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In Michigan’s Democratic race for U.S. Senate, state Senator Mallory McMorrow was caught in the middle of—and ultimately squeezed out by—centrist Haley Stevens and progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed. Now, with McMorrow having suspended her campaign on Sunday, Stevens and El-Sayed are both vying for her supporters ahead of the August 4 primary—a head-to-head contest that reflects the growing division between the party establishment and the left. “The battle for the Democratic Party that we see nationally has come to Michigan,” said David Dulio, a professor of political science at Oakland University.So far, McMorrow has not endorsed either candidate for the seat. One Michigan political organizer shared a text conversation with The New Republic in which McMorrow confirmed she had no plans to endorse. Kelly Neumann, the former financial co-chair of McMorrow’s campaign, has the same impression. “I think she wants the people to make their own decision,” she said about McMorrow’s plans. “I think everybody knows in their heart where, where she would vote,” Neumann added. McMorrow didn’t respond to an inquiry.“Whoever wins this primary on August 4th will have my full support,” McMorrow wrote in a statement on X announcing her withdrawal from the race.El-Sayed, a former state public health official and TNR contributor in 2021–22, is running on a platform that includes Medicare for All and getting corporate PAC money out of politics. He’s picked up a number of progressive endorsements, including the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the United Auto Workers.Stevens is backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, and the EMILY’s List PAC, which endorses pro-choice women running for office. She’s focused on her legislative experience, having been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2018.In a debate between the two on Tuesday night, they pushed each other on the role of money in politics. El-Sayed asked Stevens about the money her campaign has received from AIPAC, while Stevens pushed El-Sayed to release his tax returns. The two also sparred over energy costs. Both bemoaned that Michiganders have experienced power outages and high utility bills, but El-Sayed pointed out that Stevens has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Detroit Edison, the major utility company in southeastern Michigan; its PAC contributed $35,000 to Stevens’s campaigns for House, as well as $10,000 to a PAC associated with her.In their closing statements, they made their priorities clear. El-Sayed hammered on his economic populist message. “We need to take on oligopolies and billionaires,” he said. “We need to guarantee health care through Medicare for All.” He invited people to join his campaign, saying, “It’s the many versus the money.” Stevens made the pitch that she’s the right candidate to take down Republican Senator Mike Rogers in the general election: “I am fed up and fired up. Let’s go beat Mike Rogers, send him back to Florida a second time, and make sure that Michigan shines at the lawmaking table.”El-Sayed is hoping for a windfall of McMorrow supporters, writing on Sunday: “I welcome her supporters to our movement to stand up against money in politics, to put money back in pockets, and pass Medicare for All.”In a statement, Stevens praised McMorrow but didn’t explicitly ask McMorrow’s supporters to join her campaign. “Anyone who raises their hand to serve the people of Michigan and puts forward thoughtful ideas for how they would lead earns my respect,” she wrote. Caitlin Legacki, a spokesperson for her campaign, told me, “Now that it’s a two-person race, we have a chance to really go out and consolidate Haley’s voters, which includes Mallory’s remaining supporters who we’re all working really hard to try and woo.”Some Michiganders say that, anecdotally, McMorrow’s decision to drop out of the race has been a boon for El-Sayed. “We’re getting a lot of new Mallory people coming to the group,” said Wanda Hammoud, the board chair for One Fair Wage Action, about a pro-El-Sayed Facebook group she started. The group has over 21,000 members, and Hammoud said it jumped by 2,000 in just one day this week. “I’ve been pretty much an establishment Democrat, quite honestly,” said Neumann. Despite that, she said, “right off the bat, I knew immediately when I received the news that [McMorrow] was going to suspend her campaign that I was going to go to Abdul El-Sayed. I just knew that’s where I had to go. I’m looking for change.” (Neumann and the Stevens campaign sparred earlier this year when an old, controversial social-media post of Neumann’s resurfaced. Neumann blamed the Stevens campaign for publicizing the post to hurt McMorrow’s campaign.)El-Sayed has led in most polls since April. Most recently, a late-June Quantus Insights poll surveyed 433 likely voters and found 41 percent supporting El-Sayed, 36 percent supporting Stevens, 8 percent supporting McMorrow, and 16 percent undecided.“If endorsements from this point pretty much break equally, the tie goes to Abdul, because he was already leading in the polls,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “He just needs to keep the dynamics the way they were.”Since McMorrow dropped out, El-Sayed has received endorsements from Representative Analilia Mejia, Michigan state Senator Stephanie Chang, and Representative Maxwell Frost. On the day McMorrow left the race, Stevens received an endorsement from Attorney General Dana Nessel. Green expects more endorsements to come this week. He specifically has his eyes on Senator Elizabeth Warren, who endorsed McMorrow, and Jewish politicians like Andy Levin, who Green says could help draw Jewish voters to El-Sayed. Stevens, backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has called herself a “proud pro-Israel Democrat.” Meanwhile, El-Sayed is critical of Israel’s government and outspoken about the genocide in Gaza.If Warren endorses El-Sayed, Green said, “that would be a very high-profile, newsworthy signifier that McMorrow world is going Abdul’s direction.”

