CDC Restricts Travel from Three African Countries

The CDC has imposed a travel ban for people who have visited Ebola-affected areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda, and South Sudan in the last three weeks. For the next 30 days, travelers from these areas won’t be allowed entry into the US.

The restrictions do not apply to US citizens or lawful permanent residents returning from those areas. This is only the second time the agency has invoked Title 42, a 1944 law that allows the CDC to suspend entry into the US to protect public health; the first time was during the Covid-19 pandemic.

All three countries included in the ban have reported cases in the current outbreak, with the most severe in the DRC, which has more than 390 suspected cases and at least 100 deaths, according to the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak a global health emergency.

Separately, the CDC said that an American doctor in the DRC has tested positive for Ebola. He was working with a Christian medical missionary group and contracted the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus while treating patients. The doctor and six other Americans exposed during the outbreak are being taken to Germany for treatment and monitoring because the country has strong care for viral hemorrhagic fevers — a class of severe illnesses, including Ebola, that can cause internal bleeding and organ failure. CDC officials said the risk to the American public remains low.

There are no approved vaccines or treatments targeting the Bundibugyo strain, which has a fatality rate of 25 to 50 percent.

Teens Kill Three at San Diego Mosque in Potential Hate Crime

Two teenagers killed three men at the Islamic Center of San Diego yesterday and later were found dead in a car nearby, police said. Authorities are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

Police received reports of an active shooter at the mosque shortly before 11:45 a.m. The two shooters, armed with shotguns and dressed in camouflage, opened fire outside the mosque. As officers were responding, dispatchers received calls from a few blocks away reporting more gunfire. A landscaper working two blocks from the mosque was shot but survived after a bullet struck his helmet. The two suspects were then found in a vehicle nearby, dead of apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

The mosque’s security guard was killed confronting the gunmen. The Islamic Center identified him as Amin Abdullah, a father of eight. Police have not publicly identified any of the victims or the shooters, though news reports have named the 17- and 18-year-old suspects.

About two hours before the shooting, the mother of the 17-year-old suspect called police to report that her son was missing along with her vehicle and several firearms. She told officers her son was suicidal and was likely with another teenager, both dressed in camouflage. Her son apparently left a suicide note at his home containing writings about white racial pride.

One of the weapons used in the shooting had a Nazi sticker on it, and ABC News reported that anti-Islamic writings were found in the suspects’ vehicle.

Top Treasury Lawyer Quits After DOJ Creates $1.8 Billion Fund

The Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrisey, resigned yesterday, hours after the Justice Department announced settling a $10 billion lawsuit by President Trump and his sons against the IRS (which is part of the Treasury). The settlement created a $1.776 billion fund to pay people who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration.

Morrissey was confirmed by the Senate seven months ago and previously served at the Justice Department during Trump’s first administration. He has not commented publicly on his resignation.

The Trumps and the Trump Organization sued the IRS, alleging that the agency failed to stop a former contractor from leaking Trump’s tax returns to the press. Trump dropped the lawsuit yesterday in exchange for the Justice Department’s creation of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

The fund will be managed by a five-member commission, appointed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose members the president can fire at will. Anyone alleging harm from the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system can apply for a payout through Dec. 1, 2028. The money will come from the Judgment Fund, an open-ended pool of taxpayer money the federal government normally uses to pay court judgments and settlements against the United States.

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I’m so proud to share We Are Mighty, my new picture book that’s officially out today, because it’s exactly the kind of book I wish more children had in their hands. It introduces young readers to 12 real people from America’s past who saw what needed doing and did it. Some were famous. Most were not. All of them mattered.

At a time when it can feel like courage belongs only to the powerful, this book offers children something better and truer: the reminder that ordinary people have always shaped history. If there is a child in your life who could use a little more hope, agency, and honest history, I would be honored for you to share it with them.

Another ICE Officer Charged in Minneapolis Shooting

An ICE agent has been charged in connection with the shooting of a migrant in Minnesota earlier this year.

The officer, Christian Castro, 52, has been charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime in the January 14 shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. A nationwide warrant has been issued for Castro’s arrest. Castro had previously been placed on administrative leave in February after Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said two officers appeared to have made “untruthful statements” under oath about the shooting.

Castro is the second federal officer to face felony charges in Minnesota stemming from Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state. ICE agent Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. was charged in April with second-degree assault for allegedly pointing his gun at two people in another car while driving illegally on a highway shoulder.

Primaries in Six States Today

Voters in six states head to the polls today for the 2026 midterm primaries, with closely watched contests in Kentucky and Georgia. State and federal primaries are also being held in Alabama, Idaho, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

The major race is in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Thomas Massie — a libertarian-leaning seven-term incumbent — faces a Trump-backed primary challenge from retired Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. Trump endorsed Gallrein after Massie repeatedly broke with him on the 2025 federal budget, the release of the Epstein files, and the war with Iran. With more than $25 million in outside spending, the race is now the most expensive US House primary in American history, according to public ad-tracking.

Separately, Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in next week’s Texas Republican Senate runoff, a major blow to Cornyn and Senate GOP leaders, who had spent months pressing Trump to back the four-term senator. The eventual GOP nominee will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico.

Iran Sends Latest Proposal to End War

President Trump said yesterday he was postponing a military attack on Iran that had been planned for today, after leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates asked him to hold off.

The Iranian proposal, conveyed through mediator Pakistan, calls for an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon; the withdrawal of US forces from areas near Iran; reparations for damage caused by the US-Israeli war; the lifting of US sanctions on Iran; the release of frozen Iranian assets; and an end to the US naval blockade of Iranian ports, in place since April 13.

Trump has already rejected several of these conditions but said today that “serious negotiations are now taking place.” Speaking later at the White House, he said the delay of the attack would last “two or three days.”

Four wealthy boys from a local private school had taken the boat out for a joyride. One of them had climbed the mast and the whole thing tipped over. They were now six hundred feet from shore, and in trouble.

Ida ran from the house without bothering to put on her shoes or coat, and threw the ties off the family rowboat. By the time she reached the boys, they were panicked and spluttering, but she managed — somehow — to haul each one to safety. Her mother dried their clothes and put hot drinks in their hands. The boys didn’t tell anyone they’d been pulled out of the water by a girl, a secret they kept for forty more years.

Ida became a national celebrity at 27, after she and her younger brother rowed out into a snowstorm and saved two soldiers from Fort Adams whose boat had overturned. A reporter from the New York Tribune was on a train to Newport within days to conduct an interview. Harper’s Weekly put her on its cover. The papers called her the Bravest Woman in America. Ulysses S. Grant rowed out himself to tip his hat to her, and Susan B. Anthony and William Tecumseh Sherman both made the trip too. One summer three thousand strangers turned up at her rocks in a single month.

Ida had been keeping the Lime Rock light since she was fifteen, when her father had a stroke and she took over the job that kept her family fed. She had been ferrying her younger siblings across the harbor to school every morning, in any weather. And she would still be pulling people from that water in her sixties, in the same cold harbor she had grown up watching.

Ida Lewis died in October 1911 of a stroke, after collapsing one night while she was filling the lamp. Fourteen hundred people came to view her body, the bells of Newport tolling in her honor, with one of the boys she rescued serving as pallbearer. Rhode Island eventually renamed her island Ida Lewis Rock, and the lighthouse service renamed her lighthouse for her too — the only lighthouse in the country, before or since, named for its keeper.

Most American children will never hear about her.

That’s part of why I wrote We Are Mighty, which is out today from Knopf. It’s a picture book for children, with illustrations by Susanna Chapman that I think are extraordinary.

There’s a teacher named Virginia Randolph, who showed up to a one-room schoolhouse outside Richmond, found a building no one had cared for and a lane thick with mud, and rather than wait for the county to fix it, drove back into town, bought gravel with her own money, and raked it across the driveway herself. “Just do the next needed thing,” she said, a sentence and a sentiment that runs through the book.

Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears, Roebuck & Co., partnered with Booker T. Washington to build nearly five thousand schools across the American South. Maya Angelou went to one. So did John Lewis and Medgar Evers. And one of those Rosenwald schools, it turns out, was the brick building that eventually replaced Virginia Randolph’s one-room schoolhouse — a connection between two of the people in this book that I had not known about going in.

Norman Mineta met Alan Simpson through the barbed-wire fence around the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming. Norm was a Japanese American boy living inside the wire. Alan was a white Boy Scout from a town nearby, visiting with his troop. More than forty years later, they sat together in Congress and passed the bill that formally apologized to Japanese Americans for the camps. They were close friends for the rest of their lives, and yet, they almost never agreed politically.

Susanna and I cared about accuracy in ways that might not be obvious to every reader. The lighthouse on Ida’s spread is a good example. Lime Rock is a tiny rocky island just off Newport, and the lighthouse there is not the tall freestanding tower most people picture when they hear the word. When Ida was a teenager it was just a small light attached to the side of her family’s home; the government replaced it later. When Susanna was working on the spread, we tracked down the original blueprints so she could paint it correctly — the shape of the dwelling, the placement of the lamp, the rocks Ida launched her rowboat from when she was a child herself. Most children will not notice, but we wanted to get it right anyway.

What I hope children will see in these pages is that they don’t have to be famous, or save the entire world before dinner. I hope they learn to recognize the next needed thing: a friend needs help, a classroom needs care, a rule is unfair, a person has been forgotten, a question needs to be asked, a truth needs to be told, a letter deserves an answer.

I wrote We Are Mighty because children need better stories than “important people are born important.” They deserve history that tells the truth and still leaves room for hope. They deserve to know that power is not only held in offices, titles, monuments, or laws. Power is also in the hands of the person who teaches, rows, writes, testifies, builds, visits, questions, befriends, repairs, and refuses.

And I wrote it because I think adults need that reminder, too.

We Are Mighty is available now. Buy it for a child you love, a classroom that needs it, a library, a grandchild, a niece or nephew, or the kid who already asks a thousand questions. Especially buy it for the child who needs to know that being small has never meant being powerless.

Get your copy

Hours after President Trump’s personal lawyers filed to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS today, the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to pay his political allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration. Under the settlement, Trump, his two elder sons, and the Trump Organization will not receive any payments but will get a formal apology.

Trump and the Trump Organization sued the IRS and the Treasury Department in January, alleging the agencies failed to stop a former IRS contractor from leaking his tax returns to The New York Times and ProPublica in 2019 and 2020. The contractor pleaded guilty and was sentenced to federal prison.

