A proposal to overhaul the federal process for permits to construct energy projects passed a procedural hurdle in the U.S. Senate on Monday, though several Democratic supporters said the legislation needed more work.

The Senate voted, 73-25, to advance what’s known as the permitting reform bill, despite opposition from some corners of the environmental advocacy world who are influential with Democrats. Several Democratic members said they would be pursuing major changes through the amendment process.

The measure is sponsored by the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — led by West Virginia Republican Shelley Moore Capito as chair, with Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse the top Democrat — and the Senate Energy Committee’s Chair Mike Lee of Utah and ranking Democrat Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

The loudest opponents of the bill are environmental groups, and their Democratic champions in Congress, that say the bill’s promise to promote federal permitting for renewable energy production and transmission projects is outweighed by the advantages it would provide fossil fuel production.

“We support the elements of the legislation that help accelerate needed transmission, clean energy deployment, and grid modernization,” Natural Resources Defense Council CEO Manish Bapna said in a Sunday statement. “But the current package goes too far in weakening essential environmental safeguards and public participation requirements.”

Bapna said the group understood compromise was crucial to any kind of permitting reform bill, but that the current legislation, an updated version of which the sponsors released Saturday, still fell short. NRDC would be “willing to assist” in making further changes to the measure, he added.

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, similarly said Monday he could not yet support the bill, which he said had not been adequately vetted by either chamber of Congress, but he said he shared some of its objectives and hoped to improve it in coming days.

“Permitting reform for electrical transmission lines is essential,” he wrote. “But the current bill raises too many serious issues that require more deliberation. I will vote against the bill before us today, but I look forward to working with my colleagues to get permitting reform right.”

Democrats also raised issues with provisions they say would weaken tribal power to weigh in on proposed projects.

Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said ahead of the Monday vote she would support the procedural measure, but would vote against final passage if tribal issues are not addressed.

“Clean, reliable electricity in this country should be cheap and accessible – and permitting reform is the best way to deliver for the American people,” she said. “But I cannot ignore the concerns that Tribes in Nevada have with this bill text… If Title III stays in this bill, I will not vote for final passage.”

The fingerpointing is coming from inside the house.

Vice President JD Vance said in a lengthy social media post Wednesday that Republicans’ shellacking in the midterm elections the night before was mainly due to the administration’s war in Iran.

Though Vance sought to soften the blow to President Donald Trump by ascribing the same opinion to the president, the post was an unusual public distancing by a sitting vice president and marked a significant first step in a post-Trump Republican political landscape that Vance will likely seek to lead.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.

“But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

Vance served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq and later heavily criticized that Middle East war, calling it “an unforced disaster,” in a 2023 social media post.

‘Largely true’

Speaking to reporters Wednesday afternoon, Trump said Vance’s view was mostly correct.

“I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term,” he said when asked about Vance’s post. “Probably it’s true. But at the same time, if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again because long term, it’s the only answer. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear” weapon.

“I know how he feels about it,” he said later. “I thought it was fine.”

He repeated that he’d expected the war to have a negative effect on the midterms, but that it was worth pursuing.

Trump launched military operations in Iran in February, despite no apparent active threat from the Islamic republic. He promised the conflict would soon end, but when polls closed Tuesday night, it was still active and Iran maintained a block of the critical shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz that has squeezed the global supply of oil.

2028 message?

Vance is seen as a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, but Tuesday’s drubbing, in which Republicans lost Senate seats and governorships in states Trump and Vance carried by double digits in 2024 and ceded a large House majority to Democrats, could demonstrate a need to distance himself from Trump to stand a chance in the general election. 

In his post, Vance noted that Republicans’ problem on Tuesday was not turnout, but that many voters who supported the Republican ticket in 2024 flipped to Democrats this year.

He said those voters identified four issues that drove their switch: end the war, focus on the cost of living, “Put America First” and change the United States’ “relationship to Israel.”

“Our voters showed up,” he wrote. “And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats.”

Vance also predicted calls would come for significant changes to immigration policy after some analysts said that an aggressive — sometimes deadly — enforcement campaign led to backlash among some Trump 2024 voters.

Vance rejected any major overhaul, while again signaling some daylight between himself and Trump on the administration’s signature issue.

“Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty,” he said. “I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.”

Voters across the country administered a sharp reprimand to President Donald Trump and Republicans who hold majorities in Congress, with Democrats gaining comfortable majorities in the Senate and the House.

Several U.S. Senate and House races remained uncalled by The Associated Press as Election Day ended on the East Coast. But by Wednesday morning, Democrats had notched 54 Senate seats to control that chamber and 228 House seats, clearing the thresholds needed to win majorities in each chamber as the party swept virtually all of the races that were expected to be competitive.

Those wins included Senate contests in states Trump won by double digits just two years ago, some of which had not elected Democrats in decades: Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

Democrats also won a seat left open by retiring Republican Thom Tillis in North Carolina, bringing their total of Senate pickups to five, with leads in a handful of other states. And they retained their seat in Minnesota, electing Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan to the Senate.

By the early hours of Wednesday, they’d netted 25 new House seats, putting them on track to start next Congress with a majority that will give House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whom Democrats are expected to make speaker, some room to maneuver. The AP had not yet made a call by midnight that Democrats had control of the House.

Democrats also flipped four governorships, in Georgia, Texas, Ohio and Iowa.

Republicans had not flipped any Democratic-held governorships, U.S. House or Senate seats by midnight, according to race calls by AP.

PORTLAND, Ore. — The latest cosponsor of a U.S. House bill to provide single-payer health insurance defeated a Republican incumbent in a suburban and rural Oregon district by fewer than 10,000 votes two years ago.

U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum, a Democrat now seeking her second term, doesn’t have the far-left profile of past Medicare-for-All champions whose mission failed in Congress.

But the policy is popular in her purple district that stretches from central Oregon to the edges of Portland, and aligns with her values as a lawmaker, she said at an October event with the bill’s lead sponsor, Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal.

“If you ask me anything about my politics, I’ll tell you it’s about agency and freedom,” Bynum told a crowd at Portland Community College. 

“There’s a lot of Americans that have paid into a system, meaning going to work every day, trying to live the American dream, trying to just be good people, and yet this country can’t promise that you can go to the hospital or go to your doctor and not be bankrupted.”

Bynum and Jayapal argued support for single-payer healthcare, long sought by the party’s most progressive members, is growing. And it is one demonstration that voters are in an anti-establishment mood, spurring a possible Democratic takeover of Congress after next month’s elections.

Dissatisfaction with high prices, made worse by President Donald Trump’s unpopular war in Iran, along with aggressive tactics on immigration, have Democrats in a favorable position less than two weeks from Election Day, polling shows.

After a sometimes-bitter primary season, shared policy goals on affordability for Americans and accountability for the Trump administration have bonded the party’s left wing and its establishment factions, analysts say.

But as Democrats eye a likely House majority, and possible U.S. Senate control, they will soon face decision points about the rest of their legislative agenda — and which wing of the party it favors.

Class of 2026

On successive Tuesdays in June, four House Democrats running for reelection, three in New York and Colorado’s Diana Degette, lost primaries to challengers backed by the far-left Democratic Socialists of America. 

Observers and campaigners, including Republican leaders, were quick to describe the ascendancy of far-left views in the Democratic Party.

But that narrative is somewhat out of step with a qualitative analysis, according to an August study from the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

Of 64 DSA-backed members running in Democratic congressional primaries this year, 19 won, according to Brookings. Only one, Will Lawrence in Michigan, is seeking to represent a competitive district. 

The ideological makeup of the caucus next year will be “about the same,” the study’s author, Elaine Kamarck, said in an interview. 

Kamarck, the director of Brookings’ Center for Effective Public Management, has worked for the Democratic National Committee and presidential campaigns.

While the rhetoric of the House Democratic Caucus might be more progressive in tone next year, many members of the incoming class from blue districts are replacing progressive lawmakers, Rodell Mollineau, a Democratic campaign operative, said.

Practically, progressive House newcomers are likely to accept incremental wins rather than hold out for a future product, he said.

“Is that DSA member, if there’s a piece of legislation on the floor that is going to strengthen healthcare, and might not be everything that that member wants, are they gonna vote it down?”  he said.

