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    Top House Democrats vow to oppose shutdown bill over healthcare funding

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    As House Republican leaders move to hold a vote on legislation to reopen the US government, top Democrats vowed on Tuesday to oppose the bill for not addressing their demand for more healthcare funding.Democrats have for weeks insisted that any measure to fund the government include an extension of tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans, which were created under Joe Biden and due to expire at the end of the year, sending premiums for enrollees higher.With Donald Trump’s encouragement, Congress’s Republican leaders refused, sparking a spending standoff that resulted in the longest government shutdown in US history. But the Democrats’ resolve cracked earlier this week, when a splinter group in the Senate joined with the GOP to craft a compromise bill that reauthorizes government funding through January, without extending the tax credits.The Senate passed that legislation on Monday evening, and the House of Representatives is expected to vote on it on Wednesday afternoon. The House rules committee will consider the bill on Tuesday evening, setting the stage for it to come to the House floor on Wednesday.Top House Democrats oppose it, with the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, calling it a “partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the healthcare of the American people.“It’s our expectation that the House will vote at some point tomorrow and House Democrats will strongly oppose any legislation that does not decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis,” Jeffries told CNN on Tuesday.The House’s largest ideological caucus, the centrist New Democrat Coalition, has announced its opposition to the measure.“While New Dems always seek common ground, our coalition remains united in opposition to legislation that sacrifices the wellbeing of the constituents we’re sworn to serve,” chair Brad Schneider said.“Unfortunately, the Senate-passed bill fails to address our constituents’ top priorities, doing nothing to protect their access to healthcare, lower their costs or curb the administration’s extreme agenda.”The sentiment appears much the same in the Congressional Progressive caucus, where chair Greg Casar called the measure “a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them”.The Democratic opposition threatens to make for a tight vote for the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, who has kept the House out of session for more than 50 days inan attempt to pressure Senate Democrats into caving to the GOP’s demands.With a 219-member majority assuming full attendance, Johnson can only afford to lose two votes on the bill, and the Kentucky representative Thomas Massie is likely to vote no.But Democrats may have their own defectors. Maine’s Jared Golden, who last week announced he would not seek another term representing a district that voted for Trump last year, was the only Democrat in September to vote for a Republican funding bill that did not extend the tax credit. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, whose Washington state district is similarly friendly to the president, also expressed her support for that bill.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth lawmakers’ offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how they would vote on the Senate’s compromise.The compromise bill cleared the Senate on Monday evening by 60 votes, the minimum it needed to overcome the chamber’s thresholds for advancement. All Republicans supported the measure’s passage except for Rand Paul of Kentucky, along with eight moderate members of the Democratic caucus, several of whom were recently re-elected, or serving their final terms in office.That group was composed of Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the party.While they did not win an extension of the tax credits, the group claimed credit for getting the Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune, to agree to hold a vote by mid-December on extending the subsidies. However, it remains to be seen if enough Republicans will support its passage, and Johnson has not agreed to put the issue to a vote in the House.Though the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, did not back the bill publicly, Shaheen told Fox News on Monday that the group “kept leadership informed throughout” their talks. Progressive organizations who backed Schumer’s strategy during the shutdown have now turned on him, for allowing the compromise to come together.Indivisible announced plans to support Democratic candidates in primaries who oppose Schumer remaining as the party’s leader, and MoveOn joined in the calls for him to bow out.“It is time for Senator Schumer to step aside as minority leader to make room for those who are willing to fight fire with fire when the basic needs of working people are on the line,” MoveOn Political Action’s executive director, Katie Bethell, said. More

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      Democratic candidate for Congress criticizes deal to end shutdown – which her mother voted to advance

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      A Democratic congressional candidate who posted to social media criticism of the bipartisan deal that looks set to end the government shutdown omitted to mention that her mother was among the party’s rebel senators who voted to approve it.Stefany Shaheen, who is seeking to represent New Hampshire in the US House of Representatives, said in the post to X that she “cannot support this deal when [House] Speaker [Mike] Johnson refuses to even allow a vote to extend health care tax credits”.Jeanne Shaheen, her mother and a US senator of New Hampshire, was one of seven Democrats to break ranks with party leadership on Sunday night and vote to advance a funding bill that will end the 40-day shutdown without securing guarantees for healthcare subsidies. Those seven were joined by an independent who caucuses with Democrats.“Clearly we had different approaches here,” Stefany Shaheen said in an interview Monday, reported by the New York Times, after questions arose over her post. “I can’t speak for her. I think she did what she believes is right.”The deal, which extends government funding until 30 January, contains only the promise of a vote on a healthcare bill in the Senate next month, not an extension of tax credits for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that helps keep premiums low, which had been a key Democratic negotiating position.The elder Shaheen, a senator since 2009, said in a statement that she stood by her decision. “This was the only deal on the table. It was our best chance to reopen the government and immediately begin negotiations to extend the ACA tax credits,” she said.The post by her daughter condemning the deal but leaving out her mother’s involvement drew a swift and predictable backlash on social media, mediaite.com reported.“Your mom just ruined your career,” one user on X posted, while another said: “We don’t vote for the children of traitors”.In her post, Stefany Shaheen, a mother of four children whose campaign biography describes her as a “passionate advocate for groundbreaking medical research and a successful entrepreneur and business leader”, said improving healthcare was “the cause of my life”.In a section of her website about why she is running for Congress during the 2026 midterm elections, Shaheen wrote that she knew “it’s not enough to just get mad” when Donald Trump is “crushing medical research, and Republicans [are] slashing Medicaid, and healthcare for kids, seniors, and veterans – all to give big tax breaks to billionaires and corporations”.According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about 15 million people will lose healthcare by 2034 because of Medicaid and ACA marketplace cuts pushed through by Republicans; an additional 4.2 million people will lose marketplace cover if premium tax credits are not extended, one possible consequence of the vote by Shaheen’s mother and the other Democratic rebel senators.Jeanne Shaheen and another Democrat who voted yes, Dick Durbin of Illinois, have already announced they will be retiring instead of fighting for re-election next year. None of the other five, Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), John Fetterman (Pennsylvania), Margaret Wood Hassan (New Hampshire), Tim Kaine (Virginia), and Jacky Rosen (Nevada), must face voters until November 2028.Angus King (Maine) also voted yes as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. More

