Northeast
A top Senate Republican crisscrosses campaign trail in 'make-or-break moment' to win back majority
EXCLUSIVE: GOP Sen. John Thune of South Dakota says he’s stepping up his efforts on the campaign trail this year because “this is our golden opportunity” to win back the Senate majority.
“It’s kind of really a make-or-break moment for Republicans in the Senate. If we don’t get it done this time, the next two cycles aren’t great for us,” Thune said in an exclusive national interview with Fox News.
Thune, who as Senate minority whip is the No. 2 GOP lawmaker in the chamber, emphasized that “we’ve got to maximize the opportunity we have this time around to get north of 50,” adding that “it would be great to get well north of 50.”
WHAT THE SENATE GOP CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE CHAIR TOLD FOX NEWS ABOUT WINNING BACK THE MAJORITY
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the Senate minority whip, campaigns on behalf of Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate nominess Dave McCormick in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Monday.
Democrats, as they try to maintain or extend their fragile 51-49 majority in the Senate, are playing plenty of defense as they defend 23 of the 34 seats up for grabs in November.
One of those seats is in West Virginia, a deep red state that former President Trump carried by nearly 40 points in 2020. With moderate Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin, a former governor, not seeking re-election, flipping the seat is nearly a sure thing for the GOP.
Republicans are also aiming to flip seats in Ohio and Montana, two states Trump comfortably carried four years ago. And five more Democrat-held seats up for grabs this year are in crucial general-election battleground states.
“We’re hoping we’re going to have the White House, that Trump will be successful, and the House, and if we can get the Senate, we’ll be in a position to do some things,” Thune emphasized.
6 KEY SENATE SEATS REPUBLICANS AIM TO FLIP IN NOVEMBER
Thune says he’s doing “everything we can” to help fundraise and campaign on behalf of Republican Senate nominees challenging incumbent Democrats “to get as many of these folks across the finish line as possible.”
The senator — who is one of two top contenders to succeed longtime Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who’s stepping down from his leadership post at the end of the year — was interviewed ahead of a two-day campaign swing earlier this week in Pennsylvania with GOP Senate nominee Dave McCormick.
“I’ve been out with a lot of the candidates,” he noted.
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, right, campaigns with Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate nominee Dave McCormick, left, in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, on Monday. (Friends of John Thune)
Thune said he made stops earlier this summer on the campaign trail in Arizona, Michigan and Ohio, and he attended six fundraising events in the nation’s capital last week for GOP Senate candidates before heading to Minnesota on Thursday to headline another finance event for Eric Hovde, the Republican Senate nominee in neighboring Wisconsin.
And he said that he’ll be heading to Nevada and Utah later this month.
“Doing whatever we can to help the team, and a lot of that is just getting money in the bank so they can get their message out,” he said.
As is tradition in presidential election years, the battle at the top of the ticket can influence Senate races one notch down the ballot.
Asked how the replacement of President Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the Democrats’ ticket impacts the Senate races, Thune said that “there’s no question it’s a new race, and our Senate candidates have to do the best they can to benefit from what happens at the top of the ticket.”
But he also emphasized, “I still think the issue set is the same, and I think it’s going to be very hard for [Harris] to try and distance herself from the border and the inflationary spiral that’s been created by their policies… I think those issues are going to weigh heavily on voters’ minds. So if it’s about the issues, I think we are really well positioned to win and that should help down-ballot, too.”
Thune highlighted that GOP Senate candidates need “to run their own campaigns and define their opponents and define themselves in a way that creates a contrast. I’ve always maintained that elections are about differences, and the differences couldn’t be more stark between the two parties… I think our candidates have to capitalize on that.”
At the top of the ticket, Trump has increasingly attacked and insulted Harris over the past two weeks.
But Thune is cautioning Senate candidates not to stray from the issues and “don’t take the bait” from the presidential race.
Republicans wasted a perfect opportunity in 2022 to win back the Senate majority they lost in the 2020 elections. But Thune emphasized that “our side is doing a lot better job targeting voters this time around and making sure that we’re turning out and getting people to the polls way better than we did two years ago.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., speaks with reporters after a meeting with fellow Republicans at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 4. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
As for his own race against longtime Sen. John Cornyn of Texas — the previous Senate GOP whip — to succeed McConnell, Thune said he’s “been sitting down and meeting with all of our incumbent senators about the leadership position, and also being out on the campaign trail with these candidates helps build relationships that I think will be important when that vote happens.”
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who unsuccessfully challenged McConnell two years ago, is also running again.
Thune, who has served two decades in the Senate, touted his own legislative record of accomplishment and said, “I think people are going to be looking for leadership that is able to produce results and get things done.”
“I hope to be able to make that argument when the time comes,” he added. “In the meantime, we’re just working on getting the majority.”
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.
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Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll get a look inside an intake center for homeless men that the city plans to close. We’ll also find out why the Rikers Island jail complex has video games for people incarcerated there.
