The New Republic

President Donald Trump is evidently still reeling from the results of last night’s congressional primaries, especially in New York, where multiple democratic socialists won their races.

After posting on Truth Social Wednesday that he was refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill until the Senate passed his unpopular voting from bill, the SAVE America Act, the president spoke to reporters on Capitol Hill before a lunch with Senate Republicans—and quickly veered off topic.

One reporter asked, “Buying a home is unattainable for so many Americans. Is this election legislation more important to you than resolving the housing crisis?”

“Every election is important, we’re doing very well,” Trump responded. “They want a lot of communists to come in…The people that they’re pushing are communists, and this country is not going to have communists.”

asked about high housing costs and why he won't sign the housing bill, Trump immediately pivots to ranting about "communists" and says, "this country is not going to have communists" (in other words, rigging elections for Republicans with the SAVE Act is more important to him… pic.twitter.com/bVKphElGBF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

Trump went on a posting spree Wednesday morning, writing, “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” and “history has conclusively shown that the downtrodden States that [the communists] will soon be running will ONLY GET WORSE.”

Meanwhile, his decision not to sign this housing bill has sent his own party into a tailspin. As the midterms approach, Republicans are in dire need of a victory to show voters, and this housing package would demonstrate their commitment to making life more affordable for their constituents.

But Trump does not seem to take the housing crisis seriously. He said on Truth Social the bill was “of minor importance,” and that it “pales in comparison” to his SAVE Act, which would limit mail-in voting and require voters to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. As of now, it just doesn’t have the votes to pass.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna was caught using Claude to do her job—and she doesn’t care.

A description of Luna’s National Defense Authorization Act amendment that appeared on the House Rules Committee website Wednesday was filed with a tell-tale indicator of the artificial intelligence assistant.

Squeezed in the middle of the text: “11:25 AM????Claude responded.” The language of Luna’s amendment description has since been revised.

Luna was quick to respond to the controversy on X, writing that her staff had used AI to “spell/grammar check the amendment SUMMARY, not the actual amendment text itself.

“Not a shocker. Most staff use it. I have told them to make sure they are double checking and more thorough,” she continued. “What dork planted this story?”

Luna added that she loves Claude, but Grok is “way more savage.” Elon Musk’s AI chatbot alternative has been riddled with a number of scandals, including instances in which it unquestioningly created nude images of underage girls and espoused Nazi beliefs.

In a separate post, Luna clarified that “NO legislation is ever drafted with AI.”

“All bill text from the House comes from the House Legislative Council which is prohibited from using AI,” she wrote. “The screenshot you’re referencing is an AI summary of the bill that’s also used for spellcheck, c’mon man.”

Nonetheless, it’s important to keep public officials honest about the issue. Federal and state officials alike have been caught leaning on artificial intelligence. In October, federal judges were accused of using AI to write court orders, resulting in serious factual inaccuracies. The year before, a Republican Arizona state representative was found to have used AI software to draft deepfake legislation that was later signed into law.

In an already alarming moment for voting rights, the U.S. Postal Service wants to make things so much worse.

In response to a March executive order by President Donald Trump—which directed USPS to only provide mail-in ballots to voters on a federal list—the theoretically nonpartisan postal service is planning to implement a new rule forcing states to provide the Trump administration with a list of anyone who has requested an absentee or mail-in ballot. If the states refuse, their citizens wouldn’t receive their ballots.

Postmaster General David Steiner made the admission in a Senate hearing on Wednesday following questioning from Democratic Senator Gary Peters.

“If a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list over to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposal?” Peters asked.

“Under our proposed regulation, no,” Steiner replied.

PETERS: Yes or no, if a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposed rule?

POSTMASTER GENERAL STEINER: No.

PETERS: So the proposed rule basically coerces states to hand over their… pic.twitter.com/5bnJb5Atnr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

“This is basically a back-door way for the federal government to get voting information that states control under the U.S. Constitution,” Peters said later. “You’re telling the states, ‘Give the federal government this information—trust the federal government, trust the Trump administration, we’ll take good care of these—and if you don’t do it, you can’t mail absentee ballots.’”

Senator Margaret Hassan, another Democrat, said the USPS should “immediately” bin the new rule, labeling it “blatantly illegal.” Many postal workers have similarly spoken out against the idea, according to Democracy Docket.

Thankfully, the new rule can still be blocked in courts, and multiple lawsuits have been filed in order to do so. One Massachusetts lawsuit was allowed to proceed last week, after District Judge Indira Talwani stated the rule would hurt states’ constitutional right to run elections.

Steiner said the USPS would abide by whatever the courts rule. But it’s frightening to see, after years of trying to meddle with elections, that MAGA still isn’t done.

Soldiers wounded in the deadliest attack of the war on Iran have accused the Pentagon of minimizing their injuries, according to CBS News.

