Let's Start With Cutting Half, That Seems Like a Reasonable Start
The Democrats might be about to give an incredible gift to DOGE
I rarely say “watch me on the teevee” in this newsletter, but last night on Special Report with Bret Baier, Jessica Tarlov and I had a back and forth that I think speaks to the “you don’t really believe that do you?” attitude from Democrats and D.C. bureaucrats about those of us who have been calling for vast cuts in government for decades. Watch here:
Washington Examiner: Democrats weigh shutdown blame in government funding
Democrats will soon be forced to decide if a shutdown is worth the risk of political blame as they press for a shorter-term extension. They spent weeks rallying outside agencies to signal support for federal workers but could now be responsible if those very workers are furloughed.
House Democrats have signaled they will present a united front against the funding bill when it arrives on the House floor Tuesday, with even centrists prepared to vote “no” as leadership whips against the bill.
“The American people want us to fight, and they’re going to see us fight,” Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), who represents a purple district in Michigan, told CNN.
The continuing resolution is magnifying tensions in the Senate, however, as Democrats find themselves split over how aggressively to challenge Trump.
Senior Democrats like Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, have sharply criticized the funding bill. Murray released an eight-page memo on Saturday highlighting the “wide discretion” the bill gives the president to slash programs covering veteran assistance, disease prevention, and “much more.”
But Republicans are betting they can peel off enough of the caucus to send the legislation to Trump’s desk. Johnson is expected to adjourn the House for a weeklong recess following the vote, in effect jamming the Senate without a viable backup plan.
On Monday, the Democrats most likely to support the funding patch were noncommittal on how they would vote.
“Let’s see what the House does,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who is up for reelection in New Hampshire.
“I’ll wait to see what the final version is, and then we’ll make a determination,” added Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who represents swing state Arizona.
But those Democrats will be under immense pressure to support the legislation after years of panning GOP brinkmanship on government funding. On Monday, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the Republican majority whip, penned an op-ed accusing the party of being “all in” on a government shutdown.
The Democrats who represent Maryland and Virginia, both Washington, D.C.-adjacent states, will feel that pressure most acutely as thousands of federal workers face the prospect of furloughs.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) has been outspoken in his opposition to the funding patch, calling it a “horrible bill” on Monday that underfunds military construction projects.
Meanwhile, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) held out hope that appropriators could return to the negotiating table to reach a bipartisan deal.
But neither committed to opposing the legislation on the floor. A third, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), simply responded, “We’ll wait and see.”
So far, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), a centrist from Pennsylvania, is among the only Democrats who have definitely committed to supporting the CR.
The uncertainty reflects the unique predicament for Senate Democrats.
In the House, Democrats can likely vote “no” without risking a shutdown since only a bare majority is needed to pass any bill. As of now, Johnson has a GOP-only path to passing the funding patch, though the vote will be tenuous given his two-seat margin.
By contrast, Senate Democrats will be unequivocally blamed if they oppose the bill due to the filibuster. Republicans will need at least eight Democrats to meet the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a GOP fiscal hawk, pledges to vote no.
“God bless em.”
Poll: 51 Percent Say Democrats Are “Elitist”
The Democratic Party’s brand is in rough shape in the congressional battlegrounds.
Nearly two months into the second Donald Trump administration, a majority of voters in battleground House districts still believe Democrats in Congress are “more focused on helping other people than people like me,” according to an internal poll conducted by the Democratic group Navigator Research. Among independents, just 27 percent believe Democrats are focused on helping them, compared with 55 percent who said they’re focused on others.
The polling, shared first with POLITICO, is one of the first comprehensive surveys of voters in swing congressional districts since November 2024. House Democratic members and staff are scheduled to hear from one of the researchers, who will present their findings, at their caucus’ Issues Conference on Wednesday in Leesburg, Virginia. The meeting is aimed at guiding members’ messaging as they prepare for the 2026 midterms, and the survey suggests the party has an enormous amount of work to do to repair its image.
“The Democratic brand is still not where it needs to be in terms of core trust and understanding people’s challenges,” said Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters who worked on the research by Navigator, a project within the Hub Project, a Democratic nonprofit group. “Even though voters are critical about Trump and some of the things he’s doing, that criticism of Trump doesn’t translate into trust in Democrats. The trust has to be earned.”
Especially alarming for Democrats were findings around voters’ views of Democrats and work. Just 44 percent of those polled said they think Democrats respect work, while even fewer — 39 percent — said the party values work. Only 42 percent said Democrats share their values. A majority, meanwhile — 56 percent — said Democrats are not looking out for working people.
Only 39 percent believe Democrats have the right priorities.