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      Snap workers say Trump administration is ‘using country’s poorest as pawns’

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      When Stacy Smith, a government worker, showed up to work last Monday – the first working day after food benefits lapsed, amid the ongoing federal shutdown – she found a long line outside her office door. Elderly and disabled individuals desperately wanted answers.Some had gone to buy groceries, not realizing that their usual benefits were unavailable.They quickly discovered that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) payments had been paused, after the Trump administration said it would not pay benefits because of the shutdown – crushing the largest anti-hunger program in the US.“I had a client that came in and said they were afraid they were going to have to start eating cat food again, because without Snap benefits, that’s all they can afford, because they’re on a fixed income,” said Smith, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 2882, who works as an eligibility technician for assistance programs including Snap in Providence, Rhode Island.“Those are the things that I leave my job, and I go home, and that’s what I’m thinking about,” she said.Nearly 42 million Americans rely on Snap. With benefits paused for the first time in the program’s history, workers who provide assistance to Snap recipients expressed stark fears over how the move will affect low-income families and individuals. Across the country, food banks have been scrambling to keep up with surges in demand.Following two court rulings, the Trump administration said it would only provide partial funding to Snap. Funding for the program lapsed on 1 November.Snap payments continue to be contested in the courts. On Friday, the Trump administration appealed to the supreme court against a lower court’s order compelling it to make the full aid payments. Its appeal was granted, temporarily, in an emergency ruling.A Boston-based federal appeals court late on Sunday then ruled the benefits must be paid for November. But the Trump administration was expected to appeal the ruling, which was not expected to have immediate effect after the supreme court ruling, leaving the current status of the Snap program itself uncertain.As the Trump administration fights against funding Snap, Smith said low-income families were scared. With the holidays approaching and schools due to close, breakfast and lunch meals provided during term time will not be available for their children.View image in fullscreen“Clients are coming in. They want to know when this is going to end. And we don’t have an answer for them,” said Smith. “It’s hard to look someone in the face who’s telling you they can’t feed their family, and be able to try to guide them to other avenues to try to get some food for their household. We have community food banks, and we have food pantries, and they’re they’re already maxed out.”Snap is funded by the federal government, but administered by state and local governments, already facing cuts by the Trump administration. “This is more chaos for states and their ability to manage all these other big program issues that they have, and they’re throwing all their resources in,” said a former USDA food and nutrition service employee, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, as they currently work for federal contractors. “There’s a real commitment by the states to get these benefits out there. This is a lifeline for the 42 million people that get the program. I see that commitment from them, but this really is unprecedented.”As the government shutdown drags on, Snap recipients have been reaching out to state offices in desperation for answers and relief.“At this point we have no more information, really, than they have in the news currently,” said Misha Dancing Waters, a member of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 720, who also works as an economic support specialist since the last nine years in Dane county, Wisconsin. “For Wisconsin, we haven’t even gotten partial Snap funding. We haven’t gotten anything so far.View image in fullscreen“We’re giving out a lot of resources, and they’re really just hitting all of those food pantries. Places where there’s anything to help are getting hit so hard that they just really can’t meet the need.”Pausing the scheme was “really punitive”, added Waters. “It’s another way to get people off of the benefit … It’s really scary times. There’s so many things up in the air. People really don’t have any way to plan or prepare.”Contacted for comment, the US Department of Agriculture – which oversees Snap benefits – pointed to a memo, which said that “maximum allotments” for households were being reduced to 50% during November “due to the limited availability of Federal funding” and “orders from two courts”.Should the shutdown persist, and Snap funding fail to be restored, Waters expressed fear things will get worse very quickly.“I think the next month we’re going to see things get drastically more dire if we don’t get this shutdown turned around and get our situation with health insurance and food care fixed. People need those basic things just to survive,” she said. “We are using our country’s poorest and most vulnerable as pawns in a political game, and that’s not acceptable on any level. It’s not OK for us to be denying people basic things like food and medical care.” More

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      Senate advances funding bill to end longest US government shutdown in history

