Republicans

Newport Beach businessman Dale Dykema is a highly sought-after guest when potential Republican presidential candidates visit California.

He recently attended an intimate dinner with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a cocktail party headlined by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and a half-hour tete-a-tete with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

In the last quarter of a century, Dykema, 85, has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to GOP candidates, party organizations and political action committees. He has yet to make up his mind on whom to back — and more importantly, whom to raise money for — in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“There are just so many candidates in the race. I’m completely on the fence,” said Dykema, founder of TD Service Financial Corp., a company that provides foreclosure services for the mortgage industry. In 2012, he said, he settled quickly on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but for the upcoming election he may wait until after the first couple of primaries before deciding.

The size of the field — well over a dozen likely candidates — coupled with the lack of a clear favorite mean many Republican donors in California share Dykema’s reluctance to commit.

“Normally, there’s a candidate that the entire establishment is behind and there’s this huge fundraising juggernaut for one person,” said Jon Fleischman, a state GOP official from Anaheim Hills and publisher of an influential conservative blog. “This year, no one has the brass ring already in hand. We’re seeing a lot more listening and a lot less giving early.”

On the Democratic side, state donors are already uniting behind former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party’s overwhelming favorite. She raised millions for her nascent campaign at events hosted earlier this month by entertainment and business leaders.

As Republican donors weigh their choices, they’re grilling the 2016 candidates on a range of issues, including immigration, religious freedom and net neutrality. They’re doing so in homes in Bel-Air, boardrooms in the Silicon Valley, parties in Orange County and GOP functions all over the state — a nod to California’s primacy in what is known in political circles as the “invisible primary.”

California probably doesn’t matter in the nominating fight. Its June 7, 2016, presidential primary is almost certainly too late to affect the GOP’s process. The state is also too Democratic to put it in play in next year’s general election. But California is the biggest source of campaign cash in the nation.

In the 2012 election, presidential candidates directly raised more than $112 million from California’s deep-pocketed donors. That’s almost the combined total raised in the next two most-generous states, Texas and New York, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These figures do not include the millions donated to party committees and outside groups such as “super PACs” that are not controlled by a candidate.

Not surprisingly, given California’s tilt toward Democrats, President Obama was the biggest beneficiary then, raising $62.8 million here for his reelection bid, according to the center. But GOP candidates also filled their campaign coffers here — Romney collected $41.3 million, and the rest of the Republican field raised nearly $8 million.

Romney’s extensive fundraising network in California, which he cultivated over nearly a decade, became available to others when he decided in January not to run again.

“We’re talking a lot about it, but no one’s committing to anyone right now,” said Bret de St. Jeor, a Modesto businessman and Romney fundraiser in 2012. “It’s just flat-out too early…. Let’s hear a little bit more. Let’s hear the opening statements from the other candidates before we start jumping on somebody’s bandwagon.”

Donors “love the courting process,” said Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committee member from Surfside in Orange County. “Most of the serious candidates are coming to California repeatedly, and their mission is to establish a rapport as early as possible … and to try to meet as many folks as possible.”

Steel, who is undecided, recently co-hosted a meet-and-greet and intimate dinner for Walker at the tony Pacific Club in Newport Beach. He noted that the field includes multiple candidates who appeal to the same GOP faction, whether it’s establishment voters, social conservatives or tea party groups.

Many potential candidates, he added, have connections to California, or have the opportunity to grow support.

Former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina retains backers from her unsuccessful run against Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2010, Steel said. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry developed ties to the state during his unsuccessful 2012 presidential bid, in part because one of his top strategists is a longtime and well-respected California GOP fundraiser.

Walker is a familiar face in California’s donor community, as he is across the nation, because of his fierce fight against unions in Wisconsin. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has spent considerable time wooing the libertarian streak that runs through Silicon Valley. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has blown away audiences with his oratory, Steel said. And Bush’s family has long-standing alliances in the state.

Jeb Bush’s brother, former President George W. Bush, was a prodigious fundraiser here, performing a “cash-ectomy on the California donor community” whenever he visited, Fleischman said. “It was staggering.”

Those relationships haven’t sealed the deal for Jeb Bush here, but they do provide an edge for the yet-undeclared candidate that was visible during a recent, lucrative fundraising swing through the state.

“I really wanted to see him run before his brother ran,” said venture capitalist William H. Draper III, who went to Yale with their father, President George H.W. Bush, and served as his finance chair in his unsuccessful 1980 presidential run.

Draper, a former president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, co-hosted an East Palo Alto fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s committee.

Susan McCaw, a major fundraiser for George W. Bush who served as his ambassador to Austria, said she was impressed by Jeb Bush’s record as governor of Florida and his support for education and immigration reform. She and her husband held a fundraiser for his political action committee at their Bel-Air home.

“I think he has the best chance of beating Hillary in the general,” she said.

Electability was the one quality nearly every donor — committed or not — mentioned as a priority.

John Jordan, a tech entrepreneur and vintner who has spent millions on Republican causes, plans to make a decision over the summer. He is hosting a dinner for Walker at his Healdsburg vineyard and expects to huddle with Paul soon. His sole focus, he said, is backing the candidate who could win the White House in 2016 by attracting the various factions of GOP voters as well as less ideologically driven general-election voters.

“In a pretty cold-blooded way,” Jordan said, “it has got to be someone that can unite the base, that they will like enough to turn out for … but at the same time isn’t someone that’s obnoxious.”

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Reporting from Palm Desert — It was a cool and rainy day when elders of the Republican tribe recently gathered to honor one of their own.

The honoree, Stuart K. Spencer, was unmistakable in his white duck pants and a lime-green sport coat so bright it almost hurt to see. A reformed chain-smoker, he snapped merrily away on a wad of chewing gum.

The event marked Spencer’s 90th birthday, but the mood beneath the surface conviviality was unsettled and gray, like the clouds fringing the mountains outside.

If the occasion was intended as a personal celebration, it also had the feel of a wake for a time in politics long passed.

Spencer — savvy, irreverent, profane — spent decades as one of the most successful and admired consultants in the campaign business. The hundreds, both Democrat and Republican, who paid homage at a desert country club included the alumni of several past GOP administrations, in both Washington and Sacramento.

Along with former Vice President Dick Cheney and former California Gov. Pete Wilson, veterans of the Reagan years turned out in force. It was Spencer, more than anyone, who took a political long shot and washed-up B-movie actor and helped transform him into the Reagan of legend.

“This is the gang that could actually shoot straight,” said one longtime GOP operative, peering at the largely silver-haired assembly.

Inevitably, private conversation turned to the current occupant of the White House, a member, nominally, of the same political party as those Republicans present.

Feelings ranged from horror to perplexity. Not from jealousy; most of those in attendance had long ago held the reins of power and were comfortably settled in their memories. Rather, it was the startling dysfunction of the fledgling Trump administration.

Yes, said one veteran of the Reagan White House, there was infighting and jockeying early on then too, but not the public knife-fighting of competing Trump factions.

“We weren’t going on the Sunday TV shows to grandstand,” he said, requesting anonymity, still finding it uncomfortable to criticize a fellow Republican on the record. “We were nose to the grindstone, focused on policy” — which grew out of Ronald Reagan’s deep-seated philosophy, not the whims of a blustery, seemingly improvisational president.

When the time came for testimonials, there was plenty of impertinent humor and fond reminiscing: about midnight phone calls from Nancy Reagan, drinking North Carolina moonshine, and the time Spencer dropped an F-bomb in the Oval Office to advise President Ford to stick to the Rose Garden and not try to out-campaign Jimmy Carter.

“Stu called them as he saw them,” said former Gov. Wilson, dryly.

Jerry Lewis, not the comedian but a former congressman from the Inland Empire, offered one of several elegies.

Once among the most powerful members of Congress, he was known during 30-plus years representing Riverside and San Bernardino counties for a willingness to work across the partisan aisle, a facility — along with a desire to legislate and not just obstruct — that now seems almost quaint.

“I’d love to see us return to a time when people actually talked to each other,” Lewis said, to a ripple of applause.

Taking his turn at the microphone, Spencer was funny and poignant.

The thing he really likes about living a long life, he said, is that all of his enemies are now dead. Then he saluted some of them: liberals like Jesse Unruh, the legendary Assembly speaker, and Phillip Burton, the formidable San Francisco congressman, who fiercely battled Reagan and his policies. They were men of honor and principle, Spencer said, and he misses them.

His brand of Republicanism — support for legal abortion, certain gun controls and, most urgently, a need to reach out to voters who are not white or conservative — has grown largely out of fashion in the political party to which he devoted his life. He spent 70 years laboring on behalf of the GOP only to be called a RINO, or Republican In Name Only, Spencer said with wonder.

Among the behaviors he models is discretion — Spencer is one of the few insiders who didn’t cash in on his Reagan years — and an abiding respect for the political process and its practitioners. Though no fan of President Trump, he was measured in his critique.

“Today, half of America is holding its breath,” he said. “I’m one of them.”

