2026-04-22 08:53:16
Last summer, when Donald Trump began pressuring GOP-controlled states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade, Republicans had a lofty goal: pick up a dozen or more seats in an effort to fend off a coming blue wave and retain the House in the midterms.
Trump scored early wins in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. But the gerrymandering arms race he started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned. The approval by voters in Virginia on Tuesday of a new congressional map that could net Democrats up to four new seats shows how Democrats have fought Trump to a surprising draw in the redistricting wars.
Right now, the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer. The new map in Virginia makes it even more likely that Republicans will lose the House in November, given Trump’s tanking approval numbers and the fact that Cook Political Report forecasts that Republicans have to win three-quarters of toss-up races to remain in control, calling Democrats “substantial favorites.”
This is not how Trump and his allies envisioned things going. After easily securing the new maps in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, Trump suffered a humiliating defeat when Indiana Republicans refused to redraw their districts. Other GOP-controlled legislatures, including Kansas and Nebraska, also balked. Ohio passed a compromise map that, while favoring Republicans, could have been much worse for Democrats. The courts in Utah struck down the state’s existing map, leading to a likely Democratic pickup. And Missouri voters could have a chance to block that state’s new gerrymander at the polls in November, all of which helps Democrats.
Democrats in California, meanwhile, pulled off an improbable ballot measure to offset the Texas gerrymander by redrawing the Golden State’s maps. Now, Virginia Democrats have followed suit, despite the fact that the process in Virginia was actually much trickier. Democrats had to retake control of legislature and governorship last November in order to kickstart the redistricting process. Then they had to convince voters in a state that is much less blue than California to pass a constitutional amendment authorizing the very type of partisan gerrymandering that Virginia voters had sought to limit just six years earlier, when they passed a separate constitutional amendment giving a bipartisan commission the power to draw congressional maps. The takeaway is that voters dislike gerrymandering, but they now seem to hate Trump even more.
That said, the redistricting wars are far from over. Florida is planning to convene a special session next week to redraw its congressional map, which could net Republicans between two and five more seats. The Supreme Court could issue a decision any day now striking down the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, which could shift a handful of seats toward the GOP—though whether those maps would take effect before November’s elections depends partly on the timing of the decision. (It’s probably too late for most Southern states to draw new maps before the midterms.) And the Virginia Supreme Court could still strike down the new voter-approved map; the court allowed the referendum to proceed after Republicans challenged it but has yet to issue a final decision on the constitutionality of the redistricting effort.
Trump has threatened to “take over” the election system, and the mid-decade gerrymandering spree he started is part of a multi-faceted plan to interfere in the midterms. But while that has deeply destabilized American democracy, the president hasn’t succeeded in stopping Democrats from racking up a series of electoral victories over the past year. The passage of the redistricting referendum in Virginia is the latest sign of Democrats successfully fighting back.
2026-04-22 05:37:49
In a scathing ruling describing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an “unserious” and “unsafe” leader, a federal judge in Oregon issued an order that will protect doctors and hospitals, and the transgender kids they treat, from the federal crackdown on gender-affirming care.
On Saturday, US District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai ruled that Kennedy was acting illegally when he attempted last December to unilaterially cut off federal funding for healthcare providers treating kids with gender dysphoria. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Kasubhai wrote in his ruling, adding that Kennedy’s actions “caused chaos and terror for all those people and institutions of our great nation.”
The case began last December, when Kennedy issued a declaration falsely claiming that gender-affirming medical treatments for trans youth “fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care.” In reality, such treatments—including puberty blockers for kids entering adolescence and cross-sex hormones for older teens—are considered necessary for some patients under mainstream medical guidelines, and they’re supported by virtually the entire medical establishment. (And it’s worth noting that the treatments are actually quite rare, despite the amount of political attention paid to them.) Kennedy dubbed the treatments “sex-rejecting procedures” and claimed the right to pull all federal funding from any hospital, clinic, or doctor, found to be providing them. Soon, his department had referred over a dozen children’s hospitals for potential defunding, and hospitals hoping to avoid the federal crackdown began preemptively cutting off treatments for kids with gender dysphoria.
