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Mothers struggling with rising costs are taking on debt, cutting back on personal medical care, delaying rent payments and skipping meals so their kids can eat. Federal cuts are poised to make things worse. Sherrah Hill, a mother of six, didn’t think a simple promise to her kids — that she would buy them ice [...] The post Mothers Are Stretching Every Dollar — and Still Finding Ways to Care for their Families appeared first on DCReport.org.

Imagine It, but That Probably Leaves Out a Lot Imagine how much better off we would be if over the last few decades we had not made mistakes of being overly aggressive and unwisely violent toward other countries. If we had gotten in and out of Afghanistan quickly. If we had not attacked Iraq needlessly. [...] The post Imagine the America We’d Have Without Decades of Interventionist Wars appeared first on DCReport.org.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For decades, the US Forest Service has actively managed public lands to reduce wildfire risks by clearing underbrush and trees, or employing prescribed burns—something Indigenous nations have practiced for centuries. Scientists have generally lauded the ecological benefits of what is also known as “fuel […]

Over the past four days, bettors on the prediction platform Polymarket have wagered nearly $3 million on whether we’ll see a hantavirus pandemic this year. A cluster of cases of a particularly deadly strain of the virus erupted on a cruise ship last month, killing three people out of eight suspected cases linked to the […]

After a gunman allegedly attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month, Senator John Fetterman seized on the moment to accuse his fellow Democrats of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Fetterman tweeted: “Drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.”In saying this, Fetterman gestured at a certain theory of our moment: Not everything Trump does is rooted in megalomania and dictatorial abuses of power. Trump can be right sometimes. Trump-obsessed Democrats who won’t admit this squander a chance to appeal to the Reasonable Middle. Similarly, when Trump started pushing the project last fall, some centrist Democrats ridiculed calls for the next Democratic president to tear it down, calling it a “distraction.”Well, if opposing Trump’s ballroom carries echoes of TDS, it turns out some Republicans are afflicted with TDS too. Punchbowl News reports that some Senate and House Republicans are balking at the ballroom project, now that the White House has demanded that its security be funded with $1 billion in taxpayer money:Some of these skeptical Republicans feel the ballroom is just too politically toxic right now, especially when Trump said for so long that it would be paid for by private funds. Trump’s approval ratings are in the 30s. Gas is $4.55 per gallon. Trump can’t yet find a path to victory against Iran.Republicans tell Punchbowl that the ballroom funding faces obstacles in the House, in part because it’s a tough vote for vulnerable House Republicans. As one put it: “A first-year poli-sci major would know not to ask members to take this vote, and we hope the speaker does too.”All of which should prompt us to revisit the ballroom-as-distraction theory of the moment alluded to above, and ask: Why is Trump’s ballroom so politically toxic that Republicans in tough races are fearful about voting for it?In the wake of the shooting incident, pro-Trump and right-wing personalities pushing for the ballroom thought they’d struck propaganda gold. Many of them excitedly smeared Democrats who oppose the project as tacitly encouraging the assassination of Trump. At a meta level, the real MAGA game here was to get Democrats to equivocate in the face of MAGA rage, to bully them into genuflecting before Trump’s plan to build a Caesar-like monument to himself at the center of the nation’s capital—and by extension submit to his broader dictatorial project. In a sense, at moments like these, MAGA is at bottom asserting the power of fascist lies to remake political reality itself—and force Trump’s enemies to fear