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 bestselling 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.