The Surprising Issue Dividing Senate Dems Right Now

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Inside Washington

The surprising issue dividing Senate Dems right now

While Americans worry about sky-high gas prices and AI safety, the Senate has its sights trained on something entirely different—the world of college sports. Though it might seem like an odd focus for the upper chamber in the last few weeks before the October recess, a bill is sparking substantive disagreements over antitrust policy, racial justice in sports, and workers’ rights.

The bill dividing Democrats is the Protect College Sports Act, which the Senate voted to advance on Thursday. The bill attempts to regulate the lucrative world of college sports by setting a cap on payments to athletes, placing a five-year limit on playing eligibility, and giving the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, an antitrust exemption. Supporters of the bill say that it will bring order to the world of college sports, setting rules on how athletes can use the transfer portal, stopping a “spending spiral” by schools, and putting an end to lawsuits on these issues.

The bill easily passed the vote to consider it, with 77 votes for it and just 22 against it; 19 Senate Democrats voted against the bill alongside three Republicans, moving them closer to a final vote on the legislation. “I think the bill is necessary, and it’s not a perfect bill,” said Michigan Senator Gary Peters, who voted for it. “I don’t think we’d ever be able to come up with a perfect bill.”

Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, an outspoken Democratic supporter of the bill, agreed that the bill does more good than harm. “On balance, this is a compromise that secures a lot of significant benefits and protections for college athletes,” he told The New Republic on Thursday. When asked what he thought about his colleagues who were concerned about the antitrust exemption, he mumbled wryly: “Good for them.”

Anti-monopoly advocates worry that the antitrust exemption takes power away from student athletes, who in recent years have benefited from competition between schools trying to woo them onto their teams with cash deals. In 2025, the settlement of a 2020 lawsuit gave Division I schools the right to pay players directly. But before student athletes gained the right to make money from their work on the court or field, coaches and athletic directors took home the most cash. “The players were getting pennies on the dollar,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, the legal director at the anti-monopoly organization Open Markets Institute. “Even though they were the ones really generating all this money.”

Vaheesan, along with lawmakers like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, are concerned that this legislation could reverse these recent financial wins for student athletes. “I think we’re going to rue the day we gave an antitrust exemption this big to the colleges,” Murphy said. “It’s going to result in a huge cost increase for consumers and for folks who follow college sports on TV.”

Asked why he thought the bill was passing with the support of some of his fellow Senate Democrats, Murphy said: “The Power Five schools have a lot of influence. They’ve spent millions and millions of dollars on lobbying.”

Coons argued that the bill isn’t too deferential to the interests of colleges. “They did not get the definition of college athletes as never being employees, which was one of the top asks of the conferences and colleges,” he said. “That was a concession to those of us who are strong supporters of organized labor and want to retain the possibility to organize.”

Meanwhile, all five of the Senate’s Black members—Republican Tim Scott and Democrats Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Angela Alsobrooks—opposed the bill. The NAACP’s president and chief executive strongly opposes the legislation. “Sharecropping is over,” he said on a media call this week. “We should not ask athletes, particularly Black athletes, to generate revenue on the football field or basketball court and then share in none of the revenue.”

“It does raise concerns about how committed members of the Senate, including Senate Democrats, are to the well-being and welfare of workers,” Vaheesan said.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Surging gas prices are dominating headlines this week, particularly across the Midwest. In Michigan, gas prices jumped 22 cents from Wednesday to Thursday, drawing worryingly close to $5 a gallon, with further hikes predicted. (Average prices in Minnesota rose 14 cents in the same 24-hour period. In Cincinnati, Ohio, prices jumped 25 cents overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday.) At the Detroit Free Press on Thursday, Frank Witsil reported new calculations from Brown University professor Jeff Colgan estimating that since the start of Trump’s war on Iran, American households have paid on average $826 more on gas than they would have without the conflict. Susan Tompor of the same paper reported a troubling new trend of free gas and free groceries scams. “This summer,” writes Tompor, “the Better Business Bureau Scam Tracker page received reports from consumers who complained that they received postcards claiming they qualified for valuable gas and grocery gift cards and vouchers,” from the mysteriously named “AAPP”—which can look like “AARP” if people are reading quickly. Those who followed the instructions “complained that they lost money once they paid a $5 processing fee. Some consumers saw additional unauthorized charges of $46 or more being taken out of their accounts.” Analysts predict that prices will remain high for months to come—with record diesel prices rapidly affecting the rest of the economy via their impact on trucking and farming.

