Bernie Sanders Warns Chuck Schumer His Days as Senate Leader Are Up

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has added his name to the growing list of liberal-minded lawmakers asking Chuck Schumer to hand over the reins of the Senate.

Sanders told reporters Tuesday that he would not support Schumer’s bid for Senate majority leader in the new year. When asked by The Washington Times’s Lindsey McPherson if he would support Schumer even if the current leader runs unopposed, Sanders responded: “He’s not going to run unopposed, I don’t think.”

A wave of Democratic voices opposing Schumer’s possible return atop the Senate emerged after the party won an overwhelming majority in Congress last week, rebuking the septuagenarian’s establishment politics. In the days since, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen has emerged as a potential alternative, indicating a rising interest in progressive leadership.

Van Hollen rose as a leading progressive last year, when he travelled out of the country to visit his constituent Kilmar Ábrego García after he was illegally deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notoriously lethal maximum security prison, CECOT.

Whether or not Van Hollen will officially commit himself against Schumer remains to be seen, though the Marylander has already started to draft an opposition platform that could put pressure on Schumer’s politics. On Tuesday, Van Hollen declared that the U.S. cannot spend “a penny more” on the Iran War, daring Donald Trump to either stop funding the war or face the possibility of a government shutdown.

So far, at least nine major politicos have either peeled away from Schumer outright or indicated an interest in a different Senate majority leader. They include:

• Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
• Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed
• Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal
• Illinois Senator-elect Juliana Stratton
• Minnesota Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan
• Kansas Senator-elect Adam Hamilton
• Maine Senator-elect Troy Jackson
• New Hampshire Senator-elect Chris Pappas
• Texas Senator-elect James Talarico

Another 14 senators or senators-elect have not yet committed as to whether or not they will support Schumer, according to an analysis published Monday by Primary Democrats. Altogether, that’s 23 Democrats—or nearly half of the at least 54 Democratic seats that will dominate the upper chamber come January.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also refused to support her home state senator, though the decision is ultimately up to the Senate.

House Republicans elected Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio as their new minority leader on Tuesday.

Jordan, who has served as a representative for Ohio’s 4th district since 2007, won the secret ballot vote 106-73, two people present for the tally told Politico. He was up against Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who currently serves as the No. 2 Republican in the House.

Jordan was selected following sweeping Democratic victories in the midterm elections that flipped the House and Senate, prompting House Speaker Mike Johnson to announce he would step down from Republican leadership.

There are plenty of reasons that Jordan has previously been kept out of such a powerful position. That is, until now.

Years before Jordan was elected to the House, he served as an assistant coach to Ohio State University’s wrestling team between 1986 and 1994. The Ohio Republican has faced severe blowback for allegedly participating in a coverup of the rampant sex abuse by team doctor Richard Strauss, who committed 1,429 sexual assaults and 47 rapes against at least 177 male student-athletes during his tenure, according to a 2019 university report.

Jordan also has earned a reputation as a vocal election denier, who assisted President Donald Trump in his proven efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election in 2020. Along with several of his Republican colleagues, Jordan refused to comply with a subpoena from the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The committee unearthed evidence that Jordan had materially relevant communications with Trump and others related to January 6. In July this year, Jordan referred former special counsel Jack Smith to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution, alleging that he’d made false statements to Congress.

As House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jordan enjoyed playing Trump’s personal attorney. Now he’ll get to lead the much diminished party as it fends off investigations from Democratic lawmakers.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump is raking in cash from his pay-to-play scheme giving companies early access to his social media posts.

In a recent SEC filing, Trump Media & Technology Group reported that revenue for Truth Social’s parent company had surged 205 percent in the third quarter to a whopping $3 million.

At least $1.8 million, or 60 percent, of that spike was “primarily driven” by subscriptions to Truth API, which offers Truth Social users early access to posts from government officials for as much as $100,000 a month, the company said.

This would be the kind of thing that would raise a red flag for the SEC—if it were still functioning as an independent agency.

At the moment, the SEC has two commissioners, both Republican: Trump sycophant Paul Atkins, who serves as the SEC chairman, and the reliably pro-business Mark Uyeda, whom Trump appointed as acting chairman before Atkins took office. Republican administrations are historically less interested in enforcing the nation’s securities laws, but Trump 2.0 takes that laissez-faire approach to legality to stratospheric new levels.

