McConnell Stalls Trump’s Election Overhaul Bill as Republicans Fume

Senator Mitch McConnell appears to be stalling the voting bill backed by President Trump, and fellow Republicans are not happy. 

McConnell, who leads the Senate Rules Committee, is refusing to schedule a vote on the legislation, thus preventing it from moving forward. The bill would create barriers for voting, requiring specific forms of ID in order for Americans to exercise their constitutional right.

In blocking it, the retiring senator and former majority leader has drawn the ire of his colleagues. Representative Tim Burchett posted a video on X Friday saying McConnell’s actions are partially coming from a place of “meanness” because he doesn’t like Trump, and called his mental acuity into question. 

“He’s blocking the SAVE Act, or is he? Is it him or a staff member, because as you know, he’s a lot like Joe Biden was in his last few days in office, or last years in office,” Burchett said. “His cognizant level is diminishing daily.” 

Burchett went on a tangent about how much of Congress is run by staffers because certain aging members of Congress have diminishing mental capacity, citing the case of Representative Kay Granger, the former House Appropriations Committee chair who disappeared for months in 2024 and was later found to be living in an independent living facility. 

Representative Anna Paulina Luna also attacked McConnell, claiming on X without evidence that “over 84% of Americans and 95% of Republicans want voter ID. Why do you completely disregard the will of the people who voted for you?”

McConnell’s stance has similarly drawn the attention of right-wing personalities on social media who have been calling out his mental acuity for days over the bill, which doesn’t have the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Senate filibuster. Representative Andy Barr, who is running to fill McConnell’s seat in November, wrote a letter to the senator last week asking for his help to pass the bill, to which McConnell hasn’t responded.

Last year, McConnell wrote in The Wall Street Journal that such a bill would give a future Democratic president and Congress the ability to “use more sweeping mandates to carry out a complete federal takeover of American elections.” 

“The current administration has better ways to spend its time than laying the groundwork for a leftwing election takeover,” McConnell wrote. 

Burchett’s attempt to call out McConnell’s age and fitness is not without merit, as the senior Kentucky senator has had health issues and noticeable mental lapses. But not only is Burchett ignoring the long-term implications of the bill, he is also selectively ignoring the very clear cognitive decline experienced by the president of the United States.  

It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad morning for Donald Trump.

At the start of Friday, a new gross domestic product report revealed that the economy had cooled in the last quarter of 2025, showing a general deceleration in growth due to large cuts to federal spending, reported Axios.

Trump and his associates have ripped through the executive branch over the past year, hacking and slashing at government expenditures on the authority of what they claim is a “mandate from the people.” The result has shuttered several core agencies, including the Department of Education, USAID, and Voice of America, while others, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, have been hollowed out through enormous staff reductions.

Following the Project 2025 blueprint, the president and his congressional allies also took aim at Medicaid, cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the public health insurance program.

The savings, however, will not be felt by voters. Republicans opted to spend that money elsewhere, such as on a massive budget bump for ICE and enormous tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. This will result in a near-identical level of discretionary spending for 2026 compared to the previous fiscal year, according to a preliminary analysis of federal budget records by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, as reported by The New York Times.

Trump was already publicly venting about the economic revelation nearly an hour prior to the GDP report’s release, blaming the unattractive digits on Democrats.

“The Democrat Shutdown cost the U.S.A. at least two points in GDP,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “That’s why they are doing it, in mini form, again. No Shutdowns! Also, LOWER INTEREST RATES.”

Trump then mocked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, writing to his followers that “two late” Powell is “the WORST!!!”

The news is the second-worst thing that Trump heard about his economic agenda just this morning. A couple of hours after the report came out, the Supreme Court knocked down the president’s tariff plan, deciding 6–3 that the Oval Office’s sweeping trade reform was an erroneous overreach that breached Congress’s authority.

Trump learned of the judicial rebuke while attending a White House breakfast with governors. The president had ordered cameras out of the room mere moments before the ruling was made public, though he told those gathered at the assembly that he had a “backup plan” in mind, reported CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

If Donald Trump’s administration really wants to find evidence of foreign interference in Georgia’s elections, then they need look no further than the president’s old friend Elon Musk and his shady super PAC.