“I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic.”
A coalition of 21 mostly Democratic-led states and Washington, DC, immedialy sued, arguing Kennedy had skipped the legally required procedures for such a drastic policy change. Last month, Kasubhai agreed that Kennedy had overstepped his authority and issued an order temporarily blocking the declaration. “The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as sacred,” the judge said at the time.
But Kasubhai’s first order wasn’t stopping the Trump administration. While the court case played out, HHS began going through the formal rule-making process, proposing a sweeping regulation that would strip federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from any hospital that provides trans youth health care, which I wrote about in depth last week. Such a regulation, if implemented, would force hospitals nationwide to cut off trans kids’ care or else face financial devastation. A former Trump policy aide has referred to the proposed rule as a “nuclear weapon.” A second proposed policy would ban federal insurance programs for kids in low-income families from covering the treatments.
Now, Kasubhai has thrown a new wrench in the administration’s plans. His ruling on Saturday makes permanent his prior order blocking Kennedy’s declaration. But the judge also went further, prohibiting HHS from enacting any similar policy “which supercedes or purports to supercede the professionally recognized standards of care” in the states that sued. “Despite repeatedly emphasizing their commitment and obligation to protect children, Defendants have sweepingly wielded the Kennedy Declaration to threaten children’s hospitals that provide life-saving care to children,” Kasubhai wrote.
Such a broad order was necessary, Kasubhai wrote, because the Trump administration has a track record of “evading or flouting” prior court orders.
The judge also took particular exception to an argument made by HHS that Kennedy’s declaration couldn’t be blocked because it was simply an example of the secretary exercising his right to free speech. The department’s arguments are based on “the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care,” Kasubhai thundered. “Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated.”
Kasubhai’s order is sweeping enough that it likely blocks not just Kennedy’s declaration but also the soon-to-be-finalized Medicaid and Medicare regulations, according to Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law. “This administration has tried to come back multiple times and do the same thing and then try to characterize it as something new,” she explains. “The court wanted to prevent that from happening.”
The Trump administration could appeal Kasubhai’s ruling. But now, if it tries to finalize its regulations in their current form, the states defending trans youth health care can go back to Kasubhai and argue that HHS is violating the injunction, Levi says. As a result, it seems likely that the regulations will be promptly blocked—if the Trump administration does decide to finalize them.
And that matters because hospitals across the country are watching this legislation closely to figure out if it’s financially and legally safe enough for them to offer trans youth health care. Could those hospitals who ended treatments restart them on the strength of Kasubhai’s new ruling? “I think they certainly could, and I think they should,” Levi tells me.
2026-04-22 05:16:05
At the start of last week, there were four members of Congress at risk of expulsion due to allegations of severe misconduct. Two of those members, Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), quickly resigned. On Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) became the third member of Congress to resign in eight days. Now only one of the scandal-plagued members is still standing: Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.).
The allegations against Swalwell and Gonzales involved accusations of misconduct against women—including rape in Swalwell’s case. (The former California congressman has said that “allegations of sexual assault are flat false.”) Cherfilus-McCormick was indicted by a federal grand jury in November based on allegations that she and her brother stole government funding then used some of it to make illegal contributions to her campaign. A subcommittee of the House Ethics committee more recently found a pattern of “progressive and compounding corruption.” (The Florida Democrat resigned moments before the Ethics committee met to determine what, if any, punishment she should face.)
The accusations against Mills, who remains under investigation by the Ethics Committee, are shockingly wide-ranging. As I reported in a February profile, the Florida congressman has been accused of:
In October, a Florida judge placed a restraining order on Mills after concluding that he subjected his ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking. Mills has defended himself by noting that he has never been criminally charged for that, or other, alleged misbehavior. That is true but highly misleading. Mills spent more than three hours in court as part of the restraining order case. He took the stand to defend himself but failed to convince a Florida judge to rule in his favor. (As part of his decision, the judge determined that Mills was not “truthful” about explicit material recorded during the relationship.)