The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — the name announced by the DOJ — will be run by a five-member body, appointed by the attorney general and whom Trump can at will. The “Fund” will accept claims through Dec. 1, 2028, from anyone alleging harm from the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s personal defense lawyer, signed the settlement.

The nearly $1.8 billion will be drawn from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, an open-ended pool of taxpayer money the federal government normally uses to pay out court judgments and settlements against the United States.

The advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington called the deal “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”

WHO Declares Global Health Emergency over Ebola Outbreak

The World Health Organization has declared an Ebola outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) an international public health emergency.

The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, a rare strain of Ebola that has no approved vaccine or specific treatment. Symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting, severe weakness, abdominal pain, and bleeding. The Bundibugyo strain kills between 25% and 50% of those it infects, according to the CDC.

The WHO reports 246 suspected cases, eight lab-confirmed cases, and 80 deaths in the DRC. Two more lab-confirmed cases, including one death, have been reported in Kampala, Uganda — both in people who had traveled from the DRC.

A public health emergency of international concern is the WHO’s most serious alert designation. The agency said the outbreak does not rise to a pandemic emergency — a higher classification reserved for events like Covid-19 — and advised against closing international borders. The CDC said it is supporting efforts to relocate a small number of Americans who have been affected by the outbreak.

Today, the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security announced enhanced travel screening and entry restrictions on travelers from the affected region.

Trump’s Trading Activity Tops Millions in Three Months

President Trump or his financial advisers executed more than 3,700 stock transactions in the first three months of this year, according to mandatory financial disclosures filed last week with the US Office of Government Ethics. The trades included several trades in companies Trump publicly promoted.

The largest disclosed purchases include: $1 million and $5 million each in Nvidia, Apple, and an S&P 500 index fund. The largest disclosed sales — between $5 million and $25 million each — were of Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. The cumulative value of the disclosed trades was between $220 million and $750 million

The disclosures also show that Trump bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in Thermo Fisher Scientific, an Ohio-based contract drug manufacturer, on March 11 — the same day he toured the company’s Reading, Ohio, facility and praised it as “incredible.” He bought the company’s stock at other times too, according to a report by Popular Information. The disclosures were not made public until last week.

The Trump Organization has denied any impropriety in the business transitions of the president, saying Trump’s investment holdings are independently managed by third-party financial ​institutions and that neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in “selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”

Trump himself urged lawmakers during his State of the Union address in February to pass legislation barring members of Congress from trading individual stocks, arguing they should not be allowed to “corruptly profit from using insider information.” Rep. Mark Takano, D-CA, said that the same restrictions should apply to the president and the vice president, calling Trump “the last person to lecture Americans or anyone about transparency while in office.” The watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that “presidents are not supposed to be day traders.”

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Just one more day until my new children’s book, We Are Mighty, hits shelves! It tells the true stories of twelve real people from America’s past — some famous, most not — who saw what needed doing and did it. It’s a book about courage, hope, and the quiet ways ordinary people can change the world. If you’d like to share that message with a child you love, I’d be so honored for you to buy a copy.

Senate Parliamentarian Says No to Ballroom

A push to use tax money for security upgrades tied to President Trump’s new White House ballroom hit a setback over the weekend, after the Senate’s parliamentarian ruled that the funding cannot be added to an immigration bill.

The provision was attached to a fast-track immigration bill Republicans were trying to pass through budget reconciliation, a process that allows certain spending bills to bypass the 60-vote filibuster threshold with a simple majority. Reconciliation comes with strict limits — including the “Byrd rule,” which bars provisions outside the jurisdiction of the committees that drafted them. MacDonough determined the ballroom security funding violated that rule, meaning it can no longer ride along with the immigration bill and would need 60 votes to pass on its own.

MacDonough’s role is advisory in nature, and Senators are not legally compelled to follow her determinations, but they almost always do.

She has already determined that several other pieces of the broader package, including funding for parts of CBP and for screening of unaccompanied noncitizen children, violate Senate rules.

A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Republicans plan to redraft the language and resubmit it. If the Republicans can’t get the language to comply with the reconciliation rules, the security upgrades funding, including that for the ballroom, would have to be either stripped from the bill or passed separately through the normal process.

Supreme Court Rejects Democratic Bid to Restore New Virginia Map

The US Supreme Court rejected Virginia Democrats’ bid to restore a voter-approved congressional map that would have given the party a chance to pick up four US House seats.

The brief, unsigned order with no recorded dissent, issued last week, leaves in place a Virginia Supreme Court ruling that found state lawmakers violated the state constitution by putting the map on the ballot before an intervening election. Voters narrowly approved the map in April. The state’s congressional primary is August 4. With the US Supreme Court’s decision, the 2026 election will proceed under the current map.

Thousands Rally in Selma and Montgomery Against Redistricting

Thousands marched through Selma and Montgomery, AL, over the weekend to protest mid-decade redistricting efforts by southern Republican state legislatures aimed at eliminating House districts that are majority-Black and controlled by Democrats.

Organized under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South,” activists, clergy, labor organizers, and elected officials gathered for prayer at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma before crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where civil rights activists were attacked on March 7, 1965, during a voting rights march. Among those attending were Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Another rally in Montgomery drew more than 5,000 people near the Alabama Capitol, where Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addressed the crowd and spoke about past generations’ fight for voting rights.

The march followed the April 29 Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which weakened the Voting Rights Act’s protections against redistricting that disadvantages minority voters, and a May 11 ruling that cleared the way for Alabama to use a 2023 congressional map a lower court had found racially discriminatory.

Thousands Gather on National Mall for Prayer Rally

Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall yesterday for “Rededicate 250,” a daylong Christian prayer rally tied to this year’s 250th anniversary of American independence. Organizers framed it as a spiritual renewal of the country, but critics said it promoted Christian nationalism.

The event was hosted by Freedom 250, a public–private group working with the White House. The stage near the Washington Monument featured stained-glass imagery, Christian symbols, and depictions of the Founders alongside a white cross.

In a prerecorded video from the Oval Office, President Trump read a passage from 2 Chronicles often cited by Christian nationalists: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

Video messages also came from Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Live speakers included House Speaker Mike Johnson, Sen. Tim Scott, and evangelist Franklin Graham, among others. Speaker Johnson led a prayer in person, asking God for courage to “preserve this republic” and saying “our rights do not derive from the government, they come from You, our Creator and heavenly Father.”

But Duffy was not simply promoting a Department of Transportation initiative. He was promoting a family reality show.

The sitting transportation secretary, a former MTV Real World cast member, said he had spent parts of the past seven months filming The Great American Road Trip, a YouTube series starring Duffy, his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children traveling the country ahead of America’s 250th birthday. The show will premiere in June.

In the trailer, the family visits national landmarks, rides snowmobiles, cruises the Mississippi River, stops by the Liberty Bell, and appears to make visits to the homes of Kid Rock and John Rich in Nashville. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum shows up too, because apparently the Cabinet now has crossover episodes.

During the time the show was filming, the transportation system was under visible strain, including a record-long government shutdown that resulted in staffing shortages, air traffic controllers and TSA agents working without pay, and massive flight disruptions.

A Transportation Department spokesperson told People magazine (and yes, this is the first time I’ve ever used People as an authoritative source) that the series was filmed in short stretches over many months, with production costs covered by Great American Road Trip, Inc. — a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization that proudly lists the Department of Transportation, Boeing, Toyota, Shell, United Airlines, and Comcast NBCUniversal as partners. A public pitch deck obtained by Politico’s Daniel Lippman showed sponsorship tiers ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, with benefits including logo placement, social media recognition, VIP invitations, branded activations, product showcases, and, at the top tier, a “Presented by” credit for one road trip stop.

Duffy says he and his family did not receive financial compensation, but there are still clear conflicts of interest. Duffy leads the department that regulates large parts of the transportation system. A transportation secretary starring in a road-trip series funded through a nonprofit sponsored by companies with major transportation interests is exactly the kind of arrangement that makes ethics lawyers reach for the antacids. Even if no law was broken, the appearance of impropriety is hard to miss.

In many ways, Duffy’s reality show is a natural extension of both his and his wife’s existing personal brands — Duffy appeared on MTV’s The Real World: Boston in 1997, while Rachel Campos-Duffy appeared on The Real World: San Francisco in 1994. But as part of the Trump administration, Duffy’s conduct fits a growing trend, and the tone is being set from the top.

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That panic attack is what sent me to therapy. I had a difficult birth, and my daughter went straight to the NICU. I knew it had taken a toll on me, but I’d been telling myself I was fine until that day when my body told me I wasn’t. Even as a therapist myself, I had trouble accepting what had happened and getting help.

You may not relate to my story, but most of us are walking around with some version of this. Maybe it’s a divorce, a death, or a relationship that ended badly. The specifics differ but the shape is similar. Something happened, and now part of you is stuck in the room where it happened.

What we want is for the pain to be gone. We don’t want to manage it, live with it, or accept it. So we go looking for the thing that will fix it or at least make it smaller. And when nothing does, we start to wonder if we’re broken.

After a painful event, it’s natural to contract. It’s as if you have an open wound — of course you want to protect it and make sure it won’t get irritated or infected. But over time, a temporary lockdown can become permanent, and one day you realize you’ve been turning down invitations for months and haven’t been to a certain part of town in a year. The pain stayed the same size while everything else got smaller.

We can’t go back to who we were before. When something life-altering happens, we get split in two — before and after — and there’s no version of you that doesn’t carry it. The only direction is forward, into a different life from the one you would have had.

Researchers call this post-traumatic growth, and what they’ve found is that people who survive the hardest events of their lives don’t describe getting back to normal. Instead, they describe building something different. Closer relationships. A clearer sense of what matters. A life that, in some ways, is more honest than the one they had before. Nobody is grateful for what happened to them. But sometimes pain forces your life to fall apart so completely that the only option is to rebuild it from scratch and decide what’s worth keeping.

So how do you do this? You expand your life slowly, in pieces small enough that you don’t shut down. In therapy, we call these corrective experiences. You’re not trying to overwhelm your system. You’re giving it one small, manageable piece of information at a time, and the opportunity to respond differently. Mine started with the hospital where I gave birth. For a year, I’d avoided that whole part of the city. Then I started driving past it on purpose, again and again, until the sight of the building felt completely mundane. Everyone’s version will look different. If you’ve lost someone, it might be looking at a photo you’ve kept face-down in a drawer. If you were fired from a job, it might be texting an old coworker just to say something small.