Members of the Georgia State Elections Board voted Wednesday to issue a formal letter of reprimand to Musk’s America PAC over the billionaire technocrat’s illegal scheme to get Trump elected. Georgia, a key battleground state in 2024, was the target of aggressive campaigning by Trump’s team.

In October 2024, the Georgia secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after receiving numerous reports from residents across several counties saying they’d received partially prefilled absentee ballot applications from Musk’s America PAC, according to John Fervier, the State Elections Board’s chairman.

There was evidence to suggest America PAC had violated a state law that prohibits any person or entity, other than an authorized relative, to send an elector an absentee ballot application prefilled with the elector’s required information, according to Janice Johnston, the SEB’s vice chairman.

America PAC had also failed to display in a conspicuous location that this was not an official government publication, was not provided by the government, and was not a ballot, Johnston added.

The board swiftly voted to issue a letter of reprimand to America PAC.

This letter comes weeks after Trump suggested that his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the election office in Fulton County, Georgia, because she was investigating foreign interference in elections.

It should come as no surprise that the only evidence of meddling with people’s votes came from Trump’s own camp—the same thing happened in the 2020 election too.

Fox News doesn’t want a war with Iran and is trying to persuade its most famous viewer, Donald Trump, that it’s a bad idea.

On Fox & Friends Friday morning, host Rachel Campos-Duffy urged Trump to “make a better case” for “potentially going into another war.” Campos-Duffy is the wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and was filling in for Ainsley Earhardt.

“I don’t think the case has been made sufficiently for me,” Campos-Duffy said. “You read The New York Times. There’s a lot of people who also feel that way. If you’re going to get us potentially into a war, you have to explain why it matters to us.”

Campos-Duffy added that she didn’t think that military action would aid protesters within Iran against the ruling clerical regime.

“I just want to mention, you know, I do feel sorry for the protesters. Again, it’s not clear to me that doing this move, potentially going to war is necessarily going to help the protesters,” Campos-Duffy said. “I’d like to think that was true. Explain to me why. Explain to me why I should risk my military-aged boys potentially going into another war in the Middle East. I thought we were done with that.”

A Fox host openly questioning Trump’s rationale for military action, let alone one who happens to be the wife of a Cabinet secretary, suggests that there is dissension among MAGA and right-wing media over the prospect of attacking Iran. Trump told reporters Friday morning that he was considering a limited military strike to pressure Iran into a deal, and Reuters reports that the United States is in the advanced stages of planning such an attack, looking into targeting individuals and even regime change.

Will Trump listen to his supporters who have doubts or even outright oppose military action? Right now, the military buildup around Iran is almost unprecedented, and a bombing campaign could start a dangerous and deadly war for all sides.

President Trump said that he had a backup plan after the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs on Friday morning.

“President Trump commented on the Supreme Court ruling striking down his tariffs while inside the White House breakfast with governors this morning, calling it a ‘disgrace,’ I’m told,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins wrote on X. “He told those gathered that he has a backup plan.”

The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 Friday that Trump could not use a law meant for national emergencies to invoke global, sweeping tariffs.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported that Trump became enraged when he learned about the decision, at one point ranting about “these f—king courts.”

“Trump was speaking to a room full of U.S. governors at the White House when he was handed a note from an aide informing him of the Supreme Court decision, a source tells me,” wrote Reuters’s Jarrett Renshaw. “Trump was visibly frustrated and told the crowd that he had to do something about the courts, the source said.”

“There is no exception to the major questions doctrine for emergency statutes. Nor does the fact that tariffs implicate foreign affairs render the doctrine inapplicable. The Framers gave ‘Congress alone’ the power to impose tariffs during peacetime,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “And the foreign affairs implications of tariffs do not make it any more likely that Congress would relinquish its tariff power through vague language, or without careful limits.”

There really isn’t any legal “backup plan” to a Supreme Court ruling, as that’s the entire point of the highest court in the land. We can only speculate as to what kind of extrajudicial last-ditch efforts Trump might take here.

This story has been updated.

This is how the Trump administration treats its veterans: Raid them, detain them, and leave them without any way to legally defend themselves.

