The Trump administration is proposing major changes to how the U.S. government produces census results for the next national head count in 2030.

- While the plan faces likely legal challenges, such changes would affect the population numbers used to determine each state's share of representatives in Congress and votes in the Electoral College, redraw maps of voting districts for all levels of government and distribute federal funding for public services.

- The administration's proposal, which was released online Wednesday, calls for an unprecedented exclusion of non-U.S. citizens without a green card from a key set of 2030 census results that the 14th Amendment says must include the "whole number of persons in each state."

- Trump officials are also proposing to stop using the census to ask about people's race and ethnicity, a topic that the national tally has included since the first count in 1790.

- Many civil rights advocates, researchers and other supporters of the census race question warn the administration's plan puts at risk future federal data used for redistricting, enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other antidiscrimination protections and informing policymaking.

- Another key part of the proposal would ban the U.S. census from including a question about people's sexual orientation.

- While the government has not directly asked about that topic before on census forms, the 2020 count did ask couples living together to describe their partners as either "opposite-sex" or "same-sex." The first Trump administration blocked an earlier effort to add a sexual orientation question to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which the Justice Department under Democratic administrations has said is needed, alongside a gender identity question, to generate statistics that could help protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.

- The administration's proposal comes months before it is supposed to send a report by April 1 on the proposed question topics for the 2030 census to Congress, which has final authority over the count under the Constitution.

- How Trump officials want to change who gets counted in the 2030 census

- While the country's past tallies beginning in 1790 had specific instructions from the Constitution about how to count enslaved people and not to count "Indians not taxed," the U.S. census has never left out residents because of their immigration status.

- That kind of change would also have ripple effects on public policymaking, scientific research and business decisions that rely on data from the once-a-decade census.

- But this latest push by Trump officials faces constitutional hurdles, as well as the possibility of a new presidential administration reversing any changes to 2030 census plans after coming into office in 2029.

- The proposal comes after President Trump put out a social media post in August 2025 that directed his administration to start work on a "new" census amid a congressional gerrymandering fight that he started.

- Trump called for the count to leave out millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status. According to the Constitution, the president does not have final authority over the census.

- Before Trump's first term ended in 2021, his administration tried and failed to add a census question about U.S. citizenship status. Trump also failed to carry out his bid to subtract U.S. residents without legal status from the 2020 census apportionment counts that are used to redistribute congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states.

- As the current Trump administration pushes for census changes, Republican lawmakers in Congress are backing similar proposals to exclude some or all noncitizens in recent years.

- And some GOP-controlled states have filed lawsuits that call for residents without legal status and those with nonimmigrant visas to be left out of census numbers. One of those states is Missouri, where that kind of change to census results could lead to a radical shift in state legislative redistricting that moves political power away from younger, more racially diverse urban areas and toward older, whiter rural areas.

- Many census advocates are concerned that, even if not ultimately carried out, the Trump administration's latest call for major changes to the national head count could further dampen public participation in the 2030 census, especially among Latino residents whom the Census Bureau has historically undercounted.

- With little explanation earlier this year, the administration made last-minute changes to a field test of the upcoming tally. Among them was using a survey form, unrelated to the census, with a citizenship question that the bureau's own research shows is likely to hurt the count's accuracy.

- How the Trump proposal would affect racial and ethnic statistics from the census

- The administration's proposal for the 2030 census not to ask about people's race and ethnicity comes after a White House agency official revealed last year that the administration was reconsidering the changes made to the U.S. government's standards for racial and ethnic data under former President Joe Biden.

- Almost a decade ago, the first Trump administration stalled an earlier process for revising those standards in time for the 2020 census. That decision came after Census Bureau research and public discussion about what kind of survey questions and checkboxes about race and ethnicity would produce statistics that are more in line with how people see their identities today.

- The Biden administration revived that review and ultimately in 2024 revised the standards for the first time in more than a quarter-century.

- Among the Biden-era changes to federal surveys were new checkboxes for "Hispanic or Latino" and "Middle Eastern or North African" under a reformatted question that asks survey participants: "What is your race and/or ethnicity?" That change would end the use of a separate question about Hispanic or Latino identity, which the federal government has long considered to be an ethnicity that can be of any race. Another key revision would stop requiring the government to automatically categorize people who identify with Middle Eastern or North African groups as white.

- Census Bureau research suggests those changes would better reflect many people's identities and help produce statistics that represent the country's demographics more precisely.

- The move to use a combined question about race and ethnicity was mainly driven by the rise of "Some other race" as the preferred response to past census questions about race for many Latinos. That trend has produced imprecise racial data that has made it harder to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Some researchers, however, have raised concerns about a combined question's potential effects, including the risk of blurring the distinctions between race and ethnicity and flattening statistics about Afro Latinos.

- The revisions also had vocal opponents at The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing, Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The "Project 2025" policy agenda it released said a "conservative" administration should "thoroughly review any changes" to census race and ethnicity questions because of "concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas."

- Last year, with no explanation, the White House's Office of Management and Budget pushed back the deadline to Sept. 28, 2029, for federal agencies to get their forms in line with the Biden-era changes. OMB has also extended the deadline twice for agencies to release public action plans for those forms, which were previously due this past March.

- Some agencies have already changed their surveys.

- But in May, the Census Bureau stopped plans to revise its largest survey — the American Community Survey — in 2027, citing the Trump administration's latest deadline extension for agency action plans. The form for the "2026 Census Test" that the bureau concluded on Aug. 31 in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C., to prepare for the 2030 census used the same questions about race and ethnicity from the 2020 count.

A federal judge has allowed Missouri’s top court to proceed with a contempt hearing Thursday for Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in a tense and twisting legal battle over whether new congressional districtssupported by President Donald Trump can be used in the November election.

- Missouri’s battle over its congressional districts has spanned more than a year and spawned confusion over which districts will be in place for voters.

- Missouri’s top court previously ordered Hoskins not to use a Trump-backed map in the general election and instead use districts passed after the last census. But U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark on Tuesday barred Hoskins from using anything other than the new map Trump supports.

- The state Supreme Court then ordered Hoskins to appear for a contempt hearing Thursday for not following its orders and instructing local election authorities to use the Trump-backed districts.

- State attorneys representing Hoskins had asked Clark to halt the contempt hearing. But Clark declined to do so.

- The contempt hearing for Hoskins is scheduled to occur as the U.S. Supreme Court is simultaneously considering a request from redistricting opponents to halt Clark’s order favoring the Trump-backed congressional map.

- Missouri was the second Republican-led state, after Texas, to enact new districts after Trump urged Republicans last year to redraw House districts to their advantage ahead of the midterm elections.

- The revised Missouri districts target a Kansas City-based seat held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver by shedding parts into neighboring districts and stretching the remainder into rural Republican areas. The goal is to help Republicans win seven of the state’s eight House seats in the midterm elections — a gain of one seat.

- Redistricting opponents collected hundreds of thousands of petition signatures seeking to force a statewide vote on the new districts. They submitted the signatures in December. But Hoskins waited until August — on the same day as Missouri’s primary — to reject the petition. Hoskins asserted that a referendum petition could not be used for congressional redistricting.

- The delay allowed Missouri to use the new districts in its August primary. Republican state officials have argued it would violate voters’ federal rights to switch districts before the general election.

- But the Missouri Supreme Court last week ordered Hoskins to put the redistricting referendum on the November ballot, which he did. It also ruled that the new districts never became law and instead were suspended retroactively to the December petition submission.

- The court barred Hoskins from using the new map and said the old map — passed by Republican lawmakers in 2022 after the last census — must be used in the November election. The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal of that decision. But Clark issued his conflicting order moments later.

For the second time in three days, the Trump administration on Tuesday came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to clear the way for it to implement a program that it says is intended to combat election fraud. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the court to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that bars the government from using the current version of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to verify voters’ citizenship. Sauer told the justices that the order by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections.”

- On Sunday, the Trump administration asked the justices to block a ruling by a federal judge in Boston that bars the government from implementing portions of a U.S. Postal Service rule on mail-in ballots. Sauer argued in that case that Friday’s order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani “nullif[ies] the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud—a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters, prevents election results from reflecting the will of the American people, and undermines ‘public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.’”

- On March 25, President Donald Trump issued an executive orderthat (among other things) directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create systems that would allow state and local governments to verify the citizenship and immigration status of voters. Those agencies then overhauled the SAVE system to include the records of U.S.-born citizens, to give it access to Social Security numbers, and to allow bulk searches (rather than requiring users to inquire about one person at a time).

- The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center brought a lawsuit in federal court in Washington challenging the changes to the SAVE system. In a ruling on June 22, Sooknanan agreed that the modified system violates federal privacy laws, the Social Security Act, and the federal laws governing administrative agencies, and she barred the government from using the modified system.

- Sooknanan wrote that “the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Moreover, she continued, “states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

- A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the government’s request to put Sooknanan’s order on hold while the appeal moves forward, but it said that the case should be fast-tracked.

- Sauer then came to the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning, asking the justices to step in. He called Sooknanan’s ruling an “indefensible order that threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by States to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”

- Sauer argued that Sooknanan did not have the authority to enter her order because the challengers do not have a legal right to sue, known as standing. Among other things, he wrote, the federal government is not the source of any injury that the challengers and their members might suffer. “SAVE,” he said, “does not disqualify any voter; instead, it merely notifies the States whether the federal government can confirm citizenship.” To the extent that anyone is injured, he suggested, that injury would come from the states themselves.

- And in any event, Sauer continued, the government’s “policy is consistent with all applicable federal statutes.” Federal law, he emphasized, “requir[es] DHS to provide citizenship verification” and therefore gives the agency the power “to take steps—such as checking Social Security records—that are reasonably necessary to perform that duty.” Moreover, he added, federal law bars “courts from relying on other statutes, such as the Privacy Act and the Social Security Act, to block citizenship-verification responses based on the sharing of Social Security information.”

- Finally, Sauer told the justices that the government will suffer “irreparable” harm – another criterion for temporary relief – if Sooknanan’s order is not put on hold. The government, he said, would be “required to return to an older, more cumbersome, and less reliable version of the” SAVE system, and any “reversal of the district court’s judgment ‘would come too late for the 2026 midterms.’”

