WASHINGTON — Democrats are touting an ambitious legislative agenda centered on affordability and accountability if they take back the U.S. House or Senate — or both — in November. 

A slew of pressing policy debates are on tap for Democrats, including healthcare, immigration, voting rights, the war in Iran, oversight, education and beyond, as they aim to reverse many of President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ actions since January 2025. 

Some issues, while surging to the forefront, likely will provoke internal divisions, such as “Medicare for All,” a movement popular among progressives to extend single-payer national health care to all Americans. 

“Healthcare costs have consistently been at or above other concerns on the public’s affordability worries,” said Liz Hamel, a senior vice president and director of public opinion and survey research at KFF who oversees the nonpartisan health organization’s polling program.

Democrats also are poised to conduct tougher oversight of the Trump administration.

Any legislation from Democrats faces the threat of Trump’s veto, making any legislation without broad bipartisan support almost certain to fail. In addition, Democrats would need a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes to advance most measures in the Senate.

Democrats remain heavily favored to regain the majority in the House, while Senate races continue to move in the party’s favor, amid Trump’s plummeting popularity, according to the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, an elections forecaster. Democrats currently hold 47 Senate seats, including two independents who generally vote with the party.

“House Democrats are committed to fighting for an affordable America, lowering the high cost of living, lowering the cost of groceries, lowering the cost of gas, lowering the cost of housing and fighting to make healthcare affordable for every single American,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters in September. 

The New York Democrat is in line to become the next speaker — the first Black person to hold that office — if the party clinches control of the lower chamber. 

Jeffries announced five working groups on affordability — housing, healthcare, gas and utilities, groceries and goods, and caregiving — which House Democrats will concentrate on at the beginning of the new Congress. 

The Democratic Party’s campaign apparatus for House races echoed an agenda centered on affordability. 

“House Democrats are going to win the majority because voters know we’re focused on lowering costs, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do when we’re in charge,” Nebeyatt Betre, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson, said in a statement shared with States Newsroom.

“From ending the war in Iran to lower gas prices, restoring (Affordable Care Act) tax credits to lower health care prices, to rolling back reckless tariffs to lower prices on everything in between, House Democrats’ number one priority will be making life more affordable for working families,” Betre said. 

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, chair of the corresponding campaign arm for Senate races, cited healthcare access and affordability as a top priority in a Democratic-led upper chamber. 

“I think the most important issues that I’ve heard from voters is restoring their healthcare, making sure that those cuts to Medicaid get restored, making sure that people can afford healthcare and get access to good, high-quality healthcare,” Gillibrand said in a September interview with States Newsroom and other members of the Regional Reporters Association. 

The New York Democrat, who leads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said other major priorities include “trying to fix the problems Trump has created, end the war in Iran” as well as getting “costs of groceries, housing, and healthcare and other everyday costs down.” 

While not a major part of the party’s messaging in the general election, House Democrats are poised to take a harder line with Israel amid the country’s war in Gaza. Jeffries said a measure meant to discourage violence in the West Bank, where Israeli settlements have inflamed tensions, “should be considered” next year, according to The Hill. 

With less than three weeks to go until Election Day on Nov. 3, here’s a closer look at what Democrats want to accomplish in both chambers: 

Anti-corruption, impeachments 

Democrats are all but certain to open investigations into the Trump administration if they gain power over congressional subpoena decisions.

“Our promise to the country in the new Congress is that beginning on Day One, we’re going to hold the crooks accountable,” Jeffries vowed at an Oct. 8 press conference. 

High-ranking Democratic House members say multiple probes are on the table, including Trump’s IRS settlement, brokered by his administration’s Justice Department, which delivered retroactive tax audit immunity for him and two of his sons as well as the creation of an “anti-weaponization” fund.

A federal judge slammed the settlement in a July order prohibiting Trump, his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization from claiming they reached a “settlement,” and referred Trump’s personal attorneys to the bar for investigations. 

Democrats are also weighing whether the party would attempt to impeach Trump if they take back control of the House. 

The president was impeached twice in the House and acquitted twice in the Senate during prior sessions of Congress. 

Jeffries told PBS Newshour in September “we certainly haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out,” when asked about any impeachment proceedings against the president if Democrats regain the majority in the lower chamber. 

Democrats could also try to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth if they clinch control of the House. 

Outgoing GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth in September for the secretary’s handling of the war in Iran.

But House GOP leadership sent the lower chamber home early for its weeks-long campaign break, punting any vote until after the midterms. 

House Democrats will also likely dog the administration’s legally mandated release of files related to the 2019 federal sex trafficking investigation of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who kept the company of powerful and wealthy individuals, including Trump.

Trump denies any knowledge of Epstein’s involvement in trafficking girls and young women for sex.

Democrats and Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform opened a months-long probe, subpoenaing documents from the Epstein estate and compelling closed-door testimony from Epstein associates and former Attorney General Pam Bondi. 

Healthcare 

On the healthcare front, House Democrats want to undo the healthcare provisions tucked into a mega tax and spending cut law signed by Trump in July 2025, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”  

“Undoing (that law) is the floor, but not the ceiling,” according to a September memo obtained by Politico from Democrats’ affordability working group on healthcare. 

The 84-page memo proposes myriad healthcare policy priorities in the first 100 hours, first 100 days and first year of the next session of Congress, broken down into eight wide-ranging categories. 

“There is broad consensus in the Democratic caucus that the Democratic agenda must both reverse the immediate harms of the administration while also taking bold action to rein in corporate monopolies, invest in a durable healthcare system, and pursue an ambitious path towards universal coverage,” per the memo.  

Part of Democrats’ healthcare agenda includes reversing the GOP’s mega tax and spending cut law’s sweeping Medicaid cuts, which axe roughly $1 trillion in program spending over 10 years and impose new work requirements.

The party is also looking to “permanently restore” the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits, which expired in December 2025 and were used by individuals who buy their own health insurance through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. 

The expiration of those credits has “sharply increased” individuals’ out-of-pocket costs toward premiums, according to KFF. 

The memo also underscores a commitment to “achieving universal coverage” in the first year of the next session of Congress, and mentions the “Medicare for All Act” as one avenue to examine in achieving this ambition. 

The bill would establish a national health insurance program administered under the Department of Health and Human Services. 

Iran war

The costly war in Iran that has caused prices at the gas pump to soar for Americans is a major reason for Trump’s sagging poll numbers, and Democrats, if the House and Senate flip, would likely pass a measure to try to end any further conflict without congressional approval.

The war has cost $40 billion and counting, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and will continue to cost American taxpayers $2 billion to $3 billion per month as the conflict drags on.

The national average price of diesel remains above $6 per gallon in the U.S., according to AAA, as Iranian officials continue to block petroleum products from reaching the global market. 

The national motor club, which monitors daily fuel prices, reported that Americans were paying a national average of $4.33 for a gallon of gasoline as of Oct. 14.

Meanwhile, Democrats’ attempts to rein in Trump’s military campaign in Iran have slowly picked up some Republican support over multiple votes in both chambers.

Senate Democrats have forced 14 War Powers Resolution votes to curb Trump’s unilateral military decisions without input from Congress. The votes are privileged, meaning they can be brought to the floor without the blessing of majority leadership.

The measure has advanced twice in the upper chamber, but the latest attempt to advance a House-passed War Powers Resolution narrowly failed, 49-50. 

House Democrats picked up seven Republicans on Sept. 15 to approve the War Powers Resolution. 

Administration officials contend the War Powers Resolution, established by Congress during the Vietnam War era, is unconstitutional, so it’s unclear what might happen if a resolution were approved. 

Immigration 

To help the president carry out his mass deportation campaign, congressional Republicans used a legislative tool to skirt Democratic support and allocate more than $200 billion for immigration enforcement through two measures. 

With the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” more than $170 billion was given to the Department of Homeland Security to hire more immigration agents, expand detention centers and carry out deportations. 

The “Secure America Act” funded Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement until late September 2029, at nearly $70 billion, after Democrats refused to approve funding for DHS following two deadly shootings of American citizens by immigration officials in Minneapolis. 

Though it’s unlikely Democrats will be able to claw any of that funding back even if they take both chambers, there are several avenues they are likely to pursue amid the president’s immigration crackdown. 

The first avenue is oversight and the ability to subpoena Trump officials. Democrats are likely to hold oversight hearings into the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot and killed by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis in January. 

Members of both parties on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee reached rare bipartisan agreement at a grilling of top Trump immigration officials after the killings. 

Democrats will also likely hold hearings on the scores of U.S. citizens detained by ICE and also shot by federal immigration officers, such as Marimar Martinez, who has already appeared several times before lawmakers as the minority witness for Democrats. 

She was shot in her car five times by Border Patrol agents during the aggressive immigration deportation campaign in Chicago in October 2025 and was labeled a domestic terrorist by DHS. The DOJ dropped charges against Martinez after the Trump administration accused her of using her car as a weapon.

Democrats are also likely to continue with oversight at federal facilities that detain immigrants, including the high death toll of immigrants at those detention centers. So far, 61 immigrants have died in ICE detention, which has doubled under the second Trump administration. Democrats have demanded answers from the administration about the deaths, along with concerns about medical neglect at the facilities. 

And even though former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stepped down earlier this year, Democrats still plan to question some of her decisions while leading DHS, such as a $220 million ad campaign that prominently featured her and the practice of no-bid contracts awarded to her close allies. 

Apart from oversight, Democrats are likely to introduce and pass legislation related to immigration reform, such as creating a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who were stripped of their Temporary Protected Status and for children brought into the country without legal authorization under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. 

The Trump administration has stripped more than 1 million immigrants of their legal status, and House Democrats, with a handful of Republicans, in April moved to extend TPS for more than 500,000 immigrants hailing from Haiti. 

TPS is granted to nationals who hail from a country deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, disasters or other destabilizing forces.

In the Senate, Democrats have tried to pass legislation through unanimous consent to grant a pathway to citizenship for TPS recipients, but were blocked by Republicans. If Democrats regain the Senate, they will need a 60-vote majority for that legislation to move ahead. 

Some Democrats in Congress also likely will advocate an end to funding for ICE, but it’s unclear whether that would have enough support to advance.

Voting rights and democracy

Voting rights and democracy are likely to be high priorities for Democrats if they retake one or both chambers of Congress. 

A gerrymandering war egged on by Trump and a U.S. Supreme Court decision this spring that severely weakened the federal Voting Rights Act left Democrats and their base deeply angry and eager for action.

Democrats are likely to again turn to the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after the late civil rights activist and Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis. 

Though the U.S. House last passed the measure in 2021, the bill did not advance through the Senate. 

The legislation would seek to restore preclearance, a major provision of the Voting Rights Act that was previously blocked by the Supreme Court in 2013. Preclearance required states and local governments with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes, and it applied to most Southern states and a handful of others.

“We fight to pass the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act so we can end the era of voter suppression in the United States of America once and for all,” Jeffries said in an August speech.

The renewed focus on the voting rights legislation comes after the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision in April sharply weakened Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The section prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race and other characteristics. 

In 1982, Congress expanded Section 2 to ban voting practices that have a discriminatory effect, whether or not the law was intended to discriminate.

Louisiana had redrawn its congressional map in response to a court order to include a second majority-minority district where a majority of residents are Black. The Supreme Court ruled the new map was an unconstitutional gerrymander.

In response, several Southern states quickly redrew their congressional maps to eliminate majority-minority districts — part of a larger wave of gerrymandering that swept the country over the past two years after Trump initially urged Texas to enact a more GOP-friendly map.

In response, some Democrats are also pushing for gerrymandering reform. At a minimum, some lawmakers want to require states to return to a once-a-decade redrawing process. That was the norm before 2025, and followed the census every 10 years.

Over the summer, the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus unveiled a framework for changes to the redistricting process. The proposal calls for restricting new maps to once a decade, requiring “clear, objective” criteria to draw lines and supporting steps to reduce partisan influence, such as turning to independent commissions to develop district lines.

Education 

Congressional Democrats also want to halt and undo the administration’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and repeal major education provisions in the GOP’s mega tax and spending cut law.

The department has entered into a series of interagency agreements with other departments that transfer several of its responsibilities to those agencies, including Health and Human Services, Labor, Interior, State, Justice and Treasury. 

If Democrats take back the Senate, Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine told States Newsroom his first goal in education is to “stop the handoff of critical components of (the Education Department) to other agencies that don’t want them.”

