On Monday afternoon, President Trump cut the ribbon on his new White House helipad, and almost nobody heard a word of it. There was no audio feed, because there were no pool cameras, because the network assigned to film the president had been banned from the grounds...

On Saturday morning, MS NOW correspondent Akayla Gardner passed through two security gates at the White House before her badge stopped working. An officer asked her to hand it over and told her the decision came from, in his words, above him. CNN's Betsy Klein found...

On Wednesday, in her State of the Union address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed something that has never existed: associate membership in the European Union, and she named the country she wants to hold it first. Canada. By Thursday,...

Thirty five Senate seats are on ballots this fall, counting the special elections in Florida and Ohio. Republicans are defending 22 of them, Democrats 13. For control of the chamber to change hands, Democrats need a net gain of four. Every argument about this election...

This morning, somewhere in Idaho, Minnesota, South Dakota or Virginia, a voter walked into an election office and cast the first early in person ballot of the 2026 midterms. Those four states opened early voting today, the earliest in the nation. North Carolina has...

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent. It is the first increase since July 2023. The vote was unanimous, 12 to 0, and the twelve included Kevin Warsh, the chairman President...

At 2 p.m. Eastern this afternoon, the Federal Reserve announces whether it is raising interest rates for the first time since July 2023. Futures markets put the odds of a quarter point hike at 93 percent, which would lift the benchmark rate to a range of 3.75 to 4...

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency did two things at once, and the second is the one to watch. First, it finalized the repeal of the 2024 carbon pollution standards for power plants, the rules covering the coal and gas fleet responsible for more than 1.5...

Mail voting in the 2026 election will work the way it always has. That is the plain meaning of a brief, unsigned order the Supreme Court issued Monday night, rejecting the administration's request to switch on the Postal Service's mail ballot rule while its appeal...

In the middle of hurricane season, a federal judge has ruled that the administration broke the law when it ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cut its workforce roughly in half. The decision, issued late Friday by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in...

Everyone's calendar says the big date is Tuesday, November 3. This newsletter would like to direct your attention seven weeks past it, because the largest concentration of consequential deadlines in this political year sits not on Election Day but in the five weeks...

While the mail ballot fight holds the spotlight, a second emergency application about your right to vote is sitting at the Supreme Court, and it may be the more consequential one. On Tuesday, September 8, the Justice Department asked the justices to lift a lower court...

The Missouri map war ended Thursday, in the right order and just barely. In the morning, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the federal court order that had briefly revived the state's Trump-backed congressional gerrymander, effectively throwing the map out for November....

Missouri does not currently know what its congressional districts are. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the literal legal situation 54 days before the election, produced by one of the strangest afternoons in modern election law. On Tuesday at about 4:30 p.m.,...

At one minute past midnight on Tuesday, Canada's retaliation went into effect: tariffs of 15 to 50 percent on 27.6 billion Canadian dollars' worth of American goods, covering hundreds of product lines from milk and cheese to steel, furniture, appliances, farm...

The mail voting fight we have tracked for three months reached its most decisive ruling on Friday evening, and its most telling response by Sunday. In a 49 page decision, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Postal Service's...

Labor Day is the one holiday with a thesis: that the people who do the work deserve a share of what the work produces. So today, instead of speeches, this newsletter offers a ledger. Every number below is from federal data or named researchers, most of it published in...

Sometime this month, roughly 20 million Americans will get a letter about their health insurance. Federal law requires it: states must warn Medicaid expansion enrollees, no later than September, that starting January 1, 2027 they will have to document 80 hours a month...

The August jobs report, released Friday morning, was better than almost anyone predicted. Employers added 162,000 jobs, roughly triple the consensus forecast of about 56,000. July, which the government initially reported as a loss of 23,000 jobs, was revised to a gain...

On Thursday morning, a Justice Department lawyer stood in a Boston courtroom and could not tell a federal judge whether the Postal Service's system for screening mail ballots is ready to run. On Thursday afternoon, before that judge could rule and before the appeals...

Hours before a federal judge decides whether the Postal Service's mail ballot rule stays blocked through November, a whistleblower inside the agency has told Congress and reporters what the rule looks like from the inside — and the description, in the words of the...

Sixty-two days before an election his own advisers privately admit is slipping away, President Trump stood in the Oval Office and described an American economy that does not exist. U.S. growth, he said, could hit "14, 15, 16, 20 percent." For the record: the economy...

The mail voting fight arrives at its decisive week fully loaded. On Monday, the federal judge whose restraining order blocks the Postal Service's mail ballot rule denied the administration's request to pause that order pending appeal — ruling that a temporary...

Congressional Democrats have formed a task force to prepare for the possibility that President Trump attempts to undermine November's elections — by claiming fraud, by interfering in the voting process, or by contesting results — NPR reported Friday. The preparation...

Last week, a federal judge struck down the State Department's freeze on immigrant visas from 75 countries, ruling the policy unlawful. The administration's response was not to narrow the policy. It was to expand it to everyone. On Tuesday, the State Department...

The economic backdrop to the midterms turned visibly worse this month. Growth slowed to 1.5 percent in the second quarter, down from 2.1 percent in the first. The Conference Board reported that consumer confidence fell in August. Inflation, per The Hill's reporting on...

Late Thursday night, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary restraining order blocking the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing core parts of its newly finalized mail ballot rule — one day after she had vacated her own nationwide injunction and...

The U.S.-Canada trade war now has two armed sides and no negotiation. On Tuesday, Canada published its retaliation for the 50 percent U.S. tariffs that took effect August 22: duties of 15, 25, and 50 percent on more than 700 American products — nearly C$27.6 billion,...

Senator Darline Graham won South Carolina's special Republican runoff on Tuesday, August 25, defeating Congressman Ralph Norman 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent — 193,396 votes to 175,327 — to become the Republican nominee for the Senate seat she was appointed to after...

The Supreme Court on Monday opened a path for the Trump administration to begin implementing the president's executive order restricting mail voting — without deciding whether the order is lawful. The Court's conservative majority ruled that the 23 Democratic-led...