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      The Senate on Sunday made significant progress towards ending the longest US government shutdown in history, narrowly advancing a compromise bill to reauthorize funding and undo the layoffs of some employees.But the measure, which resulted from days of talks between a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, leaves out the healthcare subsidies that Democrats had demanded for weeks. Most Democratic senators rejected it, as did many of the party’s lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which will have to vote to approve it before the government can reopen.“This healthcare crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home, that I cannot in good faith support this [resolution] that fails to address the healthcare crisis,” said Democratic Senator majority leader Chuck Schumer.The bill received exactly the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate, with almost all Republicans voting in favor along with eight Democrats, many of whom are moderates or serving their final terms.“Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House, and they made clear over a period of weeks, including just this week, that this was as far as they would go as part of the shutdown talks,” said New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the group who is retiring after next year.“This was the only deal on the table.”In the 40 days since the shutdown began when the government’s funding authorization expired on 1 October, the Senate’s Republican leader John Thune held 14 votes on a bill approved on a near party line vote by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which would have extended funding through most of November.But no more than three Democrats ever voted in the affirmative, denying it the support it needed to proceed. The minority party demanded that any funding legislation also extend tax credits that lower premiums for Affordable Care Act health plans, which were created under Joe Biden and expire at the end of the year.Thune maintained that he would be willing to negotiate over those subsidies, but only once the government was reopened.“After 40 long days, I’m hopeful we can bring this shutdown to the end,” he said shortly before the vote was held on Sunday evening.“From the precarious situation we’re in with air travel to the fact that our staff have been working without pay for a full 40 days now, all of us, Republicans and Democrats who support this bill know that the time to act is now.”The compromise legislation authorizes government funding through 30 January 2026 and undoes the firings of federal workers that the White House carried out after the shutdown began. It also guarantees retroactive pay for furloughed federal workers and those who stayed on the job during the shutdown, and prevents further layoffs through January. Included in the compromise are three appropriations bill that will authorize spending through the 2026 fiscal year for the departments of agriculture and veterans affairs, among others.The compromise does not resolved the issue of the Affordable Care Act premiums, which one study forecast would jump by an average of 26% if the tax credits were allowed to expire.As part of the deal, Thune said he would allow a vote on a bill to deal with the credits by the second week of December. But even if it succeeds, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson has said he will not put such a measure on the floor.The compromise bill will now need to be approved by the House and signed by Donald Trump, which may take days. After advancing the legislation, the Senate adjourned until Monday morning, leaving the timing of further voting on the matter up in the air.Johnson has kept the House out of session since 19 September, in a bid to force Senate Democrats to vote for the GOP spending bill. Shortly after the Senate’s procedural vote on the compromise succeeded, the House told lawmakers to expect votes this week.But all signs point to a stormy reception for the bill in the chamber, particularly among Democrats.“America is far too expensive. We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said. We will fight the GOP bill in the House of Representatives, where Mike Johnson will be compelled to end the seven-week Republican taxpayer-funded vacation.”Greg Casar, chair of the congressional Progressive Caucus, said: “A deal that doesn’t reduce health care costs is a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them. Republicans want health care cuts. Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise – it’s capitulation.”Just before the Senate voted, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna called for Schumer to “be replaced”, saying he was “no longer effective”. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”Relegated to the minority in both chambers of Congress by voters after last year’s elections, Democrats seized on the lapse in government funding to make a stand on healthcare, long a signature issue of the party.In the more than five weeks that followed, polls showed the public believe the GOP was more to blame for the shutdown than the Democrats, and last Tuesday, the party swept off-year elections, in what Democratic leaders called a validation of their strategy in the funding fight.The weeks of unfunded government have taken a toll across the United States. More than 700,000 federal workers were furloughed, and hundreds of thousands more made to work without pay, leading to increasingly long lines at food banks and other social services nationwide as the missed paychecks piled up.At the start of November, the Trump administration moved to pause payments from the federal government’s largest food aid program for the first time ever, prompting an ongoing court fight.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy last week ordered a nationwide reduction in commercial air travel, saying air traffic controllers were facing unprecedented strain. More than 2,500 flights were canceled on Sunday, and Duffy said capacity would be slashed further on Tuesday if funding was not restored. More

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      US Senate vote marks step towards ending federal shutdown

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      The US Senate on Sunday took a key vote on a bill that would end the record-setting federal government shutdown without extending the healthcare subsidies that Democrats have demanded.Senators began voting on Sunday night to advance House-passed stopgap funding legislation that Senate majority leader John Thune said would be amended to combine another short-term spending measure with a package of three full-year appropriations bills.The package would still have to be passed by the House of Representatives and sent to Donald Trump for his signature, a process that could take several days.Senate Democrats so far have resisted efforts to reopen the government, aiming to pressure Republicans into agreeing to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans, which expire at the end of the year. Thune said that, per the deal under consideration, the Senate would agree to hold a separate vote later on the subsidies.Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, told reporters that he would vote against the funding measure but suggested there could be enough Democratic support to pass it.“I am unwilling to accept a vague promise of a vote at some indeterminate time, on some undefined measure that extends the healthcare tax credits,” Blumenthal said.“The Senate might get a vote” on the health insurance credits, Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, said. “I’ll emphasize ‘might.’ But is Speaker Johnson gonna do anything? Is the president gonna do anything?”Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has previously said he would not hold a vote on a plan to extend the tax credits that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans who are not insured through their employers.Two leading progressives in the Senate Democratic caucus were even more dismissive of the emerging compromise. “It’s a mistake,” Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told Punchbowl News. “It would be a policy and political disaster for Democrats to cave,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont said.Democrats in the House expressed their dismay. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, promised to fight the proposed legislation. “We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We will fight the GOP bill in the House of Representatives,” Jeffries said in a statement.“A deal that doesn’t reduce health care costs is a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them”, Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat who leads the House progressive caucus, wrote on X. “Republicans want health care cuts. Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise – it’s capitulation. Millions of families would pay the price.”“Unacceptable,” Florida congressman Maxwell Frost chimed in. “There are 189,000 people in my district who will be paying 50-300% more for the same, and in many cases worse, healthcare. I won’t do that to the people I represent. I’m a NO on this ‘deal.’”Democrats outside Washington denounced the compromise as well. “Pathetic. This isn’t a deal. It’s a surrender. Don’t bend the knee!” California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, wrote on social media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSunday marked the 40th day of the shutdown, which has sidelined federal workers and affected food aid, parks and travel, while air traffic control staffing shortages threaten to derail travel during the busy Thanksgiving holiday season late this month. Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, said the mounting effects of the shutdown have pushed the chamber toward an agreement. He said the final piece, a new resolution that would fund government operations into late January, would also reverse at least some of the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers.“Temperatures cool, the atmospheric pressure increases outside and all of a sudden it looks like things will come together,” Tillis told reporters. Should the government remain closed for much longer, economic growth could turn negative in the fourth quarter, especially if air travel does not return to normal levels by Thanksgiving, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett warned on the CBS Face the Nation show. Thanksgiving falls on 27 November this year.Americans shopping for 2026 Obamacare health insurance plans are facing a more than doubling of monthly premiums on average, health experts estimate, with the pandemic-era subsidies due to expire at the end of the year. Republicans rejected a proposal on Friday by Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to vote to reopen the government in exchange for a one-year extension of tax credits that lower costs for plans under the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare.Adam Schiff, a Democratic California senator, said on Sunday he believed Trump’s healthcare proposal was aimed at gutting the ACA and allowing insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.“So the same insurance companies he’s railing against in those tweets, he is saying: ‘I’m going to give you more power to cancel people’s policies and not cover them if they have a pre-existing condition,’” Schiff said on ABC’s This Week program. More