Chief Warrant Officer Rodney Bearman and Sergeant First Class Cory Hicks were both pierced with multiple pieces of shrapnel from the March 1 Iranian drone strike on their work station in Kuwait. Medical records show Bearman suffered a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and damage to his lungs. The Army has classified his condition as “not seriously injured,” even though he needed serious medical attention and days in the hospital.

Hicks suffered a traumatic brain injury, and his injuries were also listed as “minor,” even though he required multiple surgeries.

“That assessment is unacceptable,” Bearman’s wife, Amy, told CBS. “They told me that my husband’s injuries were classified as NSI, and they described that, or they defined that, as ‘not seriously injured.’ … He was treated and released back to duty.

“I could just hear him breathing and then he finally said, ‘I’m going to be OK.’ I waited a few moments and then asked if he returned to duty. It seemed like forever before he answered me, and then he said, ‘I can’t go back.’”

Doctors preferred that Bearman stay in the Kuwaiti hospital for a longer period of time, but that was denied by the Pentagon for “security concerns.” Being “cleared for duty” in this case means being cleared to begin recovering from injuries outside of a hospital, not that a soldier is prepared to return to active duty. Bearman returned to the U.S. on March 18 with shrapnel still in his body.

Hicks required multiple emergency surgeries in a Kuwaiti hospital after the strike. Even still, the Pentagon classified his injuries as “minor.”

“They said your husband was injured, he has a minor jaw injury, and he’s going to be returned to duty,” Hicks said his wife was told. Hicks told CBS News that he “absolutely” thinks the Pentagon has been downplaying the impact of the attack.

Hicks was still in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland at the time of this writing, almost four months after the attack, with a “pretty severe” traumatic brain injury. That is in no way minor.

The Army defended its classifications of Bearman and Hicks, saying that only someone at the risk of dying within 72 hours qualifies for a “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” designation.

“The care and well-being of our Soldiers is of the highest priority. Any assertion that the Army seeks to downplay a soldier’s injuries is simply not true,” an Army spokesperson told CBS in a statement.

“Our hope for the investigation is that an honest assessment by the Army will prevent this from happening again to other service members,” Amy Bearman said.

“Reprehensible from any administration,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on X about the CBS report. “Truly beyond the pale from the President who faked ‘bone spurs’ to avoid serving and combat.”

Six soldiers were killed in the March 1 attack, and Bearman and Hicks were among 20 others wounded. The attack and the subsequent treatment of these soldiers’ injuries is even more bleak when considering that the military accomplished virtually nothing of the Trump administration’s stated mission: The president eventually capitulated on a memorandum of understanding that allows Iran to maintain its missile arsenal and nuclear power program.

A federal judge has killed most of President Donald Trump’s first executive order changing election rules.

U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper permanently banned the administration Wednesday from implementing most components of the president’s 2025 order, which required individuals to provide “documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” before they registered to vote. In addition to lifting that requirement, the ruling also bans the president from requiring all mail ballots to be received by Election Day, even if they were postmarked by then.

Under Trump’s order, states that refused to comply would have been punished by having their federal funding withheld.

The government had argued that Democratic challenges to Trump’s executive order were premature and therefore illegitimate since the changes had not yet been implemented—but the Boston-based judge wasn’t having it. Instead, she noted that Trump’s office had effectively violated the necessary separation of powers, as only states and Congress are permitted to regulate elections.

The Constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Casper wrote.

Trump officials responded quickly to Casper’s decision, hinting online that the ruling would be appealed.

“I hope the Chief Justice understands the path these rogue judges have charted for the judiciary,” deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Trump has worked overtime to force his unpopular election reform proposals through the legislature, throwing confirmation hearings and bipartisan bill signings to the wayside while demanding Republicans prioritize passing the SAVE America Act.

The backlash to the bill—which was introduced months ago on Capitol Hill—has been grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

Since he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have amped up their base over contrived claims of voter fraud, a statistical nonissue in U.S. elections. For instance, a statewide audit out of Georgia, the epicenter of Trump’s baseless theory, revealed in 2024 that just 20 non-citizens out of 8.2 million residents existed on the state’s voter roll, just 0.00024 percent of the state’s voting population. Out of those 20, only nine participated in elections years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

This story has been updated.

Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper is calling for President Donald Trump to refund taxpayers out of his own pocket for the millions spent on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, HuffPost reports.

“For weeks, Americans have watched a national embarrassment unfold on the National Mall,” Hickenlooper wrote in a letter to the president obtained by HuffPost. “Under the guise of an ‘emergency,’ your Administration bypassed competitive bidding processes to rush a renovation of the iconic Reflecting Pool.… Today, the Reflecting Pool is a fluorescent green swamp of algae, and the expensive blue sealant is already peeling off the bottom in sheets.”

