House Kicks Off Chaotic Battle After Passing Spending Bill

The Republican-controlled House has passed another stopgap bill to keep the government chugging along until late November.

The final tally Friday morning was 217–212, with just one Democrat—Maine Representative Jared Golden—voting alongside all but two Republicans to pass it. Conservative Representatives Tim Burchett and Victoria Spartz sided with the rest of the Democrats in voting against the continuing resolution.

The measure now advances to the Senate, where Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has already promised to defeat it. In its stead, Democratic leadership in the upper chamber have proposed a separate funding plan—though that is also expected to be rejected on the Senate floor late Friday.

The House bill extends the current level of federal funding without making any changes to federal policy. It will keep the government up and running until November 21, which will likely cause another kerfuffle on the eve of Congress’s Thanksgiving recess.

The Democratic Senate bill, meanwhile, would initiate a series of policy changes, including extending Obamacare subsidies and nixing the “big, beautiful” bill’s Medicaid cuts. That plan would fund the government through October 31.

House Speaker Mike Johnson addressed Schumer shortly after the vote, informing the New York politico that the ball was now in his court.

“I hope he does the right thing,” Johnson told reporters. “I hope he does not choose to shut the government down and inflict pain, unnecessarily, on the American people. I hope that they will vote on this clean, short-term CR, so that we can continue the work to get our appropriations done.”

If Schumer’s recent actions are anything to go by, the senator is unlikely to force his caucus into a shutdown showdown. Months ago, when the party was unified in its opposition to Trump’s landmark legislation, Schumer argued that a government shutdown would have “consequences for America that are much, much worse” than the president’s $880 billion cut to social programs.

A shutdown would give the Trump administration “carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now,” Schumer said at the time. “Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired.”

The FBI is rearing up to target transgender people, according to a new report by independent national security journalist Ken Klippenstein.

Discussions are reportedly underway in the Trump administration to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of last week’s shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Authorities say the roommate and apparent romantic partner of Tyler Robinson, the alleged gunman, is “transitioning from male to female.” Notably, Robinson’s partner had no prior knowledge of the attack and “has been very cooperative with authorities,” according to Utah Governor Spencer Cox. There “is not a solid understanding” as to whether Robinson’s relationship was connected to his alleged actions, a federal official told NBC.

And yet the attack is, per Klippenstein, being used to justify plans to go after trans individuals by labeling them “nihilistic violent extremists.” Klippenstein reports that “the new classification, sources say, gives Trump officials political (and media) cover.”

“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” said a senior intelligence official, one of two national security personnel to tell Klippenstein of the FBI’s plan. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”

Klippenstein’s report offers yet another example of the Trump administration and broader MAGA right seizing on Kirk’s death as a flimsy pretext to crack down on purported undesirables.

Donald Trump’s quest to dig up more dirt on New York Attorney General Letiita James has not gone according to plan—and now the man put in charge of the operation could be on the outs.

Trump is reportedly considering axing the attorney tasked with finding evidence that James committed mortgage fraud. Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has already been informed that the president intends to fire him, reported ABC News Thursday night. Siebert’s last day on the job is expected to be Friday.

Federal prosecutors were unable to find incriminating evidence that James had knowingly committed fraud when she purchased a home in Virginia in 2023. But the lack of proof apparently didn’t matter to the Trump administration, which had ordered Siebert to bring criminal charges against her.

While Trump only nominated Siebert for the job in May, the decision to give him the boot a few short months later “could throw into crisis one of the most prominent U.S. attorney’s offices, which handles a bulk of the country’s espionage and terrorism cases, and heighten concerns about Trump’s alleged use of the DOJ to target his political adversaries,” according to ABC News.

Trump administration officials intend to replace Siebert with someone who they believe will be even harder on James, sources familiar with the matter told ABC.

New York’s top cop has become one of the president’s chief legal adversaries since she bested him in his bank fraud case in 2024. Trump’s revenge began to take form in April, when his administration launched an investigation into James’s personal finances, accusing her of lying on her bank statements in order to obtain better mortgage rates.

At the time, Trump referred to James as a “totally corrupt politician,” a “wacky crook,” and accused James—the first woman of color to hold statewide office in New York—of being “racist.”

James has since been a star of Trump’s political retribution tour, as she has repeatedly promised to hold him to account, regardless of his presidential status. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, James has filed 32 lawsuits against his administration. They range from legal rejections of Trump’s tariffs to fighting his “big, beautiful bill’s” attempt to strip Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood clinics.

Despite the apparent illegality of forcing Jimmy Kimmel out of late night, the Trump administration is moving full steam ahead on its media hit list.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr violated the First Amendment and one of Donald Trump’s executive orders Wednesday when he threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of the networks still airing the late-night comedian. Kimmel supposedly made controversial comments about the political affiliation of Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin. (Kimmel said that MAGA was rushing to claim that Tyler Robinson was “anything other than one of them”—which is technically true.)