In case you missed it: Arizona Republicans are pushing ahead with subpoenas for Governor Katie Hobbs, state Attorney General Kris Mayes, their staff, and others over events from 2022 that The Arizona Republic first reported in 2024. Specifically: The state’s Department of Child Safety, per Axios reporter Jeremy Duda’s retelling of the somewhat tangled tale, “granted a previously rejected rate hike to Sunshine Residential Homes after the group home provider gave $400,000 to Hobbs’s inauguration fund and the Arizona Democratic Party.” Mayes’s office concluded a two-year investigation last month finding no “evidence of the necessary quid pro quo to support a bribery charge,” per the final memo. But GOP State Senator Jake Hoffman says the investigation was phony and incomplete, and now the hearing at which Hobbs and others will be compelled to testify is scheduled, Duda reports, for “eight days before early voting begins and five weeks before the election.” Hobbs and her running mate, former GOP Mesa Mayor John Giles, have consistently led Republicans Andy Biggs and running mate Sine Kerr in recent polls, but the margins have varied widely from poll to poll. While the Cook Political Report moved the race from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat” in July, their race summary still rates Hobbs “the most endangered Democratic incumbent.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the Trump administration “for withholding public records detailing the efforts of politically appointed industry insiders at the Environmental Protection Agency to reapprove the dangerous, drift-prone pesticide dicamba,” according to the org’s press release. Dicamba is typically applied to crops that have been genetically modified to resist it, so that it kills the weeds but not the crops. But it also has a habit of “drifting” from its initial area of application and killing other crops, as well as wildlife. Plus it’s repeatedly been linked to increased risk of cancer in humans. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have no reason to withhold public documents,” CBD’s environmental health science director Nathan Donley said in the press release. CBD was also part of a coalition of groups that sued the Trump administration in February, challenging the initial reapproval.

Friday at 1 p.m., a webcast at the Center for Strategic and International Studies asks: “Is U.S. Economic Diplomacy Up to Speed?” The question may feel bleakly comical against the backdrop of Trump tariffs, the economic shocks of the Iran war, and speculation that Canada might join the EU just to piss Trump off. But Enoh T. Ebong, Allison Lombardo, and Jonathan Gandomi, according to CSIS’s event summary, will focus on a broader, more process-oriented issue: whether the State Department is ready to participate in a new era of negotiations over “critical minerals supply chains … technology standards,” and more. “While the State Department’s role has expanded significantly,” the organization’s event summary states, “its internal structures have not kept pace, leaving expertise fragmented across nearly 20 agencies without strong coordination.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week/Bad Week

Good Week: Macklemore

Sure, the middling rapper got booted from his supporting slot on Ed Sheeran’s tour because of his pro-Palestinian statement during a performance at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium—that’s bad news for him financially. But his righteous stance is being applauded worldwide, and other Sheeran opening acts followed suit. Plus, when was the last time everyone was talking about Macklemore? (Never.)

Bad Week: Ed Sheeran

We knew his music was an abomination. Now we know that his politics are too. Booting an artist from your tour because he said “Free Palestine” does not make you “apolitical”; it makes you an explicit opponent of Palestine’s self-determination, and a craven lickspittle of the corporate entertainment complex.

—Ryan Kearney

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With Texas on our minds: Three speakers of the House in the twentieth century, all Democrats, hailed from Texas. Who were they? One is really hard—he was speaker for just one term. One was speaker for nearly two decades. The third’s tenure ended in (ginned-up) scandal. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

The issue pitting Senate Dems against some Democratic candidates

Senate Democrats lost a battle on Tuesday when the Senate Ag Committee voted to advance the GOP’s proposed Farm Bill without the SNAP protections Democrats have been pushing for. But while sitting Dems might be frustrated, a different group might be breathing a sigh of relief: For Democratic and independent candidates in agriculture-heavy states, this means their Republican opponents might stop hitting them over the Farm Bill.