Earlier last year, Mills was also implicated in an alleged assault involving a different girlfriend, although she later retracted the claim. According to bodycam footage and documents recently obtained by the Washington Post, police were on the verge of arresting Mills in relation to those allegations. The Post explained:
Before changing her account, the woman had shown [officer] Mazloom bruises on her arms and marks on her face, the body-camera footage shows. Tearful, she told the officer that Mills had harmed her during an argument and forcibly removed her from his Southwest Washington penthouse apartment, according to the footage.
Subsequent bodycam footage reviewed by the Post showed the alleged victim talking on the phone. She then told Mazloom, the DC police officer, that “he wants me to say” that the marks “were from our vacation and that I bruise easily.” According to the Post, Mazloom told fellow officers that he understood the alleged victim had been speaking to Mills.
Mills, an Army veteran who became an international arms dealer before running for Congress, has made enemies on both sides of the aisle in Washington. On Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who has been in a long-running feud with her Republican colleague, introduced a resolution to expel Mills from Congress. Mills is reportedly weighing introducing his own resolution to expel Mace. (His congressional office has not responded to multiple interview requests and requests for comment that I have sent between January and April.)
For now, Mills may remain safe from expulsion as the Ethics Committee investigation proceeds on an open-ended timeline. This fall, though, Mills is facing what is likely to be his first truly competitive reelection battle since he entered Congress in 2023. His likely Democratic opponent, Bale Dalton, is a former Navy helicopter pilot who served as the chief of staff for NASA.
In 2024, Mills won by 13 points in his Republican-leaning district. In a normal year with a normal Republican running for reelection, that would be an insurmountable challenge for Democrats. In 2026, as Democrats overperform in races across the country and Mills’ scandals become more widely known, none of the usual rules apply.
2026-04-22 04:14:57
Voters are anxious about losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, and key players across the political spectrum have started to notice.
Now, the Working Families Party has rolled out a slate of policy proposals for the midterms, backed by more than two dozen Democratic candidates and representatives, that aims to address that anxiety. Their plan to counter AI-related job losses? Not a direct cash dividend, but a program seeking to place Americans in union jobs.
A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that over half of Americans believe AI does more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and 70 percent think that broad AI adoption will decrease the overall number of available jobs.
With the midterms coming up, corporations and politicians are looking to address these fears. This month, OpenAI proposed creating a “public wealth fund” that would “provide every citizen with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” Yesterday, New York Assemblyman Alex Bores proposed a taxation framework designed to redistribute wealth from major AI corporations to people whose jobs might be displaced by their products, calling it an “AI dividend.”
The Working Families Party, meanwhile, is proposing what looks like another Green New Deal-style jobs program to solve the same problem.
Julie Gonzales, who is running for U.S. Senate in Colorado, said the WFP’s union jobs would be in green infrastructure and healthcare, though the platform itself doesn’t specify how this jobs program would work. “Corporations and the do-nothing Dems they support have shipped jobs overseas, cut wages, and busted unions to boost their own profits,” Gonzales said.
A jobs guarantee hasn’t seen much success since the Works Progress Administration of the 1940s—despite broad popular support for such a policy. The new WFP platform, called the “Working Families Guarantee,” also includes guaranteed low-cost health and childcare. They plan to fund this program by (you guessed it) increasing taxes on the rich. “The working families guarantee is what working people deserve, and we are coming to collect,” said Maurice Mitchell, the group’s national political director. The politicians endorsing the Working Families Guarantee include Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-IL). Several prominent candidates—among them Brad Lander in New York, Charles Booker in Kentucky, and Graham Platner in Maine—have also signed on.
