Public records related to Florida’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention camp have essentially disappeared into what one expert called a “black hole.” Over 90 pages of contracts reviewed by TPM were removed from an online transparency database operated by the state; in other cases, public records requests have been met with what an academic called “ghosting” and outright denials. Multiple experts told TPM the handling of documents related to the project is “disturbing” and may be a violation of state law.
Continue reading “There Is an Information Blackout at Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Migrant Detention Camp “How Anti-Abortion and Anti-Trans Bills Are Impacted by Texas Democrats Fleeing the State
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The 19th.
Texas Democrats fled the state over the weekend to stop a Republican proposal redrawing the state’s congressional maps. But their exit has also temporarily halted other conservative priorities for the special session — including new abortion restrictions and a “bathroom bill” that would ban transgender people from using public restrooms that match their gender.
When Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives left the state this weekend, it denied lawmakers the two-thirds quorum needed to proceed with legislative work. That move came after a House committee voted to approve the new congressional maps, a plan — crafted on President Donald Trump’s request — that would likely flip five Democratic seats to favor Republicans. The redistricting effort has set off a national arms race as Democratic governors, including in New York and California, discuss changing their states’ congressional maps heading into the 2026 midterms.
Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened state Democrats with removal from office if they don’t return to Austin. But it’s not clear if or how he could enforce that threat. Breaking quorum is not a crime, and whether those lawmakers could be forced out of their seats is a question likely to be settled in the courts.
Although the redistricting effort has taken center stage in the ongoing special legislative session, Abbott tasked lawmakers with a host of other priorities. Time may be running out: The special session began July 21, and ends after no more than 30 days. Already, some are considering the possibility of lawmakers returning to the capital for a second special session to tackle now derailed items like further abortion restrictions and the anti-trans bill.
Continue reading “How Anti-Abortion and Anti-Trans Bills Are Impacted by Texas Democrats Fleeing the State”A Big, Upcoming Fight Could See Dems Demand Congress Take Back Its Power
When Congress returns from its lengthy August recess, lawmakers on Capitol Hill will only have a few weeks to work something out before the government runs out of funding at midnight on Sept. 30.
And Senate Democrats will quickly have to make a decision.
Continue reading “A Big, Upcoming Fight Could See Dems Demand Congress Take Back Its Power”Need Your Help With This
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‘Successful Businessman’ Trump Mobilizes Business Economists Against Him
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Tired of Winning Yet?
President Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has notched a new accomplishment for the bumbling autocrat: drawing the ire of economists that businesses rely on to forecast the broader economic environment and plan their operations.
On Friday, the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), which describes itself as the “premier professional association for business economists and others who use economics in the workplace,” denounced Trump’s move, calling Erika McEntarfer’s removal “baseless” and Trump’s accusation of her manipulation of jobs data “unfounded.” The organization defended McEntarfer’s credentials and BLS’s professionalism. “This unprecedented attack on the U.S. statistical system threatens the long-standing credibility of our economic data infrastructure,” its statement read.
Friends of the BLS, a partnership of the American Statistical Association, the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness, the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, and the NABE, similarly warned the McEntarfer firing “undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers.” One of the Friends of BLS co-chairs, William Beach, McEntarfer’s predecessor who Trump had nominated for the post in 2017, took these warnings to national television.
Yesterday, Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at the real estate company Redfin, posted a video on social media explaining why “economists are freaked out right now” because “trustworthy data is crucial for business decisions.”
“In my entire career, I’ve never seen economists this upset,” she said.
It is hard to imagine another presidential action that would trigger otherwise obscure professional associations of data economists to alert the public of an “unprecedented attack” on the “gold standard” of official government statistics, or to the ability of American companies to conduct business.
But the McEntarfer firing was a third rail for the business community, a constituency that Trump absolutely cannot afford to cross. Americans already worried about the state of the economy are not going to want to hear that economists, including those analyzing the real estate market, are “freaked out.” Trump can hardly use his standard line of attack — that his critics are “radical left lunatics” — when the business community says he is sending American companies into turmoil.
While many Republicans were characteristically compliant and fell into lockstep with Trump’s latest meltdown, Democrats are out front making the case that prices are up, and Trump’s tantrum tariffs, recklessness, and stupid policies are to blame.
The MAGA Evangelical Running Human Resources at the State Department
It’s almost hard to be shocked anymore by the characters Trump has tapped for top positions in federal agencies, but at Puck News, this Julia Ioffe profile of Lew Olowski, who is running human resources for the State Department, is a stunning cascade of bizarre revelations.
