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2025-12-12 06:10:56

In an extraordinary rebuke to Donald Trump on Thursday, the Indiana state Senate rejected a gerrymandered congressional map relentlessly pushed by the president and his allies that would have given Republicans a lopsided 9-0 advantage in the state’s House delegation by eliminating the seats of two Democratic members of Congress. The final vote was 31-19 in the state Senate, where Republicans have a supermajority: Twenty-one Republicans joined 10 Democrats to defeat the legislation.

Republican state senators who opposed the gerrymandered map sharply criticized the months-long pressure campaign by Trump and his allies, which led to threats of violence and intimidation against at least 11 state lawmakers.

“I fear for this institution,” Republican state Sen. Greg Walker, chair of the Senate Committee on Elections, said during an emotional speech this week. “I fear for the state of Indiana and I fear for all states if we allow intimidation and threats to become the norm.”

Ultimately, the heavy-handed tactics employed by Trump backfired on the president and his allies.

Republican state Sen. Greg Goode, a key swing vote whom Trump called out by name and who was a victim of a swatting attack, cited the climate of fear and intimidation as a reason why he was opposing the bill.

“Misinformation. Cruel social media posts. Over the top pressure from inside and outside the statehouse. Threats of primaries. Threats of violence. Acts of violence,” Goode said on the Indiana Senate floor on Thursday. “Friends, we’re better than this, are we not?”

Trump reprised the playbook he used to attempt to overturn the 2020 election, attacking, bullying, and harassing Republican state officials in Indiana who would not automatically bend to his will.

The president summoned Republican state legislators to the White House and sent Vice President JD Vance to Indiana twice to lobby the state legislature. He vowed to support primary campaigns against Republicans who opposed the redistricting plan, calling out individual state legislators by name, and attacking the leader of the state Senate, Rodric Bray, as a “weak and pathetic RINO” after Bray said the senate didn’t have the votes to pass the measure.

Trump posted another rant on Truth Social against Bray on the eve of the state Senate vote, calling the Senate leader “either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!” and once again threatening “a MAGA Primary” against “anybody that votes against Redistricting.” That same night, a Republican member of the state House who voted against the redistricting bill was the victim of a bomb threat at his home.

Another GOP state senator opposed to gerrymandering who received a pipe bomb threat at her home posted on X that it was the “result of the D.C. political pundits for redistricting.”

Trump’s allies, including Turning Point USA and another dark money group led by former Trump campaign officials, escalated the pressure campaign by vowing to spend seven figures supporting primary challengers to Republican opponents of the map. Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun, who eventually fell in line, suggested the state could lose resources if it didn’t comply with Trump’s dictates.

“If we try to drag our feet as a state on it, probably, we’ll have consequences of not working with the Trump administration as tightly as we should,” Braun said.

Heritage Action, the dark money arm of the Heritage Foundation, claimed that Trump threatened to strip all federal funding from the state if redistricting failed, a new low in his authoritarian playbook if true.

“President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state,” the group wrote on X. “Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”

Other top Republicans went so far as to invoke the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as a reason why the legislature should pass the new gerrymandered map. “They killed Charlie Kirk—the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” US Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) said a few days after Kirk’s murder.

Mid-decade gerrymandering is bad enough on its own. It’s even worse when accompanied by economic and political terrorism. The intimidation against Indiana state legislators, which included warnings of a pipe bomb and fake threats against lawmakers designed to produce a law enforcement response, called to mind the ire Trump and his supporters directed at former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence when insurrectionists broke into the Capitol on January 6 and said they wanted to “hang” the vice president because he refused to go along with the president’s unconstitutional plan to overturn the 2020 election.

But now, instead of overturning an election, Trump is trying to rig and predetermine the next one so that his party doesn’t lose power next November.

The 9-0 map was designed to eliminate all traces of Democratic representation at the congressional level in the state, giving Republicans 100 percent of seats in a state where Trump won 58 percent of the vote in 2024. Under the proposal, Trump would have carried every one of the new districts by at least 12 points. Indiana’s current map received an A from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The new one got an F.

To oust Democratic Rep. André Carson, the city of Indianapolis, which he largely represents, would be split four ways, creating districts that border three different states in the process. Carson’s new district would have shifted from favoring Kamala Harris by 40 points to Trump by nearly 20 points, one of the most outlandish examples of gerrymandering anywhere in the country. It would go from a compact urban district that is roughly 50 percent non-white to a sprawling rural district that is 80 percent white, dramatically diluting the power of minority voters in Indianapolis.

