinking — or to Politico reporting Wednesday that Pelosi is considering dropping out and backing San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan in the race — but is confident in his readiness for the role.
Wiener agreed with Chakrabarti that big ideas are needed from Democrats to win back voters and make progress. He also said that his track record in the state Legislature shows that he has “been willing to take on very, very big fights to make significant progressive change.”
“No one has ever accused me of thinking small,” he said — citing his success in passing bills to create more affordable housing, reform health insurance and drug pricing, tackle net neutrality, challenge telecommunications and cable companies and protect LGBTQ+ and other minority communities and immigrants.
“In addition to having the desire to make big progressive change, in addition to talking about big progressive change, you have to be able to put together the coalitions to deliver on that change, because words are not enough,” Wiener said. “I’ve shown over and over again that I know how to do it, and that I can deliver.”
Political analysts said a message of big ideas will clearly resonate with some voters. But they also said that Pelosi, if she stays in the race, will be hard to beat. She will also face more serious questions than ever about her age and “her ability to function at the extraordinarily high level” she has worked at in years past, Jaye said, and will “have to answer those questions.”
If Pelosi decides not to run, Chakrabarti has the benefit of self-funding and of the current party enthusiasm for fresh faces, they said, and anyone — Chan or otherwise — would benefit from a Pelosi endorsement. But Wiener already has a strong base in the district, a track record for getting legislation passed and, as several observers pointed out, a seemingly endless battery.
“Scott Wiener is an animal. The notion of work-life balance is not a concept he has ever had. He is just like a robotic working machine,” said Aaron Peskin, who served 18 years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, some alongside Wiener.
Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Oakland) speaks to reporters at the Capitol in September.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, which supports young progressive candidates, said there is pent-up demand for a new generation of leaders, and “older Democrats, especially those in Congress, need to ask themselves, ‘Am I the best person to lead this party forward right now?’”
Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Oakland), 48, won her seat in 2024 after longtime Rep. Barbara Lee, 79, who had been in the seat since 1998, decided to run for Oakland mayor. Simon said that to her, “it’s not necessarily about birthdays” but who can do the job — “who can govern, who can mentor and who can hold this administration accountable.”
As a longtime community activist who worked with youth, Simon said she is “extremely excited” by all the energy of young Democratic office seekers. But as a freshman in Congress who has leaned on Lee, Pelosi and other mentors to help her learn the ropes, she said it’s also clear Democrats need to “have some generals who are really, really tried and tested.”
“What is not helpful to me in this moment,” Simon said, “is for the Democrats to be a circular firing squad.”
RALEIGH, N.C. — Democrats rallying Tuesday against a new U.S. House map proposed by North Carolina Republicans seeking another GOP seat at President Trump’s behest acknowledged they’ll probably be unable to halt the redraw for now. But they vowed to defeat the plan in the long run.
The new map offered by Republican legislative leaders seeks to stop the reelection of Democratic Rep. Don Davis, one of North Carolina’s three Black representatives, by redrawing two of the state’s 14 congressional districts. Statewide election data suggest the proposal would result in Republicans winning 11 of those seats, up from the current 10.
The proposal attempts to satisfy Trump’s call for states led by Republicans to conduct mid-decade redistricting to gain more seats and retain his party’s grip on Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. Democrats need to gain just three more seats to seize control of the House, and the president’s party historically has lost seats in midterm elections.
With Republicans in the majority in both General Assembly chambers and state law preventing Democratic Gov. Josh Stein from using his veto stamp against a redistricting plan, the GOP-drawn map appeared headed to enactment after final House votes as soon as Wednesday. The state Senate gave its final approval early Tuesday on a party-line vote. A House redistricting committee debated the plan later Tuesday.
Still, about 300 protesters, Democratic Party officials and lawmakers gathering outside the old state Capitol pledged repeatedly Tuesday that redrawing the congressional map would have negative consequences for the GOP at the ballot box in 2026 and beyond. Litigation to challenge the enactment on the map also is likely on allegations of unlawful racial gerrymandering.
“We know we may not have the ability to stop the Republicans in Raleigh right now … but we are here to show that people across this state and across this nation are watching them,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said to cheers.
The gathering served Democrats to censure state Republicans they accuse of agreeing to kneel to Trump through a corrupt redrawing of district lines to target Davis.
State GOP leaders defended their action, saying Trump has won the state’s electoral votes all three times that he’s run for president — albeit narrowly — and thus merits more potential support in Congress.
The national redistricting battle began over the summer when Trump urged Republican-led Texas to reshape its U.S. House districts. After Texas lawmakers acted, California Democrats reciprocated by passing their own plan, which still needs voter approval in November.
Republicans argue that other Democratic-leaning states had already given themselves a disproportionate number of seats well before this national redistricting fight started.
“It is incumbent upon us to react to this environment, to respond to this environment, and not let these tactics that have happened in blue states dominate the control of Congress,” state Sen. Ralph Hise, the map’s chief author, said during Tuesday’s Senate debate.
Seminera and Robertson write for the Associated Press.
WASHINGTON — In a day of bitter partisan skirmishing, President Trump’s allies and his Democratic antagonists took to the nation’s talk shows Sunday to present stridently opposing views of the impeachment inquiry that hit Washington last week like a tornado, sweeping nearly all other priorities aside.
The sharply dueling narratives showed that the impeachment battle will be one of bitter political messaging as much as impartial sifting of evidence. Initial polls showed a majority of Americans approve of the inquiry — but no national consensus on how to assess the president’s actions.
While the president spent the day golfing, his allies angrily attacked the legitimacy of the House inquiry, excoriated the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the crisis, and repeated debunked allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.
Trump later upped the ante on Twitter, leveling an incendiary charge against Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee that is spearheading the impeachment process. Schiff, the president wrote, should be “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.”
Democrats pushed back, saying that if the whistleblower’s complaint is borne out, Trump’s misconduct was egregious enough to merit ouster from office.
“This is classic abuse of power. This is as serious as it gets,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic caucus, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
At issue is whether Trump abused his authority for personal gain, and put national security at risk, by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in promised military aid to Ukraine while urging its president to do him a “favor” by digging up dirt on his potential Democratic rival in the 2020 election.
Schiff said lawmakers had reached an agreement with the whistleblower who filed an anonymous complaint about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and subsequent White House efforts to “lock down” evidence, to testify behind closed doors.