Though Trump blamed “vandals” for the pool’s problems, it’s more likely that shoddy workmanship is the issue: Trump rushed the painting of the pool so that it would be “American Flag Blue” by July 4, and awarded no-bid contracts worth millions of dollars—one to Greenwater Services, the ironically named company of a longtime Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor.

Even if mysterious assailants did take a knife to the reflecting pool’s peeling blue paint—something Trump has declined to provide any evidence of—that wouldn’t explain how the reflecting pool became a bright green, algae-filled swamp.

“This was not a result of vandalism, but your administration’s incompetence,” Hickenlooper wrote in his letter. “The bill for this fiasco should only belong to you, Mr. President.”

In order to fix what it broke, the administration is planning to spend even more money to re-drain the pool and conduct repairs. Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” is starting to sound a lot more literal.

Republicans can’t catch a break at the minute, and it’s all due to their mad, senile king.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which passed both the House and Senate with flying colors— catching members of his own party off guard.

The bill would create new homes and limit corporate investors’ ability to buy single-family residences. Members of the GOP have used it as an example of their concern for working people ahead of the November midterms.

The stage was quite literally set for the signing in the Capitol before Trump threw his hissy fit. With little over an hour before the public signing ceremony, the president said he wants to push through the SAVE Act, Republicans’ faulty voter ID bill, before doing anything about housing.

Republicans then rushed to remove the presidential seal from the podium, as Democrats began using the stage as a backdrop to highlight the president’s sudden flip-flop.

The Presidential seals are removed pic.twitter.com/LcenV4xLDE

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) June 24, 2026

Following Trump’s public refusal, House Speaker Mike Johnson attempted some damage control in a press conference.

“The president, when we go through the details of the bill, he’s gonna understand that it’s a good product, and certainly something that fulfills his promises,” Johnson said.

The SAVE Act has passed in the House, but does not currently have the votes to pass the Senate. Nor should it—the bill will make it tougher for anyone lacking a paper copy of their birth certificate or passport to vote.

“The SAVE Act will make it exceedingly and unacceptably difficult for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans, to be heard,” Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock told Politico. “If all the people in the election can’t be heard, who are eligible to vote, then that’s something other than democracy.”

“I don’t think the American public knows what is in store for them if [the SAVE ACT] passes,” Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono added. “Millions of people are going to need to re-register.”

Kyle Griffin of MS NOW called the legislation “designed to help rig elections.”

Despite the president’s refusal to sign the housing bill, it could still become law in 10 days if Congress remains in session.

U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver could face up to 17 years in prison if the Justice Department gets its way.

McIver, 40, was charged with assaulting immigration agents outside the notorious Delaney Hall immigration detention center in New Jersey last May. On Wednesday, her case will be argued in a federal appellate court, and will be another test of the Trump administration’s power to go after political opponents, The New York Times reports.

Last year, McIver, who is now pregnant with her second child, was at the detention center with other Democratic leaders to conduct an oversight inspection. When agents attempted to arrest Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka for tresspassing, McIver was allegedly involved in a confrontation where she used her arms to “assault, resist, impede and intimidate” two federal agents, government attorneys say.

No one was injured in the altercation. McIver’s lawyers argue that the DOJ is coming after her because of her political views, citing the many pardons that the Trump administration gave to the January 6 protestors who actually did injure police officers in the 2021 riot.

However, U.S. District Court Judge Jamel K. Semper rejected those arguments in November. She appealed the case, and it will be argued before a panel of three appellate judges Wednesday.

A bipartisan group of former members of Congress wrote a letter in support of McIver, arguing that a win for the DOJ would mean that the executive branch would be able to “behave in a more chaotic and unsafe fashion, and create new, unprecedented tools to block legitimate oversight.”

If she is convicted, McIver could face up to 17 years in prison, and $1 million in legal fees. She is currently running for reelection and her baby is due in the fall.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.

The swing districts in the midterms this year aren’t just suburban areas with lots of white college graduates and rural and exurban places with lots of whites without degrees. Carrie Dann, managing editor of the Cook Political Report, says that districts with large numbers of minorities in states such as Texas and Florida could flip to the Democrats because of President Trump’s declining support among Latino voters in particular. Overall, Dann says that Democrats are favorites to flip the House, because of Trump’s deep unpopularity. The Senate will be much more challenging for the party, which must flip four seats in the chamber. She named Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio as the places Democrats are mostly likely to flip a seat, arguing that Texas and Iowa will be more challenging. She said Democrats were strongest in North Carolina, because of their candidate, former Governor Roy Cooper.

President Donald Trump abruptly canceled the signing of a bipartisan housing bill Wednesday, insisting that he would not make it law without his voter ID legislation, the SAVE America Act. But not everyone on Capitol Hill got the memo that the housing reform effort was a dud.