If Republicans are really looking for election fraud, they might want to check on their own party members. In Massachusetts, the State Ballot Law Commission ruled last week to disqualify Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general from the state’s primary election after they submitted allegedly forged signatures to get their names on the ballot. Adam Roof, executive director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, had filed objections to the veracity of the signatures collected by the campaigns of Anne Manning Martin, who is running for lieutenant governor, and Michael Walsh, who is running for attorney general. Candidates needed to gather 10,000 signatures to appear on the primary ballot. The commission invalidated 1,279 of Martin’s 10,692 signatures and 1,021 of Walsh’s 10,677 signatures.In Martin’s case, signature gatherer Joe Bronske allegedly used a list of registered Republican voters to forge hundreds of signatures. The allegedly forged signatures were first noticed by another Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, who had also hired Bronske and found he’d collected signatures from deceased voters. When deposed by an attorney for Shawn Oliver, one of Martin’s opponents, Bronske repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment, suggesting he had “something to hide,” according to the ruling. In Walsh’s case, a handwriting expert determined that many of the signatures from certain towns were “more likely than not written by the same person,” according to the commission’s ruling.Thousands of miles away in Florida, five people, including three elected officials, have been charged in connection with a scheme to allegedly create and distribute a fake voter guide.Ahead of the 2024 general election, residents in St. Johns County received flyers that listed the Republican Party’s “official 2024 membership-approved endorsements”—but included a very different list of candidates from the one the party actually supported. St. Johns County Commissioners Sarah Arnold and Christian Whitehurst, St. Augustine Beach city commissioner and former Mayor Dylan Rumrell, and Jamie Lynn Johnson each face two misdemeanor counts for conspiracy and producing a false voter guide. Brianna Jordan, Whitehurst’s campaign manager, was also charged with tampering with physical evidence. She allegedly tried to destroy the voter guides after the scheme was discovered.It shouldn’t be all that surprising that the recent instances of alleged voter fraud are coming from the Republican Party, the same party that idolizes a county clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, celebrates a rule-skirting billionaire, and bows at the altar of an election denier and alleged fraudster.

In When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine, the UN Special Rapporteur speaks with Chris Hedges about Gaza, international law, media complicity, and why she believes silence has become one of the greatest enablers of injustice. Joshua Scheer United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese shares stories of the immense suffering in Palestine […]

The longtime friends discuss their shared love of Bond movies, the rise of white supremacy, the World Cup's latest controversies, and what America would look like without immigrants.

Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner has yet to drop out of the race despite losing all major endorsements after a rape allegation by an ex-girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, who says Platner assaulted her in 2021. Platner has denied the claim. “There’s no way to force Platner off the ballot; he has to make the decision,” says Amy Fried, professor emerita of political science at the University of Maine. Platner would have to drop out of the race by Monday, “and then there’s two weeks for the Maine Democratic Party to pick someone else.” Fried discusses potential Democratic candidates to replace Platner and the legacy of Republican Maine Senator Susan Collins, against whom they would be running in November.

When Lucy found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2025, she might have been delighted. Instead, the news added to the uncertainty she’d been facing since that February, when she was among the first crop of federal workers fired by the Trump administration. Her old bosses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) […]

