Author: newyorkgazette.com Est. 1725

After this week’s Iowa primary, the field is pretty much set in the six states that Democrats are mainly targeting to retake the Senate this November.It won’t be easy. Democrats must hold their seats and win at least four Republican-held ones — including at least two in states that President Trump won easily in 2024. Those are seats Republicans should be able to defend, even in a challenging year.But in most of the key states, there’s a good reason Democrats have a shot at winning, too — whether it’s the state’s partisanship, the strength of the Democratic candidate or the…

Shortly after Susan Collins entered the Senate in January 1997 as a Republican from Maine, some of her more jaded senior colleagues offered her a bit of professional advice: Make sure to miss at least one roll-call vote to avoid getting trapped in an unbroken streak.“More experienced senators said, ‘Miss one early; remove the pressure,’” Ms. Collins recalled. “I just wasn’t comfortable with that.”Twenty-nine years later, now a powerful committee chairwoman in a tough re-election fight, she is still not comfortable with the prospect of being recorded as not voting. Ms. Collins has not missed a single roll call in…

As a crowd of well-wishers recently gathered at an Episcopal church in Harlem to pay their respects to a Manhattan power broker whose wife had died, one person’s attendance raised eyebrows among the political cognoscenti.Representative Adriano Espaillat joined the sea of mourners, staying long enough to shake hands with the Manhattan leader, Keith L.T. Wright.His appearance suggested a potential change in the bitter feud between Mr. Espaillat and Mr. Wright — a turf war dating back to 2016, when Mr. Espaillat defeated Mr. Wright to become the first Dominican American elected to Congress, seizing a House seat long controlled by…

Officially, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, has no preferred candidate in his party’s unruly primary race for Senate in Michigan.But in conversations with major donors behind closed doors, Mr. Schumer, who for two decades has tried to elevate his favored primary candidates in battleground states, has been clear about his desire.He is asking party donors to support Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate candidate running against two more progressive Democrats, according to four people briefed on the communications over the last few weeks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.They said that…

Senate Republican anger about President Trump’s $1.8 billion fund for people who claim to be victims of federal overreach was loud and apparent.It held up the Republican agenda in Congress for weeks, and during a marathon voting session on Thursday and early Friday, several Republicans voted to end the fund, though those efforts failed. Still, the furor forced the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, to announce this week that he was abandoning it entirely.Not so for the sweeping protections from I.R.S. audits that Mr. Blanche also ordered up for Mr. Trump and his family. On that front, Republican reaction has…

The Trump administration is preparing to allow off-road vehicles on millions of acres of national forest land, according to a draft order prepared for Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary.The move is a companion to President Trump’s decision on May 29 to repeal two executive orders that for decades had protected other public lands, including most national parks, from ATVs, dirt bikes and other off-road vehicles.The undated Agriculture Department secretarial memorandum, which was reviewed by The New York Times, directs the U.S. Forest Service to identify which closed “roads, trails, areas, airstrips and waterways” in each national forest might be considered…

A federal judge in Rhode Island on Friday struck down a slate of immigration policies enacted by the Trump administration, writing that the measures had “placed the lives of countless individuals on hold — solely by virtue of their countries of birth.”In a searing 135-page opinion, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. wrote that actions to lock eligible asylum seekers out of the immigration system and deny others temporary work permits had made it functionally impossible for a broad swath of people to remain in the country. He said the measures were improperly fueled by “anti-immigration sentiments” and contrary to immigration…