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      Trump’s assault on voting intensifies as midterms loom: ‘a wholesale attack on free and fair elections’

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      A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senate next year, Trump and some prominent supporters have sought to discredit the possibility that Republicans could lose in a fair fight and are using that premise to justify demands for a drastically different kind of electoral system.This is not the first time Trump has questioned the credibility of US elections – he did it almost as vigorously in 2016 and 2024, when he won his bids for the White House, as he did in 2020, when he did not – but now the president’s confidants are threatening emergency powers to seize control of a process over which presidents ordinarily have no control.Trump’s former chief political adviser, Steve Bannon, is urging him to get the elections “squared away” even before the voters have a chance to weigh in. Former legal advisers have suggested the electoral system is in itself an emergency justifying extraordinary intervention, possibly including federal agents and the military stationed outside polling stations.When Bannon was asked whether voters might find this intimidating, he replied: “You’re damn right.”View image in fullscreenThe administration itself, meanwhile, is moving on multiple fronts. Most visibly, Trump is pressuring Republican-run states to redraw their congressional maps outside the usual once-a-decade schedule and lock in as many additional safe Republican seats as possible.Texas has gerrymandered an additional five GOP seats, Ohio two, and Missouri and North Carolina one each, and other states are considering whether to follow suit. (California voters, in response, have just approved a map promising five additional Democratic seats.)Meanwhile, the justice department has abandoned its decades-long defense of voting rights, and in some instances – notably, a pending supreme court case that risks erasing a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – has switched to the side arguing against protecting minority rights. The Department of Homeland Security has slashed funding and cut staff at an agency dedicated to protecting elections from physical and cybersecurity threats.The administration is also demanding states hand over sensitive voter data and purge voter rolls, despite grave concerns about this deterring or disenfranchising large numbers of legitimate voters. In an executive order issued in March, the White House said it wants voters to produce birth certificates or passports as proof of eligibility. It wants the vote count to be over on election night, disregarding provisional and late mail-in ballots. In fact, Trump would like to do away with mail-in balloting altogether.View image in fullscreenIf all that doesn’t suffice – if Democrats still threaten to prevail next year – the administration has a multi-agency infrastructure set up to trumpet allegations of voter fraud and threaten legal action, including possible criminal prosecution of poll workers, election administrators, political adversaries and individual voters. “We’re going to come after the people … who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel, now FBI director, vowed in the run-up to the 2024 race. (No court has ever substantiated Trump’s claims that Biden was not the rightful winner in 2020.) “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”Another possibility is that Trump will seek to wrest control of voting machines from state and local officials, as he came close to doing five years ago.“Those of us engaged in this fight are witnessing a wholesale attack on free and fair elections,” said Marc Elias, a prominent election lawyer involved in more than 60 election-related suits. “From executive orders to budget cuts, the Trump administration is undermining election security and promoting voter disenfranchisement.”Perhaps the biggest underlying fear is that Trump has no interest in democracy and aims, ultimately, to destroy it. “I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election,” California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, opined as Trump invoked legally questionable emergency powers to deploy national guard troops to US cities.Administration officials insist their concern is to prevent cheating by the Democrats and improve electoral security. But on the campaign trail last year, Trump told evangelical Christian supporters they would need to vote for him only one more time. “Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”Whatever the ultimate goal, the question uppermost in the minds of many voting rights advocates is how much Trump and his allies will be able to pull off over the next 12 months. The president has almost no power over elections under the constitution, and much of what the administration has advocated is being challenged in court. It is, for example, a federal crime to deploy troops at any election site. Voter intimidation of any kind is similarly prohibited.For that reason, advocates and lawyers say, the risk is less about what Trump is allowed to do and more about what he can persuade people to do anyway.View image in fullscreen“Donald Trump is a marketing machine, and what he is doing right now is marketing power he does not have,” said Justin Levitt, a lawyer who served as a senior adviser on voting rights in the Biden administration. He described Trump’s March executive order, with its demands for strict voter identification procedures and new voting equipment standards, as just “a piece of paper with a scrawly signature on it”. (A federal judge recently blocked the order, saying the president was improperly asserting powers the constitution assigned to Congress and the states.)“It’s an attempt to fool people,” Levitt added. “Trump’s primary power is the power we give him when he asserts he is in control of everything, and we believe him.”Jasleen Singh, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, has no doubt Trump is “directing, dismantling and weaponizing agencies” with the ultimate goal of “election subversion”. But she, too, said it was important not to give in to the force of Trump’s personality.