There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

I learned many surprising lessons from my 20 months as editor-in-chief of Deadspin, the skeptical, irreverent, hilarious, trailblazing sports outlet that entertained, offended, and educated audiences in roughly equal measure. 

I learned from a cease-and-desist letter that Jacuzzi is a trademarked brand, and that the hotel room in which a world-famous soccer star was alleged to have raped a woman contained a mere “spa” or “hot tub.” I learned from inhaling Chartbeat that our very dumbest stories and our very smartest stories would always be our biggest traffic drivers. I learned from our general counsel more than I ever wanted to know about the precise limits of fair use. I learned from my coworkers — all of them brilliant and entirely deranged — that there is no limit to how hard I can laugh in a soul-suckingly bland Times Square cubicle farm. Even knowing how it all ended, I’d still take the job 100 times out of 100.

The most consequential lessons I learned, though, were about the ways in which I had misunderstood “free market” capitalism, and about what that meant for the industry that gave me my career. Those are the lessons I haven’t stopped agonizing over six years later, the ones that led to my first book but also caused scores of sleepless nights. 

Continue reading “There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business” →

Only a Fraction of Republicans’ Much-Touted $50 Billion Rural Health Fund Can Help Struggling Hospitals Pay Their Bills

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

As President Donald Trump’s deadline for a massive budget bill drew near early in the summer, Republican Senate leadership needed to corral the support of some members of the conference. The bill would help pay for tax cuts for the wealthy partly through cuts to Medicaid and needed nearly all Republican votes to pass. The impact on rural hospitals, analysts warned, would be severe. But Republican leadership was able to win over key votes by directing a small slice of money to a “rural hospital fund.”

Now, all 50 states are now vying for a piece of that $50 billion fund, billed as a savior for floundering rural hospitals — and a backstop against the harmful impacts of the now-passed, historic cuts to Medicaid. The fund, and its application process which closed last Wednesday, has been called “the rural health ‘Hunger Games.’” States are in a mad dash for a slice of the investment. 

Despite that, due to Trump administration restrictions on how the fund can be used, advocates now say that hospitals will not be able to spend it in the areas they most need to address.

Under Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rules for distributing the funds, only 15% of any money awarded to states from this fund can be used to cover unpaid patient care, a major funding shortage for rural hospitals.

“If enough people keep coming in who can’t pay their bills, the hospital can’t just survive on nothing,” Adam Searing, an attorney and research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, told TPM. “That’s why we have more hospitals closing in non-Medicaid expansion states than elsewhere and this is just going to make that program worse.”

The grant funding will be distributed to states whose applications are approved by CMS over a five year period. Half of the $50 billion will be distributed equally to all approved applications. The other half will be distributed based on a complex weighted formula under which a range of policy-based factors account for about 15% of a state’s score. Some of those factors, advocates note, have a partisan valence. 

Those policy points include whether a state restricts certain health insurance plans, sometimes called junk plans, which skirt Affordable Care Act rules, but also such MAHA-coded criteria as whether states restrict SNAP users from buying “non-nutritious foods” and whether states plan to institute Trump’s “Presidential Fitness Test” in schools.

“Ultimately the CMS administrator has non-reviewable authority to distribute that money,” Searing said. “And so that means they can do pretty much what they want and the states can’t complain about it.”

In the meantime, more than 300 rural hospitals are immediately at risk of closure, and more than 1,000 are at risk in general as of October 2025, according to an analysis by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform’s rural hospitals initiative. More than 75% of the hospitals in either category are in states that went for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. 

Solving the Wrong Problem

Ultimately, the rural health “fund” doesn’t deserve the name, rural emergency physician Rob Davidson told TPM last summer.

“I think we — probably all of us — need to stop saying that it’s a rural health fund,” he said.

Trump’s $3.4 trillion tax cuts and spending package, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, earned enough support from Republican lawmakers to pass the Senate largely only after the last-minute $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program was added. 

Yet the $50 billion fund is largely designed not for shoring up hospitals budgets left by the Medicaid cuts and other gaps in patients’ ability to pay, but for state spending on workforce recruitment and retention, modernization and technological advancement initiatives, and preventative care. The initiatives are mostly things that, barring historic health care cuts, Searing said would garner bipartisan support. 

In addition to the CMS provision that only 15% of the cash can be used by rural hospitals to cover the cost of uncompensated care, only 10% of any award amount can be used to cover direct and indirect administrative costs, and no funds can be used to supplement clinical services already covered by other insurance sources including private plans, Medicaid or Medicare. This despite the fact that insurer payments to hospitals don’t always cover the cost of patient services, according to a report from the CHQPR’s rural hospitals arm.

“We have found that many small rural hospitals are losing money because of low payments from private health plans, not because of how many Medicaid patients they have,” Harold D. Miller, CEO of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, told TPM in an email. 

