Two Republican election officials told ABC News they expect President Donald Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting to be struck down in court, even as a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in federal court in Boston to challenge it.
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer both said they believe the litigation to block the order is likely to succeed. Their comments arrived alongside a growing number of legal challenges from Democrat attorneys general, House Democrats, and left-leaning advocacy groups, all racing to block the order before it reshapes how states conduct elections.
The White House has defended the order as intended to strengthen election integrity and ensure only eligible citizens vote. That goal is not controversial among Republicans. But the messengers lining up against it, and the legal terrain they're choosing, tell a more complicated story.
Trump's executive order directs his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and to use federal data to help state election officials verify eligibility. It requires the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on each state's approved mail-in ballot list. States must also preserve election-related records for five years.
None of those provisions sound radical. Verifying citizenship, maintaining voter rolls, preserving records: these are the basic hygiene of election administration that conservatives have demanded for years. The question isn't whether those goals are worthy. It's whether an executive order is the right vehicle to achieve them.
Schmidt, appearing on ABC News' "This Week," framed his concern around voter confidence rather than partisan loyalty. He said:
"We want voters to know that the election is going to be free, fair, safe, and secure, and that everyone knows what the rules are prior to going into this."
His worry is confusion, not the underlying policy. When rules change mid-cycle or get tangled in litigation, voters lose clarity about how to cast their ballots. That uncertainty, Schmidt argued, cuts against the very trust the order is meant to build.
"So confusion is never a positive thing unless you are seeking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election."
According to Newsweek, Richer, who ran Maricopa County elections from 2021 to 2025, struck a similar note. He acknowledged agreeing with "some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations" but called the order unnecessary, noting that Arizona already has many of the features Trump wants applied nationally. His core objection was procedural:
"While I agree with some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations, the form does matter."
This is a familiar fault line on the right. Conservative election officials who have spent years building integrity measures at the state level often bristle when Washington attempts to dictate process from the top down. It's the same federalism instinct that drove Republican resistance to federal election mandates under the Obama administration. The principle doesn't change because the president signing the order has an R next to his name.
A coalition of Democrat state attorneys general announced Friday they were filing a lawsuit challenging the executive order in federal court in Boston. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who filed one of the separate lawsuits, offered predictably breathless commentary on "This Week":
"That executive order is unlawful and unconstitutional. We've already filed litigation, and we expect that it will be declared so in short order by the courts."
Jeffries also declared his side would "work as hard as we can to make sure that this is a free and fair election." Which is interesting language from a party that has spent the last several years arguing that any attempt to verify voter eligibility is voter suppression. Democrats have fought voter ID laws, resisted citizenship verification on registration forms, and sued states for cleaning outdated names from voter rolls. Now they invoke "free and fair elections" as their rallying cry against an order that asks the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to approved voters.
The contradiction is loud. When Republicans propose verifying who votes, Democrats call it disenfranchisement. When Democrats sue to block those verification measures, they call it protecting democracy. The principle bends to serve the outcome they want.
Additional cases are being pursued by what the source material describes as "arms of the Democratic Party and voting rights advocates," a coalition that functions as the legal infantry of the progressive movement whenever election rules shift rightward.
The honest conservative conversation here isn't about whether election integrity matters. It does. It isn't about whether mail-in voting has vulnerabilities. It does. The conversation is about strategy.
Executive orders are inherently fragile instruments. They can be reversed by the next president, enjoined by a single federal judge, and litigated into irrelevance before they ever take effect. The legal challenges already piling up in Boston and elsewhere suggest this order may spend more time in courtrooms than in practice.
State-level election reform, by contrast, has proven durable. Georgia's Election Integrity Act survived a corporate boycott, media hysteria, and DOJ scrutiny. Florida tightened its mail-in voting rules and saw smooth elections with broad public confidence. Arizona, as Richer himself noted, already has many of the features the executive order seeks to impose nationally. These reforms succeeded because they were built through legislatures, survived legal challenges on their own constitutional footing, and earned democratic legitimacy in the process.
The goals embedded in Trump's executive order, citizen verification, ballot delivery controls, record preservation, are goals that belong in state law. Codified through legislation, they become far harder for the next Democrat administration to unwind. Issued by executive pen, they become lawsuit magnets that hand Democrats a sympathetic narrative about overreach.
The legal trajectory is predictable. A federal judge, likely in a blue-leaning jurisdiction, will issue an injunction. The administration will appeal. The case will grind through the courts while Democrats fundraise off every hearing. Meanwhile, the actual policy goals remain unimplemented.
None of this means the underlying impulse is wrong. Americans deserve to know that only eligible citizens are voting. The Postal Service should not be delivering ballots to addresses with no verified voter. Election records should be preserved long enough to audit.
But achieving those goals requires building them on ground that courts cannot easily wash away. Two Republican officials who share the president's priorities are saying, plainly, that this particular foundation won't hold.
That's not opposition. It's advice worth hearing.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, days into his new role atop the Justice Department, poured cold water on one of the most persistent theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein: that the late financier operated as an intelligence asset. In a Fox News interview on Friday, Blanche was direct.
"All I know is that we don't have any evidence in the Epstein files that the FBI collected over 15 years that suggests that."
Fifteen years of federal file collection. No evidence of espionage. That is the current position of the United States Department of Justice.
Blanche added that he personally has "no idea" whether Epstein was a spy, and noted that neither he nor former Attorney General Pam Bondi was part of the original prosecution team. The candor is notable. He did not claim omniscience. He stated what the files show and what they don't.
Speculation that Epstein worked for the CIA or another intelligence agency has circulated for years, fueled by the sheer implausibility of his financial empire and the breadth of his elite connections. Some voices on the right, including Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, have suggested the Israeli government used Epstein as an intelligence asset, as Washington Examiner reports, as Washington Examiner reports.
The theory has always carried a certain gravitational pull. Epstein's life genuinely did not add up. A 2002 profile in New York Magazine quoted a prominent investor who seemed to sense it even then:
"It's like looking at the Wizard of Oz – there may be less there than meets the eye."
