Matthew Chapman

Republicans in Louisiana demanded California turn over a doctor who has been shipping abortion medication to their state — but Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday told them to pound sand.

The doctor in question, Remy Coeytaux, was indicted by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill earlier this week, on charges that could include up to 50 years of hard labor, and Gov. Jeff Landry proclaimed the defendant must be rendered to their state.

"I am signing the extradition paperwork to bring this California doctor to justice," said Landry in a post on X. "Louisiana has a zero tolerance policy for those who subvert our laws, seek to hurt women, and promote abortion. I know Gavin Newsom supports abortion in all its forms, but that doesn’t work in Louisiana. We are unapologetically pro-life."

In response, Newsom posted a four-word statement to X on Wednesday: "Louisiana's request is denied."

With several Republican-controlled states imposing near-total bans on abortion, the new front of the fight has moved to abortion medication, which can often be shipped easily between states in spite of laws that seek to restrict the practice.

In a twist development, Wyoming's first-in-the-nation categorical ban on abortion medication was struck down earlier this month by the state Supreme Court, under a state constitutional health care rights amendment that was passed in 2012 in protest of the Affordable Care Act.

Vice President JD Vance and the Secret Service were sent scrambling after an agent assigned to his security detail reportedly spilled sensitive security information to a Tinder date who turned out to be an undercover reporter.

According to The Daily Beast, "The agent, Tomas Escotto, was placed on administrative leave on Wednesday after a 14-minute undercover video published by reporter James O’Keefe showed the agent casually divulging details about the Vice President’s travel plans and internal shift operations. O’Keefe said the woman Escotto met through the dating app Tinder in October was working undercover for O’Keefe Media Group."

During that date, per the report, "Escotto allegedly shared information that the Secret Service explicitly bars agents from disclosing — including details about how many agents are assigned to protect the vice president and how they position themselves during travel."

Escotto even acknowledged to the reporter in text messages that giving out this information was against federal policy, saying, “I sign[ed] paperwork ... if i don’t have to give out information, I never do, otherwise I get in trouble.”

U.S. Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn confirmed to The Beast that Escotto’s security clearance was revoked and he was suspended from accessing secure facilities and systems pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

“The U.S. Secret Service has no tolerance for any behavior that could potentially compromise the safety, privacy, or trust of our protectees,” Quinn said in a statement to the outlet.

O'Keefe, a longtime right-wing activist, is best known for founding Project Veritas, a controversial group that plants undercover reporters with government officials or liberal nonprofits or media groups, and tries to get them to make compromising or embarrassing statements.

He parted ways with that group in 2023, with some reports suggesting he was ousted after subordinates alleged financial misconduct, which he denied.

Wisconsin Republicans have some bad news in their bid to retain control of a key state Supreme Court seat up for election in the coming months.

According to Mary Spicuzza of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Court of Appeals Judge Maria Lazar, the conservative in the race, "reports raising about $200,000 since she got into the race in October." This is less than a tenth the haul of liberal candidate, Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor, who has raised $2.6 million overall and $2 million in the second half of 2025.

Elections for the seven-member Wisconsin Supreme Court are officially nonpartisan; however, in practice, both parties tend to endorse a candidate, and the campaigns often touch on partisan issues that could come before the courts, particularly in recent years.

Democratic-endorsed candidates secured a 4-3 majority on the court in 2023, propelled by a backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court's elimination of the Roe v. Wade abortion rights precedent, and ending years of conservative dominance of the state judicial system.

Since gaining the majority, the liberal bloc has moved to strike down the state's 176-year-old abortion ban, invalidated the GOP's aggressive gerrymander of the state legislature, and have appointed panels that might strike down the state's congressional gerrymander, too.

Making matters worse for Republicans, Justice Rebecca Bradley, one of the court's most right-wing members notorious for firebrand opinions, announced she wouldn't seek re-election last August, opening up her seat for the 2026 race. A Republican loss would shift the court to a stronger 5-2 liberal majority, with one of the only remaining conservatives, Brian Hagedorn, a relative moderate who has earned President Donald Trump's wrath for not helping him overturn election results.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) took time during a congressional hearing with former Jan. 6 prosecutor Mike Romano to utterly dismantle the false claims from President Donald Trump and his allies that the people convicted in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol were in some way "hostages" or "political prisoners."

"Did these people, over a thousand people, get convicted of something that they did in a criminal way on January 6, yes or no?" asked Crockett, a former public defender, often described as a rising Democratic Party star, known for her confrontational attitude toward Republicans and currently mounting a bid for U.S. Senate in Texas.