In the most-far reaching of the interagency agreements yet, the department said in June that HHS would administer programs under Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, while civil rights enforcement under Education’s Office for Civil Rights would be transferred to the DOJ. 

Kaine sponsored a bill, with GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska as original co-sponsors, that would block interagency agreements that transfer programs regarding special education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education and Native American education. 

That measure advanced out of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in July. 

Sen. Mazie Hirono told States Newsroom “we need to restore federal support for education and how it’s going to look, I mean, clearly we need to support IDEA and support it to a greater extent than we have normally,” pointing to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities.

The Hawaii Democrat is also looking to repeal a national school voucher program baked into the GOP’s mega tax and spending cut law that’s set to launch in early 2027. 

The program allocates up to $1,700 in federal tax credits for people donating to organizations that provide K-12 scholarships, with 31 states having opted in so far. 

Hirono and Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, joined by more than two dozen of their colleagues, introduced legislation in April to repeal the program. 

Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore introduced a companion bill in June with Reps. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, Maxwell Frost of Florida, Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and dozens more original cosponsors.

WASHINGTON — The No Kings movement that has brought millions to the streets across the United States three times since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term is staging its next event at the polls.

Organizers across hundreds of advocacy groups will pull together thousands of events nationwide Saturday to encourage early voting in this year’s midterm elections. Voting is already underway in dozens of states, and roughly 5.1 million ballots – both in-person and mail – have been cast, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Saturday’s “No Kings: Vote Early Day of Action” events include marches and walks to the polls where early voting is already underway and open on the weekends. Also planned are gatherings that offer live music, food and assistance for voter registration, car pool sign-ups and information on how to become a poll observer.

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— Ashley Murray (@ashleymurray.bsky.social) October 14, 2026 at 10:43 AM

Beatriz Lopez, executive director of Voto Latino, spoke at a press conference about early voting outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

“The best way to prevent any funny business from this administration after Election Day is to make sure that our turnout is massive — so clear, and so overwhelming that our victory for democracy is impossible to question,” Alma Couverthie, a senior organizer with the advocacy group Common Cause, said at a Wednesday morning press conference in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Common Cause is one of the nearly 320 organizations coordinating the events under the direction of nine national steering committee groups.

“There is no time to sit on the sidelines. We need everyone. So I urge you, make your plan to vote early. Don’t trust in the way you voted before. Check again. Make sure you know where you’re going, how you’re going, and who you’re bringing with you,” Couverthie said.

This one is different

Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the nine steering committee groups, said Saturday’s events will be distinct from previous No Kings Day rallies in June and October 2025, and March 2026.

“It is different in the sense that No Kings One, Two, and Three were designed to send a message that the American people were not simply going to sacrifice their constitutional rights, that they were willing to stand up,” Levin told States Newsroom during an Oct. 9 interview.

The message of the three marches was “well sent,” he said, as each successive one expanded in numbers. It started with 5 million attendees across 2,100 individual events nationwide on June 14, 2025, to more than 7 million at 2,700 events on Oct. 18, 2025, and then reached 8 million across 3,330 events on March 28, 2026, according to organizers.

With Trump at historic low approval ratings, and with an “electoral wipeout” likely ahead if polls are on target, Levin said No Kings messaging “is largely completed” and that action is the next step.

“The goal of No Kings on October 17 is therefore not just to protest and get attention to the fact that people aren’t afraid to stand up, but to use this tool that is available to us right now in October, and it is a different constitutional right, not just the constitutional right to organize and make your voice heard — but your constitutional right to vote,” Levin said. 

As of Wednesday, more than 2,500 events were scheduled for Saturday in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to No Kings organizers.

Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer for the ACLU, said the civil liberties organization has been training thousands of volunteers to assist voters in knowing their rights and what to do if they encounter issues at the polls.

“We know that the best way to protect our freedom is to act free. That means showing up at the polls and making sure that your neighbors can show up too. See you at the polls on Saturday,” Schifeling said at the Wednesday press conference.

Joining forces

Other concerted efforts to do what organizers call “get out the vote” are joining No Kings events Saturday to amplify and strengthen their messages, leaders say.

Bishop William Barber, Repairers of the Breach founder and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has been organizing 1,000 marches nationwide to the polls in an effort he announced in July as “Love Forward Together.”

So far, Barber’s campaign has organized 652 marches in 428 locations across the United States, according to Repairers of the Breach.

Standing before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday alongside No Kings organizers, Barber said the overall goal despite the campaign or group “is about people being conspicuous in their courage and in their commitment.”

“There is no competition. We have one competition. We are competing against a low voter turnout that can no longer exist in this democracy if we are to have a democracy, and if we are to have a democracy that serves all the people,” Barber said. 

The Interfaith Alliance will be more than 10 days into a 15-state “The Vote is Sacred” bus tour Saturday when it stops in Charlotte, North Carolina, to join a “No Kings: Vote Early Day of Action” event.

Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush said the tour is about mobilizing faith communities to be “trained up” to recognize possible illegal interference at polling places.

“Unfortunately, this administration has threatened to disrupt. … We are going to bring the nonviolent spiritual mobilization that has been with us, and we’re going to be trained up all across the country,” Raushenbush said during an Oct. 6 interview with MS NOW’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” after the tour’s stop in Kansas City, Missouri.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but referred States Newsroom to a statement from a Republican National Committee spokesperson.

“From Virginia to Louisiana, Democrats have tried to manipulate congressional maps for political gain. Republicans are restoring the rule of law, protecting fair representation, and making it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” according to the statement from Ally Triolo, the RNC’s election integrity communications director.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge late Tuesday extended a block on a Trump administration ban of press passes for three news organizations, which will allow them to continue to enter the White House grounds while a legal challenge to the ban, including a Wednesday appeal filed by the administration, plays out.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly in a 26-page order rejected Department of Justice arguments that the revocation of passes for CNN, Politico and MS NOW was based on the administration’s concern over reporting that endangered national security.

“First, there is no evidence in the record that President (Donald) Trump made the decision to revoke Plaintiffs’ hard passes on national security grounds from the get-go, nor at any time has he directly stated that national security was the reason for his decision. When he announced the ban with his post on September 18, he did not mention national security,” Kelly wrote.

Kelly also said the news organizations were likely to succeed on their claim that the White House unlawfully retaliated against them for exercising their First Amendment rights. He noted that a previous court decision bars government officials from subjecting individuals to retaliatory actions after the fact for having engaged in speech protected by the amendment.

“President Trump’s own comments suggest that he intended the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes to alter their reporting on him, bolstering the case that his action here is sufficient to deter a reporter of ordinary firmness from reporting in the same way she had before,” Kelly said.

He said the news organizations were also likely to succeed in their argument that they were denied due process by the administration.

Kelly granted the news outlets’ request for a preliminary injunction, which Trump already has said the administration will appeal. It replaces a temporary restraining order, also granted by Kelly, that expired Tuesday.

The administration on Tuesday afternoon filed a notice to Kelly that it had appealed his ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The notice of appeal did not contain any legal arguments. The court ordered the administration to submit a brief outlining its case by Nov. 13. The news organizations’ response is due by the end of November.

Kelly’s ruling came a little over three weeks after Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico. The president announced the measure via his social media platform on Sept.18, “a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” he wrote. 

The White House press office followed with letters Sept. 22 to the three outlets citing national security concerns and allegations of misinformation as reasons reporters’ press passes were revoked.

Trump’s order ousted 78 journalists from the three outlets, according to a court filing.

In a show of solidarity, major television networks that rotate distributing video coverage from the White House suspended video feeds over the next several days. 

The three news outlets sued the White House in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on First Amendment grounds and alleged the ban caused irreparable harm to the organizations.

Kelly temporarily ordered the White House to restore press access on Sept. 24 to the three banned outlets. 

Kelly, who appeared skeptical during an initial hearing, wrote in the eight-page temporary order that the media outlets were likely to succeed in the case, and that the journalists were denied their due process rights before their passes were confiscated.

Michael Velchik, senior counsel in the civil division of the Justice Department, had argued on Sept. 23 that access to the White House “is a privilege not a right.”

Kelly was nominated by Trump during his first term and confirmed by the Senate in September 2017 by a vote of 94-2.

In response to a request for comment, the White House confirmed in a background statement not attributed to an individual that the decision will be appealed.

“The Fake News has no place demanding a spot in the President’s Oval Office. The lies they smear are a disservice to the American public and tear at the very fabric of our Democracy. They’re completely capable of reporting from directly outside. We intend to appeal this misguided decision,” the statement said.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., the lawyer for the news outlets, said they were grateful for Kelly’s ruling.

“When the President issued his ‘ban on the free press,’ he blatantly and explicitly violated due process and the First Amendment,” Boutrous said in a statement. “Since then, the President has repeatedly, candidly, and consistently admitted in public that he banned our clients from the White House to punish reporting he doesn’t like and to try to force journalists to cover him in ways he prefers. The harm this ban did to our clients, the First Amendment, and the public as a whole is profound. The Court was right to enjoin the White House from enforcing this unconstitutional ‘ban on the free press’ for the foreseeable future.”

Kelly also noted in his ruling that Trump could be right in his concerns about the nature of reporting on him, and that there were instances in which a national security argument would succeed.

“Still, no one should interpret the Court’s decision to suggest that President Trump’s concerns about accuracy and fairness in the media’s reporting are unfounded, or that the government is powerless when its true aim is to protect national security when classified information is unlawfully disclosed,” he said.

WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders in the U.S. House condemned a “deeply disturbing” raid early Monday at the District of Columbia home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who has long been a target of verbal attacks by President Donald Trump and Republicans.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., and House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., called the morning raid by Department of Homeland Security officials “egregious.”

The House minority leaders said the search of Omar’s home “raises serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump’s adversaries.”

“For years Donald Trump and far-right extremists have relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Omar with vile personal attacks and baseless accusations,” Jeffries, Clark and Aguilar said in a statement posted on social media Monday. “Now, less than 30 days before the midterm election, his violent mass deportation machine has descended upon the home of a duly elected Member of Congress and her family.”

Omar, a Somali-born American and one of four Muslims in Congress, represents a deep-blue district.

Fox News first published a report on the raid just after 7:30 a.m. Eastern, and cited two sources who told the network the operation was related to an investigation of Omar’s immigration paperwork. Omar was resettled as a refugee in the United States with her family at the age of 12 in 1995 and was later naturalized as a U.S. citizen.

A Department of Justice official, asked for comment on the raid, told States Newsroom: “Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice. This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”

Omar said in a post on social media Monday that she “will not be silenced.” 

“I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation,” she wrote on X.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., wrote in a statement on X that the president is “grossly abusing his power.”

“He has repeatedly attacked her, Somali Americans, and Minnesotans. @Ilhan has done nothing to justify a pre-dawn raid ahead of the election. I stand with my sister always,” Tlaib wrote.

Trump, without evidence, has accused Omar of being connected to a $242 million fraud scheme involving pandemic-era funds meant for hunger programs, as well as other fraud investigations in the state, and has called for her to be deported.

“There is 19 Billion Dollars in Minnesota Somalia Fraud. Fake ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, a constant complainer who hates the USA, knows everything there is to know. She should be in jail, or even a worse punishment, sent back to Somalia, considered one of the absolutely worst countries in the World. She could help to MAKE SOMALIA GREAT AGAIN!,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Jan 18.

WASHINGTON — Rebecca Myers lives in one of the nation’s most hotly contested congressional districts, and tariffs were on her mind as she voted early and in-person in Suffolk, Virginia in late September.

The 44-year-old trained social worker said she and her husband, who recently retired after 25 years in the U.S. Navy, are raising two children, ages 7 and 9, and forgoing a family vacation to save money.

“I’m an educated person, but I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in the economy. All I can say is I know my family’s finances very well and I know everything we spend money on has gone up in price.

“I understand some of it is due to the tariffs, some of it is due to the war in Iran,” Myers told States Newsroom in an Oct. 1 interview.

Myers is among a growing number of voters found to be taking their anger about affordability to the polls this midterm election and blaming President Donald Trump’s tariffs as a culprit for rising expenses. Public opinion surveys bear out Myers is far from alone in making the connection.

“The real top line is that for maybe the first time ever, tariffs are a salient issue at the ballot box,” said Scott Lincicome of the libertarian Cato Institute. “You know, normally trade is a boring issue that nobody really thinks about or cares about.”