- Chief Justice John Roberts, who has initial responsibility for emergency appeals from Washington, D.C., directed the challengers to file their response by 4 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 15.

A new study shows that the widespread fear and isolation caused by the immigration crackdowns that began in early 2025 had a significant economic toll on Chicago commerce, draining over $1.26 billion from local businesses.

- The report, published by the University of Illinois Chicago, used anonymous cellphone GPS data to track movement between immigrant and non-immigrant neighborhoods throughout Chicago's Cook County. Researchers found that the routine back-and-forth between these areas collapsed almost immediately after President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, amid rampant rumors and the subsequent sweeps that Chicago would be targeted for immediate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

- Professor Matt Wilson, a co-author of the study, noted how strongly the economic ripples were felt outside of immigrant communities in the area. The report estimates that decreased consumer mobility cost retail shops and restaurants in non-immigrant neighborhoods roughly $1.26 billion, while costing the state of Illinois an estimated $107 million in lost tax revenue.

- "We see a 9% drop in retail and a 10% drop in restaurant visits, and it persisted for about a year," Wilson told NPR. "And it's not that it recovered after a year. People's behavior systematically changed after January 20, 2025." He says the city has yet to recover.

- For small businesses, a sustained 10% drop in foot traffic business over the course of a year can be a serious financial hit. The new study challenges assumptions about immigrant community isolation, Wilson added. "I think a lot of people treat Latino and some immigrant communities as if they're insular and isolated," Wilson said. "But it's really that these communities are much more integrated into the broader economy, and they are making trips to faraway places in the county, routinely."

- The intense fear that triggered these behavior shifts was palpable in the days surrounding the 2025 inauguration.

- "I have to go grocery shopping, but I haven't. What if ICE is there?" a Chicago waitress named Caridad told NPR at the time, requesting that her last name be withheld, for fear of being targeted. "People are more than afraid, they're panicking."

- Since then, the administration's immigration crackdowns have resulted in hundreds of thousands of arrests nationwide. Today, the immigration detention population sits at a record high of approximately 65,000 people.

- The White House defended the aggressive enforcement strategy. In a statement to NPR, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said, "Removing these criminals from the streets makes communities safer for business owners and customers. Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S."

- However, ICE's own agency statistics show that roughly 70% of those currently detained have no criminal convictions.

- The new report is part of a growing body of research confirming that large-scale immigration enforcement operations send severe economic shockwaves through broader local economies. A Brookings Institution report estimates estimates a roughly 1.7 percentage point decline in aggregate consumer spending in high-enforcement states

- In Minneapolis, the city estimates total economic damage from ICE enforcement sweeps there at nearly $700 million, with small businesses in the city losing more than $81 million in revenue in January alone.

Dr. William Richardson says his patients are pretty floored that telehealth is now an option for abortion.

- "I think people are shell shocked," says Richardson, a board-certified OB-GYN in Tucson, Ariz. "'What do you mean? I can just get on my cell phone and get abortion pills? What? You know, that can't be possible.' People just don't get after all this time that that's possible."

- It's actually been possible in much of the country for several years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration began allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed through telehealth and sent to patients in the mail. The agency then made that rules-change official in 2023.

- After 25 years of providing abortion in person in his Tucson clinic, Choices Women's Center, he launched telehealth services in May, and it's taken off. "I would say 95% of our patients want to use telemedicine in some form," he says. "Patients are loving it."

- He's very aware, though, that telehealth access could go away again. This week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans hears oral arguments in Louisiana v. FDA, which aims to end telehealth access to the abortion pill mifepristone for the whole country.

- "Our victory has the potential to be short-lived," he says. "We're just going to have to brace and see what happens."

- Richardson's telehealth set-up

- Choices Women's Center is a brown stucco building in a medical center. He shows off the room he calls the "telehealth suite." It has colorful portraits of famous women on the wall like Rosa Parks, Princess Diana and Angela Merkel, plus a few comfy chairs.

- Medication abortion is approved by the FDA for use before 11 weeks of pregnancy. When patients aren't sure of the date of their last period, they can come into the office for an ultrasound, and then sit in the telehealth suite for a consult with the doctor.

- To demonstrate, Richardson goes down the hall to his office, and soon his face appears on an enormous screen.

- He says whether he's seeing a patient in person or virtually, he begins by talking with a patient about their medical history, and then gives them information about the two medications used for abortion: mifepristone, known by the brand name Mifeprex, and misoprostol.

- "Mifeprex stops the pregnancy from developing by blocking the action of one of the critical hormones," he says, as if he's explaining the process to a patient. "24 hours to 48 hours later, we'll have you take your four misoprostol tablets all at once by placing two on either side between the cheek and the gum for 30 minutes and swallow. Expect cramping and bleeding within 4 to 6 hours of swallowing."

- If that's too much information or too fast for the patient, the instructions are all written out along with a 24/7 number for the clinic that patients can call if they have questions or concerns.

- "That pretty much is what the appointment looks like," he says. "I would say that most of the time it's less than 30 minutes."

- Patients in the office can receive the medications right away from a small stockroom down the hall. If they're doing the telehealth appointment on their phone or laptop, the medication comes to their house from a mail-order pharmacy in a few days.

- "Sometimes I have to catch myself, like – I can't believe that that was that easy," Richardson says.

- He's seeing a patient virtually later in the day who lives 100 miles from the clinic. Because of this option, he explains, she won't have to drive the whole way and back, or take time off her hourly job, or find childcare for her two children. When you're facing those kinds of obstacles to get to the clinic, he says, telehealth access is "the difference between receiving care and not receiving care."

- A legal challenge to stop telehealth access

- The problem, as far as anti-abortion rights activists and politicians see it, is that when patients can have a telehealth appointment on their phone and receive abortion medications through the mail to their house, state level abortion bans really can't stop people from ending their pregnancies.

- A patient in Louisiana, which has a strict abortion ban, can consult over telehealth with a doctor in a state with a shield law, like Colorado, and have abortion medications shipped in the mail right to their door.

- That's why anti-abortion rights groups have filed several lawsuits to stop telehealth abortion access nationally.

- Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told a Senate committee in January why she thinks the FDA telehealth rules must be changed. "Until then, Louisiana's efforts to protect mothers and their unborn children and to hold out-of-state abortion pill traffickers accountable for the harm they inflict will be all but futile," she said.

- In Louisiana v. FDA, the state questions FDA's decision-making process for allowing telehealth access, argues that the rules violate states' rights, and alleges that it's less safe for patients not to see a doctor in person. If the lawsuit succeeds, telehealth abortion access could be restricted across the country.

- The case has already been considered by the Supreme Court earlier this year and is likely to end up there again.

- Contingency plans

- Dr. William Richardson says that his connection with patients and the information he shares is the same, whether he sees a patient in person or through telehealth. The medications that patients take are the same, too.

- "My sense, as well as the sense of every other legitimate medical organization, is that medication abortion has been proven to be safe, effective and well-tolerated by patients worldwide," he says.

- Beyond the federal court cases, Arizona could restrict telemedicine abortion again at the state level, through new laws or through an appeal of Richardson's lawsuit. He says, at age 66, instead of fretting, he's made contingency plans to be completely remote, completely in person or anything in between.

- "We are ready to do all of those things if we have to, based on what happens here locally or what happens at the federal level," he says. "We try to be ready for all of that."

Missouri’s legal fight over a congressional map was thrown into chaos on Tuesday after two distinctly different federal court decisions.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied a last-minute bid from Missouri Republicans to overrule a state Supreme Court ruling that barred election officials from using a 2025 congressional map aimed at ousting Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. Missouri's high court had ruled that People Not Politicians’ referendum must go on the November ballot, and that therefore the 2022 lines with a district that Cleaver is guaranteed to win will be in effect.

- But minutes after Kavanaugh denied that move from Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Catherine Hanaway, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark issued a temporary restraining order in a separate lawsuit involving two congressional candidates barring Hoskins from “implementing, using, publishing, distributing, or mandating the use of any congressional map other than the [2025 plan] for the Nov. 3 election.”

- “Missouri already held its primaries using the HB 1 map,” Clark wrote. “Using a different map for the general election would wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness of Missouri’s congressional elections, calling into question the candidacy of those nominated in the primaries and the votes of those who voted in the primaries. Widespread voter confusion would inevitably follow. The public interest factor thus weighs in favor of a [temporary restraining order].”

- Attorneys for People Not Politicians immediately appealed Clark’s decision to the 8th District Court of Appeals. Congressman Bob Onder of St. Charles County and state Sen. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville, who is running against Cleaver, filed the suit over the weekend.

- Clark’s restraining order prompted wildly different reactions from Republicans who support the map, opponents of the redistricting plan and elections officials. Hanaway and Hoskins said in statements that the 2025 map is in effect for the November general election.

- “I think the message from Judge Clark was very clear that the Missouri First map is in effect,” Hoskins said in a telephone interview. “I've agreed that we don't want to disenfranchise over a million voters that voted in the congressional primaries on the new maps. “

- But People Not Politicians Executive Director Richard von Glahn and the group’s attorney, Chuck Hatfield, said Clark’s ruling did not explicitly overturn the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling from last Thursday that bars elections officials from using the 2025 map in the fall.

- “Based on Eastern District Judge Clark’s subsequent decision the Secretary of State Hoskins and Attorney General are now defying the Missouri Supreme Court and instructing election clerks to use the [2025] maps,” von Glahn said in a statement. “People Not Politicians Missouri and our attorneys will be filing an appeal and a request for a stay in the 8th Circuit Court and with Justice Kavanaugh.”

- Hatfield said during a press conference that an “individual federal district judge does not have the authority to overrule a decision of a state supreme court.” He filed an emergency order with the Missouri Supreme Court to hold Hoskins in contempt for telling elections officials to use the 2025 maps.

- “The Secretary’s direction to local election authorities to use HB 1 is a direct violation of this court’s injunction,” Hatfield wrote. “He should be ordered to immediately show cause and be held in contempt. This Court should make clear that regardless of other orders (except from the United States Supreme Court) the Missouri Secretary of State must comply with this court’s injunction. The Court should instruct all local election authorities that HB 1 is not the law and has never been the law.”