Media accounts from the early 2000s described Epstein as a highly regarded "international moneyman of mystery." He mingled with former President Bill Clinton and former President Barack Obama's White House counsel. He was friendly with Donald Trump before that relationship ended in the early 2000s. The man held close connections to the world's elite, and no one could quite explain how he got there or what he actually did.
That gap between biography and plausibility is what feeds spy theories. But a theory without evidence, even an interesting one, remains a theory.
Blanche ascended to the top of the Justice Department this week after President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday. Her exit came amid intense criticism from Democrats and a few Republicans, including Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, surrounding the government's investigation into Epstein's life and the release of millions of federal files.
The Epstein file saga has been a source of bipartisan frustration, though the frustrations point in very different directions. For many on the right, the core question has never been whether Epstein was a spy. It's been simpler and more damning: Who did he enable, who protected him, and why did the system look away for so long?
Those questions remain open regardless of the espionage angle.
Epstein died in a prison cell in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide by authorities. The circumstances surrounding that ruling have never satisfied large portions of the public, and the details that have emerged since do little to inspire confidence.
Consider the conduct of the people responsible for keeping Epstein alive. One of his two prison guards, Tova Noel, Googled "latest on Epstein in jail" twice, just minutes before he was discovered dead in his cell. She was later fired after admitting to falsifying records to say she had checked on Epstein throughout the night before his death, according to prosecutors.
A guard who falsified check-in records. A Google search minutes before the discovery. A death that conveniently silenced the most dangerous witness in a generation. You don't need a spy theory to find this deeply troubling. The institutional failures are damning on their own terms.
The House Oversight Committee requested last month that one of Epstein's two prison guards deliver testimony to lawmakers surrounding his death. Whether that testimony materializes, and what it reveals, could matter far more than the espionage question.
Blanche's statement narrows one line of inquiry but opens the broader conversation about what the files actually do contain. Millions of federal documents spanning fifteen years of FBI work represent an enormous body of material. If the spy angle is a dead end, the public's attention should shift to the substance that is there, not the theory that isn't.
The Epstein case has always been less about one man and more about the system that surrounded him. The financier who moved among presidents and power brokers, whose wealth no one could trace, whose crimes were known, and whose punishment was deferred. The intelligence question is seductive because it offers a tidy explanation for the inexplicable. But the real scandal may be worse than espionage. It may simply be that powerful people protected a predator because he was useful to them, and no spy agency was required to make that happen.
Sometimes the system doesn't need a conspiracy. It just needs indifference at the right levels.
Sen. Mitch McConnell broke with President Trump on Wednesday, issuing a joint statement with a Democratic colleague that defended American membership in NATO, hours after Trump told a British newspaper that a U.S. exit from the 75-year-old alliance was "beyond reconsideration."
The Kentucky Republican, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, teamed with the panel's ranking Democrat, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, to push back publicly against the president's remarks. Their statement cast NATO as indispensable to American security and urged allies to preserve unity, a direct rebuke, however diplomatically worded, of the commander-in-chief's own position.
The episode lays bare a fault line that has run through the Republican Party for years: how far the America First foreign-policy instinct should extend, and whether longstanding alliances still serve the national interest or have become expensive liabilities.
In an interview with The Telegraph published Wednesday, Trump said he had never been impressed by the alliance. He told the British paper that the possibility of withdrawal was now active.
"I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin knows that too, by the way."
Trump had already laid the groundwork for the confrontation. In a Truth Social post last month, he criticized NATO members for refusing to back U.S. military operations against Iran.
"They didn't want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them."
The president's frustration with allied burden-sharing is nothing new. But the phrase "beyond reconsideration" marked a sharper turn than anything he had said publicly in his current term. It moved the discussion from leverage, using the threat of withdrawal to extract higher defense spending from European capitals, to something that sounded more like a policy conclusion.
McConnell and Coons wasted little time. Their joint statement, released Wednesday, described NATO as "the most successful military alliance in history" and said it had "underpinned the security of the United States for more than 70 years."
They acknowledged that disagreements among allies are nothing unusual. But they drew a clear line on the question of membership itself, as internal Republican divisions over spending and foreign policy continue to widen.
"Alliance disputes are as old as the alliance itself. Americans are safer when NATO is strong and united. It is in our interest for all allies to tend this unity with care."
The statement was careful in tone, it never mentioned Trump by name. But its timing and substance left no doubt about its target. The United States was one of NATO's 12 original founding members when the agreement was signed in 1949, and McConnell has long treated the alliance as a pillar of American strategic posture, not a favor to Europe.
Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who serves as vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was less restrained. Warner issued his own statement Wednesday and used Trump's own language against him.
"It is not a 'paper tiger', it is the most successful military alliance in modern history, and Donald Trump's threat to pull the United States out of NATO is reckless, dangerous, and plays directly into the hands of our adversaries."
Warner framed NATO as "the cornerstone of American national security" for more than seventy years, arguing it had deterred conflict in Europe and ensured the United States never faced a crisis alone. His language was sharper than McConnell's, but the two senators landed in the same place: withdrawal would weaken America, not strengthen it.
McConnell's willingness to stand with Democrats against a Republican president on foreign policy is not without precedent, particularly on questions involving NATO, Russia, and Ukraine. The same internal tension has been building for years.
At the Munich Security Conference in February 2023, McConnell pushed back on suggestions that Republican support for Ukraine was collapsing. National Review reported that he told the audience: "Reports about the death of Republican support for strong American leadership in the world have been greatly exaggerated." He insisted that his party's leaders "overwhelmingly support a strong, involved America and a robust transatlantic alliance" and urged observers to "look at people in power" rather than social media.
That same year, McConnell described U.S. aid to Ukraine as "not an act of charity" but "a direct investment" in American national interests. He warned that giving Russian President Vladimir Putin a "green light to destabilize Europe, invading and killing at will," would cost the United States far more in the long run. The New York Post documented the widening GOP rift at the time, noting that figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed to audit Ukraine aid while Sen. Josh Hawley and others demanded limits on funding.