He warned against lashing out in anger, or turning disappointment into hatred, even as he challenged some of Trump’s more preposterous claims, including the falsehood that he was victimized by millions of illegal votes cast for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“You need to win with class and lose with class,” Spencer said.

He took particular umbrage at those wrapping Trump — another political amateur who improbably made his way to the White House — in the Reagan mantle. The late president “had class and a totally different belief system,” Spencer said.

He wished Trump well. But, he said, “he is President Trump, not President Reagan.”

There was no audible dissent.

The program ended with a Sinatra impersonator singing a customized version of “My Way.” Then the guest of honor quietly slipped out the sliding glass doors, riding past Gerald Ford Drive as he made his way home.

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@markzbarabak on Twitter

ALSO

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A Californian for president in 2020? It could happen

California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Trump administration’s immigration raids this year in Los Angeles and across the nation, according to a new poll.

Just over half of the state’s registered voters oppose federal efforts to reduce undocumented immigration, and 61% are against deporting everyone in the nation who doesn’t have legal status, according to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab released to The Times on Wednesday.

But there is an acute difference in opinions based on political leanings.

Nearly 80% of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90% are against deporting everyone in the country who is undocumented, according to the poll. Among Republicans, 5% are against reducing the entries and 10% don’t believe all undocumented immigrants should be forced to leave.

“The big thing that we find, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, who studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “On these perspectives, they fall pretty clearly along party lines. While there’s some variation within the parties by things like age and race, really, the big divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”

While there were some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race, the results largely mirrored the partisan divide in the state, Lerman said.

One remarkable finding was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally knew or were acquainted with someone in their family or friend groups directly affected by the deportation efforts, Lerman said.

“That’s a really substantial proportion,” she said. “Similarly, the extent to which we see people reporting that people in their communities are concerned enough about deportation efforts that they’re not sending their kids to school, not shopping in local stores, not going to work,” not seeking medical care or attending church services.

The poll surveyed a sample of the state’s registered voters and did not include the sentiments of the most affected communities — unregistered voters or those who are ineligible to cast ballots because they are not citizens.

A little more than 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote as of late October, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“So if we think about the California population generally, this is a really significant underestimate of the effects, even though we’re seeing really substantial effects on communities,” she said.

Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities that spiked in June, creating both fear and outrage in Latino communities. Despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats, the Trump administration also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to, federal officials said, protect federal immigration officials.

The months since have been chaotic, with masked, armed agents randomly pulling people — most of whom are Latino — off the streets and out of their workplaces and sending many to detention facilities, where some have died. Some deportees were flown to an El Salvador prison. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by state officials and civil rights groups.

In one notable local case, a federal district judge issued a ruling temporarily blocking federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. The Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal and lifted that order, while the case moves forward.

More than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been arrested in the Los Angeles area by federal authorities since June 6, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted a congressional hearing on the impact of immigration raids that have taken place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House’s oversight committee, also announced the creation of a tracker to document misconduct and abuse during ICE raids.

While Republican voters largely aligned with Trump’s actions on deportations, 16% said that they believed that the deportations will worsen the state’s economy.

Lerman said the university planned to study whether these numbers changed as the impacts on the economy are felt more greatly.

“If it continues to affect people, particularly, as we see really high rates of effects on the workforce, so construction, agriculture, all of the places where we’re as an economy really reliant [on immigrant labor], I can imagine some of these starting to shift even among Republicans,” she said.

Among Latinos, whose support of Trump grew in the 2024 election, there are multiple indications of growing dissatisfaction with the president, according to separate national polls.

Nearly eight in 10 Latinos said Trump’s policies have harmed their community, compared to 69% in 2019 during his first term, according to a national poll of adults in the United States released by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on Monday. About 71% said the administration’s deportation efforts had gone too far, an increase from 56% in March. And it was the first time in the two decades that Pew has conducted its survey of Latino voters that the number of Latinos who said their standing in the United States had worsened increased, with more than two-thirds expressing the sentiment.

Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Votantes, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that one-third of Latino voters who previously supported Trump rue their decision, according to a national poll.

Small business owner Brian Gavidia is among the Latino voters who supported Trump in November because of financial struggles.

“I was tired of struggling, I was tired of seeing my friends closing businesses,” the 30-year-old said. “When [President] Biden ran again I’m like, ‘I’m not going to vote for the same four years we just had’ … I was sad and I was heartbroken that our economy was failing and that’s the reason why I went that way.”

The East L.A. native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s immigration policies because the president promised to deport the “worst of the worst.”

He grew disgusted watching the raids that unfolded in Los Angeles earlier this year.

“They’re taking fruit vendors, day laborers, that’s the worst of the worst to you?” he remembered thinking.

Over a lunch of asada tortas and horchata in East L.A., Gavidia recounted being detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a Montebello tow yard. Agents shoved him against a metal gate, demanding to know what hospital he was born at after he said he was an American citizen, according to video of the incident.

After reviewing his ID, the agents eventually let Gavidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Gavidia was detained for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants. He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.

“At that moment, I was the criminal, at that moment I was the worst of the worst, which is crazy because I went to go see who they were getting — the worst of the worst like they said they were going to get,” Gavidia said. “But turns out when I got there, I was the worst of the worst.”

Reporting from Washington — As they wrestle with how to replace the Affordable Care Act, Senate Republicans face a critical choice between cutting taxes or preserving health coverage for millions of Americans, two competing demands that may yet derail the GOP push to roll back the 2010 healthcare law.

House Republicans, who passed their own Obamacare repeal measure this month, skirted the dilemma by cutting both taxes and coverage.

Their bill — embraced by President Trump — slashed hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, a key goal of GOP leaders and the White House as they seek to set the stage for a larger tax overhaul later this year.

At the same time, the House legislation cut more than $1 trillion in healthcare assistance to low- and moderate-income Americans, a retrenchment the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates would nearly double the ranks of the uninsured over the next decade to more than 50 million.

In the Senate, coverage losses on that scale are worrisome to many rank-and-file Republicans whose states have seen major coverage gains under Obamacare. That makes the preservation of benefits one of the biggest challenges confronting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP leaders.

“Coverage matters,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, noting the importance of preserving Medicaid spending in the current law. “To someone [who] is lower-income, you’re going to need those dollars to cover that person.”

Yet moderating cuts to Medicaid and other government health programs without driving up budget deficits could force Republican senators to also dial back the tax cuts that many in the GOP want.

“It’s not that complicated. … If you want to use money for tax reform, you can’t have it for health coverage,” said Gail Wilensky, a veteran Republican health policy expert who ran the Medicare and Medicaid programs under President George H.W. Bush. “You can’t do both.”

McConnell convened a group of GOP senators — quickly panned for including only white men — to develop Obamacare replacement legislation, though the panel largely excluded Republican lawmakers who are most concerned about coverage, including Cassidy. McConnell has since said that all Senate Republicans would be involved in developing an Obamacare replacement.

The trade-off between cutting taxes and preserving Americans’ health protections reflects, in part, the legislative procedure that congressional Republicans have chosen to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

That process, known as budget reconciliation, allows Senate Republicans to pass their Obamacare repeal with a simple majority, rather than the 60-vote super-majority that is usually required to pass controversial legislation. (Republicans have only a 52-48 majority in the Senate.)

But to qualify for budget reconciliation under Senate rules, the bill must reduce the federal deficit over the next decade.

Tax cuts alone typically do the opposite, driving up budget deficits.

The tax cuts in the House Republican healthcare bill total more than $600 billion over the next decade, according to independent analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

They include most of the major taxes enacted in the 2010 health law to fund the law’s program for extending health insurance to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans.

On the chopping block are taxes on medical device makers and health insurance plans, which together account for about $165 billion in tax cuts over the next decade.

Couples making more than $250,000 a year (and single taxpayers making more than $200,000) would see two tax cuts, including one on investment income, that the budget office estimated would cost the federal government nearly $300 billion over the next decade. (That estimate may be revised down as House Republicans delayed one of the tax cuts in the final version of their bill.)

Also eliminated would be a host of limits on tax-free spending accounts that many Americans use for medical expenses. Republicans argue these taxes are unnecessary and even undermine efforts to control healthcare costs.

“It’s bad for economic growth,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) told Fox News during the House debate.

The tax on health plans, for example, is widely seen as contributing to higher premiums, as insurers customarily pass the costs along to consumers.

But eliminating so many taxes isn’t cheap.

So the Republican healthcare bill — known as the American Health Care Act — slashes hundreds of billions of dollars in federal healthcare spending, including an estimated $880 billion in federal money for Medicaid, the state-run government health plan for the poor that currently covers more than 70 million Americans at any one time.

That would in effect cut federal Medicaid spending by more than a quarter over the next decade, an unprecedented reduction that independent analyses suggest would force states to sharply limit coverage for poor patients.

The House bill would also reduce insurance subsidies now available to low- and moderate-income Americans who get health plans through Obamacare marketplaces such as HealthCare.gov.

