Republicans Give Themselves Another House Seat Come 2026

North Carolina’s Republican legislature has officially redrawn the state’s legislative map to give the GOP an additional seat in Congress.

On Wednesday, the state House approved the new map with a 66-48 vote, which makes the move official after the state Senate advanced the measure Tuesday. The changes do not require the signature of North Carolina’s governor, Democrat Josh Stein.

Now, the state’s first congressional district, currently held by Democratic Representative Don Davis, will absorb some Republican areas. The district narrowly supported Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. At the same time, the nearby third district, considered one of the most Republican districts in the state by the nonpartisan Cook Report, will absorb some Democratic-leaning areas.

Republicans control 10 of North Carolina’s 14 congressional seats, and hope to increase that number after the 2026 midterm elections. The new map will take effect before then.

“The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: drawing a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation,” said Republican State Senator Ralph Hise, who prepared the map, at committee hearing earlier this week.

Democrats in the state have called the maps racist, arguing that they diminish the voting power of North Carolina’s Black and Latino voters. Davis is one of only three Black representatives from North Carolina.

“You didn’t need to use racial data because every single member of this body knows about the Black population in the northeastern part of this state,” said Democratic State Representative Gloristine Brown Wednesday on the House floor.

The move comes at the behest of Trump, who is urging Republican-run states to engage in aggressive gerrymandering to keep the GOP in control of Congress. Texas approved a new map in August that seeks to get five more Republican seats, while Republicans in Missouri have done the same to squeeze out an additional GOP seat. The moves are certain to set off a gerrymandering war with blue states, as Democratic leaders in New York and California have already pledged to respond with new maps of their own.

Famed Donald Trump biographer Michael Wolff is suing the first lady for defamation.

Wolff’s work includes four books on the sitting president as well as extensive interviews with Jeffrey Epstein prior to the pedophilic sex trafficker’s jailhouse suicide. But Wolff, whose latest project focuses on Melania, appears to have crawled right under the first lady’s skin.

The first lady, per Wolff, is demanding he apologize for suggesting that she is covertly involved in the administration’s response to Trump’s bungled Epstein scandal—or else face a $1 billion lawsuit.

Jumping out in front of Melania’s legal threat, the best-selling author filed a 15-page civil defamation suit late Tuesday in the New York Supreme Court, arguing that Melania’s attempts to silence him in a lawsuit of her own were not legally justifiable.

“It is not defamatory to say that Mrs. Trump is actively managing the present White House response to the controversy. Nor is it defamatory to say that Mrs. Trump was involved in Epstein’s rather expansive social circle,” Wolff wrote.

Wolff also argues that his statements, in proper context, qualify as protected opinions based on the available facts. He also claimed that the first lady’s attorneys would not be able to win a defamation case since they would not be able to prove the required burden of actual malice, a legal standard requiring evidence that Wolff did not believe his own statements to be true.

“Several days ago I was notified by lawyers for the First Lady that they intend to sue me for a billion dollars for some of those statements,” Wolff said in a video statement posted to Instagram, deriding Melania’s efforts to control similar reports as meritless “SLAPP suits.”

“I can’t live like that,” Wolff continued, situated on the porch of his beachside Hamptons home. “In fact, to be perfectly honest, I’d like nothing better than to get Donald Trump and Melania Trump under oath, in front of a court reporter, and actually find out all of the details of their relationship with Epstein.”

Blue states are fighting fire with fire, flaming the Trump administration for the ongoing government shutdown by adapting the president’s home-cooked messaging strategy.

For weeks, federal websites have displayed messages overtly blaming the shutdown on Democrats in Congress, in an apparent violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the 1939 Hatch Act, which are designed to limit partisan messaging from federal employees.

In a massive reversal of the White House’s shutdown blame game, at least three states have now posted notices to their state government websites informing residents that the ongoing shutdown was entirely Republicans’ fault.

“Because Republicans in Washington D.C., failed to pass a federal budget, causing the federal government shutdown, November 2025 SNAP benefits cannot be paid. Starting October 16, SNAP benefits will not be paid until the federal government shutdown ends and funds are released to PA,” a banner on the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services website reads.

Illinois issued a similar message, further pinning the blame on “federal officials with the Trump Administration.”

“SNAP customers will not receive November food benefits—unless there is further action from the Trump administration to reopen the government,” the website for the Illinois Application for Benefits Eligibility said.