Speaking to the Daily Yonder, a national rural news service, CEO of the National Rural Health Association Alan Morgan said the fund largely pushes preventative services, initiatives his organization supports.

“But you can see there’s a huge disconnect here,” Morgan said. “The $50 billion cannot by legislation (and is not by the administration) going to be used to help rural hospitals keep their doors open. This $50 billion is about sustaining health care for the future. It has nothing to do with maintaining access today.”

During negotiations, advocates decried the provision, saying the $50 billion boost was a drop in the bucket compared to the $1 trillion cuts, about $137 billion of which will be taken away from rural hospitals, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. They warned the legislative language wasn’t strong enough, and didn’t even ensure that the comparatively small amount of money allotted would go to the most vulnerable rural communities.

Now that CMS has released its rules for the program’s grant application, those warnings are proving prescient.

There’s also the fear that the partisan aspects of the application rules could be used to block funding Democratic states, several of which have at-risk rural hospitals.

“We have an administration which just says right out, ‘We’re gonna cut money to blue states and blue communities,’ and it is doing it,” Searing said. “If you happen to live in a community that we disagree with politically, too bad.”

With a Day to Think About It

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I wrote last night’s post fresh off the news that at least eight Democrats had voted to take John Thune’s deal and vote for a continuing resolution, which got essentially none of the demands that had started this fight over. I stand by everything. If anything I feel surer of my impression of this.

There’s a key distinction I was trying to draw in what I wrote. And that is there’s a difference between the deal itself and where the deal leaves Democrats and the broader anti-Trump opposition. This deal shows us that Democrats still don’t have the caucus they need for this fight that will be going on at least through this decade. But the shutdown also accomplished a lot. And not withstanding the WTF fumble at the 10-yard line, it’s still a dramatically different caucus than we had in March. To me it’s a proof of concept that worked. Democratic voters need to keep demanding more, keep up the pressure and keep purging the Senate caucus of senators who are not up to the new reality.

In other words, it’s not defending anything. I’m certainly not happy with how this ended or endorsing anything this caucus did. I’m feeling good about what Democratic voters accomplished in forcing change on the caucus from March until November. So it’s not that Democrats demanded more and this deal isn’t that bad. It’s Democrats already got their representatives to shift a lot, and they need to keep ratcheting up the pressure, purging and reshaping how Democratic elected officials approach the question of power. And another continuing resolution cliff is just around the corner in January. If you haven’t already read my piece from last night, I encourage you to do so.

‘No Separation Between Church and State’: Inside a Texas Church’s Training Academy for Christians Running for Office

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with Fort Worth Report and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Texas Rep. Nate Schatzline’s energy was palpable as he gazed out from the video on the computer screen, grinning ear to ear, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up. 

The Republican legislator from Fort Worth had a message to share with people watching the prerecorded video: As a Christian, you have an essential role in politics and local government. 

“There is no greater calling than being civically engaged and bringing the values that Scripture teaches us into every realm of the earth,” Schatzline said.

The legislator was teaching a section of Campaign University, a series of online lessons he and others associated with Fort Worth-based megachurch Mercy Culture created to raise up so-called “spirit-led candidates.” 

The course, created in 2021, is an extension of Mercy Culture’s increasingly overtpolitical activities that have included candidate endorsements. The church’s political nonprofit, For Liberty & Justice, houses Campaign University. 

Campaign University builds on Mercy Culture’s growing political reach as Schatzline, a pastor at the church, joins President Donald Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board and as the course now is offered at other congregations across the country. 

The lessons emphasize that would-be candidates don’t need to be experts in government or the Constitution to seek public office or a place in local government. They also train potential candidates to “stand for spiritual righteousness” and teach them how to build a platform and navigate the campaign trail while maintaining a strong family and church life.

At the core of Campaign University is the idea that there is no separation between what happens within the church and what happens in the government. Students are taught to interpret the First Amendment’s establishment clause on the separation of church and state as a protection against government involvement in religion, rather than vice versa.

Previously, churches risked losing their tax-exempt status by discussing or engaging in politics. Then this summer, the Internal Revenue Service decided to allow religious leaders to endorse political candidates from the pulpit, a decision Schatzline took as a green light for him and other pastors to ramp up political activity. 

Programs such as Campaign University serve as the “next stage” of this religion-driven political movement, said Eric McDaniel, a government professor who researches the intersection of race, religion and politics at the University of Texas at Austin. Past movements encouraged churchgoers to become activists, he said, but Campaign University stands out for training Christian conservatives to seek public office. 

“One of the things about this movement that’s really important is that they started winning local elections, then started winning state and then now they’re winning at the national level,” McDaniel said. “And that’s how you’re able to build a movement and maintain a movement — you start locally.” 

