Perhaps in anticipation of Grijalva’s plan to sign the petition immediately upon her swearing-in, admin officials were working overtime on Wednesday to try to persuade one Republican who had already signed the petition to remove their name and prevent the official collection of 218 signatures.

What a thrill to be part of @talkingpointsmemo.com's series about the past 25 years of digital media! I wrote about why private equity goons destroyed Deadspin and why it matters.

Fine! Scrap it!

It might be too much to expect MAGA world to realize that its incessant attacks on its enemies and welcoming embrace of the fringiest of figures might not play well with voters. What, after all, would MAGA be without enemies and fringe figures?

The disinfo wave around Mamdani reflects a confusion in both parties about exactly how to explain the 34-year-old insurgent candidate.

It appears that DOJ employees who use language to accurately describe the events that took place on Jan. 6 — but language that does not, of course, line up with Trump’s white-washed narrative on the attack — are being punished. More in tonight's edition of Where Things Stand here:

Trump has publicly weaved his visions of deploying the military domestically and training its might on civilians before, but Tuesday’s remarks put that aspiration in starker terms.

From my colleague, @kateriga.bsky.social in tonight's edition of Where Things Stand: "The Trump administration has seen its appellate court victory delayed for days, hamstrung in its effort to flood Portland with armed troops, all due to its own baffling legal blunder." More here:

Come see! www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/talk...

The White House has been courting Indiana GOPers since August in an attempt to force them to redraw district lines for the 2 seats that Indiana Dems hold in the House. Vance has visited the state twice to make the administration’s case. And, yet, they still don’t have the votes to pass new maps.

While it is significant that a few Republicans are at least vocalizing that something about how the Trump administration is handling the shutdown is maybe probably perhaps not legal, it’s unlikely to change anything.

My colleague @hunterw.bsky.social in tonight's Where Things Stand: "The '3.5 Percent Rule' refers to the idea that no government has survived a challenge against it from a nonviolent mass movement that brought together at least 3.5 percent of the population during a 'peak event.'" More ⤵️

The Trump administration is stepping into legal gray areas, finding ways to move money around to keep the things it wants to keep operating operating — whether that is to score rhetorical points against Democrats or to keep their policy agenda creeping forward.

Trump allies have used Kirk's death as a springboard for acting on Trump's longtime vows of retribution against his political foes. Charlie Kirk’s podcast is the forum they’re using to broadcast those schemes.

The North Carolina GOP is notorious for ratfuckery:

Republicans have developed a newfound interest in mothers who rely on federal nutrient assistance programs like WIC to feed their children — the types of social safety net services and programs that Democrats champion and that Republicans have been hellbent on gutting for decades.

Republicans are pretending they care about mothers on WIC after including cuts that make the program less accessible to women and children in the "big, beautiful" bs earlier this year. Catch up on more of @talkingpointsmemo.com's live coverage here:

There are a few Trump II retribution threads converging today in the hours since the government shut down after the fiscal year ended at midnight Wednesday.

These remarks nod at a few things we’ve been tracking for some time.

Trump has been looking for ways to withhold federal funding from NYC and blue cities since he came back into office. He’s been doing it under the guise of a clampdown on municipalities that have sanctuary protections in place that might interfere with his mass detention and deportation campaign.

Democrats are using what little power they have in the Senate as a government shutdown nears to hold the Trump administration to account for some of its abuse of power.

As we saw in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination earlier this month, the Trump administration is looking to markings on bullets and grasping at any other early information they can grab ahold of to blame some amorphous, leftist, anti-Trump entity for another act of violence.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Mullin accused the ousted official of lying about her conversations with RFK Jr. and even suggested during his questioning time that there was some sort of recording of the conversation that would prove she was misleading congress.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) today got FBI Director Kash Patel to confirm a key detail about the extent to which the traditional firewall between the Department of Justice and the White House has collapsed.

In remarks to the media on Sunday, President Trump made it clear he will continue to use the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as grounds to investigate those he sees as his political foes. In fact, he suggested, that work is already underway.

“The Missouri GOP is aiding and abetting the systematic destruction of our democracy by an authoritarian regime led by a geriatric con man who knows the only way he can win is to cheat,” Democratic state Rep. Ashley Aune said of her colleagues' subservience to Trump just before the final vote.