Arkansas Representative French Hill was already in a news conference when Trump axed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Hill unknowingly celebrated a dead proposal that Republicans had hoped would bolster their reelection efforts ahead of November.

Standing beside House Speaker Mike Johnson, Hill said it had been his “top goal” to lower the cost of housing.

“This bill does that, so I’m proud of the work that both chambers have struggled through,” Hill said Wednesday morning. “But it’s successful today, and I’m proud of the work of the House and Senate to get people to ‘yes’.”

LMAO -- GOP Rep. French Hill is literally right now during a news conference touting the bipartisan housing bill and the president's support for it, unaware that Trump moments ago angrily announced he won't sign it pic.twitter.com/NqizOMVDyR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act was drafted to address the U.S. housing crisis, which has entailed bottlenecked supply, stalled family growth, and surged home and rental prices across the country. The bill would have funneled resources toward increasing housing supply and streamlined environmental reviews, and would have forced the Department of Housing and Urban Development to address red-tape issues related to zoning and land-use that have historically posed barriers to housing development.

“This is a very rare occurrence to have successive bipartisan votes across both chambers on versions of this bill, and it finally seems to be reaching the finish line,” Francis Torres, housing and infrastructure director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told TIME earlier this week. “This bill is the most serious that Congress has gotten about housing reforms in a generation.”

The House passed the bill by a vote of 358–32 on Tuesday. The day before, the Senate had passed it by a measure of 85–5. It only needed the president’s signature to become law—but that apparently won’t happen unless Congress caves to his unpopular voter ID demands.

The Save America Act sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. The backlash on Capitol Hill was grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

The Save America Act suggests numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, an enormous bureaucratic task that would place undue burdens on local election officials. The measure would also add a federal law to prevent men from competing in women’s sports and a ban on “transgender mutilation surgery.”

State and national Republican groups have developed a new midterm strategy after the left’s big wins in New York City on Tuesday: fearmongering about communism and the death of the nuclear family. (Oh, wait, that’s actually not a new strategy at all.)

The chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Representative Richard Hudson, reportedly compared the primary wins to “a Bolshevik revolution” on Wednesday, in a meeting with GOP House members. The NRCC also made a slightly cringy X post referring to the progressive winners as “America-hating Socialists.”

A few MAGA House members spoke out individually against the election results, including Randy Fine and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida.

“What is happening in New York tonight should scare every American,” Fine, who is no stranger to promoting hateful rhetoric, said. “The Democrat Party there no longer seeks to make America prosper. It seeks to destroy it.”

The fearmongering comes after New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, proved his November victory was no fluke on Tuesday. The three progressives Mamdani endorsed all won their primaries, knocking off establishment Dems and sometimes other progressives.

Former City Comptroller Brad Lander knocked off incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th district; Democratic socialist Claire Valdez, an artist and assemblywoman, defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the 7th; and in possibly the biggest upset of the night, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a little-known democratic socialist, bested incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat in the 13th.

“New York Democrats just elected three socialists in primaries,” raged the New York state GOP on X. “Their party has been taken over by radicals who support Islamic terrorism and want to dismantle the nuclear family.”

Centrist Democrats also felt a sense of foreboding on Wednesday upon seeing the success of leftists.

“Republicans will very quickly seek to elevate, as they always do, the most radical voices in the Democratic Party,” Howard Wolfson, a Democratic strategist and adviser to former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, told The New York Times. “And after tonight, they will have more radical Democrats to choose from.”

Representative Greg Meeks, who chairs the Queens Democratic Party, was a bit more diplomatic. “It was a tough night,” he said.

President Trump has cancelled the signing of the largest housing affordability bill in decades unless Congress passes his voter-suppressing SAVE Act.

“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump wrote on Wednesday.

This is a very last minute cancellation, as the signing presentation was set to happen Wednesday, an hour after his post.

“So…. Looks like they’re going to have to dissemble this stage here at Statuary Hall in the Capitol,” Scott MacFarlane of Meidas Touch wrote on X. “Trump has cancelled his signing of a housing bill… which truly jams up his fellow Republicans who wanted to campaign on it.”

The 21st Century Road to Housing bill, sponsored by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. The legislation aims to make housing easier to build and more affordable by blocking corporate entities from buying up single family homes, among other methods. Trump, a former slumlord, has also downplayed the significance of this bill.

“The Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill, which is of minor importance compared to lower interest rates, and even FISA, pales in comparison to passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT. That is what Americans, both Dumocrats, Republicans, and everyone else, care about,” Trump wrote shortly before cancelling his signing of the bill. “Get the bad Republicans to approve it or, better yet, Terminate the Filibuster and approve it, AND EVERYTHING ELSE REPUBLICANS HAVE EVER DREAMED OF.”