Schiff did not give a date, but said he expects it as soon as the individual’s lawyers are granted an appropriate security clearing to attend the hearing. “We’ll get the unfiltered testimony of that whistleblower,” Schiff said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“We are taking all the precautions we can to protect the whistleblower’s identity,” Schiff added. “With President Trump’s threats, you can imagine the security concerns here.”
Mark Zaid, one of the lawyers representing the whistleblower, tweeted, “We continue to work w/both parties in House & Senate & we understand all agree protecting whistleblower’s identity is paramount.” He added that no date or time had been set for the testimony.
Schiff, asked if Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a central figure in the impeachment storm, would also be called to testify, said it was too soon to say.
“I don’t want to commit myself to that at this point,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We certainly need to do a lot of work to find out what Giuliani has been doing in Ukraine.”
Giuliani, a private citizen who claims the State Department approved his back-channel dealings with Ukrainian officials on Trump’s behalf, said during a testy exchange on ABC’s “This Week” that he “wouldn’t cooperate” with Schiff.
He derided Schiff, who has served nearly two decades in the House, as an “illegitimate chairman” who “wants to hang the president.”
Stephen Miller, a senior White House aide who has mounted scorched-earth campaigns for Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown, branded the whistleblower’s complaint a “little Nancy Drew novel” that “drips with condemnation, condescension and contempt for the president.”
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Miller called the whistleblower “a saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government,” and endorsed Trump’s menacing characterization of the whistleblower — made in a closed-door meeting in New York last week — as “close to a spy.”
The acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, told Schiff’s committee last week that the whistleblower, who is reportedly a CIA analyst who was assigned to the White House, had acted “in good faith” and had followed the law.
Republicans have generally stood behind Trump, but in an administration beset by near-constant turnover and turmoil, some former White House officials began to venture criticism.
Trump’s former homeland security advisor, Tom Bossert, told ABC’s “This Week” that “it is a bad day and a bad week for the president and for this country if he is asking for political dirt on an opponent.”
But Trump’s staunchest congressional supporters — including Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.), who once called Biden “as good a man as God ever created” — sought to counter allegations against Trump by insisting it was the Democratic presidential candidate whose actions needed investigating.
Giuliani and other Trump supporters have repeatedly claimed that in 2016, Biden, then vice president, acted improperly to help his son, Hunter, by pushing for the firing of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, the country’s senior law enforcement official.
The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was ousted at the request of not only the Obama administration but also the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, who were seeking to stem corruption in Ukraine and believed Shokin was obstructing that work.
Shokin had once looked into the oligarch who owned Burisma, the energy company that had given a lucrative job to Hunter Biden, but the younger Biden was not the target or accused of any wrongdoing. In any case, the probe was already dormant when Shokin was pushed out.
Graham said on “Face the Nation” Sunday that “I love Joe Biden” but added, “somebody ought to look at whether or not Joe Biden had the prosecutor fired, and in a proper way.” Graham also said the whistleblower’s complaint “smells to high heaven.”
Sen. Christopher S. Murphy (D-Conn.), who recently traveled to Ukraine, said attacks on the former vice president were groundless, noting that no evidence of any criminal conduct has emerged in either Ukraine or the U.S.
“All these insinuations around Joe Biden — there is zero evidence for the claims the president is making,” Murphy said, describing them as a deliberate attempt to distract attention from Trump’s own comments in his July phone call to Zelensky.
“The whistleblower complaint is absolutely credible, but frankly you don’t need it because you have a transcript of a conversation in which the president of the United States tried to convince a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election,” he said.
“And you have Rudy Giuliani on TV every morning and every night, openly admitting that as an agent of the president’s campaign, he has been coordinating with the State Department in order to try to perpetuate the president’s political agenda,” Murphy added. “This is not allowable in a democracy.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a stark warning Monday that food assistance benefits for millions of low-income Californians could be delayed starting Nov. 1 if the ongoing federal shutdown does not end by Thursday.
The benefits, issued under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and formerly called food stamps, include federally funded benefits loaded onto CalFresh cards. They support some 5.5 million Californians.
Newsom blamed the potential SNAP disruption — and the shutdown more broadly — on President Trump and slammed the timing of the potential cutoff just as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches.
“Trump’s failure to open the federal government is now endangering people’s lives and making basic needs like food more expensive — just as the holidays arrive,” Newsom said. “It is long past time for Republicans in Congress to grow a spine, stand up to Trump, and deliver for the American people.”
The White House responded by blaming the shutdown on Democrats, as it has done before.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said the “Democrats’ decision to shut down the government is hurting Americans across the country,” and that Democrats “can choose to reopen the government at any point” by voting for a continuing resolution to fund the government as budget negotiations continue, which she said they repeatedly did during the Biden administration.
“Newscum should urge his Democrat pals to stop hurting the American people,” Jackson said, using a favorite Trump insult for Newsom. “The Trump Administration is working day and night to mitigate the pain Democrats are causing, and even that is upsetting the Left, with many Democrats criticizing the President’s effort to pay the troops and fund food assistance for women and children.”
Congressional Republicans also have blamed the shutdown and resulting interruptions to federal programs on Democrats, who are refusing to vote for a Republican-backed funding measure based in large part on Republican decisions to eliminate subsidies for healthcare plans relied on by millions of Americans.
Newsom’s warning about SNAP benefits followed similar alerts from other states on both sides of the political aisle, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned state agencies in an Oct. 10 letter that the shutdown may interrupt funding for the benefits.
States have to take action to issue November benefits before the month ends, so the shutdown would have to end sooner than Nov. 1 for the benefits to be available in time.
Newsom’s office said Californians could see their benefits interrupted or delayed if the shutdown is not ended by Thursday. The Texas Health and Human Services Department warned that SNAP benefits for November “won’t be issued if the federal government shutdown continues past Oct. 27.”
Newsom’s office said a cutoff of funds would affect federally funded CalFresh benefits, but also some other state-funded benefits. More than 63% of SNAP recipients in California are children or elderly people, Newsom’s office said.
In her own statement, First Partner of California Jennifer Siebel Newsom said, “Government should be measured by how we protect people’s lives, their health, and their well-being. Parents and caregivers should not be forced to choose between buying groceries or paying bills.”
