Political News

Hoo boy, this Paramount merger. Whoops, sorry, the company name is Skydance now—which is a dumb name with an even dumber new logo. This merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery got approved solely because David Ellison, head of this monstrosity, and his daddy, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, are big friends of President Donald Trump in particular and Republicans generally.

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Starting last week, C-SPAN began simulcasting MAGA mouthpiece Scott Jennings’ radio show, on which House Speaker Mike Johnson made an appearance Tuesday to try to scare the GOP base into voting. “The Iranians are not trustworthy negotiating partners,” Johnson said about President Donald Trump’s costly war. “They lie—some of them as part of their religion.” Johnson also blamed the…

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The world premiere of Artificial, the new movie centered around the rise of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he led an unstable company down a dangerous path, was packed. The recent wave of high-profile “rogue AI” security incidents, disputes over tech industry-led safeguards and regulation, and continued multibillion-dollar investments to advance development has clearly piqued public interest.

The movie, directed by Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, contains scenes derived from real reporting on OpenAI and the industry: discussions on ensuring their products “align” with human values while racing competitors such as Google, and undertaking corporate restructuring to draw investment from the likes of Microsoft. It also hinges on wide public sentiment that major tech companies and their leaders hold too much power and developers should pause development of their most advanced models to mitigate risks to humanity. 

The people behind Artificial appear to agree. “The deeper responsibility we all felt is to try to do some interrogation of who we are giving all of our autonomy, power, and data to,” Andrew Garfield, who plays Altman, said on Monday night during the post-screening Q&A at the New York Film Festival, “that felt like the service to the greater thing.” The actor said the filmmakers were adding new scenes while shooting to create a “living document” of how the AI industry was progressing.

The moral center of the film is Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist played by Yura Borisov, who sees in AI technology potential to solve humanity’s problems, but realizes too late that his idealism doesn’t fit within the constraints of the market. A former AI researcher played by Jason Schwartzman, presented as a prophet who sees the future of the tech with clarity, tells Sutskever that it could lead, if not to total human extinction, at least to life under AI subjugation.

But the filmmakers also portray the tech leaders who don’t recognize this—or simply don’t care—as goofy megalomaniacs. While Garfield portrays Altman as constantly dodging confrontation to get people to be as forgiving toward him as possible, he also plays him with a cartoonish quality—with his frantic shifts in posture played as a joke, and the post-production team changing the actor’s brown eyes to a bright, inhuman blue. Even more so for others like Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, whose facial expressions and demeanor seem to lean far more silly than threatening. 

The intermittent comic relief scenes give the movie’s satirical side the energy of Saturday Night Live sketches—the screenwriter, Simon Rich, previously wrote for the comedy show—immediate, but largely short on depth and nuance. The filmmakers could pull their humor, and their wider sense of what’s laughable about these characters, from deeper, and darker, places. (There are vague gestures at a misogynistic Silicon Valley culture, but nothing political or deeply personal.)

With the characters operating more as caricatures, the movie doesn’t meet what Garfield called on Monday “the deeper responsibility” to interrogate the people it depicts or the culture behind them the countless expository conversations on the potential harms of generative AI—between real-life characters who unleashed said harms through global-scale business relationships—don’t feel grounded in any reality. The mentions of existential risks stop at just that: Altman says “Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse.” The only specific harm addressed is AI’s contribution to a person’s suicide.

As I wrote on Monday, it’s good that Hollywood might finally be catching up to tech companies’ negative impacts on our world. Many Silicon Valley films before Artificial did not. But only being able to giggle at our tech overlords is not enough.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

President Donald Trump is facing condemnation from California leaders after saying that Iran could “take out” U.S. cities like Los Angeles and San Diego. “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city—let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over very soon,”…

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In the months leading up to Christa Pike’s execution date, she and her legal team made it clear that she, the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row, 50 years old, wasn’t afraid to die. She was terrified of the execution itself. 

“Her greatest fear wasn’t dying,” attorney Stephen Ferrell told USA Today in a press conference. “It was a fear of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death.”

Citing her blood-clotting disorder and a history of difficult blood draws, her attorney argued that there could be problems properly affixing the IV into Pike’s arm and that executing her via lethal injection would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. 

About a month before her execution, her lawyers had pushed for her to be hanged or shot by a firing squad instead. At the eleventh hour, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed her execution, only to have the Supreme Court overrule it. When she finally arrived in the prison’s death chamber, Pike and her lawyer’s concerns would be proven true to a degree they couldn’t have anticipated: she became the first person to survive the administration of a double dose of lethal injection drugs.

What should have been a ten- to twenty-minute process took two hours, according to the Associated Press, and ended with Pike alive but in critical condition. Christa Pike reportedly remains intubated, on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital, receiving life-saving care after being pumped with what should have been two fatal doses of pentobarbital, a barbiturate used by many states for lethal injection. When she arrived at the hospital, Pike’s arms were “swollen, burned and blistered,” according to an emergency filing from her legal team.

There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the actions of prison officials leading up to and during Pike’s execution. Pike’s attorneys believe that a problem with the state’s IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her tissue, instead of her veins.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions in the state and ordered an “independent investigation.” The head of Tennessee’s Department of Correction resigned days after Pike’s hospitalization, but defended the execution, saying the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.”

Christa Pike’s case, while unusual in many respects, is a perfect encapsulation of the pitfalls of lethal injection as an execution method in the United States. Most people’s understanding of lethal injection—as a humane alternative to more overtly brutal executions of yore—is in stark contrast to the actual barbarism behind the procedure. This misconception is no coincidence: it’s by design. 

Death penalty states are incredibly secretive about every step of the lethal injection process. Why? According to University of Richmond law professor and former prosecutor Corinna Barrett Lain, it’s because lethal injection has the best political optics—as long as people don’t know much about what’s happening behind the scenes.

