New polling demonstrates that a majority of registered voters in the United States support changing the method through which presidents are selected. Currently, the Electoral College is the mechanism used to pick presidents. Each state receives electoral votes equal to its number of congressional representatives — the number of House districts in the state plus its two Senate seats.
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President Donald Trump said this week that he wants to “get Cuba done” before his term is over, casually saying that he is considering opening yet another military front in a country whose civilian population is already being killed and starved by his sweeping sanctions campaign. When asked by conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday whether or not he would use military force in…
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In the runup to the midterm elections, it was widely assumed that if Democrats took back the Senate majority, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York would continue to lead the party’s conference and become the Senate majority leader — a position he held for the four years leading up to the 2024 elections.
Even after it became clear that this year’s cycle had become a historic triumph for Democrats, there was some chatter about a possible challenge to Schumer, though he appeared likely to succeed anyway because he didn’t have an intraparty rival.
That changed on Thursday night, when Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland appeared on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki” and launched his own bid for Senate majority leader.
“This is not about any one individual, but it is about answering the call of the American people,” he said. “We saw a huge outburst of democracy on Election Day — red states, blue states, purple states — and it wasn’t only a rejection of Donald Trump and his corruption and his wars and his cruelty, it was also about a call for a larger change to take on a broken economic system that’s rigged in favor of the very wealthy against working people, led by a corrupt political system.”
Voters, Van Hollen said, sent a message on Election Day to “reject the status quo and to reject business as usual. And to do that, I think we need new leadership.”
So, let’s dig in.
Wouldn’t it be unusual to replace a party leader in the wake of success?
Well, yes, as a matter of political history, party leaders on Capitol Hill tend to
The U.S. Department of the Interior could transfer swaths of public lands to state, local and tribal governments through sales or land swaps, according to the agency’s new strategic plan. Critics are concerned that many states, cities and counties can’t afford to maintain the lands, and would sell them to private interests — the first step toward a wholesale privatization of lands that have…
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Each week, MS NOW legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, co-host of our “Main Justice” podcast, answers legal questions from our audience in our MS NOW Membership exclusive series, “Answers with Andrew Weissmann.”
In the video above, Weissmann addresses this question from an MS NOW Member: “SCOTUS just authorized Trump to build a border wall in West Texas that would go through Big Bend National Park — how is this legal? Aren’t national parks considered protected land?”
Watch for Weissmann’s discussion of the congressional statute that gives the government leeway around certain environmental reviews and protections. He and MS NOW contributor Mary McCord also discussed the issue and likely actions of the incoming Democratic-majority Congress on Wednesday’s edition of their “Main Justice” podcast.
Other questions from MS NOW Members that Weissmann addressed this week:
“If Dems introduce legislative changes with ICE, excluding abolishing ICE, are they enforceable legally?” — C Rosie B.
“Before going after members of the Trump administration is there a legal pathway to strengthen the infrastructure of transparency within the government? If officials are able to withhold or destroy critical information, these investigations and calls for impeachment will go nowhere.” — MS NOW Member
To discuss governmental transparency, Weissmann was joined by Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation. She recently authored an MS NOW op-ed arguing that Democratic lawmakers need to focus on presidential recordkeeping if they hope to hold the Trump administration accountable for its actions.
Become an MS NOW Member to watch all of Weissmann’s answers, get the chance to submit your own questions and explore full episodes of all