Republicans are freaking out about a special House election in Tennessee because their candidate is only ahead by like two points in a district Trump won by over 20. Speaker Mike Johnson flew in and got Trump on speakerphone to tell everyone the whole world is watching this race, which is pretty wild for what should be an easy Republican win.
The GOP is throwing everything at Democrat Aftyn Behn, calling her a far-left radical who would just vote however AOC tells her to. They brought in senators, House members, and the governor to campaign against her support for trans people and her protesting ICE agents. Meanwhile, Behn is focusing on affordability issues and getting help from AOC and Al Gore for a virtual rally, and Democrats are...
The IRS is trying to figure out what counts as porn after Trump's tax break for tips got passed, and it's turning into a whole mess. Sex workers on OnlyFans were hyped about potentially claiming the new deduction, but the government said tips from prostitution or pornographic stuff don't qualify. Tax professionals are scratching their heads about how anyone's supposed to enforce this when there's no clear definition of what makes content pornographic versus just spicy.
Conservative Christian groups lobbied hard to keep adult content creators from getting the tax break, arguing the government shouldn't support industries they see as predatory. The whole thing might not even matter for successful creators since the deduction cuts off at...
The Supreme Court heard arguments about whether internet companies should get hit with massive damages when their customers pirate music online. Music labels sued Cox Communications back in 2018 because the company kept providing service to people who were constantly getting flagged for illegal downloads, and a jury originally awarded the labels a billion dollars in damages.
Justices from both sides seemed worried that siding with the music industry could force providers to cut off entire hospitals or universities just because one person on their network was downloading tracks illegally. Cox argued that making internet companies play copyright cop would mess up how everyone accesses the web, while the labels said Cox ignored tens of...
Federal prosecutors in DC just got handed a weird new power after a judge said they can use local grand juries to charge serious federal crimes. The whole thing started when prosecutors tried getting an indictment from a federal grand jury for a gun case, got rejected, and then just went to a local grand jury instead to get what they wanted. A magistrate judge was like, "Wait, that's not how this works," but the chief district judge said the law technically allows it because of how DC's court system is set up.
Legal experts are saying prosecutors probably prefer local grand juries because they hear way more cases and might just rubber-stamp stuff without thinking too hard about it. Federal grand juries apparently have more time to...
Trump's Solicitor General office is going through some wild changes under his former personal lawyer, John Sauer. More than half the frontline attorneys bounced by late November, which is way higher turnover than usual, even when administrations flip parties. The White House has been way more involved than before, sending frequent emails and making detailed edits to court filings, and the traditionally bipartisan office has been hiring more exclusively from Republican judges and justices.
The office's legal briefs have started including charged language with direct Trump quotes, which is making veterans from both Republican and Democratic administrations nervous. One retired conservative judge said the office looks like it's just...
Trump's election interference case in Georgia got tossed last week, but the fallout from 2020 is still messing with state politics heading into the midterms. The Justice Department has been going after Fani Willis, the Atlanta prosecutor who originally charged Trump, and they've already sent out dozens of subpoenas. Federal prosecutors are also trying to get their hands on tens of thousands of ballots from the 2020 election.
The case against Trump fell apart after Willis got kicked off it because she was dating the lawyer she hired to run the prosecution. Trump had tried to pressure Georgia Republicans to overturn his 2020 loss there, including that infamous call where he asked the secretary of state to find enough votes. The whole...
A 19-year-old college freshman got detained at Boston Logan International Airport while trying to catch a flight to surprise her dad for Thanksgiving, and she ended up getting deported to Honduras two days later. Any Lucía López Belloza had been living in the US since she was 7, but apparently, there was a deportation order from 2015 that nobody in her family knew about. Her lawyer says he can't even find the original order in the system, and DHS claims she got full due process as a kid.
The wild part is that a federal judge had signed a court order saying she couldn't be removed while her case was pending, but immigration agents grabbed her at the airport anyway. She spent time in detention in Texas before getting put on a bus with...
Some big-name lawmakers from both parties are saying the military might have done a war crime during Trump's boat attacks in the Caribbean. A recent report claims Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told troops to kill everyone on suspected drug-smuggling boats, and that led to a second strike being launched against survivors after an initial September attack. Republican Mike Turner and Democrats like Tim Kaine and Mark Kelly all agreed this would be illegal if it actually went down.
Congressional committees are opening investigations into these boat strikes, which have killed over 80 people since early September. The administration says they're going after drug cartels, but members of Congress are questioning whether there's any legal...
A federal appeals court shut down the Trump administration's attempt to make Alina Habba the acting US attorney for New Jersey because she had already got nominated for the permanent gig. The Third Circuit said putting her in that spot broke federal vacancy laws, and defendants in two criminal cases called out how the appointment violated rules about who can fill acting roles. The court backed a lower ruling that kicked her off two prosecutions.
This marks the second federal smackdown against the administration's US attorney appointments after a Virginia judge tossed indictments against James Comey and Letitia James because the prosecutor who brought charges got installed illegally. The ruling confirms that even after Trump pulled...
