If you haven’t heard, we’re hosting our next event Wednesday July 29 at Crystal Lake in Brooklyn. We’re partnering with Marisa Kabas, founder of The Handbasket, for a conversation about everything going on in politics at the moment. Josh Marshall and Marisa will share their experience running successful, independent media outlets. We only have about 20 tickets left, so get yours here before they are gone!
Idaho Voters Will Get the Chance to Overturn One of the Strictest Abortion Bans in the Country
This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Idaho voters will weigh in on their state’s abortion laws this November. The secretary of state’s office certified a ballot measure that could, if passed, overturn one of the strictest bans in the country, the campaign to restore abortion rights in Idaho confirmed on Monday.
The measure would enact a new law establishing a state right to “reproductive freedom,” which it defines as allowing residents to make their own decisions in areas including fertility treatment, contraception and abortion. But it would not amend the state’s constitution, meaning it could still be overturned by the state’s Republican legislature. Currently, Idaho bans abortion in nearly all circumstances, with a narrow exception if staying pregnant threatens someone’s life.
Continue reading “Idaho Voters Will Get the Chance to Overturn One of the Strictest Abortion Bans in the Country”What Price for the Soul of Democracy?
What I Got Wrong
Writing about politics every day inevitably leads to an internal mental landscape full of regrets, self-recrimination, and second-guessing about how you covered the news, what you skipped that you shouldn’t have, and what you plain got wrong.
I had anticipated only last month that Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general would “cue up the mother of all confirmation battles” and “sets up a potentially epic confirmation battle.” So far, that really has not come to fruition, even though this is most important nomination the Senate has ever considered
As the confirmation hearing began this morning, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed poised to confirm Blanche, with ostensible holdouts Thom Tillis (NC) and John Cornyn (TX) creating a bare modicum of drama but giving themselves plenty of room to jump on board the Blanche bandwagon when the time comes to vote.
The nomination is most hung up on the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, with Tillis insisting on a vote on standalone legislation to ban it before he’ll vote for Blanche. Note that he’s only demanding a vote, not passage.
This is one of those patented Capital Hill smokescreens, where a senator reduces a complicated, wide-ranging, multi-dimensional issue to a single high-profile element of that issue — then offers an easy way to talk him off the ledge on it. These kinds of maneuvers are so transparently about not taking a stand that I can’t believe they still work to fool anyone, reporter or voter. But clearly they still do, because they remain an invidious part of congressional politics.
But Tillis and Cornyn — whose political careers Trump ended — deserve no more scorn that the rest of Senate Republicans, who know exactly what Blanche has done and have a chance to put a stop to him doing any more of it. As my colleague John Light puts it, Republican senators are voting on the future prospects of Trump’s ongoing retribution campaign.
For a year and half at DOJ — including as acting attorney general for the last few months — Blanche has unmistakably shown who he is and what he will do if confirmed. He has been nothing less than a travesty: destroying the independence and professionalism of the Justice Department; capitulating to the president and letting the White House run DOJ; abusing the powers of his office for the president’s personal benefit; and hijacking the criminal justice system to use it as a tool of political retribution.
But sure, tell us more about how the slush fund is a bridge too far for you.
My error in anticipating the mother of all confirmation battles wasn’t so much misplaced confidence in GOP senators doing the right thing. It was in under-crediting the fact that Blanche, having already been confirmed by the Senate as deputy attorney general, can stay on as acting attorney general for the rest of Trump’s term of office, even if the Senate rejects his nomination. That creates a perverse dynamic where GOP senators would have to assume all of the risk of rising up against Trump but have very little to show for their efforts in the end.
And so GOP senators sit back once again — abdicating their constitutional roles and prioritizing their own self-preservation — while watching democracy slip away at an ever quickening pace.
Trump DOJ Watch
- Grand Juries: “Federal judges are increasingly peering under the hood at the Trump-led Justice Department’s use of grand juries aimed at well-known adversaries of President Donald Trump,” Politico reports. “And they don’t like what they’re seeing.”
- DOJ Case Quotas: In a blunt, statistics-driven, quantity-over-quality move, Aakash Singh, the associate deputy attorney general overseeing US attorneys’ offices, has announced the imposition of case quotas on line prosecutors, Bloomberg reports.