A city shelter near Bellevue Hospital is closing. The homeless men who were staying there have already been transferred to other shelters. Inside the building, on 30th Street, is an intake center where people go to be assigned to a bed elsewhere.
The city’s plan is to move the intake center to a building in the East Village that has been serving as a shelter for homeless men with substance abuse problems. Neighbors there are fighting the move. Last week a judge temporarily blocked the plan.
When the city announced the closing of the 30th Street shelter, it said the building was in a “severe state of disrepair.” My colleague Elizabeth A. Harris, who covers homelessness for the Metro desk, got a look inside the building. I asked her about what she saw — and what closing it would mean for the city’s shelter system.
The 30th Street shelter has served as the front door to the city’s shelter system for adult men for more than 40 years. Can the system handle the change?
We’ll see. The intake center at 30th Street is still there while the lawsuit plays out, but when it does move — wherever the new location is — it’s going to be a big shift. The 30th Street shelter was there for so long; it was very well known. Men knew it was the first stop if they needed a bed. Getting the word out to people who are homeless can be difficult, so it’s going to take time for people to be aware of the change.
The city has said it will keep a presence at 30th Street for at least a year so that when people inevitably come in looking for help, they can be sent to the new intake center.
The city says the 30th Street building is unsafe and has been unacceptable for years. Is it? What did you see?
There are parts of the building that the city is still using or used until recently. Those sections feel institutional, reminiscent of the locked psychiatric wards the building was built to have.
There are other parts of the building that have been off limits to the public for years. Those feel as if they’ve been left to rot. I saw the solarium, where psychiatric patients would have gone to get sunlight years ago. Huge chunks of the ceiling are missing. It looked as if someone had shredded the walls with a crowbar.
In the basement, there were places where the ceiling was visibly sagging, and beams that looked visibly rotted.
I was never worried that anything was going to fall on me. The city has said there’s no immediate danger in the building, and it has taken steps to shore it up, like putting temporary metal support structures in areas where support beams have corroded and netting over the Juliet balconies and the cornices so pieces don’t fall.
Closing the 30th Street shelter seems to symbolize the direction the Mamdani administration wants to take. How so?
The Mamdani administration wants to move away from big shelters. The Bellevue shelter is this huge institutional place that has had a reputation for being dangerous for a long time. Theft has been a problem. Violence has been a problem. Open drug use has been a problem. It’s a place that people don’t want to go, even if they have nowhere else to turn. Some people would rather sleep on the street than go there.
The idea is to have smaller shelters that people would actually be willing to go to. But it has been hard to close 30th Street for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s big. It has the capacity for 850 beds.
Another reason is location. It’s in the heart of Manhattan. It’s hard to find another centrally located place in Manhattan to have an intake shelter. So 30th Street was problematic for a long time, but it was hard to figure out what a better option would be.
What happens to the building if the plan to move the intake center goes through?
The Mamdani administration hasn’t said yet, but an engineering report commissioned by the city said the building was too far gone and should just be torn down.
Weather
Increasing clouds are expected today with a high near 65. Tonight, expect mostly cloudy skies and temperatures in the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“No one will ever compare to Michael Jackson.” — Grace Acosta, who wore a red “Thriller” jacket and matching pants to a Manhattan theater to see “Michael,” a biopic about Michael Jackson that critics have savaged but that crushed box-office records over the weekend.
The latest New York news
To reduce violence, Rikers lets inmates play video games
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is too violent. But people incarcerated at Rikers Island can play Mortal Kombat. Rikers bought 33 copies of the latest edition in 2024.
The notorious jail complex uses video games as part of a strategy to reduce violence among inmates. And some inmates find mental freedom playing games like Daymare: 1998.
“The environment is very hostile at times,” said Talik Thomas, 22, who was held at Rikers for eight months on gun charges. “It’s a good way to offset the hostility, so I know I’m still me. I don’t always have to be on edge.”
They play offline, on PlayStations, because the internet is not freely available at Rikers. A majority of its 49 housing units have PlayStation 4 consoles, and the Department of Correction bought 20 PlayStation 5 consoles in 2024. The newer units are kept in a center that inmates from each housing unit can visit a few times a month. The controllers are kept in a locked case — a corrections officer must take the units out and unlock them to insert the discs.
In 2024 the department bought hundreds of copies of games like NBA 2K24, Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Last year it bought the latest editions of sports franchises like Madden NFL, as well as God of War and Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order.
Jessica Medard, the executive director for facility programming at the Department of Correction, said the games available at Rikers do not include realistic violence. So, no Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
METROPOLITAN diary
Lock talk
Dear Diary:
I had just finished my workout at the Dodge Y.M.C.A. on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and couldn’t remember which locker I had put my stuff in.
A guy who looked to be, like me, in his 60s, noticed me going from row to row futilely trying my combination on every black Master Lock.
“You forgot which locker?” he said. “I have a system for that.”
I said I had a system for remembering my lock’s combination, but not the locker number.
He asked how I remembered the combination.
“I take each number and think about which Yankee had that number when I was a kid,” I explained.