In an attempt to better understand Mercy Culture’s approach to recruiting candidates, two journalists from the Fort Worth Report purchased and completed the more than five-hour Campaign University course and listened to hours of the For Liberty & Justice podcast. What became clear in the course is For Liberty & Justice’s mission to push Christian conservative values beyond church doors and into the public sphere. 

The nonprofit states on its website that it vets and supports “candidates who are willing to do whatever it takes to protect our God-given liberties and take a stand for Biblical Justice!” Its leaders have said they stand against LGBTQ rights and abortion access, and they have pushed for the ban of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in government and public education. 

For $100, Campaign University provides its students the knowledge, practical skills and spiritual guidance “to make an impact for the kingdom in government” — not “just in a way that’s passionate but in a way that’s calculated,” Schatzline says within the first five minutes of the course. 

The Fort Worth Report identified at least 10 people — through social media posts, press releases and podcasts — who completed Campaign University. They included Texas GOP Chairman Abraham George; an unsuccessful candidate who ran for a Dallas City Council seat this year; Tarrant County Republican precinct chairs; campaign managers; and a number of people who work for or previously worked for Mercy Culture or For Liberty & Justice. 

None returned the Fort Worth Report’s requests for comment.

Schatzline twice agreed to an interview but never responded to efforts to set a date and did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. He and other Mercy Culture pastors created Campaign University after working on Texas political campaigns, including the legislator’s, through For Liberty & Justice. Schatzline previously told the Fort Worth Report that he’s working to take the nonprofit to the national level. 

It’s not unusual for churches or spiritual leaders to encourage political activity from congregants, said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and lead organizer of the national nonprofit’s Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. 

“What does seem unusual — and perhaps unique — is an actual candidate training academy that’s run out of the church,” Tyler said. “Often, particularly if we’re talking about partisan campaigns for public office, that’s a place that churches and other houses of worship have largely steered clear of partisan politics.”

Schatzline has said he won’t seek reelection to his seat representing north Fort Worth and its surrounding suburbs but plans to continue as a pastor with Mercy Culture and to lead For Liberty & Justice. 

The national faith board that Schatzline has been tapped to join declares its mission is to be “a strong, unified, uncompromising voice” on issues such as religious freedom, marriage, reproductive and parental rights, and gender-affirming care.  

“It’s never been more apparent that the church has to rise up and be a bold voice in American government today,” Schatzline said in an Oct. 27 video he uploaded to social media announcing his new position. 

That sentiment is recognizable in Campaign University. 

At the start of the course, Schatzline tells Christians to ask themselves three questions the typical candidate might not consider but that he stresses are key to success if one is called to serve. 

Did the call to government come from the Holy Spirit? Will your loved ones pray with you about it? Even if you don’t win, are you still giving God glory? 

Don’t run if you “can’t hear the Holy Spirit” because other voices on the campaign trail may “shift your perspective,” Schatzline said. 

A Divine Calling 

Campaign University and other Mercy Culture political activities deliver on a commitment that Steve Penate told the Report he and fellow church pastor Landon Schott made to each other years ago: build a church that would “turn the city upside down” and be a leader in local politics. 

Schott and his wife, Heather Schott, senior pastor of Mercy Culture, did not return emails seeking comment for this story.

Over its six years, the church has become a center of conservative religious politics in the region and increasingly across the state. This year, members gathered for prayer at the Texas Capitol, blessing its walls on the first day of the 2025 legislative session. 

Last year, pastors urged Fort Worth City Council members — using threats of litigation — to approve the church’s new shelter for victims of human trafficking, despite opposition from residents of the adjacent neighborhood. Council members in favor of the move said at the time that politics did not affect their decision. 

Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, a Republican, did not return a request for comment on Mercy Culture’s impact on the city through political efforts such as Campaign University.

The skills taught in Campaign University build off lessons learned from Penate’s failed campaign for Fort Worth mayor in 2021, when he lost to Parker, the pastor told the Fort Worth Report.

Penate said “tons” of people have completed Campaign University since its creation. Neither he, Schatzline nor Campaign University’s other instructors provided lists of graduates. About 50 people were pictured in the Campaign University’s first graduating class, according to a 2022 Instagram post by For Liberty & Justice. 

Mercy Culture’s expansion has included additional church campuses in Fort Worth, Dallas, Waco and Austin, and it plans to open a San Antonio campus next year. Penate said For Liberty & Justice aims to partner with churches across the country as it seeks to elevate Campaign University to a national level. Although he didn’t provide specifics, Penate said the goal is to create lessons for local churches to politically mobilize congregants, similarly to how Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA mobilizes students on college campuses. 

He said the church is already spreading awareness about Campaign University by opening For Liberty & Justice chapters in other states. 

As of late October, two For Liberty & Justice chapters outside of Texas offer Campaign University, Penate said. They are Florida’s nondenominational Revive Church and Hawaii’s Pentecostal megachurch King’s Maui, according to Schatzline’s social media posts. Representatives from the churches did not return requests for comment. 