That’s what happened to George Retes, a 26-year-old Army veteran who was arrested by ICE officials while commuting to his job in July, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Retes, a U.S. citizen and father of two, was driving to a farm in Ventura County, California, where he was supposed to work as a security guard on July 10. As he approached the farm, droves of protesters and federal agents were blocking the road. He tried to explain that he needed to get through for work, but the message—and his legal residency—did not matter.

ICE agents followed him back to his vehicle, where they proceeded to bang on his doors and give him conflicting information. One agent told him to “reverse,” while another agent told him to “​​pull over to the side,” according to an op-ed Retes penned for the San Francisco Chronicle in September.

As the situation escalated, officers lobbed tear gas at nearby protesters. The chemical irritant filled Retes’s car, causing him to choke.

“Suddenly, an agent smashed my window and pepper-sprayed me,” Retes wrote. “I was pulled from the car, and one agent knelt on my neck while another knelt on my back.”

The veteran was zip-tied and left in the dirt for several hours before the agency sent him to Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Detention Center. They never bothered to check his identification.

Retes was detained for three days, during which he was deprived of basic rights that are granted to suspected criminals, according to his attorneys. “He was not allowed a phone call, access to counsel, or a hearing. He was also subjected to inhumane treatment, not being allowed a shower to wash chemical irritants off his body,” the lawsuit reads.

In addition, the unwarranted and violent fiasco caused Retes to miss his daughter’s third birthday, and “exacerbated injuries he had sustained during his military service.”

To make matters worse, Retes never received an explanation for his arrest or for his continued detention at MDC, according to the lawsuit.

“The officers, for their part, showed no interest in confirming George’s story,” the lawsuit reads. “No officer suggested he had broken any law, either. And no officer perceived him as a threat.”

The lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government, specifying unnamed individuals with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Navy, the FBI, and Customs and Border Protection.

“George’s rights were violated, and he is filing this lawsuit, not only to protect his own rights, but to have the rights of others be protected too,” Andrew Wimer, director of media relations at the Institute for Justice, told The Guardian. “What happened to George is clearly wrong. No one can be held for three days without being told what they’ve done wrong, without being charged with a crime. Americans deserve justice when their rights have been violated.”

Donald Trump is losing the MAHA moms.

The New York Times reports that women who flocked to the president in the 2024 election and embraced his promise to tackle “toxins in our environments and pesticides in our food” feel betrayed after Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to boost U.S. production of glyphosate, the pesticide used in the weedkiller Roundup that is possibly linked to cancer and is the subject of numerous lawsuits, including one brought by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Ensuring an adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides is thus crucial to the national security and defense, including food-supply security,” Trump’s order read.

As a result, these women, some of whom embraced the moniker “MAHA moms” after Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” slogan, are now rethinking their support for the president.

“Women feel like they were lied to, that MAHA movement is a sham,” health and wellness podcaster Alex Clark, who works for the Trump-allied group Turning Point USA, told the Times. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.”

Some MAHA moms have directed their anger at the president, but others question why Kennedy is backing production of a chemical he has criticized. On the Instagram page of Vani Hari, who promotes healthy eating and advises the White House on food policy, several commenters were upset with Kennedy.

“This begs the question why didn’t sec Kennedy have a say and stop it,” wrote one person, while another asked “Where is RFK Jr.?” Neither Kennedy’s office nor the Trump administration has addressed whether Kennedy was part of any discussions about the order before it was issued.

The founder of Moms Across America, Zen Honeycutt, has led a campaign against glyphosate, petitioning stores not to sell it and supporting testing for pesticide residue. She called Trump’s order “an egregious offense to what he promised,” in an interview with the Times.

Trump’s order also has pushback from Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who posted on X Thursday that he would introduce legislation to overturn the order. It seems that Trump has started a fight between MAGA and MAHA.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday to undo Donald Trump’s illegal Liberation Day tariffs, taking away the president’s favorite toy after he used it to hit his allies.

In the court’s 6–3 majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Trump’s invocation of an emergency in order to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was a massive overreach of Congress’s authority and flew in the face of decades of precedent.