States were already gearing up for other changes to SNAP eligibility based on the Republican-passed “Big Beautiful Bill,” which set new limits on SNAP benefits, including for nonworking adults. Republicans have argued that such restrictions will encourage more able-bodied adults to get back into the workforce to support their families themselves.
Many Democrats and advocacy organizations that work to protect low-income families and children have argued that restricting SNAP benefits has a disproportionately large effect on some of the most vulnerable people in the country, including poor children.
According to the USDA, about 41.7 million Americans were served by SNAP benefits per month in fiscal 2024, at an annual cost of nearly $100 billion. The USDA has some contingency funding it can utilize to continue benefits in the short term, but does not have enough to cover all monthly benefits, advocates said.
Andrew Cheyne, managing director of public policy at the advocacy group End Child Poverty California, urged the USDA to utilize its contingency funding and any other funding stream possible to prevent a disruption to SNAP benefits, which he said would be “disastrous.”
“CalFresh is a lifeline for 5.5 million Californians who rely on the program to eat. That includes 2 million children. It is unconscionable that we are only days away from children and families not knowing where their next meal is going to come from,” Cheyne said.
He said the science is clear that “even a brief period of food insecurity has long-term consequences for children’s growth and development.”
Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, said a disruption would be “horrific.”
“We speak out for the needs of kids and families, and kids need food — basic support to live and function and go to school,” he said. “So this could be really devastating.”
Times staff writer Jenny Gold contributed to this report.
U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) visited three Black churches in Los Angeles on Sunday morning to campaign for California’s redistricting effort, which could add five or six Democratic representatives to his ranks.
Amid a congressional deadlock over healthcare subsidies that has left the government shut down for more than two weeks, the minority leader returned to the Golden State to campaign for Proposition 50. The ballot measure would give his party more power against Republicans, who Jeffries said have refused to negotiate in the shutdown and otherwise.
“This is trouble all around us,” Jeffries told the congregation at First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles in West Adams — after poking fun at President Trump’s 2016 gaffe misspronouncing a book of the Bible. “Folks in the government who would rather shut the government down than give healthcare to everyday Americans. Wickedness in high places. And now they want to gerrymander the congressional maps all across the country to try to rig the midterm elections.”
The packed congregation — most wearing pink to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month — were receptive to his message.
“This is a way of trying to keep things equal,” said Kim Balogun, who was in Sunday’s crowd. “A level playing field.”
For many of its members, First AME is more than just a church. As the city’s oldest African American congregation, it has been at the forefront of the fight for civil rights since its founding in 1872.
“This is family,” said Toni Scott, a retired special-education teacher who has been with First AME for 52 years. “As one of the church’s previous ministers used to say, ‘This is a hospital. People are sick; we come to be healed,’” she said.
When news reached L.A. that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison, South African immigrants and anti-apartheid activists flocked to the church, anxiously awaiting the first sights of Mandela walking free. During the 1992 riots, First AME was a bastion of hope amid a sea of chaos.
“We thank you, God, for bringing us through dark times and chaotic times,” the Rev. Charolyn Jones said to the congregation on Sunday, “knowing that our church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was born out of protest.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, left, greets parishioners at First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. “It’s an honor and a privilege to spend time worshiping at Black churches here with Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove to reinforce the message of the importance of voting yes on Proposition 50,” Jeffries said.
(Ethan Swope / For The Times)
For Jeffries, the first Black person to lead a major political party in Congress, the West Coast trip amid a congressional impasse was important.
“The African American churchgoing community has always been the foundation of the Black experience in the United States of America,” Jeffries said, who also visited the congregations of Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in South L.A. and Resurrection Church of Los Angeles in Carson. “It’s an honor and a privilege to spend time worshiping at Black churches here with Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove to reinforce the message of the importance of voting yes on Proposition 50.”
The state’s redistricting effort, Proposition 50, is part of a national fight over control of the U.S. House of Representatives, instigated by President Trump. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, but in June, Trump began pushing Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps to yield five more likely GOP seats.
In response, Newsom proposed California temporarily depose of its independent redistricting commission, led by 14 citizens, to redraw the state’s maps and add five Democratic seats, effectively canceling out Texas’s move.
The Democratic-controlled state Legislature quickly produced redrawn maps and scheduled a Nov. 4 special election to put them up for a vote. Mail-in ballots are already in the hands of voters.
California Republicans, including former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, have slammed the initiative as a “big scam.” Schwarzenegger called Democrats hypocritical, arguing that while they call Trump a “threat to democracy,” they want to “tear up the Constitution of California” and “take the power away from the people and give it back to the politicians.”
Jeffries noted that California was letting its citizens ultimately decide — unlike some Republican-led states.
“We said from the very beginning that we want to find bipartisan common ground whenever possible, but unfortunately, Republicans, from the beginning of this presidency, have adopted a take-it-or-leave-it, go-at-it-alone strategy,” he said, which is part of why, he added, Proposition 50 is so important.
In the current shutdown, Democrats said they will not vote for a funding bill unless it extends tax credits in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire for many Americans at the end of the year and reverses cuts to Medicaid that Republicans passed in July’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
If the ACA credits expire, premiums would on average more than double for Americans on the enhanced tax credit, one health policy research firm found. But Republicans point out they come with a price: The Congressional Budget Office estimates they would cost the government $350 billion over the next decade.
The bill, which is now law, will cut Medicaid spending by $793 billion, the CBO estimated, and lead to 7.8 million Americans losing their insurance.
On the government shutdown, Richard Balogun, a member of Sunday’s First AME congregation, thinks fighting for healthcare is a worthwhile cause.
“Isn’t it amazing that in England, Australia … you can have national healthcare? Maybe you don’t get treated within the first hour, but you get treated,” he said. In America, “you have to ask yourself sometimes, if I’m going to the emergency room, can I afford that thousands of dollars I’m going to have to pay? That should not be the case in this country.”
A government shutdown has consequences: 2.3 million civilian federal employees are going without pay — roughly 750,000 of whom are furloughed. When the employees are back-paid after the government reopens, that’ll correspond to roughly $400 million of taxpayer money spent every day of the shutdown to pay employees who were not working, the CBO estimates.