The Working Families Guarantee platform is part of an ongoing struggle over the future of AI policy within the Democratic Party. The Searchlight Institute, a moderate think tank which pitches itself as the leader of a “realignment” within the party, has vocally opposed efforts to limit datacenter buildout. (Searchlight, however, is backed by Nvidia-linked donors.) Third Way, another centrist Democratic think tank, has taken similar positions.
The WFP, a relatively small left-wing party with big influence, wants to push moderate candidates further to the left. They’ve found a foothold among younger voters, who increasingly distrust both major parties. Ravi Mangla, National Press Secretary for the Working Families Party, told Mother Jones “people want leaders with backbone, yet groups like Third Way and the Searchlight Institute are telling Democrats to avoid taking positions on things like guaranteed health care and AI regulations.”
“That,” Mangla said, “is a losing position.”
2026-04-22 04:07:01
Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve chair promised to bring a new inflation framework and regime change to the central bank on Tuesday morning—all while maintaining that the president’s economy was doing just great.
One bizarre exchange between nominee Kevin Warsh and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) during the former’s confirmation hearing was telling:
“If Professor Warsh were to assign a letter grade to the American economy today for the average working family, what grade would you assign?” Warnock asked.
“In modern academic institutions they give everyone A’s,” Warsh joked to a handful of laughs in the crowd. “If I give a student anything but an A, I would have been summoned to the dean’s office.”
While Warnock’s question had a peculiar frame—Warsh became a lecturer at Stanford University after resigning from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2011 over disagreements on how to improve the US economy—the Fed chair nominee avoided a factual response, lest it displease the president.
Warsh made a similar move when Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) asked him about Trump’s remarks that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before” in his State of the Union address in February.
“The broad contours of the economy are improving,” Warsh responded. “I think it can improve more, and in the years ahead, I think the economy’s potential is strengthening.”
Warsh’s comment comes amid a massive affordability crisis with prices skyrocketing even further during the US-Israeli ongoing war in Iran and Trump’s tariffs—even if Wall Street appears to be happy.
It wasn’t just larger economic issues that Warsh avoided answering. Democratic senators, and even Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), questioned whether the nominee was as independent from political pressure as he asserts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized Warsh for flip-flopping on his position on interest rates, which notably aligned with Trump when he won the 2024 election. During the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh, who was a Federal Reserve board member at the time, argued against lowering interest rates to help American families and businesses borrow money. Instead, banks got bailouts during his term.
Warren said Trump passed on nominating Warsh for Fed chair over his stance on interest rates, “but as soon as Donald Trump became president a second time,” Warsh “began shouting from the rooftops about how the Fed should cut interest rates.”
Just a few hours before the Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Trump appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box and said he would be disappointed if Warsh did not cut interest rates immediately upon getting confirmed. Last week, when asked on Fox Business whether interest rates would still drop this year, Trump answered, “When Kevin gets in, I do.” And last December, Trump said that “anybody that disagrees with me will never be the Fed chairman.”
Warsh’s confirmation hearing comes as Trump strains to restore the economy and the public’s confidence before the midterm elections this November. The nomination is one desperate move in a desperate campaign by a desperate party.
2026-04-22 03:28:40
Vice President JD Vance, a relatively recent Catholic convert, has had a lot to say in recent weeks about his newfound religion—and it’s rubbing some cradle Catholics the wrong way.
Last week at a Turning Point USA event, Vance addressed remarks Pope Leo XIV had made about the war in Iran.
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” he said.
This was after his boss, President Donald Trump, posted an AI-generated image of himself depicted as Jesus and called the pope “weak on crime.”
The pope has been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s handling of the war in Iran. After the president posted on social media that Iran could lose its entire civilization if it didn’t bend to his will, Leo told reporters: “Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable.”
The feud between the pope and the president has led to admonishments from nearly every bishop in the church, according to National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winters. But some recent converts, like Vance, are speaking quite loudly and confidently while still learning the tenets of their faith. “I love converts, but you move into somebody’s house, you don’t start rearranging the furniture,” Winters said.