Myers, who lives in Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, voted for Elaine Luria, the Democratic candidate and former U.S. representative who is challenging the incumbent Republican, Rep. Jen Kiggans.

Kiggans, Myers said, has supported Trump’s “MAGA agenda,” including tariffs.

Kiggans’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump opponents seize on issue

Organizers are targeting districts like Myers’, where Democrats could flip seats.

“We talk to families every day who are struggling with the things that they need to take care of themselves and their families,” said Sondra Goldschein, executive director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy.

Her organization, which also has a political action committee that endorses Democrats, recently hosted a “tariff-proof” cooking class in Chesapeake, Virginia, to drive attention to the issue. Attendees received tips like substituting chicken for beef, buying domestic produce, and choosing frozen over canned goods — all which have been affected by Trump’s ever-changing taxes on imports.

Goldschein and national organizers are targeting voters not only in Virginia, but in Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“This Republican-backed Congress and all of the members that come from states like this have really turned their backs on working families,” Goldschein told States Newsroom during an interview ahead of the cooking class.

In a state-by-state breakdown of tariffs, the conservative National Taxpayers Union Foundation and Trade Partnership Worldwide found the top 10 states most affected by Trump’s tariffs — in the tens of billions of dollars — are California, Texas, Michigan, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio and Tennessee. 

Virginia, where business owners have paid a collective $6.2 billion in tariffs ordered by Trump since January 2025, ranked 18th.

Nearly all are in the midst of fierce battles for U.S. Senate or House seats as tariffs emerge as what critics predict will be a major factor in the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

Ever-changing tariffs

New research shows Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs on imported goods have cost business owners and consumers billions of dollars. 

“The typical estimate has it being in the neighborhood of $1,000-plus per year of additional (consumer) costs, and maybe accounting for somewhere between one-half and 1 percentage point of the inflation rate. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if someone came along and gave you a tax increase of $1,100, which is about what this is, you’d feel it,” said Kimberly Clausing, economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics.

Clausing and fellow economist Maurice Obstfeld at the nonpartisan think tank reviewed 13 academic papers from 2025 and 2026 on Trump’s tariffs and the pass-through costs to consumers and businesses.

“What makes it a little confusing and hard to measure is that there’s been a lot of uncertainty about the trade policy, and so it’s come in spurts and reversals and restarts,” Clausing said, adding that some businesses may absorb the new taxes on imports at first but then eventually raise prices later.

“It’s not like you raise the tariff on day one and (on) day two all the prices have fully adjusted. It’s a little slower than that, but you do see absolutely evidence that with time the tariffs are being passed through to consumers, and very little evidence that foreigners are bearing a significant burden,” she said. 

Trump’s tariff policy has changed more than 50 times since he began his second term in January 2025, according to the Tax Foundation, a think tank that advocates for a slimmed-down tax code and “policies that lead to greater economic growth.”

As of Sept. 10, the foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs will cost each household an average $820 in 2026.

While Trump campaigned on the promise that other countries would pay for his tariffs, and vowed the same once he took office again, the statement has always been false, economists have documented. Tariffs are taxes that American businesses and individuals pay upon retrieving their shipments of items they’ve purchased from other countries. The tariffed goods fall into hundreds of categories — anything from machine parts to food.

The president’s early round of “emergency” and “reciprocal” tariffs imposed on worldwide goods in April 2025 were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in February. Since then, Trump has used three other statutes to justify charging import taxes on goods.

Impact spreads across states

The breakdown produced by the National Taxpayers Union found the biggest effects in states and industries scattered throughout America.

Sectors hit hardest by tariffs in the top 10 states include automobiles and auto parts; steel, aluminum and other metals; clothes and shoes; and food and beverages.

For example, businesses in Michigan have paid an extra $23 billion on imports, largely cars and trucks. Meanwhile, the food and beverage sector was hit hardest in Florida, where importers have paid an extra $11 billion since Trump began implementing new tariffs in 2025 through Aug. 4, 2026, according to the conservative organization’s analysis that drew from Census Bureau import data.

 

 

Bryan Riley, director of the National Taxpayers Union’s free trade initiative, described Trump’s tariffs during his second term as “a very costly policy.” 

“If you’re in a state like Georgia, big tariff costs are mainly because there’s a lot of auto manufacturing in Georgia, surprisingly to many people. And then that’s not going to be the case in New Mexico, which doesn’t have a lot of auto manufacturing, so (there are) less tariff costs and different categories hit in each state,” Riley said. 

The analysis did not account for any court-mandated refunds the Trump administration must pay back after the Supreme Court deemed the president’s initial emergency tariffs illegal. Those refunds to businesses are not necessarily passed on to consumers.

Trump and the cost of living

Polls show voters are growing increasingly frustrated with Trump’s handling of the economy, as his approval ratings plunge, and many of those surveyed are blaming the administration’s trade policy for the rising cost of living.

Overall, 69% of American adults, and 52% of Republicans, say Trump is not meeting his promise to fix the cost of living, according to an Associated Press/NORC nationwide poll of just over 2,100 voters from Sept. 24-28.

Specifically on trade and tariffs, the survey found that overall 68% of respondents disapprove of Trump’s trade negotiations with other countries, and 64% think the tariffs have gone too far.

Lincicome of the Cato Institute said it’s a “shocker” that tariffs are becoming a mainstream concern among voters.

When surveying just over 4,100 voters in mid-August, Cato and Morning Consult found 3 in 4 participants said they will consider tariffs when casting their midterm election ballot.

Additionally, the survey revealed 74% of respondents — 66% percent of Republicans and 84% of Democrats — blamed Trump’s tariffs for increased prices on items they buy at the store.

Lincicome, vice president of general economics for Cato, pointed to his home state of North Carolina, where Roy Cooper, the former Democratic governor now vying for an open U.S. Senate seat, is making opposition to tariffs a centerpiece of his affordability agenda.

“It’s pretty clear from both the polling and Democrats in not just North Carolina but Georgia and Iowa and other places (candidates) are really chomping at the bit to run on cost of living, and to say they’re going to nix all these tariffs. … Even in places like Ohio, where Sherrod Brown is trying to win,” Lincicome said.

Brown, a Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate from 2007-2025, was “one of the most consistent protectionists” of domestic manufacturing in the upper chamber, Lincicome said.

“Now all of a sudden he’s running on nixing the tariffs,” Lincicome said. “Now he’s not nearly as vocal as somebody like Cooper or (James) Talarico in Texas or Jon Ossoff in Georgia. He’s still saying he’s going to get rid of these tariffs, and that’s a pretty shocking change.”

Trump ‘skillfully used tariffs,’ White House says

The White House defended Trump’s record on the economy and said he has “skillfully” imposed tariffs.

“President Trump signed the largest working-class tax cuts in history, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, sealed the border, drove violent crime to the lowest level in nearly a century, unleashed an energy revolution, added more than a million private-sector jobs, and sent Americans’ 401(k)s climbing to record highs. 

“The President skillfully used tariffs to renegotiate almost 20 trade deals and level the playing field for American workers and businesses. The Trump administration has consistently maintained that the cost of tariffs will ultimately be borne by foreign exporters who rely on access to the American economy, the world’s biggest and best consumer market,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers. 

WASHINGTON — The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding his colleagues across the aisle apologize to former special counsel Jack Smith after Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt launched false accusations at a recent hearing and called the former Justice Department official a “dirtbag.”

Committee ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., accused his Republican counterparts in a letter Wednesday of violating committee rules for presenting records they say supported accusations against Smith at the Sept. 29 hearing. Committee Democrats, Durbin said, did not have a chance to review the records in advance or later.

“We request that you immediately provide these and all other documents that you have withheld, commit to fully complying with Senate rules in the future, and apologize to Mr. Smith on behalf of the Committee for the unacceptable personal attacks and false accusations of perjury he faced during this hearing,” Durbin wrote in the letter to GOP Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, first reported by Politico.

Durbin specifically highlighted a poster displayed by Schmitt’s staff purporting to show text messages between Smith and security personnel about his attendance at an Atlanta Hawks NBA game. Schmitt intimated the messages were proof that Smith had been in Atlanta during a development in the Fulton County, Georgia, election interference case against then-former President Donald Trump. 

Two staff members behind Schmitt quickly flashed the poster before the senator accused Smith of perjury for denying attendance at the game and said the former prosecutor will be remembered “as a total dirtbag.”

Democrats on the panel asked for, but did not receive, copies so that they and Smith could view the poster’s contents more clearly. 

The accusations were immediately debunked in real-time during the hearing when Smith said he recalled being at a University of Maryland women’s basketball game against the University of Iowa to see the popular Iowa player Caitlin Clark on the date in question.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., then clarified that Schmitt had confused the Iowa Hawkeyes with the Atlanta Hawks, in a humiliating moment for Schmitt that quickly spread on social media.

The situation, and lack of shared records, “caused needless confusion, slowed down the business of the Committee, introduced the possibility that false information would be entered uncontested into the record, and created an embarrassing stain on one of the most important committees in Congress,” Durbin wrote.

“While Senator Klobuchar successfully clarified that Mr. Smith had attended a basketball game in a different state on the date in question, and subsequent reporting confirmed the same, Senator Schmitt has since doubled down on his false assertions. He has continued to publicly call Mr. Smith a liar and ‘dirtbag,’” Durbin continued, citing repeated comments from Schmitt to news media following the hearing.

The Republican-led hearing, titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters,” followed nearly two years of allegations by Grassley that the former special counsel improperly collected phone records of dozens of members of Congress during his probe of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Grassley has also accused Smith of collecting information on Republican-affiliated organizations and individuals.

The insurrection followed Trump’s alleged conspiracy to create fake electors to swing the 2020 presidential election in his favor.

Smith denies any wrongdoing.

In an apparent response to the letter, Grassley posted on X just after 12:30 p.m. Eastern Thursday that “Jack Smith should apologize for taking the bank records of 42 Iowans & 4,782 Americans.”

When asked earlier for a response to Durbin’s letter, a spokesperson for Grassley pointed States Newsroom to the Iowa senator’s Sept. 29 comments about the hearing to Newsmax’s “The Record with Greta Van Susteren.” The comments did not include an apology. 

“I think that we learned through the thousands of pages that I’ve released to the public that Jack Smith was a tool of the Biden administration to put Trump in prison. (Trump) was the only one indicted, but the records that we (made) public today, and a few days ago, show that he swept at least 400 Republican organizations into his investigation, and 44 members of Congress by subpoenaing their phone records,” Grassley told the conservative media outlet.

In a response to Durbin’s letter on Friday, Grassley said committee Democrats “have run roughshod over Committee rules” in the past.

“I need not remind you that my oversight of this matter is years in the making, has been supported by courageous whistleblowers who came to my office concerned about the rotten political bias at the heart of Jack Smith’s investigation, and has been transparent with the American people and my Democratic colleagues from the get-go,” Grassley wrote in a four-page letter.

The Iowa Republican continued later in the letter: “Contrary to your misguided statement, the major embarrassment of the hearing was Democrats falling over themselves defending unlawful and unconstitutional actions by Jack Smith.”

The letter did not contain an apology, and Grassley said Democrats have been provided with thousands of pages of records and are invited to his office next week to review records Durbin specified in his letter.

Grassley further accused committee Democrats of failing to cooperate on previous investigations, including a 2020 COVID-19 matter, an inquiry into Hunter Biden and the vetting of Trump’s former personal attorney who now sits on the federal bench.

Schmitt’s office did not immediately respond for comment.

Durbin’s letter also requested records from Sen. Josh Hawley, also a Missouri Republican. Hawley’s office did not immediately respond for comment.

WASHINGTON — Every child in the United States with a valid Social Security number is now enrolled in a tax-advantaged investment account, titled a “Trump Account,” President Donald Trump announced Wednesday.

Parents must claim the accounts by downloading a Trump Account mobile app. Children born from 2025 through 2028 will automatically receive a one-time deposit of $1,000 from the U.S. government, once parents or guardians officially claim it. 

Children born before the eligibility window, up to age 10, can receive a $250 deposit donated by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, of Dell Technologies fortune.

Surrounded in the Oval Office by U.S. Treasury Department officials, business moguls and a half dozen children holding a banner reading, “Thank You for Trump Accounts,” the president said parents and guardians have voluntarily created accounts for 8 million children since the July 4 launch.

“With today’s announcement, we’re building on that success by 70 million accounts of children across America,” Trump said. “Put very simply, this money is your child’s future.”