As Lain wrote in her 2025 book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection:

Every other execution method—hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber, and firing squad—lays bare the brutality of the state that kills in our name. Lethal injection hides it. With lethal injection, we don’t have to deal with the sight of blood, or the smell of burning flesh, or the sounds of suffering, all potent reminders of what the state is actually doing. Instead, we get to tell ourselves that prisoners are just drifting off into forever-sleep. 

Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain that shrouds lethal injection, revealing how everything from the drug suppliers to the science behind this method of execution is riddled with issues. I reached out to Lain to learn what might have gone wrong in Pike’s execution, and how the problems with lethal injection are not individual but systemic, baked into its very foundation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your initial reaction to hearing about the failed execution of Christa Pike? 

Yet another botched execution. I had some ideas of how it happened, why it happened, but of course, part of the problem is we don’t have any information. I’ve been studying [lethal injection] for seven years, so hearing about Christa, it’s really sad and frustrating.

“For the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic…that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.”

You know, in some ways, her case is a paradigm example of both everything that’s wrong with lethal injection and everything that’s wrong with the death penalty. More broadly, it’s an example of what’s wrong with lethal injection.

We now have a growing list of people whose executions are so badly botched that they survived their own execution. But we also know we’ve seen executions that are one hour long, two hours long, three hours long. I’ve seen autopsies with 14, 16, 18 puncture wounds. This is the stuff that’s been happening, but now, finally, it has drawn the public’s attention.

In your book, you spend a good chunk of the beginning pulling back the curtain on the real horrors that come with lethal injection and how execution states have pretty brilliantly rebranded it. Can you describe people’s biggest misconceptions when it comes to the death penalty vs. the actual reality of the procedure?

The public has been told for the last 45 years that lethal injection is akin to putting your beloved pet down, and none of that’s true. The public has been sold a bill of goods, and for the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic as one of the drugs in lethal injection that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.

The paralytic was also a muscle relaxant, so it relaxed all the muscles in the face, and then it froze them that way. So you’re going to get this nice drifting-off-to-sleep look, no matter what is actually happening, and we know what’s actually happening because now we have hundreds of autopsies that show us that those are violent deaths too.

What happened to Christa Pike was simply the truth breaking through.

That goes perfectly into my next question. Can you talk about why the use of pentobarbital in lethal injections is, for lack of a better word, problematic?

Pentobarbital is the drug that we use in physician-assisted suicide and also in animal euthanasia. So one might think that it is a better drug for lethal injection than the traditional three-drug protocol that states were using all these years.

But what we know from autopsy studies is that the pH of pentobarbital, which is between 10 and 11, is chemically burning the delicate capillaries in the lungs, causing the capillaries to become leaky and the lungs to take on fluid.

This condition is called flash pulmonary edema, and it shows up, depending upon the study, in between 84 percent of all pentobarbital executions.

Flash pulmonary edema happens in seconds when you inject a drug into the veins. It goes first to the heart. Then to the lungs. So, as the body is trying to buffer that difference in the pH so that it can metabolize the drug and use it as an anesthetic, it’s already gone to the lungs, and that happens immediately.

These people are essentially drowning in their own fluids. Some of the cases show acute flash pulmonary edema. It’s also called fulminating pulmonary edema. That’s where the lungs are so congested that the froth—the mixture of air and fluid—actually moves up into the windpipe, into their throats, and they choke on it.

“One of the things [the report] found was executioners, on the eve of an execution, looking in Wikipedia to figure out how much of the drugs to inject.”

One court asked a medical professional on the stand, while explaining pulmonary edema, if the sensation would be one of drowning from within. The court said, “Is this the same sensation as waterboarding?” And the medical professional said yes.

The public has this view of lethal injection as just putting a pet to sleep. In reality, we are actually waterboarding people to death, and I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say that to be clear, honest, and candid about what we’re actually doing.

Before her execution, Pike was issued a stay by an appeals court, which was quickly overruled by the Supreme Court. A throughline throughout Secrets of the Killing State is the role that politics plays in pushing executions forward. Can you describe why—and do you believe that politics played a role in the fast-tracking of Christa Pike’s execution?

Politics played a role in the sense that this “pro-life” Supreme Court is uniquely excited about death and advocates for it. So what happened in Christa Pike’s case is actually not unusual at all.

This is a theme that we saw in the executions from Trump’s first term too, where a court had heard a challenge to the one-drug pentobarbital protocol; the prisoners had presented two weeks’ worth of evidence, thousands of pages and documents, expert testimony, all of that stuff, and the district court issued a preliminary injunction on the execution and said—by the way, to issue a preliminary injunction, you have to make a factual finding, and the court did—that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim.

So stop and think about that. A federal court that heard two weeks’ worth of evidence paused the execution just till they could get to trial. But the standard for that is incredibly high. You have to be able to find that the plaintiffs are probably going to win. They are likely to succeed. So she issues the preliminary injunction, and the Supreme Court lifts it and greenlights the Trump executions. That was the first of, I think it was 13 Trump executions, and it all started with the court lifting a stay on the shadow docket.

It’s incredibly perverse that the court in those Trump executions would lift the stay over executions. Litigation over the very method of execution that they were then subjected to. They made a claim. They said this is unconstitutional. The court said, “You know what? I think you’re probably going to win this. Let’s at least let you get to trial.” And the Supreme Court lifts the stay. They can’t even get to trial, and then they are executed by the very method that they had shown was probably unconstitutional.

It’s pure power. Purely unjudicious.