“The law is on our side,” she said. “We have the right to vote. We have the right to participate … Part of this is not letting voters forget the power that they have.”The White House had no specific comment about Trump’s actions or intentions. Deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson limited herself to a crack about “Newscum” – Trump’s favored term of abuse for the California governor – and his “doomed-to-fail” (but unannounced) presidential campaign.Resisting Trump’s pull is proving easier said than done. On a variety of seemingly settled issues – from district maps to the grace period granted for postal ballots to reach their destination – Republican state legislatures have either reversed their own decisions or are considering doing so because of instructions from the White House. “States are under enormous pressure to do what they can to pacify this incredibly vindictive administration,” said Elisabeth Frost, a partner with Elias’s election law group.Election administrators have expressed widespread fears of doxing and physical threats, and many hundreds have quit their jobs under the pressure. The Maga movement has encouraged supporters to run for election offices to influence the process from the inside.In a worst-case scenario, voting rights activists say, Trump would win the rhetorical battle and convince large numbers of Americans that voter rolls are corrupted and ineligible voters are casting ballots in large numbers. He could thus muster support for the emergency intervention his allies are pushing for.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration certainly seized on this week’s elections to keep beating the rhetorical drum. The justice department sent federal monitors to California and New Jersey, which some local officials saw as intimidation. Trump called the California ballot initiative a “giant scam”. And New Jersey’s US attorney, Alina Habba, put out a video vowing to prosecute a long list of virtually nonexistent election-related crimes.View image in fullscreenExperts still said they thought that invoking a national emergency remained a remote possibility. More likely, they said, was a continuation of the pressure campaign to suppress votes and cast doubt on results Trump does not like. They expected the administration to continue to push legal limits first and deal with any blowback from the courts after.“Everyone is seeing the polls,” Frost, the Elias Law Group lawyer, said. “Literally none of their policies are popular, so they are terrified of this election. The more Trump can say that the vote count can’t be trusted, the more it serves his purpose … Either voters will be repressed by laws or they will be repressed by misinformation and made-up bombastic nonsense.”Marpheen Chann, a Cambodian American advocate in Maine, has seen first-hand how pressure from the Trump administration – and, in particular, demands for sensitive personal data in the state’s voting records – has deterred community members from participating next November.“Personally, I’m concerned because I’m politically active. I’m a Democrat,” Chann said. “Will I end up on a list?”What is true for him, a community leader with a law degree, runs even deeper through the membership of his organization, Khmer Maine. Many either experienced the 1970s Cambodian genocide first-hand or have been traumatized by it across generations, making them particularly sensitive to any hint of authoritarian behavior. “The fact that the federal government is trying to break into our voting data and violate our privacy definitely does not feel good for the community,” Chann said.Top of mind is the fear that immigration enforcement agents might seek to use inconsistencies in the data – a missing birth certificate, or a mismatch between a birth name and a name on a passport, both of which are issues for Chann – as a pretext to pursue even naturalized citizens for arrest and deportation. Regardless of how justified those fears are, Chann said they are vivid enough to scare people away from civic engagement. “It makes it really hard for me to get people participating and making their voices heard,” he said. “If they make their voices heard, they feel they’re going to be targeted.”In some parts of the country, Republican state legislatures have needed no pressure from the administration to suppress votes – they have been tightening voter ID requirements, cutting early voting hours, restricting voter registration drives and reducing the number of polling stations for the past 20 years. In other places, though, they have done Trump’s bidding even though it offers them little or no partisan advantage.Kansans, for example, recently voted to get rid of a three-day window for mail-in ballots to be counted after election day, even though the mail is notoriously slow there and mail-in voting is popular in rural areas, where voters tend to be conservative.Frost, who is part of a lawsuit to reinstate the three-day window, agreed that Trump’s personal animus against mail-in voting was not necessarily aligned with Republican partisan interests. Still, she saw a political advantage for Trump in demonizing parts of the electoral system.“The same way he’s been painting the Oval Office with gaudy gold adornments,” Frost said, “he’s been trying to pre-paint all these conspiracy theories so if the election doesn’t go the way he wants, he and his allies can point to the sea of litigation they’ve triggered, or they can point back to the March executive order, and say these were things that should have been done to begin with.”To counter the chaos and the conspiracies, voting rights groups have most often turned to lawsuits and have been heartened to see lower courts, at least, blocking crucial parts of the Trump agenda. Increasingly, they have also seen judges reprimand political appointees arguing on behalf of the justice department following a wave of career lawyers being fired or resigning.“The quality of lawyering they are doing now is, in a word, garbage,” Levitt, the former Biden official, said. “You’re going to see the [justice department] lose a lot of cases, and these are cases they should lose.”View image in fullscreenIn the voter data lawsuits, for example, government filings have repeated far-right talking points – and the language of Trump’s executive order – about voter rolls being vulnerable to “illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error”. That assertion flies in the face of mainstream research going back decades that shows it is passingly rare for ineligible voters to cast a ballot.“This tells you a lot about what the [justice department] is willing to endorse,” Frost said. “There are not going to be arguments too wild as we get deeper into the election cycle and we start to see other conspiracy theories float to the top.”Chann, the Cambodian American advocate, worried that facts and the law would not be enough to protect voting rights, especially in immigrant communities. “Even though people I trust in local and state government are saying they’re doing what they can,” he said, “that doesn’t give me any consolation when it comes to whether the federal government will obey its own election and voting laws.”Still, Chann acknowledged that legal avenues were the best hope for holding on to democracy, and he did not hesitate in coming forward as a named defendant seeking to keep the federal government at bay in a lawsuit over Maine’s voter data.“Congress isn’t going to do anything, and the executive branch is overreaching,” he said. “We need to make our last stand in the courts.” More

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      Senate Republicans embrace Trump’s call – from his Florida golf course – to replace Obamacare