The divide ran deep enough that McConnell singled out members of his own conference. Fox News reported that he publicly labeled fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul an "isolationist" and vowed to make opposing Russia in Ukraine his primary focus. "If the Russians take Ukraine, some NATO country will be next, and then we will be right in the middle of it," McConnell said at the time.
That pattern, a senior Republican establishment figure breaking with the party's populist base on alliance commitments, is the backdrop for Wednesday's statement. McConnell has been consistent. The question is whether consistency on NATO now puts him further from where his party's voters stand.
Wednesday's exchange was a clash of statements, not a clash of policy actions. Trump said withdrawal was "beyond reconsideration," but nothing in the public record indicates that a formal administrative process to leave NATO has begun. No executive order has been cited. No notification to allies has been reported. The gap between presidential rhetoric and executive action remains wide, and it matters, because withdrawing from a treaty alliance is not a one-sentence affair.
Nor is it clear how many Republican senators share McConnell's position. He and Coons issued their statement as the chair and ranking member of the defense appropriations subcommittee, which gave it institutional weight. But the statement carried two signatures, not twenty. The broader Senate Republican conference has not weighed in, and the silence is its own kind of message.
The episode echoes a pattern visible across Capitol Hill, where lawmakers on both sides occasionally cross party lines on national-security questions when the political pressure is strong enough. Whether more Republicans follow McConnell's lead, or quietly let Trump's remarks stand, will say more about the state of the party than any single joint statement.
Meanwhile, the broader landscape of establishment-versus-base battles inside the GOP shows no sign of cooling. From Senate primaries to spending fights to foreign-policy doctrine, the fault lines keep widening.
There is a legitimate debate to be had about NATO burden-sharing, European defense spending, and whether the alliance's institutional culture has kept pace with the threats it faces. Trump has raised those questions more bluntly than any modern president, and he deserves credit for forcing European capitals to take their own security more seriously.
But there is a difference between demanding reform and walking away. McConnell, whatever his critics on the right think of him, understands that distinction. His joint statement with Coons was not an act of disloyalty to the Republican Party. It was a statement about what he believes American security requires, the same position he has held publicly for years, through multiple administrations and shifting political winds.
The question now is whether the president's remarks were a negotiating posture, the kind of high-pressure talk that has, in the past, produced real results from reluctant allies, or something more final. "Beyond reconsideration" does not leave much room for interpretation. But Trump has surprised before, and the space between a newspaper interview and a formal policy directive is wide enough to drive a tank through.
What cannot be debated is the stakes. NATO's Article 5, the collective defense commitment, has been invoked exactly once in the alliance's history, and it was invoked on behalf of the United States after September 11, 2001. Americans who remember that day understand what it means to have allies who show up.
If the goal is a stronger, better-funded, more accountable NATO, most conservatives would sign on. If the goal is an America that stands alone by choice, that is a different proposition, and one that deserves a more serious debate than dueling press releases.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is out, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is stepping up to lead the Department of Justice. President Trump announced the shakeup Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, praising Bondi's tenure while confirming she would be transitioning to a private-sector role.
The move came together quickly. Semafor's Shelby Talcott reported Thursday morning that Trump had informed Bondi the previous day that her time as attorney general was drawing to a close. Fox News's Peter Doocy confirmed the transition before the Truth Social post went live, noting during a phone call that "the president said he was preparing some remarks."
Just the day before, Trump and Bondi had sat side by side at the Supreme Court for oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. Within hours, the president told her the chapter was ending.
Trump's post struck a tone of gratitude, not friction. He called Bondi "a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend" and credited her with overseeing results:
"Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900."
That framing matters. This wasn't a firing dressed up in diplomatic language. Trump went out of his way to commend Bondi's record, signal a continued relationship, and preview her next move. He noted she "will be transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future." No details on the role, the employer, or the timeline. But the signal is clear: Bondi leaves with the president's endorsement intact.
Trump's choice for acting attorney general is not a bureaucratic placeholder. Breitbart noted that Todd Blanche is the attorney who stood next to the president through one of the most politically charged legal battles in modern American history, representing Trump in the business records case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in April 2024.
Trump described Blanche as "a very talented and respected Legal Mind." That personal familiarity cuts both ways in Washington, but in this White House, loyalty forged in the courtroom carries weight. Blanche already holds the deputy attorney general title, making the transition legally straightforward and operationally seamless.
Before the announcement, multiple reports had floated Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin as a potential replacement. Trump chose differently, opting for continuity within the DOJ rather than pulling a high-profile appointee from another agency.
Bondi served as attorney general since February 5, 2025, a tenure of roughly a year by the time of her departure. In that window, the DOJ under Trump's direction pursued an aggressive law enforcement posture. Whether Blanche continues that trajectory or recalibrates will become clear soon enough, but the infrastructure Bondi helped build doesn't vanish with her exit.
The more interesting question is what this means for the administration's broader legal strategy. The birthright citizenship case is before the Supreme Court. Immigration enforcement remains a centerpiece of Trump's agenda. And the DOJ sits at the nexus of nearly every consequential policy fight the administration is waging. Blanche inherits all of it.
Personnel is policy, as the saying goes. And the president just installed a man who knows firsthand what it looks like when the justice system is weaponized against a political opponent. That perspective will shape how the Department of Justice operates going forward.
Washington will spend the next 48 hours speculating about what really happened. That's what Washington does. But the public facts tell a simple story: a president reshuffled his team, praised the departing member, and elevated someone he trusts. Bondi moves on. Blanche moves up. The DOJ keeps moving.
For an administration that has treated personnel decisions as strategic signals, this one is worth watching, not for what it disrupts, but for what it accelerates.
A majority of Supreme Court justices signaled deep skepticism toward the Trump administration's effort to end birthright citizenship during oral arguments Wednesday, with Chief Justice John Roberts and at least three other conservative-appointed justices pushing back hard on the government's constitutional reasoning.
The case, Trump v. Barbara, represents the most significant challenge to the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause in over a century. President Trump signed the executive order on his first day back in office, seeking to end automatic citizenship for nearly all persons born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents or parents holding temporary non-immigrant visas. He campaigned on the issue during his successful 2024 reelection bid.