Beyond National Park closures and air travel delays, food programs for low-income families could run dry without a funding bill. The Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC) can see effects as soon as one week after a shutdown, the CEO of the National WIC Assn. said. Meanwhile, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) could also run out of funding further down the line.
Republicans blame Democrats for shutting down the government over their healthcare concerns, but Jeffries pinned it on Republicans, who’ve refused to negotiate.
To Scott, the pink her congregation was wearing to support breast cancer survivors only emphasized the importance of access to healthcare. (Jeffries sported a pink tie.)
“More people need to know what’s going on, so just having him go from church to church, mostly in the Black neighborhoods — that’s where we have the most people: in our churches,” Scott said. “Some may hear the word, see something on fake news, but we know in the church you’re going to hear truth.”
WASHINGTON — Protesting the direction of the country under President Trump, people gathered Saturday in the nation’s capital and hundreds of communities across the U.S. for “ No Kings ” demonstrations.
This is the third mass mobilization since Trump’s return to the White House and comes against the backdrop of a government shutdown that not only has closed federal programs and services, but is testing the core balance of power as an aggressive executive confronts Congress and the courts in ways that organizers warn are a slide toward American authoritarianism.
Trump himself is away from Washington at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
“They say they’re referring to me as a king. I’m not a king,” Trump said in a Fox News interview airing early Friday, before he departed for a $1-million-per-plate MAGA Inc. super PAC fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. Protests were expected nearby Saturday.
More than 2,600 rallies are planned Saturday in cities large and small, organized by hundreds of coalition partners.
Republicans are countering the nationwide street demonstrations by calling them “hate America” protests.
A growing opposition movement
While the earlier protests this year — against Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts in spring, then to counter Trump’s military parade in June — drew crowds, organizers say this one is building a more unified opposition movement. Top Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and progressive leader Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are joining in what organizers view as an antidote to Trump’s actions, including the administration’s clampdown on free speech and its military-style immigration raids in American cities.
“There is no greater threat to an authoritarian regime than patriotic people-power,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, among the key organizers.
As Republicans and the White House try to characterize the mass protests as a rally of radicals, Levin said the sign-up numbers are growing. Organizers said rallies are being planned within a one-hour drive for most Americans.
Rallies were also held in major European cities, where gatherings of a few hundred Americans chanted slogans and held signs and U.S. flags.
‘Crooks and con men’ and fears of police response
Retired family doctor Terence McCormally was heading to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia to join up with others Saturday morning and walk across the Memorial Bridge that enters Washington directly in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He thought the protests would be peaceful but said the recent deployment of the National Guard makes him more leery about the police than he used to be.
“I really don’t like the crooks and con men and religious zealots who are trying to use the country” for personal gain, McCormally said, “while they are killing and hurting millions of people with bombs.”
Republicans denounce rallies
Republicans have sought to portray participants in Saturday’s rallies as far outside the mainstream of American politics, and a main reason for the prolonged government shutdown, now in its 18th day.
From the White House to Capitol Hill, GOP leaders disparaged the rallygoers as “communists” and “Marxists.”
They say Democratic leaders, including Schumer, are beholden to the far-left flank and willing to keep the government shut down to appease those liberal forces.
“I encourage you to watch — we call it the ‘Hate America’ rally — that will happen Saturday,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“Let’s see who shows up for that,” Johnson said, saying he expected attendees to include “antifa types,” people who “hate capitalism” and “Marxists in full display.”
In a Facebook post, Sanders said, “It’s a love America rally.”
“It’s a rally of millions of people all over this country who believe in our Constitution, who believe in American freedom and,” he said, pointing at the GOP leadership, “are not going to let you and Donald Trump turn this country into an authoritarian society.”
Democrats in Congress have refused to vote on legislation that would reopen the government as they demand funding for healthcare, which has been imperiled by the massive GOP spending bill passed this summer. Republicans say they are willing to discuss the issue only after the government reopens.
But for many Democrats, the government closure is also a way to stand up to Trump and try to push the presidency back to its place in the U.S. system as a coequal branch of government.
The situation is a potential turnaround from just six months ago, when Democrats and their allies were divided and despondent, unsure about how best to respond to Trump’s return to the White House. Schumer in particular was sharply criticized by many in his party for allowing an earlier government funding bill to sail through the Senate without using it to challenge Trump.
In April, the national march against Trump and Musk — who was then leading the White House government-slashing group known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — had 1,300 registered locations. In June, for the first “No Kings” day, there were 2,100 registered locations.
“What we are seeing from the Democrats is some spine,” Levin said. “The worst thing the Democrats could do right now is surrender.”
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said he wasn’t sure if he would join the rallygoers Saturday, but he took issue with the Republicans’ characterization of the events.
“What’s hateful is what happened on Jan. 6,” he said, referring to the 2021 Capitol attack, in which a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the building in an attempt to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden. “What you’ll see this weekend is what patriotism looks like.”
Mascaro, Riddle and Freking write for the Associated Press. Riddle reported from Montgomery, Ala. AP writer Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.
State Sen. Scott Wiener is a strategic and effective legislator who rarely lets emotion make his decisions — much like Nancy Pelosi, whose congressional seat he would like to take.
It has been a wide-open secret for years that Wiener wanted to make a run for federal office when or if Pelosi retired, but he’s also been deferential to the elder stateswoman of California politics and has made it equally clear that he would wait his turn in the brutal and parochial machine of San Francisco politics.
Until now.
The San Francisco Standard broke the news Thursday that Wiener is running on the 2026 ballot, though he has yet to formally announce.
It is news that shocked even those deep in the dog-eat-dog world of S.F. politics and ignited the inevitable news cycle about whether Pelosi (who was instrumental in removing President Biden from the 2024 race for age-related issues) is being Bidened herself. It also ensures a contentious race that will be nationally watched by both MAGA and the progressive left, both of which take issue with Wiener.
Oh, the drama.
Take it for what you will, but a few months after having hip replacement surgery, Pelosi is (literally) back in her stiletto heels and raising beaucoup dollars for Proposition 50, the ballot initiative meant to gerrymander California voting maps to counteract a GOP cheat-fest in Texas.
Yes, she’s 85, but she’s no Joe. She is also, however, no spring chicken. So the national debate on whether Democrats need not just fresh but younger candidates has officially landed in the City by the Bay, though Wiener remains both practical and polite enough to not frame it that way.