Once a member of the legal team for convicted Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadžić, Olowski had been a first-tour foreign service officer since 2017 when Marco Rubio summoned him to Washington from an overseas assignment in January. He alarmed department veterans by giving weird speeches about God, prayer, the Bible, and dolphins.
“He quickly made a name for himself at Foggy Bottom by marching into the office of the ombuds and telling everyone that they were being put on administrative leave, and that their office was being dissolved,” Ioffe writes. “The office’s employees later discovered that they had been transferred to the Office of Civil Rights, whose chief counsel was Heather Olowski, Lew’s wife, and the minister of a church that the couple runs.” From there, Olowski set about rooting out all supposed DEI “by changing the way the State Department recruits and promotes people, including by introducing the concept of ‘fidelity’ as an attribute that diplomats should be graded on.” Fidelity to Trump, that is.
DHS Promptly Reverses Threat to States’ FEMA Funds Over Possible Israel Boycotts
On Friday, the Trump administration threatened states’ FEMA funds should they adopt any policy supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The reason, a spokesperson for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement to Reuters, was that the BDS movement is antisemitic, and the department is very committed to enforcing “all anti-discrimination laws and policies.” By Monday afternoon, though, the department had reversed course, with a spokesperson issuing a statement that “FEMA grants remain governed by existing law and policy and not political litmus tests.”
The Art of Blowing Up the Deal
This weekend, Trump sabotaged bipartisan negotiations for the Senate to vote on Trump nominees in exchange for restoring billions of dollars in federal funding. With the Senate then recessing for the summer, Trump ended up with “nothing,” Igor Bobic reports at HuffPost.
Bondi Directs DOJ to Convene Grand Jury, Apparently to Go After Obama
Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly ordered Justice Department prosecutors to convene a grand jury to present evidence of supposed wrongdoing in the 2016 “origins” of the Russia investigation. This dangerous development in the retribution campaign against Democrats appears to be based on Trump’s chaotic effort to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal; Trump is baselessly accusing former President Obama of treason and unsuccessfully trying to tie Hillary Clinton to the probe against him.
Warning Signs Are Flashing Bright Bright Red on Texas Redistricting Gambit
Former U.S. Attorney General under Barack Obama Eric Holder tells Mother Jones’ Ari Berman that Trump’s “authoritarian move” to direct the Texas legislature to redraw its congressional maps to favor Republicans “needs to be opposed by any means necessary.” It also has some swing district Republicans worried.
Musk Is the Gift that Keeps on Giving…to Trump
New lobbying and campaign finance disclosure filings reveal that Elon Musk’s X gave a $1 million in-kind contribution to Trump’s inaugural committee, Anna Massoglia reports at Influence Brief. What’s more, Musk continued to donate to Trump-aligned political action committees, even after their supposed falling-out this spring.
Republican Attorneys General Take Aim at Interstate Sale of Abortion Pills
The Republican attorney general of Arkansas, Tim Griffin, is threatening to sue websites that provide information about medication abortion, part of a broader GOP effort to threaten the accessibility of abortion pills across state lines, Susan Rinkunas reports at Autonomy News.
Make Everyone Hate America Again
The State Department is proposing a requirement that foreign travelers seeking business or tourist visas be required to post up to a $15,000 bond.
Two Storied Institutions Deconstructed in the Trump Era
At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop takes stock of the slow-motion demise of the Washington Post since the takeover by owner Jeff Bezos and publisher Will Lewis. In New York magazine, Noah Shachtman tells the inside story of how the Anti-Defamation League, founded to fight antisemitism and discrimination, began aligning with Trump, and made equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism central to its mission.
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Texas AG Paxton Has To Water Down Abbott’s Threats to Jail State Dems
As soon as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) vowed to oust, arrest and replace Democratic state lawmakers who left Texas to slow down Republican lawmakers’ efforts to redraw state congressional maps in their political favor, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made a big show of backing Abbott’s attempted display of strength.
Continue reading “Texas AG Paxton Has To Water Down Abbott’s Threats to Jail State Dems”On Redistricting
I want to address the questions now about redistricting: specifically, what should Democrats in reliably blue states do, if anything, to counter what’s happening in Texas? The answer is simple. We are in the current situation to a decisive degree because the forces of civic democracy have not been willing to use political power with anything like the ruthlessness or aggressiveness of the authoritarian right. The answer is simple. States like California and New York should gerrymander their states to neutralize the Texas power grab. Since more Democratic states have non-partisan commissions, by definition the blue states have more to gain. What about the point of principle? If I were in the positions of the Governors of California or New York I would say if Texas desists or undoes its redistricting and stets it back to the previous maps, their states will do the same. This satisfies any point of principle. We need a national redistricting law to create a common framework. Having only one side fighting is stupid. The reality is that the United States is a nation-state. Democracy will stand or fall at that level.