Three years later, I can drive by the hospital without thinking much about it. My daughter was born at 8:07 in the evening. I wasn’t awake for it. So every year on her birthday, at exactly 8:07 p.m., I hold her. I know it won’t last forever. I can already hear the teenage version of her saying “Mom, stop!” as she’s trying to head out to a party. The pain of missing that moment still lingers. But my life has gotten big enough that I can hold both the pain of missing that moment and the joy of being with her now.

It’s Saturday, so we’re here with this week’s community open thread. What’s keeping everyone busy this week? Share anything fun and interesting you’re reading or watching, or plans you’ve got for the weekend. Jump into the comments below to join the conversation.

This community is for paid subscribers, and we’d love to have you join us! The goal is to create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone, which means speaking to and treating each other with respect in the comments.

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Trump Wraps Up China Visit

President Trump left Beijing today after a three-day state visit to China that produced no major agreements on the issues he came to discuss.

The trip was filled with pageantry — goose-stepping soldiers, US-flag-waving schoolchildren, a private tour of a leadership compound — but Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping ended their talks without breakthroughs on trade, tariffs, artificial intelligence, or the US-Iran war, the topics the White House officials had said were on the agenda. Both leaders called the visit a success.

On Iran, China’s foreign ministry said Beijing wants the Strait of Hormuz reopened as soon as possible and the war ended, but offered no specifics on how it would help.

SCOTUS Keeps Abortion Pill Available by Mail, for Now

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the abortion pill mifepristone can continue to be prescribed by telehealth and sent through the mail while a lawsuit challenging that access plays out in lower courts.

The unsigned order paused a May 1 decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that had required the drug to be dispensed only in person at a clinic. The court did not explain its reasoning or disclose the vote count. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

Mifepristone is used in nearly two-thirds of US medication abortions. The drug’s manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, brought the emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.

Louisiana sued the FDA over its 2023 rule allowing mifepristone to be prescribed without an in-person visit, arguing the policy undermines the state’s near-total abortion ban. The case now returns to the Fifth Circuit for full arguments.

In his dissent, Thomas wrote that the drugmakers “are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise.” Alito wrote that “what is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” the 2022 ruling he authored that overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

Trump Set to Drop IRS Lawsuit in Exchange for $1.7B Fund for Allies

President Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for a public apology from the agency for the leak of his personal and business tax records. As a condition of dropping the lawsuit, Trump is demanding that the settlement create a new $1.7 billion fund to pay Trump’s political allies who claim they were targeted by the Biden administration.

The fund would draw money from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, a pool that pays out court judgments and settlements against the federal government and does not require new approval from Congress. A commission set up to oversee the fund would have sole authority to award money to anyone who claims they were harmed by what the administration calls the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system. The commission would not be required to disclose its procedures or recipients, and Trump would be able to remove its members without cause, according to ABC News.

Trump filed the lawsuit against the IRS in January over the 2019–2020 leaks of his tax returns by a former contractor at the agency, who has since been convicted. The case has raised conflict-of-interest concerns because Trump oversees the IRS while suing it. Last month, a federal judge ordered Trump and the Justice Department to justify by next week why the case should proceed since the two parties did not actually seem to be on opposite sides, which is usually required for a case to go forward. The proposed settlement would end the lawsuit before the court rules on that question.

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The Invention of Wings tells the story of two unforgettable American women. Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an enslaved girl in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. Inspired by real-life abolitionist Sarah Grimke, this sweeping novel begins on her eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful. The story follows their journeys over the next thirty-five years, as both strive for a life of their own and dramatically shape each other’s destinies.

Senate’s Rule-Keeper Blocks Pieces of GOP Immigration Funding Bill

Senate Republicans’ plan to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection has stalled after the chamber’s nonpartisan rules referee found that key parts of the $72 billion package don’t qualify for the fast-track process Republicans were trying to use.

The package is the second half of a two-step plan to fund immigration enforcement. The first half — funding for the rest of the Department of Homeland Security — passed last month. That funding ended a 75-day government shutdown that began when Senate Democrats refused to provide the votes to fund ICE and CBP without new restrictions on federal immigration agents.

To fund those agencies, Republicans had structured the second immigration funding bill to pass through reconciliation, a process that lets certain budget-related legislation clear the Senate with 51 votes instead of the 60 normally needed to overcome a filibuster.

Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advises the parties on whether bills follow Senate rules, and her opinions effectively decide what can move forward. Provisions she flags as out of bounds can still be voted on, but they need 60 votes — a threshold Republicans, who hold 53 seats, cannot meet without Democratic support.

MacDonough found that four sections of the bill violated rules, including the main Border Patrol funding section and a $2.5 billion block of additional Homeland Security appropriations, according to Senate Budget Committee Democrats.

Cuba’s Power Grid Fails Again as CIA Director Visits Havana

Cuba’s national power grid suffered another major collapse yesterday, leaving the island’s eastern provinces in the dark and extending rolling blackouts in Havana amidst a US fuel blockade. The outages are affecting hospitals, water systems, transportation and food storage for the island’s 10 million people, and protests broke out in Havana on Wednesday after blackouts stretched past 24 hours in some neighborhoods.

Cuba relies heavily on imported fuel from Venezuela, its main supplier. Oil imports from Venezuela have fallen sharply under US sanctions. Earlier this year, Trump effectively cut off the island’s fuel imports by threatening sanctions on any country that ships oil to Cuba. The result has been an effective blockade that has left Cuba without foreign oil for more than four months.

Meanwhile, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana yesterday and met with Cuban government officials as well as Raúl Guillermo “Raulito” Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of former leader Raúl Castro, according to US and Cuban officials. A CIA official said the talks focused on intelligence cooperation, economic stability and regional security issues.

CDC: No Hantavirus Cases in US

CDC said yesterday that there are no confirmed US cases of Andes hantavirus linked to an outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius that has killed three people. Earlier this month, the agency reported one American passenger had tested positive.

That passenger, a 69-year-old Oregon oncologist who developed flu-like symptoms aboard the ship and tested “faintly positive” on an initial test, has since tested negative on follow-up testing. Doctors at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he had been isolated in the biocontainment unit, said the initial result was likely a false positive. He has since been moved out of biocontainment and into quarantine with other passengers.

The CDC said yesterday it is monitoring 41 people for possible exposure. That includes 16 American passengers from the cruise ship being held in quarantine at the Nebraska medical center, and two others sent to Atlanta for further assessment and care. The CDC is encouraging the quarantined passengers to remain in the facility through the end of the 42-day incubation period.

The Andes strain is the only known hantavirus that can spread from person to person, usually through close and prolonged contact. Most hantavirus infections, by contrast, spread through exposure to infected rodent urine, droppings or saliva.

The current anxiety surrounding jet fuel is tied heavily to instability around the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil typically passes. Until recently, hundreds of thousands of barrels of jet fuel moved through the strait each day. But since the conflict between the US, Iran, and Israel began in February, the strait has effectively been closed, choking off the flow of 25% to 30% of the world’s jet fuel supply.

The shortage is already affecting prices. In early February, before the Iran conflict disrupted energy markets, jet fuel in the United States generally cost about $2.30 per gallon. By early May, benchmark prices had roughly doubled to around $4 per gallon.

Airlines are used to fuel prices rising and falling, but this is something different.

“The industry has never seen this before, where the actual supply of the product needed to support aviation, that pipeline, is drying up,” said John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University.

Throughout the world, cracks in the aviation industry have already begun to show. Air Canada recently suspended several routes after concluding they were “no longer meeting profitability targets” amid soaring fuel costs. Spirit Airlines — long a symbol of the ultra-low-cost travel boom that reshaped American flying — recently collapsed altogether.

But even those impacts are just the beginning.

This is not the kind of disruption where planes suddenly stop flying overnight. It unfolds more gradually. First come higher ticket prices and fuel surcharges. Then airlines begin trimming less profitable routes. Travelers notice there are fewer nonstop options, fewer available seats, and longer delays when flights are canceled. Over time, those pressures spill beyond tourism and vacation travel into the broader economy as cargo capacity tightens and shipping delays grow.

“It’s a dire strait now, and it is going to have major implications for the global economy,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. “And the longer it goes, the worse it will be for the economic growth and inflation around the world.”

The disruptions people see first

Airlines today are tightly synchronized businesses. Aircraft rotate constantly between destinations, crews are scheduled down to the hour, and many routes remain viable only so long as the economics stay highly efficient. That efficiency helped make flying cheaper and more accessible for millions of people. But it also means there is less room for disruption when conditions deteriorate.

After Spirit Airlines abruptly shut down operations, passengers across the United States found themselves stranded with few alternatives. In Fort Lauderdale, families who had booked ultra-cheap vacation flights suddenly faced last-minute replacement fares costing more than $1,000 per ticket. Some travelers slept in airports for days waiting for seats on other airlines.

Europe has already seen smaller versions of the same dynamic. KLM recently canceled more than 150 European flights as soaring fuel prices made some routes “no longer financially viable to operate,” affecting trips to cities including London and Düsseldorf. Some passengers were rebooked quickly, but others faced disrupted itineraries, extra hotel costs, and longer routes home during an already busy holiday travel period.

Once disruptions begin, they compound quickly. And analysts say the pressure is likely to fall hardest on the low-cost carriers that transformed air travel over the past two decades and that local economies increasingly rely on for both tourists and workers.

Large international carriers typically hedge fuel costs months in advance, locking in prices through long-term agreements intended to protect them from sudden swings. That does not make them immune from shortages, but it gives them time.

Many low-cost carriers operate on extremely thin margins and do not have the same cushion. If fuel becomes significantly more expensive — or harder to access consistently — airlines begin making calculations about which routes are worth keeping.

Air travel as infrastructure

In many places, particularly more isolated regions, low-cost airlines are the infrastructure on which the local economy relies. In parts of Southern Europe, for example, low-cost airlines helped turn smaller Greek and Spanish island destinations into major tourism economies by connecting them directly to travelers from across the continent. When those routes disappear — even temporarily — hotels, restaurants, seasonal workers, and local businesses can all feel the effects almost immediately.