One large part of the branding for lethal injection is that it’s a “scientific procedure”: “We put down animals all the time, and euthanasia is legal in some countries for humans. Why can we do the same thing here?” But chapters two and three of your book unveil just how much these procedures are not, forgive the pun, “a perfect science.” Can you talk about this? 

We assume it’s science because we know that there is science behind animal euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. But it’s quite telling that in the traditional three-drug protocol that every state used for the first 35 to 40 years of lethal injection—not a single one of those drugs was the drug that we use for animal euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Not one of those drugs.

When the man who invented lethal injection was asked about that—“Hey, how did you come up with the drugs?”—he said, and I quote, “I didn’t do any research.” He just made it up off the top of his head. It’s so fantastical that it would be hard to believe if it weren’t true. But it is true, and it’s not just about what happened in 1977 when lethal injection was invented.

In 2024, Arizona botched three executions in 2022, and the governor put executions on hold and said, we’re going to have an independent investigation. They hired a retired federal judge. The judge looked into it, drafted a report that found all kinds of things. And the governor dismissed him and said, “We’re going to go a different direction.” That’s literally what she told him.

The different direction was having the Department of Corrections do a review of itself, which it then did, and said, “We’re great. Now give us our warrant, and we’re going to start with a volunteer.” So there’s no adversarial process at all. But this made the judge so mad that he actually released his draft report. You can find it on the internet. And one of the things he found was executioners, on the eve of an execution, looking in Wikipedia to figure out how much of the drugs to inject.

“It’s easier for them to argue about secrecy, and to take the hit for secrecy, than for the public to know.”

That’s 2024. This didn’t even make it in the book. They don’t know what they’re doing. The problem with lethal injection, at its core, is that medical scientists are not going to tell states how to do this. They are very much believers in the Hippocratic Oath. They are healers. They’re creating this knowledge for healers, and they are not going to tell you how to kill. So, you’ve got people looking on Wikipedia. The American public hears them saying, “Oh yes, we’re careful. Oh yes, we care. We’re following the protocol.”

And the fact of the matter is, it’s a hot mess that would make any citizen outraged if they knew what was really happening behind this curtain.

Which goes into my next question: the secrecy. One of the biggest realizations that I learned from reading this book was how much secrecy goes into an execution via lethal injection, from who the executioners are, where the drugs were obtained, to even the events happening within the death chamber. 

And this secrecy is by design. Why is this the case? 

My sense is states can’t fix what is broken with lethal injection. They can’t get the drugs because pharmaceutical companies didn’t make medicine for killing. They can’t get the medical professionals they need to competently do these executions. They can’t get access to the veins. The death row population is a geriatric population with notoriously weak veins. These are people with histories of poor health in general, and many of them are former IV drug users. Even Christa Pike- her lawyers were saying she has bad veins.

These are problems inherent in the project of using drugs to kill. So what do you do when you can’t fix the problem? You hide it.

It’s easier for them to argue about secrecy, and to take the hit for secrecy, than for the public to know where they’re actually getting their drugs from, how they’re breaking laws, who they’re using; it’s easier for them to defend secrecy with the state at its most powerful moment than to defend their practices on the merits.

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump loathes the press, save for the weird low-rent media outlets that have arisen solely to praise him, like One America News Network and whatever Mike Lindell’s TV channel is doing these days. But aside from those outlets, there’s no one that shows Trump enough fealty to avoid his violent ire. Most recently, he’s turned his rage on The New York…

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Kash Patel’s FBI slammed Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in a wildly partisan, and likely illegal, propaganda video Tuesday.

In a two-minute video posted on social media, the supposedly nonpartisan agency decried “democratic socialist leaders” for calling to defund the police. The video included footage of multiple Democrats calling to defund the police, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, current and former Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar, and, of course, El-Sayed, who is running for office in November’s midterm elections.

“Not reform. Defund the police as policy,” the video’s narration stated. “As the path they said would keep you safer. In the cities that led the charge, the street told a different story. What followed was a complete failure.” There is little data that supports this, and crime rates have been in decline for years.

The video praised Patel’s leadership, and touted a major increase in the arrest of violent criminals. It’s worth noting that Patel has reportedly instituted a policy of double-counting these arrests with those made by other law enforcement agencies, and has faced criticism for his disastrous leadership.

Federal law clearly prohibits the use of government funds for campaign purposes, partisan political messaging, and propaganda. A wildly inaccurate attack ad against a Democratic candidate would more than count under all three of these categories—and it’s more than a little ironic that the FBI’s latest video preaching law and order likely violated federal law. But under the Trump administration, it’s clear that nothing will be done.

Recently, the Trump administration has used at least 5.6 million taxpayer dollars to buy a series of at least 15 campaign-style advertisements touting the president’s agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections. In order to make and air those videos, the Trump administration stole the money from the Department of Homeland Security, specifically from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | There are far more Trump propaganda ads than we thought…

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President Trump is preventing Maryland’s Democratic Governor Wes Moore from speaking at an event in Baltimore County in the state on Tuesday.

Defense firm Andruil Industries is announcing that it is building a two-million-square-foot submarine manufacturing facility in Sparrows Point, Maryland, a deal that Moore helped put together and that is expected to create thousands of jobs. Trump is visiting the site and speaking about the investment on Tuesday and is barring Moore from speaking, the governor told The Baltimore Banner.

“That’s correct,” Moore said to reporters following a debate with his Republican gubernatorial opponent, Dan Cox. “I will not be there later on today. This was going to be a deal that we helped break. This is going to be the largest private investment that we have seen in over a decade inside the state of Maryland.”

“If the president of the United States wants to bring the circus in town and tell me that I’m not allowed to speak, despite the fact we were the ones that helped bring the deal, then I will let the circus be conducted while I go back to the work of the people of Maryland,” Moore added.