The White House estimates over 60 million accounts have been added via auto-enrollment, but did not provide a specific figure.

The president signaled to the children standing by the Resolute Desk and said, “These beautiful young children are extremely rich — they are now, and they will be in the future, extremely rich. So they have something to look forward to.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the accounts mark the “beginning of the ownership society.” 

“I was talking to these great young people earlier,” he said. “They already know about compounding. They understand how the stock market works. … I think this is going to be a real-time financial literacy project.”

Investments from government, philanthropy

More than $4.5 billion has been deposited into the accounts since July 4, according to the White House.

Trump said Wednesday “much of that” has come from large donors, including the Dells, and Altimeter tech investment firm founder Brad Gerstner, who attended the announcement.

Parents and guardians have claimed roughly $2.6 billion in philanthropic contributions to date, with more available, according to the White House. The U.S. Treasury has so far seeded the accounts with $1.3 billion.

Another $638 million has been deposited into the accounts from friends and family of the individual accountholders, according to the administration.

Family and friends can contribute up to $5,000 annually to the accounts. Parents and guardians can elect to divert pre-tax contributions from their paychecks directly into their child’s account. Employers can match up to $2,500.

Over 70 companies have signed on to contribute to accounts of employees’ children, according to the White House.

Certain contributions, like the government’s one-time $1,000 deposit and contributions from state and local governments and nonprofits, do not count toward the $5,000 cap.

Susan Dell said she has received letters from parents and grandparents who have claimed the contribution from her foundation.

“It’s not just the money that matters — that does matter — but knowing that someone believes in you and your future that matters just as much,” she said. “These accounts are ready. They’re waiting for you, and they have money in them. So claim your child’s accounts and start adding money to their accounts and preserving a wonderful future for them.”

The Dell Foundation targeted the contributions to 25 million children from ZIP codes with median family incomes of up to $118,000.

The Trump administration is directing families to the website trumpaccounts.gov to find how to download the app and manage the account.

The White House estimates the government’s $1,000 seed money could grow to approximately $6,000 by age 18, if the family never contributed another dollar, assuming historical return data.

A child’s account that receives the maximum family and employer contributions of $5,000 at the start of each year could grow to nearly $200,000 by age 18, assuming a 7% annual rate of return, according to a Fidelity Investment hypothetical example, not adjusted for inflation. 

Used for retirement, education or down payment

The Trump Accounts, as named in the 2025 law dubbed “the big beautiful bill,” are structured like a traditional individual retirement account, but with different investment features and restrictions.

Money in the account can be invested in mutual funds or exchange traded funds that track the returns of large American companies, for example the S&P 500 index.

Investments will legally belong to a minor, but can only be managed by a parent or guardian until a child’s 18th birthday. 

The accounts are bound by certain restrictions, including a prohibition on withdrawals until age 18, when the account essentially becomes an individual retirement account subject to tax penalties for early withdrawal before age 59.5.

Some penalty-free exceptions include accessing the cash for a first-home purchase of up to $10,000, birth or child adoption fees up to $5,000 and qualifying medical expenses.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans did not gain any support Wednesday from Democrats as they attempted to advance a bill that mashed together two hot-button midterm issues: requiring voter ID in federal elections and limiting stock trading for members of Congress.

The Republican-led bill, titled the Stop Insider Trading Act, failed 53-47 when lawmakers stayed solidly within party lines for the procedural vote. Most legislation requires 60 votes, or three-fifths of the Senate, to advance.

The House-passed measure attached a voter ID requirement onto a base bill prohibiting members of Congress and their spouses and close family members from purchasing certain stocks, and requiring a public notice and waiting period prior to selling stocks. 

House lawmakers approved the legislative package by a 232-192 margin.

While 13 House Democrats supported the bill, sponsored by Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., despite plenty of criticism, Senate Democrats did not bite.

“The Senate GOP let their counterparts in the House take out all of the ban’s teeth and fill it with poison pills so it could never pass. This bill has no reform, no accountability, no substance,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor prior to the vote Wednesday.

House and Senate Democrats panned the legislation for being a weaker version of other bipartisan bills aimed at stopping members of Congress from potentially profiting off insider knowledge while trading stocks. The issue has drawn support from both parties over the past several years.

“Under (the) Republican bill, members would still get to own and sell stocks. And most importantly, this bill doesn’t do anything – anything – to stop Donald Trump from trading stocks. I guess Republicans forgot that Trump has made nearly 30,000 stock trades in the past year and raked in billions – more than all of Congress combined,” Schumer continued.

The New York Democrat also said the measure “would make voting more difficult in every state than it is now” and described it as “some of the most twisted, radical schemes Trump has ever dreamed up to rig our election.”

ID for voting

Under the measure, a voter would be required to present a current state-issued driver’s license or identification card, passport, valid military or veteran ID, or tribal government-issued ID card to be able to vote. 

If a voter doesn’t have one of the listed physical forms of identification, state election officials could issue a provisional ballot. The voter would then have three days to provide the accepted ID or an affidavit that the voter doesn’t have one because of religious objections to being photographed.

Additionally, state officials would be prohibited from accepting absentee ballots unless the voter attaches a copy of a valid ID, the last four digits of their Social Security number with an affidavit that they cannot obtain a photo ID, or a notarized statement that the voter personally completed their ballot.

‘Commonsense legislation’

Senate Republicans pushed for the bill ahead of the vote, including Nebraska Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, who posted Monday on X, “This bill would ban congressional insider trading. We need to pass this commonsense legislation and restore integrity to Congress.” 

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pointed to a Department of Justice indictment announced Wednesday to argue in support of the legislation.

Quoting a post on social media about DOJ allegations that 10 noncitizens voted in a previous election, Lee wrote: “Every Senate Democrat just voted against legislation that would stop this.”

While the DOJ has alleged instances of isolated election-related crimes, widespread voter fraud has never been credibly proven. 

A database published in 2024 by the right-leaning Heritage Foundation surveying millions of votes cast in seven states over decades found reported cases of fraud to be less than 1%, according to an analysis of the results by the progressive Brookings Institution.

A comprehensive body of research has found the practice to be exceedingly rare.

WASHINGTON — Small businesses will once again challenge President Donald Trump’s tariffs in federal court this week as they continue to feel the squeeze of the administration’s roller coaster policy on import taxes.

Spice importer Burlap & Barrel and rare watch importer Collective Horology will argue Wednesday in the Court of International Trade in New York City that the Trump administration did not properly establish forced labor cases against dozens of U.S. trading partners before levying duties on goods that numerous American importers buy.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative announced in late July that products from 60 top U.S. trading partners will be tariffed at 10% or 12.5%, depending on whether governments have or have not developed laws meant to combat forced labor. The new tariffs cover 99.4% of all goods imported into the United States, according to the office.

The plaintiffs, represented by the legal advocacy nonprofit Liberty Justice Center, allege the administration exceeded its tariff authority delegated by Congress under the forced labor statute, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. 

The plaintiffs also argue the tariffs are “arbitrary and capricious” because U.S. trade officials relied on “generalized assertions” that labor policies in 60 economies imposed concrete economic harm to the U.S.

Trade law expert blasts Trump usage

Ambassador Alan Wm. Wolff, a former trade official who helped draft the forced labor statute and filed a brief in support of the small business plaintiffs, said Section 301 was “designed for sort of a rifle shot of retaliation against a single foreign country doing some particular act that’s been verified.”

Wolff served in the Carter and Ford administrations, and later as a deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization.

“I sat through the executive sessions of the committees that were drafting the statute,” he said. “No one ever conceived of the idea that you could just create a sort of a fake, bogus test for other countries – 60 of them — that none of them could meet.”

Wolff told States Newsroom in an interview Sept. 21 that the statute has never been used in this way.

“If the U.S. was serious about forced labor being dealt with in this fashion … it would say, ‘Well, we’ll review it every six months, and if you put in a statute that has the following provisions, we would probably lift the tariff,’” he said. 

“There’s none of that because the purpose is to have the tariff, not to combat forced labor,” he continued.

The Department of Justice declined to comment Monday on ongoing litigation.

The White House and the Office of the United States Trade Representative did not respond Monday.

One tariff after another

The legal challenge on behalf of small business plaintiffs is not the first one to be brought by the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit that focuses on “high-impact cases that defend individual liberty and challenge government overreach,” according to its website.

In February, the organization secured a victory against the Trump administration when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the president’s unprecedented executive tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, referred to as IEEPA, were unconstitutional.

The organization won the case on behalf of several small business plaintiffs, ranging from an Illinois-based toymaker and New York-based wine importer, to a Utah-based plastics producer and a Pennsylvania-based fishing gear company, among others.

Almost immediately after the high court struck down his emergency tariffs, Trump imposed a new wide-reaching 10% tariff on global imports under a separate statute – Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The statute limited Trump to only 150 days.

The administration concurrently opened sweeping trade practice investigations, including under the Section 301 forced labor statute, on nearly all U.S. trading partners. The government announced its forced labor findings just as the earlier tariffs expired at the 150-day mark.

New duties ‘blatantly pretextual’

Sara Albrecht, the Liberty Justice Center’s CEO, described the administration’s new forced labor tariffs as “blatantly pretextual” to replace duties imposed under Section 122.

“And Section 122 was pretextual for the IEEPA tariff that rolled off this year when he lost at the Supreme Court. So we feel like our job wasn’t done because we struck down the IEEPA tariff, and then the administration just did it again,” Albrecht said.

The organization is again representing small business plaintiffs who allege harm to their bottom line because of the administration’s tariff policy. 

Burlap & Barrel, a New York-based company with warehouses in Hagerstown, Maryland, and Las Vegas imports spices from 22 countries. The California-based Collective Horology imports high-end mechanical watches from independent makers in six European nations.

“They are two individual American small businesses that have been swept up in a political kind of debate. We’re arguing this on behalf of every American small business, every American business that is being forced to once again pay illegal tariffs,” Albrecht said.

The organization has asked the Court of International Trade for class status.

“You have to keep in mind that they’re just getting their IEEPA refunds right now, and we’re almost done with that. But they had to start paying Section 122 (tariffs), and then when that stopped, they had to pay Section 301 (tariffs). So a lot of these businesses are effectively loaning all of their working capital to the U.S. government while we kind of sort this out in court,” Albrecht said.

The Liberty Justice Center had also challenged the Section 122 tariffs on behalf of Burlap & Barrel.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is still in the process of refunding roughly $166 billion worth of tariffs paid by businesses under Trump’s IEEPA import charges.

“We’re a small nonprofit that is, you know, 12 attorneys trying to again strike down the tariffs, and it would be nice if someone else wanted to jump into the fight,” Albrecht said. “So we’re doing the best we can, and I think we’ve done a good job so far.”

Prior to the tariff case win, the organization was most well known for its role in successfully arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus v. AFSCME, in which its client Mark Janus challenged public sector unions over paying dues.

WASHINGTON — Former special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday defended before a U.S. Senate panel his past investigations of President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents and alleged role in attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Judiciary Committee Republicans repeatedly dissected Smith’s work and accused him of weaponizing the Department of Justice. In a heated exchange, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., labeled Smith a “total dirtbag” and alleged he had perjured himself when Schmitt asked if Smith was in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024, during a separate sensitive election investigation development in Fulton County, Georgia. Smith said he was not there.

But it became clear Schmitt had bungled the accusations against Smith by mixing up the names of the Atlanta Hawks and Iowa Hawkeyes basketball teams, and the back-and-forth went viral on social media. Smith had attended a University of Maryland Terrapins game against the Hawkeyes, not a Hawks game, on the date in question.

 

 

Smith said in his opening statement he “will not be silenced” by threats, including Trump’s calls for his prosecution.

“I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including my decision to bring charges against President Trump,” Smith said. “I made those decisions without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election.”

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith said.

Grassley: not ‘normal prosecution’

The hearing comes nearly two years after committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, alleged the former special counsel improperly collected phone records of dozens of members of Congress during his probe of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The insurrection followed Trump’s alleged conspiracy to create fake electors to swing the 2020 presidential election in his favor.

Smith denies any wrongdoing.

In his opening remarks, Grassley argued Smith’s investigation “ultimately wasn’t just about Trump.”

“It was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus,” Grassley said.

“This wasn’t a normal prosecution by any means. Yet today, you will certainly hear from Democrats that it was. Importantly, Mr. Smith has claimed his focus was on January 6, but his own conduct contradicts that,” Grassley said moments later, citing subpoenas for records before and after the date of Jan. 6, 2021, and those that included Republican interest groups.