“We’ve always had the stigma of being the ‘welfare party,’ but I do think this is related to a post-Covid feeling that we don’t care about people working, and we’ve had a very long hangover from that, which feels really, really consequential,” Murphy said. “How can you care about working people if you don’t care about work? It’s going to be really hard in the midterms if voters don’t think we care about work.”
Republicans, too, face their own branding problems, according to the survey, with 54 percent of voters saying they view Republicans in Congress unfavorably. Only about a third of voters said they approve of the GOP’s handling of the economy.
But Democrats’ difficulties appear to go deeper. For example, the poll found a whopping 69 percent of voters said Democrats were “too focused on being politically correct.” Another 51 percent said “elitist” described the Democratic Party well.
Poll: COVID Fallout Still Guides Our Politics
The big picture: 39% say they know someone who died. Everybody wants to leave the era behind. Yet two-thirds of Americans don't believe the nation is adequately prepared to deal with another pandemic or widespread health crisis, according to the Axios-Ipsos American Health Index.
Trust in public health institutions and leaders divided, declined and never fully recovered.
Today, just 31% of Americans (67% of Republicans, 7% of Democrats, 22% of independents) say they trust President Trump for information about health topics. Trust in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is equally low.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the prominent former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a political target during the pandemic, today is trusted by nearly three-fourths of Democrats and half of independents but only about 1 in 10 Republicans.
Since the election, Republicans have driven some uptick of support for federal health agencies and public health measures.
The Trans Issue Trap
There is perhaps no set of issues more closely tied to America’s culture wars than those related to “gender identity.” The speed with which even the concept became a part of the cultural zeitgeist is remarkable. Barely over a decade ago, these issues were nearly nonexistent in the country’s collective consciousness. Today, they’re seemingly everywhere: from left to right, and from schools to the White House.
America’s political tribes disagree vociferously over which side is responsible for opening up this new front in the culture war. Progressives maintain that transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been minding their own business and just trying to live their lives, and that as they’ve become more visible in public life and required reasonable accommodations, bigots and reactionaries have sensed an opportunity to pick on yet another vulnerable group. Conservatives believes they were minding their own business before progressive activists forced them to accept new and controversial notions about sex and gender and accommodations that go too far.
Regardless of how it started, one thing is becoming clear: the country has experienced a rightward shift on these issues, and it has been at the expense of the Democrats. Though it wasn’t the primary driver of Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, swing voters said one major reason they voted against her was that they believed she and her party paid disproportionate attention to groups like transgender people at the expense of helping the working and middle classes. One of the most effective ads that Donald Trump’s campaign ran against Harris reinforced this idea.
These sentiments have carried over into Trump’s second term. While voters have mixed views about his early policies, one of his most popular is an executive order recognizing only two sexes. Democrats have also continued feeling the heat, as they were forced to go on the record regarding their support for transgender women’s participation in women’s sports—a highly unpopular idea that nearly every one of their members supported.
Some elected Democrats, such as Congressmen Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi and California Governor Gavin Newsom, have begun to sense that their party’s current direction on the sports question, specifically—but perhaps on the gamut of related issues more broadly—is untenable. And at least some of their fellow party members are grappling with this reality. Yet even given this growing awareness, Democrats appear to be at a crossroads with public opinion, scientific opinion, activist opinion, and their own values.
The NHS is Pushing Sterlization
Flora Watkins in The Spectator:
It was a routine antenatal appointment. I’d done it twice before and knew the format. The obstetrician runs through the risks of an elective caesarean (ELCS). We agree a date, I sign the forms, then make a plea for adequate pain relief after the surgery, which I know will be ignored.
So I was blindsided by her opening gambit. ‘Why don’t we tie your tubes when we’ve got the baby out?’ she said, or something similar – I don’t recall the exact words, but I do remember the heat in my chest, the confusion and fear.
‘What?’
‘It’s your third child, isn’t it, so why don’t we tie your tubes at the same time?’
She wouldn’t drop it, ignoring my every assertion that I did not want this done to me. ‘It’s a very simple procedure when you’re open on the table,’ she said silkily. (I’ve since learnt that it isn’t.) I lost it after that, so she changed tack, offering to ‘pop in a Mirena coil at the same time’.
Again, a hard ‘no’ from me. At that stage I still thought we might have a fourth child. I was outraged at this unsolicited comment on the size of our family. I left in a terrible state, stressed and upset that they wanted to do this to me.
Then, shortly before I had my daughter, I met up with my friend Tess, who was booked in for an elective caesarian at a neighbouring NHS trust in London, due to placenta previa. We chatted about what it involved; her two older children had been natural births. ‘Can you believe,’ said Tess, ‘the first thing the consultant said to me was, “Now I understand this is your third child. Why don’t we tie your tubes at the same time?”’