"Yes," said Romano.

"So, then you come back, and they were convicted by what, a jury, some of them?" asked Crockett.

"Mostly juries, some judges," confirmed Romano.

"And some people actually did what we call a plea bargain, correct?" said Crockett.

"Correct," said Romano.

"Meaning that they walked in and they said, I am guilty," said Crockett. "Correct?"

"Yes," said Romano.

"Okay. So, the final point that I'll make, because I'm running out of time, is there was some stuff about white supremacists, and the concerns about people being alleged to be white supremacists," said Crockett. "Some of the people that got convicted were neo-Nazis. Have they been clarified as white supremacists or have they not?"

"Yes," said Romano.

President Donald Trump issued mass clemency for 1,500 people involved in the attack as one of his first acts upon reassuming the presidency, even giving commutations to the leaders of far-right paramilitary groups who were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Even some Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), have gone out of their way to condemn the blanket pardons.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to rail against President Donald Trump's latest chaotic actions, warning that they could destabilize both the economy and the international order for no good reason.

Tillis, who is retiring at the end of the year, has become increasingly outspoken against the president. Earlier this month, on the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tillis gave a floor speech condemning Trump's blanket clemency for the 1,500 people involved in the insurrection.

The speech, flagged by Semafor's Burgess Everett, began with Tillis saying, "This isn't cranky Thom, this is Thom trying to explain a very serious subject." Specifically, he took aim at Trump's escalating threats to invade and annex Greenland away from Denmark.

"The thought of the United States taking a position that we would take Greenland ... is absurd," said Tillis. "Whoever told the president that this is a viable path? It doesn't make sense."

Tillis also slammed the Trump administration's criminal probe into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump's top aides have accused of lying to Congress about the scope and cost of a $2.5 billion renovation of the central bank's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Powell has denied any wrongdoing and accused the administration of mounting a pretextual legal threat to force the Fed to cut interest rates — and many Republicans in Congress are uncomfortable with the probe, a fact Tillis himself noted.

The odds Powell will be convicted of anything, said Tillis, are "virtually impossible" — and "One of the reasons financial markets didn't react precipitously in a negative way ... is because many people stood up in Congress and said 'this seems to be crossing a line.'"

This last point comes as Tillis has threatened to block any new nominees for the Fed until the criminal probe against Powell is resolved.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of a Republican congressman, Rep. Mike Bost of Illinois, who is trying to sue over his state's mail-in voting rules.

The 7-2 decision, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, doesn't immediately change election rules anywhere; however, it establishes a precedent that potentially makes it easier for candidates for office to sue over election rules.

Bost filed a suit challenging Illinois' practice of counting mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrive days later. This practice varies from state to state, with some requiring all ballots be received by Election Day, and others merely requiring it be postmarked. Bost's contention was that the more permissive rule violates federal law.

Lower courts, including the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, ruled that Bost lacked standing to challenge Illinois' election laws because the disputed ballots would not have altered the outcome of the election.

The Supreme Court majority, however, disagreed with this logic.

"Candidates do not need to show a substantial risk that a rule will cause them to lose the election or prevent them from achieving a legally significant vote threshold in order to have standing," said the syllabus of the opinion, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. "Requiring such a showing could channel many election disputes to shortly before election day or after. Only then will many candidates be able to predict with any certainty that a rule will be outcome determinative."

Furthermore, continued the opinion, citing Roberts' own prior opinion in the landmark Rucho v. Common Cause case that limited federal courts' involvement in gerrymandering, "Premising standing on a candidate’s risk of election loss or failure to achieve a certain vote threshold would also convert Article III judges into political prognosticators."

House Republicans' headache of a week just got worse, as yet another piece of business legislation appears doomed to fail to an internal revolt of GOP lawmakers.

According to Politico's Meredith Lee Hill, the GOP is likely to cancel a scheduled vote on Thursday for the Save Local Business Act authored by Rep. James Comer (R-KY). This legislation would limit the circumstances in which businesses can be classified as "joint employers," a rule that protects labor rights for a number of workers from temps at staffing agencies, to farm hands, to janitors who serve multiple businesses.

A contingent of Republicans sympathetic to organized labor, which opposes the legislation, are reportedly revolting, with one lawmaker telling Hill, “If leadership insists on a vote, it’ll likely fail worse than today’s bill.” According to the report, leaders are likely to instead vote on a different joint-employer bill by Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) that is aimed at protecting franchise businesses.