The nonprofit plans to open its next chapter in Arizona at the start of 2026, Penate said. After that, he expects For Liberty & Justice to grow exponentially thanks to Schatzline’s visibility on Trump’s faith advisory board. 

“Next year is going to be explosive,” Penate said. 

Religion has long had a historic role in major American political movements, McDaniel, the government professor, said.

Leaders such as Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Televangelist Jerry Falwell founded the political organization called the Moral Majority in 1979 and mobilized a generation of Christian conservative voters. 

“This idea that God has called you to do this is a very empowering message. It gives you a clear source of identity and direction,” McDaniel said.

Many of Campaign University’s teachings address basic civics that might be useful to anyone running for office. Its lessons and 92-page course materials offer hands-on assignments for participants to start engaging with local government, such as reading the U.S. Constitution, identifying the elected officials who represent them at different levels of government and creating lists of potential campaign donors.

Campaign University’s goal is to bring Jesus into “every sphere of influence and every mountain,” Joshua Moore, another course instructor, says in the course’s second lesson. “That’s what we’re called to do as political activists.” Moore, who serves as Schatzline’s district director in the Texas House, is a former Republican New Hampshire state lawmaker. He did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment for this story.

In Campaign University, instructors often emphasize what they describe as a divine calling for Christians to serve in local government.  

“A grandma can pray at home on her knees, but who’s in Austin on the inside, that has a voice, that has a vote?” Penate told the Report. “It starts in prayer, but you gotta get on the inside.”

Schatzline embodies this ethos in many ways, and he’s become a well-known face in far-right Christian conservative politics in Texas. 

During this year’s legislative sessions, he authored 75 state bills on a range of issues, such as limiting DEI initiatives in local government, banning drag show performances in front of children and further penalizing the possession or promotion of child pornography. He failed to get many of his bills passed this year, except for one aimed at criminalizing the promotion or possession of child-like sex dolls. 

“We’re going to give this space back to the Holy Spirit,” Schatzline said at the Capitol during the Mercy Culture-led worship session earlier this year. “We give you this room. … The 89th legislative session is yours, Lord. The members of this body are yours, Lord. This building belongs to you, Jesus.”

Landon Schott, the Mercy Culture co-founder, also participated in the January event at the Capitol, as did George, the state Republican Party chair, who has taken the Campaign University course. 

“There is no separation between church and state,” George said at the event, according to published reports. 

Campaign University lessons highlight what its instructors argue were the Founding Fathers’ “deep religious beliefs” as evidence that “God was not separate from the public square; nor was that the intent of the founders.” 

The Founding Fathers “insisted upon a country that welcomed the role of religion in society, viewing it as a public good,” said Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a Plano-based legal group known for representing clients in high-profile religious freedom cases, including a Plano student who was banned from distributing candy cane pens with a religious message on them at a school party and an Oregon woman who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to her religious beliefs. 

“Abandoning our societal cynicism toward religion would strengthen our commitment to liberty. It would do much to strengthen our country to regain the vision of our founders that celebrated the role of religion in our lives, public and private,” Dys said in an email to the Report. 

But under the establishment clause, government entities shouldn’t impose religious laws or policies, said Tyler, the Christians Against Christian Nationalism organizer. Laws should “serve and support a pluralistic society,” she said. 

“If our goal in engaging in partisan politics is to impose our own interpretation of the Bible, our own religious views on other people, that will lead to harm for people in our communities that are not of the same religious views,” Tyler said. 

County at a Crossroads

For Liberty & Justice’s efforts to mobilize Christian conservatives through Campaign University come at a pivotal moment in Tarrant County, where Fort Worth is located, as Republicans seek to maintain control of the nation’s largest urban red county, which has shown occasional signs of turning purple. Tarrant voters supported Joe Biden’s presidential bid in 2020 and twice voted in favor of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s Democratic opponents, in 2018 and 2024. 

“Every single seat matters, and now is the time to rise up. Now is the time to run. Now is the time to get godly men and women in office,” Schatzline told dozens of attendees at a Sept. 9 For Liberty & Justice event at Mercy Culture aimed at encouraging political action. 

The Republican-majority Tarrant County Commissioners Court, the county’s governing body, led by County Judge Tim O’Hare, steamrolled through a redistricting process this summer to gain a stronger majority as detractors alleged racially motivated gerrymandering. In late October, a federal appeals court upheld a judge’s decision not to block the new map. 

O’Hare did not respond to a request for comment.

After state lawmakers adopted a new congressional map to create additional GOP seats at Trump’s request this summer, the political makeup of Tarrant County’s congressional delegation is poised to shift from five Republicans and two Democrats to four Republicans and one Democrat. 