He’ll leave that to the journalists, who have hounded Pelosi for months to announce whether she will seek another term, a question she has declined to directly answer. Instead, her team has focused on the looming election for Proposition 50 and said any announcement on her future has to wait after the ballots are counted.
To be fair to Pelosi, she’s gone all-in to both fundraise and campaign for the redistricting effort, and its passage is essential to Democrats having even a shot at winning back any power in the midterms.
If Prop. 50 fails, there is no non-miracle path, except perhaps an unexpected blue wave, through which Democrats can retake a chamber. So Nov. 4 isn’t an arbitrary date. It will determine if there is any possibility of checking Trump’s power grab, and preserving democracy. Personally, I don’t fault Pelosi for being engaged in that fight.
To also be fair to Wiener, his decision to announce now was probably driven more by money and political momentum than by Pelosi’s age.
That’s because Pelosi already has a challenger — the ultra-wealthy progressive Saikat Chakrabarti, a startup millionaire who served as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign manager during her first upset win for Congress in 2018. Chakrabarti has long been an antagonist to Pelosi, and recently announced his candidacy, positioning himself as a disrupter.
In 2019, before the House impeached Trump over his questionable actions involving Ukraine, Chakrabarti tweeted, “Pelosi claims we can’t focus on impeachment because it’s a distraction from kitchen table issues. But I’d challenge you to find voters that can name a single thing House Democrats have done for their kitchen table this year. What is this legislative mastermind doing?”
Chakrabarti, who was born the year before Pelosi was first elected to Congress in 1987, has self-funded his campaign with $700,000 and has the financial ability to spend much more. Wiener, in his on-the-down-low shadow campaign, has raised a bit over $1 million, not nearly enough. The primary will be in June and it will be expensive.
Though we have yet to reach Halloween, a stroll down the aisles of any big box store can tell you that Christmas is neigh, a season when fundraising becomes harder — putting pressure on Wiener to raise money as quickly as possible before the winter freeze.
Add to that pressure the fact that Chakrabarti has political skills and growing popularity. He was the tech architect behind a successful push to activate volunteers for both AOC and Bernie Sanders.
An internal poll released a few months ago (and any internal poll must be viewed skeptically) showed Chakrabarti drawing 34% of voters to Pelosi’s 47%. His numbers increased as voters learned more about him — a few have even compared him to New York’s socialist wonder-kid Zohran Mamdani, currently running for mayor against Andrew Cuomo.
The problem with that is that Wiener is not Cuomo. He’s a progressive himself, and one with an established track record of getting stuff done, often progressive stuff.
I’ve watched him for years push ambitious agendas through the statehouse, including bills where I would have bet against him.
Most recently, he wrote the state’s ban on cops, including ICE, wearing masks. Although the feds have said they will ignore the new law, recently signed by Newsom, and it will almost certainly end up in court, it is a worthy message to send about secret police in America.
Wiener also this term passed a controversial housing bill that will increase density around transit hubs, and spearheaded a bill to regulate artificial intelligence.
He has also passed numerous laws protecting immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights, which has made him a favorite target of the far right. He has received death threats on a regular basis for years, including one from an anti-vaxxer who was convicted on seven counts in 2022 after threatening Wiener and being found in possession of weapons. Wiener doesn’t have Pelosi’s charisma, but he has receipts for getting the job done and handling the vicious vitriol of modern politics.
Unlike Chakrabarti, Wiener has also been a part of San Francisco’s insular community for decades, and has his own base of support — though he is considered a moderate to Chakrabarti’s progressiveness. This is where San Francisco gets wonderfully weird. In nearly any other place, Wiener would be solidly left. But some of his constituents view him as too developer-friendly for his housing policies and have criticized his past policies around expanding conservatorships for mentally ill people.
But still, a recent poll done by EMC research but not released publicly found that 61% of likely primary voters have a favorable opinion of Wiener. That vastly outpaces the 21% that said the same about Chakrabarti or even the 21% who liked Pelosi’s daughter, Christine Pelosi, who has also been mentioned as a possible successor.
Which is all to say that Wiener is in a now-or-never moment. He has popularity but needs momentum and cash. The Democratic Party is in a mess, and the old rules are out the window, even in San Francisco.
So waiting for Pelosi had become a little bit like waiting for Godot, a self-imposed limbo that was more likely to lead to frustration than victory.
WASHINGTON — President Trump is showing little urgency to broker a compromise that would end the government shutdown, even as Democrats insist no breakthrough is possible without his direct involvement.
Three weeks in, Congress is at a standstill. The House hasn’t been in session for a month, and senators left Washington on Thursday frustrated by the lack of progress. Republican leaders are refusing to negotiate until a short-term funding bill to reopen the government is passed, while Democrats say they won’t agree without guarantees on extending health insurance subsidies.
For now, Trump appears content to stay on the sidelines.
He spent the week celebrating an Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal he led, hosted a remembrance event for conservative activist Charlie Kirk and refocused attention on the Russia-Ukraine war. Meanwhile, his administration has been managing the shutdown in unconventional ways, continuing to pay the troops while laying off other federal employees.
Asked Thursday whether he was willing to deploy his dealmaking background on the shutdown, Trump seemed uninterested.
“Well, look, I mean, all we want to do is just extend. We don’t want anything, we just want to extend, live with the deal they had,” he said in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office. Later Thursday, he criticized Democratic health care demands as “crazy,” adding, “We’re just not going to do it.”
Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that Democrats must first vote to reopen the government, “then we can have serious conversations about health care.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune echoed that approach before leaving for the weekend, saying Trump is “ready to weigh in and sit down with the Democrats or whomever, once the government opens up.”
Thune said he’d also be willing to talk, but only after the shutdown ends.
“I am willing to sit down with Democrats,” Thune posted on social media Friday.
“But there’s one condition: End the Schumer Shutdown. I will not negotiate under hostage conditions, nor will I pay a ransom,” he added.
Frustration is beginning to surface among rank-and-file Republicans, with bipartisan conversations breaking out on the Senate floor as members look for ways to move things forward. Still, even those Republicans admit little happens in Congress without Trump’s direction.
Leaving the Capitol on Thursday, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said, “We’re not making much headway this week.” For things to progress, Murkowski acknowledged Trump may need to get more involved: “I think he’s an important part of it.”
