Readers of The Brief are likely aware of what’s going on with Missouri’s election maps, and of a character at the center of that drama, secretary of state Denny Hoskins.
Continue reading “Missouri’s Republican-Imposed Catch-22, and the Ballad of Denny Hoskins”With his poll numbers at record lows, gas prices at record highs, and mounting signs of momentum for the Democrats, President Donald Trump just debuted a novel strategy to secure votes: bribery. Speaking at the Republican National Committee’s historically unheard of midterms convention on Wednesday evening, Trump offered to pay Americans $5,000 each if — and only if — the GOP is victorious in the upcoming elections.
“Because we’ve done so well and because our country is making so much money that only I can make this promise to you and here is my promise, if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate — both of them … because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump declared during his headlining speech.
The president framed this extraordinary offer as a result of unprecedented “tremendous economic success.”
“In history we’ve never had anything like what’s happening,” Trump said.
In reality, under Trump, the national debt has ballooned to record levels and caused alarm on Wall Street. Inflation has also continued to rise and investors are on edge over a pair of reports due out on Thursday and Friday that could show the situation has edged beyond Federal Reserve targets. Cost of living is rising as well, amid sluggish growth and the gas spikes caused by Trump’s ongoing and unpopular war in Iran. Trump’s tariffs have also led to trade wars with allies and higher prices for consumers. Overall, the economic situation is considered a major factor in Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and projections that show wider worries for Republicans, who are likely to lose the House in November.
The RNC’s wildly unusual midterm convention, which was the first of its kind, took place in Dallas, Texas against this dire backdrop. Even before Trump made his cash offer backed by false claims of an economic boom, his speech was filled with fantastical assessments of his presidency. That journey through the looking glass mirrored the several hours of preceding remarks from other speakers, including GOP candidates and members of Congress, who framed the party’s agenda as being focused on economic growth while rooting out corruption and extremism. They contrasted this with the Democratic Party, which they repeatedly characterized as “communist.”
It was as though Trump and the other Republicans who took the stage were addressing the nation from an alternate universe where there is no cost of living crisis and the president hasn’t amassed unprecedented sums and blatant conflicts of interest while in office. Their hallucinatory vision of dangerously radical Democrats also ignores the fact that the party’s centrist wing just scored a series of victories in congressional primaries while Trump and his allies maintain extensive connections to violent extremists.
In keeping with the effort to paint his policies as actually good for the economy, Trump cast his $5,000 payout as the result of the contrast between the two political parties.
“The reason the Democrats can’t do that is because they don’t do tariffs, they don’t take in money,” Trump said of the offer. “All they know is poverty and how to ruin our country.”
Along with the upside down vision of the country, the RNC midterm convention featured several odd spectacles including what … appeared to be an attempted butt slap from a Cabinet secretary, blatant lying about the anemic crowd, and — for some reason — a shirtless picture of leftist podcaster Hasan Piker on the jumbotron. Through it all, there was a grey haired DJ spinning country music and 80’s classics. Amid all of this weirdness, there was one bit of clearly good news for the GOP. With the poor polling, Democrats have an outside shot at securing a Senate majority. However, during the convention, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) broadcast a video clip to the convention audience that seemed like, at least, a partial defection from his caucus. The video added to concerns that Fetterman could switch parties following extensive leaks to the Wall Street Journal from his own staffers who have been worried Fetterman is more focused on clashing with fellow Democrats on Israel and making appearances on Fox News than he is on the basic duties of his position.
Yet even with all of this bizarro pomp and circumstance, Trump’s promise of cash payments stood out as a landmark moment in the MAGA era. The president framed it as being “very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”
“The only condition on the payment of this dividend that we’re going to be making — so it’s $5,000 to every adult — the only caveat I have is that the dividend that we’re making must be spent in the United States of America,” Trump said. “We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money. We don’t want you going to China, to Germany. You’ve got to spend the money in the United States of America.”
On the off chance that Trump’s proposal manages to turn the tides and encourage a Republican sweep in the midterms, it is unclear how he plans to track Americans’ spending.