An unnamed White House official told CNN that Moore was “graciously” invited as a guest but didn’t deny that Trump was blocking the governor from speaking.

“It’s unfortunate that the Governor is now making a multibillion-dollar announcement about himself by throwing a tantrum over a federal initiative that will bring sorely needed jobs back to his state thanks to President Trump,” the official said.

Other Maryland Democrats, such as Representative Johnny Olszewski Jr., whose district encompasses the new facility, were scheduled to speak but pulled out after news that Moore wouldn’t be allowed to make remarks.

Trump has never been a fan of Moore, uninviting him from a bipartisan dinner that included nearly every other state governor, accusing him of committing electoral fraud, and blaming him for a sewage spill in the Potomac River. Meanwhile, Moore is leading his Trump-supporting Republican opponent, Dan Cox, in polls for November’s election.

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Inside Washington

Maine’s 2nd congressional district, covering 92 percent of the state, is the largest congressional district east of the Mississippi River. And right now, the largely rural, white population is getting ready to choose between two candidates: Democrat Matt Dunlap, who is a progressive and an avid hunter, or Republican and former two-term Governor Paul LePage, who once said “tell them to kiss my butt” when asked about criticism from the NAACP. 

In the race to replace Democratic Representative Jared Golden, who isn’t seeking reelection, polling is mixed. Dunlap, a member of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s, or DCCC, Red to Blue program supporting candidates in close races, was up six points in a University of New Hampshire poll from late September. Other surveys, however, show a dead heat or LePage slightly ahead.

On Monday, Dunlap held a health care–focused press conference, amid a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by the Trump administration’s war on Iran and tariff policies. These issues are a particularly powerful weapon against LePage, who vetoed Medicaid expansion six times as governor and called last year’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act “the greatest thing that can happen to the Maine people” (LePage was referring to the bill’s “no tax on tips” provision, but the legislation also cut Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion).

Dunlap said that the cost of health care is one of the main issues he’s heard about from Mainers. In a conversation with The New Republic, he described a conversation with a resident who was considering selling their home to afford health care costs and another person whose insurance costs went from $560 to $2,700 per month when Affordable Care Act subsidies expired in December.

Mainers are also worried about the cost of gas and heating oil, which could hurt LePage like it hurts every other Republican candidate in 2026. Maine is more reliant on heating oil than any other state in the country, and prices have skyrocketed this year. “The first frost warning for much of the state is tomorrow night, maybe tonight,” said Mark Brewer, the chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Maine, which is located in the second district. “It’s cold here. Winters are long here.”

LePage has tried to distance himself somewhat from President Trump’s agenda. He came out against Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods and has emphasized his focus on affordability as governor. The district is historically conservative, and voted for Trump all three times he was on the ballot. But, said Amy Fried, a retired professor of political science at the University of Maine, “This district is one where people are OK with splitting their tickets.” She explained that, in election years past, it wasn’t unusual to see houses with signs for Trump, GOP Senator Susan Collins, and Democratic Representative Jared Golden together in one yard. “Or pretty much any combination you could think of,” she added.

Republicans in past elections have typically portrayed their opponents as out-of-touch leftists. So far, LePage has struggled to apply that playbook to Dunlap. “He doesn’t look like a wild-eyed radical in any way,” said Fried of Dunlap. “His personality is extremely even-keeled, and a friend of mine said the other day that he looks like an insurance salesman.” 

Asked about LePage recently telling Fox News Digital that the race is about “common sense versus crazy,” Dunlap seemed unfazed: “That’s what they say when they don’t have anything else to throw at you,” he told The New Republic. “MAGA Republicans,” Dunlap said, “are very good at demonizing and bringing up the wedge [issues] about the woke agenda and the Democratic Socialists of America.” But, he added, “I’m less susceptible to that because I hadn’t heard of the Democratic Socialists of America until we heard about the Mamdani campaign.”

Dunlap has also played up his experience as a fisherman and hunter. He’s a founding board member of the Maine Youth Fish and Game Association, and the former executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. One ad shows him fishing, boating, hunting, and shooting a rifle. At the end of the video, he puts down the gun and turns to the camera, saying: “I’ve always defended our Second Amendment rights, and in Congress, I’ll do the same.”

“You can’t question his bona fides on outdoors kind of stuff, or guns,” said Brewer. “He can go toe-to-toe with any Republican on those issues.” Golden, who won this district four times, is a Marine Corps veteran who has similar credibility on guns, an important issue in the district.

Both Brewer and Fried echoed what polls have suggested: This is a tight race that could go either way. Brewer said that much could hinge on the support that Dunlap gets from national Democrats in the next month. He pointed to the DCCC’s apparent hesitancy to add him to the Red to Blue program—Dunlap beat out the DCCC’s preferred candidate in June, but wasn’t added to the program until late August—as a potential issue. “The support still, to me, doesn’t seem like what it would be, or what it could be, or maybe should be in this tight of a race,” he said. “I think he could use some more money.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Early voting is now in progress across multiple states, having started on Monday in Maine, California, Nebraska, and Montana (although there it’s technically called a “late registration” period for absentee voting). New Mexico, Indiana, Wyoming, and Ohio begin on Tuesday, and Arizona starts on Wednesday. Early voting and early absentee voting (differentiated by whether a ballot is cast directly into a ballot counter) has been underway in Illinois and Minnesota for weeks. Several other states join next week. Pennsylvania technically doesn’t have early in-person voting, but it actually sort of does, since you can show up, get a mail-in ballot, and then hand it back. Voting rights advocates have typically urged people to vote early if possible, in part for convenience and to avoid lines, and in part so that there’s time to sort things out if there’s a problem. On Saturday, President Trump urged Republicans to vote early or by mail—measures he has previously opposed and tried to restrict.