Like me, Tess wasn’t sure she was finished having babies. This ‘offer’ of sterilisation wasn’t because of any concern about mine or the baby’s health, she said ‘It was just his assumption that I wouldn’t want any more children after three’. I had a straightforward third pregnancy, but when my daughter was born in October 2019, she was unresponsive at first. By the time I came round from the anaesthetic she’d been whipped upstairs to neonatal intensive care, convulsed by seizures. No one could tell us if she would live; our priest came to baptise her on the second day.
I remember thinking that if my daughter died, the only way I could possibly navigate the grief would be by getting pregnant again as quickly as possible. Discharged without her, I had quite a bit of time to dwell on the fact that, if I had consented to sterilisation, one doctor would have been permanently removing my ability to bear more children while my baby was being resuscitated.
We eventually brought Romy home after a month, with a diagnosis of cerebral palsy and prognoses ranging from poor to dire. There were so many things to sort out – feeding, mobility, a speech delay, her crucial therapy cancelled in lockdown – that I never raised the sterilisation issue with the trust. But it was there in my peripheral vision.
It’s only recently, with Romy confounding the experts to join her brothers at a mainstream primary school, that I’ve had the headspace to investigate what happened.
I posted on social media about what the obstetrician had said. Within a few days I had seven case studies with a good geographical spread, ages ranging from 36 to 42, dating from 2005 to so recently that the baby still hasn’t been born. Three of the women were in their mid-thirties when they were urged to undergo sterilisation. For two women, it was only their second child.
All the women I spoke to had been traumatised by these unsolicited offers and confused about why they had been targeted. Most felt it was a judgment on the number of children they ‘should’ have. All of them were surprised to learn that it hadn’t just happened to them.
Liberty, 37, who is expecting her third child imminently, came away from an antenatal appointment unaware that the doctor (‘whose English was dreadful’) had written in her notes that she’d agreed to sterilisation. Her midwife flagged it two days later and it was taken off her notes.
Feature
New Yorker: The Past and Future of Greenland
Items of Interest
Foreign
Semafor: US, Ukraine officials gather in Saudi for high-stakes talks
WSJ: Ukraine hits Russia with major drone attack hours before talks
WSJ: Marco Rubio says Saudi Arabia talks key to resuming support for Ukraine
WSJ: Philippines arrests former President Rodrigo Duterte on ICC warrant
National Interest: No, the first island chain isn’t lost
BBC: Canada’s Carney vows to win trade war with Trump
Spectator: Military service would ready young Britons for this unstable world
Domestic
Politico: Shutdown holdouts push back against Johnson
Punchbowl News: House shutdown showdown
Washington Examiner: Johnson faces unity test on spending deal
Spectator: Can the MAGA coalition survive a recession?
WSJ: Trump team braces for a hard economic landing
Politico: John Kennedy’s debt limit push and Trump’s agenda
The FP: The ICE detention of a Columbia student is just the beginning
WSJ: On the arrest of Columbia's Mahmoud Khalil
Spectator: Columbia University exemplifies the failure of universities
Telegraph: Pseudoscience at NOAA has agency in DOGE crosshairs
Unherd: How Elon Musk is reviving the Anti-Federalists
Washington Examiner: What’s going on with ActBlue?
Reason: Josh Blackman calls on Amy Coney Barrett to resign
Politico: Defendants angle for Trump pardons
NYT: Justice Department lawyer fired after denying Mel Gibson a gun
City Journal: The downside of New York’s prostitution decriminalization
Politico: Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist announces bid for Michigan governor
WSJ: Southwest Airlines bag policy changes to charge on basic economy
Media
Semafor: Young conservative women build an alternative to the manosphere
NY Post: Infowars reporter murdered near Austin
Tech
Health
WSJ: What’s behind the rise in autism diagnoses?
Ephemera
Politico: Where do Democrats and Republicans dine in Washington?
Semafor: Hasbro’s Dungeon Master CEO gets a glow-up
WSJ: Hollywood pivots to programming for Trump’s America
New Yorker: The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies
Variety: McConaughey returns: The Rivals of Amziah King review
Variety: Daredevil Born Again launches with 7.5M viewers on Disney+
Showbiz411: Trump's TV show “The Apprentice” will stream on Amazon
THR: Paul Heyman on the WWE’s Netflix move and Roman Reigns
NY Post: Ghost Adventures star’s wife arrested for allegedly hiring a hitman to turn him into a ghost
Quote
“The man who is honest and good ought to be exactly like a man who smells strong, so that the bystander as soon as he comes near him must smell whether he choose or not.”
— Marcus Aurelius