To Trump they are ‘lunatics’ 

Republicans have used the media attention on the often young, progressive primary winners to criticize the entire party.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, sought to make the primary winners, all of whom are almost certain to join Congress next year, the face of the entire party.

“The barbarians are inside the gate,” he said at a July 14 press conference. “We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall.”

Republicans continue to campaign nationwide against progressives in general, especially Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat who defeated establishment candidates to become the nominee for the state’s open U.S. seat.

“From Chuck Schumer to AOC, moderate Democrats no longer exist,” RNC press secretary Natalie Baldassarre wrote in a Thursday email, referring to the Senate Democratic leader and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of New York. 

Trump has also falsely painted El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate, as a terrorist sympathizer. The attack appears based only on El-Sayed’s race and religion. He was born in the United States to parents from Egypt. 

Republicans, including Trump, have sought to tie even centrist candidates to El-Sayed and far-left ideology.

In a speech in Kansas in late October, Trump criticized Adam Hamilton, a preacher who is the Democratic nominee challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, as “pretending to be a moderate.”

“In 15 days, we’re going to reelect Roger Marshall,” he said in a late October speech in Kansas, referring to the state’s incumbent U.S. senator. “We’re going to defeat the communists, the jihadists, and the corrupt anti-American lunatics once and for all.”

Size of majority 

But Democrats and experts say the establishment Democrats, especially on the House side, will retain control in the caucus, even if their numbers are bolstered by new left-wing members.

Election analysts predict Democrats will pick up between 10 and 20 seats in the House next month, which would give them a majority of 13 to 29. The party is projected to pick up two to six Senate seats, leaving party control a toss-up.

A larger cushion in the House would give Democratic leaders more room to maneuver in the majority, Mollineau, a former Senate staffer, said. Internal division is more likely with a smaller majority, where any single member could be a deciding vote, he added.

But even with a smaller majority, the disparate wings of the party agree on enough of an agenda to keep the chamber busy, he said.

“There’s a lot of shared interests that you will see in this caucus they can pursue and move the ball forward, without getting into fights every single day on ideology,” Mollineau said.

That will likely continue as long as Trump is in the White House, Kamarck said. Divisions would emerge, she said, if Democrats take both chambers and the presidency in 2028.

“As long as defeating Trump and his folks are on the agenda, Democrats are going to be pretty united,” she said. “You will only see the depth of these issues when we get the trifecta.”

The overall mood of the electorate minimizes any problems Democrats may have, Lee Hannah, a political science professor at Wright State University in Ohio, said.

“I think it was an ideal year to have some of these challenges” in primaries, he said.

Lawrence, the former DSA member running in a swing Michigan House district, is an example of someone who may not have succeeded under different circumstances, David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University in Michigan, said.

That is a sign the party is changing, with an expanding progressive wing, he said.

“I think the messages that those candidates are taking to the Democratic base are being noticed,” he said. “And people are thinking, ‘Yeah, that sounds pretty good.’”

Mood for change

The primary-season distinction was less between progressive and centrist Democrats and more between establishment and anti-establishment candidates, Mollineau said.

El-Sayed’s campaign has targeted Trump voters in northern Michigan with “a similar anti-establishment” message, Dulio said.

Jay Ward, a Medicare recipient at the Bynum-Jayapal event, said growing frustration with the healthcare system has increased the attractiveness of a single-payer model.

“I think different members had different solutions,” he said of past Democrats. “And I think times have changed.”

Jayapal made a similar point in an interview before the event, predicting that more swing district Democrats would support the measure.

“I’m really thrilled that we have people like Rep. Bynum, like Rep. Shomani Figures in Alabama, these are folks that represent really tough districts,” Jayapal said. 

“It’s unfortunate that this cruelty that American families are dealing with right now has gotten us here, but I do think there’s an opportunity here,” she said. “I think that we’re going to see more and more folks in the Democratic Caucus signing on that are not just in blue districts, that are in tough districts, that are even in red districts.”

She said the bill would receive a committee markup in a Democratic House next year.

Hannah Winchester, a political and community organizer with the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Practitioners, said following the event that her organization does not have an official position on Jayapal’s bill, but does seek to endorse candidates whose goal is universal high-quality healthcare.

“I think we all know something needs to change,” she said. 

Democrats have used President Donald Trump’s unpopularity to expand the midterm map, and analysts project the party carries momentum heading into the final two weeks of the election cycle, even as Democrats are expected to flip fewer U.S. House seats than wave elections this century.

The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter predicts Democrats will gain a net of 10 to 20 House seats in the Nov. 3 elections, Erin Covey, the top House analyst at CPR, said Monday during a panel discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution. 

The party needs to pick up just three seats to gain control next year.

The Senate is closer to a pure toss-up, with the likely range of Democratic pickups between two and six seats, experts believe. A net gain of four would give Democrats a majority in that chamber.

The landscape is more favorable for Democrats at the end of the 2026 cycle than many people expected at the outset. Trump’s dismal approval ratings, especially on the economy and the war in Iran, appear to outweigh Republicans’ advantages in the Senate map and outside spending.

That has put Democrats on offense, pushing the battleground map further into traditionally GOP states and districts.

“It’s still not clear exactly how deep into the map Democrats can play,” Covey said. “They have fewer resources to invest in some of these reach seats. But regardless of how far they can expand the map, I think they are going to be in a very good position to win the House, and the Senate perhaps as well.”

The president’s party almost always loses House seats in midterms as its base voters are less motivated to turn out and those without strong partisan allegiances tend to opt to balance out the president’s power.

That happens “even when the president’s popular, even when there’s a good economy,” Christopher Warshaw, a professor at Georgetown University’s school of public policy, said on the Brookings panel. “And today the president, of course, is unpopular, and we have a relatively poor economy.”

Promises not kept

Driving Trump’s unpopularity is the administration’s failure to rein in inflation and to stay out of foreign wars, which was core to his appeal in the 2024 election, William Galston, a senior fellow in Brookings’ governance studies program, said. 

Galston was also an official in President Bill Clinton’s White House and has staffed Democratic presidential campaigns.

Trump also blew a public-opinion advantage on immigration with an aggressive crackdown in the country’s interior that resulted in shooting deaths of U.S. citizens by federal agents, overshadowing his administration’s success at limiting illegal immigration at the southern border, Galston said.

“Trump has not done what he said he was going to do, that is, focus relentlessly on prices and bring them down,” Galston said. “He has done what he said he wouldn’t do, and that is start yet another difficult war in the Middle East … and third, he has taken what should have been his big winning issue, namely immigration, and turned it into a jump ball.”

As a result, the president’s approval rating is at record lows, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll Monday showing only 31% of voters approve of his job as president.

His record on the economy is generally viewed even more unfavorably, often polling in the 20s, Galston said.

“Other than core MAGA supporters, it is very difficult to find any appreciable pool of voters who think that the president has done a good job managing inflation, high prices, affordability,” Galston said.

Some regions, particularly rural areas, have been especially hard hit by Trump’s economic policies. That has put House districts in Iowa, southern Minnesota, Upstate New York and South Texas that had trended toward Republicans in recent decades back in play for Democrats, Covey said.

House elections: wave or ripple?

Still, even the upper limits of Democrats’ House gains would be well short of what both parties have seen in recent midterm elections. 

Democrats gained 41 seats in Trump’s first midterm in 2018 and Republicans gained 63 seats in President Barack Obama’s first midterm in 2010. And in 2006, Democrats capitalized on an unpopular Middle East war to net 31 seats during George W. Bush’s presidency.

In part that’s due to Democrats’ “higher floor” this year, Covey said in an interview. Because they’ll enter Election Day with 214 of the chamber’s 435 seats, plus a vacancy in a reliably blue Florida district, they have less far to go to gain a majority and also less potential to expand.

To reach the same 235-seat size Democrats had after the 2018 elections, they need to gain half as many, Covey said.

Fewer competitive House districts, after redistricting and geographic sorting, also factor into potential gains, she said.

Long-term effects of redistricting

Starting with Texas Republicans in August 2025, state leaders redrew several House districts this cycle in rare mid-decade redistricting. In a neutral year, the redistricting arms race should have netted Republicans between eight and 10 House seats, Warshaw said.

