House Democrats Begin Push for U.S. to Recognize Palestine

After watching Israel massacre innocents, demolish infrastructure, and incite famine in Gaza for almost two years, at least some congressional Democrats acknowledge it’s time to recognize Palestinian statehood. 

Axios has reported that over a dozen House Democrats have signed a letter calling on President Trump to recognize the state of Palestine. 

“This tragic moment has highlighted for the world the long overdue need to recognize Palestinian self-determination,” reads the letter addressed to Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “We encourage the governments of other countries that have yet to recognize Palestinian statehood, including the United States, to do so as well.” 

The United Kingdom, France, and Canada last week all moved to recognize Palestine as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza becomes undeniable. But in the United States, both Democratic and Republican leadership have remained staunch advocates of Israel, essentially signing blank check after blank check so that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can continue his indiscriminate assault on Gaza. This letter, although it’s unlikely to move the needle in any tangible way, is the most significant break from that course of action to date. Even Trump last week expressed mild displeasure at the carnage, claiming that he wants to find a way to end the starvation crisis. 

“The recognition would come by embracing the 22 state Arab League Plan just passed this week that calls for a Palestinian state and the recognition of Israel as a Jewish democratic state,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who is spearheading the effort. “We cannot be isolated from the rest of the free world.”

Progressive and vocal pro-Palestinian Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are surprisingly absent from the list of current signatories.  

The signers are as follows:

• Greg Casar 
• Lloyd Doggett 
• Veronica Escobar 
• Maxwell Frost 
• Al Green 
• Jared Huffman 
• Ro Khanna
• Jim McGovern
• Chellie Pingree
• Nydia Velazquez
• Mark Pocan 
• Bonnie Watson Coleman

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s ideology is making it difficult for federal authorities to actually meet his deportation quota.

The Justice Department is trying to distance itself from Miller and his expectations for federal agents to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day. In the midst of a lawsuit over ICE’s illegal sweeps in Los Angeles, the department informed federal judges that no such official quota existed.

“DHS has confirmed that neither ICE leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law,” a Justice Department attorney reported to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

DOJ attorney Yaakov Roth attributed the number to “anonymous reports in the newspapers,” but that’s not true. Miller was recorded stating the goal in May, when he told Fox News unequivocally that the administration was “looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day.”

The discrepancy between what White House advisers are willing to say on live air versus in court could boil down to a growing “gulf” that “may be undermining the DOJ’s already strained credibility with judges,” reported Politico. Skeptical judges have pointed to the figure as grounds to question whether the Trump administration’s immigration objectives are even legal.

Yet a Justice Department spokesperson insisted to the publication that there was no divergence between the White House and the law enforcement agency regarding its immigration stats and orders.

“The entire Trump Administration is united in fully enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and the DOJ continues to play an important role in vigorously defending the President’s deportation agenda in court,” a DOJ spokesperson told Politico.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is threatening to expel any Democratic legislators who don’t show up to the Texas Capitol by Monday afternoon—after Democrats fled the state to stop a vote on Republicans’ obviously gerrymandered congressional maps.

Fifty-one Texas Democrats left the Lone Star State over the weekend, thus denying Republicans the two-thirds quorum needed for votes in the state’s 150-member legislature. They plan to stay away for the duration of the two-week special legislation in which the House is scheduled to vote on the GOP’s new congressional maps.

“We’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” said state Representative Gene Wu, who chairs the Texas House Democratic Caucus. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”

In a statement Sunday, Abbott fulminated against the Democrats. “This truancy ends now,” he wrote. “The derelict Democrat House members must return to Texas and be in attendance when the House reconvenes at 3:00 PM on Monday, August 4, 2025.”

Citing a 2021 opinion by Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton—who, during this ongoing gerrymandering saga, has called Democrats “cowards” who ought to be “hunt[ed] down”—Abbott said he may treat quorum-breakers as having forfeited their offices, in which case they, purportedly, could be removed from office and “swiftly” replaced.

He also accused the Democratic lawmakers of possible felonies for receiving donations to offset daily $500 fines for their absence.

The Paxton opinion, however, does not say that lawmakers who break quorum can be removed, but rather that “this is a fact-specific question only resolvable by a court,” noted Politico’s Kyle Cheney. It also refrained from deciding on the constitutionality of breaking a quorum.

Texas Democrats replied to Abbott with a storied Texas battle cry, issuing a four-word statement: “Come and take it.”

The GOP’s official X page seems to have used a doctored photo of JD Vance in their birthday post for him, slimming the vice president down significantly.  

Users quickly pointed out that a post on Saturday celebrating the vice president’s 41st birthday did not in fact seem like the original photo.

“OMG. They heavily photoshopped JD Vance to make him look like he weighs 160 lbs. What a joke,” liberal commentator Chris D. Jackson commented on X. “Nothing is real with this administration. NOTHING. Original on the left. Doctored on the right. So embarrassing.”