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      US senators are working through the weekend for the first time since the government shutdown began more than a month ago, but hopes for a bipartisan agreement on how to end the standoff, and keep healthcare affordable for millions of Americans, appeared to recede as Republican senators floated a proposal toxic to Democrats: scrapping the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare.The impact on Americans from the longest shutdown of the federal government in history deepened on Saturday, as federal workers went unpaid, airlines were forced to cancel flights and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits have been delayed for 42 million Americans.As Saturday’s session got under way, Republican senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rick Scott of Florida and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana welcomed a proposal made on social media early Saturday by Donald Trump, from his golf course in West Palm Beach, for subsidies to be replaced by health savings accounts.In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested that instead of meeting the demand from Democrats to extend subsidies for health insurance plans purchased through the ACA marketplace, to pay for sharply increased premiums, Republicans should return to the project of replacing the Obama-era law, which failed during his first administration.“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE,” Trump wrote.Graham welcomed the proposal, which is similar to a replacement for Obamacare he put forward in 2017, writing on social media that Trump’s “recommendation that we stop sending tens of billions of dollars under Obamacare to money-sucking insurance companies and instead send that money directly to the people so they can buy better healthcare is simply brilliant”.“We’re going to replace this broken system with something that is actually better for the consumer,” Graham said later.Cassidy, who was a co-author of Graham’s similar plan in 2017, also praised Trump’s proposal on social media, and stood next to a giant blow-up of Trump’s post as he spoke on the Senate floor.“I’m writing the bill right now,” Scott posted in a response to Trump’s suggestion. “We must stop taxpayer money from going to insurance companies and instead give it directly to Americans in HSA-style accounts and let them buy the health care they want. This will increase competition & drive down costs.”None of the Republican senators seemed to grapple with the fact that consumers would still need to buy plans from the same insurance companies, or that Republican lawmakers need the support of eight Democrats to reopen the government, and the idea of repealing and replacing Obamacare with savings accounts is unlikely to earn a single Democratic vote.Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, shared an alarmed response to Trump’s proposal from Larry Levitt, the executive vice-president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, who wrote on social media: “You have to read between the lines here to imagine what President Trump is proposing. But, it sounds like it could be a plan for health accounts that could be used for insurance that doesn’t cover pre-existing conditions, which could create a death spiral in ACA plans that do.”“In other words, Donald Trump’s ‘concept of a plan’ for health care is another cynical attempt to repeal Obamacare,” Warren commented. “It’s the same failed Republican plan that’s been rejected by voters and Congress. We can lower costs and open the government TODAY by extending ACA tax credits.”Senate Republican leaders have signaled an openness to an emerging proposal from a small group of moderate Democrats to end the shutdown in exchange for a later vote on the “Obamacare” subsidies.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who is leading the talks among moderates, said Friday evening that Democrats “need another path forward” after Republicans rejected an offer from Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York to reopen the government and extend the subsidies for a year.Shaheen and others, negotiating among themselves and with some Republicans, have been discussing bills that would pay for parts of government – food aid, veterans’ programs and the legislative branch, among other things – and extend funding for everything else until December or January. The agreement would only come with the promise of a future healthcare vote, rather than a guarantee of extended subsidies.It was unclear whether enough Democrats would support such a plan. Even with a deal, Trump appears unlikely to support an extension of the health benefits. The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, also said this week that he would not commit to a health vote.Schumer on Saturday persisted in arguing that Republicans should accept a one-year extension of the subsidies before negotiating the future of the tax credits.“Doing nothing is derelict because people will go bankrupt, people will lose insurance, people will get sicker,” Schumer said in a floor speech. “That’s what will happen if this Congress fails to act.”Earlier, Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, said they need to stand strong after overwhelming Democratic victories on election day.One bizarre element of the Republican effort to signal that their party is working overtime to end the shutdown, even as Trump golfs in Florida, was a social media post on Saturday from Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma senator. Mullin posted four photographs of himself and two other Republican senators meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, with the caption: “Working through the weekend with President Donald J Trump. It’s always an honor to be in the Oval Office– I never take this opportunity to serve Oklahoma for granted.”What Mullin failed to make clear is that the photographs were taken on Friday, before Trump left for a weekend golf trip at his Florida resort. Mullin himself had previously posted one of the photographs in a social media video Friday night.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Democrats just won back Latinos who voted for Trump. Will they be convinced to stick around?