- Law Firm Subpoenas: In a convoluted and head-scratching move, the Trump DOJ is subpoenaing the nine law firms that struck deals with the White House plus four other firms that fought that Trump executive order, the NYT reports. The latest development comes after the American Bar Association, in its lawsuit against the administration for attacking law firms, sought to force the White House to turn over internal documents and communications among it, Trump personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn, and Stephen K. Bannon. The most charitable explanation for the DOJ move is that this falls under the rubric of “the best defense is a good offense,” but it still doesn’t really make any sense.
Is ICE Really Halting Traffic Stops?
Reports yesterday — confirmed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) — that ICE was halting traffic stops nationwide in the wake of two fatal shootings by federal agents in Houston and Maine were quickly contradicted this morning by President Trump in a social media post:
… we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.
The initial decision immediately seemed like a sop to Collins, who is in a tough re-election campaign. But only momentarily.
“It’s not a policy change. It’s a temporary pause,” Trump administration border czar Tom Homan told Fox News.
Even that was too much of a concession for Trump.
Mass Deportation Watch
- Florida: A Mexican national running from an “encounter” with ICE at a gas station was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer on a nearby roadway.
- Mexico: President Claudia Sheinbaum is demanding U.S. criminal investigations into the deaths 14 Mexican nationals who have died in detention centers and three who have been killed in ICE operations since President Donald Trump took office, the WaPo reports.
- Targeting ICE protesters: A new report documents 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of “less-lethal weapons” against ICE protesters from June 2025 through May 2026 that led to 203 injuries, including blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions, according to the Guardian.
The Corruption: ‘Development Fee’ Edition
A $2 million “nonrefundable development fee” made last year to President Trump’s holding company by a South Korean company “illustrate[s] the minefield Mr. Trump has created by maintaining personal financial ties with nearly 30 different business ventures with foreign counterparts worldwide — unlike any other president in modern American history,” the NYT reports.
In Hegseth’s Navy, Women Need Not Apply
NYT:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color, to two-star admiral rank, current and former defense officials said.
The highly unusual move means that for the first time in more than a decade, no female active-duty naval officers are likely to be promoted to admiral this year, officials said.
Musk’s $1 Million Checks Broke Election Law
The Wisconsin Elections Commission found last week that Elon Musk likely broke state law when he handed out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election and referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, the AP reports.
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The Brief: The Future of Trump’s Retribution Campaign Goes Before Congress
Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton Are on the Hill
Two figures who will play decisive roles in the future of the Trump retribution and election-meddling agenda will be on Capitol Hill for their Senate confirmation hearings today.
Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche will be before the Judiciary Committee for hearings Wednesday and Thursday. And Jay Clayton — Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence and the current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — will be before the Intelligence Committee.
Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has since January 2025 played a central role in a DOJ that has become a tool of the president in a way not seen in recent American history. The Trump II Department has been defined by its attempts to target the president’s perceived enemies, which were reinvigorated around the time Blanche was seeking Trump’s nomination: that period saw the indictment of former FBI director James Comey over his sea shells picture, and the settlement creating a slush fund that could be used to pay the president’s allies. A federal judge, in an extraordinary decision, this week found that case to be a manipulation of the judicial process, with Trump’s own government on both ends of the suit.
New examples of DOJ politicization continued to emerge in the days before the hearing: the DOJ sent subpoenas to law firms about the deals the White House struck with them last year, sent subpoenas to the New York Times about its reporting on Trump’s Qatari-donated Air Force One, and threatened to prosecute state election officials.
Blanche’s confirmation is likely, but not assured. The committee has some Republican skeptics: Two senators who owe the end of their careers to Trump, Thom Tillis (R-NC) and John Cornyn (R-TX), have said they want answers from Blanche on the slush fund. Tillis has also said he will press Blanche to condemn January 6.
It’s unclear, of course, whether these senators would truly withhold their vote — and endure Trump and his supporters’ wrath — regardless of what Blanche says.
There’s less suspense around Clayton’s nomination for intelligence chief. After the Bill Pulte experience — he’s currently overseeing a review of thousands of documents to substantiate Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — senators seem to feel eager to get someone passingly normal in the role. That relief may be ill-founded: Clayton has done his own part to display his loyalty to Trump in recent weeks, signing off on the subpoenas to the New York Times and expressing frustration with California’s slow but very normal ballot counting process. Given the way in which both Tulsi Gabbard and Pulte have weaponized the DNI role, turning it dramatically from the purpose Congress intended for it, senators should have some tough questions for Clayton — even if his ultimate confirmation is in little doubt.