The successive blocks to fall involved Nexstar, one of the largest owners of ABC stations in the country, pulling the plug on Jimmy Kimmel Live! mere hours after Carr’s comments. In the background of the whiplash decision, Nexstar is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar acquisition that requires the FCC’s approval—a nearly identical series of events to the ones that led to Stephen Colbert’s cancellation by Paramount in July.

Public backlash against Carr’s decision was not a deterrent. In an appearance on Scott Jennings’s radio show Thursday, Carr suggested that the popular daytime talk show The View could be the next target of the Trump administration. He questioned whether it should be considered a ​“​bona fide news show” and therefore if it was subject to the “equal time” broadcast rule, which requires news broadcasters to literally dole out equal time to both political parties.

“I would assume you can make the argument that The View is a bona fide news show, but I’m not so sure about that,” Carr said. “And I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs, and therefore exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.”

What exactly makes The View worthy of being the next focus of the Trump administration’s censorship campaign is not clear, though the president has a long and nasty history with one of the show’s most famous co-hosts, Rosie O’Donnell. The current hosts include Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as spokeswoman for the Department of Defense during Trump’s first term. She and many of her co-hosts are outspoken Trump critics.

Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner on Thursday seemingly defended the censorship of anti-Trump talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel: “We want an open market for speech,” she said. “But speech comes with more than responsibility, more than accountability. It comes with the expectation that we’ll have integrity when we use our speech.”

A glaring issue with Faulkner’s statement is that her standard, “integrity,” is in the eye of the beholder. And it’s particularly rich given that the Fox host’s own statements—and those of guests on her shows—don’t exactly use speech in such righteous ways, as Media Matters has thoroughly documented.

Earlier this month, for example, Faulkner suggested that people rightly questioning the legality of President Trump’s September 2 attack on a Venezuelan boat (which the president claims was “drug-carrying”) are “working against America and for the drug cartels.” In April, she asked a guest whether former President Barack Obama and “others in his political camp” are antisemitic for supporting Harvard University amid the Trump administration’s incursions. In February, she defended deporting pregnant women and children.

In November 2024, Faulkner proposed that Representative Rashida Tlaib is a “terrorist.” (“If you support terrorists, aren’t you a terrorist?” she asked rhetorically, equating the Palestinian American congresswoman’s pro-Palestinian advocacy with support for Hamas.) In January 2024, she accused Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary, of treason.

Guests on Faulkner’s shows—to say nothing of other Fox hosts and guests—also say plenty of noxious things, such as that drag queens reading to children normalize pedophilia, that Biden’s border policies “poison[ed] the bloodline in this country,” and that the woman at the center of Trump’s hush-money trial (and ultimately, felony conviction) was a “liar” and a “whore.”

Our math whiz commander in chief is once again promising to lower drug prices by 1,000 percent in the next year and a half—something that is virtually impossible.

“Now the drug companies agree that I’m right, and the countries … if they don’t agree, I’ll use tariffs to get them to agree. You understand?” Trump said in an interview on Fox News.

“We’re gonna be reducing drug costs over the next year, year and a half, by—not fifty or sixty percent—by a thousand percent. Because if you think, a $10 pill going so.… It’ll be raised up from $10 to $20 because it’s the world versus us,” Trump rambled. “So it’ll go from $10 to $20, from $10 to $50 or $60 for them. Which is bearable. And it’ll go from $10 to $20 for us.”

Incredibly, the interviewer did not request any immediate clarification.

This is not the first time Trump has tried to sell this particular strain of snake oil. Last month, Trump also claimed to have already cut drug costs by 1,000 percent. In reality, he hasn’t moved prices at all and has only sent a slurry of strongly worded letters to pharmaceutical companies demanding that they just lower their costs for Americans. And his tariff option, like most recklessly levied tariffs, might just raise the costs of prescription drugs even more.

“I find it really difficult to translate those numbers into some actual estimates that patients would see at the pharmacy counter,” Johns Hopkins University health policy professor Mariana Socal told the Associated Press last month, adding that Trump’s numbers were “really hard to follow.”

A month later, and they still aren’t making any sense.

Donald Trump is apparently intent on punishing media figures deemed guilty of lèse-majesté against him. The day after Jimmy Kimmel was censored at the behest of the Federal Communications Commission, the president told reporters that networks are “not allowed” to excessively bash him.

“When you have a network, and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something.… When you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that,” Trump said Thursday aboard Air Force One.

On Wednesday, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group dropped the show. The affair was set in motion by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who threatened media companies that platform Kimmel after the comedian displayed the “sickest conduct possible,” Carr said. (In reality, Kimmel delivered a monologue in which he mocked Trump’s and MAGA’s ridiculous behavior in the wake of the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.)

Trump warned of the move against Kimmel back in July. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,” he wrote on Truth Social after CBS announced the cancellation of anti-Trump comedian Stephen Colbert’s late-night show (which many saw as a capitulation to the president). After Kimmel’s ouster Wednesday, Trump similarly called his next shots, urging NBC to suspend the shows of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

A coalition of states is planning to release its own vaccine recommendations following Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine takeover of the nation’s health institutions.