But the oral arguments made clear that even a court with six Republican-appointed justices is not prepared to rewrite settled constitutional law by executive decree.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer carried the administration's case, arguing that the Citizenship Clause has been misinterpreted for more than 100 years and that modern realities demand a new reading. According to Fox News, his core pitch was blunt:
"We're in a new world now. 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who's a U.S. citizen."
Roberts was unmoved. He called one of Sauer's arguments "quirky," then delivered the line that may define this case's narrative:
"It's a new world, but it's the same constitution."
The Chief Justice pressed further on the administration's attempt to extrapolate a broad restriction from narrow historical examples, telling Sauer he wasn't "quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples."
That is a devastating framing for the government's position. Roberts wasn't questioning the policy goal. He was questioning whether the legal architecture could bear its weight. There is a significant difference, and it matters for what comes next.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch also appeared skeptical of the administration's arguments. Justice Brett Kavanaugh may have been the most pointed. He cited the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act and noted that Congress had every opportunity to narrow birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court's 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It didn't.
"One might have expected Congress to use a different phrase if it wanted to try to disagree with Wong Kim Ark on what the scope of birthright citizenship, or the scope of citizenship, should be."
Kavanaugh also told Sauer flatly that if the Court agreed with the administration's reading of Wong Kim Ark, "that could be just a short opinion." In other words, the argument is thin enough that disposing of it wouldn't require much ink.
Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito appeared sympathetic to the administration's position. Thomas questioned how much the original debates around the 14th Amendment actually concerned immigration, a line of inquiry that tracks with the administration's originalist argument. Alito invoked a classic analogy from the late Justice Antonin Scalia about applying old laws to new facts:
"There's a general rule there, and you apply it to future applications."
The Scalia analogy involved an old theft statute written before microwave ovens existed. Someone steals a microwave and argues they can't be convicted because the law predates the appliance. The point: general principles don't expire when circumstances change. It's a reasonable framework, but Alito and Thomas appear to be in a clear minority on this bench.
Here is where conservatives need to be honest with themselves about what this case actually reveals. The frustration driving this executive order is entirely legitimate. The idea that illegal immigrants can cross the border, give birth, and secure American citizenship for their children is a policy outcome that most Americans find indefensible. An estimated 150,000 children are born annually in the United States to noncitizens. The incentive structure is obvious, and the exploitation of it is real.
But the mechanism matters. The 14th Amendment says what it says. Wong Kim Ark has stood since 1898. If conservatives want to change birthright citizenship, the honest path runs through Congress or a constitutional amendment, not an executive order asking the Supreme Court to reverse more than a century of settled law.
This is the same principle conservatives invoke when the left tries to govern by executive fiat. Presidential power has limits. Those limits don't evaporate because the policy goal is popular with our side.
The ACLU's legal director, Cecillia Wang, argued the case on behalf of the challengers, calling birthright citizenship a "fixed, bright-line rule" that "has contributed to the growth and thriving of our nation." She also argued:
"It comes from text and history. It is workable, and it prevents manipulation."
The ACLU framing is, of course, self-serving. The organization has spent decades fighting every meaningful immigration enforcement measure. Their concern for constitutional text is situational at best. But Wang's core legal point, that the 14th Amendment's plain language creates a clear rule, is the same point Roberts and Kavanaugh were making from the bench. When you've lost the textualists, you've lost the case.
The President attended the oral arguments in person, marking the first time in U.S. history that a sitting president has appeared before the high court during arguments. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick joined him. Trump was quiet throughout, did not comment publicly as he departed, and left shortly after Sauer presented the government's case.
The gesture itself carried weight. Whatever the legal outcome, Trump forced this question onto the national stage and into the marble halls of the Court. Birthright citizenship had been a third-rail issue for decades. No president had been willing to challenge the consensus. Trump did, and now the country is having the debate that the political class spent years avoiding.
A decision is expected by late June.
If the Court rules against the executive order, as Wednesday's arguments strongly suggest it will, the question moves to where it probably belonged from the start: Congress. Legislation redefining the scope of the Citizenship Clause would face its own constitutional challenges, but it would stand on far stronger institutional footing than a unilateral executive action.
The harder question is whether Congress has the political will. Republicans have spent years talking about ending birthright citizenship. Translating that rhetoric into legislation, with the kind of specificity that survives judicial review, is a different exercise entirely. It requires drafting, debate, coalition-building, and the willingness to defend the vote in a general election. That's harder than signing an executive order on day one. It's also how the system is supposed to work.
The Constitution doesn't bend to frustration, no matter how justified. Conservatives know this. It's time to act like it.
Sen. Cory Booker took to MSNBC on Tuesday to level sweeping accusations of corruption against President Donald Trump, claiming on "Deadline" that the president is "openly grifting millions of dollars" through cryptocurrency ventures. The accusations arrived without a single named country, a single specific transaction, or a single piece of supporting evidence.
That didn't stop the segment from proceeding as though the case had already been made.
Booker's central claim was dramatic, Breitbart reported. Speaking with host Nicolle Wallace, the New Jersey Democrat alleged that Trump has profited from crypto-related dealings with unnamed foreign nations that have "national security interests," and that the president is now granting those nations things "that were refused by presidents, Republican and Democrat."
"He's made more money in one year in office than all the other US presidents in American history combined, openly grifting taking millions of millions of dollars in payments through his crypto schemes from the very countries that have huge, national security interests."
Which countries? He didn't say. What payments? He didn't specify. What was given in return? Left to the viewer's imagination. The accusation is designed to sound devastating on cable television and evaporate under the slightest scrutiny.
Wallace, for her part, did what MSNBC hosts do: she provided the runway. Her contribution framed the conversation as though corruption were a fact rather than an allegation.
"I mean, no one likes any of those things, right? Voters hate corruption, and they're doing it out in full view. There's a brazenness that suggests that they don't think Democrats can beat them."
