by Max Burns | Aug 7, 2026 | Congress, elections, Opinion
After weeks of silence, Maine Sen. Susan Collins finally announced Wednesday that she would oppose Todd Blanche’s nomination as the next attorney general. In a statement posted on X, Collins lambasted the acting attorney general for presiding over “actions that have further eroded the [Justice] Department’s independence.”
Collins specifically took issue with Blanche’s approval of a sweetheart deal between President Donald Trump and the IRS that “shield[ed] the President, his sons and the family business from IRS audits,” as well as Blanche’s recent call with religious leaders, in which he promised to expand Republicans’ war on abortion rights.
Collins has either ignored or actively blocked attempt after attempt by Democrats to restore trust and independence at the DOJ.
Collins’ objections all sound correct in isolation, but her admission that the Department of Justice has become a partisan weapon in Trump’s pocket raises a host of tough questions she cannot answer. Most pointedly, if Collins really believes what she’s saying, why is she only speaking up now? And why has she fought against Democratic efforts to bring accountability and independence back to the DOJ?
To understand Collins’ attempt to brand herself as an anti-Blanche warrior for public integrity, look no further than the latest Maine Senate polling. A recent University of New Hampshire poll found Collins trailing her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson 49-46, with a majority of voters disapproving of Collins’ job performance. Despite positioning herself as a check on Trump’s corruption, public voting data reveals she supported the MAGA agenda nearly 95% of the time. No wonder Trump endorsed Collins last month.
Collins’ opposition to Blanche’s confirmation offers her the chance to look like she’s
by Zeeshan Aleem | Aug 7, 2026 | Congress, elections, Opinion
Republicans swiftly rolled out attack ads against Abdul El-Sayed after the Democrat won Tuesday’s U.S. Senate primary election in Michigan. And those attack ads are racist as hell.
An ad released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee opens with an ominous-sounding soundtrack and calls El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health director, by the unshortened version of his first name and includes his middle name — “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.” Notably, the politician uses neither “Abdulrahman” nor his middle name in his public life, and the NRSC did not refer to him that way in its press releases before he won the primary. In the way that President Donald Trump uses “Barack Hussein Obama” to emphasize Obama’s Muslim heritage and insinuate he is a dangerous foreigner, the NRSC is using El-Sayed’s full name to do the same.
The voiceover in the spot goes on to describe El-Sayed as “the most radical Senate candidate in America” and shows him saying, “I’m pretty damn dangerous.” That’s a clip from El-Sayed at an event describing himself as a left-wing political threat — in this case to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his leadership of the Democratic establishment. But then the ad charges past innuendo, and ludicrously and falsely says he “pledged support for the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, a designated foreign terrorist group.” If you read the 2011 HuffPost op-ed the ad cites to justify that claim, El-Sayed said nothing of the sort.
There’s a long history to the commingling of attacks on minorities and left-wing ideology.
Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the Senate race, also posted a scaremongering video on X about El-Sayed, and he
by Ja'han Jones | Aug 7, 2026 | Opinion
President Donald Trump and his administration have made a habit of ensuring that their allies — if not his family — are given access to lucrative federal contracts. And one of the latest examples has potentially ominous ramifications for immigrant children under the government’s control.
Last week, the administration officially let expire its contracts with dozens of law firms that had provided legal services to undocumented children who have been deemed unaccompanied, services that included defending their legal protections from deportation.
And now the administration has awarded a no-bid, $150 million contract to a small Texas law firm with ties to Trump — and which seems to have few attorneys with experience in immigration law.
As NPR reported:
The firm, Houston-based Burke Law Group, specializes in advising “companies on complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters,” its website states. Out of 24 attorneys, only two specialize in immigration and asylum cases.
“Instead of taking care of these children, the government is instead implementing things such as awarding a contract to a private small law firm in Texas with no discernible experience in relevant immigration law or child welfare,” said Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, the deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit that provided legal services to unaccompanied minors.
There’s certainly reason to doubt this arrangement is designed to provide immigrant children with robust legal services — especially considering the firm’s ties to the Trump administration:
A co-founder of Burke Law Group, Marcella Burke, served in the first Trump administration in both the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. And a founding partner, Jeffrey Hall, currently serves as an assistant administrator at the EPA.