His eyes brightened.
“I do the same with old Mets players!” he exclaimed.
I laughed.
“Well,” I said, “we’ve got nothing else to talk about, then.”
He asked which Yankees.
He’s a Mets fan, I thought to myself. What harm would it do?
“Roy White, Lou Piniella and Sparky Lyle,” I said, lowering my voice to a murmur.
He didn’t hesitate.
“Six, 14, 28!” he exclaimed.
There were chuckles all around.
“Time to get a new lock,” I heard someone say.
— Tom Guiltinan
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Boston, MA
Lawsuit that alleges Boston is inflating commercial property taxes goes to court this week
A lawsuit that alleges the City of Boston is inflating the assessed value, and taxes, for commercial properties that file abatements will be taken up by Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday.
The alleged practice has been slammed as retaliatory and unlawful by the Pioneer New England Legal Foundation, a watchdog group that filed the class-action lawsuit on behalf of a commercial property owner last December. The property is 148 State St., a Seaport office building.
The city filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in February, arguing that the case does not qualify as one that should be considered by Superior Court, given that the plaintiff “has an adequate legal remedy at the (state) Appellate Tax Board.”
City Hall attorneys will be asking the court to grant the motion at Wednesday’s 2 p.m. hearing.
“Plaintiff failed to exhaust its mandatory administrative remedies; indeed, plaintiff and the city are involved in a pending administrative action that will address some of the excessive valuation claims raised in its complaint,” the city’s motion states. “Plaintiff chose not to appeal the remaining excessive valuation claims raised in its complaint.
“Contrary to its argument, plaintiff’s claims do not fit into the exceedingly narrow exception that would permit the Superior Court to hear its claims for declaratory and injunctive relief under extraordinary circumstances,” the city’s motion states. “As a result, the court is without jurisdiction to entertain the complaint, and it must be dismissed as a matter of law.”
The Pioneer New England Legal Foundation filed an opposition to the city’s motion to dismiss last month that argues against what it sees as the “essence” of the the motion, which is that “the court must decline to hear the case because the statutory abatement and Appellate Tax Board process is mandatory and exclusive.”
“Defendant’s framing baldly misstates what the complaint actually pleads and what this action seeks to remedy,” the Pioneer filing states. “Contrary to the premise of the city’s motion, this action is not a routine dispute over the valuation of a single parcel.
“Plaintiff alleges a deliberate, systemwide retaliatory practice: when a taxpayer exercised the right to petition by pursuing an ATB appeal, the city used an add-back or override methodology to inflate the property assessment at issue artificially, and ostensibly to ‘stabilize’ the taxpayer’s value at prior-year levels.
“Similarly-situated taxpayers without ATB appeals did not receive the same treatment. Plaintiff further alleges that this practice is reflected in the city’s own property record cards and operated as a hidden penalty on protected petitioning activity,” the Pioneer filing states.
Pioneer’s attorneys added, “At the pleading stage, those well-plead allegations must be credited as true, and the city cannot obtain dismissal by trying to recast the complaint as nothing more than an ordinary overvaluation claim.”
The lawsuit is seeking restitution, for the city to repay the plaintiff commercial taxpayer, along with others who may join the filing, the amount they were overcharged in property taxes, due to the city’s alleged overvaluation.
Despite reportedly agreeing privately to stop the alleged overassessment practice as part of settlement negotiations, the city has publicly dismissed Pioneer’s allegations as “baseless and full of misinformation,” per a prior statement from Mayor Michelle Wu’s office.
Frank Bailey, Pioneer’s president and a retired judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Massachusetts, has said Pioneer estimates as many as 200 commercial properties have been overtaxed by the city practice.
If the suit is successful, those properties could be owed restitution at a time when the city’s finances are hampered by declining commercial property values tied to vacant office space that one City Hall watchdog has projected may lead to a $1-2 billion budget shortfall over the next five years.
The city is scrambling to close a $48.4 million budget shortfall by June 30, the end of this fiscal year 2026. The mayor has pitched a $4.9 billion budget for FY27 with a 2.1% increase, the lowest rate of growth since the Great Recession in FY10.
Bailey said the lawsuit was filed “only after serious consideration and after literally months of efforts to engage the city and the Department of Revenue to ensure basic questions about the transparency and fairness of the Boston commercial real estate tax system” and that it “is operating in compliance with the law.”
He said the alleged overassessment practice went on for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
City Hall disagrees.
“The city assesses 180,000 properties annually, and less than one out of every 200 end up in dispute,” a city spokesperson said in a prior statement. “There is a well established and clear legal process for any property owner to appeal who believes their valuation is too high, including this plaintiff.
“Ultimately, Pioneer chose to sue and the city will defend Boston taxpayers and our authority to fairly tax our largest commercial properties.”
Growing up in the northern Pittsburgh suburb of Mars, Pa., Wetherholt was a big Pirates fan and idolized outfielder Andrew McCutchen. There was also a time, as a child, when Wetherholt was late to his own party at
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