The reduction in federal aid would, in turn, dramatically increase the number of uninsured Americans. Overall, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 24 million fewer people would have health coverage by 2026 under the original version of the House bill.

By contrast, the wealthiest Americans stand to get a large tax break. By 2023, families making more than $1 million would see their taxes decrease by an average of more than $50,000, an analysis by the independent Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center suggests.

That means that in a country of more than 300 million people, nearly half of all the tax breaks in the House healthcare bill would go to only about 780,000 households.

The combination of tax breaks for wealthy Americans and historic reductions in assistance to low-income patients has fueled widespread criticism of the House GOP healthcare legislation, particularly on the left.

“The math is pretty clear,” said Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “They are sharply cutting Medicaid and insurance subsidies to pay for tax cuts.”

Whether GOP senators will be able to moderate the reductions in healthcare assistance remains unclear.

The early version of the House bill was projected to reduce the federal deficit by about $150 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office analysis.

That number has likely shrunk slightly, as House Republicans added more spending to the legislation before it passed last week. An updated budget analysis is expected next week.

But under the budget rules adopted by GOP lawmakers this year, Senate Republicans will not be able to add any spending into their legislation without enacting cuts elsewhere or shrinking the tax cuts further.

That is because according to those rules, their bill must reduce the deficit by as least as much as the House bill.

Obamacare vs. Trumpcare: A side-by-side comparison of the Affordable Care Act and the GOP’s replacement plan »

Obamacare 101: A primer on key issues in the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. »

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Today we discuss Texas, overreaction and the voluminous field of candidates for California governor.

Is there anyone who is not running for governor?

I’m not. And neither are my two cats. At least they weren’t as of this morning, when we discussed the race before breakfast.

That leaves us somewhat short of the 135 candidates who ran in California’s 2003 recall gubernatorial election. But not by much.

I count nearly a dozen serious candidates, with possibly more to come. Why so many?

Opportunity.

This is the most wide-open race for California governor in decades. By comparison, you’d have to go back to at least 1998, when Lt. Gov. Gray Davis surged past a pair of moneybag candidates, Al Checchi and Rep. Jane Harman, in the Democratic primary, then stomped Republican Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren in November to win the general election.

Now, as then, there is no one who even remotely resembles a prohibitive front-runner.

Polling in the governor’s race has shown former Democratic Rep. Katie Porter and Chad Bianco, Riverside County’s Republican sheriff, narrowly leading the field. But with support for both in the middling 13%-to-21% range, we’re not talking about a pair of world-beaters.

Like nature, political ambition abhors a vacuum.

Speaking of moneybags…

Tom Steyer!

Yes.

After making a bundle as a hedge fund manager, the San Francisco billionaire and environmental activist has been panting after public office for years. Running for president didn’t work out in 2020, even after Steyer spent more than $345 million on his effort. (That’s close to what the Dodgers spent on their 2025 payroll.)

So now Steyer is running for governor, a move he appeared to telegraph by airing nearly $13 million in self-promotional ads that, oh yes, supported passage of Proposition 50, the Democratic gerrymander initiative.

What are his chances?

Longtime readers of this column — both of you! — will know I make no predictions.

But California voters have never looked favorably upon rich candidates trying to make the leap from political civilian to the governorship or U.S. Senate. In fact, over the last 50-plus years, a gilded gallery of the well-to-do have tried and spectacularly failed.

Perhaps Steyer will display the policy chops or the razzle and dazzle they all lacked. But his launch video certainly didn’t shatter any molds. Rather, it presented a stereotypical grab bag of redwood trees, potshots at Sacramento, multicultural images of hard-working-everyday-folk, a promise to fight, a pledge to build more housing and, of course, a dash of profanity because, gosh darn it, nothing says “unbridled authenticity” like a political candidate swearing!

Maybe his fellow billionaire, Rick Caruso, will show more creativity and imagination if he gets into the governor’s race.

At least Democrats have been showing signs of life.

Indeed. Dare I say, the party’s mood swing from near-suicidal to euphoric has been quite something.

Winning gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia — not by a little, but a lot — and prevailing in down-ballot contests in Pennsylvania and Georgia had a remarkably transformative effect. (Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in sky-blue New York City was no big surprise once the democratic socialist prevailed in the primary.)

Literally overnight, Democrats seized the momentum heading into the 2026 midterm election, while Republicans have begun scrambling to reposition their party and recraft its messaging.

All that being said, even before their buoyant off-year performance those widespread reports of Democrats’ demise were greatly … well, we’ll leave that Mark Twain chestnut alone. As analyst Charlie Cook points out, 2024 was a deeply disappointing year for the party. But it wasn’t a disaster.

Democrats gained two House seats. There was no net change in any of the 11 gubernatorial races and legislative contests across 44 states ended in something close to a wash. The party lost four Senate seats — and control of the chamber — but three of those losses came in the red states of Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.

“This is not to argue that Democrats had a great night in November 2024, but it certainly wasn’t a massacre or a party-wide repudiation,” Cook wrote in a recent posting. “If voters had intended to take it out on the party as a whole, the results would have looked quite different.”

Rather than a wholesale takedown of Democrats, the result seemed very much a rejection of President Biden and, by extension, his hasty replacement on the ballot, Vice President Kamala Harris.

What does that mean going forth?

If you’re asking whether Democrats will win control of the House or Senate…

Yes?!?

…I haven’t a clue.

Democrats need to gain three seats to take control of the House and both history and Trump’s sagging approval ratings — especially as pertains to the economy — augur well for their chances. The president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of the last 22 midterm elections and, according to Inside Elections, the fewest number of seats that flipped was four.

That’s why I thought Proposition 50, which sets out to all but decapitate California Republicans in Congress, was a bad and unnecessary move, effectively disenfranchising millions of non-Democratic voters.

An appeals court last week tossed out a Republican gerrymander in Texas, putting Democrats in an even stronger position, though the legal wrangling is far from over. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the decision, pending review. And still to come is a high court ruling that could gut the Voting Rights Act and yield Republicans a dozen or more House seats nationwide.

So the fight for control is far from decided.

As for the Senate, Republicans stand a much better chance of keeping control, given how the seats contested in 2026 are located on largely favorable GOP terrain.

But until the votes are counted, nobody knows what will happen. That’s the thing about elections: they help keep wiseacres like me honest.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas’ 2026 congressional redistricting plan likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.

The court’s conservative majority has blocked similar lower court rulings because they have come too close to elections.

The order came about an hour after the state called on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The order was signed by Alito because he is the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas.

Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump’s efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year’s elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle.

The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.

If the ruling holds for now, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

An Indiana lawmaker who has yet to make a decision on whether to back President Trump’s push to have Republicans redraw the state’s congressional boundaries was the victim of a swatting call that brought sheriff’s deputies to his home.

The call, in which someone reported a fake emergency at the Terre Haute home of state Sen. Greg Goode on Sunday, came hours after Trump criticized Indiana lawmakers for not moving forward with the plan and singled out Goode and Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray. Trump has been trying to persuade Republican-led states across the country to aggressively redraw their congressional maps to help the GOP hold the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections.

Deputies were sent to Goode’s home after receiving an email “advising harm had been done to persons inside a home,” according to a statement from the Vigo County Sheriff’s Office.

“All persons were secure, safe, and unharmed. Investigation showed that this was a prank or false email (also known as ‘swatting’),” the statement said. The incident is under investigation.

Goode, a Republican, wrote on social media that the responding deputies were “under the impression of a domestic violence emergency.” He thanked the deputies for acting professionally.

“While this entire incident is unfortunate and reflective of the volatile nature of our current political environment, I give thanks to God that my family and I are ok,” Goode wrote.

Trump singled out Goode and Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray while demanding that Republicans move forward with a redistricting plan for Indiana. Republicans already hold a 7-2 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.

“Because of these two politically correct type ‘gentlemen,’ and a few others, they could be depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, a VERY BIG DEAL!” Trump wrote on his social media platform.

Bray, the Republican leader of Indiana’s Senate, announced Friday that his chamber will no longer meet to vote on redistricting, citing a lack of support from his members even after pressure from the White House. Vice President JD Vance has visited multiple times to make the case.

Goode, a Republican member of the Senate, has not publicly stated his position on redistricting and says he will not make a decision without seeing a map and legislation introduced for lawmakers’ review.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The goal of swatting is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to respond to an address by making bogus claims of violence happening inside.

Democrats need to gain just three seats to win control of the House next year, leading to Trump’s strong-arming of GOP-controlled states. Legislatures or commissions in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have adopted new maps to boost Republicans’ odds, while California and Virginia are poised to counter Trump’s push and redraw their own maps to benefit Democrats.

Weber writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The House is poised to vote overwhelmingly on Tuesday to demand the Justice Department release all documents tied to its investigation of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

President Trump, who initially worked to thwart the vote before reversing course on Sunday night, has said he will sign the measure if it reaches his desk. For that to happen, the bill will also need to pass the Senate, which could consider the measure as soon as Tuesday night.