For Liberty & Justice continues to develop its pipeline of candidates for local and state offices. The group circulates a friends and family list of candidates that it says share the same values. One candidate who repeatedly made the list was conservative Fort Worth City Council member Alan Blaylock, who announced his bid for Schatzline’s seat Oct. 27 after the lawmaker said he wouldn’t seek reelection. 

Others named on the list included city council and school board candidates across the county. Several told the Report they weren’t required to complete Campaign University to be included on the list and that they hadn’t taken the course.

For Liberty & Justice is prepared to ensure strong Republican results as Tarrant voters gear up for next year’s elections, plus a runoff election to fill a Texas Senate seat vacated by now-Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock.

It makes sense that Tarrant County, which political experts describe as a bellwether in national politics, may be a driver in national conversations around how religion and politics intersect, said McDaniel, the UT professor. 

His message echoed the sentiments expressed by For Liberty & Justice leaders and attendees during a recent night of action at Mercy Culture Church. 

Throughout the night, volunteers who completed Campaign University emphasized how the lessons can not only activate people to run for office but also enable them to lead small groups of fellow Christian conservatives in political action, such as advocating for policy issues at city council or school board meetings. 

Event organizers encouraged attendees to get civically engaged that night by joining small political action groups in neighborhoods scattered across Tarrant County, with specific interests such as “biblical citizenship” or “prayer and intercession.”  

To end the night, one Campaign University graduate led the crowd in prayer. “We need you, Lord, desperately to be able to accomplish what you are calling us to do for this nation, for our city, for our county, for our state.” 

Trump Completes Jan. 6 Autocoup With Mass Preemptive Pardons

Posted on by David Kurtz

For My Friends, Everything …

Let the record show that President Donald Trump issued mass preemptive pardons to those involved in his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election five years to the day since the Four Seasons Landscaping debacle in Philadelphia.

Trump granted “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons for 77 people involved in the fake electors scheme and others aspects of the 2020 subversion effort on Nov. 7, but they were not publicized by the White House. Instead, U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin revealed the pardons in a post on X late last night.

The pardons, coming the same week Republicans were routed in off-year elections, complete Trump’s promise to vindicate his co-conspirators in the first non-peaceful transfer of executive power in American history. Trump had already issued pardons or commutations for some 1,500 participants in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Those commutations, on the first day of his second term, included 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, including some convicted of seditious conspiracy for their roles in the attack.

Among the big names in the latest round of pardons:

  • Rudy Giuliani
  • Kenneth Chesebro
  • Jeffrey Clark
  • John Eastman
  • Jenna Ellis
  • Boris Epshteyn
  • Mark Meadows
  • Sidney Powell

Trump explicitly excluded himself from this round of pardons: “This pardon does not apply to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”

The pardons were preemptive. While some of those involved in the fake electors scheme were charged in various state prosecutions, only Trump was charged federally in connection with subverting the 2020 election. The federal case against Trump, brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, was dropped after he was re-elected a year ago.

Trump’s pardon proclamation stands as a landmark in the revisionist history of the 2020 election and its aftermath. It purports to “end a grave national injustice perpetrated on the American people” and “continue the process of national reconciliation.” The pardons granted are sweeping in their scope and include the fake electors scheme as well as “efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities.”

The unusual way in which the pardons became public — via Ed Martin on X — reinforces the lawlessness of the Trump II presidency. A GOP political hack with no experience as a prosecutor, Martin is not only U.S. pardon attorney but is also designated a “special attorney” and the chief of the DOJ “Weaponization Working Group,” in which role he is spearheading the retributive investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s perceived foes, including former DOJ personnel.

Martin’s X post on the pardons was embedded in a thread he began in May with a post that simply said: “No MAGA left behind.”

The Retribution: 2016 Election Edition

While Trump put the finishing touches on his rewriting of the 2020 election, his Justice Department is continuing to contest the 2016 election with a highly politicized Miami-based investigation of a broad swath of figures involved in probing Russian interference to benefit Trump’s candidacy.

A NYT report contains extensive new details on the grand jury investigation being run by Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones:

  • Reding Quiñones issued more than two dozen subpoenas last week, including to officials who probed the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, demanding documents or communications related to the intelligence community assessment from July 1, 2016, through Feb. 28, 2017, with a due date of Nov. 20.
  • Among the subpoena recipients: former DNI James R. Clapper Jr. and former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. (CNN separately reported that prosecutors in Florida “moved to issue” a subpoena to former CIA Director John Brennan.)
  • The probe was initiated earlier this year by criminal referrals from Trump intel officials and was assigned to U.S. attorney David Metcalf in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, who “given special authority” to focus on Brennan. The case was transferred this fall by DOJ officials from Metcalf to Reding Quiñones “as part of a decision to greatly expand the scope of the Brennan investigation into other, unspecified activities.”

The NYT has quite a bit more detail but the gist of the report is that the Florida probe seems to be animated by a “grand conspiracy” that imagines a Deep State cabal targeted Trump for years. The scope of such a feverish conspiracy has the advantage of placing a vast number of perceived Trump foes under the specter of investigation and prosecution.