Wednesday’s committee meeting came after the committee failed to advance the legislation to the Senate in August. Democrats have been withholding votes from the once-bipartisan bill in an effort to delay rollbacks to SNAP that were set in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA.

OBBBA’s policy forcing states to pay more for the administrative costs of SNAP takes effect October 1 of this year. Another measure, which forces states to pay for more of the cost of SNAP benefits based on their error rates, will take effect on October 1, 2027.

Experts say these policies are already hurting states and SNAP recipients. Five million Americans have lost access to SNAP since OBBBA was signed last July, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP. “We’ve been seeing some states taking some pretty extreme steps to try to lower their error rates very quickly,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the CBPP, “and those steps are making it much harder for eligible families to access the help they need to afford groceries.”

Senate Democrats have pushed for an extension, to allow states to take more time to fix their error rates and prepare to pay more for the program. In August, committee Chairman Senator John Boozman gave Democrats part of what they wanted—a one-year extension of the error-rate change. But Dems say that’s not enough and that it comes with a poisonous addition that would actually raise some states’ SNAP costs in 2031.

Jonathan Coppess, a professor of ag policy at the University of Illinois and former federal agriculture official, said that Boozman’s concession on the error rate shows that even some Republicans think the SNAP cuts are bad policy. “It certainly is some recognition by the committee that there’s a problem with what they enacted last year” in the OBBBA, he said.

While Democrats on the Senate Ag Committee are united in their opposition to this version of the Farm Bill, not every Democrat wants to see them blocking the legislation. In Iowa, for example, Republican House and Senate candidates have been hitting Democrats on their resistance to the Farm Bill. GOP Representative Zach Nunn, who is running against State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott in Iowa’s 3rd congressional district, complained about “partisan games” this week and said that “it is completely unacceptable to hold the Farm Bill hostage.”

After the bill failed to pass committee in August, Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate candidate in Iowa, posted on X that “Democrats in the Senate failed [Iowa farmers] by letting perfect be the enemy of the good.” He promised that, if elected, he would pass the Farm Bill. Dan Osborn, an independent running for Senate in Nebraska, told The New Republic in a statement that he would vote for the bill if elected. “Senate Democrats are hurting everyone, especially our farmers, by holding up the Farm Bill,” he said. “As always, they’re looking past the middle of the country, working only for the coasts, and using Nebraskans’ lives as a political football.”

Bergh, however, pushed back against the common trope of farmers versus SNAP recipients. “We hear a lot from farm state lawmakers about how a Farm Bill needs to deliver for rural America, but SNAP is how about one in seven rural households put food on the table,” she said. “Their needs should really be front and center in a Farm Bill conversation.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Most of the backlash against data centers has focused on energy and water consumption, as well as noise and water pollution. But now there’s another reason to worry: The data center boom “will create a ‘tsunami’ of discarded electronics, putting the world on a course to triple its annual generation of toxic e-waste in the next 25 years,” and could “fill enough shipping containers to encircle the globe six times,” The Guardian reports. E-waste “typically contains toxics like lead, mercury, cadmium and forever chemicals, as well as valuable metals that are challenging to reclaim,” the paper’s Erin McCormick writes. The predictions about data centers turbocharging the e-waste problem come from a new report by environmental group Basel Action Network.

“The average Maine household has paid an average of $4,300 more for goods and services since President Donald Trump began his second term,” the Maine Morning Star announces, based on recent analysis from the Maine Center for Economic Policy. Susan Collins probably isn’t thrilled with this headline. The long-standing GOP senator, currently polling a couple points behind Democrat Troy Jackson, has been trying to distance herself from the president in recent weeks.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At the Center for American Progress, Weadé James, Paige Shoemaker DeMio, and Olivia O’Connell release a report on “5 Evidence-Based Strategies to Improve U.S. K-12 Math Achievement,” following news that international tests show America’s 2025 average math score at an “all-time low,” significantly lagging behind those of other rich countries. The report emphasizes standard-setting, “high-quality instructional materials,” and investments in “teacher preparation,” alongside other recommendations. The authors also point to Massachusetts and Alabama as examples of states that have implemented policies significantly boosting average test scores.