This Month’s Iran War Is Totally Different From The Iran War We Did Earlier This Year, White House Insists
The much-discussed 60-day clock under the War Powers Resolution has become something of a punchline, one that the Trump administration re-upped this week.
- Under the law, if the executive branch begins hostilities, it starts a 60-day clock. By the 60-day point, the president has to either obtain authorization from Congress or end the operation.
- The Iran War has seen the White House try to skirt this law through semantics, first insisting there was no war and later insisting the ceasefire halted the war, despite the fact that troops remained in the region and that, every few days, the ceasefire collapsed into fighting.
- Now that the ceasefire has thoroughly and resoundingly ended, Trump this week sent a notification to Congress that the U.S. was again at war with Iran. To be clear: a new war. A new clock. Or so they seem to claim.
- Some news outlets went with the White House framing on this, writing that the administration gets another 60-day clock for military action. That is, shall we say, a generous framing of the issue.
- Another perspective came from a go-to scholar on this stuff for TPM, Brian Finucune. “The point of these reports is to support the fiction that somehow these strikes are distinct hostilities governed by a different clock under the WPR,” he wrote.
- At stake here, of course, is whether Congress retains its constitutional authority to declare war — a division of power that has rarely been observed in practice.
Tabs
- MS Now confirms Trump’s big speech tomorrow will delve heavily into election conspiracy theories based on his administration’s new review of documents. It notes that the material is being gathered by Pulte and right-wing journalist John Solomon.
- Even other Republican senators are embracing conspiracy theories about their colleagues Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, write Kate Riga and Nicole LaFond for TPM.
Woman of the Hour
It’s Sen. Susan Collins (R-NE), trumpeting as her doing a reported administration decision to halt most ICE traffic stops after a 26-year-old father was killed by federal agents in her state — a tragedy inevitably interpreted through the lens of the midterms.
Are We At War?
Still at war.
Republican Senators Are MAGA Conspiracy Theorists Now
There is an ever-shrinking gulf between the right-wing fringe and elected Republicans in their certainty that even easily explainable events must be the work of a shadowy cabal.
Continue reading “Republican Senators Are MAGA Conspiracy Theorists Now “Kagan and Barrett Go to the Hill: Three Takeaways
Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett made a rare appearance before congressional appropriators Tuesday as the Supreme Court seeks an increased security budget.
Continue reading “Kagan and Barrett Go to the Hill: Three Takeaways”Fine-Tuning the ICE Murder Machine
As I noted yesterday, after the killings of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis last winter, ICE/DHS shifted strategy, trying to keep up the pace of arrests and predation, while also keeping it more under the radar. Then the recent push to up the number of daily arrests began to upset that apple cart with two brazen killings of two motorists in just one week. What was notable yesterday was that ICE didn’t use its standard excuse for killing a civilian — weaponized vehicles, an agent feeling his life was threatened. They simply said the agent shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero because of a vague belief he posed a danger to the community. This seemed odd since ICE has manufactured cover stories with abandon in the past. Why not now? And why go with an excuse that actually provides a much less robust defense in court? Sure it’s good not to lie. But again, they’ve done it so consistently for 18 months.
Now we’re hearing that DHS has ordered ICE to stop most traffic stops around the country, though this claim is being put out by the administration with no one actually saying it on the record. It’s just “sources.” This also looks like an effort to get Susan Collins out of a jam. She claimed credit today for the shift in policy.
The Federal Cover-Up of Three Minnesota Shootings Finally Unravels
‘Now We Have All the Evidence’
The first hints that the Trump administration might be softening its position of refusing to cooperate with Minnesota’s investigations into the three shootings by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge emerged on June 22.
In its unusual lawsuit against DOJ and DHS in federal court in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence that the feds refused to share, the state of Minnesota asked for filing deadlines in the case to be pushed back 11 days until July 6 because state and federal law enforcement agencies had “recently reengaged in discussions about the prospect of mutual information sharing.”
Then on June 30, both sides jointly asked for another much larger extension of 45 days, until Aug. 20, “in light of ongoing discussions … about the prospect of mutual information sharing” between state and federal law enforcement.