Durbin says ‘nothing untoward’

Democrats dismissed the hearing’s premise and repeatedly evoked memories of evacuating the U.S. Senate while a mob of Trump supporters violently overran law enforcement and attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Ranking member Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said attacks on Smith “are nothing but a smokescreen to distract from the president’s own clear unlawful conduct.”

“Let me be clear: there was nothing untoward about special counsel Smith and his fellow prosecutors conducting this investigation. The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith nonstop are petty, personal, and political,” Durbin said.

Sen. Cory Booker, who is speculated to be eyeing a presidential run in 2028, said the hearing amounted to “gaslighting the American people.”

The New Jersey Democrat said the scenario “should be chilling to every American that the commander-in-chief … did everything he could to undermine the legal transfer of power, incited a riot, which several Republicans said he did, and we’re now persecuting the prosecutors who followed the evidence.”

Kennedy, Cruz attack Smith

But Senate Republicans maintained accusations that the Biden administration targeted Trump for prosecution just days after he announced he would challenge then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, asked Smith if he told then-Attorney General Merrick Garland that he intended to prosecute the former president.

“I did so twice,” Smith answered.

“And the attorney general checked with President Biden. Is that right?” Kennedy asked.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Smith said, adding that he made an “independent decision” to prosecute.

“I made that decision on my own, consulting with my staff and reviewing the incredibly strong evidence that we had,” he said.

Kennedy also accused Smith of partisanship for only seeking phone records of Republicans during his investigation.

“The toll records that we sought were relevant to the investigation,” Smith told Kennedy, referring to historical logs that reveal time and duration of calls rather than content.

 

 

“Were you in the quad playing frisbee during (constitutional) law at Harvard Law School?” Kennedy asked, accusing Smith of violating the speech and debate clause that protects members of Congress.

“You make me want to throw up in my mouth,” Kennedy said.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who is widely considered a potential 2028 Republican presidential candidate, also attacked non-disclosure orders Smith obtained to keep the phone record subpoenas confidential.

Smith maintains he sought the orders in compliance with the law.

“Let me say congratulations, because you have succeeded where Richard Nixon failed, which is weaponizing the Department of Justice and the federal government to go after your political opponents,” Cruz said.

Details on the ‘dirtbag’ back-and-forth

The viral exchange with Schmitt came about when he falsely accused Smith of being in Atlanta when Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was prosecuting Trump on a separate election conspiracy case, admitted she had a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor. 

As his proof, Schmitt’s aide briefly displayed a large poster containing alleged texts between staff members about Smith’s attendance at an NBA game between the Atlanta Hawks and Golden State Warriors.

Smith said he could not recall going to an NBA game in Atlanta, or even visiting the city during his time as special prosecutor.

“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a moment to process it so you don’t perjure yourself,” Schmitt said.

“You just took it down really quick, if I could look at that again,” Smith said. 

When Durbin requested Schmitt provide Smith with a copy of the alleged texts, the Missouri Republican moved on to his next question and said “I think you’ve already perjured yourself.”

Wrapping up his questioning, Schmitt said, “You may think you’re a hero in this story, but let me tell you something, you’re a villain. … You will go down as a total dirtbag.”

Booker, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., prodded Schmitt to display the poster board again and provide a copy.

Smith said he recalled being at a University of Maryland women’s basketball game against the University of Iowa to see the popular Iowa player Caitlin Clark.

“Could it be the Iowa Hawkeyes then … Perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully?” Klobuchar said to Schmitt. 

Schmitt criticized Klobuchar for interjecting before being officially called on for questioning.

“I’m gonna begin my questioning now, but I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag,” Klobuchar said.

How the Trump cases turned out

Trump fought Smith’s prosecutions and claimed in court he was entitled to presidential immunity for any of his actions surrounding the 2020 election.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in early 2024.

Smith dropped the election conspiracy case after Trump won the presidential election in November 2024.

Months prior, a Florida federal judge dismissed Smith’s case alleging Trump hoarded sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office in 2021. 

Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the case in July 2024 on the grounds that the Biden administration illegally appointed Smith.

WASHINGTON — Despite skyrocketing fuel prices and sinking approval ratings for President Donald Trump’s conflict in Iran ahead of the November midterms, Senate Republicans blocked Democrats’ efforts Thursday to check the president’s unfettered military action in the Middle East.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., joined Democrats in supporting the House-approved Iran War Powers Resolution. 

But the number of Republicans who wanted to curb Trump’s prolonged military action in the Islamic Republic fell short in the final tally of 49-50.

While Collins, Murkowski and Paul have supported Iran War Powers Resolutions over the past several months, Thursday’s vote marked the first time the retiring Tillis crossed the aisle on the issue. 

The North Carolina Republican announced he would not seek reelection after Trump publicly harangued him for voting against the “big beautiful bill” in July 2025. 

Sen. John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, voted against the resolution, as he has on more than a dozen occasions. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., did not vote.

Senate Republicans locked in tight races, including one who spoke out about the war just one day ago, voted against the measure.

Sen. Jon Husted, who is facing a heated challenge in Ohio from former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, said Wednesday, “The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices,” according to Politico.

Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, who’s facing a challenge from Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, and Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican facing an increasingly tight race, also voted no.

House passes resolution

The block in the Senate comes after seven House Republicans, including two vulnerable Iowa incumbents who for the first time supported halting the Iran conflict via a War Powers Resolution, jumped on board with Democrats Sept. 15 to pass the measure 220-204.

Iowa Republicans Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks both face tough reelection bids rated as “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

The war has dragged on since late February, ricocheting through the Middle East and disrupting global oil supplies. Americans are paying on average $1.30 more per gallon of gasoline than they were a year ago, according to AAA. Diesel hit a record high national average of $6.52 Tuesday.

Trump mulls war options

Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signaled this week neither were ready to settle the conflict when they addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. 

Trump contemplated aloud whether he would “annihilate” Iran’s population “with no chance of survival” if the Islamic Republic leaders refused to make a deal. Trump has made similar comments as far back as April, when he was still promising a swift end to the conflict.

Thursday’s vote marks the 14th time Senate Democrats have forced an Iran War Powers Resolution on the floor. Thursday’s vote was on Washington state Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s resolution that passed the House on July 23.  

A similar measure squeaked through the Senate 50-48 on June 23, when Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., joined Collins, Murkowski and Paul in support – though two Republicans, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell and Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick, were absent.

Cassidy lost the Senate Republican primary recently after Trump endorsed another candidate. But Cassidy voted against the latest War Powers Resolution Thursday.

Diesel export ban

Iowa’s longtime Sen. Chuck Grassley urged the White House as recently as Wednesday to ban diesel oil exports.

Trump administration officials have so far tiptoed around the issue of halting diesel exports. The White House denied a Politico report Wednesday claiming the administration was preparing for a 90-day embargo. Energy Secretary Chris Wright reportedly told Reuters Wednesday that an export ban would put “upward pressure” on the oil market and increase prices.

A White House official denied the Politico report in an email to States Newsroom Thursday.

But Trump signaled Tuesday that he’s “been talking about it” and supports the idea, according to reporters who traveled with him to New York.

Global petroleum supply is backlogged as Iran maintains its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen gain more control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Both narrow passageways on either side of the Arabian Peninsula are major transit points for crude oil and liquid natural gas exports, among other commodities like fertilizer. 

Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russian oil refineries are also contributing to rising fuel prices. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sharply criticized Russia during his address at the U.N. Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump faces a “big decision” to make a deal with Iran or “annihilate” the country, he told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. 

During a 37-minute speech to his international counterparts including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, in New York City, Trump asked, “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?

“Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly … Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” he said.

Speaking at the annual gathering aimed at promoting multilateral discussion among 193 member nations, Trump suggested Iranian leaders were waiting to see the results of the approaching midterm elections for control of Congress before any major negotiating decision.

“I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election because it doesn’t make sense for them not to,” he said. “They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don’t realize is that I’m not running.”

Iran tied to GOP midterm woes

Republicans running to maintain the majority in Congress in November face a difficult task amid sinking public support for Trump’s costly, months-long war in Iran. 

The Pentagon has confirmed 19 U.S. troops have died in the conflict, though The Washington Post has reported a more accurate count is either 22 or 23. Roughly 830 service members have been injured.

And the war has spiked the price of fuel to record levels.

Trump’s approval rating hit a record low of 32%, according to the latest polling figures published Monday by Reuters/Ipsos.

Diesel hit a new high Tuesday, reaching a national average of $6.52 per gallon, according to AAA. Gasoline hovered at $4.47 a gallon. 

The cost of energy commodities and services, a main driver of current inflation, is up 16.3% over last year, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index.

Iran maintains its stranglehold of the Strait of Hormuz, a major global petroleum trade passageway, amid a U.S. naval blockade. And Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen are now targeting the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint for Saudi Arabian oil exports.

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on yet another War Powers Resolution this week aimed at curbing Trump’s military actions in Iran. Seven House Republicans joined Democrats Sept. 16 in passing a measure to stop Trump’s unilateral decision-making in Iran.

‘They want to talk’

Trump told reporters just before 2 p.m. Eastern that U.S. officials had met with Iranian leaders after his speech for what he described as “a very good meeting.” He did not provide further detail, according to reporters who traveled with him to New York City.

Speaking to reporters just before 1 p.m. Eastern, Trump said he believed “a settlement is going to be reached.” 

“They want to talk to us,” Trump said. “They have been talking to us even today. They’ve been talking to us. The relationship is developing, I’d say. But we can’t let them (have a nuclear weapon). They understand that. … And there’s a price to pay for that.”

White House pool

Trump’s trip to New York City also comes as major U.S. media organizations refused to distribute video, audio or photos of the president after he banned CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House. The three organizations have sued on First Amendment grounds.

He told reporters Tuesday he has a right “to clean out fake news,” which he also described as “dangerous.”

When pressed by a reporter on how the media outlets are “dangerous,” Trump responded: “When they make statements about the war, when they make false statements, false stories, and they don’t have sources but they say they do, it’s very dangerous for our country.”

Iran’s Permanent Mission to the UN did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. An email address listed for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs appeared to be inoperable.

Upon arrival at the United Nations this week, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araqchi criticized what he called a “cowardly” war launched by the U.S. in conjunction with Israel on Feb. 28, according to a translation posted on his ministry’s website.

“This year, after the war that took place, it is natural that this rostrum will be a place to express the oppression of the Iranian people, the martyrs of Iran, the martyrs of Minab School, and at the head of them, our martyred leader and leader,” Abbas Araqchi said, referring to early strikes during the war that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his family members and over 100 elementary school children. 

Iranian security forces killed thousands of Iranians in January as part of a crackdown on protests against the current government, according to Human Rights Watch and other advocates and observers.

Threat repeated

Trump’s speech Tuesday was not the first time he’s threatened a choice between striking peace with or heavily attacking Iran. 

Just before a short-lived ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. took effect in April, Trump threatened “a whole civilization will die” if Iran did not cooperate with U.S. demands.

The comment drummed up vocal opposition from some Republicans. 

Speaking about another military conflict, Trump said his Board of Peace was working to stabilize the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip following three years of bombardment by the Israeli government. When listing the countries involved in that effort, he twice mispronounced Kazakhstan.

The board claimed in a statement in July it reached an agreement for the “COMPLETE DISARMAMENT” of Hamas, the militant organization that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, though the conflict remains ongoing.

Trump highlighted in his Tuesday remarks to global leaders the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and claimed the U.S. “is stronger today than ever before.” He repeated familiar refrains on domestic policies, including his immigration agenda and crime statistics in the nation’s capital. 

He also briefly mentioned he would require federal documents to use the term “super intelligence” in place of “artificial intelligence.” Trump has ardently defended the use of AI without guardrails in recent weeks after tech leaders issued a warning to slow its development.

The White House pointed States Newsroom to Trump’s comments to the press following the speech.

WASHINGTON — Diesel prices hit a record average of $6.51 a gallon Monday, and some in President Donald Trump’s own party are breaking their support for the ongoing war in Iran that has driven fuel prices to staggering levels in the United States and across the globe.

Already House Republicans locked in tight races as the November midterms approach have distanced themselves from the president’s conflict and his administration’s stagnant negotiations with Iran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passage for global petroleum products. Another major vote on Iran support is expected later this week in the U.S. Senate.