that they must adapt to MAGA-dictated reality or perish. Which of course must mean wholesale capitulation to Trump. The Fetterman mode of politics cynically plays dumb about those deeper and more sinister intentions. Similarly, those Democrats who warned that the ballroom was a “distraction” from kitchen table issues effectively hand-waved away those darker intentions, proceeding as if they don’t carry big stakes for our civic well-being and democratic future.But they do, and fortunately, most Democrats appeared to grasp those stakes, continuing to vociferously oppose the ballroom even after the shooting incident. They plowed right through MAGA’s fog of bullying propaganda and emerged on the other side unscathed. Result: The MAGA assault quickly dissipated and unceremoniously went poof. It’s a nonfactor now—a big nothing.Indeed, a Washington Post poll taken before and after the shooting incident found the ballroom to be deeply unpopular. It’s opposed by 56 percent of Americans and supported by only 28 percent. Independents oppose it by a whopping 61–18, working-class Americans by 54–28, and moderates by 64–16. Importantly, the Post polling done after the incident showed no clear shift toward support for the project, another sign that MAGA propaganda around it fizzled.It’s not clear, of course, whether most ordinary voters oppose the ballroom merely because they want the president to focus on material things or because it represents a massive abuse of power suffused with Nero-level megalomania. It’s probably some of both.After all, to build the ballroom, Trump bulldozed large swaths of the White House—which belongs to the American people—without congressional approval. A judge temporarily halted the project, but Trump used the shooting to try to browbeat him into rubber-stamping it. The White House withheld the names of some well-heeled donors to the project, including some with business before the government. Trump’s fundraising for the ballroom has created new avenues for the wealthy to pay tribute to him, as part of his effort to transform the presidency into a massive Bribe Delivery System.The ballroom should also be viewed alongside other Trumpian projects—the planned Triumphal Arch, the renaming of the Kennedy Center after himself, and the stamping of his face on our passports. As Bill Kristol notes, taken with all those other things, Trump’s plan to transform the People’s House into an “emperor’s palace” symbolizes a “broader effort to replace a republican regime with an imperial one.”Understood in that context, MAGA efforts to bully Democrats into supporting the ballroom look more like an attempt to strong-arm them into capitulating to that bigger imperial project. And when Democratic strategists say the ballroom is a “distraction,” they’re putting their heads in the sand about all these larger implications. But the Post poll suggests that the ballroom has proven to be one of those things that breaks through to lower-information voters in unpredictable ways. If it’s true, as Derek Thompson says, that the smartphone is imperceptibly, indelibly transforming our politics, the ballroom might illustrate the point: With those dramatic and shareable images of Trump’s White House East Wing demolition, this saga has unexpectedly captured something larger than itself. In fact, the deeper subtexts of the ballroom tale—the corruption, the megalomania, the careless Gatsby-esque destructiveness, the Trumpian imperium—are surely a key reason it has broken through. It’s creating the type of meaningful moment in our politics that offers surprising political openings to the opposition.There’s been some talk about what Democrats running for 2028 should propose to do with the ballroom once Trump moves on. Here’s an idea: Pledge to convert it into a monument to American democracy—and all the struggles that have been fought on its behalf. For good measure, let’s throw in an exhibit about January 6. That’s just one thought—if you don’t like it, come up with another one. Democrats: If even Republicans are now running from the ballroom, surely it signals an opening for the ambitious among you to get very creative in response.