Trump and his allies are no strangers to questionable cash transactions. Behind the scenes, various administration officials and Trump family members have been involved in all manner of wheeling and dealing. Trump has also previously put his name on checks, payments, and other financial vehicles provided to Americans during his tenure. And, during the last presidential election, Elon Musk, who is both the richest person in the world and the GOP’s biggest megadonor, made $1 million payments to voters in the key state of Wisconsin, in a move that raised legal concerns.
Federal law clearly prohibits anyone from offering to pay for votes. It is unclear what manner of loophole Trump might cite to get around the obvious issues raised by his $5,000 promise.
Trump appeared to be unbothered by any technical or legal details as he took the stage on Wednesday night. The president, whose convention remarks stretched for over an hour and is set to speak again during the second night of the event on Thursday, framed the cash offer as “the best part of the speech.”
“We’re making a fortune, so if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” he said. “It will be called the ‘Trump Dividend.’ We’ll call it the ‘Trump Dividend.’
After branding his payments, Trump preemptively patted the public on the back for being in on his scheme.
“Congratulations,” he said. “Now, all we have to do is win.”
State officials and elected leaders who once championed tax exemption deals with the executives of companies like Amazon, Google and Meta for the development of data centers in their states are now having second thoughts — and some states are taking steps toward making those deals a thing of the past.
It’s a sign that elected officials are belatedly taking notice of voters’ fears about data centers, unregulated AI advancement and the broader agenda of the tech industry. Rampant construction of new data centers around the U.S. has prompted panic about spikes in the cost of electricity, drained water supplies, pollution and artificial intelligence stealing human jobs. It’s underscored by the extreme economic uncertainty that everyone is facing — except, maybe, tech executives and the people who design their messaging.
The Wall Street Journal has a new report out this week examining 10 different states that had previously granted tech companies sales tax exemptions for the equipment needed to run data centers. In each of those states, officials are now having second thoughts. The piece focuses especially closely on Ohio and the work that state legislators did more than 10 years ago to encourage Big Tech investment in the state by offering the sales tax exemption, and the ways in which the artificial intelligence surge of the last four years has resulted in over $1.5 billion in savings for tech companies developing data centers there.
After substantial public pushback, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine back in May placed a pause on new applications for sales-tax exemptions, and some state lawmakers are pushing for the sales-tax exemption to be repealed. Several other states are considering similar actions to end or pause these ongoing tax breaks for tech companies, which “seem to have more money than God,” as one Ohio lawmaker, state Rep. Tristan Rader (D-OH), put it to WSJ.
Elected officials and politicians across the political spectrum are grappling with how to address the sweeping and righteous outrage against data center construction in rural and urban communities across the country. The notable exception is President Trump, who has maintained his allegiance to his big tech friends — who are funding his ballroom, and who donated to his inauguration, among other things. He memorably told Americans that only communities who want to be “backwards and poor” should oppose the new construction. His Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, is proposing a federal policy change that will make it easier for data center construction to move forward without input from the public.
Republicans are struggling with how to walk the line, but the backlash has been so severe back home that many are fully breaking with the Trump administration on the matter. Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott recently announced that he was placing a pause on the ability for new data center projects to be connected to the state’s power grid. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Vice President JD Vance have attempted to carve out a reasonable place for Republicans to stand should they not want to bow down whole hog to tech oligarchs, like Trump. The two have both independently suggested that states should look at mandates for tech companies to “be putting power back into the grid” as one way to address Americans’ concerns that the mammoth AI facilities are spiking electricity costs.
As Rader, the Ohio Democrat, said above …
WSJ: More Money Than They Ever Imagined—and No Clue How to Spend It
You may have seen by now the deadly warning from an Anthropic researcher who resigned from his job and warned that unregulated AI models had the potential to destroy humanity in the next four years.
“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” Anthropic research Jason Coxon, who worked on training models, said on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he continued.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum are calling on Congress to do something to prevent what Coxon and others from Anthropic have been forecasting.
I’ll bring your attention to one matter in today’s edition of Where Things Stand that is less existential than the threat posed by America’s tech oligarchy. The White House apparently got involved in the recent mystery surrounding Fox News’ ousting of longtime Fox Business News host Maria Bartiromo.
Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said during an interview with Newsmax Tuesday that the White House reached out to network executive to let them know they were dismayed by the decision.