The most important part of any Supreme Court ruling today is the majority opinion, for that is what the law is. The second-most-important part is whatever Justice Clarence Thomas writes separately, for that is what the conservative legal movement would like the law to be.Thomas has long carved out a reputation for frequent and idiosyncratic opinion writing. He pens more concurring and dissenting opinions than any of his colleagues on the high court. (Chief Justice John Roberts, by comparison, has not written separately in the last two terms.) This year alone, in a wide range of cases, Thomas sketched out a stunningly broad view of executive power—and, simultaneously, a sharply narrowed view of congressional power—that verges on the monarchical.This can manifest in both historic cases and less closely watched ones. In Monsanto v. Durnell, for example, the court was asked to decide whether a federal law on insecticides could preempt state-level lawsuits against the makers of Roundup. The court’s answer was “yes,” with which Thomas agreed. But he then went further, in a concurring opinion, to “call attention to some of the underlying constitutional infirmities in the [Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide] Act.”In his view, the law exceeded Congress’s powers under the commerce clause. “This power allows Congress to regulate ‘selling, buying, and bartering’ across state lines,” he wrote, quoting from a concurring opinion that he wrote in 1995. “It does not allow Congress to regulate ‘agriculture’ or ‘manufacturing,’ activities entirely ‘separate’ from ‘commerce.’”Huh? It is somewhat absurd to treat “agriculture” or “manufacturing” as distinct from “commerce,” as if farmers grow crops and factories make goods for recreation instead of economic reasons. Thomas’s own phrasing of the commerce clause is much narrower than its actual text, which gives the legislature the power to regulate “commerce … among the several states.” Thomas’s interpretation, if adopted by the high court, would demolish most federal statutes that regulate the economy.In Learning Resources v. Trump, the Supreme Court struck down the “Liberation Day” tariffs imposed by Trump last April. The court concluded that the Cold War–era law invoked by Trump did not allow him to impose tariffs via its permission to “regulate importations.” Some of the court’s conservative members disagreed with this interpretation, including Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.Thomas also disagreed with the majority’s holding but, as usual, opted to take it one step further. He argued that Congress could delegate, and had broadly delegated, its power to levy tariffs to the presidency. Thomas claimed that the nondelegation doctrine, which generally forbids one branch of government from ceding its power to another, did not apply here.“Because the Constitution assigns Congress many powers that do not implicate the nondelegation doctrine, Congress may delegate the exercise of many powers to the President,” Thomas wrote. “Congress has done so repeatedly since the founding, with this Court’s blessing. The power to impose duties on imports can be delegated.”This seemed to baffle some of Thomas’s usual allies, such as Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has frequently called for a stricter interpretation of the nondelegation doctrine. “It’s a sweeping theory,” he wrote, while disputing Thomas’s argument at length. “One that would require us to reimagine much of our case law addressing Article I’s Vesting Clause. And one that presents difficulties of its own.”Thomas drew on medieval and early modern English sources to argue that the presidency could, in fact, wield broad powers like those of the British king. “In Great Britain, the King had no unilateral legislative power, but he had much unilateral power over foreign commerce,” the justice argued, quoting from the English jurist Lord Blackstone. “His power over foreign commerce included the power to ‘govern foreign trade,’ and to ‘prohibit any of his subjects from leaving the realm.’”Gorsuch could barely hide his astonishment at this line of argument. He noted that, to the extent it was relevant, the arc of English history was one of Parliament wrestling away revenue raising from the Crown. More relevantly, he noted, the Boston Tea Party ran counter to Thomas’s thesis. “Are we really to believe that the patriots that night in Boston Harbor considered the whole of the tariff power some kingly prerogative?” Gorsuch asked.Thomas’s view of executive power went even further in the court’s presidential-removal cases this term. In two separate cases, Trump v. Cook and Trump v. Slaughter, the justices weighed when and how the president could fire Senate-confirmed executive branch officials despite Congress’s protections for for-cause removal.In Slaughter, the court’s conservative majority held that the president could fire commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission at will, overturning a nearly century-old precedent to the contrary. But in Cook, the court held that Trump could not remove a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, even with a pretextual for-cause rationale. Thomas enthusiastically supported the former ruling but dissented at length from the latter.“Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas wrote. “Neither the parties nor the court can point to a single time in American history that this court has upheld an injunction against the president’s removal of an executive officer. In the 237-year history of our Constitution, this court has, by all accounts, never done so.”Roberts, writing for the court in Cook, concluded that the Federal Reserve could maintain its independence because it fit within the historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States, which operated at arms’ length from the federal government of that era. Thomas found the comparison to be ahistorical and argued for absolute presidential control over the nation’s central bank. “Regardless of whether unaccountable executive officers like Cook would better govern the economy, the Framers rejected such a ‘promised land of technocratic governance,’” Thomas wrote. “They instead chose government by the people. As a court, our duty is not to second-guess that decision, but to uphold it.”Thomas’s invocation of “the people” here is revealing. The executive and legislative branches are often described