This will become much more relevant when Donald Trump is no longer in power. But the old system has been shattered. Ignore the norms and follow the law. A new system will have to be built to replace the old one, which can’t be resuscitated.
Texas Redistricting Quorum Flight Time Warp!
With Texas Democrats fleeing the state to prevent the quorum state Republicans need to ultra-gerrymander their state, I’m surprised there isn’t more mention on how the exact same thing happened 22 years ago when Texas legislators did the exact same thing. This all happened back in early 2003. More than a few of you will remember this. But it’s more than a bit of interesting trivia. Because the circumstances of that earlier example are a key, though semi-forgotten, step in understanding how we arrived where we are today.
Twenty-two years ago, mid-decade redistricting was unheard of. There was, as we say now, a very strong norm against it. The U.S. Census comes out every decade and then congressional seats are redistricted for the next election. That created regularity and prevented the chaos and gamesmanship of state legislatures rushing to redistrict at every moment of partisan advantage.
Continue reading “Texas Redistricting Quorum Flight Time Warp!”So What Happens With the Jobs Numbers Now?
In that interval of a few hours between the release of the Friday jobs report and President Trump’s decision to fire of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I had a few people ask me whether I thought it was possible that the books for May and June had initially been “cooked,” since they ended up being revised dramatically downward. That question seemed a bit quaint after the subsequent firing of Erika McEntarfer. But the answer I gave is relevant in a few ways to the situation going forward.
What I said was that in the Trump era we can’t really rule anything out. (More than cooking, I noted just a few days ago that DOGE-cuts have forced BLS to rely more on estimates relative to data collection in its inflation calculations.) But we should go in with a strong assumption that that is not the case — that there isn’t any cooking — for a number of important reasons.
For me, trust figures very little into this judgment. The first of those reasons is that it would simply be very hard to do. BLS is staffed by career government economists and statisticians, very apolitical people in their work, who are just not the kind of people who are going to go along with anything like that. To the extent they were ordered to do so or Trump found a compliant statistician willing to cook for him, that fact would almost certainly leak out in short order, either through leaks to the press or people resigning.
Continue reading “So What Happens With the Jobs Numbers Now?”Trump Breaks His Campaign Promise to Fund IVF
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Trump’s IVF Flip-Flop a Sign of His Continued Reliance on Christian Right
President Donald Trump is no longer planning to require the government or insurance carriers to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization, the Washington Post reports, despite having promised during the 2024 campaign he would do so.
The promise was part of his campaign’s effort — much like Trump’s supposed “distancing” from Project 2025 — to paint Christian nationalists’ revered candidate as far more moderate than his extreme anti-abortion base. The move came in the aftermath of a February 2024 Alabama Supreme Court decision holding that frozen embryos created by IVF are considered “children” under a 19th century state law and a 2018 state constitutional amendment banning abortion. That stunning decision meant anyone involved in destroying a frozen embryo in the state could potentially be liable for wrongful death.
This judicial embrace of the concept of “personhood” (and therefore rights) for fertilized eggs, or “extrauterine children,” as the court referred to them, jolted even the deep red Alabama legislature. Lawmakers then passed a law granting IVF patients and providers immunity, although they left the question of personhood unaddressed.
Throughout 2024, Trump’s campaign presented him to the press and wider public as a supporter of IVF, even as he unabashedly aligned himself with anti-abortion radicals and IVF opponents. Now, as Trump is facing declining approval numbers, he seems to be turning to his most reliable supporters for a little boost.
With MAGA influencers in turmoil over the Epstein files and even Trump’s position on the war in Gaza, he needs to keep his most dependable bloc of support — the Christian right — close at hand. If there’s anything he could do right now that would roil Christian nationalists, it would be using government power to make IVF, which they consider to be immoral meddling with divine plans for humanity, more widely available.
To anyone who might have believed a government subsidy for their fertility treatments was in the offing, anonymous administration officials tell the Post this laughable doozy of an excuse:
A senior administration official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks, said that while expanding IVF access remains a “huge priority” for Trump, the president can’t legally make IVF an essential health benefit without Congress first approving legislation to do so. It is unclear whether the administration plans to ask lawmakers to take up a bill, but the two people said that forcing insurance companies to cover IVF is not currently on the table.