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      Latino voters delivered sweeping support to Democratic candidates across multiple states in Tuesday’s off-year elections, reversing what many Republicans had come to believe was a lasting political realignment after Donald Trump’s historic gains with the community in the 2024 election .The rapid reversal represents one of the most volatile electoral swings in recent memory and threatens to upend Republican redistricting strategies that banked on sustained support from Latinos, the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. It also suggests that Trump’s appeal to Latino voters was highly personal rather than an embrace of the Republican party itself – a miscalculation that could reshape the landscape heading into the 2026 midterms.“What we saw on Tuesday wasn’t just a vote for specific candidates: it was a vote against the current situation that the Trump administration has sparked,” said María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, a non-partisan voter registration organization. “People are feeling that it’s becoming increasingly dangerous to be Latino in this country.”While exact data can take time to be collected after an election, exit polling from the 2025 gubernatorial races revealed the extent of the Democratic resurgence. In New Jersey, Democratic representative Mikie Sherrill captured 68% of Latino voters compared with Republican Jack Ciattarelli’s 31%, according to NBC News, a reversal of the national 2024 presidential result, where Trump won 46% of Latino voters to Kamala Harris’s 51%, according to Pew Research. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a fluent Spanish speaker, secured 67% of Latino voters.MSNBC chief data analyst Steve Kornacki noted that the shift in municipalities in New Jersey with Latino populations exceeded 60%, where Trump had been more competitive or even victorious in 2024. Those same precincts swung dramatically toward Democrats in 2025, with shifts ranging from 15 to more than 40 percentage points. In Passaic county, which is approximately 45% Latino, Sherrill won by 15 points after Trump had carried it by three points the previous year.While the majority still voted for the Democrats, Trump’s 2024 performance among Latino voters represented a historic achievement for a Republican presidential candidate. Among Latino men specifically, 54% said they voted for Trump, driven largely by economic concerns and frustration with inflation, according to an Edison research exit poll. That breakthrough fueled Republican confidence that demographic trends were shifting in their favor, with House Republicans drawing congressional districts in states like Texas and Florida under the assumption these gains would persist with generic Republican candidates.But the 2025 results suggest those assumptions were premature. According to exit polling conducted by SSRS, 63% of California voters – and 70% of Latino voters specifically – said the Trump administration’s immigration actions had “gone too far”. In Virginia, those figures reached 56% overall and 77% among Latino voters.“You can’t come into my neighborhood and talk to me about rent or bread-and-butter issues if you can’t speak to the fear and dehumanization people are living with,” Kumar said. She noted that “almost a third of Latino voters who voted in 2020 didn’t vote in 2024 – and 70% of them were Democrats.”The timing of the electoral shift coincided with heightened immigration enforcement activity. Just days before the New Jersey election, Ruperto Vicens Marquez, a restaurant owner in Atlantic Highlands with work authorization and three young children, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), prompting community outcry.A Democratic congressional aide familiar with Latino voter engagement said the explanation was simpler than many analysts assumed. “Latinos didn’t swing back to Democrats because they suddenly became liberal. They swung back because the economy improved and Republicans crossed a line on immigration enforcement. People were scared – not politically activated, but genuinely scared.”The aide, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their job, added that many Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024 “thought they were voting for tough talk on border security, not militarized enforcement in their communities. No one voted for urban-warfare-style raids.”Despite the new electoral evidence, some Republican leaders remained confident the 2024 gains would endure. Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, told reporters: “I do believe that the demographic shift that we were able to see and experience in the 2024 election will hold.”Kumar, on the other hand, believes Latino voting behavior shifts based heavily on turnout, but also on economic conditions, candidate quality and the emotional salience of particular issues.“Republicans misread Latino voters this year,” she said. “Instead of doing oversight and accountability, they abdicated their responsibility to the whims of the president.”The Latino voter swing creates potential vulnerabilities in Republican-drawn congressional maps. In Texas, GOP mapmakers drew several south Texas districts with narrow margins, calculating that Trump’s gains represented a stable coalition. Those districts now appear more competitive than intended. Meanwhile, Democrats are seizing opportunities to redraw maps in states where they hold power, with California voters approving a ballot measure allowing the state’s independent redistricting commission to redraw congressional boundaries.Despite the backlash to immigration enforcement, economic concerns remained the top issue for Latino voters across all states where exit polling was conducted. The Democratic aide said that while “immigration is rarely the top issue on its own”, “ICE raids are activating, and when people feel targeted in their daily lives, that changes votes.”Still, the results underscore a fundamental reality about Latino voters that both parties have struggled to accept: the community is not a monolith, and does not represent a permanent coalition for either side.“It’s a swing vote … and so it’s for the Democrats to lose, and they have to start speaking to the real duress that the community is in, because it’s not small,” Kumar said. “When I have conversations with my Latino colleagues, it is a wholly different conversation than every other American that I interact with every day. There are two different lived experiences happening right now.” More

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      A year after devastating Trump loss, have the Democrats begun to find their way back?