Vance’s midsection looks much more rounded out and natural in the original, while the photo used in the post makes him look like he just started Ozempic. His left thumb also appears cut off in the photo, an obvious sign the photo was doctored.

While this is nowhere near their biggest issue, it’s clear that this administration is particularly concerned with keeping up appearances, to the point where they’ll engage in some casual internet deception. It’s just a bit harder to get away with when you’re the vice president of the United States. 

More than anything, this is a reminder to take the optics this administration puts out with a grain of salt. This is the same party that was justifying the strange, elderly bruises on President Trump’s hands by saying that he was just giving out too many handshakes. A JD Vance Ozempic edit is just par for the course. 

The president’s boasts about his pharmaceutical cuts aren’t just imaginary—they’re also gibberish.

Speaking with reporters in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Sunday evening, Donald Trump suggested that one of the administrative wins that Republican lawmakers should hinge their campaigns on during midterm elections is the “tremendous drop in drug prices.”

“You know we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent,” Trump said. “Because we’re going favored nations, we want the same price as Europe gets, we want the same price as other country gets.”

If Trump’s boast were true, drug companies would actually be paying consumers to take prescription drugs.

“Over the years, 25-30 years ago, it started where they were charging us much more and I put an end to it with a letter that you saw last week,” Trump said.

But the president has not tangibly lowered drug costs. Instead, his office issued letters Thursday to pharmaceutical companies, plainly asking them to lower their prices while vaguely threatening to deploy “every tool in our arsenal” to combat “abusive” prices should they refuse.

Trump has previously posited that the affordable price tags on pharmaceuticals in other countries were due to American federal subsidies that he claimed were financially offsetting their prices. But that’s not reality: The U.S. pays more for drugs because it’s an outlier among high-income, developed countries, which predominantly support universal public health coverage.

Trump’s first-term rule—“Most Favored Nation”—was focused on lowering the cost of Medicare payments on certain drugs, but the plan barely made it out of the White House. The policy was blocked by federal courts shortly after it was announced in late 2020 and was then rescinded by President Joe Biden in 2021.

In May, Trump penned an executive order that set a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to negotiate lower prices. If there was no deal, the U.S. would tie its drug prices to the costs set by other countries. But despite that threat, there hasn’t been any noticeable movement in either direction.

“I don’t know how anybody could win an election if they’re on the other side of that issue,” Trump said Sunday. “So we’ll be dropping drug prices, it will start over the next two to three months.

“But not just 50 percent or 25 percent, which normally would be a lot, because the rest of the world pays much less for the identical drug, and we’re going to be paying the same thing,” Trump said, promising that Americans would pay the same price for drugs as the company’s lowest international cost.

Other things that researchers point to as potentially resolving high drug prices in the U.S. include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies within the country, reworking insurance benefits to restrict out-of-pocket, and recentralizing price negotiations through the leverage of a single-payer system (such as Australia, Germany, the U.K., or any number of other wealthy nations), according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private American foundation focused on health care reform.

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement looks to bolster its ranks by 10,000—courtesy of the slush fund it is provided under Trump’s budget—it’s resorted to poaching local law enforcement officers who participated in ICE’s 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement to partner with the agency.

In recent days, ICE’s deputy director has reportedly sent out emails urging 287(g) participants to join the agency. “As someone who is currently supporting ICE through the 287(g) program, you understand the unique responsibility we carry in protecting our communities and upholding federal law,” the email says, per NBC News. The offer also carries potential incentives, including a $50,000 signing bonus and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment.

Jonathan Thompson, executive director and CEO of the National Sheriffs’ Association, told NBC the move was “inappropriate behavior of a partner organization,” adding, “We’re all on the same boat. And you just don’t treat friends or partners like this.”

Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, Florida, told MSNBC, “We’re a force multiplier to help ICE, and we’ve been spending a lot of time and effort. And the next thing we know, the people who we have submitted to ICE, who have been ICE-trained—on our dime, by the way—received a direct email from the administration.”

Judd reached for an idiom to convey the betrayal: “I mean, that’s biting the hand that’s feeding you.” Other Florida sheriffs also got figurative: “Quite frankly, it’s like letting the fox in the henhouse,” Brevard County’s sheriff told WFTV Channel 9. “We don’t want to burn bridges, but somebody lit the fire on the other end,” observed the sheriff of Bradford County.

A number of sheriffs are now demanding mea culpas from ICE. (Judd, for instance, told NBC that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should “get on her big girl pants and do what’s right. She needs to make sure that there’s an apology.”) Some are apparently receiving them: The sheriff’s office in Forsyth County, Georgia, reportedly received an apology from ICE’s Atlanta Field Office.

Just hours before Donald Trump announced he was firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Vice President JD Vance was celebrating some cherry-picked numbers from the latest jobs report. 

In a post on X Friday, Vance shared a graph based on the most recent BLS data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, claiming that in the last four months, native-born workers had gained a whopping 1.8  million jobs while foreign-born workers had lost 1.5 million jobs. The number of foreign-born workers included both documented and undocumented workers.