“But suffice it to say that Suzanne Scott got a call, and basically the White House let her know that that kind of thing is totally unacceptable,” Navarro said, referencing the Fox News Media CEO.
Navarro went on to complain about how “out of control” Fox News is, suggesting that the network has become anti-Trump — a suggestion that flies in the face of how often the network bolsters the president’s agenda. After news of Bartiromo’s ouster broke, reports surfaced suggestion the longtime host reportedly shared details of internal editorial decisions with the White House.
“The bigger story here is, forget about anybody thinking that Fox is a conservative network that’s friendly to MAGA, that’s friendly to Trump,” he said. “They’ll feed you some red meat over there — the easy stuff, the trans stuff, stuff like that — but when it comes down to MAGA things, Suzanne Scott gets rid of everybody over there who wants to talk about MAGA issues.”
Josh Kovensky and Layla A. Jones report on the Trump administration officially moving to exclude certain noncitizens from being counted in the upcoming Census, finding that the new, official policy is actually more extreme than the draft version that TPM was first to report on in August: Trump Admin Officially Moves to Reshape National Political Power With New Changes to 2030 Census
Kate Riga covered oral arguments today in the abortion pill mifepristone case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: Appeals Court Skeptical That Louisiana Can Sue FDA Over Mifepristone Being Mailed into the State
John Light helps unpack the convoluted legal situation in Missouri regarding which maps to use in the upcoming election — and what it reveals about the Trump administration’s approach to sowing legal chaos in the election administration process this fall: Dueling Missouri Court Decisions Give Us a Preview of the Kind of Midterm We’re in For
Making Sense of That Big Story Saying Netanyahu Was Warned About Oct 7
Jeffries says Trump is too ‘corrupt’ to focus on Americans’ struggles
Trump says he’d consider pardoning Michael Cohen
Associated Press will stick with Lake Ontario over Trump’s renamed ‘Lake America’
Louisiana was met with a chilly reception Wednesday, as it pushed to make the abortion pill mifepristone less accessible nationwide.
Continue reading “Appeals Court Skeptical That Louisiana Can Sue FDA Over Mifepristone Being Mailed into the State”A version of a federal rule proposing to exclude certain noncitizens from being counted in the 10-year Census was published to the federal register this morning, and is more aggressive in several ways than the draft version first revealed in full last month by TPM. The final version explicitly proposes a question about immigration status on the census, excludes refugees and asylees from the count, and changes how members of the military are to be tallied.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Officially Moves to Reshape National Political Power With New Changes to 2030 Census”President Trump’s concerted assault on free and fair elections is happening on so many fronts that it’s hard for a casual observer to keep track of it all, so I want to pull back briefly and offer a lens through which to assess the threat: election officials on the ground.
Even as the Trump election executive order — in the form of the new USPS rules for mail-in ballots — is winding its way to the Supreme Court for a second time in a week, election officials are up against the clock. Election Day is less than eight weeks out, but in the modern world of early voting and mail-in ballots the election has already started or will soon get underway in many states. So most of the preparation and planning was completed long ago to meet various legal and internal deadlines. That’s a key bit of context as the Trump administration and friendly judges try to change the rules of the game this late in the calendar.
But the current spate of last-minute legal challenges are orderly and tame in comparison to some of the scenarios election officials are preparing for, namely direct federal interference in an ongoing election.
Election officials have elevated federal interference in the midterms to a risk factor on par with a natural disaster, Mary Ellen Klas reports at Bloomberg:
State elections officials are moving forward with plans to mail out ballots as if nothing has changed. But they’re also developing contingency plans — the way they do to prepare for bomb threats, power outages and natural disasters. “There’s a new hazard on the list, and that is the possibility of some sort of federal interference,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told me last week.
Federal interference can take many forms, but after the FBI seized 2020 voting materials this year in Arizona and Georgia, election officials are preparing for direct election interference from law enforcement, NPR reports:
One state election official, who did not have permission to speak publicly, told NPR their office has led three separate statewide trainings this year to prepare for the possibility of law enforcement seeking to take possession of ballots or election materials while the election is ongoing.
Given these manifest risks, The Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law put out this morning a new white paper for judges: “A Judicial Guide to Search Warrants Seeking Election Materials.” It warns of the perils of breaking the chain of custody if law enforcement seizes ballots and other election materials and offers judges alternatives that minimize the risk of irreparable harm to elections.