We now know that sometime in the past two weeks the Trump administration finally relented and coughed up what state prosecutors are suggesting was the whole enchilada of evidence gathered by the feds in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.
The evidence includes the car Good was driving when she was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. It also includes body cam footage and statements by federal agents across all three cases.
“The wonderful thing is now we have all the evidence,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a press conference in Minneapolis yesterday announcing the breakthrough:
As part of the information sharing, Minnesota law enforcement reciprocated by sharing with federal law enforcement the evidence it had independently gathered in the three cases.
The Trump administration has not publicly acknowledged that it has come down from its maximalist position of withholding evidence from state investigators. Even after Moriarty’s press conference, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen “refused to confirm any cooperation agreement between state and federal agencies,” according to Steve Schleicher, an attorney representing the Pretti family who met for an hour with Rosen yesterday afternoon.
It took a virtually unprecedented lawsuit by a state against the federal government to puncture what had effectively been a cover-up of the shootings — which given everything we know about the Trump administration would have been directed from and by the White House. What we don’t know is why the White House relented, if, in fact, it did.
The Associated Press suggests the breakthrough came after, ironically, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office sought evidence from the Minnesota
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension about its investigation into the shooting of Sosa-Celis, which led to the state indictment of ICE agent Christian Castro. In a June 3 letter filed in the D.C. case, BCA superintendent Drew Evans told federal prosecutors that the state would share its evidence if the feds would share theirs.
While this breakthrough is huge and gives state prosecutors a fighting chance to complete full investigations and make sound charging decisions, a lot has already been lost that could come back to bite any attempted prosecutions of federal agents.
There’s little indication that federal law enforcement fully investigated the three shootings so while the evidence the feds do have is critical it may be incomplete. In addition, time was wasted. Leads that might have been followed if the evidence was available may be harder to follow now.
If any federal agents are eventually charged, they may use the fact of the contested investigation in their defense, raising questions about the delays, the chain of custody of the evidence, and other anomalies that wouldn’t have occurred if the feds hadn’t circled the wagons and refused to cooperate.
It’s also difficult to draw any broad lessons from this episode that might apply in future cases, especially after fatal ICE shootings over the past week in Texas and Maine — other than the obvious: Minnesota’s elected Democratic officials presented a united front and took aggressive action to assert their rights to investigate state crimes and protect their prerogatives in our federal system.
For Your Radar …
In a notable departure from recent ICE shootings, DHS said the agent in the fatal shooting of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, in Maine yesterday fired after “fearing for public safety” — rather than fearing for his own life.
I’m not sure what to make of this exactly, especially given that DHS provided a separate explanation to Congress saying the driver had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement.”
Stay tuned …
Quote of the Day
“I heard agony. I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”—Mary Hayes, a witness to the fatal ICE shooting in Maine, who described seeing a screaming woman on her knees, next to a young girl.
ICYMI …
This story last week from Bolt is newly relevant: “Maine Lawsuit is Testing the Boundaries of Suing Federal Immigration Agents”
Judge Blasts Trump’s IRS ‘Settlement’
You’ve seen by now that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams eviscerated President Trump, his lawyers, and top Justice Department officials for Trump’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS and the purported “settlement” of the case which produced the since-abandoned $1.776 slush fund and the still-live federal tax immunity for Trump.
I don’t have much to add except to note that Williams went as far as she could given the limits of the law — sanctioning Trump’s lawyers and sending her order to bar authorities in two states that have open complaints against two of the three top DOJ officials, Todd Blanche and Stan Woodward — but that is still not enough and won’t be enough until Republicans in Congress begin to put country above party and prevent the wholesale looting of the Treasury.
There is every reason to think Trump and Blanche will find some other way to compensate Jan. 6ers other than the aborted slush fund.
Good Read
Via NOTUS, Rapper Boosie Badazz is in arbitration with TPM faves Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after he paid them $600,000 to work on obtaining him a pardon from President Trump. They allegedly told him they had secured him a pardon, but it never materialized. Now they say they’re effectively bankrupt.
Quick Reminder
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How Lindsey Graham Built the Trump Supreme Court
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
I will say this about Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator who died on Saturday at 71: He had Donald Trump clocked right from the jump. During the 2016 presidential primary, Graham, who spent years carefully curating a reputation in Washington as one of the proverbial Reasonable Republicans, described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He said he would “rather lose without Donald Trump than try to win with him,” and that a “jackass” like Trump didn’t “represent my party” or “have a clue about anything.”
