Republicans Revive Their Dark Quest to Take Over D.C. Home Rule

Republicans are trying to loosen gun laws in the nation’s capital.

On Sunday, the House Committee on Appropriations released the text of its financial services and general government, or FSGG, appropriations bill—and much of it contains anti–home rule riders that take even more sovereignty from Washington, D.C, and its residents.

The most alarming rider in the bill would “permit anyone with a concealed carry permit from any state or territory to carry a concealed handgun in D.C. and on [public transportation].” Current D.C. law requires the permit and weapon itself to be registered with the city’s Metro Police.

This is just one aspect of the Trump administration’s effort to recreate the city in MAGA’s image. Republicans have long cast D.C. as some unstable, crime-ridden hell hole, even as crime has gone down in nearly every category except motor vehicle theft. Robbery is down 28 percent, homicides are down 8 percent, and violent crime in general has dropped 25 percent.

Even if crime in D.C. were as bad as Trump wants us to believe, how exactly would loosening concealed carry restrictions help that? A guy from a different state with an itchy trigger finger would be able to pull out his piece on the Metro. That’s supposed to make the city and its residents feel safer?

This is just one dark aspect of the Republicans’ attempted takeover of D.C. The rest of the bill focuses on destroying D.C.’s right to control its own funds, particularly on political issues. As longtime D.C. House Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton reported, the bill:

• Would prohibit the use of funds to commercialize recreational marijuana.
• Would prohibit D.C. from spending its own local funds on abortion services for low-income women.
• Would prohibit D.C. from spending its own local funds to enforce its vehicle emission standards.
• Would prohibit D.C. from using local funds to carry out its automated traffic enforcement law.
• Would prohibit the use of funds to implement, administer, or enforce any COVID–19 mask or vaccine mandate.
• Would prohibit the use of funds to implement the Insurance Regulation Amendment Act of 2024, which relates to reproductive health care and gender-affirming care.

This is a real city being treated like a vassal state of MAGA.

“I am outraged at the number and scope of anti-D.C. home rule riders in the bill released today,” Norton said in a press release on Sunday. “In my long career representing D.C. residents in Congress, I have rarely seen a bill as unreasonable and patronizing to the more than 700,000 people who live in the nation’s capital as this one. I will use every tool at my disposal to stop these riders from becoming law, and I commit to reminding my fellow lawmakers across the aisle that D.C. residents deserve the same consideration as their own constituents at every opportunity.”

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan on Monday issued an opinion for our times, ordering the Trump administration “to stop violating the law!”

Specifically, the Clinton-appointed judge ruled that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget broke the law by taking down the public apportionment website where, under a 2022 law that Congress made permanent in 2023, it’s mandated to report executive decisions on federal spending within two business days.

The administration removed the website in March, and, soon after, OMB Director Russell Vought sent a letter to lawmakers saying the office decided to flout Congress and scrap the database due to the purportedly “sensitive,” “pre-decisional,” and “deliberative” nature of the information it is required to reveal.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Protect Democracy—watchdog organizations that rely on the OMB database—challenged the move, and Sullivan on Monday issued a partial summary judgment ordering that the administration comply with the law and bring back the website.

According to Sullivan, Trump and Vought relied on “an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power” to “claim that their apportionment decisions—which are legally binding and result in the actual spending of public funds—cannot be publicly disclosed because they are not final decisions about how to administer the spending of public funds.”

While the Trump administration argued that the 2022 law encroaches on the executive branch’s authority, its objections amount to “a policy disagreement” with no “constitutional foundation,” Sullivan wrote.

“Defendants are complaining about the extra work the 2022 and 2023 Acts require. This is a management issue; not a constitutional one,” he wrote. And the fact that the office had previously maintained the database for nearly three years “further diminish[es] any argument that complying with the disclosure requirement is overly cumbersome or places an impossible burden.”

“The law is clear,” said Sullivan: “Congress has sweeping authority to require public disclosure of how the Executive Branch is apportioning the funds appropriated by Congress,” and “there is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money. Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”

Remember all of those hefty handouts Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski won in exchange for sealing the deal on Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill? It looks like the president has found a way to get out of delivering.