Election officials face a nearly impossible-to-reconcile duality: preparing for the possibility of an unprecedented federal assault on state-run elections while reassuring voters that their votes will count.
If you’re trying to make sense of the latest developments in the Missouri redistricting saga, I’d recommend:
Overnight, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) to show cause for why he could not be held in contempt of court for announcing that he would use the congressional district map the court deemed invalid. It set oral arguments for Thursday morning.
The Trump DOJ’s litigation strategy in a key wrongful deportation case was “not reasonable,” U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Maryland ruled Tuesday as she ordered the government to pay more than $160,000 in attorney fees:
Looking at the totality of the circumstances, even if portions of the government’s positions might have been reasonable, its overall litigation position has not been substantially justified. A reasonable person could not find that the government’s overall litigation position had reasonable basis in law and in fact.
The attorney fees award was tied to litigation over the wrongful deportation of a Venezuelan national named “Cristian” to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act last year in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement.
The wrongful deportation of Cristian was just one of numerous other violations of the settlement agreement by the Trump administration that have emerged in the J.O.P. case. Judge Gallagher had already found the administration in contempt of court even before yet another wrongful deportation came to light last week.
It’s one of the perverse ironies of the Trump II presidency that taxpayers must foot the bill for the lawlessness of the Trump DOJ.
“Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching,” 404 Media reports.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin wants to change the department’s seal so that the eagle is facing the arrows in its left talons instead of the olive branch in its right talons. “We’re actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because … when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we’re at war,” Mullin told Fox News.
A Labor Day weekend operation by the U.S. Southern Command near Ecuador may have signaled a shift in approach. U.S. forces destroyed several commercial vessels believed to be used to refuel drug-smuggling boats but only after the boats were intercepted and their crews safely removed without any deaths or injuries. It was the fourth such interdiction of floating refueling platforms.
Three retired Coast Guard officers, deploring the Trump administration’s lawless campaign against alleged drug smuggling boats on the high seas:
This policy is legally unsound, strategically counterproductive, and morally corrosive. It weakens the international partnerships that have underpinned successful maritime drug interdiction for decades while placing American servicemembers in the impossible position of carrying out actions that may conflict with the law and their own personal and professional ethics. Drug smugglers are criminals—not enemy combatants—and treating them as military targets undermines both the rule of law and America’s credibility abroad.
The Trump DOJ is refusing to cooperate with European law enforcement agencies investigating Jeffrey Epstein, the WaPo reports: “Several European law enforcement officials said in interviews that DOJ has not responded to their requests for mutual legal assistance, which could permit foreign investigators to obtain evidence, information and testimony from the U.S.”
With U.S.-Canadian relations in tatters, the European Union and Canada are “working toward a new, all-encompassing relationship that will range from trade to security” in a new alliance that will stop just short of EU membership, Bloomberg reports.
WSJ: “Jacob Coxon, a researcher who specializes in training new AI models by having them consume vast amounts of data, said Tuesday that he is leaving the company because he doesn’t want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.”
I don’t recall the phrase “destroy humanity” being used in a straight news story since the end of the Cold War.
“Fortunately Americans had the wisdom to elect a corrupt dullard who’s susceptible to sycophancy and surrounds himself with sycophants to resolve the Sycophantic, Amoral Robot conundrum that poses existential risk to humanity.”—Brian Beutler
News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
On Tuesday the United Kingdom announced a series of sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They were joined in this by Canada and France. The sanctions include a ban on imports on goods produced in the West Bank as well as those who provide services including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.” That sounds like it involves sanctions on banks funding settlements. The Times refers to this as a “symbolic step.” But I’m not sure that’s the case. The devil is really in the details of that clause I quoted, how it is interpreted and enforced; just what counts as services, direct or incidental; and what counts as expansion. It also, of course, matters a great deal whether other countries adopt the same policy.