This is a developing story.

The U.S. lifted its naval blockade over the Strait of Hormuz last week, but the returning commercial trade has not been a return to normal—and Americans are still feeling it at the gas pump.

In a Truth Social post addressing the discrepancy, Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he had directed the Department of Justice to investigate oil companies, accusing them of “gouging” customers based on the persisting inflated prices.

“The big Oil Companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they are paying for Oil,” Trump posted just after midnight. “Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words, customers are being ‘gouged.’”

“I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!” he added.

While crude oil and gas prices have both fallen since Iran and the U.S. signed a tentative peace deal last week, the drop in gas prices has been relatively minimal. Crude was down over 5 percent between June 18 and 24, but gas was down by half of that—2.5 percent—in the same period, according to data from the AAA gasoline price tracker.

Trump had promised throughout the war that gas prices would plummet “like a rock” once the violence concluded, but that has clearly not been the case, much to the chagrin of his vulnerable Republican allies in Congress who will have to rationalize the dampened economy to voters come November. Trump and his team have also promised that Americans could expect lower gas prices than the average from even before the war began—around $2.98 per gallon. At the time of publication, the cost of gas is $3.92 per gallon across the country, though some areas in California such as San Luis Obispo are still seeing prices around $5.78 per gallon, according to the AAA tracker.

Over the last month, crude oil prices have dropped by 27 percent while gas prices were down by just 13 percent, reported Yahoo Finance.

After multiple artists dropped out of President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 Independence Day celebrations, the administration has settled on a replacement: FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins.

“What a great honor to be a part of the 250th birthday of this great nation,” Wilkins posted on X Tuesday.

The event was supposed to have a series of concerts, with headliners announced in late May. Musicians immediately started dropping out, saying they didn’t know that the event would be politicized.

Now, instead of having performers Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & the Time, and Bret Michaels, the event will feature Wilkins—a country singer with 5,863 monthly listeners on Spotify.

On X, Wilkins fired back at critics questioning her dubious booking, saying, “I was invited to sing this anthem on my own accord, as I have been many other places throughout my career.”

Patel has a track record of inappropriately using government resources in his relationship with Wilkins, including using a SWAT team as her bodyguards and jet-setting in a government plane to go see her. Wilkins denies that she’s gotten special privileges, and is suing MS NOW for defamation alleging that she abused federal resources.

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that President Trump can resume fast-tracking deportations in a 2-1 ruling. While a lower court struck the program down in August, this ruling allows the Trump administration to deport potentially millions of people without offering them immigration hearings.

Judge Justin R. Walker and Judge Neomi Rao, two Trump appointees, ruled in Trump’s favor, while Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, dissented. The Trump appointees argued that it was within the executive’s jurisdiction to decide which migrants to fast-track to deportation, and that the Department of Homeland Security was not required to inform migrants that they could avoid an accelerated deportation if they could offer proof of residency for at least two years.

“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” Walker wrote.

Wilkins noted in his dissent that the expedited removal process was usually reserved for people detained immediately at the U.S. borders, rather than immigrants who’d been in the country for some time.

“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” Wilkins wrote.

This decision is a victory for the mass deportation agenda animating White House adviser Stephen Miller. The DHS celebrated the ruling, claiming that it had “vindicated” Trump, according to The New York Times.

The bipartisan housing bill the House and Senate passed this week doesn’t go far enough, Democratic leaders say. But it’s still one of the most significant pieces of housing legislation passed in decades. Further Democratic goals on housing might have to wait for a new Congress.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which President Trump could sign as early as Wednesday, was a collaboration between Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, and ranking member Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts. On Monday night, the bill passed the Senate handily with a vote of 85–5. On Tuesday, the House advanced it with a 358–32 vote.

“The biggest win is we finally did something,” said Senator Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, gesturing at Congress’s usual partisan gridlock. “In this world, the fact that you’ve got Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren and the entire U.S. Senate to support housing shows that we’re finally focusing on something that really matters to the American people. So I see it as a beginning.”

In terms of substantive victories, Warren emphasized a restriction on the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors that own at least 350 single-family homes.

“For the first time ever, [we] tell private equity ‘no,’ they cannot mow through every neighborhood in America and turn us into a nation of renters,” she told The New Republic.

Warren also pointed to the bill’s efforts to increase housing supply, which housing policy expert Will Fischer of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called the “central theme” of the bill. The bill removes some regulatory barriers and streamlines environmental reviews to accelerate the construction of affordable housing—including the first federal guidelines on zoning reform. The bill also creates an “Innovation Fund” that rewards communities that successfully build more housing.

By removing the requirement that manufactured homes have a permanent steel chassis beneath them, the bill could bring down the cost of a new unit by up to $10,000, according to Warren’s office.