“Splicing our state’s largest city—and its biggest economic driver—into four parts is ridiculous,” Carson said in a statement. “It’s clear these orders are coming from Washington, and they clearly don’t know the first thing about our community.” (Republicans confirmed the map was drawn by a DC-based group, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, that has drawn pro-Republican gerrymanderers in other states, including Texas, this year.)

The targeting of Carson, who is Black, continued the trend of Republicans drawing new maps in 2025 that seek to dismantle districts held by Black Democrats, which has also occurred in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina.

The Trump-backed map also attempted to oust Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan, who represents a district in northwest Indiana alongside Lake Michigan that Trump narrowly lost. Mrvan’s district would sprawl from two counties to eight, with the Democratic cities of East Chicago and Gary outnumbered by the red countryside, in another example of how the map disenfranchises Black and urban voters.  

The egregious nature of this gerrymander was too much for even the Republican supermajority in the Indiana state Senate to ignore. The map’s defeat is further evidence of how, despite the Supreme Court reinstating Texas’ gerrymander last week, Trump’s gerrymandering arms race hasn’t become the lopsided victory he initially envisioned. The parties may break mostly even in the end.

Voting rights supporters in Missouri submitted more than 300,000 signatures this week to hold a ballot referendum that could ultimately block the gerrymandered map passed by Republicans in September, although Missouri’s Republican Secretary of State is now absurdly claiming he can unilaterally declare the new referendum unconstitutional, which is sure to provoke another court battle. New Democratic districts in California, Utah, and potentially Virginia could also minimize Trump’s advantage heading into the midterms. 

Trump is doing everything he can to break American democracy. For one day, at least, he failed.

2025-12-12 05:53:27

In a contentious hearing that featured Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem telling Democratic committee members they should “all be fired,” House representatives repeatedly attempted to call attention to federal agents detaining non-criminal immigrants and US citizens. The secretary held the party line: she, and the Trump administration, were simply keeping Americans safe from threats.

The hearing to discuss “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland” came as President Donald Trump and Noem’s immigration enforcement continues to expand into cities across the US, often resulting in violent detainments and fostering an environment of fear for immigrants—documented or not—and, by design, people of color in general.

During the House Committee on Homeland Security’s hearing, Secretary Noem was repeatedly confronted with instances of her agency going after people who were neither violent nor criminal.

“How many United States military veterans have you deported?” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) asked Noem.

“Sir,” she responded, “we have not deported US citizens or military veterans.”

A staffer then held up a tablet behind Magaziner’s desk. 

“Madam Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sae Joon Park. He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989.” Park was taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection agents at an airport in Honolulu and placed on a one-way flight to South Korea in June. Park, a green-card holder and a Purple Heart recipient, self-deported after he was placed on a deportation list.

The Trump administration isn’t the first to deport veterans. Officials across the administration, though, have repeatedly and falsely denied detaining or deporting US citizens or those in the country with other legal protections. 

Magaziner details that Park “struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service,” adding that he was “arrested in the 1990s for some minor drug offenses, nothing serious, he never hurt anyone besides himself and he’s been clean and sober for 14 years.”

“Will you join me,” Magaziner continued, “in thanking Mr. Park for his service to our country?”

Noem said: “Sir, I’m grateful for every single person that has served our country and followed our laws.” 

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), one of the representatives who called on Noem to resign—along with Michigan Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar, a Democrat from Michigan, who told Noem he was “sick” of her “lies”—sparred with Noem on several points during the hearing.

“At your direction,” Thompson said, “DHS has illegally detained and deported US citizens, including US citizen children with cancer.” His staffer held up a photo of a 10-year-old girl who was recovering from brain cancer when she was removed with her undocumented parents in February. 

Right before Rep. Julie Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, had her time to speak, Secretary Noem left the hearing early for what she said was a meeting on FEMA. That meeting had been cancelled, which Noem’s office says she learned after the secretary had left the security hearing.

“This notion that we’re only going to pursue serious threats, it’s just not true,” Johnson said shortly after Noem left the room. “I visited an ICE facility outside of Dallas and over 70 percent of them were classified as the lowest threat level—as never having a criminal record at all.” 

During her remarks, a staffer held up a poster board featuring American citizens who were arrested by ICE.