This comes after a chaotic night on Tuesday, where Republican defectors defeated a pair of bills to weaken overtime pay protections, and another bill to change the definition of a tipped employee. Of the four Republican bills on the docket Tuesday, the only one to pass was the SHOWER Act, a bill that relaxes water conservation rules for shower heads with multiple nozzles.

This marks the latest headache for Republican leadership as a small but persistent wing of the party tries to force greater input for organized labor.

President Donald Trump managed to improve the GOP's standing with unionized workers in the 2024 election, and the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters controversially maintained neutrality rather than endorse Democrats, in return for having a say in Trump's nomination for Secretary of Labor. This has led certain Republicans to argue the party should soften its traditional anti-labor policy positions and exercise more caution in bills that are opposed by unions, putting them at odds with the majority who still advocate for business interests.

President Donald Trump started the morning with a call to expel Somalians from the country, including a smear against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a Minnesota congresswoman who has become a target for his hatred in recent months.

Trump, posting on Truth Social, was reacting to a story from the far-right website Just The News, which claimed that federal officials are investigating some $130 million in cash transfers from Minneapolis to destinations overseas by Somali immigrants, through the airport in Columbus, Ohio.

"They should be thrown out of the USA. Get it done, NOW!" wrote Trump. "That includes their loser Rep. Omar, who married her brother (gross!). President DJT."

Unproven far-right conspiracy theories that Omar's first husband was actually her brother have been circulating for years, originating from a now-deleted anonymous post on an internet forum for Somali immigrants, which claimed that the marriage was a sham to secure her brother a green card. It persists extensively in MAGA circles, though news outlets that have looked into the matter have found no evidence to back it up.

Trump has frequently pushed this claim, as well as called for Omar, who left Somalia as a child refugee, to be expelled from the United States, along with the Somali-American diaspora community in general.

President Donald Trump grew agitated when newly-hired CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed him on persistent inflation numbers on Tuesday — and seemingly reminded him that he only got the job he's currently in thanks to the administration's legal machinations.

"The inflation numbers came out," said Dokoupil. "Overall not bad, but grocery prices—"

"Well, they're overall very good," said Trump. "Good for us. Good for our country. Joe Biden had the highest inflation numbers in history." (This is not even close to true.) "I have it down to a level that people have not seen in nine years."

"Mr. President, help me understand," said Dokoupil. "When I travel the country, and I go all over the place, and I talk to everyday Americans, they tell me they don't feel it."

"They're going to now. I've only been here for 11 months, okay?" said Trump. "And the first few months were really rough if you look at them, because I inherited a mess. I inherited a mess of crime, I inherited a mess of inflation, I inherited a mess of places closing up and going to other countries. And now we have the hottest country in the world. Tony, we have now the hottest country in the world, and a year ago our country was dead. We had a dead country. You wouldn't have a job right now, if she [Kamala Harris] got in. If she got in, you probably wouldn't have a job right now."

It's possible that Trump simply meant that without him, the economy would be worse to the point of layoffs in newsrooms. However, this also comes after the Trump administration personally shepherded through a deal that merged CBS' parent company Paramount with Skydance, and brought in right-wing commentator Bari Weiss to head up CBS, who in turn hired Dokoupil to his current position.

So far, the changes at CBS have been met with distaste from the audience, as viewership has declined by 23 percent compared to last year.

President Donald Trump debased his office when he lost control and flipped the bird at a heckler in Detroit who called him a "pedophile protector," MS NOW anchor and former Republican National Committee chief Michael Steele observed in a discussion with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) on Tuesday's edition of "The Weeknight."

"So we all know we have a very, in my estimation, a very underdeveloped man sitting in the White House," said Steele to Khanna, one of the main sponsors of legislation to compel the White House to release the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files, which have still not been released in full despite legal deadlines.

"That was just a punkish move," Steele continued. "I don't know who he thinks he was impressing. I guess it's more impressive if the President of the United States flips you off. But put your big boy pants on, Mr. President, the country is a big country, and we have opinions. We have opinions about you. We have opinions about your actions. So that's all I want to say about that."

Furthermore, Steele added, "The fact that the White House response was 'a lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage,' their overdramatization of stuff is another bit of crap we have to put up with."

