The Trump administration is quietly undertaking an effort to expand a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tool used for citizenship verification to include driver’s license and passport information—personal data it plans to utilize in its voter fraud crusade. You’ve probably never heard of the DHS system known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), […]
This column originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s site Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here. This week’s huge news has to be the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations, a story that intersects with what can only be called the slow public unraveling of Kash Patel’s tenure director as FBI director. Patel, as you might remember, had long crusaded for […]
Did you know that, right now, the person who sits third in line to the U.S. presidency is a deeply strange 92-year-old from Iowa? It’s one of those facts you forget about, until you look at the government website for “presidential succession” and get taken by surprise. But there it is: if anything happens to Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson, Senator Chuck Grassley would be our country’s Commander in Chief. He’s both the President pro tempore of the Senate and the chair of its Judiciary Committee, which makes him one of the most powerful people in Congress. This is alarming news for America, because Grassley is also the oldest member of Congress—he’s been in politics since the Eisenhower administration—and one of its foremost weirdos. On a regular basis, he puts things on the internet that make Trump look normal by comparison. He has a legislative track record a mile long, and most of it is awful. But the problem he represents is much bigger than one man. The fact that someone like Chuck Grassley has represented Iowa in the Senate for 45 years is a sign that American democracy is in a near-terminal state of dysfunction. What’s more, it’s the most damning indictment of the Democratic Party imaginable. If they can’t beat this guy, what are they good for?