“The rule of law is founded on two fundamental principles,” Johnson said. “That if you are going to be subject to a criminal arrest in this country, that there is probable cause to do so. You can’t just snatch somebody walking into a coffee shop because of the color of their skin. There’s no probable cause for that. And also, that you will get due process, and that is not happening.”

2025-12-12 05:07:47

On Thursday, in a 51-48 vote, the Senate rejected a Democratic plan to extend Affordable Care Act enhanced tax credits, as well as a Republican alternative that boosted a health savings account model. It is now all but certain that the credits, which began under the Biden administration, will expire at the end of the year.

As I previously reported, that expiration will lead, for millions of Americans, to the greatest single rise in health care premiums ever.

In a video recorded after the votes, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) expressed her anger towards Republican colleagues.

“They voted to increase health care costs across the board, and now millions of Americans are left with the impossible decision of choosing between paying for health insurance or paying their rent,” Warren said. “They’ve all fallen in line behind Donald Trump and left American families in the dirt.”

On New Year’s Day, the Urban Institute estimates, at least four million ACA marketplace users will become uninsured. People seeking ACA insurance will have until Monday to select a plan in order to be covered on January 1.

Some of those people may now choose plans that are less comprehensive because it’s what they can afford, said University of Pittsburgh assistant professor Miranda Yaver, who focuses on health policy. That would leave an even greater number of Americans underinsured.

“The average American cannot accommodate an unexpected $1,000 emergency medical expense,” Yaver said. “It is not exactly hard to run up a thousand-dollar tab in the American health care system, and having a good health insurance plan can insulate us from that cost.”

American Public Health Association executive director Georges C. Benjamin said in a press release that Congress had failed its duty to safeguard the health of Americans.

“Rather than addressing a serious issue that has been on our radar for years, Congress, earlier this year, rejected the opportunity to extend the enhanced tax credits,” Benjamin said, “and instead passed legislation to gut the Medicaid program and make additional changes to the ACA that will result in 16 million Americans losing their health coverage.”

“We’re probably going to see more and more people forgoing coverage and care, which is only going to exacerbate existing health conditions,” said Marilyn Cabrera, the nonprofit Young Invincibles‘ health care policy and advocacy manager.

Yaver is also skeptical of the health savings account model being pushed by Republicans as an alternative. They are not practical, she says, for the low and middle-income people that the Affordable Care Act is supposed to help.

“You have to have the means to put a lot of money into your health savings account, and if you’re barely scraping by and living paycheck to paycheck, it’s just not going to happen,” Yaver said.

Among some people whose health insurance is now in jeopardy, there is anger at Congress on both sides of the aisle. Some Democrats, Yaver said, are willing to “sort of allow a certain amount of harm in the next plan year, not wanting to bail Republicans out from their unwillingness to extend the marketplace subsidies,” ahead of elections.

And for Republican politicians, Yaver said, “there is a real lack of connection to everyday Americans’ struggles with accessing health care, which is not a luxury item. It is basic survival for a lot of people.”

2025-12-12 05:05:45

The Department of Education announced Tuesday that it reached a settlement agreement with the state of Missouri to end former President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. 

The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program bases monthly payments on an individual’s income and family size. The plan protected more borrowers’ incomes, increasing monthly payment exemptions from 150 percent to 225 percent of the federal poverty level—equating to roughly $48,000 per year for a family of two.

In April 2024, Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s then-Attorney General, filed a lawsuit with the attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma to stop the SAVE plan. His argument was that it made student loans function more like grants, as many borrowers were paying as little as $0 per month, and that Biden had overstepped his authority by circumventing congressional approval with an executive action. 

In February, a court ruled in favor of the states, and following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the plan was dead in the water with borrowers beginning to accrue interest at rates that for some exceeded 9 percent per year.

The Tuesday settlement, if approved in court, moves this deadline forward, although the Department of Education did not specify a timeline for the changes. The agreement states that the Education Department would no longer enroll new individuals in SAVE, deny all pending applications, and transfer all approximately seven million borrowers into different plans—either fixed payment or payments based on income. 

Changing millions of payment plans is complicated. There’s already a backlog of applications on the three other federal income-based plans. All but one of those plans will be gone after July 1, 2028 because of the Big Beautiful Bill.

“For four years, the Biden Administration sought to unlawfully shift student loan debt onto American taxpayers, many of whom either never took out a loan to finance their post-secondary education or never even went to college themselves,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said. “The law is clear: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back.” 