As home insurance costs continue to rise, Public Citizen releases the results of a survey sent to state and territorial insurance commissioners: “Only 28 percent of responding offices said they support publication of homeowners insurance data at the ZIP-code level,” the watchdog reports. The reason this data is important, Public Citizen’s press release suggests, is in part to be able to figure out how much of the increase in prices is being driven by the climate crisis, and how much is being driven by profiteering and “regulatory capture.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On the subject of stupid things said by vice presidents: What fairly recent vice president once said, “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure,” and famously misspelled potato on a school visit? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

The conversation around regulating artificial intelligence has rapidly become so wide-reaching that on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon, and Ashley Judd all wound up at the same conference dedicated to tackling the technology’s risks. But while the event showed that there’s a real hunger to take on AI oligarchs, it’s still not clear how that will translate into concrete action.

The “Pro-Human Assembly,” hosted by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Washington, D.C., brought together AI industry researchers, policymakers, and civil society organization leaders in a particularly fraught moment, following a week of dire warnings about AI risks and alarming disclosures about recent safety incidents.

House members’ short speeches opening the conference illustrated just how divided Congress is on the right approach to regulating AI. Representative Greg Casar delivered the most stirring remarks, garnering multiple rounds of applause. “The answer is simple,” he said of the solution to AI threats. “We ban AI systems that are too powerful for humans to control.” The room applauded vigorously. That comment previewed legislation that he and Senator Bernie Sanders are set to release next week, which would ban the development of artificial superintelligence.

Casar also directly called out Leading the Future, the AI industry-funded PAC that has spent millions to elect candidates it thinks will advance its agenda for relatively loose federal regulations on AI. Later in the afternoon, Sanders joined Casar’s criticism, directly addressing the CEOs of AI companies: “If you believe in democracy, if you believe that the people have the right to determine their future, stop pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs,” he said. Later in the day, Leading the Future’s most prominent victim, Alex Bores, spoke to the crowd. Bores championed state-level AI regulations during his time in New York’s Assembly, and Leading the Future spent millions to defeat his bid for Congress earlier this year.

In his speech, Sanders presented his familiar anti-oligarchy messaging. “Virtually all of the decisions regarding the development of AI have been made by a handful of the richest people in the world,” he said, “whose chief goal is to achieve even more wealth and more power than they already have, no matter what the impact their work has on ordinary people.” Sanders used the opportunity to plug his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would distribute the wealth of AI companies and give the public a role in their management, and his call for a data center moratorium alongside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Representative Lori Trahan, who recently has positioned herself as a leader on AI, outlined a more moderate position. Much of her speech focused on the philosophical concerns of AI development—at one point, she quoted Hannah Arendt; at another, she called human beings “ends in ourselves.” Only toward the end did she mention her bipartisan legislation on AI, introduced with GOP Representative Jay Obernolte, and she was careful to frame it as a small incremental step that should be easy for everyone to get on board with. “We need a long sequence of small correct decisions, and we need to start making them today,” she said. “So let me tell you one Congress could make.” Trahan pitched her legislation as a commonsense regulation that won’t overly stifle AI companies. Leading the Future hasn’t endorsed Trahan and Obernolte’s bill, but said in August that the lawmakers “deserve particular credit” for their bipartisanship. On Monday, Obernolte met with OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane. According to Obernolte, Lehane “was actually asking how he could be helpful.”

Steve Bannon, the media executive and former strategist for President Donald Trump, sounded a lot like Senator Sanders in the opening line of his address: “American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs.” Bannon acknowledged that the two appeared to be odd bedfellows, but said that he and Sanders are “trying to rise above our partisanship.”