Republicans for months pushed back on the release of the Epstein files, joining Trump in claiming the Epstein issue was being brought up by Democrats as a way to distract from Republicans’ legislative successes.

But that all seismically shifted Sunday when Trump had a drastic reversal and urged Republicans to vote to release the documents, saying there was “nothing to hide.”

“It’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The reversal came days after 20,000 documents from Epstein’s private estate were released by lawmakers in the House Oversight Committee. The files referenced Trump more than 1,000 times.

In private emails, Epstein wrote that Trump had “spent hours” at his house and “knew about the girls,” a revelation that reignited the push in Congress for further disclosures.

Trump has continued to deny wrongdoing in the Epstein saga despite opposing the release of files from the federal probe into the conduct of his former friend, a convicted sex offender and alleged sex trafficker. He died by suicide while in federal custody in 2019.

Many members of Trump’s MAGA base have demanded the files be released, convinced they contain revelations about powerful people involved in Epstein’s abuse of what is believed to be more than 200 women and girls. Tension among his base spiked when Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in July that an “Epstein client list” did not exist, after saying in February that the list was sitting on her desk awaiting review. She later said she was referring to the Epstein files more generally.

Trump’s call to release the files now highlights how he is trying to prevent an embarrassing defeat as a growing number of Republicans in the House have joined Democrats to vote for the legislation in recent days.

The Epstein files have been a hugely divisive congressional fight in recent months, with Democrats pushing the release, but Republican congressional leaders largely refusing to take the votes. The issue even led to a rift within the MAGA movement, and Trump to cut ties with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who had long been an ardent support of the president.

“Watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart,” Greene said at a news conference Tuesday in reference to the resistance to release the files.

Democrats have accused Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) of delaying the swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, because she promised to cast the final vote needed to move a so-called discharge petition, which would force a vote on the floor. Johnson has denied those claims.

If the House and Senate do vote to release the files, all eyes will turn to the Department of Justice, and what exactly it will choose to publicly release.

“The fight, the real fight, will happen after that,” Greene said. “The real test will be: Will the Department of Justice release the files? Or will it all remain tied up in an investigation?”

Several Epstein survivors joined lawmakers at the news conference to talk about how important the vote was for them.

Haley Robson, one of the survivors, questioned Trump’s resistance to the vote even now as he supports it.

“While I do understand that your position has changed on the Epstein files, and I’m grateful that you have pledged to sign this bill, I can’t help to be skeptical of what the agenda is,” Robson said.

If signed into law by Trump, the bill would prohibit the attorney general, Bondi, from withholding, delaying or redacting “any record, document, communication, or investigative material on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

But caveats in the bill could provide Trump and Bondi with loopholes to keep records related to the president concealed.

In the spring, FBI Director Kash Patel directed a Freedom of Information Act team to comb through the entire trove of files from the investigation, and ordered it to redact references to Trump, citing his status as a private citizen with privacy protections when the probe first launched in 2006, Bloomberg reported at the time.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, said the Trump administration will be forced to release the files with an act of Congress.

“They will be breaking the law if they do not release these files,” he said.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Adam Gray was one of only six House Democrats — and the only one from California — who voted with Republicans in favor of a deal to end the government shutdown, and there was a calculated reason behind that decision.

Gray, a first-term Democrat from the Central Valley, is running for reelection in a majority Latino district that national Republicans are expected to heavily target as they defend their narrow House majority in next fall’s midterm elections. Last year, Gray won his seat by 187 votes, and although redistricting has since made the 13th District more favorable to Democrats, it remains highly competitive.

The Merced Democrat’s vote reflects the political reality of representing one of the nation’s few battleground districts. Gray is positioning himself as an independent-minded Democrat willing to buck leadership on politically divisive issues. The shutdown deal gave him a rare opportunity to put that in practice, even at the risk of frustrating members of his own party.

“I know it is not comfortable, and I know there’s people that are going to be mad at me,” Gray told The Times. “But I am not here to win an argument. I am here to actually help fix problems with people in my community, and I know I did the right thing.”

Democratic representatives and senators for weeks were steadfast in opposing a shutdown deal that did not include language to extend Obamacare tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year, and as a result, leave millions of Americans with higher healthcare costs.

In Gray’s district, more than half of residents rely on Medi-Cal or have coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, making them vulnerable to rising healthcare costs — a pocketbook issue that is likely to factor into an already competitive congressional race.

Beyond healthcare, nearly 48,000 families in his largely rural district rely on food benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, according to the latest data provided by the Department of Agriculture. Those benefits were put at risk during the shutdown as funding for the federal program commonly called food stamps was caught up in legal disputes.

As the shutdown dragged on without meaningful negotiations on healthcare, Gray said, he grew concerned that Republicans were too comfortable “using vulnerable Americans as political leverage.”

Ultimately, Gray was among just 13 Democrats — six in the House, seven in the Senate — who went against their party to end the shutdown that had dragged on an historic 43 days.

“The government is reopening because Democrats were willing to compromise,” Gray said.

The deal, which was signed by President Trump last week, will fund the government through January 2026 and reinstate federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown. It will also fund SNAP through September 2026, a provision that Gray says he wanted to secure because he worries that partisanship could lead to another shutdown in January.

Republicans attack his position

Although Gray voted with Republicans over the shutdown, national Republican operatives still see his seat as a main target ahead of next year’s election — and there is good reason for that.

The seat has a history of party flipping.

In 2024, Gray won his seat by 187 votes, the slimmest margin of any race in the country. His opponent, Republican John Duarte, who cast himself a centrist in the race, had only held the seat for one term before being beat. (And he defeated Gray two years earlier by just 564 votes.)

President Trump carried the 13th last year by five points, underscoring the competitiveness of the Central Valley district which backed Joe Biden in the first Biden-Trump matchup of 2020.

The passage of Proposition 50 has made the district safer for Democrats as the new congressional map shifts parts of Stockton, Modesto and northern Stanislaus County into the district, while removing more conservative, rural territory west of Fresno. Still, it remains a highly competitive district.

Like Duarte, Gray has positioned himself as a centrist, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from portraying him as being from the party’s far-left flank.

Christian Martinez, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, is now focusing on Gray’s voting history on the shutdown as a reason to criticize the incumbent. Specifically, how Gray in September abstained from voting on a bill that would have prevented the shutdown.

“Instead of delivering results for Californians, out-of-touch Democrat Adam Gray is too busy appeasing his radical socialist base, and now he’s fully responsible for holding Americans hostage with the longest government shutdown in history,” Martinez said.

Martinez added that “hardworking Californians paid the price for his refusal to vote to keep the government open, and next November, they’ll send him packing.”

Gray is now facing a Republican challenge from former Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln. When Lincoln announced his bid on Nov. 6, before the shutdown deal vote, he criticized Gray for not doing enough to prevent the shutdown in the first place.

“Washington politicians like Adam Gray have fallen in line with a failed liberal agenda that’s made life less affordable and less safe,” Lincoln said in a statement.

Moving forward, Gray sees the vote as an opportunity to reset negotiations and find a bipartisan solution before funding runs out again on Jan. 30, 2026.

“I think we’re moving in the right direction,” Gray said. “I hope my colleagues have the courage to do the right thing over the next days.”

Back in his district, Democrats have had a mixed reaction to his vote. As for his congressional colleagues, they have not offered up much criticism, choosing to let Gray explain his vote to the ever-changeable 13th District.

Republicans in California have diverging opinions on President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, according to a study published by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute on Monday.

The Trump administration has deployed a sweeping crackdown on immigration, launching ICE raids across the country and removing legal barriers in order to make deportations faster. The study found that while Democrats were largely consistent in their opposition to these immigration policies, Republican sentiment varied more, especially by age, gender and ethnicity.

“At least some subset of Republicans are seeing that these immigration strategies are a step too far,” said G. Cristina Mora, a sociology professor and co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which administered the poll. The polling data were collected from nearly 5,000 registered voters in mid-August. Just over 1,000 of those surveyed were registered Republicans.

Latino Republicans, with whom Trump made historic gains during the 2024 elections, showed the highest levels of disagreement with the party’s aggressive stance on immigration. Young people from 18 to 29 and moderate women in the Republican Party also more significantly diverged from Trump’s policies.

The majority of Republican respondents expressed approval of Trump’s immigration strategy overall. However, the study found respondents diverged more from Trump’s policies that ignore established legal processes, including due process, birthright citizenship and identification of federal agents.

“On these legalistic issues, this is where you see some of the bigger breaks,” Mora said.

Of those surveyed, 28% disapproved of the end of birthright citizenship, which Trump is pushing for, and 45% agreed that ICE agents should show clear identification. Four in 10 Republican respondents also support due process for detained immigrants.

Young people, who make up about 15% of the party in California, were on average also more likely to break from Trump’s policies than older Republicans.

The analysis also found that education level and region had almost no impact on respondents’ beliefs on immigration.

Latinos and women were more likely to disagree with Trump on humanitarian issues than their demographic counterparts.