But this year, the GOP will likely gain around three seats from redistricting, Covey said.

“That is not a lot,” she said. “There is a world in which the environment is so bad for them that they don’t net any at all, and that’s because the bulk of these districts that were redrawn were redrawn under the assessment, I think, that it would be a better or at least less terrible political environment for Republicans than what has panned out.”

That environment will shift in the next two election cycles, while the district lines are less likely to move. Democrats are likely to have trouble keeping those seats past this cycle, Covey and Warshaw said.

“In a midterm environment in 2026, that’s not going to stop Democrats from taking control of the House,” Warshaw said. “But in 2028 or 2030, I think the mid-decade redistrictings will have a much more important impact.”

Spending gap greatest in Senate races

Spending by super PACs and other outside groups has heavily favored Republicans this cycle, though individual Democratic candidates have often outraised their Republican counterparts.

The spending in House races is relatively even, Covey said, but Republican groups have poured money into competitive Senate races.

That may indicate the GOP campaign groups view the Senate majority as still up for grabs, and concede the House is likely to flip.

“Republicans came into this cycle with a massive spending advantage on the super PAC side,” she said. “What has happened is that Republicans have definitely used that spending advantage in the Senate races to try to attempt to shore up their majority there, even as they largely concede that the House is probably gone at this point.”

The Trump administration sought a federal court order Thursday to force California to purge 20,000 people from its voter rolls over claims they are not U.S. citizens, a major development less than three weeks before the midterm elections.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state, asking a judge to validate its claims that the state is willfully allowing noncitizens to vote in the Nov. 3 elections. California law requires that ballots have already been sent to registered voters.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan on Wednesday declined to open a thumb drive the federal government sent them containing a list of suspected noncitizens registered to vote in California. 

Logan said the drive was unvetted and opening it would violate the office’s security protocols. 

The Justice Department’s complaint said the refusal to open the drive was a major obstacle to enforcing federal voting laws.

“By sending ballots to likely noncitizens despite the Federal Government notifying California of serious concerns, Defendants (collectively, California) have made it nearly impossible for the United States to investigate and enforce federal law,” the suit said. “This is a substantial drain on federal resources. In addition, when aliens illegally vote in elections, they dilute the votes of citizens and unduly influence who runs the Federal Government. That also undermines public faith in federal elections.”

The suit seeks a judicial order blocking the state from counting mail ballots sent to registered voters that the administration says are noncitizens.

California sends ballots to every registered voter in every election without distinguishing among state, local or federal elections, the suit says. Ballots for this year’s general election went out Oct. 1. 

Only citizens can vote in state and federal elections. San Francisco allows noncitizens to vote in some local elections. 

In Thursday’s complaint, the administration said the Department of Homeland Security had identified 20,000 noncitizens who were registered to vote in California. The department warned California “months ago” that noncitizens may be registered to vote in the state, which “made no serious attempt to” determine if that was true, according to the suit.

Many of the people the administration says are noncitizens and registered to vote live in Los Angeles County, the suit says.

Representatives for Logan and Weber did not immediately return messages seeking comment Thursday.

Motivation questioned

The suit omits efforts by the state over the past few months to work with the federal government to identify noncitizens on its voter rolls, David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said on a press call Thursday afternoon.

The administration estimated several months ago that 190,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state. State officials asked for the federal government’s methodology and for the names of the individuals. They did not receive a response, Becker said.

Instead, the DOJ blindsided California and Los Angeles County with a letter demanding voter files be removed just weeks from Election Day, Becker said. 

Becker suggested that the administration’s objective was not to deny noncitizens from voting, but to sow doubt about the election results. If the DOJ had a “legitimate concern” and was operating in good faith, it would have worked diligently starting at the beginning of last year, he said.

“I don’t know what their motivation is, but I can tell you what their motivation isn’t, because if they were seeking to work in good faith to clean up the voter list that they believed had issues, they would have done this months ago in a much different fashion,” he said. 

“It does raise questions as to whether or not the sole purpose of this is to set the stage for false claims about election theft after an election that the president might be worried his party was going to do poorly in.”

He added that the thumb drive was sent in an envelope that included a handwritten note with a password written on it, which is a serious red flag for cybersecurity experts.

“I don’t know how much you’re aware of the cybersecurity protocols in election offices,” he said. “Election offices do not just stick thumb drives into their technology — for very good reason.”

The Trump administration’s order to allow import of Russian diesel violates a 2022 law banning Russian energy imports while the country’s war with Ukraine is ongoing, according to a bipartisan group of U.S. senators.

Following an Oct. 9 call between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control lifted sanctions against the “import sale, delivery, offloading, or importation” of Russian diesel. Prices of diesel have skyrocketed in recent months during Trump’s war in Iran.

The administration did not consult with Congress before lifting the sanctions, which is required by the 2022 law, six senators said Sunday in a statement.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, John Curtis of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina called on Trump to “immediately reverse course.”

“Congress explicitly banned Russian energy imports in 2022 to prevent American dollars from financing Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine,” they wrote. “Congress was clear: the U.S. should not import oil from Russia until it ends its aggression against Ukraine and ceases threats against our NATO Allies. 

“President Trump’s decision to allow Russian diesel imports to the U.S. runs directly counter to that law,” the group added.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who sponsored the 2022 law blocking imports of Russian energy products, also said in a Monday statement the administration’s move was illegal.

“Trump is directly violating that law, lifting sanctions to permit the first Russian diesel imports into the United States since the law took effect, without satisfying the specific legal conditions it requires,” he wrote. “He illegally rewards his pal Putin while once again blaming Zelensky for not capitulating to Putin. Meanwhile, every day Putin murders more Ukrainian civilians.”

Broad support for law 

The law passed the Senate unanimously and the House 413-9 before President Joe Biden signed it in April 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine.

It allows for the president to lift sanctions on Russian energy imports, after consultation with Congress, if Russia has withdrawn from Ukraine, recognized Ukraine’s right to independence and poses no immediate threat to any NATO members. 

Throughout his second term, Trump has attempted to use trade policy, including an aggressive tariffs schedule, to extract concessions from foreign governments.

But reopening Russian energy imports appears to break with that record. Trump did not announce any accommodation Russia provided to reenter the U.S. market, instead framing the move explicitly in domestic economic terms.

“Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST,” he wrote on social media Friday. “Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement.”

The agreement is in effect until April 7, 2027.

The nationwide average price for a gallon of diesel last week was $6.20, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That marks a $2.49 increase, or 67%, from a year ago. 

The price of fuel, including diesel, and other consumer goods is among the top campaign issues for the Nov. 3 midterm elections. 

Diesel prices are particularly important in farm states like Iowa, Kansas and Texas. Democrats in U.S. Senate races in those generally red states are polling unusually well this year.

Spokespeople for the White House and Treasury Department did not respond to messages seeking comment Monday.

President Donald Trump has formed a White House committee to investigate Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, escalating even further a lengthy feud with the Federal Reserve Board member.

The three-member committee will seek evidence that Cook made false statements in obtaining a mortgage and will hold a closed-door hearing at the White House on Nov. 5, two days after the midterm elections, according to a presidential memorandum. The memorandum is dated Oct. 7 but was published to the White House website Friday.

Trump tried to fire Cook last year after Bill Pulte, then the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged she lied on a mortgage form to obtain a more favorable rate. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in June found Trump did not have cause to remove Cook from the independent board. 

The president tasked the committee with finding enough evidence of wrongdoing to meet the court’s standard for firing. 

“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” Trump wrote.

Attorneys for Cook said Trump’s record of trying to fire Cook raised major concerns that the process would be illegitimate.

The committee will be composed of Assistant to the President for Economic Policy Kevin Hassett, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas and acting Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Keith Sonderling. They are permitted to “consult with appropriate personnel from executive branch departments and agencies, including the Department of Justice.”

The memorandum calls for Cook to be present for questioning at the Nov. 5 hearing. She is also permitted to submit a written statement to the committee. The memorandum also calls for Cook to comply with the committee’s requests for documents or other evidentiary material.

Cook can also submit another written statement up to five days after the hearing.

The committee will then write its own report with a recommendation to Trump on “whether there is cause to remove Governor Cook.” 