As key Senate and House races in Texas, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Alaska, Ohio, and more continue to dominate headlines, fewer people are watching California. But over the weekend, Bernie Sanders stopped by California’s conservative Central Valley to give Democrat Randy Villegas a boost in his attempt to unseat David Valadao in the race for California’s 22nd district. Ever since Villegas’s victory over moderate, DCCC-backed Jasmeet Bains in the primary, part of the narrative in this race has focused on whether Villegas is too far left for this “historically conservative, low-turnout area,” as CalMatters puts it. But as Sanders’s visit shows, Villegas isn’t running away from his progressivism. Dems have been fixated on beating Valadao for years, so if a progressive is finally the one to do it, it’ll be quite the story. While public polling in the 22nd has been almost nonexistent this cycle, a Democratic PAC poll in June showed Villegas up four points.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Natural Resources Defense Council issued a statement on Suncor v. Boulder, the big climate case the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for on Monday. Suncor Energy is asking SCOTUS to throw out the suit from the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, over the devastating damages of climate change, including from the Marshall fire in 2021. “Coal, oil, and gas companies have made trillions of dollars in profits from the sale of fuels that are driving the climate crisis. They have knowingly misled the public for decades” and lobbied to delay climate policies, said NRDC senior vice president for environmental health Matthew Tejada. “Now a staggering bill is coming due.… The fossil fuel industry has a responsibility to help pay for the damage its products have caused.”

On Wednesday at 4 p.m., the Center for Strategic and International Studies will host a webcast looking back at the anthrax postal attacks 25 years ago. Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Friedrichs will moderate a discussion between Wendi Kuhnert of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former GOP Senator Richard Burr.

On Thursday, the Institute for Policy Studies will hold its 50th annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards, honoring Unidos MN and La Liga Sindical Obrera Mexicana for their work mobilizing “communities” to “defend their rights.” Unidos MN gained widespread recognition training people to document ICE abuses in Minnesota, and in recent months has shifted to getting out the vote for the midterm elections. La Liga, also known as the Mexican Workers’ League, is a relatively recent independent union—as opposed to the dominant so-called “protection unions” in Mexico that tend to favor employers’ interests.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Aaron Eisenberg, political director for United Auto Workers Region 9A

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?
A: Region 9A represents 50,000 active and retired members across New York, New England, and Puerto Rico. After notching some amazing victories in New York this year, right now, our priorities are electing our former member Troy Jackson to the U.S. Senate in Maine, training our members to run campaigns and run for office, passing local and state legislation to strengthen worker power, winning unemployment for striking workers, and making it easier to unionize.

Q: The UAW backed insurgent—and ultimately victorious—candidates like Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York primaries this year, while many established unions supported their opponents. What did the UAW understand about this political moment that others missed?

A: In the last few years, we have had many strikes, pickets, and actions where we have called on politicians for their support. Those who showed up consistently in solidarity proved themselves to our members and earned their support in the future; those who did not were also remembered. Mayor Zohran Mamdani had been on the picket line with all eight of our UAW locals in New York City in the two years prior to his run. Claire Valdez was a unit chair in Local 2110 and was a UAW leader. Darializa Avila Chevalier was a leader within her public defense unit in Local 2325. Our members were ready to throw down for them as candidates when they ran.
Q: Winning elections is one thing. How does the union ensure that union-backed candidates deliver for working people once in office?A: Everything we do, including endorsements, aims to build beyond elections. In New York City, we have now seen the fruits of this with the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power—an office that we and other allies proposed to the administration, and which will be led by a former UAW organizing director, Tony Perlstein. We are also in consistent dialogue with our elected champions to support our members during legislative fights and contract battles, as well as on specific issues like unemployment for striking workers, universal childcare, and Medicare for All.
Q: What’s your favorite part about working in the labor movement?
A: Waking up with a sense of purpose. We have an immense challenge in front of us, and yet the power of working people coming together has overcome insurmountable obstacles time and time again. Working with members, trusting people to grow, developing new leaders, and shifting power away from the billionaire class to a multiracial, working-class mass movement is the battle of our times, and I can think of no more worthy cause.
Interview by Indigo Olivier

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

With Trump having visited Nebraska: A Nebraska Republican senator once defended a Nixon Supreme Court nominee criticized as mediocre by saying: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?” Who was he? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

A man was arrested Sunday for allegedly impersonating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and intimidating voters at a Miami polling site for Brazil’s presidential elections.

According to his arrest report, 46-year-old Danilo Alves Silva was aggressively pacing between polling locations and interacting with people who seemed to be “in fear” of him at Miami-Dade College’s Kendall Campus. He was wearing an ICE costume that he allegedly purchased on Amazon, complete with a blue “ICE raid jacket,” an ICE hat, sunglasses, jeans, and tactical boots, according to the arrest report. His face was covered with a camouflage mask and he was speaking into a handheld radio.

When confronted by detectives and sheriff’s deputies from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, Silva said that he was wearing the costume “so that I can come here to see people’s reactions.”

“The people were gathered and were clearly in fear that, as they portrayed it, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE agent was interfering with their election, possibly deporting individuals,” the arrest report reads.

Silva claimed that he himself was a Brazilian voter and he changed into the ICE costume after casting his ballot, apparently just to see what would happen. To make matters worse, he attempted to bribe law enforcement officers after his arrest, telling them, “I will get you paid if you let me go.”

Brazil’s closely watched presidential election is seen by many as a referendum on President Trump’s influence in South America, pitting right-wing Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of disgraced Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, against leftist incumbent Lula da Silva. The election will move to a runoff in October.