Nearly 60% of moderate Republican women disagree with deporting longtime undocumented immigrants, compared with 47% of moderate men. 45% of women believe ICE raids unfairly target Latino communities.

The political party was most split across racial lines when it came to immigration enforcement being expanded into hospitals and schools. Forty-four percent of Latinos disagreed with the practice, compared with 26% of white respondents, while 46% of Latino respondents disagreed with deporting immigrants who have resided in the country for a long time, compared with just 30% of their white counterparts.

Trump had gained a significant Latino vote that helped him win reelection last year. Democratic candidates, however, made gains with Latino voters in elections earlier this month, indicating a possible shift away from the GOP.

The data could indicate Latino Republicans “are somewhat disillusioned” by the Trump administration’s handling of immigration, Mora said. “Latinos aren’t just disagreeing on the issues that we think are about process and American legal fairness. They’re also disagreeing on just the idea that this is cruel.”

Mora said the deluge of tense and sometimes violent encounters posted online could have an impact on Republican opinion surrounding immigration. A plainclothes agent pointed his gun at a female driver in Santa Ana last week, and two shootings involving ICE agents took place in Southern California late last month.

“You now have several months of Latinos being able to log on to their social media and see every kind of video of Latinos being targeted with or without papers,” Mora said. “I have to believe that that is doing something to everybody, not just Latino Republicans or Latino Democrats.”

Nov. 16 (UPI) — Rep. Thomas Massie said as many as 100 Republicans may vote to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein, amid a last-ditch effort by the White House to stall their release.

Massie, R-Ky., said Sunday on ABC News’ This Week that at least 100 Republicans will join Democrats in the House and vote this week for the rest of the Epstein documents to be released.

President Donald Trump this week also ordered the Department of Justice to investigate Democrats and their supporters whose names appear in the files after more than 20,000 documents related to Epstein were released by Congress.

With newly sworn in Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., there were enough members of the House to sign a discharge petition forcing a vote on whether to force the Department of Justice to release all of the files it has on Epstein — over the objections of Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and other Republicans in Congress.

Massie cautioned that while there are ways to push the Senate to vote on the bill, the chamber does not have a discharge petition-like method to force a vote over the objection of the majority leader. If the bill passes both houses of Congress, Trump still would have to sign it.

But Massie also noted that Trump’s order to the Department of Justice could potentially delay some part of the documents from being released, regardless of what Congress does.

“If they have ongoing investigations in certain areas, those documents can’t be released,” he said. “So, this might be a big smokescreen, these investigations, to open a bunch of them to, as a last-ditch effort to prevent the release of the Epstein files.”

Trump has fought the release of the files, at least partially because of widespread speculation that he figures prominently in them over of his years-long friendship with Epstein.

Despite the president’s claims that “Jeffery Epstein and I had a very bad relationship for many years,” they were close for more than a decade before the friendship went south.

“This is a hoax put out by the Democrats and a couple, a few Republicans have gone along with it because they’re weak and ineffective,” Trump said about the Democrats push for the release of the files.

Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI to investigate alleged Epstein ties to former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats whose names appear in the files.

Bondi said last week that she would pursue the investigation with “urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”

Bondi announced that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton will lead the investigation just days after the House Oversight Committee released tens of thousands of emails released by Epstein’s estate, which documented his ties to friends and associates over a decade.

The emails made several direct references to Trump, Clinton and prominent media figures, Hollywood personalities and high-ranking politicians.

US President Donald Trump has called on House Republicans to vote to release the Epstein files, in a reversal from his previous position.

“House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday night.

The major shift in Trump’s stance comes as potentially dozens of Republicans signalled they were willing to break ranks, and vote for the release of the documents.

The House is expected to vote this week on legislation that would compel the justice department to publicly release the files. Supporters of the bill appear to have enough votes for it to pass the House, though it is unclear whether it would pass the Senate.

Trump would also have to sign off on the release of the documents if it passes both chambers.

Both Democrats and some Republicans have been backing the legislation. Republican Representative Thomas Massie, a co-sponsor of the bill, said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday that as many as 100 Republicans could vote in favour.

Known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the aim of the bill is to make the justice department release all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials linked to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump posted the statement shortly after landing at Joint Base Andrews following a weekend in Florida.

“The Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages to the Public on “Epstein,” are looking at various Democrat operatives (Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, etc.) and their relationship to Epstein, and the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!,” Trump wrote, adding that he wanted Republicans to get “BACK ON POINT”.

Trump’s reference to Clinton comes after the US justice department confirmed it will investigate Epstein’s alleged links to major banks and several prominent Democrats, including former US President Bill Clinton.

Trump said he would ask Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI to look into Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Clinton and others.

Clinton has strongly denied he had any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

Trump’s reversal comes after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee last week published three email exchanges, including correspondence between Epstein, who died in 2019 in prison, and his long-time associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking.

Some of those exchanges make references to Trump. In one email, sent in 2011, Epstein writes to Maxwell: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him.”

Hours after the release of those exchanges, House Republicans released a far larger tranche of 20,000 files to counter what they said was a Democratic effort to “cherry-pick” documents. They also said it was an attempt to “create a fake narrative to slander President Trump”.

The House of Representatives then announced there would be a vote next week on a much wider release of Epstein material.

In his comments on Sunday night, Trump repeated White House dismissals of the Epstein files as a Democrat-led “hoax”. His post came after House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested in comments to Fox News that a vote on releasing the documents would put to rest allegations that Trump had any connection to Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of teenage children.

Trump and Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, traditionally one of his fiercest defenders, have been feuding publicly over the files.

On Friday, Trump called Greene “wacky” in social media posts and said she should be unseated in next year’s elections. On Saturday, he called her a “traitor”.

Greene in turn questioned whether Trump was still putting “America First” and criticised his handling of the Epstein files.

In a letter addressed to Congress, Epstein survivors and the family of Virginia Giuffre – a prominent Epstein accuser – called for US lawmakers to vote in favour of releasing the files.

“Remember that your primary duty is to your constituents. Look into the eyes of your children, your sisters, your mothers, and your aunts,” the letter reads.

“Imagine if they had been preyed upon. Imagine if you yourself were a survivor. What would you want for them? What would you want for yourself? When you vote, we will remember your decision at the ballot box.”

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers seeking to force the release of files related to the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein are predicting a big win in the House this week with a “deluge of Republicans” voting for their bill and bucking the GOP leadership and President Trump, who for months have disparaged their effort.

The bill would force the Justice Department to release all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison. Information about Epstein’s victims or ongoing federal investigations would be allowed to be redacted.

“There could be 100 or more” votes from Republicans, said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), among the lawmakers discussing the legislation on Sunday news show appearances. “I’m hoping to get a veto-proof majority on this legislation when it comes up for a vote.”

Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) introduced a discharge petition in July to force a vote on their bill. That is a rarely successful tool that allows a majority of members to bypass House leadership and force a floor vote.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had panned the discharge petition effort and sent members home early for their August recess when the GOP’s legislative agenda was upended by the clamoring for an Epstein vote.

Democrats also contend that the seating of Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) was stalled to delay her becoming the 218th member to sign the petition and gain the threshold needed to force a vote. She became the 218th signature moments after taking the oath of office last week.

Massie said Johnson, Trump and others who have been critical of his efforts would be “taking a big loss this week.”

“I’m not tired of winning yet, but we are winning,” Massie said.

The view from GOP leadership

Johnson seems to expect the House will decisively back the Epstein bill.

“We’ll just get this done and move it on. There’s nothing to hide,” the speaker said. He continued to deride the Massie-Khanna effort, however, asserting that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been releasing “far more information than the discharge petition, their little gambit.”

The vote comes at a time when new documents are raising fresh questions about Epstein and his associates, including a 2019 email that Epstein wrote to a journalist that said Trump “knew about the girls.” The White House has accused Democrats of selectively leaking the emails to smear the Republican president, though lawmakers from both parties released emails last week.

Johnson said Trump “has nothing to hide from this.”

“They’re doing this to go after President Trump on this theory that he has something to do with it. He does not,” Johnson said.

Trump’s former friendship and association with Epstein is well-established, and the president’s name was included in records that his Justice Department released in February as part of an effort to satisfy public interest in information from the sex-trafficking investigation.

Trump has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and the mere inclusion of someone’s name in files from the investigation does not imply otherwise. Epstein, who killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial, also had many prominent acquaintances in political and celebrity circles besides Trump.

Khanna voiced more modest expectations on the vote count than Massie. Still, Khanna said he was hoping for 40 or more Republicans to join the effort.

“I don’t even know how involved Trump was,” Khanna said. “There are a lot of other people involved who have to be held accountable.”

Khanna also asked Trump to meet with some of Epstein’s victims. Some will be at the Capitol on Tuesday for a news conference, he said.

Massie said Republican lawmakers who fear losing Trump’s endorsement because of how they vote will have a mark on their record if they vote “no,” which could hurt their political prospects in the long term.

“The record of this vote will last longer than Donald Trump’s presidency,” Massie said.