“There is no exception to the major questions doctrine for emergency statutes. Nor does the fact that tariffs implicate foreign affairs render the doctrine inapplicable. The Framers gave ‘Congress alone’ the power to impose tariffs during peacetime,” Roberts wrote. “And the foreign affairs implications of tariffs do not make it any more likely that Congress would relinquish its tariff power through vague language, or without careful limits.

“Accordingly, the President must ‘point to clear congressional authorization’ to justify his extraordinary assertion of that power,” Roberts wrote. “He cannot.”

Roberts was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Kentanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett. In his concurring opinion, Gorsuch wrote, “Whatever else might be said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it did not clearly surrender to the President the sweeping tariff power he seeks to wield.”

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh both wrote dissenting opinions, and Justice Samuel Alito and Thomas joined Kavanaugh’s.

Trump imposed his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” in April 2025 using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a rule that allows the president to regulate commerce in case of a national emergency—but doesn’t actually include the word “tariff.”

The Trump administration initially claimed that the “reciprocal tariffs” were simply a tool to negotiate improved trade deals with other countries in order to promote domestic manufacturing and thwart drug trafficking.

But it quickly became clear that the deals were neither binding nor permanent. In reality, Trump’s tariffs were intended to be ever-changing, a whip to extend across the world at his whim. The results? Trump has hurt U.S. manufacturing, driven up prices, and strained relationships with U.S. allies.

Trump claimed in mid-January that should the Supreme Court rule against his tariff policy, the U.S. would be forced to “pay back … Hundreds of Billions of Dollars” in investments made by companies and countries hoping to avoid his steep tariffs.

“When these Investments are added, we are talking about Trillions of Dollars!” Trump wrote. “It would be a complete mess, and almost impossible for our country to pay.”

Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told The New York Times on January 19 that in the case of an unfavorable decision, Trump planned to simply ignore the ruling. He would impose a new set of tariffs that will “start the next day” in order “to respond to the problems the president has identified.”

This story has been updated.

The FBI conducted four interviews with a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child, and Trump’s Justice Department gave all four of those interviews to Ghislaine Maxwell before her trial, as reported by Roger Sollenberger. Only one of those interviews is in the publicly searchable Epstein files—and it was removed and put back earlier this week.

“By choosing not to release three FBI interviews with an underage Trump accuser—interviews the DOJ gave to Maxwell at trial—Trump’s DOJ allowed Maxwell to retain potential blackmail over the president,” Sollenberger wrote Friday on X. “But that leverage over Trump vanishes if DOJ made them public, as law requires.”

The woman sat down for the interviews with the FBI after filing a lawsuit against the Epstein estate. In the publicly available interview, she claims that she was “brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped by these other men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally. On information and belief, Epstein was aware of and, indeed encouraged, the assault of Jane Doe 4 by these other men.”

This lawsuit matches the FBI’s lone public interview with her, in which she names Trump.

“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the FBI said. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” This allegedly occurred in the mid-1980s when she was “approximately 13-15 years old.”

Trump has of course denied any wrongdoing.

There are three more interviews that this woman has with the FBI, and we don’t know what else she says or who else she names. But Maxwell does.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s husband has been banned from the department’s headquarters in Washington after he allegedly sexually assaulted two female staffers, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Dr. Shawn DeRemer, a 57-year-old anesthesiologist from Portland, Oregon, will no longer be able to visit his wife at work, after at least two female staffers told officials that he touched them inappropriately. A building restriction notice viewed by the Times put it gently: “If Mr. DeRemer attempts to enter, he is to be asked to leave.”

One of the incidents, which occurred during working hours, was caught by security cameras, people familiar with the matter told the Times. The footage showed DeRemer giving a female staffer an extended embrace, and it was reviewed as part of a criminal investigation, one of the people told the paper.

A police report documenting a December incident of forced sexual conduct at the Labor Department was filed by Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department in late January.

Concerns about DeRemer were initially raised in January, as part of an internal investigation into alleged misconduct by his wife. In an explosive complaint to the Inspector General’s Office, Chavez-DeRemer was accused of abusing her position by having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a member of her security detail.

She was also accused of drinking during the workday and of committing travel fraud by making her chief of staff schedule official taxpayer-funded trips she could use to see friends and family. Her lawyer has denied these allegations.