Notice what's happening. The host doesn't ask Booker to substantiate anything. She skips straight to electoral strategy, treating the charge as settled and pivoting to what Democrats should do about it. This is how narrative laundering works. An unsubstantiated claim enters one end of the conversation as an accusation and exits the other end as a premise.
The most revealing moment in the segment wasn't about Trump at all. It was Booker's brief, almost involuntary admission about his own party.
"This has got to be a moment in the we don't just beat Trump. It's not just what we're against. We need to start talking about what we're for and having a bolder vision for what we can be as a country and who we can be together."
He also called on Democrats to "take a little responsibility," acknowledging "gross money-in-politics" and "individuals trading stocks" within his own ranks. That's a remarkable concession buried inside an attack segment. Democrats have spent years defending their own members' stock trading habits while simultaneously positioning themselves as the party of clean government. Booker, perhaps accidentally, admitted the glasshouse problem.
But the admission was fleeting. Within seconds, he pivoted back to Trump, insisting that whatever his party has done, the president has taken it "to a level never before matched." Convenient framing: acknowledge your own sins just long enough to seem credible, then immediately argue they don't matter by comparison.
This segment is worth examining, not because the accusations are compelling. They aren't. It's worth examining because it illustrates the formula Democrats have settled into heading toward the next election cycle:
Booker told Wallace that if Democrats "make this all about Donald Trump," they "make a mistake." He then spent the bulk of his airtime making it all about Donald Trump. He offered no policy. No legislative agenda. No vision beyond the negative.
If a sitting senator has evidence that the president is receiving payments from foreign governments in exchange for policy concessions, that's not a cable news segment. That's a referral to the Department of Justice. That's articles of impeachment. That's front-page news with documents attached.
Instead, it's a Tuesday afternoon on MSNBC, sandwiched between takes about emergency preparedness kits and affiliate marketing links. The venue tells you everything about the seriousness of the charge.
Booker wants voters to believe this is a crisis. He said so himself: "We are in a time of crisis." But crises demand specifics. They demand evidence. They demand action beyond a cable hit. What Booker delivered was atmosphere, not substance.
Democrats keep telling the country they need a bolder vision. They keep not offering one.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a subpoena Monday to California Air Resources Board Chair Lauren Sanchez, escalating a seven-month investigation into the state's vehicle emissions regulations after what the committee called a pattern of non-cooperation from Sacramento.
The subpoena demands communications and documents tied to California's plan to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2035, regulations that were effectively nullified last year when President Trump signed three bipartisan Congressional Review Act resolutions revoking the Biden-era waivers that had allowed the state to impose them.
Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) told the New York Post that the move became necessary because CARB refused to produce the records voluntarily. In a letter accompanying the subpoena, Guthrie wrote that "CARB's lack of cooperation with this investigation requires the issuance of compulsory process."
That is a significant step. Congressional subpoenas to state officials remain relatively rare, and the committee's willingness to use compulsory authority signals that House Republicans view California's defiance as something more than a routine bureaucratic delay.
The subpoena specifically targets communications between CARB and two other state offices: the California Governor's Office and the California Attorney General's office. Guthrie's letter framed the request in direct terms.
"Reviewing these documents and communications is vital to understanding what actions, including actions related to enforcement and implementation of the aforementioned laws and regulations, the state of California has taken thus far with respect to its new vehicle and new motor emission reduction plans following the CRA resolutions signed into law last year."
In plain English: Congress wants to know whether California kept enforcing regulations that federal law had already voided. And it wants the paper trail proving it.
Guthrie's letter alleged that California had been "denying auto manufacturers approval to bring vehicles to market unless the manufacturers agreed to comply with the regulations that had already been nullified through these CRA resolutions." If true, that would mean Sacramento was using invalidated rules to block carmakers from selling vehicles, a direct end-run around federal authority.
CARB pushed back. A spokesperson said the agency "has provided information and documents" and defended "California's longstanding authority under the Clean Air Act and the actions CARB has taken to protect public health and welfare in the state." The spokesperson added that "CARB's goal is to support the Committee's legislative inquiry through a transparent, cooperative exchange of information."
Seven months of investigation and a subpoena suggest that "transparent" and "cooperative" mean different things on opposite coasts.
The fight traces back to Section 209(b) of the Clean Air Act, which bars states from imposing their own emissions standards on new cars unless they obtain a federal waiver. The Biden administration granted California those waivers, allowing the state to push regulations that officials said would transition the state away from gas-powered vehicles by 2035. More than a dozen other states adopted California's standards as a template for their own rules.
Last June, Trump nullified those waivers after signing the three CRA resolutions, which had passed on a bipartisan basis in both the House and Senate. At a White House bill-signing event, Trump said the resolutions would "kill the California mandates forever."
California did not accept the outcome quietly. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and CARB joined with a group of 10 other state attorneys general to sue the Trump administration in June over the revocation. That case is currently before the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The pattern is familiar. When Congress or the executive branch acts against Sacramento's preferred policies, California's response is to litigate, delay, and keep enforcing its own rules in the meantime. The committee's willingness to escalate with contempt-level tools reflects growing frustration in the House with that playbook.
In June 2025, Newsom signed an executive order asking CARB to submit yet another proposal that would help the state transition from fossil fuels. The timing matters. By that point, the CRA resolutions had already stripped the legal basis for the earlier mandates. Newsom's order signaled that California intended to find a new path to the same destination, with or without federal permission.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice sued California in March over a separate fuel economy regulation, opening a second front in the federal-state standoff over vehicle standards.
The committee began its probe in August, well before the subpoena. That means Guthrie's team spent roughly seven months trying to get CARB to produce records through negotiation before resorting to compulsory process. The timeline undercuts any claim that the subpoena was a political ambush.
Guthrie laid out the broader argument in a statement to the Post:
"Forcing Americans to buy unreliable, and costly, EVs would eliminate consumer choice, strain our electric grid, raise costs, and increase our reliance on entities tied to the Chinese Communist Party."