A MAGA split

On the Republican side, three Republicans joined with Massie in signing the discharge petition: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

Trump publicly broke with Greene last week and said he would endorse a challenger against her in 2026 “if the right person runs.”

Greene, a MAGA stalwart throughout her time in Congress, attributed her fallout with Trump to the Epstein debate. “Unfortunately, it has all come down to the Epstein files,” she said, adding that the country deserves transparency on the issue and that Trump’s criticism of her is confusing because the women she has talked to say he did nothing wrong.

“I have no idea what’s in the files. I can’t even guess. But that is the question everyone is asking: … ‘Why fight this so hard?’” Greene said.

Even if the bill passes the House, there is no guarantee that Senate Republicans will go along. Massie said he just hopes Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) “will do the right thing.”

“The pressure is going to be there if we get a big vote in the House,” said Massie, who thinks “we could have a deluge of Republicans.”

Massie appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” Johnson was on “Fox News Sunday,” Khanna spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and Greene was interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Freking writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was unapologetic about putting America first. He promised to secure the nation’s borders, strengthen the domestic workforce and be tough on countries he thought were taking advantage of the United States.

Now, 10 months into his second term, the president is facing backlash from some conservatives who say he is too focused on matters abroad, whether it’s seeking regime change in Venezuela, brokering peace deals in Ukraine and Gaza or extending a $20-billion currency swap for Argentina. The criticism has grown in recent days after Trump expressed support for granting more visas to foreign students and skilled immigrant workers.

The cracks in the MAGA movement, which have been more pronounced in recent weeks, underscore how Trump’s once impenetrable political base is wavering as the president appears to embrace a more global approach to governing.

“I have to view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally,” Trump said this week when asked to address the criticism at an Oval Office event. “We could have a world that’s on fire where wars come to our shores very easily if you had a bad president.”

For backers of Trump’s MAGA movement, the conflict is forcing some to weigh loyalty to an “America first” ideology over a president they have long supported and who, in some cases, inspired them to get involved in the political process.

“I am against foreign aid, foreign wars, and sending a single dollar to foreign countries,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who in recent weeks has become more critical of Trump’s policies, said in a social media post Wednesday. “I am America First and America Only. This is my way and there is no other way to be.”

Beyond America-first concerns, some Trump supporters are frustrated with him for resisting the disclosures about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his network of powerful friends — including Trump. A group of Republicans in the House, for instance, helped lead an effort to force a vote to demand further disclosures on the Epstein files from the Justice Department.

“When they are protecting pedophiles, when they are blowing our budget, when they are starting wars overseas, I’m sorry, I can’t go along with that,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said in a CNN interview. “And back home, people agree with me. They understand, even the most ardent Trump supporters understand.”

When asked to respond to the criticism Trump has faced in recent weeks, the White House said the president was focused on implementing “economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America.”

Mike Madrid, a “never Trump” Republican consultant, believes the Epstein scandal has sped up a Republican backlash that has been brewing as a result of Trump deviating from his campaign promises.

“They are turning on him, and it’s a sign of the inviolable trust being gone,” Madrid said.

The MAGA movement was not led by a policy ideology, but rather “fealty to the leader,” Madrid said. Once the trust in Trump fades, “everything is gone.”

Criticism of Trump goes mainstream

The intraparty tension also has played out on conservative and mainstream news outlets, where the president has been challenged on his policies.

In a recent Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham, Trump was pressed on a plan to give student visas to hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, a move that would mark a departure from actions taken by his administration this year to crack down on foreign students.

“I think it is good to have outside countries,” Trump said. “Look, I want to be able to get along with the world.”

In that same interview, Trump said he supports giving H-1B visas to skilled foreign workers because the U.S. doesn’t have workers with “certain talents.”

“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles,’” Trump argued.

Trump in September imposed a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas for skilled workers, a move that led to confusion among businesses, immigration lawyers and H-1B visa holders. Before Trump’s order, the visa program had exposed a rift between the president’s supporters in the technology industry, which relies on the program, and immigration hard-liners who want to see the U.S. invest in an American workforce.

A day after Trump expressed support for the visa program, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem added fuel to the immigration debate by saying the administration is fast-tracking immigrants’ pathway to citizenship.

“More people are becoming naturalized under this administration than ever before,” Noem told Fox News this week.

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and close ally of Trump, said the administration’s position was “disappointing.”

“How is that a good thing? We are supposed to be kicking foreigners out, not letting them stay,” Loomer said.

Polling adds on the heat

As polling shows Americans are growing frustrated with the economy, some conservatives increasingly blame Trump for not doing enough to create more jobs and lower the cost of living.

Greene, the Georgia Republican, said on “The Sean Spicer Show” Thursday that Trump and his administration are “gaslighting” people when they say prices are going down.

“It’s actually infuriating people because people know what they’re paying at the grocery store,” she said, while urging Republicans to “show we are in the trenches with them” rather than denying their experience.

While Trump has maintained that the economy is strong, administration officials have begun talking about pushing new economic policies. White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said this week that the administration would be working to provide consumers with more purchasing power, saying that “we’re going to fix it right away.”

“We understand that people understand, as people look at their pocketbooks to go to the grocery store, that there’s still work to do,” Hassett said.

The acknowledgment comes after this month’s elections in key states — in which Republicans were soundly defeated — made clear that rising prices were top of mind for many Americans. The results also showed Latino voters were turning away from the GOP amid growing concerns about the economy.

As Republicans try to refocus on addressing affordability, Trump has continued to blame the economic problems on former President Biden.

“Cost, and INFLATION, were higher under the Sleepy Joe Biden administration, than they are now,” Trump said in a social media post Friday. He insisted that under his administration costs are “tumbling down.”

She’s a little bit country; he’s a little bit rock ‘n’ roll.

And me? I’m a little bit stunned. Two politicians have emerged, against all odds, to surprise and impress us this year: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

You’d be hard-pressed to find two Americans less similar — politically, culturally, geographically, maybe even molecularly. These two occupy opposite poles. She’s NASCAR and CrossFit. He’s electric vehicles and Pinot Noir. They shouldn’t have much in common, but lately, both have done the unthinkable: They’ve taken on President Trump and lived (politically) to tell about it.

Let’s start with Greene because, honestly, she’s more fun.

For years, MTG was seen as an embarrassment. The QAnon congresswoman. The “Jewish space laser” lady. The lawmaker who, just two years prior to winning her House seat, questioned whether a plane really hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

She harassed a then-teenage Parkland survivor and coined the immortal phrase “gazpacho police,” apparently confusing the soup with Nazi secret police.

But then, something strange happened: Greene started making sense. Not “agree with her at dinner” sense, but the “wait, that’s not totally insane” kind.

She blasted Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, which — if you take the “America First” philosophy literally and not just as performance art — is consistent with her beliefs. And in a time when selling out is perceived as being shrewder than standing for something, the mere act of holding a consistent position is a virtue.

MTG also called out her own party for blocking the Epstein files, and volunteered to walk “on the House floor and say every damn name that abused these women.”

And in an act of shocking populist coherence, she ripped into Republicans for letting Obamacare subsidies expire: “Health insurance premiums will DOUBLE,” she thundered on X, adding: “Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!”

Trump, naturally, took all this personally. “I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” he said, recently. “Nice woman, but she’s lost her way.” To which Greene, never one to back down, fired back: “I haven’t lost my way. I’m 100% America First and only!”

The thing I’m liking about Greene isn’t just that she’s standing up to Trump — although, I admit, it’s fun to watch. But what’s really refreshing is that she’s a true believer who got elected, got famous and yet continues to believe.

Which brings us to Gavin Newsom.

Newsom has always been the poster boy for everything people hate about California — a man who looks like he was genetically engineered by a Napa Valley venture capitalist to play a slick politician.

The “important” coiffed hair. The smug grin. The French Laundry dinner during COVID-19, while the rest of us were holed up in our houses microwaving Lean Cuisines.

Once upon a time, he and his then-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, posed on a rug for a Harper’s Bazaar spread where they were dubbed “The New Kennedys.”

Enough said.

If Greene is the quintessential MAGA mama, Newsom is the slick bro you want to throat punch. But somehow he has had a banner year.

Newsom stood firm against ICE raids and troop deployments in Los Angeles. Then, he trolled Trump with online memes that actually landed.

After Texas Republicans tried to grab five congressional seats for the GOP, Newsom shepherded Prop. 50 through California — an amendment to the state constitution aimed at mitigating Texas’ gerrymandering by redrawing maps to help Democrats even the score.

Then, he waltzed into Houston for a celebratory rally — some political end zone dancing on the opponents’ home turf, just to twist the knife.

Like Greene, the guy has moxie.

And here’s the thing I’m learning from the Trump era: Guts come from the most unlikely places, and looks can be deceiving.

You never know when some heroic-looking leader will fold like a cheap suit, just like you never know when some “heel” out of central casting for villains will turn “face” and rise to the occasion.

I don’t mean to sound naive. I’m not proposing a Newsom-Greene 2028 unity ticket. (Although … tell me you wouldn’t watch that convention.)

