Politics
House Democrats to hold California ‘shadow hearings’ on midterm election security
House Democrats will hold a pair of “shadow hearings” in California next week on the upcoming midterm elections — part of a broader party effort to defend state voting systems against mounting critiques and threats of intervention from the Trump administration.
Such hearings, similar to those recently held in Los Angeles on President Trump’s immigration raids, provide Democrats an opportunity to highlight issues their majority Republican counterparts won’t schedule for more formal hearings in Washington.
The hearings — scheduled for Los Angeles on Tuesday and San Francisco on Thursday — will feature testimony from voting and elections experts, and will be led by Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee with oversight of elections, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the former House speaker.
Morelle, in a statement to The Times, said, “Democracy’s defenses are under attack” and must be defended.
“We will not let President Trump and House Republicans’ efforts to take over our elections prevail. We’re going to use every tool in our toolbox and that includes working with pro-democracy allies in communities across the country,” he said. “I look forward to hearing about the work being done in California to protect democracy as we fight on the ground and in Congress.”
Pelosi, in her own statement to The Times, said protecting democracy “demands vigilance, transparency, and action,” and the shadow hearings “will bring together voices on the front lines of election security, voting rights, and accountability to ensure that every American’s vote is protected and every institution earns the public’s trust.”
“At a time of rampant threats to our democratic system, we must strengthen and defend the integrity of our elections to reaffirm that our government is of, by, and for the people,” she said.
Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), chair of the Democratic Caucus, and other Democrats from California are also expected to attend. Republican members of Congress are not expected to be there.
The hearings will be the first in a while to be led — at least in part — by Pelosi, 86, who gave up her position in party leadership and does not currently hold any committee assignments. She announced in November that she will not seek reelection.
Trump has alleged for years, without evidence, that U.S. elections are undermined and swayed by widespread voter fraud, and that such fraud cost him the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden. He and his personal attorneys have repeatedly argued as much in court, but always lost — in part because they could never produce any evidence to back their claims.
Since retaking the White House last year, Trump has continued pushing his baseless claims, and pushed his administration to attack voting systems — particularly in blue states where he has been unpopular.
In September, Trump loyalists in the Justice Department sued California and other states for their voter rolls and other sensitive voter information, but were pushed back by the courts.
In January, the FBI raided and seized 2020 election records from an elections office in Fulton County, Ga., that was the subject of Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in 2020.
In February, Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” alleging that voting irregularities in what he called “crooked states” are hurting his party. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
This week, Trump issued an executive order purporting to give federal agencies control over ballot processing by the U.S. Postal Service.
Trump administration officials and allies have also raised concerns that they might send immigration agents to polling locations during the midterms, in part by refusing to rule out such a move in the wake of mass deployments of such agents into American cities to pursue Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Trump has framed his efforts to end voting by mail — which he recently did himself — and increase voter identification requirements as “common sense” steps to combat fraud that most Americans agree with. A vast majority of California voters cast ballots by mail, including nearly 90% in last year’s special election on Proposition 50, the state’s mid-decade redistricting measure.
Democrats and many elections experts have rejected Trump’s election claims as baseless, defended state-run systems as safe and secure, and said his demands for stricter voter ID regulations would disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizen voters who lack the sort of documents he wants to mandate — including women who changed their name in marriage.
Voting experts say fraudulent votes, including by noncitizens, are rare, and that there is no evidence that fraud swings U.S. elections.
States including California have joined voting rights organizations in suing to block Trump’s various attempts to intervene in state-run elections, including his order last week and a previous one purporting to place new federal requirements on voter identification and proof of citizenship.
California officials and others have repeatedly noted that federal law gives states the right to administer elections as they see fit, and promised to fight any attempts by the president or his administration to infringe on state election powers.
Local elections officials in California have also been preparing for potential election day interruptions from the Trump administration.
Scheduled to participate in the hearings were experts from the UCLA Voting Rights Project, Loyola Law School, the League of Women Voters of California, Common Cause California, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF.
WASHINGTON — For much of Donald Trump’s second term, Republican senators have largely stayed in line, wary of defying a president with a history of targeting those who cross him. This week, that dynamic noticeably shifted.
Senate Republicans blocked two of Trump’s legislative priorities, angered by the push to create a $1.8-billion federal fund to compensate people who claim to have been politically persecuted, including rioters who assaulted the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The revolt forced Republican leaders to pull a planned vote on legislation to fund the president’s immigration crackdown and security features for his White House ballroom project.
In response, the president defended the fund and lashed out at its critics.
“I gave up a lot of money in allowing the just announced Anti-Weaponization Fund to go forward,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media website. “Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE”!
The president also called Republican senators who broke with him quitters who are “screwing the Republican Party.”
The friction, which has been building for weeks, is being watched as a potential test of the limits to Trump’s grip on his party amid an already tense political environment heading into the midterm elections.
“This is kind of a perfect storm,” former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It may be that this time you can point to it and say this is when the great migration begins, away from some of the president’s policies and away from the fear that the president can target you.”
Whether this week marks the beginning of that moment — or simply another episode of political turbulence that fades — is the central question now hanging over Trump’s second term.