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      It has been a year of soul-searching, hand-wringing, and self-flagellation for Democrats after a ballot-box rejection so thorough that some had come to believe that the party had lost not only the White House and Congress but the culture itself.Shell-shocked, Democrats entered Donald Trump’s second term in a political stupor – unsure of who they were or what they stood for. Their base had lost faith in its aging leadership class, and their brand, in Democrats’ own words, had become “toxic”: a party increasingly confined to coastal states, big cities and college towns. And even there, warning signs were flashing.Then came Tuesday night – a coast-to-coast romp in the first major elections of Trump’s turbulent return to the White House that exceeded even the party’s most optimistic projections.“What a night for the Democratic party,” California governor Gavin Newsom marveled, after news networks projected the redistricting ballot measure he spearheaded had passed so decisively that some voters were still in line to cast ballots. “A party that is in its ascendancy,” he continued, “a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels.”Abigail Spanberger, a congresswoman and former CIA agent, stormed to victory in Virginia, becoming the first woman elected governor of the state, an office currently held by a Republican. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, another congresswoman and former Navy pilot, turned what was expected to be a close race into a rout. And in New York, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, made history by vanquishing the former three-term Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, in a race that drew the highest turnout in decades.“Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” Spanberger proclaimed in her victory speech, while in New York, Mamdani celebrated “a new era of leadership” and declared that “no longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great”.Their wins did little to resolve the big, existential questions of whether Democrats’ future lay in a full-throated adoption of leftwing populism or a tactical turn to pragmatic centrism. The night offered ammunition for either path, or perhaps both.Yet a year after Kamala Harris’s concession to Trump, Democrats have repeatedly found success not by picking a single ideological lane, but by embracing the forces of disruption that have dominated Trump-era politics. Their victories, while strikingly different in style and approach, point to a party less bound by orthodoxy and old notions of decorum – a recognition that the times have changed, and so must they.“This is not your grandfather’s Democratic party,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the next morning. “We are not going to play with one hand behind our back. We’re not going to roll over. We’re going to meet you, fire with fire.”For much of the past decade, Democrats cast themselves as guardians of the system – defenders of the democratic institutions under siege by a “wrecking ball” former builder who bulldozed his way into the White House and then clawed his way back.After the tumult of Trump’s first term, Democrats turned to Joe Biden, a consensus-builder and institutionalist who once predicted that history would view his adversary “as an aberrant moment in time”. In office, Biden dedicated his presidency to restoring domestic political norms while preserving the liberal international order abroad. But with his legacy now framed by Trump’s re-election, many Democrats have abandoned Biden’s return-to-normalcy appeal, seeing it as ill-suited to the politcal moment.Instead, as Trump moves aggressively to consolidate power and tilt the electoral map in his favor, the party’s instincts have shifted sharply away from caution, yet many progressives felt they had been too slow to adapt. Shortly before the 2024 election, a survey found that the overwhelming majority of voters valued a candidate who could deliver “change that improves people’s lives” rather than one who was committed to preserving institutions.Tensions built earlier this year, when angry Democrats began calling on their leaders in Washington and in state capitols around the country to do something – anything – to stop Trump’s attacks on the federal government, the rule of law and his political opponents. Those fears grew into the No Kings protest movement, which saw an estimated 7 million people in all 50 states take to the streets last month.Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, argued that Tuesday’s wins, following mass days of protest, were proof that a more combative and less deferential politics was the way to defeat Trumpism. “The No Kings era is here to stay,” he wrote.That assertive posture extended to Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats are refusing to lend the votes needed to reopen the government – now the longest federal shutdown in US history – unless Republicans extend healthcare subsidies: a bare-knuckle approach they had resisted as recently as few months ago.Meanwhile, in the redistricting battles unfolding across the states, party leaders and longtime champions of fair maps including Barack Obama campaigned for California’s retaliatory gerrymander, as Newsom called on other Democratic governors to follow suit.View image in fullscreen“Politics has changed. The world has changed,” Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, told NBC earlier this month. “The rules of the game have changed.”In nearly every election held this year, Democrats improved on their 2024 showing. Exit polls in Virginia and New Jersey show that both governors-elect not only held their base but peeled off Trump voters, while re-engaging young men and Latino voters who defected in 2024. In New York, Mamdani saw enormous youth turnout for his candidacy.“On Tuesday night, we saw a lot of different kinds of Democrats win – and that’s kind of the point,” said Rebecca Katz, a veteran political strategist whose political firm, Fight, worked for Mamdani’s campaign. “To win big, we need a big tent.”Voters, she said, sent a clear message that a back-to-basics formula – a relentless focus on improving affordability and a campaign built around authentic and visible candidates – resonates.Katz, who also advised the successful swing-state Senate campaigns of John Fetterman in 2022 and Ruben Gallego in 2024, argued that the central divide in the party was no longer where a candidate falls on the moderate to liberal spectrum but a choice between boldness and caution: “Playing it safe is the riskiest thing Democrats could do right now.”Winning has given the wounded party a much-needed morale boost. In a fundraising appeal this week, Democrats told supporters to “remember this feeling”. Yet beneath the celebration, the old fault lines – over age, ideology, tactics, and style – still run deep.Several seasoned House Democrats are facing contentious primary challenges, fueled by generational impatience and a desire for the party to take a more combative approach to Trump. Democrats’ prospects in 2026 may hinge on whether progressives and moderates can unite behind a message that addresses both economic anxiety and the fears of Trump’s presidency.In 2028, Democrats say they need a nominee who can articulate a vision beyond their opposition to Trump, the glue that has held together a Bernie Sanders-to-Liz Cheney coalition.Appearing at a live taping of the podcast Pod Save America this week, Obama said it was exhilarating to see progressives “get off the mat”. But, he added, “we’ve got a lot of work to do” and cautioned progressives in the audience against pushing ideological “litmus tests”.“We had Abigail Spanberger win and we had Zohran Mamdani win,” the former president said, “and they are all part of a vision for the future.”Sanders, the progressive Vermont senator who campaigned for Mamdani, told reporters this week that ideological divisions in the party were “no great secret”.But he sensed a party-wide shift: “I think there is a growing understanding that leadership and defending the status quo and the inequalities that exist in America is not where the American people are.”Republicans have sought to downplay Democrats’ string of victories this year. Since 2016, Democrats have tended to perform better when Trump was not on the ballot, their coalition proving more reliable in off-year and special elections.“They say that I wasn’t on the ballot and was the biggest factor,” Trump said this week. “I don’t know about that. But I was honored that they said that.”Historically, the party out of power typically fares well in the midterm elections. But redistricting efforts are expected to tilt the 2026 House map toward Republicans. In the Senate, the task is even more daunting for Democrats, who will have to win in states Trump carried by double digits. While Trump’s plunging popularity has Republicans worried, Americans hold markedly negative views of the Democratic party as well.Still, Democrats see momentum building in parts of the country where they haven’t been competitive for years.This summer, Catelin Drey, a Democrat and first-time candidate, won a special election for a state senate seat in Iowa, breaking the Republican supermajority by flipping a district that backed Trump in the 2024 election. It was a consequential victory and one that gave Democrats a jolt of hope.For weeks after her election, she kept getting the same question: how did she pull it off?“I knocked on thousands of doors,” said Drey, 38, a mother whose campaign centered on affordability, especially the rising cost of childcare. “I had people tell me, ‘I’ve never had a candidate come to my door before,’” she said. “Seeing that kind of work ethic – having someone show up and say, ‘Yeah, life is really tough right now. What’s the hardest thing for you? How can I help? What would make things better?’ That type of attention is not what we’re seeing across the board right now.”Since Harris’s defeat last November, Democrats have produced a glut of election postmortems, polling memos and policy white papers offering theories about why they lost — and how to win again. Drey thinks the answer might be surprisingly simple.“Show up and work for the people you serve,” she said. “It’s not rocket science.” More