The odds are, both of these figures will disappoint me again, probably by next Thursday. Life is complicated, and it’s sometimes hard to disentangle heroism from opportunism.

Indeed, some have speculated that MTG’s sudden streak of independence is the result of Trump putting the kibosh on a “Greene for U.S. Senate” bid in Georgia. And as for Newsom — is his show of toughness an act of patriotism, or a prelude to his own presidential campaign?

Frankly, that’s a difference without a distinction.

For now, here’s what is clear: These two political figures have shown a flash — a glimmer — of something like backbone.

And in the year of our Lord 2025, that’s rarer, and more valuable, than almost any commodity in politics.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

WASHINGTON — Now that the government shutdown is over, House and Senate Republicans say they will negotiate with Democrats on whether to extend COVID-era tax credits that help tens of millions of Americans afford their healthcare premiums. But finding bipartisan agreement could be difficult, if not impossible, before the subsidies expire at the end of the year.

The shutdown ended this week after a small group of Democrats made a deal with Republicans senators who promised a vote by mid-December on extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies. But there is no guaranteed outcome, and many Republicans have made clear they want the credits to expire.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called the subsidies a “boondoggle” immediately after the House voted Wednesday to end the shutdown, and President Trump said the Obama-era healthcare overhaul was “disaster” as he signed the reopening bill into law.

It is far from the outcome that Democrats had hoped for as they kept the government closed for 43 days, demanding that Republicans negotiate with them on an extension before premiums sharply increase. But they say they will try again as the expiration date approaches.

“It remains to be seen if they are serious,” said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. But he said Democrats “are just getting started.”

Republicans have been meeting privately to discuss the issue. Some want to extend the subsidies, with changes, to avoid the widespread increases in premiums. Others, like Johnson and Trump, want to start a new conversation about overhauling “Obamacare” entirely — a redo after a similar effort in 2017 failed.

Democrats push for extension

Healthcare has long been one of the most difficult issues on Capitol Hill, marked by deep ideological and political divides. Partisan disagreement over the 2010 law has persisted for more than a decade, and relationships are already strained from weeks of partisan tensions over the shutdown.

Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said that while Republicans have promised negotiations and a Senate vote, Democrats are wary. She noted that Johnson has not committed to anything in the House.

“Do I trust any of them? Hell no,” DeLauro said.

If the two sides cannot agree, as many as 24 million people who get their healthcare from the exchanges created by the law could see their premiums go up Jan. 1. New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, one of the Democrats who struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to reopen the government, said she thinks an agreement on the tax credits is possible.

During the talks that led to the shutdown’s end, Shaheen said she and other moderate Democrats sat across from Thune and “looked him eye to eye” as he committed to a serious effort.

“We’re going to have a chance to vote on a bill that we will write by mid-December, in a way that gives us a chance to build — hopefully build — bipartisan support to get that through,” Shaheen said.

While Democrats would like to see a permanent extension of the tax credits, most realize that is unlikely. Just before the shutdown ended, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York proposed a one-year extension and a bipartisan committee to address Republican demands for changes to the Affordable Care Act. But Thune said that was a “nonstarter” as the government remained shut down.

In the House, Democrats have proposed a three-year extension.

What Republicans want

While Republicans have long sought to scrap Obamacare, they have had challenges over the years in figuring out what would replace it. That problem plagued the 2017 effort, when then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) cast the deciding vote to kill a bill on the Senate floor that was short on detail.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have proposed overhauling the law to create accounts that would direct the money to individuals instead of insurance companies. Those are ideas that Trump echoed as he signed the funding bill Wednesday evening.

“I want the money to go directly to you, the people,” Trump said.

It is unclear exactly how that would work, and scrapping the law in its current form would take months, if not years, to negotiate, even if Republicans could find the votes to do it.

Slow start to negotiations

Some moderate Republicans in the House have said they want to work with Democrats to extend the subsidies before the deadline, which is only weeks away. In a letter to Thune and Schumer on Wednesday, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, the Republican co-chair of the Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, encouraged negotiations.

“Our sense of urgency cannot be greater,” Fitzpatrick wrote. “Our willingness to cooperate has no limits.”

So far, though, Senate Republicans have been meeting on their own to figure out their own differences.

“Right now, it’s just getting consensus among ourselves,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said Monday after GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee met to discuss possible ways forward.

Tillis is supportive of extending the tax credits, but said lawmakers also need to find a way to reduce costs. If the two sides cannot eventually agree, Tillis said, Republicans may have to try to figure out a way to do it on their own, potentially using budget maneuvers that enabled them to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” this summer without any Democratic votes.

“We should have that in our back pocket too,” Tillis said.

Another shutdown?

Some House Democrats have raised the possibility that there could be another shutdown if they are unable to win concessions on healthcare. The bill signed by Trump will fully fund some parts of the government, but others run out of money again at the end of January if Congress does not act.

“I think it depends on the vulnerable House Republicans who are not going to be able to go back to their constituents without telling them that they’ve done something on healthcare,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).

“We’ll just have to see” if there could be another shutdown, said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Riverside).

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said he is “not going to vote to endorse their cruelty” if Republicans do not extend the subsidies.

DeLauro said that Republicans have wanted to repeal the ACA since it was first enacted. “That’s where they’re trying to go,” she said.

“When it comes to Jan. 30 we’ll see what progress has been made,” she said.

Jalonick writes for the Associated Press.

The Justice Department on Thursday sued to block new congressional district boundaries approved by California voters last week, joining a court battle that could help determine which party wins control of the U.S. House in 2026.

The complaint filed in California federal court targets the new congressional map pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in response to a similar Republican-led effort in Texas backed by President Trump. It sets the stage for a high-stakes legal and political fight between the Republican administration and the Democratic governor, who is seen as a likely 2028 presidential contender.

“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in an emailed statement. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.”

California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 50, a constitutional amendment that changes the state’s congressional boundaries to give Democrats a shot at winning five seats currentlyheld by Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.

The Justice Department is joining a case challenging the new map that was brought by the California Republican Party last week. The Trump administration accuses California of racial gerrymandering in violation of the Constitution by using race as a factor to favor Latino voters with the new map. It asks a judge to prohibit California from using the new map in any future elections.

“Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50 — the recent ballot initiative that junked California’s pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines,” the lawsuit says.

Proposition 50 was Newsom’s response to Trump’s maneuvers in Texas, where Republicans rejiggered districts in hopes of picking up five seats of their own ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, when House control will be on the line.

Democrats need to gain just a handful of seats next year to take control of the chamber, a win that would imperil Trump’s agenda for the remainder of his term and open the way for congressional investigations into his administration. Republicans currently hold 219 seats, to Democrats’ 214.

The showdown between the nation’s two most populous states has spread nationally, with Missouri, Ohio and a spray of other states either adopting new district lines to gain partisan advantage or considering doing so.

The national implications of California’s ballot measure were clear in both the money it attracted and the high-profile figures who became involved. Tens of millions of dollars flowed into the race, including a $5-million donation to opponents from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super political action committee tied to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Former action movie star and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opposed the measure, while former President Obama, a Democrat, appeared in ads supporting it, calling it a “smart” approach to counter Republican moves aimed at safeguarding House control.

The contest provided Newsom with a national platform when he has confirmed he will consider a White House run in 2028.

Richer and Blood write for the Associated Press. Richer reported from Chicago.

Democrats’ caterwauling this week after a few of their senators caved to end the government shutdown couldn’t completely drown out another noise: the sound of President Trump pinballing dumb “policy” ideas as he flails to respond to voters’ unhappiness that his promised Golden Age is proving golden only for him, his family and his donors.

On social media (of course) and in interviews, the president has been blurting out proposals that are news even to the advisors who should be vetting them first. Rebates of $2,000 for most Americans and pay-downs of federal debt, all from supposed tariff windfalls. (Don’t count on either payoff; more below.) New 50-year mortgages to make home-buying more affordable (not). Docked pay for air traffic controllers who didn’t show up to work during the shutdown, without pay, and $10,000 bonuses for those who did. (He doesn’t have that power; the government isn’t his family business.) Most mind-boggling of all, Trump has resurrected his and Republicans’ long-buried promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

It’s been five years since he promised a healthcare plan “in two weeks.” It’s been a year since he said he had “concepts of a plan” during the 2024 campaign. What he now calls “Trumpcare” (natch) apparently amounts to paying people to buy insurance. Details to come, he says, again.

With all this seat-of-the-pants policymaking, Trump only underscores the policy ignorance that’s been a defining trait since he first ran for office. No other president in memory put out such knee-jerk junk that’s easily discounted and mocked.

In his first term, Trump didn’t learn how to navigate the legislative process, and thus steer well-debated ideas into law. He didn’t want to. Even more in his second term, Trump avoids that deliberative democratic process, preferring rule by fiat and executive order (even if the results don’t outlast your presidency, or they fizzle in court). For Trump, ideas don’t percolate, infused with expertise and data. They pop into his head.