It remains unclear what facts arguably gave rise to the investigation being based in Miami, other than Trump having his primary residence in south Florida.

The Retribution: Letitia James Edition

In a new filing, New York Attorney General Letitia James makes a compelling case for why she is a victim of vindictive and selective prosecution by the Trump DOJ. The James filing takes special aim at Ed Martin, who has been agitating for her prosecution.

Shutdown Ends With Senate Dems Caving

A bloc of eight Democratic senators broke ranks to end the government shutdown. A late-night vote began the process of funding the government, which could take a few days to fully implement, especially if Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) slowrolls the process for his own reasons. Of the eight senators, two are retiring; none face re-election next year; and half come from two states, New Hampshire and Nevada: Angus King (ME), Tim Kaine (VA), Dick Durbin (IL), John Fetterman (PA), Maggie Hassan (NH), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), and Jacky Rosen (NV).

Reaction to the cave, especially in light of Democrats’ strong showing in Tuesday’s election has been fierce:

  • Brian Beutler: “Caving as they were winning the fight, and as Trump abuses power to hurt regular people (withholding SNAP benefits, canceling flights) supposedly as ‘punishment’ for the shutdown, sets a nightmare precedent.”
  • TPM’s Josh Marshall: “Many people see it as some kind of epic disaster and are making all the standard threats about not voting or not contributing or whatever. That’s just not what I see. It’s a big change in the direction of the fight we need in the years to come that just didn’t go far enough. Yet.”
  • HuffPost: Democrats Line Up To Slam Deal To Reopen Government

SNAP Funding Update

On a normal Monday, the legal fight over SNAP funding — which landed at the Supreme Court — would have warranted significant attention. But given there’s a decent chance the deal to end the government shutdown will render the SNAP fight moot, it doesn’t make sense to expend your limited attention on this quite yet.

Quote of the Day

Former Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, on the Trump-led coup:

[L]et’s look at what’s happening with the boats that they’re blowing up and now in the Pacific, first in the Caribbean, now in the Pacific, they’re just simply assassinating people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely illegal. In fact, what it now means is that Trump could just kill anyone anywhere just by saying they’re a terrorist. The way it’s going to work is they’re going to say, “Okay, these narco traffickers are terrorists. Oh, the immigrants are terrorists. Anyone protesting ICE now is a terrorist. If you’re against us blowing up boats without any legal justification or evidence, or if you are against ICE brutalizing little kids, you are a terrorist. The Democratic Party are terrorists.” So they’re trying to illegalize the opposition.

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How Elon Musk’s Changes to X Made Our Discourse Far Stupider

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

We don’t know the minute when X started throttling links to news, but we know that Elon Musk asked for it, and we basically know why. 

Musk disdains the “legacy media.” He wanted people to spend more time in his walled garden, and to build the walls so high that you couldn’t see outside of them. For the umpteenth time, maybe for the last time, people who published news were lulled into giving it away gratis. 

Continue reading “How Elon Musk’s Changes to X Made Our Discourse Far Stupider” →

A Quick Take on Team Cave’s Big Win

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I have what I suspect is a somewhat counterintuitive take on the deal Senate Democrats’ Team Cave made with the Republican Senate caucus tonight. This is an embarrassing deal, a deal to basically settle for nothing. It’s particularly galling since it comes only days after Democrats crushed Republicans in races across the country. Election Day not only showed that Democrats had paid no price for the shutdown. It also confirmed the already abundant evidence that it has been deeply damaging for Donald Trump. But even with all this, I think the overall situation and outcome is basically fine. Rather than tonight’s events being some terrible disaster, a replay of March, I see it as the glass basically being two-thirds or maybe even three-quarters full.

Continue reading “A Quick Take on Team Cave’s Big Win” →

Group of Senate Dems Joins With GOP to End Shutdown Without Extending Obamacare Funding

Posted on by Emine Yücel

After 40 days of the government shutdown, a small — but large enough — group of Democrats has caved. For more than a month, the party incessantly demanded Republicans get on board with its effort to protect expiring Obamacare subsidies, preventing significant premium hikes for millions of Americans. But on Sunday, several Senate Democrats broke ranks with their caucus, setting in motion an end to the shutdown without a promise of extending said tax credits.

Continue reading “Group of Senate Dems Joins With GOP to End Shutdown Without Extending Obamacare Funding” →

It’s Dick Cheney’s World, We’re Just Living In It

Posted on by Josh Kovensky

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️

Neither side would ever admit it, but MAGA’s ongoing authoritarian takeover is the heir of one man: Dick Cheney, the former Vice President who died this week.