But while the two men’s willingness to appear back-to-back on the same stage could signal a new coalition of the populist left and right, other parts of Bannon’s speech suggested that it might not be that simple. Sanders, for example, implored President Trump to strike a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping to slow AI development. Bannon, by contrast, took a far less conciliatory tone. “We should quarantine every aspect of the ecosystem of artificial intelligence away from the Chinese Communist Party,” he told the crowd, calling for the U.S. to stop training Chinese students in tech and to kick Chinese-owned companies out of the country. Those moments made the hope of a horseshoe-shaped coalition feel less possible, and created a rather awkward silence in the room.

Ultimately, the conference gave a hint of the messaging Americans are likely to hear for the rest of 2026 and beyond—a populist approach to tackling AI companies, the importance of bipartisan cooperation, and the corrupting influence of money in politics. What Congress might do legislatively, though, remains unclear.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

More bad news on affordability: A report from United Way of the Greater Capital Region finds that “nearly half of New York households are struggling to make ends meet despite earning incomes above the federal poverty line,” Spectrum News 1’s Noah Love reports. That may sound extreme, but it’s in line with what a Brookings Institution report this summer estimated regarding households across the nation. New York Governor Kathy Hochul is on an affordability blitz this week, announcing that the state’s energy rebate checks to an estimated 8.1 million households will be sent September 21. On Tuesday, she announced an “all-of-government push” to enroll some 2.5 million households on a utilities discount program that her administration expanded eligibility for in January.

While polls consistently show Hochul leading her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, she’s not a wildly popular figure to have at the top of the ticket, and there are several competitive House races in New York where Dems could use a bump. As Politico’s Nick Reisman put it last week: “Success would enable the governor to reverse the perception—stoked by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi four years ago—that her 2022 campaign’s weak showing against Republican Lee Zeldin kept the House in GOP hands.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Outside Washington

The Center for American Progress releases a report on “The Long Game on Energy Affordability.” Energy efficiency, writes its author, Frederick Bell, is what will reduce people’s energy bills in the long term. Right now, the Iran war and other developments have created what Bell calls an “affordability trap: The public’s demand for immediate relief can entice policymakers to reduce or eliminate investments that keep energy bills lower over time in order to find savings today.”

In case you missed it: Data for Progress released a new poll this week with the striking finding that “voters blame Republicans for rising gas prices by a 30-point margin.” That includes 36 percent of Republicans blaming their own party for the spike.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World

By Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

THE GIST: Klein and Taylor first coined “end times fascism” in The Guardian last April, in one of the shrewdest pieces to emerge from the chaos of the early months of the second Trump administration. “The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death,” they wrote. “They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.” The piece referred to billionaires, Christian fundamentalists, and ethnonationalists working together on behalf of the same sinister ends. In End Times Fascism, Klein and Taylor elucidate the threat posed by this coalition and also explain how to fight back.

PRAISE: The environmentalist and author Bill McKibben has said that End Times Fascism “will be a playbook for how a lot of progressives respond to the fix we find ourselves in.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: Like almost all of Klein and Taylor’s work, End Times Fascism is not mere polemic—it mixes history, theory, and reportage in novel and trenchant ways. The book covers Sam Altman, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Elon Musk, as well as doomsday preppers, “great replacement” neo-Nazis, and billionaires with persecution complexes. Although rooted in the (bad) last couple of years, its scope is wider, encompassing the rise of Nazism and World War II, race, reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the wider state of global fascism.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: End Times Fascism sings with its authors’ intellect and experience as two of the most wide-ranging writers on the left. (Disclosure: Taylor is also a TNR contributor.) But the best thing about the book isn’t its persuasive diagnosis of all that ails this moment but its roadmap for how to get us out of this mess, which is both clear-eyed and surprisingly joyful. “End times fascism’s war on earthly life calls on us to develop a more inclusive and expansive form of universalism than the one developed in the twentieth century,” they write. Amen.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Speaking of the Federal Reserve, historians of the Fed generally agree that this chairman was the worst Fed chair of all time. Who was he, and why is his reputation so low? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free.

Inside Washington

What is this bipartisan data center bill really about?

On Tuesday, Congress will consider the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to make data centers responsible for their costs to the energy grid. The premise sounds good—but some critics say all it would really do is give cover to vulnerable incumbents in an election season dominated by concerns about affordability and AI data centers.