These provisions, Fischer said, are “part of what’s needed to address the housing crisis in the country to build more housing, but they are only a first step in order to really solve the affordable housing crisis.”

So what’s next? Fischer pointed to the need for more rental assistance programs that will help the lowest-income Americans afford a place to live. Increasing the supply of housing is critical, he said, but not sufficient to fix the issue. “No matter how much we build, that’s never going to be enough to make housing affordable to tens of millions of people with low incomes,” he said.

Rental assistance programs are a harder sell with Republicans, and the Trump administration has attempted to cut such programs through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s unlikely that the current Congress is going to take the kind of action that’s really needed to sharply reduce homelessness and evictions,” Fischer said.

Democrats echoed that sentiment in their public statements. “Our work is far from over and this is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of a renewed effort to tackle our housing affordability crisis and ensure every American has access to a safe, decent, and affordable place to call home,” said Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California and the ranking member on the House Committee on Financial Services, in a statement.

Still, the message on Tuesday was one of optimism. “Let me put it this way,” Warren said. “The bill is not the one I would have written all by myself, but there are some really big wins here that made all the work and all the pain totally worthwhile.”

Allies of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept the region’s Democratic House primaries Tuesday evening, the latest example of liberal-minded voters shifting their preferences.

And after Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez won—all of whom have been vocal critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza—the biggest loser seemed to be MAGA world, which was left befuddled and irate that voters had turned away from candidates espousing the historically pro-Israel party line.

Appearing on Fox News, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller complained that the “Democrat Party has abandoned [centrism] and instead adopted this radical, revolutionary, and in many cases, violent ideology that wants to tear America down, and destroy everything that we know and love, from top to bottom.”

Miller further used the trio’s massive win Tuesday to urge Democrats to vote MAGA in the midterm elections, claiming that progressive politics—which he said involved hating America, God, family, and gender—would be the country’s “death knell.”

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer was similarly disgusted by the political development, insisting that the Big Apple’s mayor is an Islamic militant and that Donald Trump needs to do something about it.

“I remember when Trump, who I love, said Mamdani isn’t a jihadi. I was shocked,” Loomer wrote on X late Tuesday, reacting to the race. “Mamdani is a jihadi and this growing threat of Islamic jihad and pro-Islamic terror candidates getting elected in America is a national crisis. It needs to be addressed by the Trump administration. Tonight should prove it to everyone.”

Meghan McCain, a conservative TV personality and daughter of former Arizona Senator John McCain, also added her two cents, writing directly to Jewish Americans via social media.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone. We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening,” McCain wrote.

Lander, one of the three Mamdani-backed candidates who cruised to victory Tuesday night, is Jewish.

President Donald Trump had a meltdown Tuesday after a slate of Democratic Socialist candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primary elections.

“America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“Many Communists running in badly failing Blue States. The votes seem to have them doing quite well against each other,” Trump wrote in another post. “The bad news is that history has conclusively shown that the downtrodden States that they will soon be running will ONLY GET WORSE.”

Trump also lashed out at Democratic Representative Dan Goldman, who lost his seat to former city Comptroller Brad Lander, an ally of Mamdani.

“Weak and pathetic Congressman Dan Goldman just lost, BIG! I guess people didn’t like him illegally targeting President TRUMP. In any event, this jerk is finally GONE!” Trump wrote.

Representative Adriano Espaillat, the 71-year-old leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist who previously organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. And Assemblymember Claire Valdez, another member of Democratic Socialists of America, triumphed over the handpicked successor of outgoing Representative Nydia Velazquez.

“Solidarity forever, abolish ICE, free Palestine, organize your union, and join DSA!” Valdez said at the end of her victory speech.

Being the mayor of New York is an enormous task for anyone, let alone a 34-year-old. But Zohran Mamdani’s ambitions seem to go beyond leading the Big Apple. He wants to help remake the national Democratic Party. And he may succeed. All three of the candidates Mamdani endorsed in New York-area House Democratic primaries won on Tuesday night. Those victories will likely push House Democrats in Washington further left and embolden the increasing successful progressive wing of the party.

With the mayor’s backing, Brad Lander, the former city comptroller who finished behind Mandami in the mayoral race last year, resoundingly defeated incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in the 10th Congressional District. A bigger sign of the mayor’s sway was the 7th Congressional District victory of Claire Valdez, a first-term New York assemblywoman, who easily beat Antonio Reynoso, a former city councilman and longtime figure in the city’s politics. Reynoso had the backing of the district’s retiring incumbent, Nydia Velazquez. Lander could have won without Mamdani’s endorsement, but Valdez almost certainly would not have.