This arrest comes amid widespread anxiety that ICE or other federal law enforcement officials at the polls may interfere in voters’ ability to cast their ballots on America’s Election Day, less than a month away. FBI Director Kash Patel himself hasn’t ruled out sending the bureau’s agents to voting locations in November, ostensibly to prevent “violations of the law,” though their presence would more likely frighten and intimidate voters. Impersonators like Silva could have the same effect.

In the run-up to an election, candidates’ behavior often tells us as much about the political environment as polling and ad spending do. And with exactly four weeks to go until the midterms, many Republican candidates are desperately trying to run away from President Donald Trump—as clear a sign as any that his toxicity could take his entire party down. Multiple Republican candidates have…

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President Trump accepted a diamond ring as a gift in June and seems to have stashed it away somewhere.

Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal are asking what happened to the “18-karat gold ring encrusted with 321 diamonds and 75 gemstones that the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) gifted to President Trump,” in a letter addressed to the director of presidential gifts, the head of the General Services Administration, and the archivist of the United States.

“To date, we are not aware of any public reporting indicating the current location of the ring,” Warren and Blumenthal wrote in the letter, first reported by Newsweek. The AWDC, which represents the diamond trading industry in Antwerp, Belgium, delivered the ring to the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, a few weeks before the White House announced that European diamonds would be exempt from tariffs.

Warren and Blumenthal said when they asked the AWDC if the gift was a bribe to Trump, they were told it was a gift to the American people, not the president. The organization denied any connection between the tariff exemption and the ring, estimated to be worth close to $30,000, in a statement in August.

“The discussion about U.S. import ‌tariffs was entirely separate from [the gifted ‌ring],” the organization said.

In July, the White House claimed the ring had not been presented to Trump, the senators wrote. Federal law states that gifts given to the president by anyone other than a foreign government have to be screened, categorized, and evaluated by the White House Gift Office.

“If a gift is made to the President personally, it may be retained by the President, while those made out to the government of the United States are cataloged and distributed to the appropriate government agency,” Blumenthal and Warren’s letter states. “The circumstances in which AWDC gifted this ring, and the lack of clarity about its disposition, raise significant questions about whether the President has in fact accepted the ring as part of a quid pro quo agreement to reduce diamond tariffs.”

Trump has a history of taking gifts that are ethically questionable at best, like that luxury private jet from the government of Qatar. His lack of transparency could mean that the ring has been hidden away in the White House or one of his estates.

Students across France are protesting underfunded and understaffed schools, but President Donald Trump has decided to co-opt the movement for his own xenophobic aims.

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday, the U.S. leader claimed that “what’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration.”

“This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!” Trump wrote.

But there’s no evidence for that. Since September 17, students, parents, and teachers in 40 French cities have collectively closed hundreds of high schools in protest of poor classroom conditions and deteriorating schools, demanding smaller class sizes and better funding for the country’s educational system.

Since then, portions of the nationwide demonstration have converted some of the anger towards police brutality and the racism underlying it. Protesters have been spotted with signs reading “ACAB,” an anti-law enforcement slogan that stands for “all cops are bastards,” and “we are all antifascists.” Others have been spotted with signs expressing anger at France’s government as well as the National Rally, the country’s far-right party.

Immigration has not been a part of the conversation in France—but that hasn’t stopped far-right American thought leaders from weaponizing the protests for their own political gain stateside.

Ex-InfoWars host Alex Jones, who still owes Sandy Hook victims $1.4 billion for claiming the school shooting never happened and instead was staged by child actors, shared images of people on fire during the protests last week, falsely insisting that the demonstrations were a “racial uprising against the indigenous whites” in France.

In another post, Jones said that there were “dead bodies everywhere” as a result of the protests. In truth, zero deaths have been reported—although one student in Lens reportedly lost his hand after picking up a stun grenade fired by riot police, according to Al Jazeera.

Fox News host Tomi Lahren suggested that the protests should be a “cautionary tale” for Americans, fabricating a connection between the student protests and a supposed problem with diversity.

“This is something we’re learning from Europe, and we would be wise to learn from Europe: They decided they wanted to have open borders,” Lahren said on-air Saturday. “When you let so many people come into your country, leech off of your system, then the people who are from there are going to at some point get upset.”

But the conservative perspective appears to be completely divorced or entirely uninformed by reality—at least according to the people present in the streets.

“Young people are worried about their future, and we can understand them,” Mickaël Sauvage, a 50-year-old aerospace worker and union member that attended the protests, told The New York Times Tuesday. “The trap is that the government is pushing them to violence, so that public opinion will turn against them and their demands won’t be heard.”

John Murdock, a top conservative lawyer at the Department of the Interior, has quit over what he calls an “assault on the rule of law.”

Murdock is stepping down after 18 years at the federal agency because, as he wrote in a bombshell resignation letter obtained by The Guardian and Public Domain, “We are headed in the wrong direction.” A self-described conservative Christian, Murdock’s resignation letter makes it clear that the Trump administration’s impact on the Interior Department, and its blatant disregard for environmental regulation, has gone too far.

“Simply going fast and breaking things is not, in my view, the solution,” Murdock wrote. “Flooding the zone with shit is a strategy for producing a shitty country.”

Murdock went on to list actions outside the Interior Department that most concerned him, both as a citizen and an attorney: “Masked federal agents; the abandonment of Afghan allies; pardons and payouts for rioters and those who supported them; the rapid dismantling of USAID; our military likely committing war crimes; plus, a president who demeans the dead and sees himself as Jesus comprise a partial list of the instances that have left my mouth agape.”

The longtime lawyer also cited specific experiences he had over the course of his career. He was especially concerned by a statement from Matt Giacona, the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, who announced to the public that the Trump administration was “upholding the highest environmental standards” soon after completing a large oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration explicitly bypassed federal regulations in the Endangered Species Act, Murdock wrote, and Giacona lied about it with impunity. “I have seen my supervisors behave in ways that I would never have expected,” Murdock wrote.