California, whose governor played his own imitation game against Trump this summer, also jumped on the bandwagon. In a note on the California Health and Human Services Agency website, the state government blamed the shutdown on the “failures of the President and Congress.”

The government has been shut down for more than 21 days as of Wednesday, making it the second-longest federal closure in U.S. history. It’s only bested by a 35-day shutdown between 2018 and 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term.

Both national political parties are hung up on how to fund Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included details to slice billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.

Democrats—and their constituents—have insisted that party representatives hold firm until they can find a way to salvage the subsidized health care programs. But a major hitch looms on the horizon: Open enrollment for Obamacare plans begins on November 1. If the shutdown is not resolved by then, millions of Americans will be forced to make a decision about their health coverage without knowing whether premiums will come down or not.

Is Florida trying to hide how many U.S. citizens have been detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants?

The Miami New Times reported Wednesday that the Florida State Board of Immigration Enforcement removed the number of U.S. citizens arrested as part of law enforcement’s sweeping deportation efforts from its website, after the publication asked the state why citizens were being arrested in the first place.

As of October 14, Florida’s Suspected Unauthorized Alien Encounters Dashboard had recorded the arrests of 21 U.S. citizens and another nine who had encounters with law enforcement but were not arrested, according to the Times. After the outlet reached out to the board, the figure vanished. The Times reported the dashboard now shows that U.S. citizens have had two encounters and only one arrest.

The Times reached out to the board, as well as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Governor Ron DeSantis’s office about the change, but received no response.

Last week, ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including 20 children.

Since August 1, immigration authorities in Florida have recorded more than 5,800 encounters and made 4,700 arrests. Of those arrests, more than 2,400 have been conducted by state and local law enforcement operating federal immigration powers under a 287(g) agreement.

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has been under fire this week after revelations that he has a skull tattoo associated with Germany’s Nazi Party on his chest. On Wednesday, he announced that it has been covered up.

In an interview with Vanity Fair published on Wednesday, Platner said that the tattoo has been covered up with “some kind of Celtic knot with a dog on it, because that’s far more in line with my opinions about nature and animals now than my connection to the violence that I partook in when I was a young man.” On Wednesday, Platner revealed his new tattoo in an interview with Maine TV station WGME.

The oyster farmer turned progressive political candidate vehemently denied any connections or affinity to Nazism, saying that he got the tattoo on a drunken night out in Croatia in 2007 while serving in the Marines. A video posted to Instagram earlier this week showed Platner singing shirtless at a wedding where the skull tattoo, known as a Totenkopf or “death’s head,” is visible.

Platner told the magazine that he wasn’t aware of the tattoo’s background until recently, saying that he got it because “skull and crossbar motifs are popular amongst military units.” He said that his tattoo had been reviewed at a Military Entrance Processing Station when he later joined the U.S. Army, and before he began work as a contractor for the State Department.

Platner added that the wedding where he was singing was that of his sister-in-law, who is Jewish, and that several members of his extended family are Jewish.

“If I thought that I had a Nazi tattoo, I would not have just been taking my shirt off in front of everybody. I just had a skull and crossbones that I got when I was in the Marine Corps,” Platner said.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Platner said that he chose to cover up the tattoo because a full removal would be a longer and more difficult process where he lives in rural Maine, and he “wanted this thing off my body.”

Platner is looking to unseat Republican senator Susan Collins, who has held her seat for 25 years despite shedding her once-moderate image in favor of the GOP’s ideological shift toward Donald Trump. While Collins has faced rising unpopularity in Maine, even being jeered and booed at a public appearance over the summer, Platner now has a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in Governor Janet Mills, who has the support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Platner burst onto the scene in August with a now-viral campaign launch video where he pledged to “topple the oligarchy that’s destroying our country” and end “endless wars,” and has appealed to to many voters in Maine by calling Israel’s massacre in Gaza a genocide and refusing to “take money from AIPAC or any group that supports the genocide in Gaza.” Now, his upstart candidacy faces the obstacle of convincing those voters that he isn’t hiding secret Nazi inclinations and is running for the right reasons.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is blatantly attempting to weasel his way into a $230 million payout from his own Justice Department. Unsurprisingly, the GOP couldn’t care less. 

“How comfortable are you with the president apparently seeking $230 million from the Department of Justice?” a reporter asked House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, a day after the news broke. Johnson, of course, reverted back to his favorite response: ignorance.