Not the first break — but an escalation
This is not the first time Republicans have broken with the president. In November, Congress overwhelmingly voted to force the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, an effort that Trump unsuccessfully tried to thwart for months.
The Epstein vote showed that on the right issue, under the right circumstances, Republicans could be moved to defy Trump. This week, the creation of the fund changed the circumstances again, and the number of Republican senators willing to act quickly grew.
This moment comes after months of rising costs during the war in Iran, efforts by the president to oust members of his own party and now a set of proposals that are proving hard to defend in an election year.
“What you have is basically a bunch of people who feel a bit under siege,” said Bob Olinsky, the senior vice president of Structural Reform and Governance at the Center for American Progress. “At the same time, they know that most of what the president is doing is unpopular, and they’re the ones who are going to be standing for reelection in November.”
Republicans push back
Senate Republicans leaders are now asking the Department of Justice to reconsider the terms of the fund, underscoring just how politically toxic the idea has become within the president’s party.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told reporters that politically speaking, the fund is “unexplainable.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told the New York Times that the fund should be in real trouble. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the fund “utterly stupid” and “morally wrong.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican whom Trump has singled out for going against him, was equally unsparing, saying he opposed “using billions of taxpayer dollars to compensate convicted felons and thugs who attacked police.” He also criticized the administration for pushing domestic and foreign policy issues that he says are bad for housing and the military.
“If opposing these things makes me a RINO [Republican in Name Only], then I gladly accept that nickname,” Tillis wrote on X. “We need Republicans to do well in November, but the stupid stuff is killing our chances!”
The GOP pushback comes at a time when concern about self-dealing runs deep across the electorate.
A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 59% of Americans believe Trump is using his office for personal gain, though that belief is sharply divided along partisan lines. A CNN poll found that 37% of Americans say Trump puts the good of the country above his personal gain, while 32% say he is in touch with the problems of ordinary Americans.
Asked whether the political environment influenced the actions this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters that there is a “political component to everything we do around here.”
Funds and tax immunity clauses
Senate Democrats are wondering whether the fund will mark a watershed moment for Republicans.
“Have Republicans finally found a bridge too far?” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said to reporters after Republicans left Washington without funding Trump’s priorities.
Democrats have called the fund an illegal abuse of power designed to line the pockets of Trump’s allies with taxpayer dollars. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) called it a “pure theft of public funds.”
The fund was created as part of a settlement resolving a $10-billion lawsuit Trump brought against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. Alongside it, the deal says the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing any tax claims against Trump and his businesses that were filed before May 19.
Under the tax immunity clause, Trump and his family could save more than $600 million, according to an analysis by Forbes.
The fund, however, has been the target of most of the bipartisan ire. Mostly because Trump and administration officials have not ruled out that it could stand to benefit people who carried out violence during the Jan. 6 riot.
The public funds, if disbursed, would come from the federal judgment fund, which is a Congress-approved ongoing appropriation that allows the Justice Department to settle cases and make payouts. In the past, Republicans have taken issue with the fund. The GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee characterized it an abuse in 2017.
Several of the president’s allies have already talked about tapping into the fund.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney who served prison time in relation to campaign finance violations, said he plans to apply for compensation.
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and later pardoned by Trump, told CBS News that he would seek a payout from the fund.
“I was targeted,” Tarrio said. “And I do believe that this fund does apply to me.”
Ever since Kamala Harris’s defeat in 2024, Democratic politicians, activists and policy wonks have argued about whether the party should move toward the left or the center.
But in this week’s New York Times/Siena poll, there’s a lot more common ground than one might expect within the Democratic coalition — a group defined here as Democrats, Democratic-leaning independents and independents who voted for Ms. Harris.
A surprisingly clear majority of the Democratic coalition is mostly fine with where the party stands on the issues overall. Only 20 percent say it’s “too far” to the left; only 17 percent say it’s “too far” to the right. The dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party seems less about its ideology and more about its failures to stop President Trump — whether in the last election or once in government.
With Democrats generally satisfied with the party’s ideological position, the poll arguably contains the outlines of a potential path forward for the party. Respondents offered relatively clear answers on three basic questions that have divided the party since the last election: They say Democrats should embrace economic populism, oppose aid to Israel and find modest ways to shift toward the center on the cultural issues thought to have contributed to President Trump’s victory in 2024.
This path happens to have a lot in common with the Democratic politicians who have seemed to resonate across the party’s ideological spectrum this cycle, like Graham Platner in Maine or Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia. While Mr. Platner is more progressive and Mr. Ossoff more moderate, they’ve both earned a reputation for attacking corruption and corporate power, they’ve supported restrictions on offensive military aid to Israel, and they’ve de-emphasized the culture wars.
But the debate within the party hasn’t been about whether to embrace this specific mix of populist economics, moderation in the culture wars and the progressive view on Israel. Instead, the biggest argument is whether the party as a whole should move toward its left or center flanks. On that question, voters in our poll appear more divided.
Overall, 47 percent of the Democratic coalition said they would like to see the party move toward the center, while 28 percent said the party should move to the left, and 19 percent said the party shouldn’t move at all.