Trump and his movement tried to distinguish themselves by loudly abandoning the Iraq War as a legacy of the Bush administration. During one debate in 2016, Trump pointed out to Jeb Bush that 9/11 wasn’t exactly an example of his brother having kept the country safe. Before the 2024 election, Cheney called Trump the biggest individual “threat to our republic” that the country has ever seen.

Now, now. It’s a shame they couldn’t get along, after all, they had so much in common.

Starting in the late 1980s, Cheney developed and implemented the dictator-like theory of executive power in which we all now live. The roots here lie in the long-held bitterness among many on the right over President Nixon’s resignation in the aftermath of Watergate, but, as NYT reporter Charlie Savage noted, Cheney expressed the idea fully as the Iran-Contra scandal wound to a close. That was a critique of what Cheney described as a “more assertive Congress that no longer honors the traditions” of executive power, but really a vision of a president who, when invoking national security concerns, could do whatever he or she wanted with backing by the full federal government.

At one point, in 2002, Cheney told Cokie Roberts that there had been an “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,” citing both the War Powers Act and the Anti-Impoundment Act.

What’s striking here is how much this all anticipates — in a much more considered fashion — major Trump II actions. Russ Vought keeps threatening to impound federal funds, and the administration has done all but that. The most obvious examples of authoritarianism — troop deployments in American cities, the Alien Enemies Act removals to CECOT — have been done in the name of national security.

Both Cheney and Trump lack certain elements of what advocates of this view might want for an architect of autocracy. Cheney was never President. Trump is not the kind of philosopher king that an advocate of the unitary executive theory might envision (though there’s an argument among the theory’s supporters that Trumpian excess validates that the system “works” at the extremes).

But the reality is that Trump is Cheney’s true heir in terms of the breadth of the powers that he can claim. It’s not a particularly surprising irony, then, that the only Republicans to really mourn him this week were outside of the executive branch — it was Senators, now extremely supine, to pay their respects.

— Josh Kovensky

The Trump Administration Plays Games With SNAP

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to fund SNAP in full after the government delayed payments to more than 42 million people who rely on the benefits during the shutdown, kicking off a series of appeals and orders that played out over the course of Friday evening.

The Justice Department almost immediately appealed the district court decision, asking a federal appeals court Friday to block it. That court declined to, and the administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, which almost immediately provided a brief stay and returned the issue to the appeals level, where another ruling is expected soon. (The back and forth here is complicated, though very interesting, and we’ll punt you to law professor and writer Steve Vladeck for a full explanation of it, including the role played by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.)

As this unfolded, the Department of Agriculture curiously announced it is “working towards” providing full November benefits, seemingly contradicting the administration’s legal forays.

“The president and the entire administration are working on that, but we’re not going to do it under the orders of a federal judge. We’re going to do it according to what we think we have to do to comply with the law,” Vice President JD Vance said on Friday about the judge’s order, suggesting the administration might again defy the judiciary.

Friday’s district court order from Judge John McConnell Jr. came after the Trump administration ignored his initial order directing the Department of Agriculture to either provide full SNAP benefits to recipients by Monday or partial benefits by Wednesday.

USDA announced the administration picked the latter in a Monday legal filing but did not meet the deadline set. Trump threatened on Tuesday that payments will not go out until Democrats vote to open the federal government, but the White House walked that back quickly.

Judge McConnell attributed the delay, in part, to an attempt by President Donald Trump and his administration to disrupt the program “for political reasons.”

— Emine Yücel & John Light

Chuck Schumer Wasn’t Always Quiet About the NYC Mayor’s Race

As voters headed to the polls to elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City on Tuesday, one of the city’s most prominent politicians stayed quiet about his preference in the race. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has spent the months since Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary repeatedly refusing to make an endorsement or even to reveal who he voted for. 

Schumer’s conspicuous, tortured silence made headlines as some Democrats have expressed worries about Mamdani’s socialist leanings and past pro-Palestine activism. The latter issue with Mamdani has led some Jewish voters to be particularly concerned about his mayoralty despite the fact the mayor-elect has repeatedly denounced anti-Semitism. 

The awkward situation stood in stark contrast to Schumer’s handling of another contentious mayoral election 36-years-ago. During the 1989 race, the Democratic nominee, David Dinkins, faced skepticism and anger among Jewish voters. At that time, Schumer stood up to represent Dinkins in the community. 

On Nov. 2, 1989 Schumer, who was then a member of the House of Representatives, stood in for Dinkins during a debate at the Rego Park Jewish Center in Queens. According to CSPAN, which has a full video of the absolutely weird and suddenly newly relevant event, Dinkins had “asked” Schumer to “appear in his place.” 

As the program began, it was immediately clear why Dinkins might not have felt comfortable attending. Schumer was met with boos and shouts in both English and Yiddish. 

At the outset, Jeff Wiesenfeld, a representative of the synagogue who served as a moderator warned the crowd there were to be “no outbursts of any kind.” He also touted the bonafides of Schumer, who is Jewish and, at the time represented what Wiesenfeld described as “the most heavily Jewish district in the United States.”