The stunner was the win of Mamdani’s third candidate, activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who narrowly defeated incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District. Avila Chevalier had never run for office before, while Espaillat is a five-term congressman and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Avila Chevalier’s win was entirely about the political power of the mayor and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which boosted Mamdani last year and his preferred candidates this year.

It’s not an exact parallel, but Avila Chevalier beating Espaillat echoes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win over then-Representative Joe Crowley in 2018. This is another sign of voter frustration with establishment Democratic politicians.

Three House primaries alone don’t change American politics drastically. But Lander is a progressive in the mold of Senator Elizabeth Warren and will likely be more supportive of left-wing causes than Goldman. And Valdez and Avila Chevalier are likely to be two of the most progressive members on Capitol Hill, constantly challenging party leadership from the left and perhaps forming an even more progressive “Squad” than the prior version. So Mamdani is building the left flank on Capitol Hill and in the Democratic Party. And Lander and Valdez’s wins will embolden other progressives to run in 2028 and try to knock off more moderate Democratic incumbents.

How this happened is fascinating. Mamdani’s decision to aggressively campaign for his preferred U.S. House candidates was odd and even misguided in some ways. Mayors don’t usually interject themselves into congressional races. A mayor getting his favorites sent to Washington obviously doesn’t help him or her get their agenda passed through the City Council. And in Mamdani’s case, a mayor already hated by the city’s elite establishment made new enemies by endorsing candidates running against two incumbents and a third popular figure in New York politics (Reynoso). New York Attorney General Letitia James was among the one-time Mamdani allies who groused about him playing such a heavy hand in these primaries.

So why did he get so involved, with little personal benefit and considerable potential cost? Because Mamdani is deeply invested in the broader leftist/progressive/socialist movement, beyond his own ambitions. In the run-up to the House primaries, he openly expressed his hopes that progressives winning in New York could inspire a broader reckoning in the Democratic Party. He believes that the party should broadly adopt his populist economic views, focus on affordability and the working class, and skepticism of the Israeli government. While he’s a new figure, Mamdani is following in the footsteps of Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez, who have spent the last several years endorsing progressive candidates in races across the country in hopes of building a cadre that changes the party.

“For far too long, our party has seen its job as managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people,” Mamdani said at a rally last week in support of these House candidates, as reported by CNN. “It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot instead of showing how we can, and that old way of thinking will lose on Tuesday. And frankly, it will lose in South Carolina and New Hampshire. It will fall short of 270 electoral votes, because the party of the past will not be what leads us into the future.”

In a later part of the speech, he said, “People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party. This slate here today is our answer.”

On Election Day, Mamdani said, according to the Associated Press, “It’s not just a question of electing more Democrats. It’s a question of electing better Democrats. When I look at these candidacies, I see in them a willingness to also put working people back at the heart of our politics.”

Those comments were remarkably direct, invoking this November’s elections, but also the 2028 Democratic primaries (South Carolina and New Hampshire are likely to be early voting states), the 2028 general election, and the broader discourse about the party. I am skeptical that House primaries in New York City in 2026 tell us much about Democratic primaries or the general election in 2028. But Mamdani is arguing that what’s happening in New York is connected to the future. And more importantly, he’s trying to will that view into action.

While Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez have been in national politics much longer than the mayor, his stunning and high-profile victory in America’s biggest city has given him a microphone that is perhaps as big as theirs. I wonder if Mamdani will endorse candidates outside of the New York area in the next few years.

There’s another reason Mamdani may be particularly interested in endorsements: He can’t run for president himself. The Uganda-born mayor is the rare powerful, popular figure in American politics who isn’t plotting out his route to the White House. A politician as talented as Mamdani may be frustrated he can’t ever be president. But for the progressive movement, having a famous, charismatic figure who isn’t obsessing over Wisconsin swing voters (as Ocasio-Cortez seems to be doing these days) is very useful. Opposing the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is a gutsy move. But it’s less risky if being mayor may be your only political job. Mamdani can in some ways be president of the American Left because he can’t be president of the United States.

Mamdani’s victory in last year’s New York Democratic primary for mayor seemed like the perfect combination of great candidate, flawed opponents, and ideal political environment. I thought it was a fluke, or at least a perfect storm. But Valdez and Avila Chevalier aren’t masters of viral video like Mamdani, and their opponents weren’t sexual harassers like Andrew Cuomo. Zohran Mamdani has it. He’s transferred it to other politicians in New York. The big question now is if Mamdani-ism can go national.

Less than one month after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration I ventured the prediction that Trump’s anti-regulation strategy, which was to gum up operations at regulatory agencies in every conceivable way, was self-defeating. (See “Trump’s Incompetence Is Botching His Own Deregulation Spree.”) To deregulate, I explained, a regulatory agency must be functional. Eliminating a Biden-era regulation is a process: It requires an agency to propose a new regulation reversing the prior one; collect public comment on same; and follow various other time-consuming steps required under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. The same logic applied to eliminating Biden-era precedents at quasi-judicial independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, or the National Labor Relations Board. To achieve these goals, you need a quorum at such agencies. Firing board members and refusing to fill vacancies, which is Trump’s preferred method, deprives you of that quorum.