This is a wise, judicious and necessary policy. If Barack Obama had put measures like this at least on the table back in 2009 when he tried to force a resumption of final settlement talks we might be living in a much better and very different reality today. When the then-newly elected Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Obama’s overtures Obama mostly walked away and gave up. In his semi-defense he wasn’t elected to bring about a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict and it would have required an immense amount of political capital simply to set the stage for it, let alone accomplish it. The key feature of this new British policy is that it distinguishes between what is legitimate (Israel within its internationally recognized 1967 borders) and what is not (its settlements on the West Bank).
A set of dueling federal court decisions sets the stage for the kind of legal flurry we can expect between now and the midterms.
As Kate Riga reported for TPM, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who oversees appeals for the federal judicial circuit that includes Missouri, denied an effort by the state’s Republican leaders to use a gerrymandered map in the midterms. Moments later, a federal district court judge ruled in another case that those maps should be used.
To catch you up: Voters in Missouri can put any act of the state legislature to a referendum — including these new maps. But Secretary of State Denny Hoskins invited full chaos by waiting months, until the primary election was underway, to reject a petition by thousands of voters to hold a referendum on the new maps, which were produced at Trump’s request. Last week, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously that voters should get their referendum, and the pre-gerrymander maps should be reinstated. Thanks to Hoskins, the state now faces the bizarre situation of having held its primary under different maps than it will use in its general election.
That Kavanaugh rejected Missouri’s appeal without referring it to the full court suggests he felt there was very little chance his colleagues would go along with it. But, as Kate details, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark — a Trump appointee who is chief judge in the Eastern District of Missouri — on the same night issued a temporary restraining order requiring Hoskins to use the new, gerrymandered maps. The orders point in different directions, and will need to be resolved somehow in the coming days. The main group challenging the gerrymandered map, People Not Politicians, immediately appealed Clark’s order to the 8th Circuit.
This set of court decisions does not directly involve the Trump administration, though Missouri’s new maps were created at the president’s urging. In several other cases, however, the Department of Justice is frantically working to get its assault on the midterms before the Supreme Court. It yesterday appealed its bid to audit states’ voter rolls, using its controversial and faulty SAVE database, to the Court. It has multiple times asked the Court to rule on its bid to implement a Postal Service plan that is poised to sow extensive chaos with mail-in ballots.
The Court’s uneven approach to ruling on election-related chaos that could cause disruption makes it hard to know what to expect here. Yes, the Court tends to side with Republicans — but on something as dramatic and sweeping, with potential to sow chaos, as the USPS rule?
As David Kurtz wrote yesterday, we are seeing an unprecedented assault on the midterms by the executive branch. In past elections, we’ve seen Trump and his allies approach November with little plan beyond flooding the zone with misinformation, and hoping options emerge. Even in 2020, when their attempt to overturn the election resulted in a mob ransacking Congress, they were largely making it up as they went, as TPM has reported through close analysis of White House messages and documents.
This time is different. Chaos is still the plan, but we are seeing a whole-of-government effort to create it, involving not just the president’s close advisors but each federal agency, now fully underway months before the election. The end goal isn’t clear — there may not be any specific one. But chaos presents the administration with more options — more opportunities to spread disinformation, to question the results — than an orderly election.
The question now is the extent to which the Supreme Court will go along with it.
Rep. Chris Pappas (D) will face former Senator John Sununu (R) in New Hampshire’s Senate race this November after both easily defeated primary opponents last night.
Its Natalie Harp, who, along with two other aides, apparently got a Christmas gift of $45,000 from President Trump, per the Washington Post — a seeming violation of the law.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Missouri Republicans’ attempt to jam through a new gerrymander that would leave Democrats with only one House seat to their seven.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Rules Against Missouri’s Bid to Snatch Extra Seat in Midterms”House Republicans voted on an amusingly slapdash resolution last week that both condemned the concept of “socialism” and made the case for how great the SAVE America Act is. The resolution was put forward by Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO), seemingly in an attempt to make Democrats look bad for supporting socialism, when it appears most Dems opposed the measure, regardless of how they might have voted on a “socialism” bill, because they don’t want to touch the SAVE Act voter suppression bill with a 10 foot pole.
The resolution cleared the House 220-192, with eight of the more moderate members of the House Democratic conference voting with Republicans on a measure that called for the “condemnation and denouncement of socialism in all its forms” while also describing Democratic Socialists of America’s ideology as “incompatible with American values and the United States Constitution.”