In a response statement, a spokesperson for the Interior Department reaffirmed the agency’s devotion to Trump’s agenda. “One former employee’s personal disagreement with the Department’s policies does not transform lawful policy decisions into an ‘assault on the rule of law,’ nor does his inflammatory rhetoric make his opinion accurate,” the spokesperson said. “The Department stands firmly behind its work to implement President Trump’s agenda consistent with federal law.”

Murdock’s departure is the latest in a string of federal officials resigning in protest against the Trump administration. The Interior Department alone lost thousands of workers following Elon Musk’s DOGE escapades last year.

“I walk away from the stable salary and benefits of a government job and my retirement likely becomes less lucrative and more complicated,” Murdock wrote. But that calculation is worth it, he wrote—“I will preserve my integrity. Thankfully, the arithmetic is easy.”

After killing mass transit projects left and right, the Trump team is suddenly interested in funding rail and bus rapid transit. But, as with everything in this administration, the reason for the change of heart is both racist and stupid. In July, The New York Times reported that the administration was refusing to spend billions allocated by Congress and that the Federal Transit…

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On Monday morning outside the Supreme Court, as Justices heard arguments concerning a landmark climate liability lawsuit, a rally organized by the Center for Climate Integrity and Fossil Free Media drew a crowd of roughly one hundred people. Many carried signs with messages like “Climate Change is No Accident,” “SCOTUS Hands Off Boulder,” and “Warning: Burning Fossil Fuels Can Destroy Civilization.” At several points, The People v. Big Oil gathering chanted “They knew, they lied” in a call-and-response, referencing fossil fuel scientists and executives who knew more than 50 years ago that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures, and instead sowed doubt to undermine scientific evidence.

As Louie Delaware, a survivor of the 2021 Marshall Fire told the crowd, “No company or industry should gain an advantage by hiding facts that people need to protect their health, their communities, and their future. The bottom line is that they knew, they lied, and they must be accountable for their actions.” Delaware lost his home along with roughly 50 others on his street when the fire devastated Boulder, Colorado. His family was displaced for more than two and a half years. Other survivors of the Marshall Fire spoke at the rally, as well as survivors of the 2025 Eaton fire in Altadena, California.

Meanwhile, inside the courtroom, the justices heard arguments in Suncor Energy v. Boulder, widely regarded as a seminal case concerning the issue of whether or not local governments can demand damages from fossil fuel companies for their contributions to climate change. The fossil fuel companies are arguing that a state court can’t hold multinational companies accountable for global harm. As I reported last week: 

The case revolves around a dispute between the City and County of Boulder, which first sued the energy companies in 2018. They are arguing that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. “The damages will only multiply as climate change worsens,” Boulder stated in its lawsuit. Suncor and Exxon, meanwhile, are asking the justices to kill the case before it makes it to trial—and with it a host of other state-level climate cases.

Depending on how the eight justices rule—Justice Samuel Alito announced what some considered to be an 11th hour recusal earlier this week—the case could have far-reaching consequences for people [in Colorado]. But its implications extend beyond the state’s borders: dozens of other climate-related lawsuits hang in the balance of how Suncor v. Boulder is decided.

“The Eaton Fire took my sister and eighteen other people. My family lost five homes, including my childhood home,” said Zaire Calvin, who lost his sister, Evelyn McClendon to the disaster. “From Altadena to Boulder, we carry different stories. Today, we stand together in one demand: let the evidence be heard. Let responsibility be determined.” California’s own climate liability lawsuit against major oil companies is currently on hold while the Supreme Court weighs in on the Boulder case. 

“From Altadena to Boulder, we carry different stories. Today, we stand together in one demand: let the evidence be heard. Let responsibility be determined.”

Former Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee was also present on Monday outside the courtroom. “The fossil fuel industry malignantly and maliciously lied to the American people, and I’ll be damned if I let them take away an American right to hold industries accountable and have their day in court,” he said. “They knew for decades what the consequences of their products were, and they chose to lie.” In 2021, Inslee signed Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, a market-based cap-and-invest program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and has emerged as a leading voice against industry pushing against sweeping immunity laws against climate liability lawsuits. 

Neighborhood home during the Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado on December 30, 2021.

When the speeches ended, I spoke with Deirdre Macnab and Dr. Kathryn Bedell, two regenerative cattle ranchers from Rio Blanco County who had traveled to Washington for the event. After interviewing Macnab last week, I asked her what it felt like to be in front of the Supreme Court. “I’m glad it’s coming to the Supreme Court. Now we need to come together. We can solve this,” she said. “But we’ve got to bring the big boys to the table, and that’s the oil companies.”  

Fellow rancher Bedell echoed her call to action, and underscored the devastating effects of wildfires, drought, and extreme heat. “I think there isn’t anybody here who should be able to deny the impacts of climate change. It’s going to be obvious in our food supply pretty soon if we don’t change,” she told me. “If you can’t grow food, we have to import it, and we won’t have any food security or control over the price. People should be terrified. It terrifies me.” Bedell, a sixth-generation farmer who has been a rancher for over three decades, has been forced to sell her cattle. “I’ve had these same cattle for generations, so I know them all personally. They’re moving to the sale yard on December 19.” 

As oral arguments drew to a close, I spoke with Louie Delaware and another Marshall Fire survivor, Jenny Singer-Rupp. “One of the tenets of a free democracy is ‘the David’ can go after ‘the Goliath’. Everybody deserves their day in court to be able to prove their case,” Delaware told me. He pointed to settlements by the tobacco industries and pharmaceutical companies over opioid addiction, adding, “They’re huge entities, but there are a lot of huge entities that have been taken down in court.” 