The International Energy Agency has warned that poorer countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will feel this most acutely, lacking the financial buffers to compete for scarce supply. In Asia, that is already visible: airlines have canceled thousands of flights, stranding migrant workers and tourists alike, while countries like Vietnam, which imports nearly three-quarters of its aviation fuel, are racing to secure emergency supplies from wherever they can find it.

The disruption could also hit Europe’s large migrant-worker economy, which has become dependent on low-cost air travel. According to Oxfam, Europe’s agricultural sector alone employs at least 2.4 million migrant workers. Budget airlines like Ryanair and easyJet helped create a system in which workers from Eastern Europe regularly fly to jobs in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and tourism across Western Europe — sometimes for seasonal work lasting months, sometimes for shorter rotations.

A system built for efficiency, not shocks

Disruptions in passenger air travel are only part of the story. A significant amount of global cargo travels underneath ordinary passenger flights — everything from pharmaceuticals and medical equipment to Apple products, airplane parts, and highly perishable items. That means disruptions in passenger air travel can quickly reverberate in wider ways.

For decades, global markets operated on the assumption that the flow of energy and fuel around the world — even amid wars, sanctions, and regional crises — would remain fundamentally intact. That assumption shaped the architecture of globalization itself.

Airlines expanded route networks around predictable fuel access. Supply chains became increasingly dependent on rapid air cargo. Today, air freight moves goods worth more than $8 trillion annually — roughly one-third of global trade by value, according to the International Air Transport Association. And much of that cargo does not travel on dedicated freight planes. Before the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of global air cargo moved in the belly holds of ordinary passenger flights.

What comes next

As the ripple effects of the shortage continue to grow, some governments around the world have already begun to act.

The European Commission has begun emergency coordination with member states and is now assessing whether to introduce mandatory minimum jet fuel reserves. The EU is also investigating alternative jet fuel imports from the United States. The United States, which has no equivalent strategic reserve for aviation fuel, has responded primarily through military and diplomatic channels, pressing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

But even an immediate resolution may not bring quick relief. Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler, described the unfolding shortage as a “slow-motion car crash.” He warned that even if the strait fully reopens, supply chains will not normalize until at least July, “and even that,” he said, “may be optimistic at this point.”

Xi Offers to Broker Peace with Iran

President Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping has offered to broker an end to the war in Iran during their closed-door summit in Beijing yesterday. In an interview with Fox News after the meeting, Trump said that Xi also pledged that China would not supply Iran with military equipment, though Xi made clear China intends to keep buying Iranian oil. China is Iran’s largest oil customer.

But Xi paired the diplomatic opening with a sharp warning on Taiwan, saying that differences over Taiwan could jeopardize US-China relations. According to the Chinese foreign ministry, Xi told Trump that Taiwan is the most important issue in the relationship between the US and China. Taiwan is a self-governed island democracy that China claims as its territory and has threatened to take by force. The US does not formally recognize Taiwan as independent, but is its most important security partner.

But the White House summary of the meeting did not mention Taiwan. Instead, it said the two sides agreed the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to global energy flows and that Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon. Each government issues its own summary of such meetings.

At the state banquet in Beijing yesterday evening, Xi called the US-China relationship “the most important bilateral relationship in the world” and said the two countries “must make it work and never mess it up.” Trump invited Xi and his wife for a return visit to the White House on Sept. 24. The two sides are expected to hold more talks ahead.

White House Withholding $1.3B in Medicaid

The Trump administration is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California, saying the state has failed to combat fraud, particularly in its hospice program.

Vice President JD Vance announced the plan to withhold funds at a news conference yesterday, calling California’s response to the alleged fraud insufficient. He heads the White House antifraud task force, formed in March, which has alleged misconduct in both Democratic and Republican states.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) separately suspended 800 hospice programs in the Los Angeles area, where CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said operators have been billing Medicaid for end-of-life care for people who aren’t dying. Oz said only 20 of the 800 suspended hospices contacted CMS to dispute the action. Oz said the state’s record contains “major red flags,” including $630 million in disputed billings, $500 million tied to home health services, and $200 million in what he called questionable expenses.

Medicaid is the joint federal-state program that provides health coverage to low-income Americans. The federal government pays 62% of the costs; California pays the rest. California has already reimbursed providers who treated patients in the program, but CMS said it will not pay the federal share unless the state proves that it is billing for the services provided to eligible patients. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office pushed back, saying CMS has refused to share the underlying data on the suspended hospices, “preventing the state from going after bad actors.”

CIA Officer Alleges Coverup of Covid Origin

At a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee meeting convened by Republicans yesterday, a CIA officer accused the Biden administration of altering intelligence assessments to suppress evidence that Covid-19 originated in a Chinese lab.

Testifying before the committee yesterday, CIA officer James Erdman said the agency’s scientific analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that the virus most likely leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. He singled out Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former federal infectious disease chief, saying Fauci intentionally helped shape the official narrative against the lab-leak theory. Erdman alleged that the conclusions were deliberately suppressed by senior intelligence officials.

The CIA rejected Erdman’s claims. In a statement issued before the testimony, agency spokesperson Liz Lyons said his account “amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing.” She also accused the committee of “bad faith” for subpoenaing Erdman after obtaining earlier closed-door testimony from him.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri used the hearing to argue that the Biden administration violated the COVID-19 Origin Act — legislation Hawley sponsored — which required full declassification of intelligence on the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s possible links to the pandemic.

All seven Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee skipped the hearing. Republicans accused them of avoiding a politically uncomfortable topic. Democrats have not publicly explained the boycott.

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Judge Orders US to Return Colombian Woman Deported to Congo

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Trump administration likely violated the law by deporting a Colombian woman to the Democratic Republic of Congo in April and ordered the government to bring her back as soon as possible.

Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata is being held at a hotel outside Kinshasa with 14 other migrants deported by ICE. Congolese authorities have refused to admit her on medical grounds — she has diabetes and other illnesses.

Quiroz Zapata entered the US in August 2024 and was later detained by ICE, according to court filings. She said she fled Colombia to escape an abusive former partner, an officer in the Colombian national police, who she said raped and beat her while on duty.

After several federal courts ruled that the government cannot deport migrants back to countries where they might face persecution or torture, the Trump administration has been sending them to third countries willing to accept them.

More GOP Senators Join Democrats to End the War in Iran

Senate Republicans blocked another Democratic effort to end US military involvement in Iran.

The proposal was a war powers resolution introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA). It would have required President Trump to withdraw US forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress explicitly authorized the war. The proposal failed 50-49. Republican Sens. Rand Paul, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted with Democrats to require congressional approval for further military action against Iran. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was again the only Democrat to vote against it.

The administration notified Congress on March 2, two days after Operation Epic Fury began, starting the 60-day clock that expired May 1. Trump administration officials argue the conflict effectively ended with the April 7 ceasefire with Iran, and that the ceasefire altered the War Powers timeline. The ceasefire remains in effect but both the US and Iran have fired at each other’s ships and other targets.

The next congressional action on the war is unclear. Ahead of the vote, Sen. Kaine said that there “will be a day, and it might be soon… where this Senate will say to the president, ‘stop this war.’”

White House to Host 9-Hour National Prayer Event

Top Trump administration officials will headline a day-long prayer gathering on the National Mall on Sunday that organizers say will celebrate the nation’s Christian heritage and spark “a movement of renewal” in America.

The event, “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” is tied to the country’s 250th anniversary and is partly funded through Freedom 250, the Trump administration’s official initiative marking the semiquincentennial of American independence.

Rev. Paula White-Cain, a senior White House faith adviser, said the gathering “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.” It will feature evangelical and Catholic leaders and high-ranking Trump administration officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. President Trump is expected to send a video message.

When he came into office in 1992, Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president elected in 12 years. But the GOP swept the 1994 midterms, campaigning on promises to repeal Clinton’s upper-income tax increases, stave off health care reforms, and push through wide-ranging spending cuts to balance the federal budget. By 1995, Newt Gingrich had become the first Republican speaker of the House in 40 years.

Clinton had also promised a balanced budget and deficit reduction, but when Congress sent him a budget proposal with cuts to critical safety net and social programs like Medicare, welfare, and Social Security, he promptly vetoed it. With the president and Congress at an impasse, by December 15, the government was out of money.

The shutdown ground on through the new year, until Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole helped deliver a compromise deal. The government reopened, but the shutdown marked the beginning of an era of hyperpartisanship in which disruptions to the ordinary functioning of the government would, within a few decades, go from rare aberrations to a regularly wielded weapon.

An exploitable funding process

Before Clinton and Gingrich’s standoff, government shutdowns were more commonly known as “fiscal lapses” or “funding gaps.” Although 14 funding gaps occurred in the 1970s and ’80s, most lasted less than a week and didn’t lead to any agencies shutting down operations either because the gaps were too brief or they happened over a weekend, and funding was restored before any work was impacted.

Shutdowns stem from the government’s complicated funding process — which creates funding gaps and deadlines that can be used to pressure political opponents — and a level of polarization that’s less common in other democracies, particularly those with parliamentary systems.

Every year, Congress must pass 12 separate appropriations bills to keep the government operating. If one or more doesn’t pass, a partial shutdown can occur. But if all appropriations stall, there can be a complete shutdown. Temporary spending bills — called continuing resolutions — can allow the government to keep operating under the prior year’s spending levels until final appropriations are approved, but the deadlines and threats make funding gaps a constantly recurring point of leverage.

To understand how the mechanism for government shutdowns came to exist in the first place, we need to look back to the 19th century.

Prior to the Civil War, Congress and the executive branch often clashed over what historians call “coercive deficiencies,” in which agencies spent their appropriations early and then pressed Congress for more money. For example, the Post Office regularly sought and received additional funds following threats it would not be able to pay contractors to deliver the mail. In the 1850s, combined deficiencies topped $5 million a year (around $212 million in today’s dollars). Then, at the start of the Civil War in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the Treasury to pay out an initial $2 million for military preparations despite the lack of a congressional appropriation. When back in session, Congress retroactively approved the spending.

During the war years, spending grew from around $80 million a year at its start to a peak of $1.3 billion in 1865 because there were no guardrails to stop ad hoc and emergency expenditures.

After the war, Congress pushed back, passing the Antideficiency Act — legislation designed to curb government spending that exceeded appropriations.

Essentially, it meant that federal agencies could no longer spend money that hadn’t been appropriated by Congress. With the legislation helping to curb coercive deficiencies, Congress also formed new appropriations committees to manage spending more closely. In subsequent years, Congress strengthened the Act to add penalties, including fines and even imprisonment for federal employees who knowingly and purposely overspent.