The bill, introduced by Democratic Representative Kathy Castor of Florida and Republican Representative Gabe Evans of Colorado, tells states to consider adopting a federal standard that ensures data centers cover the costs of their grid updates. The key word there is “consider.” Under the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, state-level utility commissions set their own rates. Congress can only tell these commissions to consider changes, but can’t actually force those changes itself. The bill is the legislative counterpart to President Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” a voluntary and nonbinding pledge that the White House said nearly 200 utilities and AI companies signed in March. Both the bill and the pledge tell AI companies to shoulder the cost of data centers, but neither has an enforcement mechanism to make that happen.

“It doesn’t really have much in the way of teeth,” said David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute. Both Pomerantz and Grayson Flood, a senior fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, said that the bill’s toothlessness doesn’t mean it’s bad—just that it doesn’t actively change much. “It should be something that folks support,” Flood said. “Where I would push back is if it starts to be framed as: Well, we’ve done the thing and now we don’t need to do any more.”

Some view the legislation more harshly. Mitch Jones, the managing director of policy and litigation at Food and Water Watch, said that his organization is opposed to the bill because it acts as a “fig leaf” for Big Tech companies and members of Congress to hide behind without meaningfully addressing high utility costs from data centers.

“This legislation is clearly meant to give members of Congress cover, especially during an election year, when the issue of data centers and the issue of AI more broadly have really come to the fore as one of the top issues animating politics in the United States currently,” Jones said.

Polls suggest voters overwhelmingly hate data centers, and a number of this bill’s co-sponsors are facing tough elections this November. Notably, GOP Representatives David Valadao of California, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Mónica de la Cruz of Texas, and Bill Huizenga and Tom Barrett of Michigan have signed on to the bill since September 1. All are facing strong Democratic challengers in their elections. Barrett is facing Will Lawrence in Michigan’s 7th congressional district; Lawrence has made data centers a central part of his campaign, and has criticized Barrett on data centers and AI specifically.

Instead of this bill, Jones said, Congress should pass the moratorium on data center construction introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in March. Flood, for his part, wants to see Congress levy taxes on data center tenants based on their electricity usage—something Congress actually does have the authority to do. “That creates a floor that every data center has to pay, regardless of what state it’s in,” he said. That “makes it harder for these tech companies to do what you would call regulatory arbitrage,” playing states off of each other to secure the best deals possible.

The experts who spoke to The New Republic emphasized that states are already tackling this issue themselves, and don’t need Congress to tell them it’s important—in recent months, governors including Kathy Hochul in New York and Greg Abbott in Texas have called for pauses to new data center construction, and other states are considering plans to address the issue. “There’s nothing inherently wrong” about Congress making a “political statement” about data center costs, Pomerantz said. But ultimately, Flood noted, “This is the bare minimum.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

In barely 24 hours after Republican Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French posted a bizarre, racist comment on X, several Republicans denounced him—and 500 new donors flocked to Democratic candidate Jon Rosenthal, The Texas Tribune reported on Monday. The original social media post on Sunday featured a picture of numerous nonwhite students cheering the Texas Longhorns’ big comeback win over Ohio State Saturday, with French commenting: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Wrote the Tribune’s Carlos Nogueras Ramos: “French, who has scarcely debated the issues the Railroad Commission regulates since launching his campaign last November, vigorously defended his remarks. He said UT-Austin and other institutions have prioritized foreign students and workers, which, without evidence, he said has resulted in fraud.” Last year, Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called for French’s resignation as Tarrant County party chair after French posted a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims posed a bigger threat to the United States.

For those curious about the outsize influence that the three-member Texas Railroad Commission has over the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, check out Kate Aronoff’s explanation from the 2020 election season.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Tuesday, Arizona State University and New America host their 12th Annual Future Security Forum “in collaboration” with the Global SOF Foundation, Security & Defense PLuS, the McCain Institute, and Small Wars Journal. The forum, focused on “America’s Post-9/11 Wars,” will feature among its many speakers Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch, Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow, General Joseph L. Votel, and reporters Azmat Khan, former New America head Steve Coll, Jason Burke, and Joby Warrick.