Singer-Rupp is simply fighting for her children. “My kids talk to me about climate change and natural disasters, and they’re worried about their future,” she said. “I never thought I’d be standing in front of the Supreme Court. But I’m doing everything I can to protect that future for them.”

In the early hours of President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran, Tehran targeted a makeshift tactical operations center in Kuwait, killing six U.S. military personnel and injuring more than 30 others. Not only did the Department of Defense fail to provide the personnel stationed there with the necessary tools to defend themselves, but multiple service members who were injured in the attack say their government also neglected them in the aftermath.

The Associated Press spoke to a group of nine service members who all claim that the U.S. military’s medical system failed them after they were injured in the deadly attack on March 1.

Army Lieutenant Colonel Arturo Lincón, a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffered extensive injuries from shrapnel, including to his left vertebral artery, which put him at risk for a stroke. However, his injuries were not considered serious enough to get him admitted to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Instead, he was dismissed to the Army barracks and instructed to schedule outpatient appointments.

“I was just kind of on my own, at least it felt like that,” Lincón told the AP. He underwent weeks of specialized outpatient care at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington. Months later, he is still struggling to receive traumatic injury benefits under the Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance.

Another service member, Major Stephen Ramsbottom, said he waited over four months to receive MRI results after he had shrapnel removed from his head. “I’ve had to build my own case for everything,” Ramsbottom told the outlet. “It’s very frustrating.”

While some of the most injured service members were evacuated within two days of the attack, others weren’t so lucky.

One group was not evacuated out of Kuwait for 10 days after the attack, including Chief Warrant Officer 4 Rodney Bearman, who had shrapnel embedded in his face and legs. When the soldiers were eventually evacuated, they were strapped to the floor of a cargo plane and taken to Germany. When the group arrived, Bearman said he learned that the military had not documented them as wounded in combat, so they would not receive medical treatment at Landstuhl. Bearman told the AP they were not documented as wounded in combat due to a coding error.

“Never did I think that if I was wounded that these things would happen,” said Bearman. “Some sacred trust that I thought would never be broken was broken.”

The military also failed to provide timely evaluations of the soldiers. Some soldiers told AP they they only learned they had traumatic brain injuries after they returned back to the United States. Many of the troops who spoke to AP did not know the severity of their own TBIs.

“It’s disappointing but not surprising,” said Dr. James Kelly, chief medical scientist at the Invisible Wounds Foundation, a group that studies brain injuries in the military. “In a war scenario, it goes on a fair bit.”

It seems that the Department of Defense’s failing medical system is the system working as it was designed: The Pentagon has shuttered large military hospitals in the Middle East and regularly redeploys troops after they receive a mild TBI diagnosis.

The Pentagon downplayed the severity of the retaliatory strike, and U.S. Central Command initially claimed that only five service members had been seriously wounded. The day after it happened, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the deadly strike in Kuwait “a squirter,” and later complained that reporting on the troops killed was a ploy to make the president look bad.

Better Know a Democrat is an interview series to give voters a closer look at candidates in competitive races across the U.S. JoAnna Mendoza is familiar with the struggle felt across Arizona’s 6th District. And while she faces a tough fight to unseat incumbent GOP Rep. Juan Ciscomani, the retired Marine’s policies and relatability might help put her over the edge.

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A federal court struck down a California rule that required voters to sign and return vote-by-mail ballots on paper, rather than doing so electronically. The ruling in California Council of the Blind v. Weber, announced October 3, is a victory for disabled voters—but it probably won’t change things much until the next election cycle.

Since 2021, California has mailed ballots to all registered voters for all statewide and local elections. Voters with print disabilities—those who are blind or low-vision, or whose physical disabilities prevent them from marking a paper ballot—can request a link to vote electronically. After filling out their ballot on a computer, they must print it, put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and return it “through non-electronic means.”

This is complicated by the fact that many blind people don’t own printers, because they have no use for them. And that’s only one of the obstacles they might face under the current vote-by-mail rules.

Christopher Gray, a resident of San Francisco County and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, is blind. Under the current system, as he wrote in a 2024 court declaration, he is unable to vote without assistance.

He could theoretically vote using a virtual vote-by-mail ballot, which he can fill out unassisted using his own assistive technology, including a Braille-equipped computer.

But printing the ballot, finding where to sign it, signing it, putting it in an envelope, sealing it, and returning it without assistance is not possible for him. “Because of the lack of an accessible method of returning my ballot by mail, when I vote I must forgo my right to vote confidentially and privately,” Gray wrote.

During the 2022 general elections, Gray ended up paying an assistant to help him fill out his ballot—but in doing so, he was forced to give up that privacy and independence. He also gave up his certainty that his ballot had been submitted at all. “Though I trusted my reader, I could not independently confirm they accurately marked my ballot and mailed it on my behalf,” he said.

The vote-by-mail program, as it stands, discriminates against voters who cannot return their ballots without assistance, he and the other plaintiffs argued. “I want to vote in a private and independent manner just as voters without print disabilities are able to do in my state,” Gray wrote. “I will be able to do so only if alternative accessible options for returning a vote-by-mail ballot are available to me.”

The court ruled that the current vote-by-mail system does exclude some disabled voters, and “denies them meaningful access to the vote by mail program,” as Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim wrote. The court, however, did not specify a resolution. The state of California now has until October 19 to propose a new vote-by-mail protocol, and since California ballots have already been mailed out, any changes made likely will not take effect until the next election cycle.

As Democracy Docket has reported, “32 states allow for electronic absentee ballot return for certain voters, with 13 of these states providing a specific carveout for voters with disabilities.”