“I think there are some folks in his administration that are kind of liking the fact that Congress really has no role right now,” she added. “I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.”
Trump has not been slowed by the shutdown
While Congress has been paralyzed by the shutdown, Trump has moved rapidly to enact his vision of the federal government.
He has called budget chief Russ Vought the “grim reaper,” and Vought has taken the opportunity to withhold billions of dollars for infrastructure projects and lay off thousands of federal workers, signaling that workforce reductions could become even more drastic.
At the same time, the administration has acted unilaterally to fund Trump’s priorities, including paying the military this week, easing pressure on what could have been one of the main deadlines to end the shutdown.
Some of these moves, particularly the layoffs and funding shifts, have been criticized as illegal and are facing court challenges. A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the administration from firing workers during the shutdown, ruling that the cuts appeared politically motivated and were carried out without sufficient justification.
And with Congress focused on the funding fight, lawmakers have had little time to debate other issues.
In the House, Johnson has said the House won’t return until Democrats approve the funding bill and has refused to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva. Democrats say the move is to prevent her from becoming the 218th signature on a discharge petition aimed at forcing a vote on releasing documents related to the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
So far, the shutdown has shown little impact on public opinion.
An AP-NORC poll released Thursday found that 3 in 10 U.S. adults have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Democratic Party, similar to an AP-NORC poll from September. Four in 10 have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Republican Party, largely unchanged from last month.
Democrats want Trump at the table. Republicans would rather he stay out
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries have said Republicans have shown little seriousness in negotiating an end to the shutdown.
“Leader Thune has not come to me with any proposal at this point,” Schumer said Thursday.
Frustrated with congressional leaders, Democrats are increasingly looking to Trump.
At a CNN town hall Wednesday night featuring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both repeatedly called for the president’s involvement when asked why negotiations had stalled.
“President Trump is not talking. That is the problem,” Sanders said.
Ocasio-Cortez added that Trump should more regularly “be having congressional leaders in the White House.”
Democrats’ focus on Trump reflects both his leadership style — which allows little to happen in Congress without his approval — and the reality that any funding bill needs the president’s signature to become law.
This time, however, Republican leaders who control the House and Senate are resisting any push for Trump to intervene.
“You can’t negotiate when somebody’s got a hostage,” said South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, who added that Trump getting involved would allow Democrats to try the same tactic in future legislative fights.
Trump has largely followed that guidance. After previously saying he would be open to negotiating with Democrats on health insurance subsidies, he walked it back after Republican leaders suggested he misspoke.
And that’s unlikely to change for now. Trump has no plans to personally intervene to broker a deal with Democrats, according to a senior White House official granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. The official added that the only stopgap funding bill that Democrats can expect is the one already on the table.
“The President is happy to have a conversation about health care policy, but he will not do so while the Democrats are holding the American people hostage,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Thursday.
A product of the Congress Trump has molded
In his second term, Trump has taken a top-down approach, leaving little in Congress to move without his approval.
“What’s obvious to me is that Mike Johnson and John Thune don’t do much without Donald Trump telling them what to do,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
His hold is particularly strong in the GOP-led House, where Speaker Mike Johnson effectivelyowes his job to Trump, and relies on his influence to power through difficult legislative fights.
When Republicans have withheld votes on Trump’s priorities in Congress, he’s called them on the phone or summoned them to his office to directly sway them. When that doesn’t work, he has vowed to unseat them in the next election. It’s led many Democrats to believe the only path to an agreement runs through the White House and not through the speaker’s office.
Democrats also want assurances from the White House that they won’t backtrack on an agreement. The White House earlier this year cut out the legislative branch entirely with a $4.9 billion cut to foreign aid in August through a legally dubious process known as a “pocket rescission.” And before he even took office late last year, Trump and ally Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan funding agreement that both parties had negotiated.
“I think we need to see ink on paper. I think we need to see legislation. I think we need to see votes,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “I don’t accept pinky promises. That’s not the business that I’m in.”
Both parties also see little reason to fold under public pressure, believing they are winning the messaging battle.
“Everybody thinks they’re winning,” Murkowski said. “Nobody is winning when everybody’s losing. And that’s what’s happening right now. The American public is losing.”
Cappelletti and Kim write for the Associated Press. AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
It was an overcast Sunday in June, the WeHo Pride parade was in full swing and the hit song about an iconic West Hollywood gay bar was blasting at full volume.
Sure, the county supervisor’s sequined, rainbow muumuu was giving her an angry rash. But that did little to dampen her spirits as she danced atop her pink pony-themed Pride float, swaying and mouthing the lyrics.
Five hours later, Horvath had traded her sequins and rainbow sneakers for a simple black dress and heels.
Now, she sat on a wooden pew for evening Mass at her 121-year-old Catholic parish in Hollywood.
But she still knew all the words, albeit this time to a traditional hymn about the holiness of the Lord. And then she knelt down in quiet prayer.
Horvath, 43, defies easy characterization.
She is the first millennial member of the county Board of Supervisors, a governing body that wields tremendous power despite remaining unknown to most Angelenos.
When elected in November 2022, she went from representing roughly 35,000 people as a West Hollywood City Council member to having more than 2 million constituents across a sweeping, 431-square-mile district that sprawls from the Ventura County line down to Santa Monica, east to Hollywood and up through much of the San Fernando Valley.
While attending the University of Notre Dame, Horvath held a leadership position with the school’s College Republicans chapter, helped create Notre Dame’s first gay-straight alliance and drew national opposition for staging “The Vagina Monologues” at the Catholic university — all while working three jobs to pay off her student loans. (She’s still paying them off.)
During her 2022 campaign for supervisor, she had the backing of some of the most progressive politicians in the city, including then-Councilmember-elect Eunisses Hernandez, as well as then-Councilmember Joe Buscaino, one of the more conservative members of the body.
As a member of the West Hollywood City Council, she helped approve what was then the highest minimum wage in the country, yet her county reelection bid was just endorsed by one of the region’s most prominent pro-business groups.
In the three years since she was elected to the county Board of Supervisors, she has effectively rewritten the structure of county government and drastically changed its approach to homelessness response.
Horvath’s Midwestern mien, unflagging politeness and warm smile belie her fierce ambition.
