by Kai Ma | Jul 28, 2026 | Opinion
In a more normal time, South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden would have easily locked down the Republican nomination before this week.
An establishment conservative, he served in the state legislature for 18 years before becoming lieutenant governor for seven years, then becoming governor when Kristi Noem joined the Trump administration last year.
He’s also a native South Dakotan who served in the state National Guard and worked as a rancher and welder before going into politics.
Any challenger to Rhoden would have needed to persuade major donors to spend money on the race in a year when they’re hoping to minimize their losses in more competitive general election races elsewhere. A candidate would have also needed to pull in thousands of smaller donors with populist ideas that capitalized on voter discontent.
But Rhoden isn’t facing a typical challenger. In Tuesday’s primary runoff, he’s facing multimillionaire Toby Doeden, an entrepreneur, real estate developer, podcaster and bitcoin investor who has put $4 million of his own money into the race.
Wealthy Americans have always sought political office.
Wealthy Americans have always sought political office. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were among the richest Americans of their day. But until recently, personal wealth wasn’t nearly as useful as a campaign asset.
That changed after the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which held that candidates have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of their own money on their campaigns.
In 1992, billionaire Ross Perot became the wealthiest person to ever run for president at the time. Since then, billionaires Steve Forbes, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and Vivek Ramaswamy have also mounted presidential campaigns that
by Zeeshan Aleem | Jul 28, 2026 | Congress, Opinion, White House
The late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose funeral services begin Tuesday in Washington, has been praised by his supporters as a man of conviction who never shied away from his belief that America had a duty to project its strength worldwide. Conversely, critics will remember Graham as an ally of President Donald Trump who abandoned his stated principles in order to be closer to the seat of power.
But these accounts miss something vital about the South Carolina lawmaker’s legacy: Graham was an operator who used his carefully cultivated proximity to the president to have a better chance of persuading Trump to adopt his own ultra-hawkish foreign policy goals. Their relationship was a two-way street, one that culminated in Trump’s disastrous decision to launch a war with Iran.
Graham and Trump formed a marriage of convenience based on their distinct but overlapping ideological worldviews.
The consequences of the Graham-Trump collaboration were vividly captured in a recent report by The Wall Street Journal based on unreleased footage from a documentary about Graham that was being filmed before he died. In one scene reported on by the Journal, Graham is outright giddy after Trump started the Iran war:
“Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried,” [Graham] tells the crew, laughing loudly just after U.S. strikes on Iran began in February. “How long have we been pushing this?”
He then tells the crew that Trump was equally happy about the war. “I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, ‘Best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up.”
Graham also goes on to boast about how his view prevailed over those of the isolationists
by Hayes Brown | Jul 28, 2026 | Congress, Opinion
During his 2022 campaign for Senate, then-Lt. Gov John Fetterman of Pennsylvania declared that if elected, he would vote to eliminate the Senate filibuster. At the time, 48 Democratic senators had backed overriding the 60-vote threshold in the name of passing an updated Voting Rights Act and codifying Roe v. Wade. They fell two votes short, though, thanks to Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Fetterman’s win that November meant Democrats needed just one of Manchin or Sinema to reform the filibuster. Yet neither budged. Now they are retired, but Fetterman declared in a Washington Post op-ed Monday that he intends to take up their cause.
Halfway through his term, Fetterman now claims that he has seen the light: The filibuster is in fact a necessary tool for compromise. Every stale argument Fetterman makes mirrors those made by his former colleagues and shows how much he shares their cowardice.
Every stale argument Fetterman makes mirrors those made by his former colleagues and shows how much he shares their cowardice.
Much of Fetterman’s essay is a counterfactual, highlighting what the GOP would have done had Democrats lifted the filibuster during the Biden administration. “If we win the Senate, we will not have enough votes to override the 60-vote threshold on our own and will once again have to find common ground with our Republican colleagues,” Fetterman declared, before smarmily adding, “assuming the Democratic Party’s narrative on the filibuster remains what it has become under Trump: that we love it.”