The appeals evidently didn’t work. Schumer noted in his remarks that he was “pushed” as he came into the room. As Schumer spoke, members in the audience continually became unruly and interrupted. Some surged towards the stage.

“I thought you were going to have some police here,” Schumer remarked to Wiesenfeld. “We’re going to need them.” 

“This is disgraceful! … This is a synagogue!” Wiesenfeld shouted. “This is not the way to do things. Please!”

The tension largely stemmed from ties Dinkins, a former Manhattan borough president who was vying to be the city’s first Black mayor, had to Jesse Jackson, a Civil Rights activist who mounted a presidential bid the prior year. Some of Jackson’s comments and his support for Palestinian statehood deeply angered members of the Jewish community. 

Amid the outbursts and upset, Schumer cited various ways Dinkins had expressed support for Jews. He also appealed to the idea of open debate.

“We are a people who do believe in argument. Our sages — during the worst of times — sat and argued,” Schumer said. “The day that the Jew cannot sit in a room with another Jew and have rational argument is the day we’ll begin to be washed up as a people.”

Schumer’s remarks also contained a comment that perhaps sheds light on why his response to Dinkins was different than the reaction he had to Mamdani. The future Senate minority leader repeatedly indicated that the idea of a Palestinian state was a bridge too far for him and said “the real reason there’s no peace in the Middle East is because the Arabs and the Palestinians don’t want peace.”

“I above all would never never support anybody who we thought would hurt the Jewish people and would hurt the cause of Israel,” Schumer said. 

The man on stage with Schumer that night was former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was Dinkins’ opponent. Dinkins ultimately defeated Giuliani that time, however four years later, Giuliani was victorious in their rematch. That win was widely attributed to Jewish voters who were angered by Dinkins’ handling of riots that took place in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, a largely Black and Jewish neighborhood. And Giuliani’s victory was immediately preceded by a police riot he helped provoke outside City Hall.

And, of course, after his time in City Hall, Giuliani would go on to become one of President Donald Trump’s top lackeys. In that capacity, he played an intimate role in another mob scene: the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building. And, in response to this latest election, Giuliani went on Facebook and posted an Islamophobic attack comparing the win by Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim mayor, to 9/11. 

Back in 1989, during the question and answer portion of his debate with Schumer, Giuliani was asked by an audience member if he would denounce the chaos that had erupted in the room. While Giuliani urged the crowd to show Schumer “courtesy” and said “debate and discussion in America is important,” his comments also provided a glimpse into his own political future and the Trumpian willingness to look the other way when supporters run amok. 

Giuliani described political violence as par for the course while also absolving himself of any responsibility for responding to the evening’s outbursts.

“At one dinner recently, several members started knocking over tables and yelling and screaming and harassing people. I mean, look, that happens in politics,” he said. “I find it strange that Mr. Dinkins doesn’t show up for these things himself. … I didn’t see what anybody did and I’m not going to go around agreeing or disagreeing with behavior that I didn’t see.”

— Hunter Walker

Palantir CEO Not Sure if His Company Is Involved in Caribbean Bombing, but if It Is He Is Proud

“By the way, let me say something slightly political.”

That’s how Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp began a bizarre, two-minute rant at the end of a company earnings call Monday, during which he suggested that the Trump administration’s recently acquired habit of blowing up boats in the Caribbean is simply a matter of the government exercising its rights under the U.S. Constitution.

“To believe our Constitution does not give us the right to stop 60,000 deaths a year of working-class men and women is insane,” he said. “This country is right to stop that. I am very proud.” 

Karp’s diatribe implied that people who opposed the Trump administration’s lawless attacks in Venezuela and around the South American-Caribbean region were actually classist, and did not care about the “working class” people being impacted by the illegal flow of fentanyl into the U.S. Unlike those oppositionists, the billionaire Karp said, Palantir is “on the side of the average American.”

“I want people to remember,” he said, “if fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads instead of 60,000 working-class people, we’d be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America.”

Karp runs the difficult-to-categorize government contractor, whose data systems have been described by ICE as “mission critical” and decried by former employees. Palantir recently scored a $10 billion contract with the Army and raked in more than $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts between fiscal years 2021 and 2026, according to an analysis by left-leaning public interest advocacy and research nonprofit Public Citizen. The company is also a donor to Trump’s ballroom project. According to its own third-quarter earnings call, Palantir’s largest revenue segment is U.S. government contracts, which saw a 52% increase year over year and netted the company $486 million year-to-date. 

Karp claimed to be unsure of the extent to which Palantir is involved in the U.S.’s bombing of South American people and boats. “I don’t know all the efforts we’re involved in, but to the extent we’re involved in these efforts, I and most Palantirians are very proud of this,” he concluded.

— Layla A. Jones