Cook’s attorneys Abbe Lowell and Norm Eisen said in a statement that an objective investigation would show no wrongdoing, and that Cook looked forward to clearing her name.

“In light of the President’s repeated statements that he has already decided to fire Governor Cook – regardless of the facts and evidence –  we have grave doubts that this ‘hearing’ is a legitimate one that would conform to the law,” they wrote. “But if it is anything close to objective, the conclusion will be that Governor Cook did not commit mortgage fraud, leaving no cause to remove her from the Federal Reserve Board.” 

Trump has squabbled with Cook and former Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom he appointed and who still serves on the board, over interest rates that the president believes should be lower to stimulate the economy. 

He has used legal investigations to pressure Cook and Powell, including a probe into Powell’s oversight of a Fed headquarters renovation. 

A leading Democratic campaign committee is projecting confidence in U.S. Senate toss-up races four weeks before Election Day, though it has yet to commit resources to the reddest states that have recently entered the Senate map.

Senate Majority PAC, which is run by allies of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, has bought ad time, or has commitments to do so, in nine states, Lauren French, the group’s chief spokesperson told reporters Tuesday. 

Those states — Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — show Democrats are competing this cycle in typically Republican places. Elections analysts generally say those states are toss-ups or lean Democratic.

The Democratic super PAC’s slate, though, is not as expansive as some of the latest public polls and forecaster ratings show could be in play.

The group is “watching really closely” the races in GOP strongholds of Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi and Kansas, French said. 

At least one of those states, Kansas, could be in play for the first time in decades, according to elections forecaster The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, which moved it into the toss-up category Tuesday.

“Broadly, we are very pleased with the state of the race right now,” French said. “We are invested in nine battleground states and are looking very closely at some of the expansion states that are coming (into) play as we get four weeks from the election and the environment continues to be increasingly rough for Republicans.”

An expanded Senate map is available to Democrats because of President Donald Trump’s unpopularity, especially tied to the Iran war and related high gas prices, French said. Trump’s approval rating is lower than his disapproval rating “in every battleground state,” she added.

North Carolina moves

Opportunities for Republicans appear to be shrinking, with North Carolina moving further toward Democrats. 

Cook shifted the race from lean Democrat to likely Democrat on Tuesday, after the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, said last week it was freezing future spending in the state.

French said the Senate Majority PAC also canceled its television and digital spending this week in the race for the seat left open by retiring Republican Thom Tillis. The group has not made decisions on spending in the Tar Heel State beyond this week, she said.

Republicans hold cash edge

While the national political environment favors Democrats, the GOP and its fellow campaign groups maintain a massive cash advantage against Democrats.

Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., held more than $400 million at the end of August, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. Senate Majority PAC showed around $57 million on hand in the same report.

Fundraising numbers for official party committees also significantly favor Republicans. 

The Republican National Committee and the party’s campaign groups supporting House and Senate candidates outraised their Democratic counterparts by about $100 million through Aug. 31, according to an analysis by nonpartisan elections analyst Ballopedia. 

Republicans have largely aimed to portray Democrats as too far to the left to capably manage Congress.

“Voters have a clear choice this November between Republicans who will fight for them and radical, socialist Democrats who would serve as rubber stamps for Chuck Schumer’s Washington machine,” Bernadette Breslin, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement.

Rare pickup opportunities

Still, the Senate Majority PAC’s bullish sentiment broadly matches expert opinion, as forecasters continue to see a strong case for Democrats to pick up Senate seats. Republicans now control the Senate with 53 seats.

The elections handicapper Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved two Senate races in Democrats’ direction Tuesday. 

The group labeled Alaska as leaning toward Democratic former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola in her challenge to incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan, and shifted U.S. Sen. Darline Graham’s race in South Carolina from safe Republican to likely Republican. Graham was appointed to the seat when her late brother died, won a Republican primary election and is now seeking a six-year term.

Overall, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which operates at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, rates 49 seats, including those of incumbents not on the ballot this year, as at least leaning toward the Democrat, with four seen as toss-ups. 

Democrats, who now hold 47 seats, would need to net 51 seats to win a majority because Vice President JD Vance casts tie-breaking votes.

A flip in control of the chamber would significantly slow Trump’s nominees to the federal bench and executive branch posts. 

President Donald Trump is scheduled to kick off a month-long blitz of campaign stops with a Thursday rally in deep-red Oklahoma before heading to other states with strong Republican leanings.

The first events in the closing stretch of the midterm election campaign suggest his strength with swing voters is limited, as even some Republican candidates seek distance, political analysts said. 

Trump’s low approval ratings amid growing consumer costs, spiraling gas prices and an unpopular war in Iran have put U.S. Senate races in typically GOP-leaning states like Alaska and Iowa in play.

After the Oklahoma rally, the president will travel to Alabama and Ohio through the weekend. On Monday, he will be in Nebraska.

He has vowed he would make another stop in Texas soon as part of 32 days of travel before the Nov. 3 elections that will determine control of Congress. 

Vice President JD Vance also rallied voters in Texas on Wednesday before a planned event in Florida on Thursday.

The red-state itinerary makes it appear Trump will be used to rally the base, rather than attempt to win over voters who switch preferences from one election to another, said Chandler James, a political science professor at the University of Oregon. 

“These are places where Trump has the most support that he’s retained, and probably has the most influence,” he said. “Trump still has a lot of sway within the Republican Party, and he has a pretty sizable political base, many of whom don’t traditionally show up for elections besides when Trump is on the ballot.”

In more traditionally contested states, such as North Carolina, Michigan or New Hampshire, the median voter may be further to the left and have a lower opinion of Trump, James said. 

“He can still help, but he has to do so in different ways,” Christopher Stout, a political science professor at Oregon State University, said. “Going to places where you might be able to recruit supporters rather than places where it’d be easy for Democrats to say, ‘Look how closely this candidate is tied to a president whose popularity is pretty low.’”

Trump’s approval rating was hovering Wednesday near 37%, with 60% disapproving, according to The New York Times polling average.

‘They all want me’

Trump told reporters Tuesday he was strongly in demand for campaign appearances.

“I’m one person. They all want me to go campaign,” he said. “In about two days, I’m starting a literally 32-day tour. … I’m going to Texas. I’m going to Ohio. I’m going to all different places.”

Candidates from a president’s party typically face strong headwinds in midterm elections, a phenomenon that is likely to be especially true this year as Trump faces historically low approval ratings, James said. 

Republicans could minimize that disadvantage, while still appealing to Trump’s supporters, by keeping him focused on redder states and districts.

The base-focused strategy could also help recruit volunteers who can work across state lines or raise money, Stout said.

Texting and other technology allows volunteers to be active remotely, meaning that volunteers fired up in Oklahoma or Alabama could be helping mobilize Republican voters in Georgia or Iowa.

No longer a change agent

But there are indications Trump’s support is cracking even in red areas.

U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican from Florida, released a campaign ad in September in which she said Trump’s immigration policy had “gone too far.” 

Iowa U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, a Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, criticized the Iran war in a social media post last week.

The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter in late September moved Salazar’s race to “lean Republican,” a shift signaling a more competitive race. The open Senate seat in Iowa is rated as a tossup, although the state’s entire congressional delegation is currently Republican.

Even Ken Paxton, the far-right Texas attorney general who is running for U.S. Senate, privately groused that Trump’s two-night midterm convention in his state hurt his polling in the close race against Democrat James Talarico, according to leaked audio obtained by The New York Times. 

Paxton, a polarizing figure who defeated the more moderate incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary this year, also faces a tossup race against Talarico, even though the last Democrat to win a Senate seat in the reliably Republican state resigned to run for vice president in 1988.

Part of the challenge for Republicans is that swing voters in recent elections are looking for change, Stout said. That has helped Trump in the elections he ran while not in office, but that advantage has evaporated.

“A lot of those swing voters, many of them just want change,” Stout said. “They want things to be different. So in 2016 and in 2024, he represented that change. In 2026, he represents the status quo. And so if people want change, he’s not the person you want there.”