She has long been seen as someone who does not — to crib a phrase occasionally used about her behind closed doors — “wait her turn.” And that impatience has worked out OK for her so far.
All of which raises the question, will Horvath challenge Karen Bass in the June 2026 Los Angeles mayoral race?
Horvath speaks as supporters rally in September for her motion to pass an emergency rent relief program.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Her name has been bandied as a potential Los Angeles mayoral candidate since early in the year, when her public profile exploded in the wake of the devastating Palisades fire and tensions between her and Bass first became public.
She has done little to tamp the speculation since, though some posit she is merely expanding her profile ahead of a run for county executive in 2028.
Still, the political rumor mill went into overdrive in early summer, as word trickled out that the erstwhile mayor of West Hollywood had moved into a two-bedroom apartment at the edge of Hollywood — firmly in the city of Los Angeles.
When asked about her mayoral intentions late last month, Horvath demurred, but made clear the door was open.
“I have no plans to run for mayor,” she said, sitting under the sun in Gloria Molina Grand Park, just outside her office in the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, within direct view of City Hall.
“I continue to be asked by people I deeply respect, so I continue to listen to them and consider their requests, and I’m taking that seriously,” she continued. “But I’m focused on the work of the county.”
Horvath, left, embraces Mayor Karen Bass in August at an event in Pacific Palisades.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Horvath declined to share specifics about who was pushing her to run, though she said they were “significant stakeholders” that didn’t hail from any single community.
On Monday, former schools chief Austin Beutner kicked off his campaign for mayor, becoming the first serious candidate to challenge Bass. Political watchers have speculated that Beutner’s entrée could potentially open the floodgates by offering a permission structure for others to challenge the mayor of the nation’s second-largest city.
In the immediate wake of the January firestorm, Bass’ political future appeared to be in real jeopardy, but she has since regained some of her footing and shored up support with powerful interests, such as local labor groups.
***
Horvath was 26 and had lived in West Hollywood for all of 18 months when Sal Guarriello, a 90-year-old West Hollywood council member, suddenly died.
It was spring 2009. The advertising executive and Ohio transplant was active in Democratic and feminist circles, co-founding the Hollywood chapter of the National Organization for Women and leading the West Hollywood Women’s Advisory Board. (Raised by conservatives, Horvath started college as a Republican but soon evolved into a staunch Democrat.)
Former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — who was then president of the Los Angeles City Council — had become a friend and mentor to Horvath through her activism. He and others urged her to throw her hat into the ring for the open seat.
More than 30 people applied, but Horvath was ultimately chosen by the remaining members of the council to join them — an outcome that was stunning, even to her.
After two years in her appointed role, she lost an election bid in 2011 but continued to make a name for herself in the tight-knit, clubby world of progressive West Hollywood politics.
Undeterred, she ran again for West Hollywood City Council in 2015 and won.
Horvath is sworn in as the new county supervisor for District 3 in December 2022.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Horvath remained on the council for the next seven years and twice served as mayor before turning her ambitions toward the county Hall of Administration.
She was seen as an underdog in her supervisor’s race, running against former state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a political veteran who had a 3-to-1 fundraising advantage and first took elected office as she was entering high school.
Hertzberg had far more name recognition, but Horvath ultimately defeated him with a coalition that included local Democratic clubs and some of labor.
***
On the Board of Supervisors, Horvath has been unafraid to take chances and ruffle feathers.
Less than two years into her first term, Horvath was leading the charge to fundamentally reinvent the structure of county government, which hadn’t been meaningfully changed in more than a century.
Horvath’s bold plan to increase the size of the board from five to nine supervisors and create a new elected county executive position was approved by voters last November.
Voters will choose the county’s first elected executive in 2028. Opponents (and even some allies) have long griped that Horvath has her sights set on the very position she helped create, which will undoubtedly be one of the most powerful elected offices in the state.
“There are people who are never going to be convinced that I created this measure without seeing a seat for myself in it,” she says. “I’m not interested in convincing people of that. I’m interested in doing the work.”
As she campaigned for Measure G, critics also said Horvath and her allies were moving too fast, with too much left to figure out after the vote, including the price tag.
“Not everybody always loves you when you do things that upset the status quo. But I think history judges people not by ‘Did everybody love them in a given moment?’ … It’s were they smart and were they brave,” Garcetti said of Horvath.
“And she’s both,” he added.
Still, some of those criticisms came to bear in July, when it was revealed that county officials committed a near-unthinkable administrative screwup. When voters approved the sprawling overhaul to county government in November, the move unintentionally repealed Measure J, the county’s landmark criminal justice reform passed by voters in 2020.
Horvath said she didn’t think she and other proponents moved too fast, arguing that if they hadn’t seized the moment, they would have missed the opportunity “to bring about the change that has been stuck for far too long.”
Horvath argues that the fact that Measure J could have been unwritten in the first place is why Measure G was so needed.
***
Horvath was, briefly, everywhere during the fires.
While Mayor Bass receded into the background, Horvath was a constant presence at media briefings and on the news.
Her face was so omnipresent that a man she’d recently gone on a date with — someone who didn’t fully understand what she did for a living — spotted her on television with some confusion.
That was the last she heard from him, she said. (Dating as a public official is “very weird,” and not just because the one time she tried to use Tinder while abroad, she was seemingly banned for impersonating herself.)
She also tussled with Bass behind closed doors in late January, as revealed in text messages obtained by The Times that highlighted an increasingly fractious relationship.
The two women were at odds even before flames laid waste to a wide swath of coastal paradise.
Last November, Horvath went public with a proposal to shrink the duties of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which is overseen by city and county political appointees.
Horvath called for hundreds of millions of dollars to be shifted out of the agency and into a new county department focused on homelessness — a proposal to which Bass strenuously objected.
Horvath ultimately pushed her strategy forward in April, but not without warnings from Bass about creating a “massive disruption” in the region’s fight against homelessness.
Horvath attends a news conference celebrating the Army Corps of Engineers clearing debris from the final house in the Palisades in late August.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Horvath’s relationships in the Palisades have also not been without some tension.
The supervisor recently pledged $10 million of her county discretionary funds to help rebuild the Palisades-Malibu YMCA, but some in the community have felt betrayed by her, according to Pacific Palisades Residents Assn. President Jessica Rogers.