Cracks in Trump’s Inner Circle
Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng reports that Trump’s ham-fisted efforts to change the subject from Epstein by threatening to prosecute former President Barack Obama for treason are “doing next to nothing right now to dig the president out of this Epstein-shaped hole that he and his loyalists dug for themselves.” Instead, they are worried that it is massively backfiring.
Trump’s bungling of the Epstein situation by refusing to release the files that he knows include mentions of his name has MAGA influencers up in arms, and has drawn wider public disfavor. It is not going away, no matter how flamboyantly Trump tries to deflect it. Now, according to Suebsaeng’s reporting, people close to Trump are admitting that his impulsive, rake-stepping reactions are a disaster for him.
MAGA’s entire disappointment with the Epstein files is that they expected their hero Trump to expose the supposed deep state by releasing all the documentation of its nefarious inner workings. His attempts at misdirection have prompted a dismissive reaction. One administration official told Suebsaeng “people aren’t buying it,” after receiving “messages from high-profile Trump allies and MAGA-aligned influencers insisting that this ‘Obamagate’ reboot will not get them to move on from Epstein.”
Ooops
To further distract from the Epstein debacle, Trump and administration officials have attempted to resurrect bogus claims that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” of Trump, engineered by Hillary Clinton. Last week, FBI Director Kash Patel tried to claim an “annex” to the investigation of former Special Counsel John Durham contained evidence “that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.” But the New York Times reports the annex “shows the opposite,” because the supposed evidence of a Clinton campaign plot was “almost certainly a product of Russian disinformation,” a conclusion Durham sought to bury in the “annex.”
You read that right. The annex had been in the deep freeze until the Trump administration dug it out, only to have it disprove the very claim it had released the annex to prove.
Will We Ever See How Trump Appears in the Epstein Files?
Freedom of Information Act expert Jason Leopold has stunning details about how Trump’s name ended up getting redacted from the massive trove of Epstein documents reviewed by a team of a thousand employees at the FBI. According to Leopold’s sources, the rationale for the redaction was that during the time period covered by the files, Trump was a private citizen and therefore subject to FOIA’s privacy exemptions. That’s a standard FOIA procedure supported by the law, Leopold explains, although it is directly at odds with the administration’s promises of maximum transparency.
After the review was finished, the Department of Justice and FBI reversed course and announced they would not be releasing the Epstein files after all.
Leopold concludes that overcoming a privacy-based FOIA redaction is “a really high bar.” Of course if Trump were maximally transparent as he claims, he could order the files’ release without his name redacted. Otherwise the public will likely have to wait until after he is dead to see how he is mentioned.
DOJ Flailing to Deny 3,000-A-Day Deportation Quota Stephen Miller Bragged About
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has gone on television to boast of an administration goal of deporting 3,000 undocumented immigrants a day. Now that some trial courts have ruled that its detention methods are illegal, DOJ is trying to claim the quota doesn’t exist. In a court filing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, “DOJ attorney Yaakov Roth attributed the quota claim to ‘anonymous reports in the newspapers,’” Politico reports.
House Republicans Now Panicking Trump’s Deportations Will Hurt Them in 2026
Latino members of the House GOP are desperately signalling to Trump and Miller that their mass deportations will hurt them with voters that they won over in 2024. “President Trump, sir, the same God who saved you from death in Pennsylvania one year ago and who put you back in the Oval Office against all odds, is the same God Almighty who millions and millions are begging to for some type of dignity, not amnesty,” said Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL), as she introduced a bill to provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers (immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children), and protected status for some other undocumented immigrants.
Democratic Lawmakers Flee Texas
With shrinking options, Democrats are attempting to deprive Republicans of a quorum to vote today on their proposed gerrymandered Congressional maps by leaving the state. Governor Greg Abbott has now threatened to remove them from office.
Not Just Eggs
A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds “the vast majority of U.S. adults are at least somewhat stressed about the cost of groceries.”
Tell Me Again About Trump’s Brilliant Outreach to Influential Podcasters
After Charlamagne Tha God criticized Trump on his daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s Fox News program, Trump called him a “dope” and a “racist sleazebag.”
Trump Also Ruined Summer Vacation
Tourism and vacations are down this year, thanks to consumers opting for budget travel due to economic concerns amid tariff uncertainty, and foreign travelers repelled by Trump’s xenophobic policies.
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