A federal grand jury indicted 10 noncitizens for unlawfully voting in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday, highlighting the administration’s effort to keep election security a top issue, in line with President Donald Trump’s longstanding unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

The indictments, which include nine counts of unlawful voting and nine counts of falsely claiming citizenship to register to vote, bring the number of noncitizens charged nationwide with election-related crimes since Trump re-took office last year to 90. The census reports 154 million people voted in the 2024 election.

Blanche said at a news conference at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., that the indictments show how seriously the administration takes election security.

“We have talked repeatedly about the importance of election integrity, and we’re certainly not going to stop talking about that now,” he said. “Voter fraud erodes the public’s trust in our electoral system, and it’s vital to our democratic process that we do everything that we can to restore that trust.”

Blanche’s participation in a press conference, alongside fellow Cabinet member Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, underlined the administration’s continuing focus on noncitizen voting, though numerous studies have shown it to be rare. Trump has for years amplified debunked conspiracy theories centered on election fraud.

Mullin made that connection explicit Wednesday, saying the indictments confirmed Trump’s accusations.

“The president said it for a long time, and the Democrats were sitting there denying it and saying, ‘There’s no fraud. That wasn’t taking place. There’s no fraud. There’s nothing, nothing here. Don’t look over here,’” he said. “We’re realizing there’s actually a lot. And we believe that some of these states probably even knew about it, chose not to look into it. Well, we are.”

But the allegations of illegal voting in Minnesota in the 2022 and 2024 general elections and 2026 primaries made virtually no difference to election results. 

The seven alleged illegal votes in the 2024 presidential election, for example, would account for only .0002% of votes cast in that election in Minnesota.

Federal officials charged a Utah letter carrier Tuesday with throwing 300 primary ballots in a church parking lot dumpster, an incident that a top U.S. Justice Department official said made the case for stricter regulations of voting.

The prosecution of Damon Matai Seei, of Payson, Utah, showed “voting fraud is real,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a press conference at DOJ headquarters in Washington.

The Justice Department gave the arrest an unusually high profile, spotlighting the administration’s efforts to combat voter fraud after the U.S. Supreme Court this month blocked a new U.S. Postal Service rule limiting mail voting from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The regulation was meant to “address the chronically abused mail-in ballot system,” McCotter said. He criticized the trial judge who initially blocked the rule, which would have required special tracking and design features, among other things such as creating a national database of eligible voters.

“Election integrity should not be a political or partisan issue,” McCotter said. “Who could be against properly tracking mail-in ballots? Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, that regulation was blocked by a judge in Massachusetts. … The Trump administration, however, will continue taking aggressive actions to protect our elections.”

Postal Service rule

U.S. District Judge Indiria Talwani’s order blocking the rule is only in effect for the Nov. 3 elections, a provision meant to preserve the status quo because the rule was finalized mere months before the midterms. The merits of the case are still being argued. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Talwani’s decision.

The prosecution of Seei, and the attention the administration sought to give it, undercut a key argument the administration made in the case: The rule included only “modest” technical specifications for a category of mail and should not be interpreted as an election regulation.

The U.S. Constitution grants states the authority to administer elections, with policy oversight from Congress. 

In siding with the Democratic states and voting rights groups who filed suit, Talwani and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit said the rule was clearly an attempt to affect election policy and was not restricted to a modest mail regulation.

Trump and mail-in voting

President Donald Trump has railed against mail-in voting and claimed, without evidence, that it is a major source of election fraud and contributed to his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.

Since Trump retook office in January 2025, the department has charged 70 immigrants with illegally voting, compared with only 13 in the four years of Biden’s term, McCotter said Tuesday.

“And we intend to bring many more,” he added.

Homeland Security Investigations, a Homeland Security Department agency, has made 160 recent arrests, from 1,600 open voter fraud cases, HSI acting Deputy Executive Associate Director Matthew Millhollin said.

A reporter in the room noted that 70 prosecutions amounted to a bare fraction of the 150 million votes cast in the 2024 election.

McCotter responded that the Utah case involved 300 ballots, and that law enforcement had only scratched the surface of possible incidents. “Thousands more” cases were being investigated, he said.

“The folks on the other side, the opponents of the president, insist this has never happened, that there is no voting fraud,” he said. “And so when we have dozens of cases … I think that discourages and defeats their characterization.”

No partisan motive alleged

Seei, who is no longer a postal worker, intentionally threw out about 300 mail ballots on June 3 that were being mailed to voters in advance of the June 23 primary in Utah, according to charging documents.

In an interview with law enforcement, he indicated he did not have a political motive but said he threw away the mail, which also included advertisements, “because he wanted to ‘lighten his workload’ so he could presumably go home earlier,” prosecutors said.

Melissa Holyoak, the top federal prosecutor for Utah, traveled to Washington, D.C., for Tuesday’s press conference. She noted that 95% of the state’s voters cast their ballots by mail.

Many people in Seei’s delivery area in Eagle Mountain, Utah, complained to the Utah County Clerk that they hadn’t received ballots, Holyoak said. Using county databases, the clerk found that voter participation was “remarkably low” in the area where complaints originated.

“As American citizens, we have certain freedoms and rights,” Holyoak said. “And one of those fundamental rights is the right to vote. But when defendant allegedly tossed the mail-in ballots into a parking lot dumpster, those citizens’ right to vote were also thrown away.”

The federal public defender representing Seei did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Voting rights groups and Democratic officials are looking to defend against what they see as possible election interference from the Trump administration ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, now that they’ve won a major battle over mail ballots.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization, announced a “voter protection” campaign Thursday that would place thousands of volunteers at polling sites in 25 states.

The initiative is designed to counter potential administration moves to intimidate voters, such as ordering troops or law enforcement officers to polling places.

The Democratic Party is also upping its voter protection efforts, launching its own initiative this week to deploy 10,000 volunteers to assist voters at polling locations in all 50 states plus seven U.S. territories.

Both efforts are described as preemptive efforts to head off any possible attempts by President Donald Trump to skew election results. Trump for years has alleged, without evidence, U.S. elections are beset by myriad attempts at fraud.

He has used that pretext in attempts to enact policies to restrict voting, including the order limiting vote-by-mail that the U.S. Supreme Court blocked for this election. 

‘Breathing down our neck’

Voting rights advocates say they are preparing for more efforts to dissuade voters from casting ballots. 

Voters are “facing aggressive and deliberate threats from this administration and anti-voter forces that are tied to this administration,” Common Cause CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said. “Whether it be voter intimidation at the polls, the attacks on mail-in voting or attempts to collect your personal data, the barriers that voters are facing right now … are not only real, they are urgent. And they are intentionally designed to make everyday Americans give up.”

The Democratic plan, led by the Association of State Democratic Conferences, a coalition of the 57 state and territorial party leaders, was also in part a reaction to Trump, ASDC Chair Jane Kleeb said in an interview.

“We had to react to the threat that was breathing down our neck,” Kleeb, who is also the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said in an interview.

Trump has broadly accused Democrats of trying to cheat, and has placed particular focus on the possibility of noncitizens voting.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis wrote in a Thursday email that the administration would continue to guard against that possibility.

“Despite extreme Democrats and the media claiming it never happens, the evidence of non-citizens registering and voting in our elections continues to pile up,” Bis wrote. “Any non-citizens found registering and voting in our elections will be arrested and held accountable. Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”

The Justice Department has charged a handful of voter fraud cases of foreign nationals in recent months. 

The administration has also argued a software glitch in New Jersey that registered 6,600 noncitizens showed why tighter regulations on voting are needed.

“There continues to be a narrative and a concern that noncitizens are voting,” Ari Mittleman, the executive director of the civic education group Keep Our Republic, said, adding that examples like the New Jersey glitch kept the issue “on the minds of many.”

Troops at the polls?

Common Cause officials and Kleeb highlighted the possibility of federal troops or law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at polling places as a strong concern.

“We don’t know exactly what Donald Trump is going to do,” Kleeb, whose interview was conducted before the Supreme Court’s mail voting decision on Sept. 14, said. “But if we take him at his word, he will disrupt the vote-by-mail process, and he will have people outside of polling locations to intimidate voters.”

Administration officials have dismissed the idea of sending federal agents to the polls, but have not completely ruled it out. 

FBI Director Kash Patel repeatedly dodged the question during a U.S. Senate hearing Wednesday.