“We don’t believe that she’s properly engaging her community,” Rogers said, citing the independent commission that Horvath convened in the wake of the fires. “She put a lot of time and energy into creating this report. The intentions might have been good, but she didn’t include proper community participation.”
Rogers was particularly bothered by Horvath’s proposal for a countywide rebuilding authority, since Rogers felt like Horvath hadn’t earned their trust. The rebuilding authority, which was supported by the mayor of Malibu, did not come to fruition.
“There’s a perception that [Horvath] is too aggressive,” said another community leader, who asked to speak anonymously because they hope to get things done without alienating anybody. “But there’s more of a mix to how people feel about her than you can see.”
The loudest voices, particularly in community WhatsApp groups, NextDoor and other forums, tend to be the most vitriolic, the community leader said, positing that some of the gripes about Horvath had more to do with her progressive politics than her leadership.
“People are suffering, and I will always show up for my constituents — especially when the conversations are difficult. The Blue Ribbon Commission provided independent, expert guidance on a sustainable rebuild. Its recommendations were meant to inform, not replace, community engagement,” Horvath said.
***
The chances of Horvath entering the mayoral race still remain far slimmer than the alternative, particularly because she is up for reelection in 2026 — meaning she would have to sacrifice her safe board seat for an uphill battle challenging an incumbent who still has deep wells of support in the city.
Former Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who long represented the Westside and now directs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State LA, said he wondered why someone would want the job of mayor while in the comparatively plush position of county supervisor.
Supervisors have more power and suffer far less scrutiny, he argued. Still, there were benefits to remaining in the mix.
“Being mentioned as a potential candidate is one of the greatest places a political figure can be. Because when you’re in the mentioning stage, it’s all about your strengths, your assets, your positive attributes,” Bonin said with a laugh. “Once you declare, it’s the reverse.”
Times staff writers David Zahniser and Rebecca Ellis contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats are poised for the 10th time Thursday to reject a stopgap spending bill that would reopen the government, insisting they won’t back away from demands that Congress take up healthcare benefits.
The repetition of votes on the funding bill has become a daily drumbeat in Congress, underscoring how intractable the situation has become. It has been at times the only item on the agenda for the Senate floor, while House Republicans have left Washington altogether. The standoff has lasted over two weeks, leaving hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, even more without a guaranteed payday and Congress essentially paralyzed.
“Every day that goes by, there are more and more Americans who are getting smaller and smaller paychecks,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, adding that there have been thousands of flight delays across the country as well.
Thune, a South Dakota Republican, again and again has tried to pressure Democrats to break from their strategy of voting against the stopgap funding bill. It hasn’t worked. And while some bipartisan talks have been ongoing about potential compromises on healthcare, they haven’t produced any meaningful progress toward reopening the government. Thune has also offered to hold a later vote on extending subsidies for health plans offered under Affordable Care Act marketplaces, but said he would not “guarantee a result or an outcome.”
Democrats say they won’t budge until they get a guarantee on extending the tax credits for the health plans. They warn that millions of Americans who buy their own health insurance — such as small business owners, farmers and contractors — will see large increases when premium prices go out in the coming weeks. Looking ahead to a Nov. 1 deadline in most states, they think voters will demand that Republicans enter into serious negotiations.
“The ACA crisis is looming over everyone’s head, and yet Republicans seem ready to let people’s premiums spike,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in a floor speech.
Still, Thune was also trying a different tack Thursday with a vote to proceed to appropriations bills — a move that could grease the Senate’s gears into some action or just deepen the divide between the two parties.
A deadline for subsidies on health plans
Democrats have rallied around their priorities on healthcare as they hold out against voting for a Republican bill that would reopen the government. Yet they also warn that the time to strike a deal to prevent large increases for many health plans is drawing short.
When they controlled Congress during the pandemic, Democrats boosted subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans. It pushed enrollment under President Obama’s signature healthcare law to new levels and drove the rate of uninsured people to a historic low. Nearly 24 million people currently get their health insurance from subsidized marketplaces, according to healthcare research nonprofit KFF.
Democrats — and some Republicans — are worried that many of those people will forgo insurance if the price rises dramatically. While the tax credits don’t expire until next year, health insurers will soon send out notices of the price increases. In most states, they go out Nov. 1.
Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she has heard from “families who are absolutely panicking about their premiums that are doubling.”
“They are small business owners who are having to think about abandoning the job they love to get employer-sponsored healthcare elsewhere or just forgoing coverage altogether,” she added.
Murray also said that if many people decide to leave their health plan, it could have an effect across medical insurance because the pool of people under health plans will shrink. That could result in higher prices across the board, she said.
Some Republicans have acknowledged that the expiration of the tax credits could be a problem and floated potential compromises to address it, but there is hardly a consensus among the GOP.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) this week called the COVID-era subsidies a “boondoggle,” adding that “when you subsidize the healthcare system and you pay insurance companies more, the prices increase.”
President Trump has said he would “like to see a deal done for great healthcare,” but has not meaningfully weighed in on the debate. And Thune has insisted that Democrats first vote to reopen the government before entering any negotiations on healthcare.
If Congress were to engage in negotiations on significant changes to healthcare, it would likely take weeks, if not longer, to work out a compromise.
Votes on appropriations bills
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are setting up a vote Thursday to proceed to a bill to fund the Defense Department and several other areas of government. This would turn the Senate to Thune’s priority of working through spending bills and potentially pave the way to paying salaries for troops, though the House would eventually need to come back to Washington to vote for a final bill negotiated between the two chambers.
It could also put a crack in Democrats’ resolve. Thune said Thursday, “If they want to stop the defense bill, I don’t think it’s very good optics for them.”
It wasn’t clear whether Democrats would give the support needed to advance the bills. They discussed the idea at their luncheon Wednesday and emerged saying they wanted to review the Republican proposal and make sure it included appropriations that are priorities for them.
While the votes will not bring the Senate any closer to an immediate fix for the government shutdown, it could at least turn their attention to issues where there is some bipartisan agreement.
Still, there was a growing sense on Capitol Hill that an end to the stasis is nowhere in sight.
“So many of you have asked all of us, how will it end?” said House Speaker Johnson. “We have no idea.”
Groves and Jalonick write for the Associated Press.