Recall, if you can stomach it, the late summer months of the 2024 presidential campaign. The political press was churning out (accurate) stories about how Vice President Kamala Harris was distancing herself from some of the bolder policy proposals she’d previously backed, and many of the left were in a froth over it. But I paid it little mind. Timidly pivoting to the center was nothing new for Democratic presidential candidates, and what was the point of big policy proposals anyway? For that matter, what was the point of small policy proposals? As I noted at the time, Harris and her fellow Democrats had a bigger problem: They weren’t going to get to enact anything without the approval of Chief Justice John Roberts and at least four of his colleagues.Disappointingly, Harris largely ducked what was—and is—the fight of the Democrats’ lives: the court’s wholesale elimination of the party’s ability to govern. The conservative bloc, through what I would charitably describe as chicanery, has locked down American life for the foreseeable future. They essentially possess veto power over any legislation or executive order not to their liking, and they are now moving in the direction of stripping Democratic voters of their electoral power. This is an existential crisis that affects every Democrat running for federal office, and as we barrel toward the midterm elections and then into a presidential campaign, it’s incumbent on Democrats to explain how they will confront this challenge. Or to put it another way: How will they change the Supreme Court? Because it cannot persist in its current form.Naturally, if you ask Roberts, he will tell you this is all overblown. This week, he whinged about the public’s low opinion of the court, saying, “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” As The New Republic’s Matt Ford noted, it’s hard to see what a hypothetical high court filled with avowedly naked partisans would have done differently than these allegedly non-political actors, whose every move is laser-focused on delegitimizing and eliminating the GOP’s political competition.The Roberts court has dismantled the Democratic Party in a number of ways. One was its 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which did away with a judicial doctrine known as Chevron deference that allows the executive branch to respond nimbly and autonomously to laws passed by Congress. Its elimination essentially allows the high court to undercut the actions taken by the administrative state to carry out laws. This is specifically bad for a party that actually uses the federal government to facilitate policy, rather than using the federal government to destroy the federal government.But the Supreme Court has put its finger on the scale for Republicans in even less ambiguous ways in recent years. The conservative majority’s embrace of what’s known as the “major questions doctrine” has added a new layer of imperviousness to its reign of Calvinball terror. That doctrine, which is a very recent invention of the conservative legal movement, allows the justices to overturn a federal regulation if they believe Congress didn’t “speak clearly” enough when authorizing it. If you’re wondering what that means, well, it means whatever a majority of justices think it means: Over time, the major questions doctrine has allowed the justices a wide range in applying subjective and malleable criteria to rule against regulations.The Supreme Court, by the way, has never applied the major questions doctrine to a Republican president’s actions—though Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch did contend in a concurring opinion that it should have been applied to Trump in the recent case that struck down the president’s tariff regime. In every other instance, the major questions doctrine has provided a facially neutral jurisprudential scheme to derail Democratic presidents. Democrats have also, in recent years, been sabotaged whenever the court issues a shadow docket ruling, whereas lately those unsigned rulings keep siding with Trump. As Ford recently noted, leaked Supreme Court memos have shone a new light on how the conservative justices’ shadow docket dabblings have gone from being “a simple administrative mechanism [to] a major roadblock for progressive governance.”As if kneecapping the Democratic Party’s ability to govern isn’t enough, the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has effectively eliminated the safeguards in the Voting Rights Act that ensured the rights of Black Americans to participate in electoral politics. Ford wrote that the ruling all but ensures that “Black representation in Congress will … plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.” True enough, within days, Republican-controlled legislatures began the process of dismantling majority-minority districts.To Ford’s mind, Democrats find themselves facing some pretty stark choices to confront a Supreme Court that has gone to such lengths to annihilate their party: “Since the Supreme Court as currently constructed cannot be trusted to protect the egalitarian republic that, as Kagan noted, Union soldiers and civil rights activists fought and died to build, sufficient justices must be appointed to it to remedy the problem.” To pack the court, or not pack the court? This is a question that Democrats have been at pains to avoid. And to be fair, they may have other options besides the nuclear one. They could engage in jurisdiction stripping to limit the court’s ability to interfere with liberal governance. They could reform the court in other ways beyond simply nominating four new justices to turn the tide: Pete Buttigieg has floated the idea of a 15-member court split among conservatives, liberals, and ostensible neutrals. Other lawmakers have proposed we simply abolish lifetime appointments. I could spend several more paragraphs sketching out solutions to end the misrule of an illiberal court, but the time has come for Democrats to step forward and announce what they plan to do about it. The party is no longer on a collision course with the Roberts court—the collision has happened; the wreckage is in the road. To do anything, now or in the future, Democrats will have to undo the grievous harms that imperil their party’s ability to function. In these upcoming election cycles, if Democratic candidates don’t have serious ideas of how to solve this problem, then they are not serious Democratic candidates.This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Managing Editors Note: I chose to publish this article because I believe in presenting a wide range of perspectives and encouraging open debate. My own view is that the billionaire class exerts control over both major political parties and is helping drive the authoritarian, fascistic direction this country appears to be heading toward — if […]

Nate Bear Do Not Panic Yesterday elections were held in parts of England to elect local councillors, and in Scotland and Wales to elect their devolved parliaments. Fearing a challenge from the left, Starmer’s ruling Labour party spent the campaigning period, in coordination with Britain’s legacy media, confecting antisemitism slurs about Green party candidates. The final effort, […]