The cost of diesel, which fuels the movement of goods through the United States, is up nearly $1 since last month, and up from just over $3.69 a year ago, according to AAA. 

The national average cost for a gallon of gasoline landed at just over $4.47 Monday, up more than a dollar from last year’s average at $3.18, according to the motor club’s daily monitor.

Trump has an opportunity this week to potentially meet with Iranian officials, as leaders head to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Trump told Fox News on Sunday he is “open” to meeting with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Trump said he is in “deciding mode” about next steps in Iran, and that “big things” will happen in the “not so distant future,” he told the network’s Trey Yingst. 

Grassley wants diesel embargo

Longtime Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley urged Trump throughout the weekend to embargo diesel fuel exports as costs impact farmers in his largely agricultural state. 

“W(ith) diesel $6.57 in Iowa why doesn’t Pres Trump put an embargo on diesel exports like presidents in the 70s put embargoes on (agricultural) products bc food prices were inflated. High diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME,” Grassley wrote Saturday on X, followed by two more posts on Sunday urging the president to put “AMERICA FIRST.”

The administration does not have plans at this time to ban or restrict diesel exports, according to a White House official Monday. 

Seven House Republicans broke ranks last week and voted in support of stopping Trump’s war with Iran unless Congress approved further action. 

The Republicans included two vulnerable Iowa representatives, Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who are facing tough reelection bids in the fast-approaching midterm elections.

Democratic senators are expected to move on a War Powers Resolution vote this week. 

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Wednesday he will force the vote to continue applying pressure on Trump to stop the military campaign that has not been authorized by Congress.

“We’re gonna force a vote to end this illegal war every week until we succeed,” Kaine said in a video posted to X. 

Two Republicans who will not serve in Congress next year, largely due to Trump’s public opposition to them, have also spoken out against the Pentagon leadership.

House Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who has consistently supported War Powers Resolutions on Iran, unexpectedly introduced articles of impeachment last week against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, citing his leadership during the Iran conflict. 

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told reporters on Capitol Hill Thursday that Hegseth “needs to go.” Tillis has voted no on multiple War Powers Resolutions aimed at ending hostilities in Iran.

Energy commodities up 16.3%

Inflation continued a steady march upwards in August, with fuel leading the way, according to the government’s latest consumer price index. 

The cost of all types of gasoline and fuel oil rose 3.9% from July to August. All energy commodities and services, like electricity, shot up 16.3% over the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump and his administration officials have downplayed the squeeze on Americans at the pump, and Trump has promised fuel prices will drop “quickly” once the conflict ends.

On Monday he shifted the blame for skyrocketing diesel prices on to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Russia has unfortunately lost control of its Diesel Oil Industry due to its War with Ukraine. A large number of their Diesel refineries have been blown up and are, at least temporarily, out of commission. This ridiculous and never ending War with Ukraine must be ended,” he wrote on his platform Truth Social.

Vice President JD Vance told reporters Monday that the administration “is doing everything we can” to reduce energy prices, and suggested that states should suspend gas taxes.

“We’re very cognizant of the fact that because the Iranians are terrorizing international shipping, energy prices are elevated,” he said.

Meanwhile the conflict has expanded in the Middle East as Iran -backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fight for control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a key route for Saudi Arabian oil exports. 

The State Department issued a safety alert Saturday to U.S. citizens in the Middle East, warning “the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation.”

“Americans currently in the Middle East should exercise heightened vigilance and be aware of potential flight cancellations, airspace closures, and travel disruptions,” according to the warning, which instructs American travelers to make sure cell phones are charged at all times and to “keep a low profile.”

WASHINGTON — A federal judge told the Trump administration Friday a case against the Department of Justice’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is “still alive and kicking.”

The administration sought to dismiss the case brought against President Donald Trump’s negotiated settlement terms to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for a years-old grievance over leaked tax returns. 

The settlement, brokered by the DOJ and Department of Treasury and met by heated opposition even from Republicans, established a massive taxpayer-funded settlement fund to pay “victims of lawfare.” It also included retroactive relief from tax audits and enforcement for Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization.

Critics of the fund asserted the likelihood that violent participants who assaulted police during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol could reap a reward from the pot of money.

The administration maintains the fund never became operational and that the case is moot, though it refused to provide a sworn statement requested by the court saying as much.  Attorney General Todd Blanche testified at his July 15 confirmation hearing that the fund is “dead” and “never started.”

30 days to produce documents

On Friday, Judge Leonie Brinkema at the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia overruled the government’s objection to producing evidence and gave DOJ 30 days to produce documents potentially revealing who structured the deal. 

The “real concern,” she said is “this concept of taxpayer money being used to promote political viewpoints.”

“I think the fund now is gone, but is there a functional equivalent?” she asked, noting violators of federal laws that the administration opposes, like protections for abortion clinic clients, could be paid from a DOJ judgment fund.

Plaintiffs, including individuals and interest groups, sued the DOJ, Blanche and Treasury officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano.

Among the numerous plaintiffs are Andrew Floyd, a former assistant U.S. attorney who alleges he was fired for prosecuting Jan. 6 defendants, and the nonprofit National Abortion Federation, which represents abortion providers and advocates for abortion access.

Pooja Boisture, counsel for the plaintiffs, argued Friday the fund is “discriminatory.”

“This fund was designed to reward and give credence to election deniers and violators of the FACE Act,” she said, referring to the 1994 law that penalizes violence or threats from protesters against those entering to abortion clinics.

In response to a request for comment on Friday’s hearing, a DOJ spokesperson said, “The Department is confident that the court lacks jurisdiction over this lawsuit against the (anti-weaponization fund), which never started and isn’t moving forward.”

Constitutional question

The plaintiffs also allege the tax immunity arrangement for Trump, his sons and private conglomerate amounts to an unfair gain or advantage for the president, therefore violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

The National Treasury Employees Union is also party to the suit and brought the claim of an emoluments violation, as well as allegations of injury to tax auditors who may have been told to stop any audits of Trump.

“These members have no good options: If they comply with a request to terminate audits, they violate their oath of office; and if they refuse to comply, they will likely face retaliation for insubordination,” the union argued in a court filing.

The plaintiffs allege the president has ongoing audits that will be terminated under the immunity deal. 

Lisa Newman, attorney for the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward that is representing the plaintiffs, also told Brinkema, “We do plead that the president was participating in negotiation of the settlement.”

Newman referred to public reporting by The New York Times on May 19 that a loss in an IRS audit of Trump’s previous tax returns could cost him roughly $100 million.

Andrew Block, senior counsel for the Justice Department, told Brinkema he’s “not aware there are or (are) not” audits of the president’s tax returns from that period of time.

“It is speculation to say … that there was an improper request,” he said.

Brinkema shot back that Trump’s underlying $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS is “unique.”

“The plaintiff is absolutely controlling the defendants” who are at risk of being fired by the president on “a whim,” she said.

Settlement ‘castrated’ by judge

Brinkema said the Florida federal judge in Trump’s IRS case “castrated” the settlement in a July 13 order, adding the president’s underlying lawsuit against the nation’s tax enforcement agency is “extraordinarily relevant” to the lawsuit before her.

Judge Kathleen Williams for the  U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, where Trump filed his lawsuit, wrote in a 56-page order that “No sitting President has ever sued federal agencies completely subject to his control for monetary benefits, or any benefits that inure to him, his family, and associates.” 

“The failure of any attorney in this case to address, on this docket, the relationship of this Article II proscription with the benefits conferred by the ‘settlement’ is a glaring omission that speaks to the control of the Lead Plaintiff,” Williams wrote.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday for the first time in three years as inflation continues to dog the economy, largely driven by soaring gas and fuel oil prices while the war in Iran drags on.

The central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee voted 12-0 to increase its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, reaching the new range from 3.75% to 4% and making the cost of borrowing more expensive for Americans.

The committee released an upbeat statement touting economic growth at “a solid pace.”

“While uncertainty remains elevated owing, in part, to geopolitical developments, domestic spending has been resilient. Productivity growth is strong, and capital investment is robust. Job gains have kept pace with the workforce, and the unemployment rate has changed little,” according to the statement released Wednesday afternoon.

“Inflation remains elevated. Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal. The Committee will deliver price stability,” the statement continued.

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, four months into his tenure, described Wednesday’s unanimous decision to raise rates as “sober.”

“The plain fact is that inflation is too high, and has been for too long,” Warsh said during a press conference following the Fed’s meeting.

“This summer’s inflation readings do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved. … Too many categories are still posting increases above 3 percent on both a six and 12-month basis,” Warsh said.

Trump campaign for lower rates

President Donald Trump publicly pressured and name-called Warsh’s predecessor Jerome Powell for months for not lowering interest rates. 

The public attacks escalated into a federal probe of Powell and the Fed for costly renovations at the Fed’s headquarters in Washington. The administration eventually dropped the investigation.

Trump criticized the rate increase on his Truth Social platform Wednesday afternoon, saying the U.S. rates “should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World — BY FAR.”

“Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word “Deficit” is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are “carrying” almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!,” he wrote.

Warsh declined to answer questions from reporters about Trump’s previous calls for lower interest rates.

“Part of the independence of the Federal Reserve is we stay in our lane,” Warsh said.

The interest hike comes less than a week after the government’s latest consumer price index revealed the cost of food, energy, housing and other goods and services rose 0.4% from July to August. The cost of all items over the past year has risen 3.4%.

Rep. Jason Smith, the Republican chair of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, criticized the decision, saying in a statement that “interest rates should be coming down, not going up.”

The Missouri Republican praised the Trump-led “big beautiful bill” tax law passed last summer for delivering “larger paychecks” to Americans, and he blamed former President Joe Biden for past higher inflation.

“After years of elevated borrowing costs, a rate increase is the opposite of the relief families and small businesses need. As President Trump works to restore stability in the Middle East and bring down energy prices, the Fed should recognize the progress,” Smith said in a written statement Wednesday afternoon. 

Soaring gas prices

Spiking energy prices caused by the war in Iran were the main driver behind higher costs. Gasoline alone rose 3.9% over the month of August. 

As of Wednesday, Americans were paying an average of nearly $4.37 a gallon at the pump, according to AAA. Diesel prices reached a record high of $6.31.

The price of a barrel of oil surged above $100 in recent days, including Wednesday afternoon, when it reached $105, as fighting flared in the Middle East. 

The United States and Iran continue launching rockets in the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s petroleum traveled prior to the war. U.S. Central Command claimed Sept. 8 that it “destroyed” five Iranian crude oil carriers as part of its naval blockade aimed at damaging Iran’s economy.

The conflict spilled over in July into another key waterway for Saudi Arabian oil exports. Iran-backed Houthi rebels restarted an assault on commercial vessels in the Red Sea for the first time since 2024, and are fighting for control of the Bab al-Mandab strait. The group also directly struck targets in Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, beginning in July, and is threatening more strikes, according to Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree. The United Nations Security Council is warning of the likelihood of a humanitarian crisis. 

When asked by a reporter at Wednesday’s press conference how incremental rate hikes will help when geopolitical events do not show signs of improvement, Warsh said the Fed “cannot affect any individual price, whether it be oil prices, whether it be foodstuffs at the grocery store.”

“But what we can do and will do is ensure that any change in relative prices don’t broaden out, don’t have second and third order effects on the economy. That’s what we’re tasked to do, and that’s what we will do,” Warsh said.

WASHINGTON — As the November midterms approach, vulnerable U.S. House Republicans voted late Tuesday to require congressional approval for President Donald Trump to continue his war in Iran.

Seven Republicans broke ranks and joined all Democrats to pass a War Powers Resolution sponsored by Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat. Tuesday’s vote marked the third time since June that the House passed a measure to curb Trump’s military powers in Iran. The war has dragged on for over half a year.

The vote came as diesel prices reached a record high of $6.31 per gallon in the United States, and gas hovered at an average of nearly $4.37 a gallon Wednesday, according to AAA. 

Global oil markets have been rocked since Iranian officials effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, a major petroleum trade route. The conflict has since expanded, and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are slowing traffic through another major trade passage, the Bab-al Mandab Strait.

The resolution passed, 220-204, despite Republicans’ narrow majority in the chamber. GOP House members who voted for the Iran War Powers Resolution for the first time included Zach Nunn and Marianette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

Nunn and Miller-Meeks both face tough reelection bids in Iowa. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter rates both races as “toss-ups.”