How a legal opinion turned lapses into shutdowns

During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began making broader use of its power — originally granted by Congress in the 1930s — to regulate “unfair or deceptive” practices, with a focus on protecting consumers from the tobacco industry and the marketing of “sugary foods” on TV commercials. By 1980, industry lobbyists and friendly members of Congress were pushing back on FTC powers, and a congressional majority threatened to defund the agency unless it backed off.

In anticipation, President Carter asked his attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, to explore the legal ramifications of an unfunded federal agency; what would happen and what would it mean?

Civiletti sent the president a five-page interpretation of the 1884 Antideficiency Act. The analysis emphasized that the government could not operate “nonessential obligations” during these lapses — meaning that when appropriations ran out, government operations had to cease. The White House accepted the interpretation.

On April 30, 1980, Congress allowed the FTC’s funding to lapse. The next day, to comply with the Antideficiency Act as Civiletti had interpreted it, the White House ordered the FTC to shut down, sending nearly 2,000 workers home and halting its operations. The General Services Administration, which provides security at government buildings, sent US Marshals to FTC offices to ensure compliance. The shutdown — unprecedented at the time — quickly led to a compromise in which Congress would restore funding if the FTC’s regulatory authority were reined in. The agency reopened a day later, but a precedent had been set: forcing a shutdown had resulted in pressure that changed policy.

Civiletti would later offer a follow-up opinion of the Antideficiency Act in 1981, arguing for the existence of shutdown exceptions for the “safety of human life” and “the protection of property.” Those exceptions for “essential” government functions have become the norm in the modern shutdown era.

After originating with Carter and Civiletti, this interpretation of the Antideficiency Act continued under President Ronald Reagan. Eight funding lapses occurred during Reagan’s two terms, but they lasted only one to three days. Extended shutdowns didn’t begin until the mid-1990s, and they were a surprise to the man who’d initially cleared the legal path for them.

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“I couldn’t have ever imagined these shutdowns would last this long of a time and be used as a political gambit,” said Civiletti in 2019.

The modern era of shutdowns

After Newt Gingrich opened the door to an extended shutdown in 1995, it would take nearly 20 years before one happened again, in part because of the political risks to members of Congress.

“It was all a blame game… and the Republicans were hoping that Clinton would get the bigger share of the blame,” explained former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. “But in the end, they got the share of the blame in the public’s mind.” And while Clinton went on to a second term as president, Gingrich ultimately resigned as House speaker after disastrous midterm elections for Republicans (and several unrelated scandals).

But in 2013, the Republican majority in the House found an issue that made the potential backlash worth the risk: during President Barack Obama’s second term, they led an unsuccessful effort to roll back the Affordable Care Act, resulting in a 16-day shutdown. During the shutdown, Republicans repeatedly proposed spending bills that also included delayed reauthorization of the ACA.

More than 800,000 federal workers were furloughed this time, and polls put most of the blame on the GOP. After 16 days, the Republican House pulled the amendments that would’ve defunded the ACA, and affected government agencies reopened. Republicans didn’t pay much of a political price, though, expanding their majority in the House and maintaining control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms.

The next government shutdown, in 2018, established a new record of 34 days. This clash centered on funding for a wall at the US-Mexico border. President Donald Trump had campaigned on building the wall, and he declared in late 2018 he would veto an annual congressional appropriations bill brought by the House unless it contained $5.7 billion in border wall funding. But Republicans held only a slim majority in the Senate, and the bill stalled, leading to the shutdown. Furloughed workers protested outside the White House, and Trump eventually caved, signing an appropriations bill without his requested border funding.

In October of 2025, another government shutdown began and eventually set a new record of 43 days. This time, it was Democrats who forced it, refusing to pass appropriations unless Republicans agreed to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits. (Though Republicans control the House and Senate, they needed Democratic votes to pass appropriations because of defections within their own party.) This time, more than a million federal workers were furloughed.

Polls were evenly split on which party was to blame, though the majority of Americans supported Democrats’ policy aims in trying to extend ACA tax credits, which lowered premiums for more than 20 million Americans. In the end, Democrats agreed to reopen the government without the extension, based on Republican assurances it would be part of separate legislation. But while the House made good on the deal, the Senate did not, and the tax credits ultimately expired.

The current landscape

This year, the Department of Homeland Security’s administrative functions went unfunded for 76 days. Democrats used the filibuster to halt funding in an attempt to force Republicans to agree to limitations on immigration enforcement, which had attracted public condemnation in light of brutal and sometimes deadly crackdowns around the country.

While essential functions continued during the partial shutdown, TSA workers temporarily went without pay, but the president redirected previously appropriated funds to keep them paid even as overall funds to run the agency stalled. Ultimately, the shutdown ended when Congress passed a bill to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP, which Republicans try to fund separately through the budget reconciliation process (which means they won’t need any Democratic votes). Ultimately, none of Democrats’ demands for immigration enforcement reform were met, illustrating yet another instance where a shutdown failed to produce any meaningful policy change.

A solution in the making

While shutdowns are increasingly common, they’re not inevitable, and some members of Congress argue that they’re not a necessary feature of the US government.

In 2025, Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the House Budget Committee, introduced the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act. Its companion bill was refiled in the Senate.

The bills would trigger automatic rolling 14-day continuing resolutions until a funding lapse is resolved, allow no congressional votes unrelated to appropriations during that time, and limit recesses, adjournment, and travel by members of Congress, staff, and the White House Office of Management and Budget until new appropriations are made.

“My Prevent Government Shutdowns Act is commonsense legislation that would shift the burden of a shutdown away from We the People and onto the politicians where it belongs,” Arrington posted upon filing the bill. The legislation has attracted bipartisan support, with 10 Republican and nine Democratic cosponsors to date for the House version.

Similar bills have been proposed before, including Sen. Rand Paul’s Government Shutdowns Prevention Act as well as the more recent Eliminate Shutdowns Act and Withhold Member Pay During Shutdowns Act, neither of which ever emerged from committee.

Ultimately, though, the future of government shutdowns may hinge on voter response.

“Americans across the country seem to be either apathetic, confused, or frustrated,” said Sen. James Lankford about government shutdowns. “It’s a shutdown Groundhog Day.”

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Justice Dept. Considering Settling Trump’s Suit Against IRS

The Justice Department is weighing whether to settle a $10 billion lawsuit President Trump filed against the IRS in January over the leak of his tax records. Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump family business sued the IRS for at least $10 billion in January over the leak of their personal and business tax returns during Trump’s first term.

A former IRS contractor was convicted in 2024 of leaking the records to The New York Times and ProPublica and is serving five years in prison.

The New York Times reported that the Justice Dept. and the White House officials are discussing settlement options, including the IRS dropping any audits of Trump, his family members, or the Trump Organization. Settlement terms remain unclear at this time, and a deal could also involve a cash payment to the president.

The case has raised unusual legal questions because Trump oversees the IRS while suing it. US District Judge Kathleen Williams in Florida has questioned whether there is a genuine legal dispute between the two sides, since the DOJ represents the IRS in court while also serving under the president. For a court to decide a case, the parties typically must be adversaries.

Last month, the judge appointed six private attorneys to advise her on whether the lawsuit is legitimate, and she ordered Trump’s personal lawyers and Justice Department attorneys to file briefs by May 20 explaining whether they are genuinely opposing parties.

South Carolina Senate Defies Trump, Blocks Redistricting Push

The South Carolina Senate blocked an effort yesterday to redraw the state’s congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterms, defying President Trump.

Five Republicans joined all Democrats in voting against a resolution to extend the legislative session, which ends tomorrow, so lawmakers could take up a new map. The 29-17 vote fell two short of the two-thirds majority needed.

A state House committee had endorsed a map yesterday that could eliminate the state’s only Democratic-held seat, currently held by Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state’s only Black member of Congress. Earlier this week, Trump urged South Carolina senators to pass the proposal, saying he was watching closely.

The state primary is June 9, and early voting begins in two weeks.

Separately, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld yesterday a new map drawn by Republicans that could help the GOP win an additional seat in November. Republicans hold six of Missouri’s eight House seats.

Appeals Court Pauses Trump Payment to E. Jean Carroll — For Now

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that President Trump does not have to immediately pay the $83 million defamation judgment awarded to writer E. Jean Carroll while he seeks Supreme Court review of his appeal. Carroll has won two civil cases against Trump in New York tied to her allegation that he sexually assaulted her in a dressing room in the mid-1990s and later defamed her by denying the claim.

A jury awarded her $5 million after finding Trump sexually abused her and defamed her, and a separate jury in January 2024 awarded her $83 million for defamatory statements Trump made in 2019 while serving as president. Trump has argued those statements were made in his official capacity and should be covered by presidential immunity.

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Trump in China for State Visit Dominated by Iran War, Trade

President Trump arrived in China for a three-day state visit, his first since 2017.

Meanwhile, US intelligence has gathered information that Chinese companies and Iranian officials have discussed weapons transfers that would be routed through other countries to mask their origin. It is unclear how many arms, if any, have been shipped, or how much Chinese officials have approved in sales. Trump told reporters yesterday that Chinese President Xi Jinping had been “relatively good” on Iran. He also said he would have “a long talk” with Xi Jinping about the war with Iran, but that their meetings would focus primarily on trade.

China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil, and US officials want Beijing to pressure Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and to accept a peace deal.

Beijing is expected to ask for lower tariffs, more semiconductors that are used to power artificial intelligence systems, and reduced US military support for Taiwan, which China claims as its territory.

The US delegation includes more than a dozen business executives, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

Kevin Warsh Confirmed as Fed Chair

Kevin Warsh is on track to become the next Federal Reserve chair after the Senate approved his nomination in a 54-45 vote today. He was confirmed to a 14-year term on the Fed’s Board of Governors yesterday. His swearing-in is expected after the Senate confirmation paperwork is signed by Trump.

Warsh, 56, a former Fed governor who served from 2006 to 2011, will replace Jerome Powell, whose term as Fed chair ends this week.

“Alligator Alcatraz” Detention Center to Close

The Florida immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will close as soon as next month, with its roughly 1,400 detainees moved elsewhere.

State officials notified vendors yesterday that the facility was shutting down, with the last detainees to leave by the start of June. It remains unclear where detainees will be transferred.

Detainees, their lawyers and families, and immigration advocates have reported unsanitary and inhumane conditions and difficulty accessing attorneys. State officials have denied those descriptions. Lawsuits over conditions and environmental impact remain pending.

The facility is being closed primarily due to the soaring cost of operating the facility.
Florida has spent more than $1 million a day to run the facility and is still awaiting $608 million it requested in federal reimbursement.

Trump Administration Freezes New Medicare Hospice Enrollments

The Trump administration imposed a six-month nationwide freeze today on new hospice and home health agencies signing up to receive Medicare payments, citing widespread fraud in the two categories.

The moratorium announced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services bars new providers from joining Medicare reimbursement programs, though existing agencies will continue operating and patients can still receive services.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said the move is intended to stop fraudulent operators from entering the system while investigations continue. CMS recently suspended $70 million in payments to hundreds of hospices and home health agencies in the Los Angeles area over suspected fraud.

Methinks the Chief Justice does protest too much.

Speaking at a judicial conference, Roberts challenged the oft-expressed view that Supreme Court justices are just like everyone else — that they have political views and that their decision-making is influenced by those political views, rather than being declarations of some objective legal truth. “At a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” he said. Essentially, he insists that there’s a fundamental difference between the justices and politicians who are elected to office.

But in fact, there’s a long history of Supreme Court justices being political actors of the kind that Roberts describes. Before becoming justices, they worked elsewhere in government to advance their political views, and once on the Court they advanced those same views in the language of the law. The Roberts Court is no exception. Indeed, the Roberts Court is now a partisan institution in addition to a political one.

Even aside from the justices’ political views influencing their decisions, there’s no getting around the fact that the justices’ decisions influence our politics, which makes them part of the political system, rather than above it.

Justices with political backgrounds

The very first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, was a political actor before, during, and after his tenure as Chief. Before serving on the Court, Jay was the President of the Continental Congress. While on the Supreme Court, he negotiated a treaty with Great Britain, and later resigned from the Court to become the Governor of New York.

While most justices haven’t simultaneously served as foreign diplomats or gone on to governorships, Jay was not unique in having held an obviously political role before his time on the Court. William Howard Taft was President of the United States before he became Chief Justice, and John Marshall was the Secretary of State before he took on the same role. Indeed, as Secretary of State, Marshall helped the Adams administration develop the court reforms that were at issue in Marbury v. Madison, where Marshall himself authored the opinion that first established the Court’s authority to declare laws unconstitutional.

While members of the Roberts Court may not have previously served in elected office or in a presidential cabinet, they had political jobs before becoming judges. And in those political jobs, they unsuccessfully pursued the very same policy goals they managed to achieve once they were confirmed to the Supreme Court.

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FDA Chief Resigns

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary resigned today after clashing with the Trump administration over flavored e-cigarettes.

Makary was confirmed in March 2025 and oversaw a tenure marked by senior-staff turnover, massive reductions in FDA staff due to cuts and departures, and internal disputes over policy. He was criticized for shortening the review and approval process for certain drugs, while dragging out a study on the abortion drug mifepristone.

But according to news reports, Makary’s departure was over the FDA’s May 6 authorization of fruit-flavored e-cigarettes from Glas Inc., a vape manufacturer from California — a decision Makary opposed and that came only after Trump personally pressed him to approve it. Sources say Makary did not want to sign off on products he believed would fuel nicotine addiction among young people.

Deputy Commissioner Kyle Diamantas is expected to serve as acting commissioner.

Inflation

Consumer prices rose 3.8% in April, the highest annual rate since May 2023, driven largely by oil costs from the war in Iran.

The Consumer Price Index — an economic indicator that tracks how much the prices of everyday goods and services, such as food, gas, rent, and clothing, change over time — released this morning showed prices climbed 0.6% from March. Gasoline is up 5.4% since last month and more than 28% since this time last year.

Congressional Map Redistricting

The fight over congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms is intensifying after last month’s Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which narrowed the Voting Rights Act’s protections against states drawing districts that disadvantage minority voters.

In Alabama, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the state to use an older congressional map a lower court had previously blocked. Returning to the old map would likely eliminate one of the state’s two Democratic seats by removing a majority-Black district from the map. Alabama plans to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts 1, 2, 6, and 7, and Gov. Kay Ivey today pushed the primary from May 19 to Aug. 11.

In South Carolina, the state senate is expected to vote today on a revised map after President Trump urged Republicans to back it. Republicans hold six of seven House seats and the proposed new map will potentially give them all seven, eliminating Rep. Jim Clyburn’s district and removing South Carolina’s only Black representative from Congress.

In Missouri, the state Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to a GOP-backed map that opponents say violates the state constitution’s requirement that districts be drawn as one connected area and kept as compact as possible. Republicans hold six of Missouri’s eight House seats; the primary is Aug. 4.

In Virginia, Democratic leaders yesterday asked the US Supreme Court to restore a Democratic-leaning map after the state Supreme Court struck it down. Voters narrowly approved the map last month, which could give Democrats four more seats. The state’s congressional primary is on Aug. 4.

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I’m so proud to share We Are Mighty, my new picture book, because it’s exactly the kind of book I wish more children had in their hands. It introduces young readers to twelve real people from America’s past who saw what needed doing and did it. Some were famous. Most were not. All of them mattered.

At a time when it can feel like courage belongs only to the powerful, this book offers children something better and truer: the reminder that ordinary people have always shaped history. If there is a child in your life who could use a little more hope, agency, and honest history, I would be honored for you to share it with them.

Supreme Court Extends Abortion Pill Access

The Supreme Court yesterday extended its temporary order keeping the abortion pill mifepristone available by mail and telemedicine while it weighs Louisiana’s challenge to the drug. The order will remain in effect through Thursday.

Louisiana sued the FDA for allowing the pill to be dispensed without an in-person clinic visit, arguing that allowing mifepristone to be prescribed by telehealth and shipped by mail undermines the state’s near-total abortion ban. On May 1, a three-judge Fifth Circuit panel sided with Louisiana, ruling the drug can only be dispensed in person at a clinic and cutting off mail and telehealth access nationwide.

Mifepristone, used in about two-thirds of US abortions, is one of two drugs typically used in medication abortion.

Southern California Mayor Pleads Guilty

The mayor of Arcadia, California, has resigned and agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government, the Justice Department said yesterday.

In her plea agreement, Mayor Eileen Wang admitted that from 2020 to 2022, she helped to run a local Chinese-American news website that posted pro-China content at the direction of Chinese officials, all without registering as a foreign agent.

Wang, 58, faces a maximum of 10 years in federal prison. The man she partnered with to run the site — a Chinese citizen living legally in the US — is currently serving a four-year federal sentence after pleading guilty to the same offense.

City manager Dominic Lazzaretto said no city finances or staff were involved in Wang’s conduct.

Iran War

President Trump said the month-old US-Iran ceasefire is on “massive life support,” rejecting Iran’s latest peace proposal as a “piece of garbage.”

Trump is reportedly considering renewed strikes on Iran because of its continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has restricted shipping traffic in the waterway since the war began on Feb. 28. The waterway remains effectively closed because of both Iran’s restrictions and the US blockade of Iranian ports.

Pentagon Officials Defend $1.5 Trillion Budget Request

The Pentagon raised its estimate of the war’s cost by about $4 billion today, putting the total at $29 billion since fighting began in late February.

Two weeks ago, Pentagon comptroller Jay Hurst put the cost at $25 billion, saying the extra money is needed for equipment repair, replacement, and operational expenses.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine appeared before House and Senate committees today. Hegseth declined to say how much additional money outside the Pentagon’s normal budget would ultimately be needed to finance the war.

DOJ Seeks WSJ Reporters’ Records on Iran

The Department of Justice has subpoenaed The Wall Street Journal seeking reporters’ records tied to alleged government leaks about the Iran war.

The WSJ said the subpoenas relate to a Feb. 23 story the newspaper published revealing that Gen. Dan Caine and other Pentagon officials had warned President Trump about the risks of an extended campaign against Iran.

Trump complained to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche last month about leaks related to the war, administration officials said, and Blanche vowed to seek subpoenas of reporters who have covered sensitive national security stories. In one recent meeting, Trump handed Blanche a stack of articles he and other senior officials viewed as threats to national security, with a sticky note that read “treason.”

A spokesperson for The Journal’s parent company Dow Jones called the subpoenas “an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering” and said the company will vigorously oppose them. The First Amendment protects newsgathering, and longstanding Justice Department guidelines have required prosecutors to exhaust other avenues of finding information before seeking reporters’ records.

Less than one week after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision that rolled back minority voter protections under the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee Republicans responded to pressure from Washington, DC, and called our General Assembly into a special session for the sole purpose of splitting Memphis into multiple districts.

The intent was to make it impossible for a Democrat to win any Tennessee seat in the US House of Representatives in this year’s midterm election. To accomplish that, state leaders threw out a Tennessee statute that had stood for over half a century: since 1972, state law had mandated that “districts may not be changed between apportionments,” barring the state legislature from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade in between census cycles. On May 7, the state legislature approved a bill repealing that provision, and it was signed into law the same day by Governor Lee.

During political seasons like this, it is important to remember that our Founding Fathers warned against the dangers of a two-party system in the United States. George Washington himself advocated against having only two parties, because these men knew that an us vs. them government would fracture a vulnerable nation.

Tennessee’s Capitol is called the “Athens of the South,” named after the birthplace of democracy in Greece. But what transpired in the sacred halls of our state government this week was anything but democratic.

The rules of the special session blocked citizens from giving public comment on the maps. Democrats attempted to add more than 30 different amendments to the legislation that officially redrew the congressional districts. They attempted to rewrite the bill to keep Memphis and Nashville in singular districts, to delay the effective date of the map, to require public disclosure of map-making discussions, to require adequate support for elections administrators, and even to establish a Tennessee Voting Rights Act. All efforts by the minority party failed in party-line votes.

But rather than rehashing each of the actions in Tennessee, it feels pertinent to highlight the broader view of redistricting across the country. This moment calls us to examine the shortcomings of our nation that only offers two party machines for its incredibly diverse set of citizens.

The maps are moving, but the numbers aren’t

This redistricting scramble has touched millions of voters across the country, and if you look only at raw seat counts, the partisan payoff appears modest. The more consequential shift is structural.

Before 2025, only two states had conducted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970. Today, just months into the 2025-26 cycle, at least six states have already enacted new maps, and more are expected to follow in the coming weeks. Through this campaign, Republicans are building a firewall that insulates them from the public’s verdict at the ballot box. According to analysis from The New York Times, the maps enacted so far would allow Republicans to lose the national popular vote by 2.5 percentage points and still win control of the House. If Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina follow Tennessee’s lead and redistrict in response to the Supreme Court’s rollback of Voting Rights Act protections, that cushion could grow to nearly four points.

In plain terms, Democrats may need to win the national congressional vote by four points just to retake the House. This is a system designed to produce Republican governance regardless of what the American public actually wants.

The Virginia Supreme Court accelerated this dynamic just last week, striking down on procedural grounds a Democrat-drawn map that voters had approved, eliminating what had been Democrats’ primary structural counterweight. Meanwhile, Florida Republicans redrew their map, potentially adding up to four new Republican-leaning districts. In two weeks, what had been a redistricting stalemate became a rout.

Millions of voters have had their representation reshuffled, their local election administrators thrown into chaos, and their communities carved apart. The goal was never simply to flip a handful of seats, but to construct a durable advantage that allows one party to govern while being rejected by a majority of the country. That is a structural threat to representative democracy itself.

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The financial cost of partisan redistricting

That threat to democracy comes at a real and immediate price, and we can use Tennessee as an example. The special session sparked sharp debate over the estimated $3.1 million cost of redistricting in the middle of an election year, with House Speaker Cameron Sexton saying the state plans to reimburse counties for expenses tied to the changes. Lawmakers also clashed over whether local election administrators could realistically implement the new maps before the 2026 primaries.

Instead of spending three million dollars on a political play that is soon to be tied up in court, Tennessee could have hired 50 new qualified teachers, staffed a behavioral health hospital for Knox County, or funded early childhood education for 600 families. Instead, it was spent drawing lines to protect incumbents, in a session that, by one Republican lawmaker’s own admission on the House floor, was about taking “advantage of a political opportunity” to send “an all-Republican delegation to Washington to represent conservative values.”

That admission proves Tennessee’s redistricting was used as a tool to override the will of voters, spending public dollars to engineer electoral outcomes that the public itself might not choose. Tennessee is just one tile in a much larger mosaic being assembled across the country, state by state, map by map, to ensure that the party in power stays in power regardless of how people vote.

The sleeping giant in the room

What neither party seems willing to reckon with is the voters they are both losing. A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, surpassing the 43% measured in 2014, 2023, and 2024. Meanwhile, equal shares of Americans identified as either Democrats or Republicans — 27% each. Among younger generations, 56% of Gen Z and 54% of Millennials now identify as Independents.

These are not protest voters. Registration data points in the same direction: Unaffiliated voters now make up about 32% of registered voters nationally, up from 23% in 2000, and this growth is driven heavily by younger voters in increasingly diverse communities. The two parties are spending millions of dollars drawing maps to lock in their bases, while the largest and fastest-growing bloc in the electorate is looking for a different kind of leadership altogether.

The moment for something different

The conditions are in place for leaders outside the traditional party structure to build something real, but what this moment demands is structural reform alongside different leadership.

Voters watching Republicans redraw maps in Tennessee, Florida, and across the South while their own representation is carved apart are not wrong to feel that the system is being rigged against them. That frustration is rational, and is a natural response to what is actually occurring.

But the answer cannot simply be for Democrats to gerrymander back wherever they can. California’s legislature already overrode its own independent commission to redraw maps in response to Republican moves elsewhere. Virginia attempted the same. When both parties treat redistricting as a weapon rather than a public trust, the losers are always the voters, and particularly the growing majority of Americans who don’t belong to either party.

The root of this problem is a system that hands politicians the power to choose their own voters before a single ballot is cast. As long as legislatures draw their own maps, the incentive will always be to protect incumbents and entrench power rather than to represent communities. Independent commissions at the state level, however well-intentioned, cannot solve the national problem on their own as long as deeply red or deeply blue states are still free to manipulate congressional seats. A state-by-state approach hands structural advantages to those willing to gerrymander voters, giving us the headlines of the last two years.

The structural solution requires a federal floor, like the Redistricting Reform Act of 2025. This legislation was introduced in both the US House and Senate, and would mandate that every state conduct redistricting through an independent nonpartisan commission while banning mid-decade map redrawing entirely. Critically, its provisions would take effect starting after the 2030 census, meaning this is not a bill designed to rescue any party in the next election cycle.

This is a long-term fix to a structural problem, and while it naturally has broad Democratic support since they are currently the minority party, its passage means Independents as well as any minority party in the future are somewhat protected in a more perfect union.

A national standard for how congressional maps are drawn is the kind of narrow, structural intervention that federal authority exists to provide. It is not an expansion of federal power into how states govern themselves. Local governance and limited federal overreach are genuine values for many, and measures like this need to be used with a targeted purpose.

But even the best federal legislation cannot be passed by a Congress controlled by the party that benefits from the current system, and that is precisely why building independent political power from the ground up should be a primary strategy for political outsiders.

Americans are rejecting the extremes of both parties, and 2026 candidates should recognize that independent voters are watching a system being actively rigged against their voice. They are not looking for a better party. They are looking for leaders who will dismantle systems that diminish the power of their votes, and who will replace them with consistent and fair election laws.

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Trump Rejects Iran’s Response to End War

Peace talks between the US and Iran have stalled, as President Trump yesterday rejected Iran’s counterproposal to the latest US offer to end the war.

Last week, the US proposed a two-month ceasefire, a halt to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, and a full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. In its response, Iran said it wanted the war ended within 30 days rather than extended through a ceasefire, and reiterated longstanding demands: war reparations from the US, recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and the lifting of US sanctions.

Trump called Iran’s terms “totally unacceptable.”

A ceasefire has been in place since April 8, but both sides have continued to hit each other’s ships around the strait, which Iran has effectively kept closed by laying sea mines, warning ships from attempting to cross the waterway without its permission, and demanding tolls of up to $1 million per ship.

Gas Prices Surge Again

The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.52 yesterday, up from just under $3 the week before the US-Iran war began, according to AAA. Drivers in six states — Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington — are paying near or above $5 a gallon. In California, the state average has crossed $6.

President Trump said Monday that he wants to temporarily suspend the federal gas tax, which currently stands at 18.4 cents per gallon. The president does not have the authority to suspend the tax unilaterally; only Congress can do so. Suspending the tax will cost the treasury about a half billion dollars a week. Following Trump’s remarks, allies in both the House and Senate said they planned to introduce legislation to pause the federal gas tax.

American Tests Positive for Hantavirus

The Department of Health and Human Services said one American has tested positive for the Andes strain of the hantavirus and another is showing mild symptoms. Seventeen American passengers from the hantavirus-hit cruise ship MV Hondius arrived at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha early this morning for clinical assessment.

The two passengers with confirmed or suspected infections are being held in the medical center’s biocontainment unit. The rest are being observed at the center’s National Quarantine Unit. The Andes virus can take up to 42 days to produce symptoms after exposure, so passengers without signs of infection will be allowed to complete the 42-day monitoring period at home. Symptoms include fatigue, fever, and muscle aches.

The Andes strain is the only hantavirus known to spread person-to-person, typically through close, prolonged contact. Most other hantaviruses spread when humans come in contact with infected rodent droppings, urine, or saliva.

Three passengers from the MV Hondius have died so far. The World Health Organization has said the risk to the broader public is low. The Americans and one British national who lives in the US disembarked the MV Hondius yesterday in the Canary Islands, and were flown overnight to Omaha.

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In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer draws on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, to show how other living beings ― asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass ― offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she argues for the importance of acknowledging and celebrating our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.

Alabama Congressional Map

Alabama is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to throw out its current congressional map that has two majority-Black districts and revert to one with a single majority-Black district, before the state’s May 19 primary. The state filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court after a federal district court rejected its application to throw out the current map last week.

Alabama has seven congressional seats, with Republicans holding five and Democrats two. The current map has been in place since a three-judge panel found Alabama’s 2023 map violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voters’ power. The state argues its case mirrors the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black district as a racial gerrymander.

Hours before Alabama filed the appeal, Gov. Kay Ivey signed legislation authorizing her to call special primaries for congressional districts 1, 2, 6 and 7 — whose boundaries would be affected if the courts allow the state to use a different map this year. The special primaries do not yet have a date — Ivey would set one if and when the courts rule in Alabama’s favor.

Alabama is asking the justices to act by May 14. The Black voters and civil rights groups who originally sued Alabama over the map had to file their response today by 5 p.m. EDT.

Trump-Xi Summit

Trump will travel to China this week for a three-day state visit with President Xi Jinping, his first trip to China since 2017.

US officials said he will push China to buy Boeing aircraft, US beef, and soybeans, among other demands. China is expected to press for relief from Trump’s tariffs, an easing of US controls on importing advanced semiconductors, and reduced US military support for Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.

Both sides are also expected to discuss AI technology and export restrictions. Trump is bringing a delegation of major US CEOs with him, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and the heads of Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Citigroup, and Meta.

Iran is also expected to be a subject of discussion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last month that Xi had given the White House high-level assurances China would not send weapons to Iran. China is Iran’s largest trading partner and the biggest buyer of its sanctioned oil, purchasing roughly 90% of its oil exports.

Last week, the State Department sanctioned more than a dozen companies for supporting Iran, including three Chinese firms accused of sharing satellite imagery of US facilities in the Middle East.

Hegseth Calls for Mark Kelly Investigation, Again

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for a second Pentagon investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly, this time over Kelly’s comments about how much the Iran war has drained US weapons stockpiles.

On CBS’ “Face the Nation” yesterday, Kelly, who sits on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said he and his colleagues had received multiple Pentagon briefings detailing how much of the stockpile of US weapons had been used in the war. He said he was shocked to find out how depleted the stockpile had become and blamed Trump for going to war “without a strategic goal, without a plan, without a timeline.”

In a post on X, Hegseth accused Kelly — a retired Navy captain — of “blabbing on TV (falsely & dumbly) about a CLASSIFIED Pentagon briefing he received.” He said the Defense Department’s legal counsel will review whether Kelly violated his oath as a military retiree.

The senator responded to Hegseth’s post with a video clip of a recent Senate hearing, writing, “We had this conversation in a public hearing a week ago and you said it would take ‘years’ to replenish some of these stockpiles. That’s not classified, it’s a quote from you.”

Hegseth’s first call to investigate Kelly was in November of last year after Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers with military or intelligence backgrounds released a video urging US service members to refuse illegal orders.

WHCD Shooter Pleads Not Guilty

The man charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner pleaded not guilty in federal court today.

Cole Tomas Allen, 31, a tutor from California, faces four counts: attempting to assassinate the president, shooting a Secret Service officer, transporting a firearm and ammunition across state lines with intent to commit a felony, and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence.

His lawyers asked the judge to disqualify Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, and the entire US Attorney’s Office from the case, arguing they are potential victims and witnesses because they were at the dinner.

The judge did not rule on that request but asked the defense to elaborate. The government has until May 22 to respond.

She does not move much anymore. The years have been both good and hard. Loss, failure, meals, church services, sitting on the front porch, awaiting the arrival of family, departures, and loneliness. What lingers most is memory: of her lover, of her meals, of her courage, of the South. “I was born in the South, I live in the South, I’m going to die in the South.”

That ol’ wretched and magnificent place where both the ghost of Jim Crow and the magic of the Black Belt dwell. The place that saw the country’s first majority-Black state legislature form during Reconstruction, only to see it dismantled after President Rutherford B. Hayes pulled troops back from former Confederate states. The place that had been the home of both “Redeemers” — white Southerners hell-bent on forcing Black people back into slavery — and resisters like my grandmother, who refused.

Kwame Ture, who changed his name from Stokely Carmichael in homage to his black revolutionary heritage, once said, “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it is a question of power.”

As soon as the Court’s decision was handed down, white Southerners started flexing their power.

Last week, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee passed a new congressional map that carved up the city of Memphis, erasing the state’s only majority-Black House district. It was one of the first major redistricting moves since the Court’s ruling, and other Southern states — South Carolina included — are rushing to follow suit. This is not just about a court ruling; this is racism and white supremacy in practice. It follows a long, bitter, and familiar history of white violence — both literal and metaphorical.

Between 1892 and 1939, Shelby County, Tennessee — one of the areas included in the Republicans’ power grab — had the highest number of documented lynchings in the state: three people were killed after defending their grocery store from a white mob; Ell Persons was burned with thousands watching after being accused of a crime; Jesse Bond was killed and dumped in the Loosahatchie River after a dispute over a receipt. In every instance, no one in the lynch mob was convicted of any crime. No one was held accountable.

A country is more than a place. It is its own kind of story, told again and again, beat into form by the determination and grit of weary hands. Black people have always been the heartbeat of American democracy. And America has always found a way to betray us, even as we hold out the promise of the nation’s liberation and healing. “Black people still ain’t all the way free,” my grandmother said when I asked her if she saw the news of the ruling.

When someone shows you who they are, as one of our poets said, believe them.

As I think of our conversation, and the days since, I don’t think we actually understand just how devastating and depressing — and enraging — the ruling is. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has reinterpreted a key provision of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is meant to ban voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race and color. The decision removes the already weakened protections for at least 15 House districts across the country with significant Black populations, which exist precisely so Black folks can claw back some of the political power we lost after Reconstruction.

This may mean very little to some, but to those of us who have had to be strong enough to fight against this country and wise enough to survive it — this means everything. The political shift of the last few years was never just about “book bans” or “wokeness” or “patriotism.”

When they spoke of these things, they were always talking about Black equality, Black dignity, and Black liberation. That is what they hate. They are anti-Black. What’s happening now — what has been happening — has always been about white supremacy and power. It was always about the erasure of Black people and the gains we have made, that our ancestors fought so hard to protect and expand. The Constitution and flag and land we have lived and died for.

My grandmother likens Black Americans to Jesus — how he wrestled until his tears had become like blood. All of American history is marked by Black wrestling with the sheer audacity of white and conservative America’s desire to erase and demean us. The redistricting ruling is more than an opinion: it’s an invitation to roll back progress — one that Southern states are already eagerly accepting. It is once again a declaration that this country is really good at forgetting and undoing.

The deep anger and sadness that I feel has been felt before. It is old and ancestral. It is as old as my grandmother’s breath, as old as many of your grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ and aunties’ and uncles’ and cousins’ and friends’ breath, as old as their determination to build some kind of life in spite of the death and dying all around us, as old as their fighting and enduring and handing us the keys.

So turns my heart to the lyrics of a gospel song Aretha Franklin famously sang in 1972: “Lord, my soul just looks back and wonder … how I got over.” Like 2026, 1972 was a year of both triumph and tribulation for Black people — in the same year as Shirley Chisholm’s historic run for president, the barbaric Tuskegee experiment on Black men was exposed.

In such a moment, the power of Franklin’s voice and her song weren’t just about the content or composition alone; it was about the way she tended to the sacred garden of our grief, our frailty, our dreaming, our depravity, our goodness, our tiredness, our numbness. She wondered. And not all wondering is bad. There is the kind of wondering where we feel the very real, present, and human doubt, and then there is the kind of wonder that is astonishment at the mystery of things, their beauty and grandeur.

Right now, we need both.

I, too, wonder. I wonder how we escaped the bitter and brutal chains of chattel slavery. How we were left with nothing in its aftermath, only to have what little we built taken from us during Reconstruction. How we have survived each great American betrayal. How we marched when our children, women, and men were killed. How we went to school when they locked us out.

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How we have fought in the wars and returned home with nothing to show for it. How we have ascended to the highest places in the land, while at the same time being forgotten in the darkest corners of the country. How we have kept our hearts open and fought for more than just our freedom alone. How we have created and danced and lived and loved in spite of everything this country has done to us.

Black people should not have to be perfect to be seen, be accounted for, be protected, be represented, be loved, be alive. We deserve all these things and more. We deserve it because we’re American, because we’re human, because we’re still here. Is that too much to ask?

My wife and I recently took a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, 96.6 miles from my grandmother’s home. The skies were gloomy, heavy with rain and wind, until the sun began to break just as we were leaving. While there, I made a trip to the International African-American Museum. Walking in was a kind of homecoming, a brief and powerful reminder of the blood and love that are soaked in our South Carolina soil.

For all the ways Black South Carolina is erased in America at large, a placard inside the museum reads in small white letters that we had “spearheaded groundbreaking changes through the region, state, nation.” There’s the story of Robert Smalls, the Congressman who famously hijacked a Confederate ship, securing the freedom of his family. There’s the Penn School, erected before the end of the Civil War, which resisted the prohibitions against Black literacy. From there, we can draw a straight line from the 1860s to the 1960s, when the children of Black South Carolina fought the racist Jim Crow segregation of schools.

Decade by decade, epoch by epoch in American history, I was drawn into the story of my ancestors in the state who braved the streets to vote, who stitched quilts for the next generation, who stood resolute in the face of mob violence, who went to the most forbidden and forgotten cracks of the state to report on the story of what Black South Carolina endured, exposed, and defied. Many left in the Great Migration. Many remained and took on the beautiful and terrible work of repair. Whether they left or stayed, their stories washed over me like a baptismal pool and I felt some sense of renewal.

Of all the present ways this country has tried to erase the past, the witness of our humanity is carved into history’s stone, etched in every sentence at the museum that tells the truth of who we are in Charleston, in South Carolina, in the South, in America, in the world. Of all the ways this moment threatens to push us beyond the brink of despair, I read the words in bold, black, brilliant letters beneath my feet: STILL HERE.

That phrase reminded me of the words of James Baldwin: “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” he wrote. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time. And all that God can do, and all that I expect Him to do, is lend one the courage to continue.”

The Supreme Court’s decision is a slap in the face of Black America — really all of America. This country is turning 250 years old this year and has barely moved beyond its racist and bigoted adolescence. But no matter what, the court can’t make a ruling on our existence and humanity. We refuse.

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“Why didn’t you respond?” I asked Zara as she fidgeted with her hair on my couch.

“I don’t know, there was something about her assuming we were friends already that made me not want to hang out with her anymore… It just gave me the ick.”

The ick is something I’ve had probably hundreds of sessions about, so let me skip to the ending: the ick is rarely about the other person. It’s that our culture has decided that openly wanting things — visibly and without irony — is embarrassing. And that genuinely caring makes you look stupid. So when someone shows up earnestly, we recoil.

If you want a relationship, you’re a pick-me. Try too hard at your job and you’re a try-hard. Care about the outcome of an election or a friendship or a creative project, and someone will ask why you’re letting it get to you. So we’ve gotten very good at performing the opposite. We pre-qualify our interest. We deflect compliments. We text “No pressure!” and “No worries if not!” These phrases give us plausible deniability in case we come on too strong.

Protecting yourself from being seen trying is an old move that most of us learned in middle school. But the internet has raised the stakes — everything can be screenshotted, recorded, and posted for strangers to weigh in on. Detachment has become a necessary self-defense.

This performance costs more than you realize because you have to manage two layers at once: what you actually feel and what you show to the world. Most people think they’re tired because they care too much, but they’re actually tired because they’ve spent the day pretending they don’t. Eventually the performance stops being a performance. You start to believe you shouldn’t take anything seriously. Until one day someone asks what you actually want and you genuinely don’t know, because you’ve been so busy not wanting visibly that you’ve forgotten how to want anything at all.

You’re significantly more likely to get what you want when you actually go for it. Hiding feels safer, but it also means you lose the things you never let yourself want. So start by saying the hard thing out loud. Text your friend that you missed her. Ask your crush out on a date. Tell your friends you’re hoping the job offer comes through. It will feel mortifying in the moment, but it’s the only way to get what you want.

A few weeks later, Zara came back to my office. Hannah had posted a photo on Instagram of herself having brunch with two women from the run club. Then another, laughing at a bar. “She just, like, made other friends,” Zara said. She sounded surprised, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that Hannah would keep going without her.

We sat with it. Zara didn’t have much to say. She’d waited too long, and it felt like the window had closed. Months later, she told me about a new coworker she’d been hitting it off with. They’d had lunch a few times and Zara liked her. “I almost did the thing again,” she said. “I felt myself wanting to play it cool.” Instead, she texted the coworker that weekend and asked if she wanted to grab a drink. Zara had realized she would rather look like she was coming on too strong than lose a potential friend.

Most of us have a list of people we never followed up with, jobs we didn’t apply for, things we wanted but didn’t have the courage to say out loud. You can’t go back and change what happened, but you can show up differently in the future. Stop pretending you don’t care.

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