According to a report from the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress, nearly 43 million people—or one in six adults in the country—have federal student loan debt, all of which totals more than $1.6 trillion. This increases the burden of rising living costs: a survey of federal student loan borrowers conducted by Data for Progress in September found that 20 percent of borrowers are currently in delinquency or default and 42 percent said their debt payments made affording essentials like food or housing difficult.

2025-12-12 01:56:37

A US citizen, who is Somali, was detained by immigration agents in Minneapolis on Tuesday after he repeatedly offered to hand over his identification, according to the man, a local elected official, and legal advocates. Mubashir, 20, who has chosen to go by his first name only, said at a news conference that he “felt targeted.” 

A video of the incident published by the Sahan Journal shows a federal agent putting Mubashir in a headlock while handcuffed, bringing him to his knees in the snow, and forcefully placing him in the back of a vehicle before driving off. Multiple people chased after the vehicle, with one witness to the detainment standing in front of the car. Prior to the recording, Mubashir said that the immigration agents chased him on foot in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. 

“I deserve to be here like anyone else. I’m a U.S. citizen,” Mubashir said. “I can’t even step outside without being tackled—no question—because I’m Somali.” 

Before grabbing Mubashir, according to Sahan Journal, the agents were walking into nearby businesses in the Somali-heavy neighborhood, questioning people and asking them to show their passports.

Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement descended upon the twin cities last week in what federal officials are calling “Operation Metro Surge.” The operation is primarily targeting the Somali immigrants in the area, spurring locals to carry around their passports or even fear going outside at all, according to the New York Times. This week, Trump repeatedly referred to people from Somalia as “garbage.” The president said Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times. 

According to Mubashir, while en route to the immigration offices, which were about twenty minutes away, he repeatedly asked the agents to show his identification. But, he said, they refused. 

Once they arrived at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Mubashir said that the agents took his fingerprints, asked to take his photo, which he refused, and then eventually allowed him to show ID proving his US citizenship. Then, Mubashir, who has lived in Minneapolis since he was a year old, was allowed to leave. 

“I asked them, ‘can you take me back to where you picked me up from?’ They said ‘no, you have to walk in the snow,'” Mubashir said. His parents then came to get him. 

“I apologize that this happened to you in my city, with people wearing vests that say ‘police.’ That’s embarrassing,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a press conference.

“This young man is a bright, hardworking member of our community,” Minneapolis City Council Member Jamal Osman said in a statement “and his experience is a stark reminder of the overreach and lack of accountability in ICE operations.”

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which organized the press conference where Mubashir shared his story, said they have received many calls from local Somali residents who are US citizens reporting that they were either arrested or questioned by immigration agents. “We believe this is a violation of our constitution,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-MN, said. Hussein said that at least two other US citizens were picked up by immigration officials and then released on Tuesday. 

In a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem following these arrests, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz urged her to review all recent arrests in Minnesota. “The forcefulness, lack of communication and unlawful practices displayed by your agents will not be tolerated in Minnesota,” Walz told Noem in his letter.

According to a ProPublica investigation published in October, more than 170 US citizens were detained and held against their will—whether during immigration raids or protests—in the first nine months of Trump’s second term.

A representative from the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on whether its immigration agents detain people without checking identification that is actively being offered. 

2025-12-11 23:33:16

Already this year, anti-vaccine activists have downplayed the risks of measles and polio. Now, they’re adding whooping cough to the list, even as cases of the disease surge, killing at least ten babies over the past two years. Two of those babies died in Louisiana, where a crusading state surgeon general, Dr. Ralph Abraham, waited months to warn the public about the outbreak and banned mass vaccination campaigns.

Instead of discipline, Abraham has been rewarded: Last month, he was appointed to the second-highest leadership role at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Abraham will now be the highest-ranking scientist at the agency. His background is unusual for the role. He practiced veterinary medicine at first, and only later was a family physician. Abraham also served as a representative for Louisiana in Congress from 2015 to 2021. (During the pandemic, Abraham promoted the anti-parasite drug ivermectin as a Covid cure, despite evidence showing it didn’t work.)

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, is caused by bacteria that produce toxins that damage the respiratory lining, resulting in prolonged bouts of coughing. Such episodes are especially dangerous for infants, in whom they can lead to life-threatening respiratory distress. Pertussis has been on the rise since the pandemic—according to the CDC, last year, there were more than 35,000 cases, compared to fewer than 8,000 the year before.