But diktats are not always possible, as the shutdown dramatized when Republicans couldn’t agree with Democrats on the must-pass legislation to keep the government funded.

With Republicans controlling the White House and Congress (and arguably the Supreme Court: see recent decisions siding with the Trump administration to block SNAP benefits), the Democrats were never going to actually win the shutdown showdown — not if winning meant forcing Republicans to agree to extend health insurance tax credits for millions of Americans. Expanding healthcare coverage has never been Republicans’ priority. Tax cuts are, mainly for the wealthy and corporations, and Republicans pocketed that win months ago with Trump’s big, ugly bill, paid for mainly by cuts to Medicaid.

Yet Democrats won something: They shoved the issue of spiraling healthcare costs back onto politics’ center stage, where it joins the broader question of affordability in an economy that doesn’t work for the working class. Drawing attention to the cruel priorities of Trump 2.0 is a big reason that I and many others supported Democrats forcing a shutdown, despite the unlikelihood of a policy “W.” (I did not support the Senate Democrats’ caving just yet, not so soon after Democrats won bigger-than-expected victories in last week’s off-year elections on the strength of their fight for affordability, including health insurance.)

The fight isn’t over. The Senate will debate and vote next month on extending tax credits for Obamacare that otherwise expire at year’s end, making coverage unaffordable for millions of people. Even if the Democrats win that vote — unlikely — the subsidies would be DOA in the House, a MAGA stronghold. What’s not dead, however, is the issue of rising insurance premiums for all Americans. It’s teed up for the midterm election campaigns.

Such pocketbook issues have thrown Trump on the defensive. The result is his string of politically tone-deaf remarks and unvetted, out-of-right-field initiatives.

On Monday night, having invited Fox News host Laura Ingraham into the White House for an interview and a tour of his gilt-and-marble renovations, he pooh-poohed her question about Americans’ anxiety about the costs of living with this unpolitic rejoinder: “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats.” When Ingraham, to her credit, reminded Trump that he’d slammed President Biden for “saying things were great, and things weren’t great,” Trump stood his shaky ground, sniping: “Polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” (False.)

On Saturday, Trump had posted that Republicans should take money “from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate” Obamacare. He told Ingraham, “Call it Trumpcare … anything but Obamacare.” Healthcare industry experts pounced: Such direct payments could allow younger, healthy people to get cheaper, no-frills coverage, but would leave the insurance pools with disproportionately more ailing people and, in turn, higher costs.

As for Trump’s promised $2,000 rebates and reductions in the $37 trillion federal debt, he posted early Sunday and again on Monday that “trillions of dollars” from tariffs would make both things possible soon. On Tuesday night, he sent a fundraising email: “Would you take a TARIFF rebate check signed by yours truly?”

Maybe if he’d talked to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who professed ignorance about the idea on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, Trump would have learned that tariffs in the past year raised not trillions but $195 billion, significantly less than $2,000 rebates would cost. Not only would there be nothing to put toward the debt, but rebates would add $6 trillion in red ink over 10 years. That would put Trump just $2 trillion short of the amount of debt he added in his first term.

When Ingraham asked where he’d get the money to pay bonuses to air traffic controllers, Trump was quick with a nonanswer: “I don’t know. I’ll get it from someplace.” And when she told him the 50-year mortgage idea “has enraged your MAGA friends,” given the potential windfall of interest payment for banks, Trump was equally dismissive: “It’s not even a big deal.”

Not a big deal: That’s policymaking, Trump-style.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
Threads: @jkcalmes
X: @jackiekcalmes

Nov. 11 (UPI) — Senate Republicans have signaled that they are willing to negotiate with Democrats on healthcare subsidies, but are demanding tighter abortion rules on insurance plans.

Senate Republican Leader John Thune described his party’s negotiating position to reporters before the chamber passed a bill on Monday to reopen the government, according to NBC News. Thune’s remarks set the stage for the next partisan fight over expiring health care subsidies that were at the center of the longest government shutdown on record.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sharply criticized the Republican proposal in a floor speech Saturday, calling it “a backdoor national abortion ban.”

“Democrats must dismiss this radical Trojan horse against women’s essential healthcare out of hand,” he said.

Senate Democrats earlier demanded that an extension of pandemic-era enhanced subsidies be included in any government-funding bill. That demand was left out of a funding bill that passed the Senate on Monday and is expected to pass the House.

With no extension of the subsidies in place, individuals who purchase health insurance through Affordable Care Act marketplaces will see steep premium rises — some by thousands of dollars a month — beginning next year.

Republicans have expressed a willingness to negotiate on the enhanced subsidies, but Thune said that in exchange for an extension of the subsidies, Republicans will ask for more stringent enforcement of longstanding restrictions on federal funding being used for abortion, known as the Hyde Amendment.

“A one-year extension along the lines of what [Democrats] are suggesting, and without Hyde protections — doesn’t even get close,” Thune said, according to NBC News.

Wyden said in his floor speech that the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, already bars the use of taxpayer money for abortions.

However, Republicans want to block states from allowing people to access abortions through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces using state or other funding, NBC News reported.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., has indicated he’s open to extending the subsidies, but said Republicans won’t support it without the abortion restrictions.

WASHINGTON — President Trump and Republican lawmakers took a victory lap on Tuesday after securing bipartisan support to reopen the government, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history without ceding ground to any core Democratic demands.

House members were converging on Washington for a final vote expected as early as Wednesday, after 60 senators — including seven Democrats and an independent — advanced the measure on Monday night. Most Democratic lawmakers in the House are expected to oppose the continuing resolution, which does not include an extension of Affordable Care Act tax credits that had been a central demand during the shutdown negotiations.

The result, according to independent analysts, is that premiums will more than double on average for more than 20 million Americans who use the healthcare marketplace, rising from an average of $888 to $1,904 for out-of-pocket payments annually, according to KFF.

Democrats in the Senate who voted to reopen the government said they had secured a promise from Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, that they would get a vote on extending the tax credits next month.

But the vote is likely to fail down party lines. And even if it earned some Republican support, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has made no promises he would give the measure a vote in the lower chamber.

An end to the shutdown comes at a crucial time for the U.S. aviation industry ahead of one of the busiest travel seasons around the Thanksgiving holiday. The prolonged closure of the federal government led federal employees in the sector to call out sick in large numbers, prompting an unprecedented directive from the Federation Aviation Administration that slowed operations at the nation’s biggest airports.

Lawmakers are racing to vote before federal employees working in aviation safety miss yet another paycheck this week, potentially extending frustration within their ranks and causing further delays at airports entering the upcoming holiday week.

It will be the first time the House conducts legislative work in over 50 days, a marathon stretch that has resulted in a backlog of work for lawmakers on a wide range of issues, from appropriations and stock trading regulations to a discharge petition calling for the release of files in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

“We look forward to the government reopening this week so Congress can get back to our regular legislative session,” Johnson told reporters Monday. “There will be long days and long nights here for the foreseeable future to make up for all this lost time that was imposed upon us.”

To reopen the government, the spending package needs to pass the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority and Democrats have vowed to vote against a deal that does not address healthcare costs.

Still, Trump and Republican leaders believe they have enough votes to push it through the chamber and reopen the government later in the week.

Trump has called the spending package a “very good” deal and has indicated that he will sign it once it gets to his desk.

At a Veterans Day event on Tuesday, Trump thanked Thune and Johnson for their work on their work to reopen the government. Johnson was in the crowd listening to Trump’s remarks.

“Congratulations to you and to John and to everybody on a very big victory,” Trump said in a speech at Arlington National Cemetery. “We are opening back our country. It should’ve never been closed.”

While Trump lauded the measure as a done deal, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the chamber, said his party would still try to delay or tank the legislation with whatever tools it had left.

“House Democrats will strongly oppose any legislation that does not decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis,” Jeffries said in a CNN interview Tuesday morning.

Just like in the Senate, California Democrats in the House are expected to vote against the shutdown deal because it does not address the expiring healthcare subsidies.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi said the shutdown deal reached in the Senate “fails to meet the needs of America’s working families” and said she stood with House Democratic leaders in opposing the legislation.

“We must continue to fight for a responsible, bipartisan path forward that reopens the government and keeps healthcare affordable for the American people,” Pelosi said in a social media post.

California Republicans in the House, meanwhile, have criticized Democrats for trying to stop the funding agreement from passing.

“These extremists only care about their radical base regardless of the impact to America,” Rep. Ken Calvert of Corona said in a social media post.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) publicly called on Johnson to negotiate with Democrats on healthcare during the shutdown. He said in an interview last month that he thought there was “a lot of room” to address concerns on both sides of the aisle on how to address the rising costs of healthcare.

Kiley said Monday that he was proposing legislation with Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-San José) that proposed extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits for another two years.

He said the bill would “stop massive increase in healthcare costs for 22 million Americans whose premium tax credits are about to expire.”

“Importantly, the extension is temporary and fully paid for, so it can’t increase the deficit,” Kiley said in reference to a frequent concern cited by Republicans that extending the credits would contribute to the national debt.