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have formed the Northeast Public Health Collaborative. New York City, which has the country’s largest municipal health department that is independent from the state, has also joined the group.

The group released its first round of Covid-19 vaccine recommendations Monday, advising that infants and toddlers between the ages of 6 months and 23 months, as well as adults over 19 years old, “should be vaccinated.” Healthy children between the ages of 2 and 18 do not need to be vaccinated but may receive the vaccine, according to the group.

While the group’s recommendations are in line with guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the American Academy of Family Physicians, they vary vastly from those of the federal government.

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved updated Covid-19 shots for people aged 65 or above only, requiring younger adults and children to prove one high-risk health condition, such as asthma or obesity, in order to qualify for the jab.

“The Trump Administration walked away from its responsibility to protect public health,” wrote New York Governor Kathy Hochul on X Thursday. “Through the Northeast Public Health Collaborative, we’re making sure New Yorkers get the facts and access they need to stay protected.”

New York, New Jersey, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island have all expanded access to Covid-19 vaccines, ordering that pharmacies must administer the shot in alignment with recommendations from trusted national medical societies.

California, Oregon, and Washington state have also formed their own West Coast Health Alliance to deliver independent vaccine recommendations.

Kennedy, who has spent much of his time in office promoting unproven medicine and fearmongering about vaccine side effects, has overseen a total upheaval of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Just days before an upcoming meeting to discuss Covid-19 vaccinations for the fall, Kennedy added five new members to the panel, including some vaccine skeptics who had criticized vaccine mandates or downplayed the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic. Kennedy had previously added eight new members in June, after dismissing the original 17.

Susan Monarez, the former CDC director, testified before Congress Wednesday that Kennedy had asked her “to commit, in advance, to approving every” recommendation by the CDC’s ACIP, “regardless of scientific evidence.”

Top U.S. military leaders are considering a new recruitment strategy that would leverage Charlie Kirk’s legacy and memory to draw more of America’s youth into the armed services.

The Pentagon would frame the drive as a “national call to service,” according to U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News. Possible slogans for the recruitment effort include “Charlie has awakened a generation of warriors.”

The enlistment strategy could potentially involve Turning Point USA, Kirk’s political organization, morphing it into recruitment centers. “That could include inviting recruiters to be present at events or advertising for the military at the chapters,” NBC reported that two defense officials explained.

There are some 900 official college chapters and around 1,200 high school chapters of Turning Point USA across the nation, but the conservative advocacy nonprofit received more than 54,000 inquiries for new campus chapters in the 48 hours after Kirk’s assassination, according to TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet.

The undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, Anthony Tata, is the brains behind the initiative, sources told NBC News.

It was not immediately clear what the timeline for the drive would be, or if it will even come to fruition. Some dissent has already permeated among some Pentagon leaders, who are reportedly concerned about the P.R. nightmare that could ensue if it’s perceived the U.S. military is attempting to “capitalize on Kirk’s death,” officials told the news network.

Kirk was shot dead last week during an event at Utah Valley University. He was immediately martyred by the ideological right, which has since celebrated the 31-year-old firebrand as a pivotal figure in the MAGA movement.

A college dropout, Kirk had become one of the most prominent conservative activists in the country, attracting droves of young people to the Republican cause by meeting and debating them on college campuses. He was one of the few conservative personalities outside the Trump administration to maintain regular contact with the president, and was credited with playing a critical role in reelecting Donald Trump in 2024.

At The Atlantic Festival on Thursday, the former Vice President co-signed the firing of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, while also identifying the exact reason it is unjust: because the Trump administration forced ABC to do it. 

“We ought ever to be vigilant, to ensure the right of every American to express their views without government interference or censorship,” Pence told The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. “The First Amendment, though, does not protect entertainers who say crass or thoughtless things, as Jimmy Kimmel did in the wake of a national tragedy.”  

Kimmel poked fun at Trump’s admittedly strange change of subject when asked about how Charlie Kirk’s death affected him, and pointed out that the right was doing an all-out media blitz to convince the public that the shooter was a left-wing terrorist from a radical movement with little information out. 

Pence continued, getting so close to getting it right while still missing it completely. 

“Private employers have every right to dismiss employees, whether they’re a television talk show host or otherwise, if they violate the standards of that company. Now, I would have preferred that the chairman of the FCC  had not weighed in. But I respect the right of the networks to make the decision.” Pence went on to call Kimmel “callous” and “thoughtless” for his comments. 

The part Pence conveniently wedged between his very monotone outrage over Kimmel’s speech is what the issue is. This isn’t simply a disgruntled employer firing an employee for mouthing off; this is the Trump administration putting pressure on a network to fire someone for saying things they don’t like. From Mahmoud Khalil  to Rümeysa Öztürk to Kimmel, conservatives are being willfully obtuse about what speech crackdowns are really about.