“I feel cheated,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News Friday. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”

Ahead of the bill’s passage earlier this month, Murkowski had co-sponsored an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. Her measure would ensure a 12-month window for clean energy projects, which would end in 2027. These tax credits would help to alleviate a looming energy crisis along Alaska’s Railbelt, the electrical grid that serves roughly 75 percent of the population, due to declining resources of natural gas.

Trump threw a wrench in that agreement Friday when he issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects. The order directs Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.”

Now Murkowski claims that she and her pals were duped. “Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes,” she told the Anchorage Daily News.

She torched Trump’s order as “reckless,” claiming that it directly “goes against” what he signed into law earlier this month with the budget.

Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the Senate, green-lighting the gutting of social programs such as SNAP and Medicaid while extending tax breaks for the rich, and agreeing to add trillions to the national deficit. She’d sent the bill back to the House with the hopes that lawmakers would continue to refine the massive tax and spending bill, only for it to be immediately passed and then signed into law.

But under the Trump administration, which regularly skirts congressional authority to withhold federal spending and obliterate government agencies, lawmakers should know better than to think the president actually cares about the law of the land.

The U.K.’s Stop Trump Coalition and other protesters are planning to put Vice President JD Vance’s luxury vacation spot on blast.

Vance and his family have a trip scheduled for the Cotswolds, a countryside region in Southwest England often frequented by the rich and famous (Ellen DeGeneres currently resides there). They’re expected to be met with a wide variety of demonstrators—anti-Trump, pro-Palestinian, trade union members, and environmentalists.

“JD Vance is every bit as unwelcome in the UK as Donald Trump,” a representative from the Stop Trump Coalition told The Telegraph. “We remember how Vance cut short his ski trip in Vermont because he was so enraged by the sight of a few protesters. We are sure that, even in the Cotswolds, he will find the resistance waiting.” The group also plans to protest President Trump’s upcoming visit to Scotland, which begins on Friday.

Vance will be in London in mid-August, then head to Cotswolds, and later to Scotland. The vice president has been met with vitriol on his vacations thus far, speaking to the mostly negative feelings that much of the public has for the current administration, both home and abroad. He and his family were booed ruthlessly while they were at Disneyland earlier this month.

“Hope you enjoy your family time, @JDVance,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “The families you’re tearing apart certainly won’t.”

According to a new report, Jeffrey Epstein’s first accuser, on two occasions, mentioned Donald Trump’s name to law enforcement as an associate worth investigating. The revelation raises the possibility that files related to the case of the deceased sex trafficker contain information that would embarrass the president.

Artist Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein from 1995 to 1996 and says she was sexually assaulted by him and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, told The New York Times that, when she spoke to law enforcement about Epstein in 1996 and 2006, she urged them to investigate his associates, including now-President Trump.

The Times report describes an unpleasant encounter Farmer recalls with Trump at Epstein’s Manhattan offices in 1995.

After Farmer was called in to work by Epstein one night, she said Trump arrived and “started to hover over” her, while staring “at her bare legs.”

Farmer, who was wearing running shorts, grew frightened, before Epstein entered and told Trump, “No, no, She’s not here for you.”

Epstein and Trump then are said to have left the room, at which point Farmer heard Trump speculate that she was 16 years old.

While Farmer reports having no “alarming interactions” with Trump afterward and “did not see him engage in inappropriate conduct with girls or women,” her experience—which the White House fervently denies happened, but which is corroborated by accounts from her mother and sister—was apparently enough for her to bring up Trump’s name when speaking to the New York Police Department and FBI.

The report, as the Times notes, shows how the Epstein files may “contain material that is embarrassing or politically problematic to” the president, as he continues to dismiss the case as a Democratic hoax, disowning his supporters who remain invested in it after his DOJ effectively closed the case earlier this month.