That line captures the core conservative objection. California's EV mandates don't just affect Californians. Because more than a dozen states adopted the same framework, the regulations functioned as a de facto national policy, one never voted on by Congress, never signed by a president, and imposed through a waiver process that was designed as an exception, not a backdoor to rewrite the rules for the entire auto market.
When Congress acted through the CRA to revoke those waivers, it was exercising exactly the kind of legislative authority the system is supposed to use. California's apparent refusal to comply, and its refusal to hand over records showing how it responded, raises a straightforward question: Does a state get to ignore federal law simply because it disagrees with the outcome?
Congressional subpoenas have become a more common tool as House committees push for accountability across multiple fronts. Jim Jordan recently subpoenaed a local prosecutor in a separate dispute over stonewalled records, and the broader question of what happens when officials simply refuse to produce documents remains unresolved in several ongoing investigations.
Guthrie closed his statement with a direct appeal:
"We will continue to follow the facts and demand accountability from California. I urge California to comply with this subpoena speedily and in good faith."
Whether CARB will comply remains an open question. The agency's public statements suggest it views its own authority as settled, regardless of what Congress or the White House has done. The Ninth Circuit case adds another variable, Sacramento may try to run the clock, hoping a favorable ruling will moot the congressional inquiry entirely.
That strategy has worked before in other contexts. Some officials have chosen to cooperate voluntarily when House committees come calling. Others have not, and the consequences for defiance vary widely depending on political will and legal follow-through.
What makes this case different from a routine oversight skirmish is the underlying conduct the committee is investigating. If California was indeed blocking automakers from selling vehicles unless they complied with regulations that Congress had already nullified, that is not a policy disagreement. It is a state agency substituting its own judgment for federal law, and then refusing to let Congress see the receipts.
The EV mandate fight has always been about more than tailpipe emissions. It is about who gets to decide what Americans drive, how much it costs, and whether a single state's regulatory apparatus can dictate terms for the rest of the country. Congress answered that question last year. California apparently didn't like the answer.
Accountability is not optional just because you govern the largest state in the union. If CARB has nothing to hide, the subpoena should be easy to answer.
CPAC has thrown its weight behind Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race, with Chairman Matt Schlapp announcing the endorsement at the conference held just outside Dallas in Grapevine, Texas. A straw poll of Texas attendees wasn't even close: 67% backed Paxton compared to 21% for incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, with 12% undecided.
Schlapp made it official from the stage.
"It's my honor … to say we officially endorse Ken Paxton."
He cited Paxton's "perfect CPAC voting record" and alignment with President Donald Trump on major political fights. Cornyn, meanwhile, skipped the gathering entirely.
The March 3 primary ended without a clear winner, sending Paxton and Cornyn into a late May runoff after neither secured a majority. But if CPAC is any barometer of where the conservative grassroots stand, Cornyn has a problem that no campaign adviser can spin away.
Hundreds of activists at the conference embraced Paxton as the GOP's clear pick, according to the Washington Examiner. He headlined events, worked the rope lines, posed for photos, took questions at meet-and-greets inside the Gaylord Texan, and spoke at CPAC's Ronald Reagan dinner in Dallas on Friday night. The energy wasn't manufactured. It was organic, and it was lopsided.
Attendee after attendee made clear what's driving the divide. Matthew Kingston, 26, of Lubbock, put it bluntly:
"After Uvalde, Cornyn chose to side with Democrats on gun control. That was the turning point for me. It showed he's willing to compromise on core Second Amendment rights."
Michael Reaud, a 55-year-old boutique owner, said he's been in Paxton's corner for years. On Cornyn, his memory was sharp and unforgiving: "As far as John Cornyn, if I remember correctly, I think he's gone against President Trump on a few things."
Anne Diaz, a 64-year-old retiree from Georgetown, didn't need persuading either. "I just have a feeling that Ken Paxton is honest and conservative," she said, adding that even a Trump endorsement of Cornyn wouldn't change her mind.
That's the kind of loyalty that doesn't bend with the wind.
Paxton used his platform at CPAC to hammer the issue that has become central to his campaign: election integrity. Speaking to the crowd, he zeroed in on mail-in ballots:
"Mail-in ballots … they send them out by the millions, and we have no idea who's voting."
"That shouldn't be the way it is. We should know who's voting. They can vote however they want, but we should verify who they are, that they are citizens, and that they are following our laws."
The SAVE Act, a proposal that would impose stricter proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting, is a top priority for the president. It has stalled in the Senate. Paxton has blasted Cornyn over the impasse and suggested he would consider stepping aside in the race if the measure became law.
Days after the issue gained traction, Cornyn shifted course, signaling openness to altering Senate rules and writing in an op-ed that he would support whatever changes were needed to move the legislation forward. The timing was not subtle. When a 20-year Senate veteran suddenly discovers urgency on a bill his base has demanded for months, the conversion tells you more about the pressure than the principle.
The Cornyn camp isn't sitting still. Campaign adviser Matt Mackowiak offered a statement to the Washington Examiner that leaned heavily on the senator's voting record:
"Senator Cornyn has voted with President Trump 99.3% of the time and is one of his most effective allies in the Senate. He has consistently delivered on conservative priorities, from confirming judges to advancing border security, and has the experience to be effective on day one."
That 99.3% figure is designed to neutralize the MAGA loyalty question. But for many grassroots conservatives, the 0.7% is exactly where the betrayals live. The gun control vote after Uvalde. The dragging of feet on the SAVE Act. The sense that Cornyn's instinct, when the pressure mounts, is to find the bipartisan middle rather than hold the line.
A voting percentage doesn't capture those moments. The base remembers them anyway.
NRSC communications director Joanna Rodriguez offered a different angle, one aimed squarely at electability:
"When President Trump needed him most, Ken Paxton repeatedly went AWOL. John Cornyn is the best candidate to beat radical James Talarico and hold this seat for Republicans. This race isn't just about the primary, it's about winning in November."
The November question is real, and it's the one card Cornyn's allies keep playing. Democratic state Rep. James Talarico awaits the runoff winner, and a Democratic-aligned survey reportedly found Talarico narrowly leading both Republican candidates in hypothetical matchups.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who is staying neutral in the primary, acknowledged the stakes in an interview with the Washington Examiner:
"The voters of Texas can make the choice who they trust to go and fight for their conservative values."