“You want to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” Graham said in December 2015. On Election Day, he tweeted that he’d voted for a third-party candidate because, he said, he “couldn’t go where Donald Trump wanted to take the USA & GOP.”
Trump’s victory later that night changed Graham’s mind in a hurry. In the years that followed, Graham became one of the president’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders, always willing to hop on the Sunday shows and say whatever was most likely to earn him the shiny bauble of an attaboy Trump tweet.
Continue reading “How Lindsey Graham Built the Trump Supreme Court”The Brief: Get Ready for Trump’s 2026 Disinformation Deluge
Its Time to Flood the Zone With Shit Again
Trump announced Monday evening that he’s hauling out an old trick — the prime-time address — on Thursday at 9 p.m. What will the topic be? “Just gonna be a speech like a lot of my speeches,” he told Hugh Hewitt on Monday. Indeed.
MS Now reported last night that the president, joined by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, is expected to advance a new set of allegations — or, more likely, warmed-over old ones — that foreign interference played a major role in the election in 2020. Axios was more hedged, saying the president would offer thoughts on “a potpourri” of topics including Iran, the need to pass the SAVE Act and “findings from his intelligence officials about the administration’s review of the 2020 election.”
That review is chugging forward, examining “thousands of pages of classified intelligence and law enforcement documents” for “irregularities,” per a separate MS Now report.
The foreign interference conspiracy theories that will almost certainly make their return before the midterms are numerous, and often whimsical. A plot by Hugo Chavez to control U.S. voting machines; an intervention by Italian satellites; skullduggery by China, detectable only through bamboo fibers on ballots. We’ve heard these before, including in the days immediately after the 2020 election.
That’s not to dismiss the effort the Trump administration is currently undertaking. In 2020 and early 2021, Trump’s strongest allies included an ink-streaked Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, a handful of internet-addled lawyers and a tight core of loyalists in the White House. It was a circus, and it still produced January 6, the greatest threat to the peaceful transfer of power in U.S. history.
On Thursday, Trump may choose to return to this familiar territory flanked by his acting director of national intelligence, his FBI director, his CIA director. Each has enormous resources that they’ve already turned toward the task of discrediting 2020. Nothing should surprise us when it comes to their plans for November 2026.
Federal Agents Kill Young Father in Maine
A second fatal shooting by immigration agents in recent weeks — this one in Biddeford, Maine — has left dead a man identified by immigrants’ rights groups as a 26-year-old native of Colombia. Sen. Angus King’s (I-ME) office identified him as Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
- The groups say the man who was killed was authorized to work in the U.S.
- Witnesses described a woman and a young girl with a pink backpack and bluey pajamas — who neighbors believed to be the victim’s daughter — standing by the side of the road following the attack.
- Security footage obtained by the AP “shows a white vehicle approaching an intersection at a modest speed before making several slow circles. A law enforcement SUV blocked its path and two officers open the driver’s door and dragged out a limp body.”
- One neighbor told reporters he “clearly heard the victim say, ‘I tried to stop.’”
- DHS head Markwayne Mullin initially told King that the person who was killed had been the target of an arrest warrant, but then later called back to correct himself, according to a King spokesperson. The man had not been the target.
- Protesters crowded into Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-ME) Biddeford office on Monday afternoon, demanding action. Collins’ office released a statement defending her recent vote for ICE funding, noting that the funding included money for expanded use of body cameras. Though the bill passed last month, neither set of agents involved in shootings in recent weeks was wearing body cameras.
- ICE released a statement claiming that the person killed was an “illegal alien” who “attempted to flee the scene.” It used stronger, familiar language in a message to members of Congress, claiming that he “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement,” per the New York Times. Witness accounts do not seem to support either set of official statements.
Tabs
- The Trump administration appears to be abandoning a proposed rule that would deny hospitals Medicaid and Medicare funding if they provide gender affirming care, per NPR.
- Trump on Monday ordered Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments be dramatically reduced to 10 percent of their current size, the New York Times reports.
Man of the Hour
It’s Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), never hesitant to advance a conspiracy theory and, this week, declaring that the proof-of-life photo McConnell posted over the weekend is, per “a source,” an “older photo.”
Are We At War?
Yes, officially now.