Disciplined deregulation requires the sort of patience and intelligence that, happily, is in short supply within the Trump administration. Even White House budget chief Russell “Project 2025” Vought can’t summon it.

What this means is that, although Trump has reversed a lot of executive orders, fired a lot of people, and cut off a lot of funding (often, in the latter two instances, in violation of the law), he hasn’t killed a lot of major regulations. I count five thus far, according to a regulatory tracker maintained by the Brookings Institution, of which only one—an Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinding an Obama-era regulatory finding that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a danger to the nation’s health and welfare—is cause for serious alarm. And whether even these five regulations were crafted with sufficient care to survive court challenges remains to be seen. During Trump’s first term they usually were not. In a 2021 law review articletitled “Tired of Winning,” Bethany A. Davis Noll, litigation director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, reported that where previous administrations had won 70 percent of all regulatory court challenges, the Trump administration won a mere 23 percent.

I can’t find a comparable tracker for quasi-judicial rulings at independent agencies, but the business lobby lost a couple of big ones this month at the NLRB. Both cases were about union-busting at Amazon, whose chairman, Jeff Bezos, kisses Trump’s ass so relentlessly that even Trump finds it a bit much. These NLRB rulings might have gone in Amazon’s favor had Trump not fired NLRB Chair Gwynne Wilcox (in violation of a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that the current high court is expected any day now to overturn) and then delayed giving the NLRB a quorum until this past December.

The first NLRB ruling, on June 15, rejected Amazon’s request to overturn an organizing victory by the United Food & Commercial Workers at a Whole Foods market in Philadelphia. Employees at the grocery voted to unionize in January 2025, and the NLRB certified the victory four months later. It was the first successful union drive in the 46-year history of Whole Foods. Amazon is hopping mad, and it filed no fewer than seven complaints to the NLRB about it, starting before the union election even took place. Amazon’s principal argument is that management was not permitted to compel Whole Foods employees to attend gatherings at which the company discouraged unionization because a Biden-era ruling (also involving Amazon) forbade such “captive meetings.” That decision, Amazon said, “imposed a flagrantly unconstitutional set of handcuffs on [Whole Foods management] in violation of the First Amendment.”

The board didn’t elaborate on why it rejected Amazon’s First Amendment argument, but one likely reason was that the board felt it lacked sufficient Republican members to overturn a Biden precedent. The NLRB did finally acquire a quorum in December, along with a Republican majority, with two Republicans and one Democrat. But the board has declined to overturn any precedents with fewer than three votes, and that would require one more Republican member. This is longstanding practice at the NLRB, not required by any law or regulation. It’s the kind of genteel tradition that one would expect a Trump appointee to flush down the toilet. But the current NLRB chair, James Murphy, worked as a staff aide at the NLRB more than 40 years, and the tradition matters to him; he recommitted to honoring it earlier this month at a House hearing.

It was Amazon’s hard luck that its case came before the board before the Senate got around to confirming Trump’s nominee to fill a vacant Republican slot on the board, James Macy. For his part, Trump didn’t get around to nominating Macy until this past April, even though the slot had been open since August 2025. Macy’s nomination is expected to get a Senate vote today.

The second NLRB ruling against Amazon’s union-busting, handed down by a regional administrative law judge rather than by the Washington-based board, occurred earlier this week. The case was about Amazon’s refusal to bargain over a union contract with warehouse workers in San Francisco who voted, way back in October 2024, to affiliate with the Teamsters. This refusal violates a Biden-era ruling by the full board that said after a successful “card check” (in which a majority of workers sign union authorization cards) management must immediately start negotiating a contract or request a more formal NLRB-supervised union election. Amazon did neither. Once again, Amazon asked the NLRB judge to reverse a Biden precedent, arguing in this instance that it was at odds with a Supreme Court precedent. Amazon lawyers had to know that the administrative law judge, or ALJ, lacked any power to overturn NLRB precedent, so it can hardly be surprised that it lost.

Amazon’s intended audience was never the ALJ, but rather the Washington-based board, or, failing that, an appellate judge. It seems likely that the Republican board will be willing to overturn the offending precedent if Macy is confirmed. I doubt the Democrats will try to postpone or kill Macy’s nomination, but that would be one way to prevent Amazon from winning this one. Too bad it isn’t up to the House, which has already demonstrated its willingness to compel management to negotiate union contracts. The pro-union Republican virus, alas, has not crossed over to the Senate side.