Mace lost her South Carolina gubernatorial primary bid in June and is not seeking reelection to the House.

‘Open-ended war’

Nunn posted on social media Tuesday that, as a U.S. Air Force veteran who flew missions in the Middle East, he could not support “another open-ended war,” though he still believes the Islamic Republic “must be held accountable for killing Americans, supporting terrorism, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and pursuing nuclear weapons.” 

Presidents have a 60-day period to pursue military action with congressional approval, but that window has passed, he added.

“Iowa has already paid a devastating price, including two service members killed by an Iranian drone in Kuwait,” Nunn wrote on X late Tuesday night. “Congress owes them, their families, and every American in uniform clear objectives and constitutional oversight. … We can defend Americans, pressure Iran, and pursue peace while ensuring Congress fulfills its constitutional responsibility.” 

Miller-Meeks posted Wednesday morning that with her 24 years served in the Army, she remains skeptical of Trump’s actions in Iran. 

“I said it in March: the mission had to stay focused and limited, because Americans do not want another forever war. I will not vote to keep our soldiers in an open-ended war, with Iowans paying too much at the pump,” Miller-Meeks wrote on X.

“The Iranian regime and its nuclear ambitions have been defanged,” she continued. “The President needs to present a plan to Congress and the American people for how this ends so we can focus on bringing our soldiers home and lowering prices.”

Third House vote

Nunn, Miller-Meeks and Mace joined House Republican Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who have now each voted three times to rein in Trump’s actions in the Iran conflict. Massie voted yes an additional time in April, but the measure failed to pass the House then.

Massie on Tuesday introduced eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his handling of the war in Iran.

The Trump administration maintains War Powers Resolutions are unconstitutional and has dismissed the measures passed in both chambers. Similar War Powers Resolutions to stop Trump’s hostilities in Iran cleared procedural votes in the Senate in May and June. The Senate has voted on such measures 13 times.

Congress overrode a veto from President Richard Nixon to enact the War Powers Resolution statute, at the time aimed at reining in Nixon’s actions in Vietnam.

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Kash Patel sidestepped questions about FBI agents at polling places in the midterm elections at a U.S. Senate hearing Tuesday that also featured a tense exchange between GOP Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

With the November midterm elections fast approaching and the parties jockeying for control of Congress, several Democratic senators wanted assurance from Patel, under oath, that the FBI would not send agents into polling places.

“Do you pledge that you will not, in any way, interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November?” Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, asked.

“I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel told Welch.

Patel in addition faced questions during the five-hour hearing from members of the Judiciary Committee about recent changes to the agency’s hiring requirements, an ongoing probe into 2020 election ballots seized in Georgia, and how the FBI plans to handle crimes committed by AI agents. 

‘We have a lackey here’

A boiling point came when Booker spoke beyond his allotted time and name-called Patel a “thug” who “wouldn’t qualify” to be an FBI special agent. 

Booker accused Patel of not answering questions about whether the agency was improperly targeting journalists. The FBI subpoenaed multiple New York Times reporters in July after the outlet published accounts of security deficiencies on President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-donated jet now used as Air Force One. The DOJ dropped the subpoenas later that month after a federal judge pressured the agency.

“My concluding remark is we don’t have an FBI director. We have a lackey here who is using government, and frankly, he’s not even a good lackey. He’s an incompetent lackey. He’s like an 18-year-old kid who wants to join a fraternity that he could never be a member of, doing keg stands and chugging with friends,” Booker said, before continuing the exchange for roughly four minutes more.

“Are you ready to shut up?” Grassley, of Iowa, asked Booker with a raised voice.

 

 

Patel brushed off Grassley’s offer during the exchange to respond to Booker.

“I don’t have much to say. This guy called me a thug. It’s kind of ironic. He’s running for president of the United States. He just got his 20-second ad campaign,” Patel said. “Next.”

Booker told NBC News’ “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” in March that he’s “definitely not ruling out” a presidential run in 2028.

Grassley thanked Patel for “putting up with what you had to put up with.”

“And I’m sorry I couldn’t control some of them more than I already did,” he said.

Democratic probes promised

Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, warned a Democratic-led Congress would investigate the FBI’s actions under Patel’s leadership. 

That includes the alleged firing of agents who worked on investigations of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack and President Donald Trump’s alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago following his first term.

“The FBI is being sued for wrongful termination. I will remind you, director, because you probably need reminding, that while this Congress is not going to investigate the wrongful termination of potentially hundreds of agents for working on properly predicated investigations, the next Congress will,” Schiff said.

The panel’s Republicans praised Patel for his record at the agency.

Patel said his agency “has made America safer than it’s ever been.”

“Across six America 250 events and this year’s World Cup alone, we welcomed over 12 million visitors to the United States to attend these events. Not one single incident occurred at any single one of these events,” he said during his opening remarks.

Bizarre exchange over FBI hiring

One topic that drew scrutiny from both sides of the aisle was a recent reported change at the FBI that lifted previous disqualifying behavior for special agent recruits, including theft from employers, prostitution and bestiality.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said he understands “the game” of Democrats broaching the subject of bestiality to “make you look bad,” but said he was also “trying to get to the bottom of this.”

In a bizarre and unexpected exchange for a Senate hearing, Kennedy asked hypothetically, “If ‘Joe’ participated in bestiality, not as the animal, but as the human, don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?” 

“If he voluntarily did it, sure,” Patel said.

Kennedy interrupted, “Okay, how do you involuntarily do that?”

Patel said some people are trafficked and forced into “degrading acts of all kind,” but later want to join the FBI.

“But you’re not telling us today that if a human being (voluntarily) had sex with an animal that they can still be an FBI agent?” Kennedy asked.

“No,” Patel responded.

“In fact, they ought to be in jail, right?” Kennedy shot back.

“They all are,” Patel said.

“Yea, well, okay,” Kennedy said.

FBI at polling locations

On the topic of an FBI presence at the polls on Nov. 3, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Patel he was “dissatisfied that you are unable to give us an unequivocal, clear, unambiguous commitment that the FBI will be kept out of election interference.”

“You are involved in seven voter-related subpoenas issued to the Nevada Secretary of State’s office, you were involved in seizure of election records from Fulton County, Georgia. Clearly, the FBI has been involved in possible election interference,” Blumenthal said.

FBI agents seized 2020 presidential election ballots in Fulton County in January.

The Trump administration served voter-related subpoenas earlier this month in Nevada.

Welch told Patel he’s concerned about what he’s “willing to do for the president in this year’s midterm elections that the president is already saying are going to be rigged if he loses.”

Moments later Welch asked, “Last month, Congressman and Michigan gubernatorial candidate John James said to podcaster Benny Johnson, quote, ‘I’ve already had a good conversation with my friend Kash Patel, who has said already that the FBI will have a presence leading up to Election Day in Michigan, in both West Michigan and Southeast Michigan.’ Is that true?”

“We have an election crimes community coordinator in all 56 field offices, so you bet we’re going to have them there and manning the posts for election interference,” Patel said.

The exchange continued for several minutes, growing more contentious, as Welch pressed for an answer and Patel said he would not take part in a “charade of lies.”

“Then why are you being such a panderer to President Trump, who’s still claiming that he won the 2020 election, and who has said the only way Democrats can win in 2026 is if they cheat. Do you believe that?” Welch replied.

“I believe in the rule of law. … I want to know how your wealth increased 4,000% since you became a United States senator?” Patel shot back.

“Let’s knock it off,” Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, chimed in after taking over the hearing for Grassley.

AI hacking

Sen. Josh Hawley, who has shown skepticism of the skyrocketing growth of artificial intelligence, used part of his time to ask how the FBI will handle illegal hacking incidents by AI agents.

Several incidents this summer involved AI agents hacking into other systems, including OpenAI agents that broke into tech company Hugging Face, without explicit instructions to do so.

The recent explosive development of AI has dominated headlines and conversations on Capitol Hill in recent days after top tech executives warned development was moving too quickly to adhere to safety guardrails. Congress has yet to pass overarching AI regulations.

“What’s the role here for the bureau? How, how do you wrap your head around these kind of crimes?” asked Hawley, a Missouri Republican.

“This is a great question. It’s literally the new frontier, and nobody’s really talking about it, so thank you. So a couple things: The president has issued his AI directive on what the government can and can’t use, and that’s the right first step because you don’t want 77 different large language models,” Patel said.

The FBI, he said, has reviewed 140 “test case models” to measure their capabilities and “make sure they are cooperating and following underlying federal statutes.”

“What we need to do on a resource basis is go after the people that created these models that are going rogue,” Patel said.

Powerful U.S. officials past and present faced families, survivors and first responders Friday at ceremonies to honor the 25th anniversary of the day 2,977 Americans died in terrorist attacks in Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania.

At the Pentagon, Condoleezza Rice, who was serving at the time under President George W. Bush as national security advisor, told the crowd she wanted to share something “deeply personal.”

“Those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11. We did what we knew to do, but by definition, it was not enough. … I will always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured,” she said.

Speakers at all three Sept. 11 milestone anniversary events recounted stories of courage and loss as people found themselves in an unimaginable circumstance. 

Some also flared with frustration at what they say is a lack of justice for those who planned the attacks.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, speaking at the memorial service for the 184 people who died when the hijacked United Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, highlighted the anniversary as a justification for their stagnant war with Iran. 

That nearly seven-month-old conflict has killed 18 U.S. service members, injured over 700 more and taken the lives of thousands of civilians across the Middle East.

“We will never, ever forget. That’s why we fight today. We don’t have a choice,” Trump said. “There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win. We will always remember the victims and the families of September 11, 2001, very famous date, unfortunately.”

Hegseth told the crowd, which was only open to victims’ families, survivors and their families, that Americans were “ignorant of the Islamist threat” 25 years ago.

“Every day, enemies plot to curb our power and kill our citizens, including from Islamic terrorists abroad and at home, but we are ever vigilant,” he said, adding that the U.S. has killed Iran’s leaders and put their Navy “at the bottom of the sea.”

The deeply unpopular war has continued, despite early promises from Hegseth and Trump that it would not morph into the prolonged Middle East conflicts that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.

‘No justice’

At the site in Lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center’s twin towers once stood, families read names of the 2,753 victims who died inside the towers, on the ground and on the two hijacked airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.

Terry Strada, widow of the late Tom Strada, who died in the north tower, slammed recent presidential administrations of both parties for not holding Saudi Arabia accountable for allegations that the kingdom’s officials knew about the attacks.

“My husband Tom Strada, you are missed more with each year that passes. But how can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?” she said to loud cheers from the crowd.

“For 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families,” she said. 

 

“President Trump can still change that. Tell the Saudis to stop lying. Tell them that if they want to be friends with the USA, they cannot continue to deny all of this, all of the pain, all of the destruction that we have all been suffering through. Vice President Vance, thank you for being here today. Please carry that message back,” she said, again receiving loud cheers.

Vice President JD Vance sat in a front row at the ceremony alongside former presidents Bush, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. 

Former first ladies Michelle Obama, Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton, also a former secretary of state, were seated in the row, as was former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Neither the Embassy of Saudi Arabia nor the White House immediately responded to States Newsroom’s requests for a response.

Painful memories

Families at the site in Lower Manhattan shared memories seared in their minds.

Bob Lee, 67, was a firefighter in the Bronx that day. He remembers how many first responders had to gather together to clean up the dust and debris that had settled around the city.

“When you see the people that were down here, everybody’s eyes was … full of soot and dust, and their eyes were glowing like bright red because all the stuff that was in their eyes,” Lee said. “It was just a crazy scene.”

Lee moved to Kansas City, Missouri, shortly after 9/11. He was 42 at the time and realized he had been exposed to a lot of toxic air.

“I told them I was retiring,” Lee said recalling that he knew a lot of his colleagues would get sick. He was a union representative for his unit in the Bronx. 

“I lost hundreds of those guys. You know, it’s crazy … Quite a few friends have died of cancer.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani this week announced that his office had released around 170,000 pages of records that had been closed off over the last 25 years on the level of toxic air pollution people were exposed to in the aftermath of 9/11.

The records suggest that New Yorkers were misled about the air quality and that officials downplayed how dangerous it was to breathe the air. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, close to 50,000 people, including first responders and survivors, developed cancer in relation to the event. 

Christopher Santora, then 23, was a firefighter who responded to the attacks and was enveloped in debris as the towers fell. He lost his life trying to save people that day. His cousin Jason Roettger, 56, was chosen to read the names of people who had died during 9/11 at Friday’s ceremony.