While there is plenty to unpack about how Democrats of various stripes are engaging (or not) with the rise of the DSA and voters’ increasingly favorable view of socialism, the key point here is that Republicans are talking about socialism and fearmongering about “radical leftists” again this cycle because they have nothing else with which to energize voters as they attempt to hold Congress. That’s by President Trump’s own design. He’s torpedoed or trampled on any legislative victories they could’ve had this year for the sake of the SAVE Act.
And, so, Republicans spew Islamophobia and manufacture a new Red Scare and bolster Trump’s conspiracy theories about noncitizens supposedly voting en masse for Democrats in federal elections to help them steal seats in Congress. In some ways, Crank’s resolution could be read as a pamphlet on the Republican Party’s 2026 policy platform: creating outrage about something that is not happening — a socialist takeover of America just because a few left-leaning progressive populists won Dem primary elections — while tossing a little bit of the SAVE Act and some grievances about noncitizen voting into the mix because Trump cannot think or speak about much else this cycle.
There have been lots of insider accounts the last few weeks about GOP hand-wringing over the upcoming convention in Dallas, Texas that the Republican Party is hosting to get people jazzed about the midterms and to give Trump a platform to make the election about himself. Many members and candidates are planning not to attend; Trump isn’t exactly popular among voters right now, given his downplaying of the nation’s affordability crisis and everything he has done to make it demonstrably worse since taking back the White House.
In fact, Republicans have been able to accomplish so little with their Republican trifecta in Washington that they’re reportedly planning to elevate the Big Beautiful Bill at the upcoming convention — legislation that passed more than a year ago that cut taxes for the wealthy and made sweeping cuts to Medicaid. After all, what else have they done since then?
One consensus message Republicans want the convention oriented around is the choice between their legislative record and a Democratic Party they argue has moved way too far left.
“You’ve got Republicans that are campaigning on commonsense ideas. You’ve got Democrats that are being drawn to the absolute most extreme left of their party,” said Rep. Brian Jack, a deputy chair of the House GOP campaign arm. “So I expect each night to see that on full display.”
Another Republican staffer is endorsing Democrat James Talarico in his Texas Senate bid over Texas Attorney General and Republican candidate Ken Paxton, explaining how blatantly toxic and corrupt he is known to be among Republicans in the state. A few weeks back, a longtime Republican aide for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) endorsed Talarico over Paxton, after Paxton ended his boss’ Senate career.
Now a former top aide to Paxton, David Maxwell, is endorsing Talarico. Maxwell was Paxton’s director of law enforcement for years before he joined other top Paxton staffers in accusing the attorney general of corruption and reporting him to the FBI. More details from the New York Times:
The aide, David Maxwell, served as Mr. Paxton’s director of law enforcement for several years until 2020, when he and other high-level staffers accused Mr. Paxton of abusing the power of his office to help a campaign donor under federal investigation. The allegations were central to Mr. Paxton’s impeachment trial in 2023, in which he denied any wrongdoing and was acquitted by the Republican-led Texas Senate.
“Ken Paxton ended my five-decade career in public service because I blew the whistle on his corruption,” Mr. Maxwell says in the ad. “I am supporting James Talarico for U.S. Senate.”
The New York Times has a sickening new report out today about Sen. Roger Marshall’s (R-KS) habit of suing patients who could not pay off outstanding medical debt to his practice. In some cases those patients were arrested over unpaid medical bills:
Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.
Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases for missing court dates, the record show. In an additional 13 lawsuits, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers sought warrants but it is unclear whether an arrest occurred.
You can read the whole piece here.
“As I sat down this morning to try to catch you up on the state of play of the various Trump administration threats to the sanctity of the midterms elections, I realized anew how hard it is to keep track of it all — and how much that is the point,” David Kurtz writes in today’s edition of Morning Memo as he helps us unravels the web of threats the Trump administration is lobbing at election administrators ahead of the midterms.
DC Starts to Get Worried for the GOP
Smithsonian’s Secretary to Resign as Trump Tries to Rule the Institution
Here is Trump’s blueprint to rig the 2026 midterms
Former GOP lawmakers join Democrats to challenge Trump’s mail-in voting crackdown
Correction: This article originally misidentified Marshall’s home state. TPM regrets the error.