“I don’t know the details about that, I’ve just read it, I didn’t talk with him about that,” Johnson replied. “I know that he believes he’s owed that reimbursement. What I heard yesterday was if he receives it, he was gonna consider giving it to charity, he doesn’t need those proceeds.” 

How does Johnson know that Trump (known for being forced to shut down his own charity foundation after being caught using it for personal funds) might give the millions to charity if he just said seconds before that he didn’t know any details? 

“It’s absurd,” the speaker continued. “They attack him for everything he does.” He then quickly changed the subject to defend Trump’s bulldozing the White House’s East Wing to clear room for his upcoming ballroom.  

Trump is essentially demanding that the DOJ pay him hundreds of millions of dollars for investigating his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia and his mishandling of classified documents after he left the presidency. This is an unprecedented, deeply questionable move. 

“What a travesty,” ethics professor Bennett L. Gershman, told The New York Times. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.… And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”

This reimbursement, if successful, will likely have to be covered by the American taxpayer. 

At least one GOP member, Thom Tillis, had the courage to speak out.

“It’s terrible optics, particularly right now,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju. “We’re talking about a quarter of a billion dollars transferring, maybe to the president when we’re in a shutdown posture.” 

But the majority of Republicans seem to be staying quiet.

Zohran Mamdani’s preventative crime plan is so effective that criminals are fleeing New York City before he’s even mayor.

Disgraced ex–Long Island Representative George Santos revealed his plans to exit the Big Apple Tuesday, claiming that the New York Democratic mayoral candidate’s policies would make the city unsafe for him.

“Sadly it seems that my family and I will be departing the city I’ve called home my entire life. NYC will become a very dangerous place to live in if we elect mayor Mamdani and that is a risk I am unwilling to take now that I want to start growing my family,” Santos posted to X.

Of course, Santos was the danger. The reputed hustler was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things. He had victims across continents, having graduated from stealing wallets in Brazil to using political donations to his congressional campaign to bankroll his personal lifestyle—namely, his designer shoe addiction.

Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as credit card fraud and illegally receiving unemployment benefits. He was sentenced to seven years in prison—a detention commuted by President Donald Trump on Friday for no clear reason other than the prolific fraudster’s undying loyalty to the president.

“He lied like hell,” Trump said of his fellow Republican to Newsmax in August. “But he was 100 percent for Trump.”

Santos served just 84 days, while his victims described the presidential pardon as a knife to the gut.

But if the fabulist con man’s prior statements are to be believed, then Santos isn’t planning on staying stateside, either.

“Once I finish my obligations with the U.S. criminal justice system I will leave and never return,” Santos posted in May. “I rather take my chances in other countries than live in a country that has a weaponized justice system and is run by the industrial prison complex.”

But Santos may have another reason for trying to get as far from New York as possible: Although Trump commuted Santos’s sentence for federal crimes, his move does nothing about state-level charges. Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly released a statement Tuesday regarding Santos’s newfound freedom.

“While the office cannot comment on ongoing investigations, suffice it to say that I remain focused on prosecuting political corruption wherever it exists regardless of political affiliation,” she said in the statement.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accidentally injured a deputy U.S. marshal while firing shots at a TikTok streamer known for documenting ICE raids.

The violent incident occurred during a traffic stop in South Los Angeles Tuesday, when agents attempted to detain Carlitos Ricardo Parias, known as Richard LA, who had previously received recognition for his work as a citizen journalist documenting ICE operations.

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the operation was “a targeted enforcement traffic stop,” and that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant “had previously escaped from custody” and “attempted to evade arrest yet again.”

McLaughlin claimed that Parias was pulled over using “standard law enforcement procedure,” but acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said that agents had “boxed him in,” which is not considered standard procedure for a traffic stop.

According to the affidavit, Parias ignored commands to exit his vehicle, hitting two law enforcement vehicles before “accelerating aggressively” with his car.

The affidavit claimed that the spinning wheels of Parias’s Toyota Camry produced smoke and debris, and Essayli shared an image of the arrest on X that showed a plume of white smoke beside the car. However, an eyewitness claimed that officers had fired tear gas during the arrest, which could also explain the cloud of smoke.

McLaughlin claimed that officers “followed their training and fired defensive shots” when Parias “weaponized his vehicle and began ramming the law enforcement vehicle in an attempt to flee.”

CNN reported that an ICE officer confronted Parias and used his weapon to smash Parias’s window, according to a law enforcement source who spoke to the outlet. Authorities believe the agent’s weapon fired while he was attempting to grab Parias, striking Parias and a deputy marshal. McLaughlin made no mention of this interaction in her statement.

Parias was struck in the elbow, and a ricocheted bullet hit one deputy marshal in the hand. Both are expected to recover.

Parias has been charged with assault of a federal officer. His lawyer Carlos Jurado told CNN affiliate KCAL/KCBS that his client was “a very pacifist man. He’s very calm. A lot of the police officers here know him. They know that he’s very respectful.”

This is not the first time ICE has opened fire during an attempted arrest. Earlier this month, a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot a woman five times during a traffic stop. DHS claimed that the woman had attempted to ram law enforcement vehicles, but her lawyer claimed it was the other way around.

Republican Representative Brandon Gill threw a fit over a clip posted on X of journalist Mehdi Hasan pointing out America’s freedom of religion clause applies to all religions—and then doubled down on his own bigotry.

On Tuesday afternoon, Gill quoted a post from far-right account End Wokeness showing a video clip of Hasan pointing out that American Muslims have a right to play their call to prayer from mosque loudspeakers, just like Christians do to ring church bells. The Texas representative then accused Muslims of moving to the U.S. “en masse” to “fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life.”

Hasan responded by pointing out that Gill’s xenophobia doesn’t seem to extend to his own wife, the daughter of Indian immigrant and right-wing writer Dinesh D’Souza. Gill didn’t take kindly to that, making it clear that he is prejudiced against Muslims. Hasan seems to have gotten the last word, though.

Gill has a long history of bigotry and Islamophobia. In February, he called for his Muslim congressional colleague, Representative Ilhan Omar, to be deported, falsely claiming that she told undocumented immigrants how to break the law. He also joined fellow conservatives’ hysteria over a video clip of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, also a Muslim, eating with his hands.

Freedom of religion is explicitly granted in the First Amendment of the Constitution, so perhaps Gill needs a lesson on actual American values. His congressional district in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs includes at least one mosque, the Islamic Society of Denton. Maybe he ought to show more respect to religious diversity in the U.S. and his own backyard, if only for political reasons.

Republican rage over Jack Smith’s investigation was apparently all for naught.

Conservative lawmakers accused the former special prosecutor earlier this month of spying on them during his investigation of Donald Trump by tapping their phone lines and monitoring their phone calls. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley dubbed the right-wing scandal “worse than Watergate.”

But none of those allegations have held up, especially not in light of a letter Smith’s legal team issued Tuesday that reveals just how legal—and common—the log request was.

“Although you have not reached out to us to discuss this matter, we are compelled to correct inaccurate assertions made by you and others concerning the issuance of a grand jury subpoena for the toll records of eight Senators and one Member of the House of Representatives,” attorneys Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski wrote.

“It is well established that obtaining telephone toll records pursuant to a subpoena is a routine and lawful investigative step that does not violate an individual’s expectation of privacy,” they continued, underscoring that phone toll records don’t contain the content of the calls—only the incoming and outgoing phone numbers, as well as the calls’ duration.

The practice was so ordinary, per Smith’s team, that another special counsel investigator requested the same information during his investigation of President Joe Biden.

“Indeed, Special Counsel Robert Hur subpoenaed toll records in his investigation of President Biden,” the letter reads.

“During the current Trump administration, the Department of Justice has routinely relied upon subpoenaed toll records in numerous criminal prosecutions. During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department purportedly obtained communications records of two Democratic Members of Congress—Rep. Eric Swalwell and then-Rep. Adam Schiff—and forty-three congressional staffers in connection with an investigation into media leaks. More recently, the Department of Justice used toll records in the prosecution of Senator Menendez,” Breuer and Koski continued.

Smith conducted two parallel investigations into Trump, both of which resulted in indictments. They centered on allegations that Trump mishandled and retained classified records after the end of his first presidential term, and his alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Trump pleaded not guilty on all charges before the charges were dropped altogether after the 2024 election due to Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president.

Senior Trump officials have since deemed Smith an enemy of the administration, arguing that his investigation was tantamount to the political weaponization of the Justice Department.

In a historic turn of events revealed Tuesday, Trump has apparently demanded reparations for the legal comeuppance, expecting the DOJ to pay him millions because the agency investigated him.