It’s hard to
by Zeeshan Aleem | Aug 6, 2026 | Congress, elections, Opinion
The prevailing wisdom among centrist Democrats is that former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan on Tuesday spells disaster for the party’s chances of winning the seat — and jeopardizes its odds of clinching a majority in the senate. El-Sayed’s boldly progressive positions, according to this view, will alienate the electorate of a purple state whose statewide outcomes are determined by moderate swing voters.
But a recent study by two political scientists indicates that this view is wrong — and that even in the Rust Belt a left-wing candidate like El-Sayed is not doomed by virtue of supporting Medicare for All and cutting off military aid to Israel. A big reason for that is because of the way President Donald Trump has scrambled our politics and transformed the way Americans think of the left-right political spectrum.
Plunging trust in institutions and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus have made the banner of “anti-establishment” and “populist” positioning more salient than conventional ideology.
A lot of political scientific literature supports the idea that from the late 20th century through the mid-2000s, there were clear rewards for candidates in federal elections to take moderate positions and penalties for taking extreme ones. But there’s evidence indicating that during the 2010s — around the time of Trump’s rise and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ insurgency in the Democratic primaries — that dynamic began to change. Stanford University professor Adam Bonica and University of California professor Jacob Grumbach recently released a working paper — currently under peer review at a journal — that analyzes congressional elections from 2016 to 2024, and it found
by Jarvis DeBerry | Aug 6, 2026 | Opinion, Politics, White House
We shouldn’t know who David Hearn is. The 67-year-old placed ninth in a white water canoe race at the 1996 Olympics — a distant finish in the near-distant past that underscores the point that, in 2026, he should be blissfully anonymous.
But in a move that violated the legitimate expectation that our government will not wrongly scapegoat its people, the Trump administration slimed Hearn’s name. In June, the Justice Department made the outrageous claim that Hearn had vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington and charged him with a felony count of destruction of property, which brings a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Rather than admit to a botched renovation, Trump’s despotic administration charged Hearn, and three others, with crimes.
Hearn was one of several people who reportedly reached into the 104-year-old Reflecting Pool and touched pieces of the recently installed liner they said had peeled off, and rather than admitting to a botched renovation, Trump’s despotic administration charged Hearn, and three others, with crimes. After leaving them in this legal peril for more than a month, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Friday that her office was dropping the case against Hearn and the others after documents from the Interior Department made clear that they didn’t vandalize the pool, but rather that a contractor on the project did poor work.
This is not a “no harm, no foul” situation — because unwarranted attention from the federal government is harm in and of itself. Yes, Pirro throwing out the cases is better than her continuing to pursue them, but dismissals and acquittals will never be as significant as not having been wrongly prosecuted
by Ja'han Jones | Aug 6, 2026 | Opinion, White House
New Mexico is formally suing Donald Trump’s Justice Department, alleging that officials — including attorney general nominee Todd Blanche — are “stonewalling” the state’s investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The lawsuit, filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, quotes a 2021 finding from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit that the Epstein case’s underlying facts constituted a “national disgrace” — and it accuses Blanche, currently the acting attorney general, and other DOJ officials of perpetuating it by withholding key unredacted materials needed for New Mexico’s probe.
According to the lawsuit:
Current Acting United States Attorney General Todd Blanche and members of United States Department of Justice (“USDOJ”) leadership in Washington, D.C., the Southern District of New York, and the District of New Mexico perpetuate that disgrace. Their conduct now actively harms victims and undermines the public interest, by stonewalling New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s ongoing criminal investigation into conduct by Epstein and his co-conspirators at “Zorro Ranch” located outside Santa Fe.
The ranch reportedly was a site that Epstein, a former associate of Trump’s, envisioned using as part of a scheme to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating various women. And it’s the site of an unconfirmed allegation that Epstein had the bodies of two girls buried on the estate.
New Mexico’s efforts to investigate Epstein’s ranch have apparently been met with federal resistance during both of Trump’s terms. Even Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., a staunch Trump loyalist and the House Oversight Committee chairman, has raised questions about why the federal government “asked New Mexico to stop” its investigation in in 2019.
“We want to