“I was told 6 months ago that Americans losing jobs and the foreign-born gaining jobs was an irreversible demographic fact,” Vance wrote. “Turns out you just needed a new president and a new immigration policy.”

As per usual, Vance was a little behind the curve. 

Within hours, Trump had directed his administration to fire BLS Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer, a Biden-appointee. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social, torching the very numbers Vance had been toasting him over. 

The latest jobs report revised the number of new jobs created by 258,000 in just two months—a revision on par with those that Trump had railed the Biden administration over ahead of the presidential election. It’s honestly amazing that Vance was able to find anything to celebrate in the dismal report, which saw only 73,000 jobs created in July, trailing estimates by more than 30,000.

Trump on Friday proved that fears about the president manipulating official data in his favor are founded, as he fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, due to a disappointing July jobs report.

The bureau’s report, released earlier in the day, showed a marked slowdown in job growth. It also revised previous months’ gains downward, shaving nearly 260,000 jobs off May’s and June’s report. Reacting to the news, Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested appointing “a MAGA Republican that President Trump knows and trusts” to head the BLS.

Shortly thereafter, Trump announced his plan to do just that.

“I was just informed that our Country’s ‘Jobs Numbers’ are being produced by a Biden Appointee,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday afternoon. He baselessly accused McEntarfer of having fabricated job numbers, both in July and in the lead-up to the 2024 election—when, he claims, McEntarfer attempted to help rig the election for Kamala Harris.

“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.” The president dubiously insisted that “the Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP.’”

The move is a remarkable one, as Trump has all but confessed to a plan to ensure that official data (whose integrity has already been imperiled by his cuts to federal statistical agencies) suits MAGA’s narrative.

Steve Benen of MSNBC last month observed that some were worried Trump would cook the books by, for example, telling “the Labor Department to manipulate the data and deceive the public.” However, Benen noted, “there’s been no evidence of statistics being altered to fit a political narrative” to date.

If Trump appoints a MAGA lackey to head the BLS, he wouldn’t have to tell anyone to do anything; the new commissioner would know that the bureau’s numbers are to reflect favorably on the administration no matter what.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be shutting down in response to federal funding cuts, it announced on Friday.

The closure marks a victory in Donald Trump’s war against public media. The CPB’s announcement cites the federal recissions package, which clawed back $1.1 billion in previously approved funding for the organization, and its exclusion from a fiscal spending bill for the first time in over five decades.

“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” said CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison.

The company, which helps support more than 1,500 locally managed public television and radio stations nationwide, including NPR and PBS, will begin an “orderly wind-down” of its operations, including the termination of the majority of its employees by September 30.

Organizations like NPR and PBS have been the targets of Republican ire for years over alleged liberal bias. The national organizations will survive the CPB’s announcement, since they receive most of their funding through nongovernmental sources. But small, local news stations that serve rural areas will be seriously affected by these closures.

Some stations, like KCUW in Pendleton, Oregon; KUHB in St. Paul, Alaska; and WVLS in Monterey, Virginia; rely on CPB for 90 percent of their funding, according to Axios.

“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said in the announcement. “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”

Ghislaine Maxwell has been moved to a minimum-security prison amid speculations that Donald Trump might pressure the Epstein co-conspirator to clear his name.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons confirmed that Maxwell had been moved to the Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a women-only, minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas. She had previously been held at FCI Tallashassee, a low-security facility in Florida.

Just 24 hours earlier, a Trump administration official told CNN that the government had no such plans to go easy on Maxwell. “No leniency is being given or discussed. That’s just false,” the official said. “The president himself has said that clemency for Maxwell is not something he is even thinking about at this time.”

Maxwell’s sudden move arrives amid swirling rumors that the president may try to offer her a presidential pardon in exchange for helping him disperse the heightened scrutiny over his numerous mentions in the Epstein files, which the government had coincidentally decided not to release.

The family of Virginia Giuffre, the former Trump employee who claimed she was recruited by Maxwell at 16 to travel with the convicted sex offender, previously warned against giving Maxwell leniency and blasted Maxwell’s favorable treatment in a Friday statement. 

It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received. Ghislaine Maxwell is a sexual predator who physically assaulted minor children on multiple occasions, and she should never be shown any leniency. Yet, without any notification to the Maxwell victims, the government overnight has moved Maxwell to a minimum security luxury prison in Texas. This is the justice system failing victims right before our eyes.  The American public should be enraged by the preferential treatment being given to a pedophile and a criminally charged child sex offender. The Trump administration should not credit a word Maxwell says, as the government itself sought charges against Maxwell for being a serial liar. This move smacks of a cover up. The victims deserve better.

Earlier this week, the president claimed that Epstein “stole” Giuffre, sparking widespread outrage and inviting even more questions about whether he had been aware of his old friend’s alleged sex trafficking.

Other high-profile inmates at the Maxwell’s new digs in the Lone Star State include fake-blood extractor Elizabeth Holmes and Jen Shah of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City infamy.