3+ week, 2+ day ago (216+ words) Republicans are feeling the pressure after getting clobbered in the 2025 election to end the government shutdown. Moderate Senate Republicans have been meeting with moderate Senate Democrats to try to work out a deal to reopen the government. One of the areas that they still haven't found agreement on is the restoration of the Obamacare subsidies. One of the biggest problems that any deal faces is that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson refuses to even allow a vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies. If the speaker will not change his position, it doesn't matter what the Senate agrees to, it will go nowhere. Johnson's falsely labeled "clean CR" expires on November 21. Republicans seem to be frantic to get a deal done before the glut of air travel over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Trump is MIA and doesn't care about the…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago (275+ words) Donald Trump's approval rating is currently lower than it was after 1/6. Trump has known for quite some time that his presidency is effectively over if Democrats win back the House in 2026. If Democrats win a House majority, Trump becomes a lame duck, and by the late summer of 2027, Democrats will start holding their first presidential primary debates, and the nation will turn its attention toward the 2028 election. Trump will be an afterthought, and the person who will be keeping the seat warm for the next, and definitely much younger, president. To counter his looming irrelevance, Trump came up with a plan. Trump's plan is to rig the 2026 midterm election by getting red states to gerrymander more Republican leaning seats for his party. It seemed like a great idea that was going swimmingly as Texas quickly fell into line and redrew…...

19+ hour, 21+ min ago (195+ words) Republicans are hanging on to their majority in the House by a thread. Marjorie Taylor Greene's abrupt resignation means that a reliable red House seat will remain unfilled for months. However, it is what is happening in a special House election in Tennessee that should be terrifying Republicans. Tennessee's Seventh US House district is not a race that, in a normal year, anyone would consider to be ripe for flipping. Republicans have heavily gerrymandered the district. Trump carried it in 2024 by 22 points. Hakeem Jeffries and House Democrats have been consistently widening their map of potential 2026 pickups. The Democrats have been telling anyone who would listen for months that districts Republicans carried by 20 points or more are in play for 2026. Experts and Republicans scoffed because if seats that Republicans carried by more than twenty points were in play, it could result…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago (217+ words) Donald Trump's scheme to rig the 2026 election so that Republicans can keep the House majority was always a dumb idea. Political scientists who have studied the impacts of gerrymandering have found that gerrymanders don't rig elections or pad majorities. In 2023, Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Research (ISPS) and Harvard University analyzed all of the potential simulations of national gerrymandering scenarios. Taken together, the data shows that most of the electoral bias cancels out at the national level, resulting in only a two-seat advantage for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives compared to what could have been drawn under geographic and legal constraints. Gerrymandering can't rig the House or create a voter-proof majority, but what it can do is create structural disadvantages in up to 8 House seats that will make it more challenging for Democrats to win those seats. Trump…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago (253+ words) Donald Trump hates to be reminded that the Constitution comes before his wishes in the United States of America. After a half a dozen members of Congress who served in the military released a video urging the troops and the intelligence community not to follow illegal orders and place the Constitution first, Trump lost it. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH! Here is the video that Trump considers seditious: The six members of Congress whom Trump threatened are Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania; and Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. The members who, unlike Trump, have served this country and risked their lives were not intimidated. In a joint…...

3+ week, 2+ day ago (209+ words) Tomorrow there will be a vote in the Senate on a plan to reopen the government. That vote will fail like more than a dozen that came before it. While the American people have blamed Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown from the day it started, Republicans have felt pressure to act until now. Well, Republicans in Congress feel pressure to act. Donald Trump is continuing to ignore his shutdown. The difference in perspective between Trump and vulnerable Republican members of Congress has opened up a gap, and as the hours of the shutdown continue to fly by, Republicans are getting more nervous and starting to talk to Democrats about a deal to extend Obamacare subsidies. There is the discharge petition idea that is being negotiated if Speaker Mike Johnson continues to be Trump's personal flying monkey and blocks…...

3+ week, 2+ day ago (331+ words) It could be argued that Nancy Pelosi is the most important political figure in the United States over the last 40 years. Throughout presidential administrations, Pelosi has navigated key legislation and led critical fights for the American people in the House. During the Clinton administration, she championed the Ryan White Care Act that expanded Medicaid to cover HIV/AIDS care and established the national care system for HIV and AIDS. Pelosi was vital to changing the way that HIV is cared for and the she changes she brought about through legislation saved lives. During the Bush administration, she led the opposition to the Iraq War. The national oppostion to the Iraq War led to a blue wave in 2006 that led to Pelosi making history as the first woman Speaker of the House in 2007. During her first stint as speaker, Pelosi got…...

6+ day, 22+ hour ago (288+ words) Some problems go beyond politics. Political polarization and a lack of agreement on the basic moral sense of right and wrong are two different things. One of the reasons why Trump has been able to establish a tyranny of the minority is that he has followed the Fox News playbook of destroying the basic foundational truths of the nation. One of the most dangerous things that the president and his party have done since returning to power in 2025 came in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting, when Trump and his allies tried to use the killing of Kirk to turn political violence into a debatable partisan issue. Trump and his allies blamed Democrats for Kirk's death and falsely claimed that their political opponents were the cause of political violence in the United States. As Donald Trump does with most…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago (240+ words) Gov. Gavin Newsom is one of the Democrats who have been leading the charge, and telling his party to wake up and not play by the old political rules. Newsom's biggest move, which is set to pay off on Tuesday, is Prop 50, which could potentially add five new House seats to the Democratic column next November and offset Trump's gerrymandering of Texas and other red states. The change in Gavin Newsom came when Trump sent federal troops and ICE into his state. After Trump invaded California, Newsom went from a governor who featured Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk as podcast guests to someone who was sounding the alarm about Trump's abuse of federal power and threat to the rights of the American people. Newsom, it seemed, listened to Democratic strategists at first who incorrectly said that the party needed to…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago (253+ words) Donald Trump isn't hard to read. It is easy to imagine why he has failed throughout his life, because he has the poker face of a four-year-old. Trump often reveals beneath his usual mountain of false statements what he is afraid of. Voters in the United States are going to the polls on Tuesday, and while the vast majority of the seats up for election are municipal, there are gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, along with the redistricting ballot measure before the voters in California. New polling on Monday revealed that things are going in a bad direction for Donald Trump. CNN reported on its latest poll: Trump's approval rating in the poll stands at 37%, the worst of his second term in CNN polling and roughly equivalent to his 36% approval rating at this point in his first term....