"Look, it's not a coincidence of what sets him off," said Khanna. "What set him off is the heckler saying you're a protector. I was just on a podcast with Shawn Ryan. Shawn Ryan is the number two podcaster in the country. He was all in on Trump, and he said, what lost [him] is Trump is protecting — that's what this Epstein issue is about. It has gotten under his skin because he knows he's losing the MAGA base on this. He was elected to expose the corruption, to hold these people accountable. Instead, every move they made is to protect people who raped underage girls."

"And now you have, today, a federal judge who responded to Marcy and my motion, quite a breakthrough, where he's now ordered the Department of Justice to brief him on whether he should appoint a special master to actually get these documents released," said Khanna.

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The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board had a dire assessment of Trump's current economy: he's effectively fiddling while it burns, rather than deliver on any of the GOP's more conservative, growth-focused policies.

"Regarding prices, the consumer-price index came in somewhat hotter than expected with an increase of 0.3% in December and 2.7% over the past 12 months. Overall inflation isn’t rising, but it also isn’t coming down. Increases last month were especially notable for categories of goods and services that Americans buy on a regular basis like shelter (0.4%), medical care (0.4%), food (0.7%) and energy bills (1%)."

The sectors that saw the most inflation disproportionately hit lower-income Americans, the board noted. Worse still, earnings aren't getting any better, the board wrote.

"Real average hourly earnings rose 0.7% during the first five months of this year, but income growth has since stalled. For production and nonsupervisory workers, real average hourly earnings have declined 0.2% since May. The reason is a bump in inflation in the summer months that erased the gains from wage increases."

"This goes a long way to explain why so many Americans feel as if they are treading financial water," wrote the board — and it makes Trump's legal bullying of the Federal Reserve to try to lower interest rates look even more counterproductive, since the Fed isn't even at its inflation target yet and doesn't have room to lower rates to what Trump wants.

Instead, the board concluded, Trump is scrambling to try to implement price controls — something that has been tried and failed in previous inflation spells — most recently controls on credit card interest.

"The President has recently been rolling out a flurry of counterproductive policies worthy of Bernie Sanders in the name of reducing prices (see the editorial nearby on credit-card interest rates). But what the President really needs is what he promised in the campaign, which is rising real wages," wrote the board. "That means further reducing inflation and letting deregulation and tax policy drive faster economic growth and productivity. That will make everything more affordable."

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is trying to kick off the new year with a series of bills focused on the economy — but he suffered a stunning defeat on Tuesday, as three out of the four bills on the schedule failed to pass.

The four bills under consideration were the Flexibility for Workers Education Act and Empowering Employer Child and Elder Care Solutions Act, two bills that carve out exceptions to when workers can claim overtime pay; the Tipped Employee Protection Act, which expands the definition of a tipped employee; and the SHOWER Act, which permanently codifies President Donald Trump's definition of a shower head to relax water conservation rules.

Of these three bills, just the SHOWER Act passed. And the failures didn't go unnoticed.

"House GOP defections sink labor bill to ease overtime rules — in a surprise defeat for Mike Johnson," reported Meredith Lee Hill of Politico.

Multiple Republicans who voted against the bill slammed it as an attack on labor rights, with Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) saying, “I believe hardworking Americans should be paid for their time, including when they’re training with their employer, and I will stand against efforts to take that pay away.”

"Bad start to 2026 for Johnson and House Rs," wrote CNN's Sarah Ferris on X. "A somewhat random coalition of Rs just tanked a workers education bill. Some had issues with it being anti-labor. Others had other random gripes. This comes as Johnson & leadership made a clear pivot toward more economy focused bills."

"What a mess for the House GOP. 4 minor bills on the schedule — and only one of them passes (the SHOWER Act)," wrote independent congressional reporter Jamie Dupree.

This comes as Johnson, who is fighting to keep his narrow House majority in this year's midterm elections, is facing a number of vacancies, including the unexpected death of Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA).

House Republicans, led by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), have put out what they claim is legislation to put an end to congressional stock trading — but it does nothing of the sort, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said in a lengthy thread on X dismantling the bill. In fact, she argued, it could actually make certain kinds of congressional stock trades easier and less transparent.

The main problem, she wrote, is that the only thing the bill actually prohibits is buying new stocks after taking office — not holding or selling the stocks lawmakers already have.

"This is NOT a Congressional stock trading ban. It’s leadership’s attempt to kill the existing bipartisan proposal," wrote Ocasio-Cortez. "Bill is a set of new vehicles and loopholes written by and for the wealthiest members of Congress to evade tracking of their trades. It lets them continue to own, trade, and sell stock - but with less transparency so YOU can no longer track them."