At a press conference this month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE would not have a sizable presence at election sites, but could deploy as part of the agency’s routine duties.

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” Mullin said. “We’re there to enforce specific threats. The only reason why we would be at polling places: Because there is a threat to that polling place or we are serving a warrant on someone we are actively tracking down.”

And then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called a question about sending ICE agents to the polls “disingenuous” at a February press briefing.

“I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November. I mean, that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question,” she said. “But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations.”

Disinformation, distrust

Trump’s relentless focus on election regulations has contributed to a distrust of elections. Only 34% of adults in a AP-NORC and USAFacts poll this month said they trust government certifications of election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit.”

Solomon said on the Thursday press call announcing the voter protection drive that the administration and its allies were seeking to sow distrust in the election.

The program, which the group said was the country’s largest nonpartisan election protection effort, hopes to counter that narrative by installing voter advocates at polling stations.

Volunteers will receive about an hour to 90 minutes of training on their state’s voting laws and how to help voters. ASDC volunteers will also receive about an hour of training. 

“They are trained to check for things like signage, polling place accessibility, long lines,” Common Cause Director of Policy Carol Evans said. “They are trained to be a positive and joyful presence at the polls to make the experience better for voters. And importantly, they are our eyes and ears on the ground to alert us to serious issues.”

In another voter education initiative, Keep Our Republic has launched a series of town hall-style events in the five states in which it operates — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to give election officials a platform to speak to voters and increase trust in the election process, Mittleman said.

The Trump administration will comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s order this week blocking new restrictions on mail voting for this year’s elections, but President Donald Trump was right to attack the ruling, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a wide-ranging White House press conference Tuesday.

Concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence are overstated, military action in Iran is not a war and the justices wrongly decided the case in which the Justice Department argued in defense of a U.S. Postal Service rule overhauling vote-by-mail requirements before the election, Blanche told reporters during a roughly half-hour briefing in the White House Rose Garden.

Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney before joining the government, began the press conference praising federal prosecutions of terrorism and election fraud suspects. 

But he quickly transitioned into a broad defense of recent Trump actions and administration policies.

The Trump administration will continue prioritizing “election security” ahead of this year’s midterms, despite its setback at the Supreme Court on the proposed mail voting regulation, he said. 

“Of course we’re going to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision, as we always do,” he said. 

“That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to do everything in this administration that we can to make sure that there are free and fair elections,” he added. “There’s this constant pressure and this effort by the media and mostly by Democrats that somehow doing that is a bad thing. Everybody should want that.”

Trump’s morning Truth Social post articulating regret over nominating some Supreme Court justices who have ruled against him was “what a democracy is about,” Blanche added.

“As far as President Trump’s Truth about about the justices, he is very frustrated, and … he has every right, and, indeed, he should communicate his concerns with the Supreme Court whenever he has them,” Blanche said. 

“I am also upset about the Supreme Court decision. But the idea that President Trump shouldn’t be allowed to communicate to the American people his frustration, I don’t share that.”

While opining on a host of issues, Blanche declined to comment on potential criminal investigations, including when asked about Minnesota Democratic U.S. Rep Ilhan Omar and longtime public health official Anthony Fauci.

AI as campaign issue

Anxiety about artificial intelligence “conveniently became a flashpoint this week,” Blanche said, suggesting Democrats sought to ramp up discontent ahead of Nov. 3 midterm elections to determine control of Congress.

Asked about how AI should be regulated and if development should be slowed, Blanche said the Department of Justice’s mission is to prosecute, not regulate. 

But he echoed Trump’s comments this week that U.S. companies should press forward with the technology to remain competitive with China.

Political figures from both parties have commented on AI policy following a call by the chief executives of top companies for a development slowdown amid disclosures the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity.

“When the leaders of the top AI companies are sounding the alarm about the potential for imminent threats, we need to take them seriously,” Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said Tuesday. 

“This is an emergency, and we need to treat it like an emergency. If the risk of AI is anywhere near the level that it has been characterized to be, then we have an obligation to act on a bipartisan basis immediately.”

In the Rose Garden, Blanche questioned whether Democrats were raising the issue in good faith or for an electoral advantage.

“Every Democrat senator suddenly races to a microphone to talk about AI after being eerily silent for months and months and months,” he said. “So to talk about the timing of this as being nothing but an effort to to influence the midterms, I shouldn’t have to say that out loud. Of course, that’s what it is. And that shouldn’t be what drives the decisions that we’re making around AI. We can’t lose the AI race to China, right?”

Hegseth ‘phenomenal’

Asked about the articles of impeachment Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie introduced Tuesday against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, objecting to continued military action in Iran even after the House passed a resolution calling for an end to the war, Blanche said Hegseth was doing “a phenomenal job.”

The Justice Department ensures that all Defense Department activity is lawful, Blanche said. 

He added that the conflict should not be categorized as a war.

“You called it a war,” he told the reporter who asked about the impeachment. “I disagree with that characterization, as does most of Congress.”

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday kept in place a lower court’s order blocking President Donald Trump’s embattled plan to place new restrictions on mail ballots for this year’s midterm elections.

The unsigned, one-paragraph order upheld a Massachusetts federal court’s injunction on a U.S. Postal Service rule until after Nov. 3 and did not decide whether the rule itself was lawful. But a majority of the court said the Democratic state officials and voting rights groups challenging the rule were likely to succeed.

Two of the court’s stalwart conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented from the decision. Alito wrote that the Postal Service has “broad authority to regulate the mail” and that at this preliminary stage of the suit challenging the rule, its policy should remain in place.

“I express no view on whether the Government would be likely to succeed on de novo review of the Postal Service’s powers,” he wrote. “But for now, the Government has satisfied its burden of making a strong showing that the plaintiff States’ … claim is not likely to succeed.”

In a brief concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the rule, which codifies technical requirements on the envelopes carrying ballots and requires states to collect and send to the federal government lists of eligible voters, may be legal, but was unworkable for the midterm elections 50 days away.

“There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority,” he wrote. “But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious …  because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

In a social media post Tuesday morning, Trump excoriated the decision, saying, without evidence, it would allow Democrats to use vote-by-mail to cheat.

“It is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself, and makes cheating by the Radical Left ‘Dumocrats,’ on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do – And now they have an open field to do so.” 

He also complained about other high-profile rulings that he lost and, without naming them appeared to aim particular ire at the justices he appointed to the court: Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

“This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” he wrote. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.”

Case continues

The rule’s challengers argued, in part, that the regulations would be impossible to install ahead of Election Day. Several election administrators, pro-democracy groups and others declared to the court that they agreed with that argument. 

The Postal Service did not bring any evidence against those claims.

Democrats and voting rights advocates also argued the rule was illegal and unconstitutional. The executive branch has virtually no role in elections administration, which is a state responsibility with congressional oversight under the U.S. Constitution, they said. 

The case, tried before President Barack Obama appointee U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, will continue to evaluate the legality of the rule for future elections.

Challengers react 

The groups and officials challenging the rule, as well as other Democrats, hailed the ruling in statements.

“Today’s order from our nation’s highest court makes clear that states cannot be forced to undermine their mail voting systems and risk voter disenfranchisement because of the President’s political agenda,” Massachusetts Attorney General Joy Campbell said. “Mail voting is safe, secure, and reliable, and I will continue to stand up for Massachusetts residents who rely on mail ballots to ensure that they can have their voices heard in the November election.”

Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and CEO of Common Cause, one of the groups suing to block the rule, called the decision “a major win for the millions of everyday Americans,” including elderly and rural voters, and those with disabilities, who depend on vote-by-mail.

“This executive order was a blatant power grab designed to silence voters and undermine our elections, but it failed because the people and the law were on our side,” she said in a statement. “Our Constitution is clear: states run our elections, and voters choose their leaders—not the other way around. No administration can strip the people of their power.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose state was the lead plaintiff in the case, said the rule was part of Trump’s “attacks on democracy” for the past 20 months.

“California stood up for democracy and we won,” Newsom wrote on social media. “Today is a good day for democracy, the rule of law, and the American people looking to exercise their Constitutional right to vote.”

Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general and Democratic nominee for governor, said the court “just sent the message that President Trump and the Postal Service need to stay the hell away from our elections.”

California and Colorado are among the eight states that send ballots to every registered voter.

Spokespeople for the Postal Service and U.S. Department of Justice, which represented the administration in the case, did not respond to emails seeking comment late Monday.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will revoke limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that run on coal and natural gas, according to regulatory documents Administrator Lee Zeldin signed Monday.

The administration framed the action to repeal 2024 limits on greenhouse gas emissions from virtually all power plants other than wind, solar or hydro-powered as lowering energy costs, which the war with Iran has driven up, as energy producers will save at least $310 million on compliance. The move could produce a tenfold increase in coal power, the agency said.

“Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices, but this is just the beginning,” Zeldin said in the release. “We are working to go even further so that American energy can be fully unleashed. Realizing the full potential of American energy means more jobs, lower prices, and a more prosperous America.”

Environmental groups and elected Democrats blasted the move, which would roll back regulations set by Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, for hastening climate change and increasing air pollution. Some called the action a corrupt favor to an industry that boosted President Donald Trump’s campaign.

“It’s simple. Big Oil & Big Coal give millions to help get Trump elected. He lets them pollute more. You get dirtier air, extreme heat, flooding, & droughts,” Maryland U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “Trump’s trading away your health & safety to pad his donors’ pockets. Polluters win, Trump wins, you lose.”

Repeal of Biden carbon pollution standards

The EPA published two regulations in the Federal Register in a single effort Monday that it said would reduce energy costs and boost availability, while complying with judicial rulings in recent years that restricted the agency’s power to regulate climate change.

A final rule would partially repeal the Biden-era Carbon Pollution Standards, which the agency said was not achievable by their 2032 target date and would lead to power plants shutting down. And a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking considered stripping all greenhouse gas limits on fossil-fuel power plants since 2015.

U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who leads the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, applauded the move.

“Finally, under President Trump’s leadership, we are ending the Biden-era Clean Power Plan 2.0, which was designed to eliminate coal and natural gas power generation, drastically increasing Americans’ electric bills,” she said in a statement. “I have long opposed this rule and warned of the devastating economic impacts it would have in West Virginia.”

Zeldin laid the groundwork for the move last year by repealing the agency’s “endangerment finding” that formed the basis of federal regulation targeting climate change.

Monday’s release called concerns about greenhouse gas emissions’ effect on climate change overblown, while elevating “baseload power” generation as a much more important issue for Americans.

“Models continue to show that (greenhouse gas) emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change,” the release said. “In fact, if all carbon dioxides were eliminated tomorrow, there would be no meaningful climate impact.”

That finding is disputed, including by an EPA webpage, the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action noted. 

“Electric power generation is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide pollution, contributing to climate change, which is threatening public health and affecting ecosystems at multiple levels,” the EPA webpage, which was last updated in December, says.

“The EPA’s own publicly available analysis contradicts the administration’s laughable claims that the U.S. power sector doesn’t meaningfully contribute to climate change or harm public health,” Pete Wyckoff, Evergreen’s vice president for policy, said. “If the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would rank as the world’s fifth-largest emitter of climate pollution.”

Regulation moving to states

Rhode Island U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, blasted the move and rebutted the EPA’s cost-saving rationale, saying the agency’s “own analysis” showed a 2024 Biden rule would have saved about $20 billion annually in “prevented climate disasters and health care costs.”

“The fossil fuel-captured EPA’s decision to end its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants is a tragic and expensive mistake,” Whitehouse said. “In refusing to address this national crisis, EPA is shifting the costs of climate change onto every family in America.”

More frequent natural disasters driven by climate change cost lives as well as billions in damage to buildings and infrastructure, property insurance, agricultural losses and more “long-term destabilization of the national economy,” he continued. “But the Trump EPA refuses to measure these costs and is only interested in tabulating, and inflating, the alleged costs to industry.”

Whitehouse added that the decision could backfire on fossil fuel energy producers, as more states and local governments would seek to fill the void left by federal regulators and place their own limits on fossil fuel energy generation.

President Donald Trump has, at times, justified his campaign against mail-in voting in explicitly partisan terms, claiming Republicans’ electoral chances hinge on whether the practice is allowed.

A new analysis from a Democratic-aligned voting rights group, shared first with States Newsroom, shows he may be right: Eliminating mail-in voting would be more disruptive to Democratic voters than Republicans.

Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based advocacy group founded by Democratic former state Rep. Stacey Abrams, analyzed vote-by-mail data in seven 2024 swing states and potential battlegrounds for the 2026 midterm elections. 

Records indicated that Democrats voted by mail more often than Republicans.

The partisan differences didn’t swing any battleground states in the 2024 presidential election, all of which Trump won.

But if Trump succeeds in restricting mail voting in the 2026 midterms, which he is attempting through a contentious executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to enforce new requirements, it could help Republicans win key House and Senate seats as each party seeks a narrow path to a majority in either chamber.

Dems’ mail voting edge

For example, in Michigan, one of the toss-up U.S. Senate races that will determine control, more than 2 million voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to the Fair Fight analysis. 

Nearly half came from Democrats, while Republicans sent 39%, a difference of about 200,000 votes in Democrats’ favor. That gap represents a smaller number of votes than the margin of victory for the winner of the state in the last three presidential elections.

In North Carolina, another state with a close U.S. Senate race in 2026, Democrats voting by mail outnumbered Republicans by about eight percentage points in 2024, though mail ballots accounted for only about 5% of all votes, according to the data.

In a Friday statement to States Newsroom, Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo blamed Trump for undermining trust in vote-by-mail and encouraged voters to view mail voting as a viable method.

“Trump is a desperate loser who has spent years lying to his supporters about mail voting ‘fraud’ – as a result many stopped using a method they once trusted,” she said. “Voting by mail is secure, convenient, and accessible. Whether voting by mail, early, or on Election Day, make your plan to vote now and see it through.”

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis portrayed the rule on mail ballots as a “commonsense” election security measure.

“If securing America’s elections – through commonsense methods like voter ID and proof of citizenship – would make it harder for Democrats to win elections, perhaps they should reconsider the methods they’re using to ‘win,’” Bis wrote.

The Fair Fight analysis shows the partisan gap narrows in states with more mail-in voting.

In Arizona, where 83% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, Republicans held a 5-point margin in mail voting, roughly the same as Trump’s 5.5-point victory in the state. And in Nevada, where 44% of ballots were cast by mail, the mail-in vote was almost evenly split among Democrat, Republican and “other” voters.

Mail voting history

Until 2020, mail voting enjoyed broad bipartisan support.

An April 2020 study published by Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research found that in the six Western states — Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Hawaii, Utah and California — that had started implementing a system of mailing ballots to every registered voter, the policy did not help either party while modestly boosting turnout.

“Vote-by-mail does not have meaningful partisan effects on election outcomes,” the authors wrote.

But as states ramped up mail voting in the 2020 election as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue turned more partisan, with Democrats more likely to stay away from in-person voting. 

Trump, then running for reelection, cast unfounded doubts on vote-by-mail’s integrity and warned of dire effects for Republicans.

“MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE,” he tweeted in May 2020. “IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.”

After several cycles of roughly equal rates of mail voting, Democratic mail voters nearly doubled Republicans, 60% to 32%, in 2020. The gap narrowed in 2024, with Democratic voters outpacing Republicans 37% to 24%.

Trump’s claims

While the Postal Service is now arguing in court its rule based on Trump’s March 31 executive order is not an election regulation but only includes “modest” technical specifications for mail, other statements by Trump show the purpose is directly tied to election administration. 

Trump’s order justified new regulations on mail ballots to maintain “public confidence in election outcomes” and “enhance election integrity.”

He previewed the effort in an August 2025 social media post saying he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” that again made the issue explicitly about partisan advantage.

“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” he wrote. “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on whether the rule can be in effect for this year’s midterms.

The Democratic-led states and voting rights groups suing to block enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order to restrict mail-in voting warned in briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday the policy would have disastrous consequences for the upcoming midterm elections if it is allowed to move forward.

Less than two months before the Nov. 3 elections, at least two states have already begun sending ballots to voters, and officials in several others have voiced serious concerns that complying with the U.S. Postal Service rule this election cycle is impossible, opponents said.