Roettger said it was an honor to be a part of the event and to represent his cousin. He said he’s glad the air quality records were released.

“I think everyone that was here in the city, or even in New Jersey, everyone in this area knew the air wasn’t good,” Roettger said. “Even though the government said ‘No, the air is fine.’ I think everyone knew that that was a lie.”

Wanda Hernandez, 72, lost her daughter Monique de Jesus, who was 28 at the time. She was working at the World Trade Center. 

Hernandez said Friday she was focusing on all the beautiful moments she had with her daughter before that day.

“We went on vacation for my birthday before it happened, like a month before. Yeah. Yeah, we had a good time, you know, and we went to a wedding like a week before it happened,” Hernandez said. “Two weeks, so that was nice. Had a good time. I was a good mother. She was a good daughter.”

‘A vast empty space in the side of the Pentagon’

Over a 13-minute speech Friday morning at the Pentagon, Rice, who also served as secretary of state later in the Bush administration, painted a picture of administration officials caught completely off guard by the attacks, orchestrated by the well-known anti-American extremist terror network al-Qaeda.

“I was at my desk at the White House that day when my executive assistant, a young Army officer, told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. ‘What a strange accident,’ I thought,” Rice said.

“I called President Bush, who was reading to children at an education event in Florida. He too thought that it must have just been an accident. But within 17 minutes, a second plane hit the World Trade Center,” she continued.

What followed, according to Rice, was a whirlwind as officials rushed to secure locations — Bush to Air Force One, Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney to a White House bunker and CIA Director George Tenet to an undisclosed location. 

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Peru “and trying to get home.” Those in the White House “Situation Room,” Rice recalled, just heard the “ringing and ringing and ringing” of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s phone at the Pentagon, where he had been hosting a congressional breakfast. 

The late Rumsfeld would end up outside assisting in rescue efforts “as his security detail begged him to flee,” she said.

“I remember turning to a television screen, and the horror and the shock that I felt. There was a smoking crater, a vast empty space, in the side of the Pentagon.”

Fight with hijackers

A morning observance program was also held at the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to mark 25 years since 40 passengers and crew members died when the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a rural field. 

Families read aloud the names of the victims during the ceremony.

Members of Flight 93 fought with hijackers over Western Pennsylvania and forced the flight to crash, which prevented the hijacked aircraft from hitting the intended destination of the U.S. Capitol.

Others expected to speak Friday afternoon included Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

Gordon Felt, brother of Edward Porter Felt, one of the 40 people who died on Flight 93, was set to speak, along with retired United Airlines Capt. Morrie Wiener, who piloted Flight 93 prior to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and Jessica Bowron, acting director of the National Park Service.

Mullin ties mass deportation to Sept. 11

Outside of the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington, D.C., Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin used the anniversary to promote the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, and said that lack of cooperation from so-called sanctuary cities is what could lead to another 9/11.

“It’s a safe haven that incubates terrorist activity and it doesn’t just stay local,” he said.

He specifically called out Democratic-led cities of Seattle, Boston and New York City.

“It shouldn’t be political,” he said. “When we start looking at the 25th anniversary, if there’s anything we should agree on, it should be that. Why should the Department of Homeland Security be controversial? We’re taking care of your backyard.”

Immigration enforcement agencies under the department have been roiled in scandal and carried out alleged illegal orders since Trump’s second term began. 

The events have included allowing deportation flights to take off against a judge’s order, erroneous deportations of individuals with legal protections, and the killing by immigration agents of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, of Minneapolis. 

The latest scrutiny of the department comes after a $20 million no-bid contract was extended in Kentucky to outfit agents with electric shock gloves.

Courage and ‘selfless service’

Despite the lasting pain, speakers Friday noted that relatives of those killed in the attacks found ways to move forward and persevere.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine at the Pentagon said the milestone anniversary was not only about remembering those lost, but “it is also a story of great American courage, selfless service, and those who’ve made the choice to carry those memories forward.” 

“The courage of those extraordinary Americans in Pennsylvania, in New York, and right here on these hallowed grounds, did not end when the smoke cleared and the fires went out, because survivors and families have carried it forward through service, through sacrifice, and through remembrance,” Caine told the crowd.

WASHINGTON — A proposal by President Donald Trump to give $5,000 to each American adult if Republicans retain control of the U.S. House and Senate in November would “explode” the national deficit and worsen inflation, according to an analysis issued Thursday by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The committee, whose board includes economists, bankers and former elected and administration officials from both political parties, estimates Trump’s plan would cost roughly $1.2 trillion.

“This proposal is fiscally dangerous, economically backwards, and fundamentally unserious,” Maya MacGuineas, the committee’s president, said in a statement. “It’s hard to understand how anyone could look at our current fiscal and economic situation and think we need to borrow another $1.2 trillion to send everyone cash.”

Trump announced the “Trump dividend” Wednesday night during the latter half of a nearly two-hour keynote speech at the Republican National Committee’s first midterm convention.

Trump told attendees at the political gathering in Dallas, Texas, that his “only caveat” is that Americans spend the money in the United States. 

“We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money,” he said during the livestreamed speech.

Ultimately, Congress would need to appropriate the funds.

Debt, deficits, inflation

MacGuineas pointed out in her statement that the nation’s debt “is now as large as our entire economy, deficits are running $2 trillion per year, inflation is about 3.5%, and the 10-year Treasury yield is approaching 5%.”

“This half-baked political scheme would make this all worse – exploding the deficit, ginning up inflation, and further driving up the cost of borrowing throughout the economy.”

The national debt sits at $40 trillion to date, which breaks down to $117,446 per taxpayer, according to a tracker by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Vice President JD Vance said on Fox News following Trump’s speech that the dividend would be funded by tariff revenue.

“What the president’s just saying is … if you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we’re creating in the United States of America,” he said to Fox News host Bret Baier.

But the expected revenue generated by Trump’s executive tariffs would only cover one-tenth of the cost of sending $5,000 to each American adult, according to an analysis Thursday from the Tax Foundation.

The organization that identifies itself as pro-economic growth, and generally opposes tax increases, estimates Trump’s new tariffs will bring in roughly $124.9 billion in 2027.

“A deficit-financed dividend payment of this scale would signal to markets that the US is not serious about getting its fiscal house in order. It would risk further rises in interest rates, add to inflationary pressures, and worsen the very problems that are trying to be ‘solved’ by the proposal,” said Erica York, a senior economist with the Tax Foundation, in a written statement. The organization opposes Trump’s tariff policies.

Tariff promises

This is not Trump’s first time promising to send what he describes as dividends to Americans — though none of the payments materialized.

The president said in November 2025 he would send $2,000 to Americans from tariff revenue that he falsely said would reach “trillions” of dollars. 

Trump’s emergency tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court in February, and the government is in the process of refunding nearly $170 billion in illegal import taxes. 

Trump and then-special government employee and billionaire Elon Musk said in March 2025 they would send $5,000 refund checks to Americans as a result of savings created by the project titled the Department of Government Oversight. The ultrawealthy tech mogul went public with his plan without consultation from Congress, which controls the nation’s proverbial purse strings.

In spring of 2020, Trump’s name appeared on $1,200 stimulus checks for individuals, $2,400 for married couples, sent out as part of a $2.2 trillion initial COVID-19 relief package approved by Congress.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump headlined the first night of the first Republican midterm convention Wednesday, seeking to rally his base ahead of the November elections and dangling a “Trump dividend” to voters if his party retains control of both congressional chambers.

While the Republican National Committee’s two-day event — dubbed a “Trump-a-palooza” by party Chair Joe Gruters — aimed to bolster support for major candidates, some vulnerable Republicans were notably absent.

Still, speaker after speaker, including Republican lawmakers, Cabinet members and people billed by the RNC as “everyday Americans,” filled five hours before Trump took the stage and promised, “Vote Republican and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come.”

“There’ll be nothing like it,” Trump said during a nearly two-hour keynote address in which he touted the “greatest two years in the history of the presidency.”

The event at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, which did not include voting delegates, is the first major-party midterm convention since Democrats’ convention in 1982. Democrats also held convention-like conferences following the 1974 and 1978 elections.

The GOP convention comes amid sagging poll numbers for Trump as his war with Iran drags on and voters worry about inflation driven by increasing energy costs and tariffs.

Financial incentive

Trump acknowledged political challenges without attributing them to the unpopular parts of his agenda.

“For some reason, when a president wins, even if he’s really a good president or a great president — there aren’t too many of them — they don’t win the midterms, and nobody quite knows why,” he said. “We’ve got to change that because we have something going that’s so good we can’t let that string be broken. So I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot.”

Trump said if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate, he would pay out $5,000 “to every adult.”

“The only caveat I have is that the dividend that we’re making must be spent in the United States of America. We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money,” he said.

This is not the first time Trump has promised to send checks. The president said in November 2025 he would send $2,000 to Americans from tariff revenue that he falsely said would reach “trillions” of dollars. 

Those payments never materialized and Trump’s emergency tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court. The government is now on the hook for refunding American businesses that paid the import taxes.

Trump announced he’ll be campaigning for nearly three dozen Republican candidates in competitive races over the next 55 days.

“We can win every one of those races, but I’m going to go to every one of those states for congressmen and for senators,” he said.

Collins, Sullivan absent

In perhaps the night’s most surprising turn, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman made an appearance in a video praising fellow Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormick, a Republican, and vowing to work with Trump to shore up the steel industry. 

But two of those most vulnerable Republican senators were missing from the more than three dozen speakers Wednesday night.

Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, both locked in tough reelection bids, reportedly declined to attend. Neither Collins’ nor Sullivan’s campaigns or Senate offices replied to States Newsroom’s requests for comment.

Sullivan’s campaign posted several images and videos of the senator in Alaska Wednesday.

Collins posted a message of support for the New England Patriots on her X feed as the RNC event was in full swing. The made-for-TV political gathering aired the same night as the NFL’s season kick-off between the Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.

An analysis by CNBC on Wednesday found fewer than half of Republican candidates in the most competitive congressional districts were slated for speaking roles during the two-day event. 

Crowd boos Thune

But many Trump allies running for reelection spoke, and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, sat in a row with Vice President JD Vance and several Cabinet members.

Attendees cheered when Trump said Johnson “will go down as the greatest speaker of the House in the history of our country.”

But a chorus of “boos” erupted when the president asked where Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota was in the crowd.

“No, no,” Trump responded to the booing. “John is working hard. He’s got great opposition.” 

Thune and Trump have been at odds about the Senate taking up a strict election bill that would require voters to provide a birth certificate or passport to register to vote, among other provisions.

Unlike other Republican leaders from both chambers, Thune was not scheduled to speak at the convention.

An individual close to Thune told States Newsroom the majority leader is in Dallas and wanted to give other Republicans an opportunity to speak.

‘We’re so glad you’re here’

Several Trump allies, even those facing tight or toss-up races, spoke in praise of the president while stumping for their own candidacies.

Former RNC Chair Michael Whatley, running for an open Senate seat in North Carolina, and Sen. John Husted, fighting to keep his seat in a special Ohio election, praised Trump for passing tax cuts. 

The North Carolina seat is rated “lean Democrat,” by the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, and the Ohio seat rated a “toss up.”

While both Whatley and Husted mentioned their opponents and former President Joe Biden more times than they did Trump, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for U.S. Senate, did not shy away from lauding the president.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” said Paxton, who unseated longtime Sen. John Cornyn in a Republican primary after receiving Trump’s endorsement.

“The press, the courts, and the establishment all tried to take President Trump down, but he’s won every single time. He’s delivered more for this country than anyone before, secured victories for America that no other president could, and always stood up for Texas,” Paxton said.

Attendees waved “Keep the Majority” signs and chanted “USA” while House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., railed against Democrats, and said “We will not let the Marxists, communists and anarchists destroy it.”

“This historic midterm convention is rallying Republicans at the perfect time because so much is on the line this November,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican.

‘A party for Donald Trump’

Democrats panned the event as an expensive celebration for the president.

“While Republicans spend millions of dollars throwing a party for Donald Trump, Democrats are spending our time and resources doing the work that wins elections: Talking to voters, registering new ones, organizing communities, and fighting for every vote,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement Wednesday.

“The difference is stark,” he continued. “As Republican candidates worship an unpopular president, Democrats are going on offense and staying focused on lowering costs, making life more affordable, and delivering for working families.”