The bill, as written, Ocasio-Cortez continued, "allows members with massive holdings to continue to own individual stock and buy using their dividends," and "creates new exceptions for member's spouses and child dependents to buy ON BEHALF OF OTHER PEOPLE" — all while letting millionaire lawmakers continue to sell the stocks they already own, whenever they want.

"If anything, this bill makes it harder for public trackers of member trades to follow member investment activity," she concluded. "And they are hoping that if the public can no longer track their trades, that you will think they are no longer trading."

At the same time as Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats criticize the Steil bill's half-measures and lack of transparency, many Senate Republicans appear opposed to any change to congressional stock trading rules altogether, putting it in doubt whether the bill could even be taken up by the Senate if it passes.

Proposals to ban members of Congress from trading stocks have cropped up for years, as the existing rules — which allow stock trading but require full public disclosure — have proven ineffective and are frequently ignored.

Earlier this week, Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA), one of Congress's most notorious day traders, was exposed having purchased over $1,400 of stock in a supplier for artificial intelligence data centers, right around the same time he was pushing for tech companies to build more of these data centers in his own district. He denies any trading off non-public information, saying that his financial advisers made the purchase on his behalf without any input from him.

Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) was confronted on NewsNation with footage of a Minneapolis woman being accosted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents, and with new polling that indicates the American people are recoiling at the violence Trump's federal agents are inflicting in American cities — and her response was categorical denial.

"Supposedly this woman, the way she explains it, was saying that she was trying to get to a doctor's appointment and these immigration agents, federal agents busted into her car, ended up busting some of the windows, dragged her out of the car," said the anchor. "You know, I guess the basic question here is ... not whether the goal is to remove the people who are in the country illegally, or especially those who may have committed a crime, but what are we doing in terms of how we're going about this, and is it fair to say at this point that some, if not may, of these operations are simply just going too far?"

"I don't think that they're going too far," said Miller, a staunch MAGA supporter who has come under fire for praising Hitler. "These are people that have broken our federal immigration laws, they've bellied up to taxpayer benefits, they've, a lot of them have been involved in fraud in Minnesota and in Illinois, and now they are resisting arrest, and if you break the laws and resist arrest, it's not going to be pretty."

"Well, even if you tell an agent, I'm trying to get to the doctor, and this is what happens?" the host pushed back.

"She's here illegally, she's probably getting free health care, taxpayers are paying for — if she truly isn't an illegal, I just now am seeing this, I've been busy all day so I have not seen this, I don't know the background, the truth will come out like it always does," said Miller, backtracking. "But if she is here illegally, she's on her way to the doctor and she is resisting arrest, who cares? She's breaking the law and she is resisting arrest. The American people are fed up with this. The American people voted overwhelmingly for President Trump, he told everybody what he was going to do."

"But this part, we had a poll earlier in the week, only 39 percent support the president's approach, the way he's carrying it out," said hte host.

"Well, I don't believe that," said Miller. "I don't know how they're doing their polling. The people in my district want people that are breaking our federal immigration laws to be deported, and they want noncitizens off taxpayer-funded benefits."

President Donald Trump got a massive danger sign in a new poll released this week: for the first time, more voters support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement than oppose doing so.

This comes amid a national uproar sparked by graphic video footage of an ICE agent in Minneapolis fatally shooting a mother of three in the head as she tried to move her car around them.

According to Forbes, "The poll published Jan. 13 from The Economist and YouGov found 46% of people support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, compared to 43% who are in opposition of the movement; 12% were unsure. It represents a significant change in public opinion since July, when the same polling group found 27% were in support of ICE’s abolishment."

By contrast, the report noted, "When The Economist and YouGov asked the same question in 2019 — a year after the 'Abolish ICE' movement began — Americans showed an unfavorable opinion of the federal agency, but just 32% felt it should be eliminated."

Only a handful of Democrats have ever openly supported abolishing ICE up to this point, but Republicans aggressively used these positions in attack ads in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

While the United States has had immigration laws since its founding, and border security laws of some sort dating back to the 1920s, ICE as an agency, with its current structure, is relatively new, first being created as part of the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, replacing earlier agencies with a similar role like the Department of Labor's Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Not all activists or politicians who advocate abolishing ICE support the outright end of immigration enforcement, with some simply wanting it to be enforced by a smaller agency with reduced militarization or increased oversight, as used to be the case.

Short of ICE abolition, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are demanding accountability reforms, including an end to the practice of ICE agents patrolling with masks to conceal their identities.