The Democratic attorneys general of 23 states, the District of Columbia and the governor of Pennsylvania told the high court they strongly object to the Trump administration’s request that justices allow the rule to move forward.

“Whatever else may be said of USPS’ new rule, it would wreak havoc on States and their voters if it takes effect at this late point—when some States, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, have already begun to mail out ballots,” they wrote.

Only Democratic state officials have sought to challenge the rule in court, but Wednesday’s brief noted that top elections officials in the Republican-led states of Utah, Florida and Ohio have also warned the rule would cause “catastrophic harms.”

The suit, now at the Supreme Court, was brought by the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin, along with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

“Allowing USPS’ new rule to take effect would be virtually certain to prevent many millions of Americans from casting mail ballots in this fall’s elections,” opponents wrote.

The record in the Massachusetts federal court that issued the preliminary injunction blocking the rule’s enforcement that the administration is seeking to overturn includes “unrebutted evidence” that “establishes that compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms,” the state officials wrote.

Spokespeople for the White House, Postal Service and U.S. Department of Justice, which is representing the Trump administration in the case, did not respond to messages seeking comment Wednesday.

The case is on what’s known as the court’s emergency docket, and it’s not clear when a decision on whether or not to keep the preliminary injunction in place will be issued.

Voting rights groups echo Dems

A coalition of voting rights groups also filed a response Wednesday, making similar arguments.

The groups, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, emphasized the likelihood of disenfranchisement for many of the roughly 50 million voters set to receive ballots from the states challenging the rule.

Even if the mail specifications under the rule could be met in time for the election, the online portal the Postal Service has rushed to develop is not ready, the challengers wrote. 

Several friend-of-the-court briefs also made that argument, including the federal employee whistleblower who reported last week that the portal’s rushed development would lead to numerous errors if used this election. 

As of late last week, states had not yet been given access to the portal, which is supposed to be the mechanism for verifying compliance with the rule, even as some began mailing ballots.

“USPS’s Rule gives states mere weeks to implement sweeping changes to their election systems—even though USPS has not yet established the necessary infrastructure to administer its new requirements,” they wrote. “The Rule would disrupt the administration of mail voting mid-election and disenfranchise eligible voters nationwide, including voters in all-mail states like Colorado and Utah and elderly, rural, and disabled voters who must vote by mail.”

Beyond Postal Service power

In addition to the impossibility of states’ complying with the Postal Service rule, which places new requirements on ballot mail and requires states to transmit voter data to the federal government, less than two months before Election Day, the regulation impedes states’ constitutional authorities and oversteps the executive branch’s powers, the state officials and groups wrote.

The U.S. Constitution specifies that administering elections is a state responsibility, though Congress may pass laws governing certain elements. The executive branch has virtually no role unless specifically delegated by Congress, the rule’s challengers wrote.

And Congress never passed a law to give the Postal Service the kind of power over election mail that the rule claims, they said.

“To the contrary, Congress has exhaustively enumerated the types of materials that USPS can lawfully refuse to deliver,” the state officials wrote. “Ballots are not among them.”

The rule bans postal workers from delivering ballots that do not meet any of the conditions specified in the rule, including pre-approval of envelope designs and lists of eligible voters that the administration plans to check against a citizenship database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

Outsiders weigh in

A flurry of 17 friend-of-the-court briefs hit the Supreme Court docket Tuesday and Wednesday. 

None sided with the administration.

The briefs, representing bipartisan former governors, state and local election officials, military voters, the Postal Service workers’ union, good government organizations, Democratic campaign groups and others all said the rule was impossible to comply with at this point in the election cycle.

“The late-breaking USPS Final Rule—which was promulgated mere months before the November 3, 2026 general midterm elections, and which mandates sweeping, costly, and burdensome changes to mail-in voting procedures—would prove disastrous for election officials and election administration,” local officials and the pro-democracy group Center for Election Innovation wrote. “And it would seriously undermine the upcoming elections.”

In another filing, a bipartisan group of current and former local and state election officials said it was impossible to comply with the rule this year. 

Their brief noted that many of their members were Republicans or represented Republican-majority districts and emphasized that they took no position on the rule’s legality. 

But they said implementing it now was infeasible and ran afoul of a Supreme Court principle that changes in election policy should not happen during or close to an election.

“The principle rests on incontestable facts about voters and about the people who run elections: that late changes breed confusion, that confusion keeps eligible voters from voting, and that a chaotic election erodes confidence in the result,” they wrote. They “therefore suggest only this: that the November 3, 2026 general election be conducted under the rules that were in place when the election’s administration began.”

The hotly contested U.S. Postal Service rule restricting mail-in voting usurps Congress’ authority, as well as states’ power to administer elections, more than 250 current and former members of Congress said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.

All 47 members of the U.S. Senate Democratic Caucus, 199 current House Democrats and 15 former House Republicans signed the friend-of-the-court brief opposing President Donald Trump’s policy to add several requirements to mail ballots. 

The U.S. Constitution “is unambiguous” in empowering states to run elections, while Congress can enact laws to oversee elections generally, they argued.

“Congress has passed several laws regulating federal elections—though it has always done so surgically, deliberately leaving the States with considerable room to maneuver,” they wrote.

The executive branch has no role, they said. 

The Trump administration has argued the rule, published last month, requires only “modest” technical specifications for mail ballots and that states transmit lists of eligible voters to receive the ballots. The rule is a targeted measure affecting mail delivery, not elections, the administration says.

But the lawmakers say that argument fails. 

The agency cannot take action related to elections without a congressional directive, they wrote. Congress never wrote a law asking for the requirements included in the USPS rule, they said. 

Executive order

In this case, Trump spurred the Postal Service to write the rule in a March executive order, based on the unsubstantiated premise that vote-by-mail is vulnerable to fraud. 

That shows the rule is meant to address Trump’s concerns about election administration, not mail specifications, the lawmakers said.

“The integrity of our constitutional system depends on each branch keeping to its assigned role,” they wrote. “The Framers set up a two-part system that gave States default authority to regulate federal elections subject to Congress’s authority to override the States. The Framers did not provide the President with any authority to interfere in that system, nor has Congress imbued the Executive Branch with any such authority by statute.”

Spokespeople for the White House, USPS and the Department of Justice, which is representing the Trump administration in the case, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Tuesday.

In a separate brief, the legal advocacy group the Society for the Rule of Law made a similar argument, saying the federal postal law the administration has cited provides only broad language that does not empower the agency to regulate election mail.

“The non-election, boilerplate … provisions on which Applicants rely are not a secret, alternative way for the USPS to bar ballot mail, conditionally or otherwise, on the eve of election day,” the group wrote. “Under the federalism presumption and the major question doctrine, the USPS needed a clear statement of statutory authority.”

Rushed delivery

The rule would require technical elements such as unique barcodes on ballot envelopes. Elections experts say those requirements are unworkable in time for the fall’s midterm elections because states have already designed, printed and — in some cases — begun sending ballots.

The rule would also require states to send to the federal government lists of eligible voters, which would be checked against a Department of Homeland Security database to verify citizenship. 

The rule bans the Postal Service from delivering ballots to registered voters who are not verified through that method.

The online portal that the rule says states should use for this process has still, less than two months until Election Day, not been introduced to states. A whistleblower last week reported the rushed development has led to myriad problems with the tool, which could result in legitimate ballots being rejected.

Opponents, including more than 20 Democratic state officials and voting rights groups that sued to challenge the rule, say it would risk disenfranchisement for the millions of voters, including Trump, who vote by mail.

High court ruling pending

The rule has been the subject of rapidfire legal fighting over the past several weeks, and the Supreme Court is now weighing whether to overturn a Massachusetts federal judge’s order pausing the rule while litigation continues, after the Trump administration filed an appeal over the weekend.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Sunday asked the states and voting rights groups challenging the rule to file their response to the application by Wednesday at 4 p.m. Eastern.

That district court injunction from Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, held that the rule was likely unconstitutional and unlawful for reasons the members of Congress articulated Tuesday: The Constitution grants states and Congress the power to oversee elections and states would be harmed if they are forced to comply with the regulation before courts can determine its legality.