Details about Trump’s long-documented relationship to Epstein are continuing to surface. Days before the Times report, The Wall Street Journal unearthed a sexually suggestive birthday card Trump reportedly gave Epstein in 2003. (Trump has denied the veracity of the report and is now suing the paper.)

Meanwhile, when asked whether his name appears in the Epstein files, Trump has insisted that the files were concocted by the previous two Democratic administrations.

Donald Trump has become so desperate in trying to change the subject from Jeffrey Epstein, that he’s now started ranting about imprisoning former President Barack Obama.

During a posting spree on Truth Social Sunday night, Trump posted a series of lame memes attacking Obama, after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard suggested last week that the former president should be prosecuted for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy.”

Gabbard released a declassified report alleging that members of the Obama administration had “manufactured and politicized” intelligence to create the narrative that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. It’s worth noting that shortly after the 2016 election, the Obama administration insisted that hackers had not affected the vote tallies.

Gabbard said she would deliver her findings to the Department of Justice to seek long-awaited accountability on behalf of Trump, who, despite twice finding his way back into the White House anyway, obviously never emotionally recovered from the so-called Russiagate “hoax.”

On Truth Social, Trump posted a Brady Bunch–style photo grid of Obama Cabinet officials wearing prison jumpsuits, and a video of different Democratic officials declaring that “no one is above the law” while circus music played. He also shared an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and donning prison orange.

This is the third week of fallout from the Trump administration’s disastrous rollout of the Epstein files—or lack thereof. The Justice Department announced earlier this month that the sex offender kept no incriminating “client list,” even though Trump’s attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk, sparking widespread backlash among Trump’s conspiracy-addled following. Now Trump hopes to shift the flames by tossing them another political enemy.

Donald Trump just made good on his threat to sue The Wall Street Journal for reporting on his lewd birthday note to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The president filed a lawsuit in Miami court Friday against Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, and two Wall Street Journal reporters, according to Reuters. The two journalists named in the lawsuit are likely Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, whose names appeared in the story byline.

The Journal reported Thursday that in 2003, Trump penned Epstein a “bawdy” note inside of a doodle of a voluptuous woman as part of a book of birthday notes for the financier. The president wrote that he had “certain things in common” with the child sex offender, and wished his “pal” that “everyday may be a wonderful secret.”

In a post on Truth Social Thursday night, Trump fumed over the report, threatening legal action.

“The Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, personally, were warned directly by President Donald J. Trump that the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued,” he wrote.

Trump said he’d insisted the letter was fake, but that the publication had proceeded with the “false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway.”

“President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” Trump wrote.

By the next morning, Trump was ranting about getting Murdoch to testify in court. And within 24 hours of the story being published, a lawsuit had been filed. Talk about promises made and promises kept.

Trump’s lawsuit against the publication isn’t the least bit surprising—he has a tendency to sue any outlet that makes him look bad.

Paramount recently agreed to a $16 million settlement with Trump over the editing of CBS’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, despite CBS calling the suit “completely without merit.” The settlement summoned criticism that Paramount was attempting to ease its sale to Skydance Media, which will require approval from the Trump administration. On Friday, there was rampant speculation that openly criticizing the deal had cost Stephen Colbert his late-night gig.

Earlier this year, ABC News agreed to pay Trump $15 million to settle his defamation lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’s use of the phrase “liable for rape” while discussing Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict, which technically found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape. That settlement showed the then president-elect exactly how he can silence the press during his second administration.

This story has been updated.

Trump is purposely using a construction project that his own appointees are making more expensive as grounds to pick a fight and potentially fire his nemesis, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The Fed building, opened in 1937, began undergoing plans for renovation in 2020 under the first Trump administration. While the architects wanted to give the Fed glass walls to indicate its transparency, three Trump appointees insisted on marble, which was much more expensive. One of those appointees was Duncan Stroik, who is now an architecture professor at Notre Dame. He acknowledged that the appointees on the commission willfully ignored the cost implications of sticking to marble.

“If they wanted to play the cost game, you do a marble facade and you do the glass facade and you compare the cost,” Stroik told the Associated Press. “And you know, they never did that.”