Two weeks ago, Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe unveiled the new congressional map — which he called a “Missouri First” map, in MAGA fashion — and called for a special session for the map to be approved.

TPM's @emineirmakyucel.bsky.social spoke to a bunch of Senate Dems this week. They appear to be focused on extending the ACA enhanced subsidies instead of Trump's power grab as part of the coming funding fight to keep the government open.

"RFK Jr. claimed to a Senate panel that the Biden admin had hidden evidence of the danger of the abortion drug mifepristone — an age-old anti-abortion smear that gives the movement pretext to make the medicine difficult to obtain." More from @kateriga.bsky.social in tonight's edition of WTS:

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) signaled on Wednesday that he would oppose any effort to have the Senate consider a new nominee to replace Lisa Cook:

A scoop: Connor Clegg, former Charlie Kirk employee who was ousted as student body president over his racist social media posts, is working at the EEOC talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/fo...

Worked with @brycecovert.bsky.social on this new piece for @talkingpointsmemo.com: "Connor Clegg, a former Fox News producer who was ousted from his school’s student government over accusations of racism, is working in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s communications department."

The other GOPer who sometimes counters President Trump — and then still votes for things that advance his agenda, like the sweeping Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill this summer — is slamming the White House for lawlessly withholding federal spending that’s been authorized by Congress.

President Trump will reportedly have another big boy military parade later this year.

New from me + @emineirmakyucel.bsky.social about the damage Trump/allies did to DC before flooding it with armed federal law enforcement under pretext that its own government can't handle the fabricated crime spike talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-a...

while Republicans howl about DC being a den of iniquity, worth remembering that House GOP still refuses to let the district use $1B of its own taxpayers' money. That plus the economic hobbling from the DOGE layoffs have left the district in a much more damaged state than it was pre-January 20th

The Trump White House has been focused for weeks on forcing Indiana to engage in mid-cycle gerrymandering to help ensure that Republicans are able to keep the House next year — the prospects of which, according to some polls, are pretty up in the air, absent his egregious redistricting campaign.

TPM breaks the news that the University of Michigan's hospital system has been hammered by the Trump administration's DOJ into suspending gender affirming care for minors. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/univers...

As has been obvious since the moment he sent National Guard troops into D.C. to do things like patrol tourists on the National Mall, Trump is using decades-old right-wing propaganda — fear mongering about supposedly lawless urban hellscapes — to justify bringing the military in to Dem run cities.

Big new exclusive from @kateriga.bsky.social and @joshkovensky.bsky.social: The University of Michigan’s statewide hospital system will stop providing gender-affirming care for patients under 19 after receiving a subpoena and being threatened with investigation by Trump’s Justice Department.

Great new reporting this afternoon from @talkingpointsmemo.com's @laylaayanna.bsky.social: Trump’s problematic pick to lead the Bureau of Labor and Statistics is expected to face a hearing before the Senate HELP Committee, according to two people familiar with committee proceedings. More here:

The whole “100 more seats” thing is perhaps a hyperbolic troll — unlike anything anyone’s ever seen, etc. But it’s nonetheless significant.

Even on the precipice of a massive victory for the Trump administration, Texas Republicans are still conjuring up creative news ways to threaten and intimidate their Democratic colleagues — for simply using the tools at their disposal to protest the GOP’s egregious power grab.

In the wake of Vance's meeting with Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, he and other Republican members of the state legislature were tight-lipped about whether they’d agreed to redraw their state maps, and potentially flip the only two seats that Dems hold in the U.S. House.

Obviously, to those paying attention, the reason that California Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to work around his state’s independent redistricting commission is because of the gravity of the moment.

It’s been clear since President Trump and his Fox News DC U.S. Attorney first announced that he was placing the Metropolitan Police Department under emergency federal control that he was trying to pull off another LA-style federal occupation of a city run by politicians he doesn’t like.

Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Waged On All talkingpointsmemo.com/news/pete-he...

Cornyn and Paxton using the situation to out-hard ass each other is a pellucid campaigning strategy for both.

Reports from Indiana about the meeting did not exactly describe a ringing endorsement of the Trump administration’s ratfuckery.

While Texas Republicans threaten elected state Democrats with arrest for trying to resist President Trump’s power grab via their state’s congressional maps, the Trump administration is trying to plant some mid-decade gerrymandering seeds in Indiana, too.