But Cruz didn't hide his concern about what comes after.
"Regardless of who wins the nomination, the two candidates have attacked each other relentlessly, and the hard Left is really energized. We've got a fight on our hands for November."
That's a fair warning. But it also cuts both ways. If the Republican establishment forces a candidate on a base that doesn't want him, the enthusiasm gap in November could be just as dangerous as any Democratic surge. Nominees who excite nobody tend to lose races they should win.
Paxton's opponents will never stop reminding voters that he was impeached by the Texas legislature three years ago on corruption charges. What they mention less often: he was acquitted. Paxton addressed it directly at CPAC, framing the episode as a fight he never backed down from.
"The people of Texas had just elected me. I had won overwhelmingly. This is wrong. We're going to fight this."
"I am not going to resign. I don't care what happens. We are going to fight this. Whatever happens, happens."
His supporters view the impeachment as political persecution. His critics call it disqualifying baggage. The CPAC crowd made clear which interpretation they've adopted.
There's also the personal dimension. His wife, Angela Paxton, recently filed for divorce, citing infidelity. One attendee, Trimaan Malik, a 30-year-old from Las Vegas wearing a "#TeamAngela" shirt, offered a dissenting take: "I prefer attorneys general who are not always in scandals every five minutes." He then added, "I don't even live in Texas. I don't have a dog in the fight."
Fair enough. But the people who do live in Texas and who showed up to CPAC made their preferences unmistakable.
The wild card remains President Trump, who said weeks ago he would weigh in on the race with an endorsement but has yet to follow through. Some attendees, like Reaud, said they'd follow the president wherever he lands: "I'll support President Trump, whatever his decisions are."
Others, like Diaz, have already made up their minds regardless. That split is instructive. A Trump endorsement of Cornyn might consolidate some reluctant supporters, but CPAC suggests the grassroots energy is already flowing in one direction. Redirecting it would take more than a Truth Social post.
Not every attendee had made up their mind. Xavier Heim, a commercial airline pilot from Grapevine, said he's still weighing his options: "We thought we knew, and then we got some more information, and we're doing our research." Molly Sawyer, a flight attendant also from Grapevine, said she's evaluating both candidates on their track records and electability.
But the undecided were the minority at this conference. The decisions were loud, they were organized, and they were wearing Paxton stickers.
Paxton closed his CPAC appearance with a line that distilled his entire pitch:
"It's about the people of Texas wanting somebody that is going to represent them. Let's get rid of the guy that represents Washington, and let's put somebody in that represents Texas."
That framing is familiar because it works. The outsider versus the institution. The fighter versus the dealmaker. It's the same energy that reshaped the Republican Party over the last decade, and it's the energy that filled the Gaylord Texan this weekend.
Cornyn has the Senate infrastructure, the NRSC backing, and two decades of incumbency. Paxton has the room. In a late May runoff where turnout is everything, the candidate whose supporters actually show up tends to win.
CPAC just showed us who's showing up.
A House Ethics adjudicatory subcommittee found Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., guilty of nearly all violations outlined against her, bringing the 47-year-old congresswoman one significant step closer to expulsion from Congress. The eight-member panel, chaired by Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss., announced its decision in a written statement Friday morning after a rare public hearing that stretched past midnight the night before.
The subcommittee found that Counts 1 through 15 and 17 through 26 of the statement of alleged violations had been proven. That's 25 out of 26 counts. The charges ranged from using ineligible funds to finance her campaign to repeatedly filing false financial disclosure forms and seeking "special favors" with recipients of earmark funding requests.
Cherfilus-McCormick, who first won election to Congress in 2021, is also facing a separate federal criminal indictment. She was indicted by a Miami grand jury for allegedly stealing $5 million in FEMA funds on Nov. 18, 2025, according to the Department of Justice. If convicted, she faces up to 53 years in prison. Her federal criminal trial is expected this summer.
Thursday's proceedings were the first public ethics hearing since 2010, and they lasted more than six hours. What emerged wasn't just a portrait of alleged corruption. It was a case study in obstruction.
Cherfilus-McCormick has shifted between four different attorneys while largely refusing to cooperate with the bipartisan panel. Her new attorney, William Barzee, repeatedly claimed violations of her due process rights while maintaining her innocence. He also sought to use the fact of his recent hiring to delay the committee's proceedings until June, as Fox News reports.
The eight-member panel promptly denied that request in a closed-door session.
Rep. Michael Guest was not inclined to let the due process argument stand unchallenged. In a combative exchange with Barzee, Guest laid out exactly what the committee had been dealing with:
"For two years we've tried to get documents from your client. Not only have we requested documents, but we have subpoenaed those documents. Those documents were not provided for two years."
Two years of requests. Two years of subpoenas. Two years of silence. And then an attorney shows up to argue the process was unfair.
Guest continued:
"For you to sit here and make the claim that we, the committee, is trying to trample upon the rights of your client. I take offense to that."
One of the more revealing moments came when Barzee attempted to explain the alleged movement of millions of dollars in disaster relief funds. He claimed that an undated chart was evidence of a "profit-sharing agreement" showing Cherfilus-McCormick's legal title to the money. He further argued that because she is of Haitian descent, it was not atypical to have a "handshake agreement" to divvy up millions of dollars between her and her family instead of a formal legal document.
Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, who practiced business transaction law before coming to Congress, wasn't buying it:
"I did a lot of business transaction law for a number of years before I came to Congress. I drafted a lot of profit-sharing agreements. Never saw one that was just a chart that was unsigned."
An unsigned chart and a cultural appeal. That was the defense offered for the alleged misuse of more than $5 million in disaster relief funds, money that exists because Americans expect it to reach people whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed.
This wasn't a partisan pile-on. Rep. Mark Desaulnier, D-Calif., set the tone at the start of the hearing Thursday:
"The allegations before us are extremely serious. They not only concern an individual member's conduct, they also implicate the public's confidence in the House's integrity as an institution."