First off, senator, speak for yourself. Second, I must have missed the great feats of legislative compromise that have taken place with Republicans
by Ja'han Jones | Jul 28, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion, White House
The federal immigration agent who fatally shot a man in Maine is facing allegations that are raising questions about the hiring standards at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Two former wives’ allegations against ICE agent David Brouillette are fueling the public relations disaster surrounding yet another death in the Trump regime’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown. (The Associated Press, which extensively detailed the domestic abuse allegations, said Brouillette did not respond to its requests for comment.)
Brouillette fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national, during a traffic stop in Maine two weeks ago. The Department of Homeland Security’s official explanation for the shooting was that Guerrero tried to flee in his vehicle and that Brouillette shot him while “fearing for public safety.”
Amid public outcry — and recent polling showing that most Americans have little or no confidence in ICE — the Trump administration said it will investigate the matter. White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN on Sunday that the vetting process may have failed in this case and that the process is under review.
But the fact that people with disturbing backgrounds have been hired to work for ICE has been no secret whatsoever — and there have been heaps of evidence showing that the administration lowered ICE’s agency standards to aid Trump’s mass deportation push.
Last fall, NBC News reported that ICE’s hiring push led to some recruits being allowed to participate in training despite criminal backgrounds and having failed drug tests. In April, The Associated Press raised fresh concerns about ICE’s vetting practices, spotlighting various problematic hires. In response to the AP’s report, DHS told the outlet that vetting “is an
by Dr. Martha Edwards MD, FAAP | Jul 28, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
Parents deserve honest answers about vaccines. They deserve physicians who will listen to their concerns, explain the evidence and help them make informed decisions. Above all, they deserve confidence that the nation’s leading public health institutions are communicating science and not suggesting that there’s uncertainty where none exists.
That is why the recent changes to information presented on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website regarding vaccines and autism are so concerning. News organizations reported in November that the website had been wrongly edited to say, “The statement ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim.” Last week, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said that in exchange for his support for Dr. Erica Schwartz to lead the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services made “a sign of good faith” and “modified the CDC’s autism and vaccines webpage.”
The science has not changed: Vaccines do not cause autism.
But those changes have done nothing to mitigate the concerns. The website continues to wrongly say that a rejection of a link between vaccines and autism isn’t based on evidence. It also says, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
As pediatricians who have spent our careers caring for children and their families, we know that trust is one of the most valuable tools in medicine. Trust takes years to build and moments to erode. At a time when public confidence in health institutions has already been tested, government agencies should be strengthening that trust by communicating what decades of scientific evidence have consistently shown, not reopening questions that have long been settled.
The science has not changed: Vaccines do not
by Julio Ricardo Varela | Jul 28, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion, Supreme Court, World
At the end of June, President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies lost — for now — the Supreme Court fight over birthright citizenship. Vice President JD Vance said MAGA needed to keep fighting birthright citizenship after the ruling in Trump v. Barbara, but it’s set its sights on a different nativist victory, this time relying on a set of racist laws the high court approved back at the start of the 20th century.
Just two weeks after the ruling on June 30 didn’t go MAGA’s way, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., introduced H.R. 9724, the End Birthright Citizenship for Territories Act. The bill would deny children born on or after Jan. 1, 2027, in Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands automatic citizenship unless at least one parent is already a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident. Griffith calls it a crackdown on “birth tourism,” and the bill doesn’t hide where its legal authority comes from.“The application under the Barbara case of birthright citizenship in the U.S. territories differs from what is established in the 50 U.S. States according to Supreme Court cases,” Griffith noted in a July 16 e-newsletter about the bill. “The birthright discrepancy between the territories and the States dates to legal cases beginning in the early 20th century known as the Insular Cases.”
Those Insular Cases are generally considered so racist that even Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch called them “shameful” back in 2022.
No matter how many times this country calls me a U.S. citizen, Washington still isn’t sure what to do with the place where I was born.
For those unfamiliar with the