One factor that may be contributing to the soaring pertussis case counts is declining rates of vaccination: Last year, the CDC reported that just over 92 percent of US kindergarteners were vaccinated against the disease, down from 95 percent in 2017. The dip occurred against a backdrop of increasing anti-vaccine activism, embraced by the US Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In Kentucky, three babies have died this year of the disease—none of them were vaccinated, nor were their mothers, according to Kentucky’s Center for Health and Family Services.

Since 2024, the pertussis surge has been especially acute in Abraham’s home state of Louisiana. But this didn’t prompt swift movement from him or other officials. Despite high case counts, it wasn’t until May of this year, by which time two babies in the state had died of the disease, that Louisiana finally issued a health alert. Physicians criticized Abraham for failing to warn residents of the disease’s dangers—and the critical importance of maternal vaccination during pregnancy, since babies can’t be vaccinated until they are two months old.

Abraham has a history of anti-vaccine rhetoric. In February, Louisiana’s Department of Health officially banned vaccine promotion events in the state. That same month, Abraham and his deputy surgeon general, Wyche Coleman, published a letter on the health department’s website decrying what they saw as an overbearing public health system. “For the past couple of decades, public health agencies at the state and federal level have viewed it as a primary role to push pharmaceutical products, particularly vaccines,” they wrote. “Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine.” (The Louisiana Department of Health didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

Given Abraham’s vaccine skepticism, it is perhaps unsurprising that he has earned a leadership position under Kennedy. In his new role, Abraham will work on high-level agency strategy, as well as coordinate between divisions, and oversee both internal and external communication.

Against the backdrop of the whooping cough surge, anti-vaccine activists have been mounting a campaign against the immunization that protects people from the worst effects of the disease. Last week, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, devoted an episode of its TV show to whooping cough, inaccurately claiming that the vaccine actually caused more cases. In September, another anti-vaccine group, Physicians for Informed Consent, falsely claimed to its 117,000 followers on X that pertussis vaccines “have big gaps—surveillance, trials, even population data fall short.”

Dr. Fiona Havers, a respiratory disease and vaccine expert who led the pertussis work for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices before the pandemic, said the anti-vaccine groups’ claims about whooping cough weren’t supported by evidence. While protection from the version of the vaccine that children receive can wane and require a booster, large, high-quality studies consistently show that the vaccines are indeed effective. Likewise, community immunization is critical for protecting babies who are too young to be vaccinated.

The anti-vaccine groups’ claims were “very consistent with the false information that the anti-vaccine movement, including RFK Jr, has been spreading about vaccines for years,” said Havers, who is also an adjunct associate professor at the Emory School of Medicine. “They are minimizing the seriousness of whooping cough and also spreading false information about the effectiveness of the vaccines, which are very effective in preventing disease in children.”

In its TV show episode, Children’s Health Defense suggested that a home remedy of Vitamin C could treat whooping cough. Social media wellness influencers offer similar treatments—one with the Instagram handle of the_detoxmama tells her 811,000 followers that a natural treatment works by “clearing out the barrier and allowing the immune system to get in and deal with the bacteria.”

Pediatric immunologist and social media health communicator Dr. Zachary Rubin said the only proven treatment for whooping cough is antibiotics, which are most effective when given early on in the illness. “Vitamin C does not neutralize the toxin, clear the infection, or shorten the course of illness,” he wrote in an email to Mother Jones. “Relying on vitamin C alone can delay appropriate treatment and increases the risk of complications, especially for babies.”

As of late November, there have been more than 25,000 pertussis cases this year, including three deaths of infants, two in Louisiana and one in Kentucky. Though this year’s total number of cases will likely be lower than last year’s, it will surpass counts in the few years before the pandemic; in 2019, there were fewer than 19,000 cases.

In recent weeks, pertussis has continued its rampage, especially in western states, including Washington, Oregon, and California. The CDC hasn’t yet issued any specific alerts about whooping cough, and the agency did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, except to confirm Abraham’s new role.  

Havers sees Abraham’s appointment as part of a pattern of dubious public health leadership decisions—evidenced by his failure to warn Louisiana residents about the dangers of whooping cough. “Obviously, getting information out to the public and to clinicians that pertussis is circulating in a community is critical for protecting vulnerable infants and for stopping an outbreak,” she said. “It continues to be appalling, the type of people RFK Jr. is putting into high-level positions in CDC.”