He's right, and it's worth noting how rare it is for a Democrat to publicly acknowledge that a member of their own party threatens institutional credibility. The bipartisan nature of this proceeding makes the defense team's claims of procedural unfairness even harder to sustain. This wasn't a Republican hit job. Both sides looked at the evidence, looked at the obstruction, and arrived at the same conclusion.
The panel will meet after the Easter recess to determine its recommended punishment, which could be as severe as expulsion. Meanwhile, Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., has vowed to move forward with his resolution that would expel Cherfilus-McCormick regardless of the committee's outcome. Under House rules, two-thirds of lawmakers have to agree to expel a member.
That's a high bar. But consider what's already established:
Cherfilus-McCormick has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges. She is entitled to that plea and to her day in court. But the ethics process is separate from the criminal one, and the ethics process just delivered its verdict on the facts it had. Twenty-five counts. Found proven.
Americans who lost everything in disasters trusted that FEMA funds would reach them. Congress has an obligation to show that trust wasn't misplaced, or at least that it won't tolerate the people who violated it sitting among them while they legislate.
The hearing ended past midnight. The facts didn't need the extra hours. The obstruction did.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed four Army officers from a promotion list for one-star general, pulling their names from a roster of roughly three dozen candidates currently under White House review before heading to the Senate for final approval.
The New York Times, which broke the story on Friday, framed the removals almost entirely around the race and sex of the officers: "two Black and two female Army officers." The Pentagon isn't playing along with that framing.
Spokesperson Sean Parnell called the report:
"Full of fake news from anonymous sources who have no idea what they're talking about and are far removed from actual decision-makers within the Pentagon."
Parnell added that promotions "are given to those who have earned them." He did not address the specific decision to pull the four names.
According to the Times report, Hegseth pressed senior Army leaders for months to remove the officers' names. Those leaders, including Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, repeatedly refused. Earlier this month, Hegseth struck the names himself.
The report also describes a tense exchange between Hegseth's chief of staff, Ricky Buria, and Driscoll over a separate promotion for Maj. Gen. Antoinette Gant, a combat engineer who began heading the Military District of Washington last summer and was promoted to two-star general earlier this month.
Three unnamed current and former Defense and administration officials told the Times that Buria said President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.
Buria's response was unequivocal. He called the claim "completely false" and stated, The Hill:
"Whoever placed this made up story is clearly trying to sow division among our ranks in the Department and the administration. It's not going to work, and it will never work when this Department is led by clear-eyed, mission driven leaders unfazed by Washington gossip."
Driscoll reportedly replied that "the president is not a racist or sexist."
It's worth stepping back and cataloging what this story actually rests on. The four officers are unnamed. The reasons for removing two of them, one in logistics and the other a finance specialist, are described as "unclear" even within the report itself.
The most explosive claim, that Buria invoked the president's alleged racial preferences, comes from anonymous officials relaying a private conversation. Every named person involved has denied it.
This is the anatomy of a narrative-first story. Start with the conclusion (Pentagon leadership is racist), then arrange anonymous sourcing around it. The New York Times didn't report that Hegseth removed four officers from a promotion list and let readers evaluate the reasons. It reported that Hegseth removed "two Black and two female" officers, making the demographic composition the lead rather than a detail.
The article doesn't tell readers what the promotion criteria were, how these four officers compared to the roughly three dozen who remained on the list, or whether any of them had performance flags unrelated to their identity. That information would be relevant. Its absence is telling.
The broader context matters here, and it's the part the framing is designed to obscure. Hegseth has directed an overhaul of how officers are selected for promotion, including a mandate that the Defense Department not consider sex, race, or ethnicity when evaluating individuals for promotion, command, or special duty.
Read that again. The new standard is a race-blind, sex-blind evaluation. The complaint from the Times and its sources is, in effect, that removing demographic considerations from the promotion process is itself evidence of demographic targeting. The logic is perfectly circular: if you stop using race as a factor, and the outcome changes, then the change proves racism.
This is the trap that every institution faces when it tries to dismantle DEI frameworks. The framework's defenders define any departure from its outcomes as proof that the framework was necessary. There is no way to end race-conscious policy without being accused of racial animus by the people who built race-conscious policy.
The promotion list episode sits within a much larger reshaping of Pentagon leadership. Since taking over, Hegseth has either fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals. Among them:
The Times presents this list as a pattern of targeting women and minorities. There's another way to read it: Hegseth is clearing out the senior ranks that presided over the military's most aggressive period of ideological transformation, the years in which DEI offices proliferated, readiness metrics declined, and recruitment cratered.
Some of those officers happen to be the "firsts" who were elevated during that era. Correlation is not causation, a principle the left claims to understand in every context except this one.
The report also notes that the promotion overhaul is being led by retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, now heading the Pentagon's personnel office. The Times flags Tata's "history of Islamophobic comments" and controversial remarks, noting that Trump nominated him to head the Pentagon's policy office during his first term but that Tata was never confirmed by the Senate. Trump himself denounced Tata's remarks at the time.
The inclusion of Tata's background serves an obvious purpose: guilt by association. Tata's past statements are meant to color the entire promotion overhaul as bigotry dressed in policy. But the actual policy, evaluating officers without regard to race, sex, or ethnicity, is the definition of what the left claimed to want for decades. Now that someone is implementing it literally, it's suddenly a threat.
The Pentagon spent years building a promotion culture in which demographic representation was an explicit goal. Officers knew it. Leaders knew it. The entire incentive structure bent toward outcomes that could be reported as progress. Dismantling that structure means some people who benefited from it won't advance as they expected. That isn't cruelty. It's a correction.
None of this means the four unnamed officers are unqualified. They may be exceptional. But the burden of proof has shifted, and the people most invested in the old system are the ones screaming loudest about the new one. They aren't defending individual officers. They're defending a framework, one that treated demographic identity as a qualification and called it merit.
The Pentagon says promotions are given to those who have earned them. The question is whether "earned" means the same thing it meant two years ago. For the first time in a long time, the answer might actually be yes.