Wednesday at noon, the Center for American Progress hosts an in-person and Zoom discussion with Senator Tim Kaine, Representative Jason Crow (busy guy this week!), and Representative Chrissy Houlahan about how to “reform” national security post-Trump. The Brookings Institution’s Damian Murphy and Allison McManus will moderate, with opening remarks delivered by Dan Herman.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Clarence Thomas is probably the most conservative Supreme Court justice in modern U.S. history. Which two men, who both sat in the mid-to-late twentieth century, are generally considered the most liberal justices in the court’s history? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

Dems want to regulate AI. But will AI money divide them?

Democrats are loudly demanding new artificial intelligence regulation after an Anthropic researcher publicly announced his resignation this week with a social media post saying his colleagues believe AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” On Thursday, another Anthropic news item threw fuel on the fire: The company announced that it had discovered and thwarted a “series” of attempts by “suspected state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, and politically motivated individuals” to use its AI models to develop biological weapons.

Now, as some Dems call for immediate action, the question isn’t just whether the party will hold the power to do something in January—it’s also whether the new Congress could be hampered by the role of pro-AI money in politics.

The biggest player in the AI PAC world is Leading the Future, which is funded by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir.

The other major AI PAC is Public First Action, which was founded by former Democratic Representative Brad Carson and former Republican Representative Chris Stewart to act as a counterweight to Leading the Future. Anthropic is a major funder of the group, and donated $40 million to it this year. “This is too important a conversation to let a few billionaires decide the future of AI in our country and put profits over people,” Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, a spokesperson for Public First Action, told The New Republic. “We exist to advocate for public safeguards in this debate.”

Other tech sectors, notably the cryptocurrency industry, pour money into politics as well. There’s some overlap between the interests of pro-AI and pro-cryto PACs like Fairshake.

While both groups are funded by the AI industry, campaign finance reform advocates say there are crucial differences. “If I had my druthers, none of these PACs would exist,” said Colin McGlynn, the AI policy adviser at Demand Progress Action. “But given that we’re stuck with the Supreme Court we have for now, that we’re not going to get that kind of money out of politics, I definitely prefer that there be some money on the side of being ready to regulate AI,” he said, referring to Public First Action’s stated goal to support AI regulation.

So far, Leading the Future’s Democratic sub-PAC, called Think Big, has intervened in 15 Democratic primaries, according to Federal Elections Commission filings and the watchdog group Guardrails Action. The candidates they’ve supported include: Ritchie Torres, Marilyn Strickland, Greg Stanton, Jimmy Panetta, Joseph Morelle, Robert Menendez, Jared Moskowitz, Dan Koh, Ben
McAdams, Jesse Jackson Jr., Valerie Hoyle, Yvette Clarke, Melissa Bean, and Jeremy Moss.

Notably, Think Big spent millions to oppose Alex Bores’s campaign for New York’s 12th congressional district. Bores authored New York’s RAISE Act, which requires frontier AI labs to publish information about their safety protocols and disclose any safety breaches. Jobs and Democracy PAC, an affiliate of Public First Action, jumped in to support Bores, but he ultimately lost his race.

Think Big has also offered endorsements (but not financial support) to Sam Liccardo, Josh Gottheimer, Jimmy Gomez, Tom Suozzi, Eric Sorensen, Joyce Beatty, Herb Conaway, Emilia Sykes, and Suhas Subramanyam.

Of those, a few names stand out: Gottheimer is a co-chair of the House Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy, a group launched by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries late last year. Meanwhile, Subramanyam is a co-sponsor of the FRONTIER Act.

Besides Bores, Public First Action and its Jobs and Democracy PAC has spent money on candidates like Colin Allred, Valerie Foushee, Brian Poindexter, Scott Weiner, and Bob Brooks. Alongside Representatives Greg Casar and Sara Jacobs, Foushee last month introduced a bill to prevent mass unemployment due to AI.

In sharp contrast to Leading the Future, Public First Action explicitly supports state and local AI legislation, and says on its website that it “opposes federal efforts to freeze state progress without adequate federal safeguards.” That could put the group at odds with the FRONTIER Act, which critics say preempts states’ abilities to regulate AI.