The project is now $600 million over budget, with an expected total cost of $2.5 billion, including additions of an underground parking garage and atria. The Trump administration is now blaming this on Powell, framing him as an irresponsible spender.

“Chairman Jerome Powell has grossly mismanaged the Fed,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote last week on X. “While continuing to run a deficit since FY23 (the first time in the Fed’s history), the Fed is way over budget on the renovation of its headquarters. Now up to $2.5 billion, roughly $700 million over its initial cost. These renovations include terrace rooftop gardens, water features, VIP elevators, and premium marble. The cost per square foot is $1,923--double the cost for renovating an ordinary historic federal building. The Palace of Versailles would have cost $3 billion in today’s dollars!”

But none of this was Powell’s idea.

Trump has sought to remove Powell as Fed chair for some time now, as he has consistently refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands to lower interest rates and remained brutally honest about the negative inflation impacts of Trump’s trade war. And while Trump has said that he won’t fire Powell outright, he certainly seems to be exhausting less direct methods.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now allowing ICE to use U.S. military bases to detain undocumented immigrants as part of Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts. 

In a brief letter signed Tuesday, Hegseth approved Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey “for temporary use by the Department of Homeland Security to house illegal aliens.”

Hegseth insisted that the policy would “not negatively affect military training, operations, readiness, or other military requirements, including National Guard and Reserve readiness.” 

So, somehow having trangender people serve in the military affects readiness, but refashioning military facilities as internment camps doesn’t? In the case of both policies, the Trump administration is carrying out a wildly radical agenda that will only result in more human suffering. 

It was first reported in May that Camp Atterbury was being considered as a possible detention facility, as immigration arrests in Indiana surged. The base, which is operated by the National Guard, was one of a dozen military bases that housed hundreds of Afghan refugees in its barracks starting in 2021. 

In a statement Friday, Representative André Carson said he’d asked the federal government to confirm whether it intended to use the military training center in May, but received no reply. This week, the Indiana Democrat got his answer.  

“I remain concerned on this use of Camp Atterbury given the deplorable and inhumane conditions at other ICE detention facilities nationwide,” Carson said in a statement, stressing the “alarmingly high rates” of detainee deaths during the second Trump administration. At least 12 people have died in ICE custody so far this year. 

“This is a dark time for our nation. I will continue fighting these unlawful, cruel policies and will actively monitor activities at Camp Atterbury to ensure humane and sanitary conditions,” Carson added. 

A group of Democratic lawmakers from New Jersey also released a statement condemning the Trump administration’s decision. 

“This is an inappropriate use of our national defense system and militarizes a radical immigration policy that has resulted in the inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants and unlawful deportation of U.S. citizens, including children, across the country,” said the statement from Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, and Representatives Herb Conaway Jr.,  Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez, Frank Pallone, Nellie Pou, Donald Norcross, LaMonica McIver, and Josh Gottheimer.

Dick Durbin is leading the Senate Judiciary Committee in an effort to receive more transparency regarding the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, particularly an order from Attorney General Pam Bondi for FBI agents to “flag” any mention they made of President Trump.

In a letter addressed to Bondi on Friday, Durbin wrote: “According to information my office received, you then pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division (IMD), including the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” he added.

There was likely something for those agents to flag, given Trump’s well-documented relationship with the defamed sex trafficker. There’s the 2002 New York magazine quote where Trump referred to Epstein, his friend of “15 years,” as a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.” And there was the recent Wall Street Journal report that showed Trump writing a strange birthday message to Epstein in 2006, with the closing line “may every day be another wonderful secret.”

But what else was flagged under Bondi’s watch, and what happened to it? Durbin’s report asks just that:

Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?

1. Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.

2. What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?

Trump’s rollout of the Epstein files has been so disorderly that it has Democrats and the most hardcore MAGA loyalists asking the exact same question: What is the truth about Epstein?

The due date for Durbin and the committee’s request is August 1. Trump and Bondi have yet to comment.