as the “elected branches,” in comparison to the life-tenured appointees to the federal bench. But only one of those two branches was elected from the start. The Framers always intended for Americans to choose their own representatives in the House, even if they circumscribed in practice who actually got to cast a vote.The presidency, on the other hand, is not and has never been directly elected by the American people. The Framers inserted the Electoral College as a buffer between the popular will expressed by American voters and state legislatures and the nation’s executive power. While some states allowed voters to cast ballots for slates of presidential electors, this did not become the norm until after the founding generation had passed out of public life in the 1820s and 1830s.Congress, on the other hand, was always meant to be the branch that channeled the popular will into law and policy. Part of that “government by the people” is Congress’s decision to create a central bank with a healthy degree of independence from the president’s day-to-day influence. If the American people wished to change course, they could elect representatives to Congress who would change it for them. They have not done so because, broadly speaking, it is good financial policy to not let the president personally set interest rates.Thomas’s monarchical tendencies are strongest when it comes to immigration and foreign policy. Mullen v. Al Otro Lado involved a challenge by immigrants rights groups to a federal immigration policy that prevented asylum-seekers from applying for asylum at U.S. ports of entry by physically preventing them from stepping foot on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the policy, interpreting the statute’s defining of “arriv[ing] in the United States” to mean literally setting foot on U.S. soil.Thomas joined the majority opinion but also wrote a concurring opinion where he went even further to criticize the lower court that had initially ruled in favor of the immigrants. “The relief that the district court provided may well have unconstitutionally infringed on the president’s inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country,” Thomas wrote.Under the high court’s precedents, Congress and the executive branch have absolute discretion to determine which foreign nationals—whether they be immigrants, asylum-seekers, temporary visa holders, or whatnot—can or can’t enter the country. Thomas took this reasoning an additional step to argue that this power actually rests with the executive branch, not with Congress.Thomas previously argued, in the Muslim travel-ban case during Trump’s first term, that the president “has inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country,” a remarkable theory given that Congress has the explicit Article 1 power to regulate immigration and naturalization. But Thomas disagreed with that approach on two levels.First, he claimed, the president inherited such a power from the English monarchy. “For example, William Blackstone explained that the King could send alien friends ‘home whenever the king sees occasion,’” he wrote. “And, at the time of ratification, [the] Framers of the Constitution argued that the President would have the same power.”Second, he argued that Congress’s power over immigration was much narrower than the legal consensus assumed over the past 150 years. “Congress, for its part, has no enumerated power to require the President to bring certain aliens into the country,” he wrote. “The Constitution grants Congress the power to ‘establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.’ But, the class members in this case are not naturalized or even on the path to naturalization.”To the extent that this is true, it is because the executive branch literally denied them the ability to request asylum at a U.S. port of entry. But to Thomas, this does not matter. “Any statute that forced the president to allow aliens to cross the border against his will would appear to exceed Congress’s enumerated powers, and a court could not enforce it against the President,” he claimed.If the court were to adopt this position, it would gut much of federal immigration law. Holding a green card would be pointless if the president, on a whim, could deport you back to the country from which you originally came. Statutory protections for refugees, asylum-seekers, and temporary visa holders would be meaningless. A broad swath of people lawfully present in the United States would suddenly find themselves at the president’s personal mercy, even if Congress wished to protect them.Thomas’s concurring and dissenting opinions, by nature, are not law. They can nevertheless prove to be highly influential in conservative legal circles. Lower court judges routinely cite them when challenging or disputing Supreme Court precedents. Some of those judges can be former Thomas clerks themselves: The Trump administration has drawn heavily from his acolytes to staff the federal bench. While Thomas’s opinions are rarely the law today, they can be a telling indicator of the world in which the conservative legal movement hopes to one day make us live.

The post Estos jóvenes inmigrantes antes estaban protegidos. Con Trump, sus deportaciones se han triplicado. appeared first on ProPublica.

For weeks, Donald Trump’s fury has been growing at Republicans for failing to pass voter suppression legislation, demanding that they end the filibuster to do so. In a late-night tirade, he urged them to attach the SAVE Act to a must-pass defense spending bill, a dramatic move that reveals his deep frustration with them. As everybody knows, Trump sees restricting voting as the only way to stave off a midterm calamity. Meanwhile, in a striking piece, NBC News reports that Trump’s angry pressure has left Senate Republicans at wit’s end. They privately fear Trump is laying the groundwork to pin a midterm fiasco on their failure to pass something. They also blame Trump for letting this obsession take his focus off costs. One GOP Senator even tells NBC: “He’s a bully, and he’s f------ things up as fast as he can.” We talked to congressional scholar Norm Ornstein. He walks us through the details of the GOP predicament, decodes the real reason Republicans aren’t nixing the filibuster, and explains why it’s premature to rule out passage of the SAVE Act, offering a road map to what’s next. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.