Though the groups have spent massive sums of money in the 2026 midterms, experts say they think the power of AI interests could decrease soon. Polling shows that Americans are desperate for AI regulation; 65 percent of Americans surveyed earlier this year said the government had done “too little” to regulate AI. Anger over data centers and AI has become a talking point in races across the country.

“I absolutely think that the anger about data centers and other AI overreach is going to be part of what powers the next generation of reform on money in politics,” said Abigail Bellows, the senior policy director for anti-corruption and accountability at Common Cause.

McGlynn agrees that Leading the Future is in a weaker position than they were at the beginning of 2026. “They started out with the crypto strategy of spend big and early to scare people into line,” he said, referring to the strategy of crypto PACs like Fairshake in 2024 and 2026. But now that voters are animated by data centers and AI, “they’re kind of on the back foot now, and we’ve seen them basically stop spending recently. I think they’re trying to come up with new strategies.”

Some lawmakers are already taking action, suggesting the formation of a select committee on artificial intelligence and, in the case of Senator Bernie Sanders, holding briefings on the dangers of AI. It remains to be seen what strategies the AI industry might take come January to influence any legislation the new Congress might consider.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The anti-Flock backlash continues. In Ohio, Democratic state lawmakers Tristan Rader and Darnell Brewer and Republicans Levi Dean
and Justin Pizzulli recently penned a letter to “request that the Ohio Department of Transportation stop permitting automated license plate readers in state highway rights-of-way and review the permits already issued,” the Ohio Capital Journal reported Thursday. Recent reports of law enforcement abusing the technology, and general concerns about surveillance, have turned Flock cameras into “a hot topic on the Ohio campaign trail,” writes Nick Evans. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, the paper notes, “initially praised the cameras’ role in solving crimes” but now has said she supports a full ban on the cameras. Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been a bit cagier, and apparently did not respond to the paper’s request for clarification on his position.

In case you missed it: ProPublica’s Andrea Suozzo and Agnel Philip this week find in a striking new report that deaths from ectopic pregnancy doubled in the period from 2020 to 2025 as compared to the prior six years—and that “while the uptick in ectopic deaths occurred nationwide, the climb has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.” Troublingly, they note, “the mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response”: The reporters contacted “more than a dozen maternal health experts, including leaders in the field, who were unaware of the spike.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin pen a new report on “Teaching American Democracy,” probing “where civics [education] went wrong” and how to “revitalize” it. One of the recommendations: “All states should require three years of American Democracy, just as they typically require three years in math and reading. Helping all students understand who we are as Americans and why,” Kahlenberg and Lin write, “is of enormous importance in a country where liberal democratic norms are under steady attack—as important as literacy and numeracy.”

Next Tuesday at 10 a.m., the Brookings Institution will host an event exploring “whether industry, community, and government can ever get closer to agreement on data centers.” Participants include Representative Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, NAACP director of the Center for Environmental and Climate Justice Abre’ Conner, Elena Schlossberg of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, Groundswell CEO Michelle Moore, and Tuckahoe Creek Strategies founder Marie Sylla-Dixon. Brookings Center for Technology Innovation director Nicol Turner Lee will moderate.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week/Bad Week

Good Week: The Washington Sun

Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the media operation formerly known as NOTUS has morphed into its final form as The Washington Sun. The outlet has made a strong showing in recent years, publishing keenly written stories, hoovering up local journalistic talent, and filling the yawning gap left by The Washington Post as it pivoted from news to cut-rate right-wing opinion goulash and unwatchable podcasts hosted by dweebs.

Bad Week: Hey, maybe everyone, who knows?

Was Jacob Coxon’s announcement that Anthropic’s AI models were destined to wipe out humanity within a decade a genuine cry for help, or a personal-branding stunt, or a marketing gimmick? It’s impossible to say. Still, not great to have a trillion-dollar industry barreling into a future it doesn’t understand and cannot explain that’s this good at keeping us awake at night.

—Jason Linkins

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On this opening week of the NFL season: A number of former NFL players have gone on to careers in politics. Mostly, they’re Republican, but there have been at least two recent Democrats. Name one. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky