Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows removed Donald Trump from the state's 2024 ballot. A superior court judge stopped her. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the legal theory behind her move unanimously, all nine justices, including the three liberal members. Now Bellows is running for governor and treating that rejected action as a campaign credential.
That is the state of Democratic politics in 2025: an official whose signature constitutional gambit failed at every level of judicial review is selling it as proof of her courage.
The former ACLU executive director in Maine has posted videos referencing her decision to bar Trump from the primary ballot. In one, she claimed she attempted to instruct Trump on the Constitution and quipped that "the president clearly didn't get the copy of the Constitution I sent him." In another, she declared, "There are no kings in America... We have a democracy." She has described the January 6 events as "an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election" and framed her ballot-removal effort as an act of "bravery."
Bellows' effort did not survive contact with the judiciary. A superior court judge in Maine enjoined her decision. She then repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to get the matter before a higher court, according to legal commentator Jonathan Turley.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, addressed the same legal theory in the Colorado case, and dismantled it. The justices ruled 9-0 that individual states could not unilaterally remove a presidential candidate from the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment without congressional authorization. The Court's language was pointed.
"Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos."
That was the Court's assessment of the legal framework Bellows and like-minded officials tried to invoke. Not a close call. Not a split decision. Nine to zero. Every liberal justice joined the majority.
Even within her own party, the move drew criticism. Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden denounced Bellows' decision to bar Trump from the primary. When a member of your own caucus calls out the overreach, the "bravery" framing starts to look less like principle and more like political positioning.
Bellows is not alone. Turley, a law professor and author, has described a broader pattern among Democratic candidates who are running on pledges to circumvent or stretch constitutional limits in the name of opposing Trump. He characterizes the approach as a "by any means necessary" posture toward constitutional governance.
George Conway, now a New York congressional candidate, has pledged to ease impeachment rules to secure the removal of both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That pledge treats the Constitution's most serious accountability mechanism, impeachment, as a tool to be loosened for partisan convenience. The administration, for its part, has moved in the opposite direction, with Vance tapped to lead a government-wide fraud investigation aimed at restoring accountability inside federal agencies.
The common thread is an eagerness to treat extraordinary constitutional powers as ordinary political weapons, then to campaign on having wielded them, regardless of whether courts upheld the action.
Bellows' messaging rests on a familiar contradiction. She claims to be defending democracy. But her specific act, removing a major-party candidate from the ballot before voters could weigh in, was the opposite of letting democracy work. A secretary of state, an appointed or elected administrative officer, decided which presidential candidates the people of Maine were permitted to choose. The courts said no. The voters ultimately chose Trump anyway; he won the election.
The question voters in Maine's gubernatorial race will have to answer is whether an official who lost unanimously at the Supreme Court, and who now treats that loss as a badge of honor, can be trusted to respect the boundaries of executive authority as governor. The track record suggests she views those boundaries as suggestions.
Election integrity has become a flashpoint nationally. Concerns about who belongs on the ballot, who is eligible to vote, and how elections are administered are not abstract. They play out in real cases, from illegal immigrants charged with voting in multiple presidential elections to state officials making unilateral decisions about ballot access.
The constitutional order depends on officials who accept the limits of their own power, even when they believe the cause is righteous. Bellows did not accept those limits. She pushed past them, got stopped by a judge, tried again at a higher level, and got stopped by the entire Supreme Court. Now she wants a promotion.
President Trump has made election security a priority, pressing Congress on measures like voter ID requirements. He has vowed to pursue voter ID for future elections by executive order if legislators fail to act, an approach that works through the political process rather than around it.
Bellows' gubernatorial pitch amounts to this: I defied the courts, lost at every level, and I'd do it again. She frames it as standing up for democracy. But democracy already had a mechanism for dealing with candidates voters didn't want. It's called an election.
The Supreme Court, including justices appointed by Democratic presidents, concluded that what Bellows and her Colorado counterparts attempted would produce constitutional chaos. That is not a partisan talking point. It is the holding of the nation's highest court, stated in plain English.
Democrats who attempt to manipulate ballot access are not the only ones testing the system's limits. Courts have also refused to rescue a Democrat who tried to get onto Ohio's Republican ballot through procedural maneuvering. The pattern is consistent: when officials or candidates try to game the process, courts push back.
What makes the Bellows case distinctive is not the legal defeat, plenty of officials lose in court. It is the decision to campaign on the defeat as though it were a victory. She is asking Maine voters to reward her for an act that nine Supreme Court justices, across the ideological spectrum, said the Constitution does not permit.
Meanwhile, legislative efforts to shore up election integrity continue at the federal level. The push for the SAVE America Act reflects a growing demand that election rules be set through lawful channels, not improvised by state officials acting on their own authority.
Turley, in his recent book "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution," has examined the broader tendency to abandon constitutional constraints under the pressure of political passions. Bellows' campaign fits that pattern neatly. The passion was real. The constitutional authority was not.
A secretary of state who removes a presidential frontrunner from the ballot, gets overruled by every court that reviews the action, and then runs for higher office on the strength of that overruled decision is not defending the system. She is advertising her willingness to override it.
Maine deserves a governor who reads the Constitution and follows it, not one who mails a copy to her political opponents and ignores it herself.
Gunfire erupted inside a Chick-fil-A in Union Township, New Jersey, on Saturday night, killing one person and injuring several others in what witnesses described as a brazen, coordinated attack at the busy fast-food restaurant just fifteen miles outside New York City.
At least six people were shot after gunfire broke out at approximately 8:40 p.m. at the Chick-fil-A located at 2139 US Route 22, the Daily Mail reported, citing local outlet RLS Media. One person was confirmed dead. Authorities have released almost no information about suspects or a motive.
The Union County Prosecutor's Office confirmed it is handling the case. Spokesperson Lauren Farinas told NJ.com the office is conducting "an active and ongoing investigation" and that "more information will be released as it becomes available." That was the sum total of official guidance as of the latest reporting, no suspect descriptions, no arrest announcements, no explanation for why a Saturday-night crowd at a family restaurant became a crime scene.
What little is known about the attack itself comes from witnesses and people connected to Chick-fil-A employees, not from law enforcement. The father of one worker told reporters that his son described multiple armed suspects in masks bursting into the restaurant. He called the scene "a warzone" and said several of his son's co-workers had been injured.
A man whose girlfriend works at the location gave a similar account to CBS, saying a group of suspects barged in, went directly behind the counter, and fired multiple shots. The detail about the gunmen heading behind the counter suggests this was not random spray, it was targeted, or at least deliberate.
A Lyft driver who happened to be finishing a drop-off nearby provided another angle. He told ABC he heard more than seven shots ring out.
"I finished my trip over there, in the return zone. I heard the shots. When I finished the trip, I go to Chick-fil-A to buy two burgers, I see the police, I heard the shots very close."
Hours after the shooting ended, a local resident living a block away said they could still hear "a ruckus" and sirens blaring. The parking lot off Route 22 was completely closed off. Businesses nearby were locked down.
The shooting in Union Township fits a grim and recurring pattern across the country: sudden, deadly violence in a public place, followed by official silence that stretches for hours or days while communities are left to piece together what happened from social media and secondhand accounts.
Former New Jersey Assemblyman Jamel Holley posted a statement on social media shortly after the attack. He wrote that "numerous people are injured & one confirmed dead as emergency crews are on the scene responding to a mass shooting after gunfire erupted inside a Chick-fil-A in Union, New Jersey." He urged people to "keep everyone in your prayers."
That a former state legislator was among the first to publicly confirm a fatality, before law enforcement issued any substantive update, tells you something about the information vacuum that surrounded this event. The Daily Mail said it contacted the Union Township Police Department for more information, but no additional details had been provided as of the latest reporting.
The incident adds Union Township to a growing list of American communities forced to reckon with mass-casualty gun violence in ordinary, everyday settings. The FBI recently opened a terrorism investigation into a campus shooting at Old Dominion University, underscoring the range of motives behind such attacks. In this case, no motive has been disclosed, or perhaps even determined.
The list of unanswered questions is long. Authorities have not identified the person who was killed. They have not named or described any suspects. They have not said how many gunmen were involved, whether anyone has been arrested, or whether the attack was connected to a dispute, a robbery, or something else entirely.
Witness accounts suggest masked suspects, plural, entered the restaurant and opened fire. But whether law enforcement has confirmed that version of events is unclear. The gap between what witnesses say and what officials will confirm remains wide.
The shooting also raises practical questions. A Chick-fil-A on a busy highway corridor, on a Saturday night, would have been full of families. How many customers were inside? How many children? Were employees the targets, or were they simply in the line of fire? None of this has been addressed publicly.
Gun violence in public gathering spots has become a persistent feature of American life, from parade routes in Louisiana to fast-food counters in New Jersey. Each incident renews the same debates. But for the people who were inside that Chick-fil-A on Saturday night, the workers behind the counter, the families in the dining room, the debate is abstract. The bullets were not.
When law enforcement goes quiet after a mass shooting, the vacuum fills with speculation, fear, and political posturing. That is not a criticism of investigators doing careful work. It is a description of what happens when the public gets almost nothing from the people whose job it is to keep them safe.
Union Township sits just over fifteen miles from Manhattan. It is not a remote outpost. It is a suburb where people go to Chick-fil-A on a Saturday night because they expect to come home afterward. The fact that masked gunmen reportedly walked into a fast-food restaurant and opened fire, and that, hours later, the public still had almost no official information, should concern anyone who believes accountability and transparency are not optional.
Across the country, communities have watched similar tragedies unfold with distressingly little follow-through. A violent killing spree in Mississippi and a fatal shooting of an infant in Brooklyn are just two recent reminders that deadly violence does not confine itself to any single region or demographic. What these cases share is the demand, from victims, families, and ordinary citizens, for answers and consequences.
The people of Union Township deserve both. So does the person who did not make it home Saturday night.
Prayers are welcome. Answers are required. And if masked gunmen can walk into a family restaurant and open fire with apparent impunity, the question is not whether the system failed, it is how many more times it will fail before someone fixes it.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor told a law school audience Thursday that the Trump administration's use of the Supreme Court's emergency docket is "unprecedented in the court's history", a complaint that says less about executive overreach than it does about the liberal minority's frustration with losing.
Speaking at the University of Alabama School of Law, Sotomayor framed the administration's 34 emergency applications since President Trump retook the White House as a break from normal procedure. She argued the Court should wait for lower courts to work through cases before stepping in. But the numbers tell a different story about who is actually winning these fights, and why.
The Supreme Court has sided with the administration in the vast majority of those emergency cases. In roughly two dozen decisions last year alone, the conservative majority lifted lower-court orders that had blocked Trump's policies, allowing key parts of his agenda to move forward while litigation continued. That pattern is what Sotomayor is really objecting to, not the process, but the outcomes.
The administration has a straightforward explanation for its frequent emergency filings. Federal district judges, many appointed by Democratic presidents, have repeatedly issued sweeping orders blocking Trump's policies, on immigration, on firings of members of independent federal agencies, and on other executive actions. The administration says these judges are overstepping their authority to obstruct the president's lawful agenda.
That argument has weight. When a single district judge can freeze a nationwide policy with an injunction, the executive branch has limited options. It can wait months or years for the normal appeals process to grind forward, or it can ask the Supreme Court to intervene quickly. The administration has chosen the latter, and the Court's conservative majority has repeatedly agreed that intervention was warranted.
Sotomayor, however, wants the old rhythm back. As The Hill reported, she laid out her preferred approach in detail:
"We should be letting the lower courts decide these issues first before we the highest court of the land make the final decision. We should make sure that all the facts are fully aired below."
She went further, arguing the Court should wait for a circuit split, meaning different appeals courts reaching different conclusions, before stepping in.
"That the intermediate courts have looked at this, and we really shouldn't take cases and decide them until there is a circuit split, meaning that circuit courts across the country have disagreed on the answer, because then we are sure that every viable and important argument has actually been aired, that all of the important facts have actually been brought out in the various cases."
That sounds reasonable in the abstract. In practice, it would mean district judges could block presidential action for months or years with no immediate check, exactly the dynamic the administration is trying to break.
Sotomayor was not alone in her complaints. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who frequently dissents in emergency orders, offered her own criticism in March. Jackson said the administration creates new policy and then demands it take effect immediately, before any legal challenge is resolved.
"The administration is making new policy... and then insisting the new policy take effect immediately, before the challenge is decided. This uptick in the court's willingness to get involved in cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem."
Jackson went even further, saying that Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the other conservatives who sided with Trump repeatedly last year "were not serving the court or the country well." The two justices sparred publicly last month over the emergency docket, a sign of how deep the internal divide runs.
But notice what Jackson's complaint actually concedes: the Court's majority keeps agreeing with the administration. If the emergency applications were frivolous, the justices would deny them. They are not.
Sotomayor identified the analytical framework she believes has tipped the scales. She said the Court's conservative majority now often starts from the presumption that blocking executive policies or laws passed by Congress causes "irreparable harm", a legal standard that, once met, makes emergency relief far more likely.
As the Washington Times reported, Sotomayor explained the practical effect plainly:
"If you start with the presumption that there is irreparable harm to one side, then you're going to have more grants of emergency relief. Because the other side is going to have a much harder time."
"It has changed the paradigm on the court," she added.
Changed it from what, exactly? From a paradigm where district judges could freeze executive action indefinitely while cases crawled through the system? That is not judicial restraint. That is judicial obstruction dressed up as process.
The administration has appealed cases related to Trump's immigration directives, including matters like the fight over Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants, and his firings of members of independent federal agencies. These are not minor policy disputes. They go to the core of whether a president can govern.
Sotomayor's speech fits a broader pattern. Liberal justices have increasingly used public appearances and written dissents to signal their displeasure with the direction of the Court. At the same event, Sotomayor told lawyers they should "stand up and fight," as Breitbart reported.
"Our job is to stand up for people who can't do it themselves. And our job is to be the champion of lost causes. But right now, we can't lose the battles we are facing. And we need trained and passionate and committed lawyers to fight this fight."
That is not the language of a neutral arbiter. That is the language of an advocate who happens to sit on the bench. When a Supreme Court justice tells lawyers to "fight", and the context is a sitting president's policies, the line between judicial commentary and political organizing gets thin.
The emergency docket is not the only front. The Court recently heard arguments in Trump v. Slaughter over whether the president can fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without cause. During those arguments, Sotomayor told the solicitor general he was "asking us to destroy the structure of government," the Washington Examiner reported. The conservative majority appeared more receptive to the administration's position, and the case could lead the Court to revisit the 1935 Humphrey's Executor precedent limiting presidential removal power.
The Court has also weighed in on cases involving Trump's birthright citizenship executive order, further illustrating the range of legal battles reaching the justices on an accelerated timeline.
Even on the emergency docket, the administration has not won every time. In December, the Supreme Court refused to intervene in a battle concerning immigration judges' speech restrictions, a rare loss for the administration in that venue. The record is not one of rubber-stamping. It is one of a Court that evaluates each application and sides with the executive branch when the legal merits support it.
There is a familiar pattern in Washington: when one side keeps losing on substance, it shifts to complaining about process. Sotomayor's speech fits that template precisely. She is not arguing that the Court's emergency rulings were legally wrong on the merits. She is arguing the Court should not have taken them up so quickly.
But the emergency docket exists for a reason. Cases on it seek quick intervention from justices in matters still working through lower courts. They are decided without oral arguments and often without written explanations. That speed is a feature, not a bug, when a lower court has blocked executive action that the Supreme Court's majority believes should proceed.
The three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Jackson, and their colleague, are outnumbered on a Court with a conservative majority. Their public frustration reflects that arithmetic. When Sotomayor says the emergency docket has "changed the paradigm," she means the paradigm has changed in ways she does not like. The conservative majority disagrees, and it has the votes.
Meanwhile, the administration continues to face a gauntlet of lower-court judges willing to issue nationwide injunctions against presidential policies, on immigration, on agency personnel, on the basic mechanics of governing. If district judges keep blocking the president's agenda on an emergency basis, the president's lawyers will keep asking the Supreme Court to respond on the same timeline.
Sotomayor calls that unprecedented. The administration calls it necessary. The Court's majority, by its actions, has made clear which side it finds more persuasive.
When the process complaint comes from the side that keeps losing on the merits, it is not a warning about the institution. It is a concession.
Brian Hooker was arrested by the Royal Bahamas Police Force in connection with the disappearance of his wife, Lynette Hooker, 55, who vanished during a boating trip near Elbow Cay last weekend. His lawyer called the arrest "shocking." But a decade-old police report from Kentwood, Michigan, paints a more complicated picture of the couple's history, one that includes mutual assault accusations, alcohol, and a night in county jail.
The arrest came Wednesday, after Hooker sat for what his attorney, Terrel Butler, described as an hourslong interview with authorities. NBC News reported that the Royal Bahamas Police Force had officially requested U.S. assistance in the case, and the U.S. Coast Guard has opened its own criminal investigation.
Brian Hooker's account of what happened Saturday night is simple. He told police that Lynette fell overboard with the boat's keys during a dinghy ride near Elbow Cay. He said he then paddled for hours, reaching Marsh Harbour Boat Yard early Sunday morning. On Wednesday morning, before his arrest, he posted on Facebook that he was "heartbroken over the recent boat accident in unpredictable seas and high winds that caused my beloved Lynette to fall from our small dinghy near Elbow Cay in the Bahamas."
Lynette Hooker's daughter doesn't buy it.
Karli Aylesworth, Lynette Hooker's daughter, told NBC News the couple had "a history of not getting along, especially when they drink." She said her mother was unlikely to "just fall" overboard and described Brian Hooker's demeanor when he spoke to her as "monotone and relaxed."
Aylesworth told NBC News:
"I hope this was just a freak accident, but I just have a hard time believing it at the moment. It's hard to see the people you've grown up with and care about possibly doing something like this. I just want to know the truth."
The couple had been sailing for more than a decade, Aylesworth said, and had recently bought a larger vessel in Texas. These were not inexperienced boaters caught off guard by rough water. That context makes the husband's account harder to accept at face value, and apparently, Bahamian authorities reached a similar conclusion.
Investigations like this one, where a spouse's story faces scrutiny from both family members and law enforcement, echo the dynamics seen in other missing-person cases that have gripped the public in recent months.
A February 2015 police report from Kentwood, Michigan, documented an incident in which the Hookers accused each other of assault. Brian Hooker told officers that Lynette, whom he said was also drunk, struck him in the face "4 to 5 times." Police found him intoxicated, with blood coming from his nose. He told them, according to the report, that "he had never been hit like that in a long time." He started to cry and became emotional.
Lynette Hooker gave a different version. She told police Brian hit her in the forehead, choked her, and punched her one time. But officers observed Brian Hooker's red, swollen, and bloody nose, and said Lynette Hooker had no visible injuries.
A witness told officers she heard Lynette Hooker upstairs "causing a commotion" and saw Brian Hooker return downstairs with a bloody nose. The report also noted that Lynette Hooker believed two people, Jacob Hooker and another individual, were locked in an upstairs room and "fooling around." Police tried to contact Jacob Hooker and the other person after the event, but they had already left the home and neither answered when called.
Lynette Hooker was arrested that night on charges of assault and battery/simple assault and spent a night in county jail. But the warrant was later denied. The reason: "insufficient evidence as to who started the assault."
Mark Hunting, an attorney who represented the couple at the time of the 2015 case, told NBC News that attorney-client privilege applied and he was not at liberty to opine. NBC News said it was unable to reach Jacob Hooker despite multiple attempts Thursday. Jacob Hooker's relationship to the couple was not specified.
The 2015 report does not prove anything about what happened near Elbow Cay more than a decade later. But it does establish a documented pattern: alcohol, conflict, and mutual accusations of violence between the Hookers, with law enforcement unable to determine who was the aggressor.
Butler, Brian Hooker's attorney, described the circumstances of the arrest itself in striking terms. He said officers took Hooker to his vessel, the Soul Mate, and that while Hooker was attempting to follow instructions, handcuffed and holding a change of clothes, he fell overboard and had to be rescued.
Butler told NBC News:
"They took him to his vessel, the Soul Mate, and he alleges that while he was attempting to follow the officer's instruction, while being handcuffed and holding a change of clothes in his hand, he fell overboard and had to be rescued. And during the whole ordeal... he received injury to his knee."
Butler also stated that Brian Hooker "has been cooperating with the relevant authorities as part of an ongoing investigation" and denies wrongdoing. Butler rejected claims made by Aylesworth, though the specific nature of that rejection was not detailed.
When a suspect is apprehended after cooperating with investigators, the arrest itself can signal that authorities believe the story doesn't hold up. That dynamic is familiar in cases where law enforcement must weigh family members' accounts against physical evidence and decide whether cooperation is genuine or strategic.
Several critical questions remain unanswered. NBC News did not report what specific charges, if any, have been filed in the Bahamas against Brian Hooker. What evidence led to the arrest was not specified. Whether the couple had been drinking on Saturday night, a detail that would be significant given their documented history, was not immediately clear.
Lynette Hooker has not been found. Her status remains listed as missing.
The U.S. Coast Guard's criminal investigation adds another layer. A U.S. law enforcement source told NBC News that the Royal Bahamas Police Force officially requested American assistance. That request suggests the case may have complexities, jurisdictional, evidentiary, or forensic, that extend beyond what Bahamian authorities can handle alone. Cases involving international cooperation and cross-border law enforcement coordination often take unexpected turns as new agencies bring fresh resources to bear.
Brian Hooker's Facebook post, written the morning of his arrest, framed Lynette's disappearance as a tragic accident caused by "unpredictable seas and high winds." His daughter described a couple with a volatile history. The 2015 police report documented a night of drinking, mutual violence, and a case that fell apart because no one could say who started it.
Now, more than a decade later, Lynette Hooker is gone, her husband is in custody, and the question of what really happened on that dinghy near Elbow Cay is in the hands of investigators from two countries. The case also underscores a grim reality familiar to anyone who follows arrest stories involving suspects whose accounts don't survive scrutiny: cooperation with authorities is not the same thing as innocence.
When the facts finally come out, and in cases like this, they usually do, someone's story is going to fall apart. The only question is whose.
Republican Clay Fuller won the Georgia special election runoff Tuesday night, capturing the House seat vacated by former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and delivering a needed boost to Speaker Mike Johnson's razor-thin majority. Fuller, President Donald Trump's endorsed candidate, held 54% of the vote with 45% counted, as reported by Just the News, citing the Associated Press.
His Democratic opponent, Shawn Harris, trailed at 46%.
The result matters beyond Georgia. Every seat counts for House Republicans, who have struggled to hold their caucus together on a string of high-stakes votes. Fuller's arrival adds one more vote to Johnson's column at a moment when the Speaker can afford to lose almost none.
The race followed a familiar two-step process. In March, a crowded special election narrowed the field. Fuller and Harris emerged as the top two finishers, sending the contest to Tuesday's head-to-head runoff.
Trump's endorsement shaped the primary landscape. Fuller carried the president's backing into the runoff, and the eight-point margin at the time of the AP call suggests it carried real weight with Republican voters in the district. The dynamic mirrors a broader pattern: when Trump puts his thumb on the scale in a red-leaning seat, the endorsed candidate tends to run ahead of the pack.
That pattern has not always held in competitive general elections. But in a deep-red Georgia district built for a Republican, the endorsement functioned less as a gamble and more as a coronation, one the voters ratified at the ballot box.
Johnson has spent months managing a House Republican conference that can barely afford a handful of defections on any given vote. Every vacancy makes that math worse. Every filled seat makes it marginally better.
Fuller's win does not solve the Speaker's coalition problems. But it does give him one more body in the chamber, and in a majority this slim, one seat is not a rounding error. It is the difference between passing legislation and watching it stall on the floor.
Trump himself has shown a willingness to enforce discipline within the party. He recently pulled his support from Rep. Jeff Hurd after a House vote that challenged his tariff authority, sending a clear signal about the cost of crossing the White House.
Fuller, who owes his seat in part to Trump's endorsement, arrives in Washington with that signal fresh in the air. Whether he governs as an independent voice or a reliable vote for the administration's priorities will be one of the early tests of his tenure.
The seat opened because Marjorie Taylor Greene left Congress. The circumstances of her departure were not detailed in the Associated Press report, but her absence created the vacancy that triggered the special election cycle.
Greene, one of the most recognizable figures in the House Republican conference, had been a lightning rod for both parties. She has since explored a possible role on "The View," signaling a pivot from legislative politics toward media.
Fuller now inherits a constituency that elected Greene by wide margins. The district's voters clearly lean conservative. The question is whether Fuller carves out his own identity or steps into the combative mold his predecessor established.
The Georgia result adds another line to Trump's endorsement ledger. In a cycle where the president has been willing to reward loyalty and punish dissent, Fuller's comfortable margin reinforces the value of a Trump nod in a friendly district.
That willingness to pick sides has created friction elsewhere in the party. Trump publicly rebuked Tucker Carlson over nuclear-war claims tied to Iran, and senior Republicans like Mitch McConnell have broken with the president on foreign policy. The internal tensions are real.
But in Georgia on Tuesday night, none of that mattered. The Trump-backed candidate won going away. And Johnson's majority grew by one.
Several details remain outstanding as final votes are tallied. The AP called the race with only 45% of ballots counted, though Fuller's lead was wide enough to project a winner. The final certified totals, the exact district number, and the specific counties involved were not included in initial reporting.
None of that changes the bottom line. Fuller won. He heads to Washington. And House Republicans have one less headache, at least for now.
In a majority this thin, every seat filled is a problem deferred. Whether Fuller becomes a reliable vote or a new headache of his own is a story for another day.
The United States launched a sweeping series of strikes against Iran's Kharg Island early Tuesday, hitting more than 50 military sites on the strategically vital landmass off Iran's southern coast, two U.S. officials told Newsmax. The operation came just ahead of President Donald Trump's deadline for Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil normally flows.
Officials described the strikes as carefully targeted. American forces deliberately avoided oil infrastructure on the island, which serves as Iran's primary oil export hub. The goal, officials said, was to degrade Iranian military capabilities without triggering broader economic disruption in global energy markets.
The distinction matters. Kharg Island is not just a military outpost, it is the beating heart of Iran's oil revenue. Striking military assets while leaving export terminals untouched sends a message that is hard to misread: Washington can reach the regime's most sensitive real estate and choose exactly what to destroy.
The Tuesday morning operation, measured by Eastern time, did not arrive out of nowhere. In recent days, military assets in and around Kharg Island had increasingly come under fire as tensions between Washington and Tehran escalated. The latest action represents the most concentrated single blow in that sequence, more than 50 sites hit in a single wave.
President Trump had set a deadline for Iran to restore full transit through the Strait of Hormuz. The administration warned of further consequences if Tehran failed to comply. Tuesday's strikes landed just before that clock ran out.
The pattern fits the posture the administration has maintained for weeks. Trump has rebuffed ceasefire proposals from Middle Eastern intermediaries, signaling that military pressure, not diplomatic half-measures, would define his approach to Iran.
That posture has produced results on the water as well as from the air. Earlier in the confrontation, the president ordered the destruction of Iranian mine-laying boats operating in shipping lanes, warning Tehran of unprecedented consequences if it continued to threaten commercial navigation.
Kharg Island sits off Iran's southern coast in the northern Persian Gulf. It handles the vast majority of Iran's crude exports. Any disruption to the island's oil terminals would ripple through global energy prices within hours. That the U.S. struck military targets there, and only military targets, reflects an operation designed to maximize strategic pressure while minimizing collateral economic damage to allies and trading partners who depend on Gulf oil.
Two U.S. officials stressed that the operation was calibrated. The word "carefully" appeared in their framing more than once. They described the intent as degrading Iran's military posture on the island, not crippling its export capacity.
For years, critics of a harder line on Iran argued that any military action near Kharg would automatically spike oil prices and punish American consumers at the pump. Tuesday's operation appears designed to answer that objection directly, by proving the U.S. can operate on the island's doorstep with surgical precision.
The Kharg Island strikes are the latest in a series of escalating U.S. actions against Iran's military infrastructure. The campaign has unfolded rapidly, with each step ratcheting pressure on a regime that has long relied on asymmetric threats, mines, proxy forces, missile programs, to deter direct confrontation.
That deterrence model has been tested and found wanting. The scope of Tuesday's strikes, more than 50 sites in a single operation, suggests Washington has moved well past symbolic gestures. This was an operation built to impose real military cost.
The confrontation has also reached the highest levels of Iran's leadership. A joint U.S.-Israeli strike earlier in the conflict killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a development that reshaped the entire strategic landscape in the region.
Trump himself has framed the campaign in blunt terms, publicly calling Iran's regime serial deceivers who misled American presidents for decades. That rhetoric has matched the operational tempo: no pauses, no drawn-out negotiations, no off-ramps that Tehran could exploit to rearm and regroup.
Several important details remain unclear. U.S. officials have not publicly identified which specific military capabilities were targeted on Kharg Island, whether air defenses, missile batteries, command facilities, naval installations, or some combination. No casualty figures have been released, and no formal damage assessment has been made public.
The identities of the two U.S. officials who described the operation have not been disclosed. The exact calendar date of Trump's Strait of Hormuz deadline has not been specified in public reporting, nor has the administration defined precisely what "restore full transit" means in operational terms, whether it requires the removal of mines, the withdrawal of naval assets, or some broader guarantee of free passage.
Iran's response, if any, has not yet been reported. Whether Tehran attempts retaliation, through proxies, cyberattacks, or direct military action, will shape the next phase of the confrontation.
The president has signaled that the endgame may be closer than many observers expect. Trump recently indicated the U.S. could wind down its Iran campaign within weeks, saying the nuclear objective had been achieved.
The deliberate avoidance of oil infrastructure deserves a closer look. It is not simply a tactical choice, it is a policy statement. The administration is telling the world that the United States can project force onto Iran's most economically sensitive territory without destabilizing global markets. That capability, demonstrated rather than merely claimed, changes the calculus for every actor in the region.
For Iran, the message is stark. The regime's military assets on Kharg Island, the one piece of geography it cannot afford to lose, are now proven to be within reach and vulnerable. The oil terminals next door survived this round. Whether they survive the next depends entirely on Tehran's choices.
For allies and energy importers, the signal is reassurance. Washington struck hard and kept the oil flowing. That is the kind of strength that builds coalitions, and the kind of restraint that keeps them intact.
Decades of half-measures, frozen negotiations, and carefully worded communiqués did not stop Iran from mining shipping lanes or threatening the world's energy supply. Fifty strikes on Kharg Island speak a language Tehran has no trouble understanding.
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) reportedly pursued a sexual relationship with yet another former staff member, according to newly released text messages first reported by the San Antonio Express-News. The texts show Gonzales sent vulgar messages to his campaign's political director in 2020, reportedly asking her over a dozen times for nude photos and asking "what kind of panties" she wore.
This is the second staffer Gonzales is now linked to. He dropped his reelection bid in March after admitting to an affair with Regina Santos-Aviles, a married staffer who later died by suicide. The House Committee on Ethics is currently investigating him over that relationship.
Gonzales, who is married with six children, was first elected to Congress in 2020, the same year the text messages were sent.
According to the Washington Examiner, Gonzales attempted to pursue a sexual relationship with his former political director over multiple weeks. The two met at her home twice for work purposes. In the text messages attributed to Gonzales, the congressman wrote "squeeze my balls" and, in what appears to be a reference to her rejections, "47 nos is about my limit."
The former political director connected the pattern immediately. Speaking about Santos-Aviles, she said:
"He obviously pursued, pursued, pursued her like he did with me."
She went further, describing the moment Santos-Aviles's death changed her understanding of who Gonzales is:
"I never took him serious… It wasn't until this poor girl died that I thought, 'No, this guy is pure evil.'"
Those are not the words of someone describing a one-time lapse. They describe a pattern.
When Gonzales first addressed the Santos-Aviles affair during a podcast interview in March, he framed it this way:
"I made a mistake, and I had a lapse in judgment."
He added that he takes "full responsibility for those actions." On March 5, he released a statement announcing his decision to step aside:
"After deep reflection and with the support of my loving family, I have decided not to seek re-election while serving out the rest of this Congress with the same commitment I've always had to my district."
The language is carefully constructed. "A mistake." "A lapse." Singular. The newly released texts suggest something quite different: a congressman who serially pursued subordinates, leveraging the power dynamic of employer and employee to make vulgar advances over a period of weeks, absorbing rejection after rejection without stopping.
"A lapse in judgment" covers a lot of ground when it has to stretch across two staffers and dozens of unwanted messages.
When Gonzales forfeited his bid for a fourth term, Brandon Herrera, who had been in a runoff with Gonzales, automatically became the Republican nominee for Texas's 23rd Congressional District. That transition is now complete, and the district moves forward without the baggage Gonzales accumulated.
Conservatives should be clear-eyed about this. The right gains nothing from circling the wagons around a man whose conduct betrayed his family, his staff, and the voters who trusted him with office. The Ethics investigation continues. The facts, so far, speak plainly enough.
The policy implications and political fallout will sort themselves out. TX-23 will have a new representative. The Ethics Committee will issue its findings. Gonzales will serve out his term and leave.
But Regina Santos-Aviles is dead. A former political director carries the memory of a boss who wouldn't take no for an answer. These are real people whose lives were bent and broken by a man who treated the power of his office as a personal entitlement.
Forty-seven nos. He kept count.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley posted a video to social media Thursday declaring that "eviction is an act of violence." She introduced legislation on Wednesday that would prevent evictions from appearing on credit reports and fund legal assistance for tenants facing removal. She wants you to know that housing is a human right.
What she doesn't want you to dwell on is the $8 million in rental property assets sitting on her family's balance sheet.
Pressley, the Massachusetts progressive and Squad member, delivered the line with the kind of moral gravity usually reserved for actual acts of violence. In the video, she laid out her position plainly:
"It degrades the health of communities. There is great stigma associated with it."
Her spokesperson doubled down in a statement to Fox News Digital, calling evictions "destabilizing life events with devastating consequences for the physical, financial, and mental wellbeing of those being evicted, who are disproportionately women and families with young children."
Strong words from the office of a four-term lawmaker whose 2024 financial disclosure tells a different story. According to that filing, Pressley and her husband reported up to $8 million in combined assets derived from four Massachusetts rental properties. Her spouse earned up to $350,000 in rental income and from a property sale. The couple also sold a one-bedroom condo in Fort Lauderdale valued at under $500,000. And they own a house on Martha's Vineyard worth more than $1 million.
So when Pressley says "housing is a human right," the question writes itself: whose housing, exactly?
This is not a new contradiction for Pressley. She has long advocated for rent cancellation legislation and pushed for an eviction moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has previously faced charges of hypocrisy for pushing rent-relief policies while appearing to profit from her husband's status as a landlord.
The rhetoric keeps escalating anyway. Calling eviction "violence" does specific rhetorical work. It reframes a legal process, one governed by courts, leases, and due process, as a moral atrocity. It strips property owners of legitimacy. It turns every landlord who enforces a lease into an aggressor.
Unless, apparently, that landlord is married to Ayanna Pressley.
Journalist Brad Polumbo captured the absurdity in a single line:
"Great. When can I move into your house for free?"
Conservative commentator Steve Guest was more pointed:
"The only violence in this statement is what Ayanna Pressley is doing to the meaning of words and the English language."
Pressley has a pattern of inflating language until it collapses under its own weight. She raised eyebrows in February for comparing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to members of the Ku Klux Klan, declaring:
"In the same way that the KKK cannot be reformed, another — you know, masked militia group — I do not believe that ICE can be reformed and that this has anything to do with training and protocols."
ICE agents are the KKK. Eviction is violence. Words are unmoored from their definitions and repurposed as political weapons. This is not carelessness. It is strategy. If everything is violence, then everything justifies extraordinary government intervention: moratoriums, rent cancellation, credit report manipulation, taxpayer-funded legal teams to prevent landlords from enforcing their own contracts.
The legislation Pressley introduced Wednesday follows this logic to its natural conclusion. Preventing evictions from appearing on credit reports doesn't help tenants build better financial habits. It hides relevant information from future landlords, who will then price that uncertainty into higher rents, stricter screening, or fewer available units. The people Pressley claims to champion end up in a tighter market with fewer options.
This is the progressive housing feedback loop: regulate landlords, shrink the supply, watch rents climb, blame landlords again, regulate harder.
There are real families who face eviction through genuine hardship, and that reality deserves seriousness, not sloganeering. A medical emergency, a job loss, a sudden crisis: these are painful situations that communities and local institutions can and do address.
But Pressley is not proposing solutions proportionate to those problems. She is proposing a framework in which the act of enforcing a legal agreement becomes morally indistinguishable from assault. That framework doesn't protect vulnerable tenants. It erodes the property rights that make rental housing possible in the first place.
Meanwhile, the Pressley household collects rental income, sells condos, and summers on Martha's Vineyard. The four-term congresswoman who calls eviction violence profits from the very system she wants to dismantle for everyone else.
Rules for thee. Rental income for me.
A 43-year-old Southern California woman who slashed her boyfriend's throat and buried his body in what police called a "makeshift tomb" in her backyard has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. The corpse stayed there for eight years before anyone found it.
Trista Spicer was sentenced Friday in San Bernardino Superior Court after a jury late last year found her guilty of second-degree murder in the October 2014 killing of her boyfriend, Eric Mercado, 42. The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department is holding Spicer in the county jail until her expected transfer to a California state prison.
According to news outlets, the killing began after Mercado complained about the dinner Spicer served him. What followed was not a momentary act of panic.
Spicer testified during the trial that she struck Mercado in the head several times with a cast-iron skillet. She then stabbed him in the neck with a kitchen knife he had dropped after she struck him with the skillet. The sequence matters. This was not a single blow in a struggle. It was repeated blunt force trauma followed by a fatal stabbing.
What came next reveals something colder than the killing itself. Spicer enlisted a friend to help her wrap the corpse in a deflated air mattress. She then concealed the body in her backyard, where it remained undiscovered while Mercado's family searched for answers. His family had reported him missing since 2014, as Breitbart reports.
For eight years, a family grieved a disappearance that was never a disappearance at all.
The case broke open in 2022, and the circumstances of its unraveling are as jarring as the crime itself. According to the San Bernardino Sun, Spicer told her boyfriend at the time that she needed to remove Mercado's corpse because her family wanted to sell the house. Not guilt. Not confession. Real estate logistics.
Police acted on a search warrant of the property and discovered what they described as a makeshift tomb on the grounds. After eight years buried in a backyard, Mercado's remains finally told the story his family had been desperate to hear.
Mercado's sister, Mahira Torres, addressed the court during Friday's proceedings and called Spicer "evil." Her victim impact statement carried the weight of nearly a decade of not knowing.
"You took my brother's life, and you shattered ours."
There is no rebuttal to that. There is no mitigating context that erases what Torres and her family endured: years of searching, years of wondering, while the woman responsible for their brother's death walked free and lived in the same house where she had buried him.
Spicer testified that Mercado had a history of physically and verbally abusing her, and that he often made her sit naked for long periods as part of his punishing and controlling behavior. This was her defense. The jury weighed it.
They returned a verdict of second-degree murder.
Domestic abuse is real, and its toll on victims is serious. But a jury heard the full testimony, evaluated the evidence, and concluded that what happened in October 2014 was murder. The post-killing conduct tells its own story. A person acting in genuine self-defense does not typically enlist help to wrap a body in a deflated air mattress, bury it in the backyard, and maintain silence for eight years while the victim's family files missing persons reports.
Concealment is not the behavior of someone who believes they had no other choice. It is the behavior of someone who believes they could avoid consequences.
Fifteen years for taking a life and hiding it for nearly a decade. Torres called Spicer evil. The justice system called it second-degree murder. Whether 15 years adequately accounts for the killing itself, plus the calculated concealment, plus the years of anguish inflicted on a family left searching, is a question the sentence invites but does not answer.
Eric Mercado's family spent eight years looking for a man who was buried a few feet from where his killer slept. They deserve better than closure. They deserved the truth in 2014. They got it in 2022 because someone wanted to sell a house.
ActBlue, the Democratic Party's fundraising backbone, may have given Congress a misleading account of how it screens out illegal foreign donations, and its own attorneys knew it, according to internal legal memos now surfacing through a New York Times investigation published Thursday.
The memos, drafted by ActBlue's outside law firm Covington & Burling, warned that CEO Regina Wallace-Jones' 2023 letter to congressional investigators described safeguards that were not consistently followed. One memo went further, raising the prospect of a criminal investigation if prosecutors concluded ActBlue had tried to conceal the truth about foreign contributions flowing through its platform.
For a nonprofit that functions as the central clearinghouse for Democratic campaign cash, the implications are serious. Federal election law bars foreign nationals from donating to American political campaigns. When Wallace-Jones told Congress in 2023 that ActBlue had a "multi-layered vetting framework" to catch illegal foreign money, she was speaking under the kind of scrutiny where accuracy is not optional, it is a legal obligation.
Wallace-Jones wrote to Congress in 2023 in response to concerns about ActBlue's ability to vet donors overseas. She told lawmakers the platform processed contributions with foreign mailing addresses only when the donor supplied a U.S. passport number. She also said ActBlue would contact donors to request passport information and return any money when the donor could not be reached.
That account painted a picture of tight controls. But Fox News Digital reported that the New York Times reviewed internal memos, resignation letters, and other communications showing those procedures were not fully accurate, and not consistently happening.
Covington & Burling's attorneys flagged the gap between what Wallace-Jones told Congress and what was actually occurring inside the organization. The Washington Examiner reported that donors using third-party payment platforms such as Apple Pay, PayPal, and Venmo were not required by ActBlue to provide documentation showing they were legally permitted to donate to U.S. political committees.
That is not a minor technical oversight. It is a hole in the vetting system large enough to let foreign money walk through.
The internal memos from Covington & Burling did not mince words. One memo, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon, stated plainly:
"It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections."
The same memo warned that because ActBlue's staff knew the system was not as robust as necessary, any violations could be characterized as "knowing and willful", a legal standard that increases the penalties the Federal Election Commission might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.
Another passage addressed the November 2023 letter to Congress directly:
"An aggressive prosecutor may view the November 2023 letter not just as a false statement but as an effort to conceal the foreign contributions."
That language, "effort to conceal", is the kind of framing that separates a sloppy mistake from potential obstruction. It came not from Republican investigators or conservative critics, but from the law firm ActBlue had hired to protect it.
The pattern of officials making claims to Congress that later prove questionable has become a recurring theme in Washington. Democrats have been eager to push criminal referrals over alleged false congressional testimony when the target is a Republican. Whether they apply the same standard to their own fundraising apparatus remains to be seen.
A spokesperson for Covington & Burling told Fox News Digital: "We have complete confidence in the legal advice our lawyers provided to ActBlue." That statement is carefully worded. It expresses confidence in the advice given, not in ActBlue's compliance with it.
The New York Times reported that Covington's relationship with ActBlue was ultimately severed. The Times also reviewed resignation letters and interviewed ActBlue employees on the basis of anonymity, suggesting internal turmoil that went beyond a routine legal disagreement.
When your own law firm warns you that your statements to Congress may be viewed as concealment, and then the firm walks away, the situation has moved well past "misunderstanding."
ActBlue was already the target of several congressional probes led by Republican House committees before the Times report landed. Newsmax reported that several former ActBlue officials invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during closed-door testimony before those committees, a legal right, but one that rarely inspires public confidence.
The New York Times reported that three investigations by GOP-led House committees remain ongoing. Trump called on the Justice Department last year to investigate ActBlue over concerns the platform was allowing straw donations and foreign contributions barred by federal election law. Early in his term, he directed the DOJ to return a report within 180 days on the status of its findings.
That report, the Times noted, has never been made public.
House Republican committee chairmen Bryan Steil, James Comer, and Jim Jordan responded to the Times findings directly. The New York Post reported their joint statement:
"The New York Times' bombshell report raises serious questions about whether ActBlue's CEO intentionally misled Congress."
GOP investigators also said ActBlue relaxed its fraud-prevention policies twice during the 2024 campaign cycle and did not require CVV entry for card transactions until January 2024. Internal documents reportedly indicated some overseas prepaid-card transactions were flagged.
The question of what officials tell Congress under oath, and what happens when those statements prove false, has generated intense debate in recent months. Democrats have called for special counsel investigations over testimony disputes involving Republican officials. The standard they set should apply here, too.
In May, ActBlue issued a press release addressing the scrutiny. The organization called it a "myth" that its platform allows foreign nationals to illegally contribute donations and described its new measures:
"While ActBlue has always had strong measures in place that have successfully prevented illegal foreign donations, beginning in 2025 we have gone even further. We now require that Americans living abroad be physically present in the United States to make a contribution on our platform, despite campaign finance laws allowing citizens to contribute to campaigns while living abroad."
Read that carefully. ActBlue says it has "always had strong measures." Its own attorneys said those measures were not robust enough and that staff knew it. ActBlue says it went "even further" in 2025. But the congressional letter in question was sent in November 2023, and the vetting gaps existed during the 2024 election cycle, the most expensive in American history.
The timing matters. If ActBlue's safeguards were inadequate during the very cycle when billions of dollars flowed through its platform, the 2025 reforms do not retroactively fix the problem. They confirm one existed.
ActBlue did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment in time for publication.
Federal prosecutors have shown increasing willingness to pursue evidence from congressional proceedings when they suspect misconduct tied to major political controversies. Whether that appetite extends to the Democratic Party's fundraising machine is a test of institutional evenhandedness.
Several questions hang over this story. The DOJ report Trump requested within 180 days has not surfaced publicly. The specific findings of the three ongoing House investigations have not been disclosed. And the full scope of foreign money that may have entered Democratic coffers through ActBlue's platform remains unknown.
The Breitbart report on the Times findings noted that Covington & Burling concluded Wallace-Jones' 2023 letter described screening steps that were not always followed in practice, and that one memo raised the possibility of a criminal investigation if prosecutors believed facts had been concealed.
Congressional testimony carries weight precisely because it carries consequences. When officials volunteer to testify before House committees, they do so knowing that false statements can trigger real legal exposure. Wallace-Jones did not volunteer; she responded to an investigation. The bar for accuracy was no lower.
ActBlue processed donations for virtually every major Democratic candidate and cause in the country. If its vetting system had holes, and its own lawyers said it did, then the integrity of an entire fundraising ecosystem is in question. The people who deserve answers are not partisan operatives. They are American voters and donors who trusted that the system was lawful.
When your own attorneys warn you in writing that prosecutors could view your letter to Congress as concealment, the word "myth" stops being a defense. It starts sounding like a habit.