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WASHINGTON — As various officials and groups aim to use the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, with the help of a famed sitcom actor, turned the spotlight Tuesday to a central tenet of U.S. democracy: religious freedom.

Actor Rainn Wilson, widely known for playing Dwight Schrute on NBC’s “The Office,” joined a press conference that U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., and Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., hosted along with religious leaders to advocate for the American tradition of religious freedom.

A senior Justice Department official in charge of relations with Congress wanted to recuse himself from working on the Trump administration's so-called "Anti-Weaponization Fund" — because he wanted to apply for money from it.

According to Politico, Patrick Davis, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, "raised his plan to file a claim with others at the DOJ in May because he viewed it as a conflict" — but his colleagues were alarmed by this development "in part because he was responsible for communicating the department’s reasons for setting up the fund to lawmakers."

Inflation hit a three-year high last month as President Donald Trump's war in Iran continued pushing energy costs higher, and an analyst warned that could hurt Republican chances in the midterm elections.

Consumer prices rose 4.2 percent in May from a year earlier, surpassing the 3.8 percent hike the previous month, and CNN's Jeff Zeleny said those higher consumer prices could get baked in as a political issue even if they alleviate before the election.

Add to the number of missteps Donald Trump’s White House has made with regard to the “explosive” Jeffrey Epstein files, Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles believed that the controversy would blow over after the FBI released a memo on their findings.

She could not have been more wrong and she had been warned, according to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

A pro-MAGA Real America's Voice host declared he won't wear a single drop of sunscreen on an upcoming Florida trip — then played a clip of an anti-medicine influencer arguing against science that the sun doesn't cause cancer; it's the corn dogs.

Steve Gruber, host of the conservative network's morning program Day Break, made the announcement Wednesday alongside his guest and wife, Ivey Ramos Gruber, who agreed sunglasses might also be unnecessary. The segment fits neatly into the MAHA movement's growing anti-sunscreen wing — and straight into a public health nightmare.

Democratic candidate Graham Platner coasted to an easy nomination for the U.S. Senate race in Maine on Tuesday night, overcoming weeks of negative press over scandals about his personal life and interactions with women to take on longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a top target of Democrats hoping to flip control of the upper chamber.

While Republicans project confidence in the race publicly, a recent memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is throwing up alarms, warning this could be a tough fight and Collins must not be caught off guard.

New Louisiana laws will establish stricter voter identification protocols and require election officials send every voter’s personal information to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Act 5 by Sen. Thomas Pressly, R-Shreveport, removes provisional ballots from voting locations, forcing anyone without a photo ID to go to their parish registrar of voters and provide additional identifying documents in order to cast a ballot.

MS NOW's Joe Scarborough bashed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for questioning a Democratic candidate's masculinity.

Cruz joined the chorus of Republicans jeering Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, whom his GOP rival Ken Paxton has insulted as "Talafreako," and the GOP senator mocked him as weak and not manly enough.

White evangelicals are just 13% of the American population. But according to one columnist, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is building a Pentagon that looks a lot like their church — and writer Amanda Marcotte says that's no accident.

When the Pentagon cut its official list of military religious designations from 211 to 31 earlier this month, it left out one group that expected to be included: Latter-day Saints. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wasn't classified as Christian at all.

According to reporting in the upcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, former Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly infuriated the president’s inner circle during a meeting with high-profile conservative influencers about the Jeffrey Epstein files.

On February 27, the White House Communications Office had scheduled a lineup of cabinet officials to brief popular MAGA influencers in the Roosevelt Room. Vice President JD Vance led the session, followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, walking the influencers through the administration's agenda. In attendance was a "who's who of online Trump world": Mike Cernovich, Liz Wheeler, Collin Rugg, and DC Draino.

According to Swan and Haberman, Trump himself brought them to the Oval Office and presented custom-designed challenge coins as tokens of appreciation. Before the day went sideways, one influencer remarked: "It was the best day of my life."

Then Bondi and her team reportedly waltzed into the Roosevelt Room carrying boxes. The attorney general had prepared binders as handouts; her aides would later claim the FBI had prepared them with revelatory details. One staffer reportedly boasted: "Watch this. This is cool. This is going to be epic."

Instead, the binders led to panic in the room.

As Bondi's staff distributed the binders, "blood pressure in the room" skyrocketed among other officials because no one in the White House had vetted the material in the binders and the attorney general was distributing materials she was calling "the Epstein files" without approval.

According to the report, one official opened a binder and frantically flipped through pages looking for Trump's name and, "A few pages in, right in the middle of the page, there it was."

Controversial candidate Graham Platner won the Democratic nomination in Maine's Senate race, but a new analysis found the party doesn't even need him to win to take back control of the U.S. Senate.

The Iraq war veteran won his primary race and will face off against Republican Sen. Susan Collins despite allegations of mistreatment by past girlfriends, sexually explicit text messages sent to other women while he was married, questionable comments posted online and getting a tattoo of a Nazi symbol – but CNN's Harry Enten said his campaign is not essential for Democrats.