Media and watchdog groups have alleged that Trump is exploiting his office to benefit a private company that he owns. In August, The Intercept and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation sued Trump, alleging that Truth API violates the First and Fifth Amendments.

In September, Trump and his aide Natalie Harp, who helped to develop the service, were named in a lawsuit from the groups American Oversight and Campaign for Accountability. A separate lawsuit out of San Francisco alleges that Truth API is a “corrupt business scheme” that violates federal laws against insider trading as well as California’s Unfair Competition Law.

Trump Media’s latest filing caused the value of the company’s stock to jump Tuesday, adding a whopping $34 million to the president’s net worth.

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report Tuesday detailing how the Department of Justice mishandled investigations into sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, failing to interview witnesses.

“The crimes committed by Epstein after 2005 could have been prevented and justice served had it not been for the repeated failures of law enforcement and federal prosecutors,” the 136-page report states. 

The report detailed how the DOJ failed to interview key witnesses while investigating Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse, pointing out that “Too many survivors and other witnesses informed this Committee that they were never approached or properly questioned by federal authorities.” The report called on the DOJ to reinterview witnesses, especially Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff, who survivors say lied to Congress about her role in Epstein’s abuse. 

The committee pointed out other failures as well, including how the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida entered into a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein in 2007 that allowed him to serve a lesser sentence. Notably, the report also criticizes Trump’s DOJ for failures after the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed in 2025, saying that the department  “failed to adequately communicate about document releases and failed to sufficiently protect survivors. Deficient redactions exposed survivors’ sensitive personal information.” 

The report still took aim at Democrats, claiming that they put politics first by “trying to implicate President Trump and insinuate that he was involved in the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell,” calling their efforts an “unfounded witch hunt … without regard for the interests of survivors, even though the facts gathered during this investigation do not suggest President Trump is implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes.”

While this report is a step forward, the fact that it’s coming out after last week’s midterms, where Republicans lost in a landslide, shows that House Republicans are scrambling to save face. Republicans on the committee are using the report to make partisan attacks against Democrats and absolve President Trump, even though Democrats on the committee released their own report before the election that included a new rape allegation against the president. That woman, Beatrice Keul, is nowhere in Republicans’ report and wasn’t called before the committee.

Representative Haley Stevens apparently can’t face her caucus anymore.

The Michigan Democrat was caught hiding in the Republican cloakroom during Congress’s first day back in session, seemingly unable to confront her liberal colleagues after her recent public meltdown, The Washington Sun reported Monday night.

Stevens imploded her reputation and doomed her political prospects just days before the election, when she demanded that Dr. Abdul El-Sayed—the man who bested her in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary—condemn an ad aired by one of his allies, and further apologize for his prior criticism of Israel.

Representative Debbie Dingell then waded into the mix, disinviting Stevens from a church event with El-Sayed and Representative James E. Clyburn, one of Stevens’s lower chamber mentors.

That’s when Stevens went berserk. Rather than attempt to make peace or let bygones be bygones, she did a complete 180 and endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, aligning herself with the MAGA nominee in an apparent effort to undermine El-Sayed’s odds. Notably, she did so without telling anyone, as her staff were reportedly at the El-Sayed event waiting for her arrival.

But her public tantrum did little to turn Michigan voters away from El-Sayed’s campaign, and by the middle of Election Night, it was clear that he had won the state’s Senate seat.

Stevens, meanwhile, now has to face the consequences of her actions. More than half of Stevens’s staff have already resigned, while Democratic leaders have condemned her duplicity. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a “despicable betrayal,” while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries slammed it as a “terrible decision” that could result in Stevens’s expulsion from the Democratic House caucus.

But not every Democrat is in agreement that Stevens’s time in the Democratic Party is over.

“We have three more weeks or two more weeks of being in Congress, so I don’t think we should start making judgments about anybody in the caucus at this point,” said outgoing California Representative Nancy Pelosi. “I was disappointed, I conveyed that to her. I want to be helpful to her in terms of how she deals with this, but I’m not supporting kicking her out.”

Yet despite her sudden affinity for the opposing party, Stevens is still keen to cling to her political identity.

“I am a Democrat who has voted with my caucus 96 percent of the time this term and I don’t expect that to change,” Stevens told the Detroit Free Press Tuesday. (Well, it will change in that after January 2, 2027, she won’t have a vote with the caucus anymore.)