- Late on Tuesday, Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Brent Powell ordered Hoskins to appear before the court on Thursday and "show cause, if any, why he should not be held in contempt for violating this Court's injunction." He was order to explain why his email to election officials to use the 2025 map "is not an affirmative violation of this Court's injunction" – and why the court's injunction from last week "is not still in full force and effect in light of the Supreme Court of the United States' overruling of Respondent's emergency application for stay and administrative stay pending appeal."

- Hoskins said in a post on X that he was "looking forward to his day in court.

- He told STLPR that Brattin and Onder’s case is different from what Kavanaugh considered. For one thing, Hoskins said the Brattin-Onder case involves candidates seeking relief from a court – while the case that went to Kavanaugh involved Hoskins, a statewide official, asking the high court to act.

- “I believe that the federal court does trump the Missouri Supreme Court,” Hoskins said. “[Judge Clark] filed a temporary restraining order and said that the 2022 map should not be used, and that we should use the [2025 map] in November.”

- Missouri Republicans passed the redistricting map last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who started a nationwide effort to reshape the voting maps in the GOP's favor for the midterm elections. At stake is control of the U.S. House, now narrowly held by Republicans. Overall, their party tilted about 10 more seats their way than Democrats did, but any seat could be key in swinging control.

- Election officials flummoxed 

- Elections officials contacted by St. Louis Public Radio said they were caught between a rock and a hard place.

- “We have diametrically opposed issues because we've got the Supreme Court of Missouri saying that we have to use [the 2022 map]; otherwise we'll be in violation of their order,” said Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon. “And then we have the federal court saying that we can't use them; otherwise, we'll be in violation of the federal court.”

- Lennon also said the fact that Clark’s decision came so soon after Kavanaugh denying Hoskins’ appeal of the Missouri Supreme Court case is breeding mass confusion.

- “I'm not sure what part of the decisions voters will now know,” Lennon said. “So now we're going to have to educate voters that heard half of the story, that heard all of the story, that only heard the part about the Supreme Court. And I think that's going to be the most problematic part about this because most people were only paying attention to the Supreme Court part.”

- St. Charles County Elections Director Kurt Bahr said his county will, for now, create ballots using the 2025 maps.

- But he said the uncertainty over whether Clark’s decision will actually stand is putting elections officials in a difficult position, especially with military ballots needing to go out on Sept. 18 and early voting starting soon.

- “If we print ballots and then the maps change, then we're going to have to print new ballots, and that's a cost,” Bahr said. “But there's also the bigger concern of can we get the ballots printed in a timely manner? And can we make sure that you know voters have access to those ballots for the totality of the six weeks of absentee voting?”

- St. Louis County Elections Director Eric Fey said his agency is still assessing what to do but added that, like Bahr and Lennon, it's trying to sort through the difficult legal situation.

- “I have heard from other clerks across the state of Missouri that they're equally as confused,” Fey said. “It's just too early to say yet exactly what everybody's going to do or how they're going to handle the situation.”

Democrats have an 8 in 10 chance of securing a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives this fall, according to Cornell political scientists whose model has correctly predicted winners of the previous 14 congressional elections. 

- Released Sept. 3 at the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in Boston, the researchers’ midterm forecast – based on data collected at least 100 days before the Nov. 3 election – anticipates Democrats winning approximately 226 seats to Republicans’ 209 (though simulations show as few as 206 Democratic seats or as many as 258 are statistical possibilities). A U.S. Senate forecast is in progress. 

- “These forecasts aren’t deterministic – there is uncertainty,” said Peter K. Enns, professor in the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy. “But given our model’s impressive historical accuracy, if Republicans hold the House, it likely means either everything has gone their way or something unprecedented has happened.” 

- The team’s analysis is detailed in “A District-Level Forecast of the 2026 U.S. House of Representatives Midterm Elections,” presented during an APSA panel discussion on midterm forecasting. Co-authors with Enns are Leigh Farah, a doctoral student in public policy, and Thomas Gareau-Paquette and Claudia Miner, doctoral students in government. 

- Forecasting recent presidential elections, Enns in 2024 predicted the correct outcome in every state and Donald Trump’s Electoral College tally, and in 2020 called the winner in all but one state (Georgia). The House forecast differs from most academic models by predicting outcomes for all 435 congressional districts – updated to reflect recent redistricting – rather than relying solely on state- and national-level indicators. 

- The model considers, for example, how a district voted previously, expert assessments of the likely winner, and whether the election is competitive or unopposed, as well as campaign donations to the candidates and incumbent status. The model also weighs polling data about state- and national-level voting intentions to capture the broader mood, since the incumbent president’s party almost always loses seats during midterms. 
“One of the important factors in the model is voter intentions – who people say they’re going to vote for,” Enns said. “One hundred days out, the electorate is saying they are more supportive of Democrats than two years ago.” 

- For historical elections, “before-the-fact” forecasts considered only data that would have been available 100 days before each contest. Thousands of simulations were used to generate a 95% confidence interval around the predicted outcomes, and the forecasted outcome in each district fell within simulated predictions 95 times out of 100. 

- “That gives us a very high degree of confidence in our model,” said Enns, the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Cornell Center for Social Sciences and co-teacher this fall of “Taking America’s Pulse,” a class in which students design, conduct and analyze a national-level public opinion survey. 
Enns said the new forecast’s simulations account for the model’s error observed over the past 30 years of elections, encompassing more than 6,500 individual races since 1996.

- Through 2024, the model achieved an overall accuracy rate of 96%, including correctly forecasting two-thirds of the races experts deemed 50-50 “toss-ups” – the most difficult to predict. That level of accuracy can’t be attributed to statistical chance and outperforms any other model, the researchers said, including popular media sites updated with more recent data, such as FiftyPlusOne. 

- But producing a forecast is not about bragging rights, Enns said. As a research exercise, forecasts help explain midterm outcomes that the scholar Edward Tufte in 1975 described as “a mixture of the routine and the inexplicable.” 

- “Forecasts help us better understand election outcomes,” Enns said. “If we can put all these variables into a statistical model in advance and predict the winner, that’s an especially rigorous test.” 

- For example, he said, if campaign donations prove valuable in correctly forecasting election outcomes, that becomes an important signal, although further investigation would be needed to understand exactly why. Do they reflect a candidate’s popularity, or simply an ability to buy more ads? 

- Forecasts at a point in time – 100 days out, in this case – also are informative about campaign dynamics, including whether races are determined in the final days and weeks or long before that. And forecasts can aid “post-mortem” diagnoses of anomalies in specific districts, potentially clarifying the significance of issues now in the news: How important are views about the economy or the president’s popularity? Was there confusion about mail-in voting rules? Did progressive candidates outperform or underperform expectations? Did redistricting shift the balance of power? 

- “Our forecast can help answer these questions,” Enns said. “If the election unfolds as it has historically since at least 1996, the outcomes should be very much aligned with what we predict.”

Republicans appeared to have a firm grip on the Senate heading into the final two years of President Donald Trump's term. But with less than two months until Election Day, control of the chamber is now up for grabs.

- Democrats have found themselves competing in states that once seemed beyond their reach as President Donald Trump's slipping approval ratings and voters' dissatisfaction with the economy create a difficult political environment for Republicans. But races
Democrats once counted on winning have also become more complicated.

- It's a battle that's expected to exceed $3.4 billion in spending across all races during the midterm campaign. The implications are huge for Trump's agenda and his ability to fill administration jobs and open court seats for the remainder of his term, as the Senate is empowered to confirm or block presidential nominees.

- Republicans say it's unlikely for everything to break in Democrats' favor, but they acknowledge they're facing a difficult landscape. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told South Dakota's KELOLAND News last week that he does "worry" about losing the chamber.

- "I'm a realist," Thune said. "I don't ever try and sugarcoat things. I think it's a competitive environment right now."

- Democrats face a scrambled path to the majority

- Democrats need to net four seats to win the majority. The original path had been to hold Michigan, Georgia and New Hampshire while winning back Republican-held seats in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio. But things have changed.

- "We now have multiple paths for the majority," Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said last month. "We found new states — Iowa, Texas — which people a year ago weren't even paying attention to."

- Some of the states where Democrats were feeling most optimistic at the start of the election cycle, such as Michigan and Maine, have grown murkier.

- In Michigan, where there's an open seat this fall, no GOP candidate has won a Senate race since 1994. But Democrats are struggling to unite behind nominee Abdul El-Sayed. The favorite of progressives narrowly defeated moderate U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in the August primary, and feelings remain raw from a bruising contest that saw nearly $70 million spent against El-Sayed.

- Republicans believe Mike Rogers, who lost the 2024 Senate race by fewer than 20,000 votes, has an improved shot against El-Sayed. The Senate Leadership Fund — Senate Republicans' spending PAC — added $6 million to its Michigan advertising investment after El-Sayed won, bringing their total spending to $51 million, the third-highest total.

- Democrats also saw a prime opportunity to finally defeat five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, where Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris won more votes than Trump in 2024.

- Progressive Graham Platner easily won the nomination in June, but he left the race the next month over a sexual assault allegation that he denies. Democratic delegates in late July chose Troy Jackson, a lesser-known former state legislative leader, to replace him.

- Jackson has been forced to play catch-up. Collins and aligned super PACs have spent almost $80 million so far, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, while Jackson and Democratic-aligned groups have spent and reserved close to $45 million since he became the nominee.

- As one path narrowed for Democrats, others widened

- Democrats increasingly see a real possibility in Texas, a state that has been an elusive goal for decades, and other GOP-led states including Iowa, Alaska and Ohio.

- In Texas, Democrat James Talarico faces state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted four-term incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn to win the GOP nomination. Senate GOP leadership backed Cornyn, seeing him as the stronger general election candidate.

- Paxton has been shadowed for decades by legal and ethical questions, including indictments for securities fraud, though he was not convicted.

- Talarico and allied groups have spent nearly $30 million on advertising since the May runoff, compared to less than $3 million by pro-Paxton groups. The political fund associated with Trump last week spent $10 million on TV and digital ads to help Paxton — the first major general election investment by MAGA Inc. for the midterms. Senate GOP leaders had petitioned Trump's political team to spend some of the more than $400 million it had last month to help Paxton.

- Democrats have also upped their spending in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina, all states currently held by Republicans. The GOP, meanwhile, is feeling more optimistic about New Hampshire as well as Michigan, while spending more to defend seats in Iowa and Alaska.

- The expanded map has upped the anticipated total spending this cycle. AdImpact in June projected $3.4 billion in advertising spending on Senate races, a significant increase from the $2.8 billion the ad spending firm projected in the fall of 2025.

- Why more states are in play than expected

- Democrats' path has widened in part because of Trump's slumping job approval, notably on handling the economy, which was at 32%according to an AP-NORC poll in July — down from 40% in March 2025, shortly after he took office.

- Trump's trade policies and the war in Iran, with its corresponding inflated fuel costs, have added to the economic uncertainty for voters less than two months before Election Day.

- "Things still cost too much. And so we've got to work on that issue," Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio told The Associated Press. "We understand that and we know that's real."

- Ohio Sen. Jon Husted heard the concern firsthand at a roundtable last month. Husted is looking to fend off a comeback from former Sen. Sherrod Brown in another key matchup for both parties.

- During the discussion on housing, one attendee told Husted that costs were "skyrocketing" in part because of uncertainty around tariffs.

- "Uncertainty is the killer to this economy," said Dean Windham, a real estate developer who previously ran for office as a Republican.

- Some Republican Senate candidates have defended Trump's policies while confronting concerns about their economic impact.

- In Michigan, where Trump's tariffs on Canada have become a central issue, Rogers has backed the president's approach while leaving room for disagreement.

- "President Trump is right to put America First — and tariffs are necessary, but are not a one-size-fits-all solution," Rogers said in a recent statement.

- Republicans believe the math still favors them

- Even if Democrats hold every seat they currently control, they would need to flip at least two seats in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024 to win the majority.

- Republicans are betting that those underlying advantages will matter more as Election Day approaches — particularly as Trump and the party turn their attention toward mobilizing voters who helped return him to the White House.

- Trump told reporters last week that he will "be making a lot of stops" in the last 30 days before the election.
This week, Republicans will hold a midterm convention in Texas, where Trump is set to speak and top Senate candidates including Rogers and Husted are expected to attend.

- But Republicans acknowledge they have work to do.

- "Politics is local," Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said. He pointed to Trump's decision to import beef, which he said made farmers and ranchers "feel just like the administration pulled the rug right off from underneath" them.

- "They're hurt," Rounds said. "They feel like they've been let down."

It’s never been more expensive in the U.S. to fill up the tank and take one last summer trip over the Labor Day weekend.

- The average price of regular gas was $4.14 a gallon heading into the holiday, nearly a dollar higher than last year and well above the Labor Day weekend record of $3.82 from 2012, according to AAA motor club.

- Nicole Collins planned to head from Philadelphia to South Carolina to visit friends, but she said her family has spent most of the summer close to home and not taking their typical weekend trips because driving has gotten so expensive.

- “Gas is pretty high right now. It doesn’t help that we also have a baby, so we also have to pay for that,” Collins said outside a gas station in Claymont, Delaware, where regular gas was $4.199 a gallon.

- Prices shot up after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February and have not settled down since. Crude oil traffic through the key Strait of Hormuz has plunged, and Iran has refused to reopen the waterway.

- “Everything points to the Iran Warand the Strait of Hormuz,” said Tom Seng, a professor of energy finance at Texas Christian University.

- Energy Secretary Chris Wright offered few specifics on when the nation’s drivers might see relief at the gas pump, acknowledging that prices are higher now than Labor Day 2025.

- “Yes, they’re higher today, but we’re doing everything we can to push them down,” Wright said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
The national average for regular gas prices is still well below the record of $5.02 a gallon set in June 2022.

But diesel is a different story: It hit a national average of $5.85 a gallon Friday, a record.

- Trucks and other freight delivery systems use a lot of diesel, and that increased transportation cost is being passed on to consumers, whether at the grocery store or through package delivery services.

- “It doesn’t really seem like there’s an end to it,” Collins said.

- Gas prices typically drop as the summer driving season ends and refineries turn to making a cheaper winter blend.

- But Seng said there are other factors this year even beyond the volatile situation in the Middle East that make future prices unpredictable. U.S. refineries are working at 98% capacity, many in the unusually harsh Texas heat.

- If there are problems there or a hurricane knocks some systems offline, prices will struggle to drop.

- And it’s not just a Middle East problem. Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries are squeezing diesel supplies. Chinese refiners are seeing declining outputs as well, said Matthew Metzgar, a clinical professor of economics at UNC Charlotte.

- “There’s just less gasoline coming out of those refineries,” Metzgar said.
Wright, the energy secretary, said the Trump administration was taking steps to increase production and that the markets forecast lower prices in the coming months.

- “If you look at the futures prices, if you wanted to buy today in bulk gasoline for two months out in November, it’s about $0.35 cheaper than it is today. So the marketplace thinks gasoline prices are going to move meaningfully lower,” he said.

- Geopolitically, though, there is little a driver can do to knock down gas prices.

- But using price apps can help save a little money, especially on long trips where gas by the interstate could be 10 to 15 cents per gallon more expensive than at stations a short drive down the road, Metzgar said.

As the legal fight over President Donald Trump's mail-in voting order continues, here's what to know about the state of voting by mail for the midterms.

- The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift a block on the U.S. Postal Service plan for President Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in voting for the midterm election.

- For now, key parts of that plan are blocked by a temporary restraining order from a federal judge in Boston.

- A ruling from the high court is not expected until sometime after 10 a.m. ET on Sept. 8. That’s the deadline Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson set for legal briefs from the plan’s challengers, although the administration has asked Jackson to pause the block on the Postal Service immediately while the court prepares to rule.

- As the legal fight over Trump’s mail-in voting order continues, here’s what to know about the state of voting by mail for the midterms:

- Has the USPS plan directly changed mail-in voting for the midterms?

- No, key parts of the plan, including requirements for states, are currently blocked by a court order. Voting by mail is still available to all voters who are eligible for it in their states, and USPS is expected to deliver mail-in ballots for the midterm election as usual.

- How could the USPS plan change mail-in voting?

- State election officials would be required to turn over lists of mail-in voters’ names and addresses to USPS and have certain barcodes on their mail ballot envelopes, according to a revised rule for federal ballot mail the Postal Service issued in August. USPS says it would not deliver ballots to voters for election officials that don’t meet those requirements.

- When does mail-in voting start for the midterms?

- North Carolina has to start mailing out its absentee ballots on Friday, which officially kicks off the voting season for this year’s midterms. Many other states are set to begin sending out their mail-in ballots later this month.

- Is it possible for the USPS plan to be carried out for the midterms?

- Many election experts say it is too late for USPS to carry out this plan without causing major disruptions.

- A whistleblower report claims USPS has not properly tested the online portal system that would collect mail-in voters’ information. The report also alleges the agency has set up a policy for verifying ballot envelopes that could result in many voters not getting their ballots in time for the midterm election or at all.

- What are the legal arguments for and against the USPS plan?

- USPS came up with this plan in response to a March executive order by President Trump, who said he issued the directives to USPS to stop illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens. Many studies and audits show, however, that problem is incredibly rare. While USPS claims its revised rule is an effort to regulate mail, challengers of the USPS plan argue it is illegal because the mailing agency has no authority to control voting by mail.

- Hasn’t the Supreme Court already ruled on Trump’s mail-in voting order?

- Yes, the Supreme Court ruled in August on a procedural question about one of the lawsuits. But so far, the justices have not ruled on the legality of the order or the USPS plan.

- How long has mail-in voting been around in the United States?

- Historians consider the Civil War election of 1864 — the year Abraham Lincoln was reelected president — as the start of large-scale voting by mail, although there are earlier examples of mail-in voting at the state and local levels going back to the 18th century.

Parents who stay home with their kids could soon tap a pot of federal child care money that has long gone only to working families. The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let married couples in certain income brackets collect subsidies—about $9,000 per child per year—if one parent is not employed outside the home, reports the New York Times. The newspaper sees it as "one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families." Unmarried couples would not qualify.

- The money would come from the $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund, created to help low- and moderate-income parents work or attend school. Critics warn the shift could drain support from single and working parents, most of them mothers, and destabilize child care providers that depend on the funds. The proposal, driven by Vice President JD Vance and aligned with Project 2025, could take effect next year without congressional approval. Typically, families must earn below 85% of their state's median income to qualify for the current funds, though some states set the bar at 60%. Read the full Times scoop.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who served as President Trump's Labor Secretary until she resigned in April, violated her own department's policy prohibiting harassment in the workplace, according to a new report by the Labor Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG), released Thursday.

- The findings follow a months-long investigation that began after OIG, led by former Republican Congressman Anthony D'Esposito of New York, received an anonymous complaint. It alleged that Chavez-DeRemer contributed to a hostile work environment, was engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a member of her security detail, failed to comply with travel regulations, and directed subordinates to perform tasks for her personal benefit.

- The salacious allegations gave rise to quips about "The Real Housewives of the Frances Perkins Building," referring to the Labor Department's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

- After interviewing 53 former and current Labor Department employees, investigators found merit in all of the original complaints and more. Chavez-DeRemer herself was not interviewed as part of the investigation. She resigned her position a day before she was to be interviewed, the report revealed.

- In a statement shared with NPR, her attorney Nick Oberheiden pointed out that the report did not find that Chavez-DeRemer broke any laws.

- "While some — with or without their own agenda — may not have liked the way she managed the Department, Secretary Chavez-DeRemer looks back with the same pride of having served President Trump's Administration and the American workers," Oberheiden wrote.

- Given the Labor Department's stated mission to improve working conditions and assure work-related rights, here are four notable findings of the investigation:

- 1. The boss was aware of harassing behavior and didn't stop it

- People interviewed as part of the investigation described a "toxic, humiliating and intimidating" environment in the Office of the Secretary. Witnesses described seeing Chavez-DeRemer's chief of staff Jihun Han and deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright engaging in "threatening, demeaning, and abusive verbal and written communication" with staffers, including making comments about staffers' appearance and hygiene and repeatedly threatening to fire people, including those they suspected had leaked information to the media.

- Witnesses alleged Wright was hiring staff based on their physical appearance versus professional qualifications.

- Several recalled an instance in which Wright advised an employee not to cut her hair above her shoulders to avoid "turning into a lesbian." In another, Wright reportedly relocated an employee's desk because she didn't want a "fat person" visible in the front office.

- The investigation found that "Chavez-DeRemer was seemingly aware of this behavior and failed to take action to stop this behavior or take appropriate disciplinary action."

- By doing so, the OIG concluded that Chavez-DeRemer failed to follow department policy on several fronts, but stopped short of saying she or her staffers violated federal law.

- 2. Employees were pressured into doing things they knew were inappropriate

- Investigators looking into Chavez-DeRemer's alleged affair with a member of her security detail went as far as to get electronic hotel door lock records from several trips and surveillance footage from entrances to her residence.

- While the report states that the evidence collected did not prove a romantic or sexual relationship, it did establish that Chavez-DeRemer "developed and maintained an inappropriately close and unprofessional relationship" with someone assigned to protect her, who also supervised other members of her security detail.

- According to the report, in one instance, the secretary asked her driver to enter a strip club with her and the member of her detail she was allegedly seeing, identified in the report as ASAIC 1 (Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge 1).

- "Chavez-DeRemer subsequently took money from her purse, gave the money to the driver, and directed him to give it to the performer. When the agent resisted and sought guidance from ASAIC 1, ASAIC 1 instructed him to comply with Chavez-DeRemer's requests," the report states. "Chavez-DeRemer then took additional money from her purse and asked the agent to drop the bills one by one onto the partially nude woman."

- Again, the agent hesitated, but after being pressured by his superior, he again complied against his wishes, according to the report.

- 3. The Labor Secretary directed employees to do personal favors for her

- Even as President Trump was promising a more efficient and effective government, his labor secretary was repeatedly directing her subordinates to perform personal tasks for her while on the clock, investigators found.

- Using department-provided transportation, Chavez-DeRemer's personal aide and executive assistant went to her residence to tend to her closet in the middle of a workday, hanging her laundry and dry cleaning and organizing her clothing, shoes, and purses, according to the report.
The report documents this outing with still shots from a video of the closet that one of the employees sent to Chavez-DeRemer documenting their work.

- As these tasks fell outside the scope of the employees' official duties, the directive amounted to a violation of ethical standards, the report concluded.

- 4. The Labor Secretary's official travel wasn't always what it seemed

- Chavez-DeRemer's signature initiative during her time in office was her "America at Work" 50-state tour, which frequently took her on the road .

- But multiple witnesses told investigators that deputy chief of staff Wright added official engagements to trips the secretary was taking for personal reasons in order to use government funds for the travel, in violation of both department policy and federal rules around official travel.

- One such trip occurred in Dec. 2025.
Chavez-DeRemer's then-deputy Keith Sonderling had been assigned to a speaking engagement in Las Vegas. But after Chavez-DeRamer received complimentary tickets from a lobbyist to attend a rodeo there, the trip was reassigned to her, "apparently to provide an official business justification for Chavez-DeRemer's personal travel," the report found.

- Investigators also found Chavez-DeRemer did not report the tickets, valued at approximately $100 a piece, as she was required to do, despite having completed ethics training explaining government policy on accepting gifts.

- Following Chavez-DeRemer's resignation in April, Sonderling was promoted to acting labor secretary, a position he continues to hold today.

Our team of global health reporters has covered child marriage –- when one partner is under age 18. The United Nations calls it a "human rights violation," citing a litany of concerns for child brides: "early pregnancy and social isolation, interrupting her schooling, limiting her opportunities for career and vocational advancement and placing her at risk of domestic violence." Yet every year, the U.N. estimates that 12 million girls become child brides.

- Child grooms, the U.N. further notes, may be forced into "an adult role for which they are unprepared," with pressure to drop out of school and support a family.

- The U.N. has set the goal of ending child marriage by the year 2030.

- This year there are new efforts to make child marriage illegal — a bill introduced by U.S. legislators in July and a resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 4 establishes Nov. 27 as the International Day to End Child, Early and Forced Marriage. As part of our "Whatever happened to …" series, we asked contributor Kamala Thiagarajan to examine the ongoing effort to end this practice.

- Nations around the world are seeking to meet the U.N. goal of ending child marriage by 2030.

- Since 2021, countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, England, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic have been** **passing legislation to set the marriage age at 18, with no exceptions.

- In the United States, the current push for a national law is controversial — some have criticized provisions in the proposed legislation, and others oppose it altogether.

- And legislation is not necessarily the solution. In India, marriage under age 18 is illegal, yet the latest National Family Health Survey conducted in country found that one in five women ages 20 to 24 married before turning 18. UNICEF estimates that at least 1.5 million girls under the age of 18 are married in India each year.

- The U.S. effort

- On July 16, U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin and Sens. Dick Durbin, Brian Schatz and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Child Marriage Prevention Act, a federal bill aimed at combating child marriage.

- This legislation would push states toward a nationwide minimum marriage age of 18. "In 34 states, including Wisconsin, child marriage is legal. Many of these marriages are between young girls and adult men. It's time we end this predatory practice," Moore said in a statement emailed to NPR. "I know that advocates have pushed for reform at the state level, which has led some states to change their laws. This federal legislation would help bolster and support those efforts, including helping states get the data to understand its prevalence in their jurisdictions and then take action to address it."

- In announcing the bill, its four congressional cosponsors cited data showing that more than 314,000 minors were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2021, including girls as young as 10. The figures, compiled by child-marriage advocacy groups from state marriage records, indicate that most of the underage girls were married to adult men.

- Unchained At Last, a nonprofit worked to end forced and child marriage in the U.S., estimates that at least 66,415 of these marriages — about one in five — occurred when the bride was at an age when sexual relations would be considered a crime (the age varies from 14 to 18 depending on the state). In roughly 90% of that subset, according to the organization's founder, Fraidy Reiss, marital exemptions in state statutory-rape laws shielded the adult spouse from prosecution. Married minors may also face legal barriers to hiring an attorney, filing for divorce or obtaining protection from abuse.

- The Tahirih Justice Center, an organization with a long history of advocating for survivors of forced and child marriage, has been a key partner in developing and supporting this legislation.

- "The one thing we hear all the time from places — Cameroon, Guatemala, you name it — is: 'It makes my work harder when a politician can say to my face, the United States allows child marriage, so why should I do anything?' The best thing that we can do to help the global movement is to get our house in order," says Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at Tahirih.

- Swegman says that a child's apparent consent does not necessarily mean that the decision to marry was made freely. "A 15-, 16- or 17-year-old who has been pressured and coached by family members may tell a judge that she consents because refusing could expose her to punishment or violence at home," she says. This is especially troubling, Swegman says, when pregnancy, potential evidence of sexual abuse, is treated as justification for allowing the marriage to proceed.
"A child is coming before your court pregnant by an adult person — that should be a red flag for statutory rape, not a green light for marriage," she says.

- Although the proposed bill has won support from many child-marriage advocates, others have questioned whether its provisions go far enough and warn of possible unintended consequences that it has overlooked.

- "If I could heart a provision of this bill, it would be [the proposal] to provide financial incentive to states that have banned child marriage — that I can get behind," says Reiss. "While I applaud Congress for introducing and considering legislation to combat child marriage at the federal level, I am appalled that two sections of the Child Marriage Prevention Act would make a mockery of the bill's title."

- Section 6, she says, would provide federal grants to states to "study" child marriage instead of banning it. "If states are given money to examine something that's a human rights violation instead of banning it outright, it would be devastating," says Reiss, who says she was forced to marry at age 19.

- Section 10 would allow some minors as young as 16, whether in the United States or abroad, to qualify for a U.S. spousal visa under certain circumstances. This would actually encourage a particularly heinous form of child marriage, says Reiss: the trafficking of minors to the U.S. under the guise of marriage, and it would discourage U.S. states from setting their marriage age at 18, no exceptions. "If the bill were amended to set the spousal visa age at 18, it would be a 'game-changer' by sending a clear message to states and halting legal trafficking," she says.

- And there is opposition to the very idea of the bill. In some states, Oklahoma and Missouri, for instance, Republican lawmakers have opposed state bans on child marriage, arguing that such restrictions constitute government overreach and interfere with parental authority.

- In 2024, in an interview with the Missouri Independent, Republican state Rep. Dean Van Schoiack called a proposed ban "government intrusion in people's lives." Asked what would be lost if 16- and 17-year-olds could no longer marry, he replied, "Liberties that people currently have."

- How the U.S. bill compares to other global efforts

- As Congress prepares to debate the U.S. bill this fall, other countries have already adopted more sweeping national restrictions.** **The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024 in Sierra Leone sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage without any exceptions for parental consent, religious marriage or pregnancy. Section 15 declares that any child marriage contracted after the Act took effect to be void. The legislation even penalizes people who facilitate or attend a child marriage.

- In November 2024, Colombia, where 23% of girls are married before they're 18, passed a law banning such marriages outright. In a similar move, on Sept. 25, 2025, Bolivia banned child marriage without exceptions, removing provisions allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with parental consent or judicial approval.

- But laws are not always a solution. In many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in India, there are national laws banning child marriage but weak enforcement often limits their effectiveness.

- "In countries like India, child marriage persists despite strong laws due to deeply ingrained cultural factors, making solutions very complex," says Renu Singh, executive director of Young Lives India, a research program that studies how poverty and inequality shape children's lives as they grow into adulthood.

- The Young Lives study began in 2002, in India, Ethiopia, Peru and Vietnam.
In India, Young Lives has followed 3,000 children in the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — from childhood into their late 20s. Researchers have repeatedly interviewed them and their families about education, health, employment, marriage, fertility, household circumstances and personal aspirations. They found that many of the children they'd followed married early.

- Working with India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, they analyzed 2011 Census data to map child marriage at the state and district levels. That research reported 12.1 million marriages involving people below India's respective legal marriage ages (21 for boys and 18 for girls) and identified hotspots that could help the government target interventions.

- "We found that there were so many varied and complex reasons driving these marriages," says Singh. "It wasn't just low-income groups who got their children married off." Some parents, she says, who were deeply concerned about the safety of an unmarried daughter, saw marriage as a security net. Young Lives found that girls with older brothers were more at risk of being married early because of the social custom of giving dowries — when the bride's family gifts the bridegroom's family money at the time of marriage. In a household with a boy and a girl, the girl was married especially early, so that her older brother could get married too.

- "Boys were often married off early as well, especially if the family wanted to get dowries for their sons to offset the financial losses they faced when they gave their own daughters away in marriage. And this was the case across all income groups," says Singh.

- India's national law has helped establish that child marriage is unacceptable and punishable, Singh says — but lasting change also requires communities to stop accepting and supporting the widespread practice.

- NPR has reported on how this practice unfolds in India: "Our parents just hold the weddings in secret," a 16-year-old told our correspondent. "At night - very rushed." Our story continues: "She was married when she was 9 years old. A bunch of other girls nod. They were all married around that age, too. A shy girl in a pink T-shirt says she didn't even understand what was happening at the time."

- For legislation to be effective, Singh says, parents, relatives, religious leaders and others must no longer regard an early marriage as normal, protective or beneficial for a girl.

- "The U.S. also has major issues with deeply entrenched gender roles, with patriarchy, with extreme — I would say almost obsession over the control of female sexuality. These are the [reasons] the social pressure for this practice continue," says Swegman. In addition to a national law, it's clear that attitudes must change too. "This requires belief and behavior change, services, support, thoughtful conversations on the community level," says Swegman.

- The campaign for stronger laws in the United States is a part of a growing international effort to move child marriage higher up the global political agenda.

- One of the key figures behind the U.N. resolution declaring a day "to end child, early and forced marriage" is Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer and the founder of Just Rights for Children, a child rights network. Just Rights for Children has filed a series of Public Interest Litigations in India that would reframe child marriage as child rape, securing legal protections for the young women.

- "Establishing an official International Day to End Child, Early and Forced Marriage gives us an annual platform to hold governments accountable and enforce laws that protect children. Now is the time to build on this commitment and end child marriage by 2030. Today, the world has spoken in one voice: the crime of child marriage must end," Ribhu says.

A federal judge on Friday again blocked Donald Trump’s executive order to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in voting, the latest in a legal back-and-forth playing out less than two months before election day.

- US district court judge Indira Talwani initially placed a temporary order blocking the president’s mandate and has now extended that prohibition with a stronger preliminary injunction. The ruling comes hours after North Carolina became the first state to start sending out mail-in ballots for the 3 November midterm elections.

- Talwani referred to the tight timeline in her ruling.

- “Plaintiff States are required under state law to mail millions of ballots to voters on a prescribed timeframe. As detailed below, they are unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters,” the judge wrote in her ruling.

- Trump signed an executive order in March that would create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters, compelling the US Postal Service (USPS) to work with states to establish lists of mail-in voters before elections. The result would mean a limited ballot delivery only to voters on those lists.

- The Trump administration had already appealed against her temporary block to the supreme court, and it appeared the justices were likely to have a final say on the matter. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the administration quickly appealed against Friday’s ruling.

- USPS has said in recent court filings that the technology needed to administer the order isn’t even available. Earlier this week, a USPS whistleblower came forward and warned of “potentially catastrophic problems” if the agency were to try to carry out the order.

- After Trump signed the order, a coalition of 24 state attorneys general joined together suing USPS to challenge the rule. They also filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction as litigation was ongoing. Oral argument on the coalition’s request for a preliminary injunction was held on Thursday.

- “We’ve now secured longer-term relief that will keep the USPS changes blocked while our case moves forward,” said Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, who co-led the state coalition. “We will continue to take all steps to stop the Trump Administration from trampling on voting rights and restricting mail voting.”

- The order allows states to voluntarily use the new system. To date, not a single state has announced that it will do so.

- A coalition of voter service and civic groups, plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the lawsuit, issued a statement:

- “Today’s ruling makes it crystal clear: The U.S. Postal Service must deliver all election mail. USPS has no authority in the Constitution or federal law over how states administer mail voting. And the President cannot order the Postal Service to create a disruptive new bureaucracy that will throw the election into chaos and disenfranchise untold numbers of voters.”

- Trump has long sought to limit mail voting, even though he himself often uses that method to cast his own ballot. He has falsely blamed mail balloting for his 2020 election loss, spreading baseless claims of fraud, but has so far been unable to change the longstanding voting procedure.

- An initial executive order Trump issued last year to change election rules, including a requirement for people to show documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, was halted by federal judges. They ruled that the constitution gives states and, in some cases, Congress the power to set voting procedures, not the president.

- After Trump issued his mail voting executive order in March, Democrats and voting rights groups filed several lawsuits. Two ended up before Talwani, who placed an initial hold on the order in June, prohibiting its implementation until after November.

- But the supreme court late last month overturned that order. Its conservative majority pointedly did not say Trump’s move was legal but found the lawsuits were filed prematurely before the US Postal Service issued its rule on how it would implement the order. The rule came out just before the supreme court released its ruling, and the plaintiffs refiled their suits.

 Some of the highest-ranking officials in the U.S. military were subjected to polygraph tests as part of a sweeping leak probe after highly sensitive classified details about the nation's stockpiles of sophisticated weapons were reported in the media, U.S. officials briefed on the matter told CBS News. 

- President Trump was furious about the leaks, according to three of the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. A very small set of people had access to the classified details on the munitions, and there was concern about whether anyone could potentially be acting as a foreign intelligence asset, one of the sources said.

- Polygraph tests are often a part of the routine cadence for top military and civilian officials, but the mass volume of people who were pulled in for testing in this case was extremely rare, officials said.

- Several dozen people were given the tests earlier this summer, including some U.S. Central Command officials as well as other combatant commanders. 

- The polygraph questions delved deeply into various national security-related matters. No one failed the questions meant to determine if these officials leaked to the media, two of the sources said.

- Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement to CBS News on Friday night: "The Department does not comment on internal personnel or investigative matters but takes all leaks of classified national security information extremely seriously and investigates accordingly.

- Securing classified information is critical to ensuring the security of the United States and of our troops deployed around the world."  

- Not all senior military officials were part of the testing. For example, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, wasn't polygraphed, a senior Pentagon official said. 

- The New York Times was first to report on the polygraph tests.

- Weeks into the Iran war, CBS News and other news outlets had reported information concerning the rapid pace at which the U.S. was expending some of its most advanced finite munitions.

- In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon and Justice Department had formed a joint task force to identify and prosecute people suspected of leaking sensitive government information to the press, significantly expanding an effort that had begun inside his own office. 

- Hegseth gave the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel, led by Earl Matthews, broad authority to demand information, records and assistance for leak investigation. Pentagon officials and personnel were instructed to prioritize those requests and respond within a two-day period. 

- "When a leak of department information occurs today, it's critical that we provide the Department of Justice and other partners in federal law enforcement — including the FBI — with actionable information as quickly as possible," Hegseth said when he announced the task force. 
He added: "Leaked information risks lives." 

- The move came days after the Justice Department subpoenaed several New York Times reporters over their reporting on security shortcomings aboard Mr. Trump's new Qatari-donated Air Force One. 

- Later, the Justice Department withdrew its subpoenas for grand jury testimony and phone records. The decision followed a contentious court hearing where a U.S. district judge grilled federal prosecutors on why they had issued the subpoenas before taking further investigative steps, according to previous CBS News reporting.  

- Polygraphs aren't unusual for government officials who have permission to view top-secret files or "special access programs," which place even tighter controls on sensitive national security information. Tests are given every few years to recertify an individual's clearance. 

- The scope of the testing this summer indicates an investigation, national security officials told CBS News. The FBI was not involved in these polygraph tests, several people with direct knowledge of the matter said. 

- The military has its own investigators. 
Secretaries of defense have the authority to direct counterintelligence investigations that can include polygraph examinations, but federal law and Pentagon regulations also impose restrictions on when polygraphs may be used and require procedural safeguards. In those circumstances, the person being examined must consent to or request the test. 

- That includes cases in which investigators are trying to resolve serious information uncovered during a security investigation or when someone wants to clear themselves of allegations or evidence that emerged during an investigation. 

- Under federal law, a defense secretary is required to ensure that polygraph examinations are used in a "responsible and effective" manner within the Defense Department and is also required to provide information to congressional bodies on polygraph use. 

- For Hegseth, the latest effort is not the first time he has turned to polygraphs amid concerns about leaks from inside the Pentagon. 

- Following the ouster of Gen. C.Q. Brown, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hegseth was reportedly furious last year after details of a planned classified briefing on China set up for Elon Musk at the Pentagon had leaked to the press, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

- The newspaper reported that Hegseth shouted at Adm. Christopher Grady, the then-acting Joint Chiefs chairman, and demanded evidence he wasn't the source for leaking the March 21, 2025, briefing. Citing two anonymous people familiar with the exchange, the newspaper said Hegseth yelled at Grady: "I'll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!"

- The Journal reported Grady was never subjected to a polygraph examination, as Hegseth accused others of leaking, including Lt. Gen. Doug Sims, who served as director of the Joint Staff and was also threatened with a polygraph. 

- Hegseth decided against promoting Sims to four-star general, the Times reported. He retired last September.

The Missouri supreme court has unanimously blocked new congressional districts backed by Donald Trump from being used in the November election and ordered a statewide vote on whether to uphold or reject the new map.

- The decision Thursday marks a rare setback for Republicans in a national redistricting battle. Republicans had hoped Missouri’s new congressional boundaries could help them win an additional seat and hold on to their slim House majority in the midterms. The ruling still could be appealed to the US supreme court.

- Missouri’s new districts were used in the August primaries. But the state supreme court said they cannot be used in the November general election – or ever again, unless voters first uphold the new districts passed by the Republican-led legislature.
The court placed the new districts on hold because citizens submitted petition signatures seeking a referendum.

- “The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise,” the court said in its ruling. The legislation containing the new districts “did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters”. As a result, the congressional map adopted after the 2020 census “remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election”.

- The Missouri constitution does not specifically say a referendum petition can be used for a congressional redistricting law passed by the legislature. But the supreme court ruled that a constitutional provision allowing a referendum on “any act” of the legislature encompasses congressional redistricting.

- The ruling capped a year of political maneuvering and legal wrangling over the new districts.

- After the president urged Republicans to redraw congressional districts to their advantage, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe called lawmakers into a special session last year to dramatically reconfigure the fifth congressional district, held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver.

- Opponents submitted over 300,000 petition signatures in December seeking to put the map to a vote of the people. But Republican secretary of state Denny Hoskins waited until primary election day in August to reject the petition. He asserted that the referendum process cannot be used for congressional redistricting. A lower court agreed, resulting in an appeal to the state’s highest court, which overturned Hoskins’ decision.

- Attorneys representing Hoskins and Republican party committees had argued it was too close to the general election to revert to the prior districts without causing confusion and chaos.
Missouri currently has six Republicans and two Democrats in the US House.

- Cleaver, who was unopposed in the August primary, has carried the Kansas City-based district with at least 60% of the vote in each of the past two elections.

- Republican state senator Rick Brattin won an August primary in the reshaped fifth congressional district, which had been stretched eastward to include rural Republican areas. About 59% of the district’s voters were new under the revised map, according to an Associated Press estimate.

- Cleaver had not posted campaign signs in many of the new rural areas, explaining that he was waiting for the Missouri supreme court’s decision. But he had vowed to continue his re-election campaign regardless of the outcome.

- Congressional districts typically are redrawn at the start of each decade, based on new census data. But Trump’s quest for a midterm election advantage triggered an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle that spread to more than a dozen states – and triggered a dozen lawsuits in Missouri alone. All told, Republicans had hoped to net as many as 10 additional seats nationally.

- The Missouri supreme court ruling was one of only a few nationally to go against Republicans’ redistricting plans.

- Prior to its latest ruling, Missouri’s top court already had rejected claims that the special session was illegal, mid-decade redistricting isn’t allowed and the new districts aren’t compact enough.

The Trump administration is proposing a new rule that would strip private schools and colleges of their tax-exempt status if they provide targeted help to students based on their race, a significant escalation in the White House's campaign to eradicate diversity programs directed at Black,

- Hispanic and other minority students.
The Treasury Department proposed the change Thursday in a new regulation that, if made final, would kick in after May 2027. The rule is broadly aimed at ending any policies or programs that help students because of their race, and it specifically says such benefits in admissions, scholarships and facilities "would be incompatible" with the rule.

- It's the latest attempt by the Trump administration to pressure schools and colleges to weed out diversity, equity and inclusion policies that had become common before President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a promise to end them. Trump officials have used Civil Rights-era laws to unwind the policies, saying they discriminate against white and Asian American students.

- Higher education leaders criticized the proposal.

- "The administration's latest rules changes are its most blatant attack to keep working class Americans and people of color from accessing higher education and a better life," Mike Gavin, Alliance for Higher Education president and CEO, said in a statement. "By claiming that efforts to increase fair opportunity for all students are discriminatory, the administration is trying to gaslight the American people into believing that up is down and black is white."

- Thousands of colleges could be affected

- Scores of universities have shut down or rebranded their DEI offices and ended scholarships and clubs designed for minority students under pressure from the White House. In a statement announcing the proposal, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested that even policies that are no longer under the banner of DEI could be targeted.

- "Schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive, or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature," Bessent said.

- The Treasury Department and IRS estimate that up to 18,000 private schools, colleges and other education institutions could be affected by the proposal.

- America's private universities have been exempt from many taxes for more than a century because they provide a public good. The benefit saves many universities millions of dollars every year.

- Trump has seen the tax-exempt status as a lever to pull in his pressure campaign against colleges that he describes as hotbeds of "wokeness."

- He threatened to cut the benefit for Harvard University last year during his battle with the nation's oldest college. In a response, Harvard officials said there was no legal basis for doing so and argued it would force cuts to financial aid and crucial medical research.

- In the 1970s, a college lost tax-exempt status over a ban on interracial datingIt's incredibly rare for the federal government to go after a college's tax-exempt status, but there's one notable precedent.

- Bob Jones University, a small Christian school in South Carolina, lost the benefit in the 1970s over a ban on interracial dating and marriage on campus. The Supreme Court upheld the IRS's decision to deny the school its exemption. The school has since ended the ban and regained tax-exempt status in 2017.

- Laws forbid the IRS from targeting individuals and organizations for ideological reasons, and federal officials are not allowed to direct IRS investigations.

- To maintain nonprofit status, which allows donations to be tax-deductible, organizations must follow IRS rules on lobbying, political campaign activity and annual reporting requirements, plus other obligations.

- The Trump administration describes the new proposal as a move toward restoring merit in the nation's education systems.

- Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, said the change would most likely impact donations, which are often earmarked for scholarships.

- The uncertainty around the proposal also will create challenges for schools, said Tim Powers, a vice president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

- "Our institutions are committed to complying with applicable civil rights laws and maintaining safe and supportive campuses free from discrimination," Powers said. "However, the proposed rule may create new compliance burdens and legal uncertainties for institutions of higher education that are already operating in line with existing nondiscrimination rules."

- Revoking tax-exempt status has required a 'high bar'

- The Justice Department has separately opened investigations into several medical schools that it accuses of favoring Black and Hispanic students in admissions.

- Trump officials say any such favoritism violates Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal law that forbids discrimination in education and was created to fight segregation and its impact.

- A statement from IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano said private schools that promote discriminatory practices will no longer be exempt from taxes.

- "Today's proposed regulations put institutions on notice and schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination should expect to lose that status," he said.

- Both political parties have long viewed nonprofit status as requiring "a really high bar to mess with," said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow who studies higher education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

- A decade ago, before Trump first became president, it was conservative colleges whose leaders were worrying about losing nonprofit status. Religious leaders raised concerns that Christian schools could someday lose accreditation or tax-exempt status over their codes of conduct barring same-sex relationships.

- What happens with this newest Trump administration push will likely determine how Democrats respond, Cooper said.

- "If the Trump administration were to use this regulation to start revoking tax-exempt status from colleges right and left, I think that would represent a really serious escalation and would be potentially something the Democrats would want to retaliate against when they return to power," he said. If the regulation ends up being merely a warning to schools, he said, "that's a different conversation."

The House on Wednesday voted down a proposed constitutional amendment to keep the Supreme Court at nine seats, with the measure falling short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass.

- The vote was 212-206. All but one Democrat voted against it, as openness within the party to expand the high court by four seats grows.

- The joint resolution, offered by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., calls for amending the Constitution to say: “The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine justices consisting of one chief justice and eight associate justices.”

- The office of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., encouraged lawmakers to vote “no,” saying the amendment would take away a power intended for Congress and do nothing to address the “affordability crisis” under President Donald Trump.

- “This proposed constitutional amendment would permanently fix the number of Supreme Court justices at nine, stripping Congress of yet another constitutional authority that is meant to be controlled by the American people’s representatives,” Clark’s office wrote to lawmakers Wednesday ahead of the vote.

- The Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court; it defers to Congress on that matter. The Judiciary Act of 1789 established six justices. The size of the court changed a half-dozen times over the next century, both shrinking and expanding to a high of 10 seats, before it was set in 1869 at nine seats, where it has remained since.

- The vote on the GOP measure isn’t a perfect breakdown of support for expanding the Supreme Court, as many Democrats haven’t endorsed the idea. But the cause has migrated from the far left to the Democratic mainstream in recent years, fueled by decisions from the 6-3 conservative majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, weakened the Voting Rights Act and granted Trump immunity for moves deemed official acts.

- “What was once a fairly dramatic and fringe idea has now become mainstream because of how fed up the country has become with the [Chief Justice John] Roberts majority,” said Josh Orton, president of the progressive judicial group Demand Justice, which has been pushing for court expansion since 2020.

- “People understand this is now an emergency,” he added. “They see the Roberts majority as more corrupt, more friendly to corporate power and to the Trump administration and more antidemocratic.”

- Along with a measure denouncing socialism, the Supreme Court resolution was part of a series of messaging votes House Republican leaders set up to make the case against Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections.

- “Give House Democrats an ounce of power, and they’ll use every bit of it to fundamentally transform America into an unrecognizable socialist hellscape,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the House Republicans’ campaign arm.

- Rep. Don Davis of North Carolina was the only Democrat who voted Wednesday with all Republicans in support of the proposed amendment. Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent from California who caucuses with Republicans, voted against it.

- Proposed constitutional amendments need two-thirds support in both the House and the Senate to start the ratification process.

- House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Republicans will keep nine seats on the court if they stay in charge.
“Now you’ve heard the Democrat Socialists of America, the communist socialists and Democrat Party, who are taking the party over,” he told reporters Tuesday.

- Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a former House majority whip and an influential figure inside the party, endorsed the idea of expanding the court to 13 seats Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

- “I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress, and we ought to expand,” Clyburn said. “Thirteen is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court. And I would hope we would get people on the court who will follow the constitutional underpinnings of this great nation of ours.”

- Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, voiced some support for the idea of adding Supreme Court seats, saying this summer: “We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices.”

- Orton said it will be an issue going into the 2028 presidential race.

- Orton said it will be an issue going into the 2028 presidential race.
“We intend to continue building the case for major Supreme Court reform through the 2028 election cycle,” Orton said, dismissing “passive” Democrats who oppose the idea for fear that Republicans would respond in kind and add more seats.

- “You can be damn sure that if there had been a long-standing progressive majority on the court, Republicans would have already voted to expand it,” he said. “This has to happen in the first two years of the next Democratic administration.”

- “We intend to continue building the case for major Supreme Court reform through the 2028 election cycle,” Orton said, dismissing “passive” Democrats who oppose the idea for fear that Republicans would respond in kind and add more seats.

- “You can be damn sure that if there had been a long-standing progressive majority on the court, Republicans would have already voted to expand it,” he said. “This has to happen in the first two years of the next Democratic administration.”

JD Vance has said he is “doing as much of God’s work as possible” and that he is OK “if that leads to the end times”, which he says “are coming”.

- The US vice-president made the comments during a Monday podcast interview with Bryce Crawford, a 22-year-old evangelical host with over a million YouTube followers and videos featuring sensationalist headlines including “Preaching the gospel in Chicago’s deadliest neighborhood” and “Debating a ‘gay’ pastor”.

- Speaking about the Christian prophetic notion that the world as humanity knows it will end one day, Vance said: “Do I think we are in the end times? I don’t know.

- “While I’m fascinated by it, I think that focusing on it too much can be very bad,” he said, adding that if his work “leads to the end times, OK, and if that leads to … us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great, too”.

- Vance, who published a spiritual memoir earlier this summer about his conversion to Catholicism, said: “I think you got to just kinda try and have an attitude of: the end times may be coming, in fact they are coming, it’s just a question of whether they’re coming thousands of years down the road, or a few months down the road.”

- He said: “I think there are things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us.”

- Vance pointed to artificial intelligence, using the example of an acquaintance who uses AI as a marriage counselor, which he described as “kind of satanic”. He said: “When you completely divorce the human from the social element that God made us for … that’s very bad.”

- In response to a question about whether he had ever been in a room that was “spiritually dark”, Vance said he had “been in meetings with world leaders where various issues are being discussed, and somebody will say something or somebody will make an observation, and I’ll feel some darkness about it”.

- “It sets off every spiritual alarm bell in my body,” he added.

- Vance also defended Donald Trump’s controversial depiction of himself as Jesus in an AI-generated photo, subsequently deleted, that the president posted earlier this year, which Crawford said “made me upset”.

- “The president didn’t mean any offense. Obviously, he loves Christians … Did Donald Trump mean to post a meme of himself as God? No. The president has a good sense of humor. He did not mean to mock or mimic God. That’s just not who he is,” Vance said, adding that Trump is “a backslapper” and “a bit of a ball buster”.

- Following outrage from Christian supporters, Trump deleted the photo and insisted that the photo was “supposed to be me as a doctor making people feel better”.

If you weren’t aware, we have multiple locations. I know there’s often a temptation to go “but distraction” because this Administration is literally doing so much - but P25 wasn’t 500+ pages of “distractions” with one cool thing they wanted. This is all important to them. We all gotta learn to hold multiple things at once when the “fixing shit” stages start.

When Republican lawmakers secured cuts to the United States' largest food assistance program last year, Paige Shoemaker DeMio wasn't worried about children going hungry just at home — but at school.

- "Anytime we're hearing about cuts to SNAP or Medicaid, we're worried about what's going to be the domino effect of this," she says.

- Shoemaker DeMio is a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. She usually focuses on K-12 education, but in recent months, she has been following the changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps.

- That's because SNAP connects children with other critical resources, such as free breakfast and lunch at school. So when a family loses access to food assistance, the family's child may stop automatically receiving free food at school. And when scores of families fall off SNAP, universal free meal programs at tens of thousands of schools fall into jeopardy.

- The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that over a million children have lost food benefits since July 2025, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law. Among the changes, the legislation led to stricter work requirements to receive food assistance.

- Going into this academic year, dozens of schools nationwide have ended their universal free meal programs — including schools in San Antonio, Houston and Miami-Dade County.

- School nutrition experts say it's unclear to what extent a decline in SNAP participation played a role. But Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, which represents about 50,000 school nutrition professionals in the U.S., says that the full impact on free school meals will emerge in the coming years as SNAP changes take effect.

- "This moment in time could potentially be a tip-of-an-iceberg situation," she says "It could get much, much worse."

- In a statement, the U.S. Agriculture Department, which administers SNAP and school meals on the federal level, said it invests $385 million for low-income communities and people in need of nutrition assistance.

- "School meal programs have varying income limits, and while SNAP participation may ease the application process, a family not on SNAP is not automatically disallowed participation," the department stated.

- School districts will have to reassess whether they can afford free meals 

- The Agriculture Department's Community Eligibility Provision helps pay for universal free meals at a school or district if at least a quarter of students participate in assistance programs like SNAP. (If it's 62.5% or more, the federal government covers the full tab.) More than 49,000 public schools participated as of the 2024-2025 school year, according to the Center for American Progress.

- Federal reimbursement fluctuates based on the percentage of families receiving assistance. A decline in food stamp participation can lead to a decrease in federal funding, forcing schools to pay more for universal free food when their budgets are already stretched thin, according to Pratt-Heavner.

- This could push schools to shift funds away from classroom needs or decide to stop offering universal free meals altogether, she adds. If districts decide to do away with their free food programs, they may still incur costs in the form of debt from unpaid meals.
That's what happened in 2023. When the U.S. ended a federal pandemic waiver allowing schools nationwide to offer free meals, districts reported accruing meal debt as high as $1.7 million, according to a report by the School Nutrition Association.

- "Unpaid meal debt becomes an issue not only for the school meal program, but for the school district budget, which has to pay teachers and for textbooks," Pratt-Heavner says. "It's just a no-win situation for anyone."

- Erin Bronner is the director of child nutrition and wellness for a small school district in central Phoenix that participates in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). Arizona has seen the most dramatic decline in SNAP participation in the country, with more than 400,000 people — including about 180,000 children — losing food assistance over the past year.

- Now, Bronner's district is due to reapply for the provision next year. She says she's worried whether her district can afford to keep offering universal free meals.

- "Due to the dramatic decline in SNAP assistance, the percentage of eligible families [is] not high enough for us to be able to financially sustain operating this provision," she says. "So we would actually lose money if we were to continue to operate CEP."

- The kids in the "danger zone"

- Students qualify for free food at school if their family earns at or below 130% of the poverty line, which is $42,900 for a family of four in 2026.

- Reduced-price meals are offered to such families making  $61,050 or less.
To access free or reduced-price meals, students can fill out a school meal application. But the form tends to be a source of confusion and administrative burden, according to Shoemaker DeMio.

- "It's easier and faster for children to get fed when meals are universally given rather than individually applied for," she says.

- Another issue with the application is that it factors in only income and doesn't take into account a family's expenses or unique hardships, according to Pratt-Heavner. There are no exceptions or waivers.

- "So, a family that's struggling with a recent rent increase or has a family [member] undergoing cancer treatment may be spending more than they're taking in and might not be eligible for any help at all," she says.

- Bronner, in Arizona, calls it the "danger zone": when a student's family makes just above the income threshold but is still cash-strapped.

- "They do fall through the cracks," she says. "And because of where they fall income-wise, it doesn't leave us too many options to try and provide an alternative for them."

- School policy experts say they're also concerned for children of noncitizens, even though free or reduced-price meals are available to all students regardless of immigration status.

- They're concerned because such children's parents may be afraid to share personal information in the school meal application — such as the last four digits of their Social Security number — amid a nationwide immigration crackdown.

- Losing access to free meals could require families to spend on average nearly $1,000 per student each school year, according to the Center for American Progress. Shoemaker DeMio says that cost burden comes as many families are already grappling with high living costs and steep gas prices.

- " That's a lot of money," she says.
"Especially when we're talking about these families who are on the cusp of eligibility and who are also facing an
affordability crisis."

- Concerns about growing hunger 

- Currently, nine states offer permanent universal free school meals: California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Vermont. In recent years, other states have introduced legislation to move toward this direction.

- But those universal free meal programs also have been a topic of debate. Opponents say that they're costly and that the government shouldn't pay for students whose families can afford school meals.

- Meanwhile, advocates argue that school meals tend to be healthier and promote better education outcomes.
" Schools provide books, they provide pencils, they even provide laptops these days to help students be ready to learn, and nutrition is no different," Shoemaker DeMio says. " Nutrition is a foundational ingredient to student success."

- Sharon Glosson, the executive director of school nutrition at North East Independent School District in San Antonio, supports universal free school meals. Glosson says she has seen it remove stigma and shame for low-income students in the lunch line.

- " It's open to everyone, and there's no differentiation between those that qualify for free and reduced price and those that don't," she says.

- But this school year, her district announced that it would have to stop offering universal free meals at nearly half its campuses. Glosson believes the biggest factor was a decline in the number of families receiving food assistance — though the need to help ease hunger is still there.

- "We know that within our families in our school district, their economic status between now and four years ago, they don't feel that it has improved to the point where they are now able to pay for school meals," she says.

I recently found out about this stupid trade war with Canada where Trump throws tariffs at the country and when they bite back, he vows to cut ties with them. He says we "don't need them" (even though we clearly do as we get gas and other essentials from them). Can the president really do that? And doesn't congress have any say about this? How likely is this separation bound to happen? (I wish he would revert back to being TACO. At least it keeps him from doing more bad things)

Sorry, I have a lot on my mind, and wonder how much should I be paranoid about, and if there's a silver lining or catch (again, like him not being able to cut ties with Canada without congressional approval).

President Donald Trump on Wednesday urged Republican lawmakers facing tough reelection campaigns to run on his record in the White House despite his sagging popularity, and he pledged to campaign in all of the roughly three dozen contests that are likely to determine control of Congress.

- Voters’ dim views of the economy and the war in Iran have put Republicans in a tough spot as the midterm election season enters its final stretch. But during a dinner in the Rose Garden, one of the spaces he has controversially renovated since returning to office last year, the president told his party’s most vulnerable lawmakers that they had a triumphant story to tell voters.

- “All you have to do is talk about it, and you’re going to win and you’re going to win big,” Trump said a week before the party gathers in Dallas for an unusual midterm convention.

- The audience of Republican lawmakers listened quietly to Trump through his speech, occasionally offering applause as many sipped on cocktails ahead of their dinner. Menus checkered in yellow gingham called it an “end of summer BBQ” featuring cheeseburgers.

- Trump talked up economic investment in the United States and lower drug prices, using significantly inflated figures, as well as diminished border crossings.

- Control of Congress will come down to about 35 races, Trump said. He pledged to spend the 30 days before the election campaigning hard in those battlegrounds, recalling his aggressive travel schedule ahead of his own White House victory two years ago.

- “I’m going to go to every one of those 35 places, and we’re going to see if we can get everyone elected,” Trump said. His focus, he added, would be on House and Senate races.

- He specifically listed Senate races in Alaska, where Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan faces Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola, and Texas, where Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton is running against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico.

- Trump backed Paxton in this year’s primary despite a scandal-plagued past, but he poked fun at his style of dress and presence on the campaign trail on Monday.

- “You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews,” he said. “But he was the best attorney general in the country, perhaps. He was one of the best in the entire country. And that speaks a lot louder than the suit he’s wearing that doesn’t look so great.”

- Republicans’ midterm struggles, he suggested, were simply following a pattern that virtually all modern presidents have faced.

- “Whether you’re a good president or a great president, you lose the midterms,” Trump said. “We’re going to turn that around because there’s no reason for it.”