A slightly higher proportion — 52 percent — said the party needs to move to the center to win the next presidential election, compared with 25 percent who say it needs to move left and 18 percent who say it doesn’t need to move in either direction to win.
In each case, the centrist position may not be quite as far in the lead as it looks. If “move to the left” and “do nothing” are combined, the party is split 47-47 on whether to move to the center. When the question shifts to “in order to win” the 2028 election, moving to the center is ahead by a modest margin of 52 percent to 43 percent.
The appetite for a shift to the center also looks weaker when voters are asked about specific issues, including those often blamed for Ms. Harris’s defeat, like immigration or transgender rights. On immigration, just 46 percent said the party needed to move to the center to win, while only 38 percent said the same about transgender issues (though in each case, voters may feel that Democrats have already made some movement toward the center).
Perhaps even more important, the preference for shifting toward the center vanishes altogether when voters are asked about bread-and-butter issues, like the economy and health care. Most strikingly, half of the Democratic coalition wanted to see the party move toward the left on health care, compared with only 25 percent who wanted to see it move toward the center. Democratic supporters split roughly evenly on whether the party should move to the center or the left on economics, with 38 percent saying the party should move to the center and 37 percent calling for a move toward the left.
The poll found very little awareness of the so-called “abundance” movement, which calls for making it easier for the government and the private sector to build more housing and energy. More than 90 percent of the Democratic coalition said they had never heard of it. When asked whether they preferred a candidate who would pursue those goals or one who would try to lower prices by going after corporate monopolies, Democratic supporters preferred the populist by a two-to-one margin.
The party’s preference for a candidate who goes after the nation’s largest corporations — and presumably issues like wealth inequality and corruption — is underpinned by broad and deep dissatisfaction with the nation’s economic system. Overall, 88 percent of the Democratic coalition said the economic system was generally unfair to most Americans. A similarly large 83 percent said the political and economic system in America needs at least “major changes.”
And while the war in Gaza divided progressives from the party’s establishment during the Biden years, the progressive view on Israel is more like a point of consensus today. Only 15 percent of the Democratic coalition says it sympathizes with Israel more than with Palestinians, while 74 percent opposes additional military and economic support for Israel.
These examples of relatively populist and progressive policy preferences don’t necessarily mean that Democrats are always opposed to moving to the center. Two-thirds of the Democratic coalition does want to move to the center on at least one of immigration, transgender issues or crime, and nearly 70 percent say doing so is necessary to win in 2028, even if there is not a consensus on exactly which issue it should be. Of all the issues tested, “crime” is the one where Democrats are the likeliest to say the party should move to the center.
It’s also worth noting that respondents may want the party to move to the center in ways that do not necessitate shifting on policy. Although this was not asked in the poll, the backlash against “woke” was often less about the Democratic Party’s policy platform and more about a kind of righteous and identity-centric politics that had spread into everyday life.
Deliberately or not, the Democratic Party’s politicians have been inching toward the consensus positions found in the poll. In their own ways, many of this cycle’s most successful Democrats, like Mr. Ossoff, Mr. Platner and even Zohran Mamdani, could be said to fit the description across all three areas of consensus, even though they hail from very different parts of the ideological spectrum.
Whether this emerging solution to the party’s internal divisions would address the party’s other problems is another matter. The poll doesn’t offer insight into whether this kind of candidate would stand a much better chance of winning the general election in 2028, let alone winning by the decisive margin that Mr. Trump’s growing unpopularity could potentially allow. It also can’t foretell whether the party would succeed once in government if it enacted such an agenda. And of course, it was the party’s perceived failures in elections and governance that left Democratic voters dissatisfied and its elites searching for a new direction in the first place.
There’s no reason to assume that the preferences of the Democratic coalition offer a solution to those bigger challenges.
The detailed polling cross-tabs are available here.
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A top Senate Republican is publicly pressuring President Donald Trump against pursuing what he described as a weak Iran deal as administration officials signal negotiations with Tehran are making progress.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a sharply worded warning Thursday urging Trump not to abandon military pressure on the Iranian regime in favor of diplomacy.
“We are at a moment that will define President Trump’s legacy,” Wicker said in a statement. “His instincts have been to finish the job he started in Iran, but he is being ill advised to pursue a deal that would not be worth the paper it is written on.”
REPUBLICANS URGE TRUMP TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON HIS PLAN TO DISMANTLE IRAN’S NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES
“Our commander-in-chief needs to allow America’s skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait,” Wicker went on. “Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness. We must finish what we started. It is past time for action.”
The remarks expose growing tension inside Republican national security circles as the Trump administration weighs whether to pursue a negotiated agreement with Iran or continue its military campaign against the Iranian regime and its nuclear capabilities.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a sharply worded warning Thursday urging Trump not to abandon military pressure on the Iranian regime in favor of diplomacy. (Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images)
The White House could not immediately be reached for comment.
Wicker’s comments came just hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged there had been “some progress” in ongoing negotiations with Iran, while cautioning that no agreement had been reached.
“There’s been some progress,” Rubio said Thursday. “I wouldn’t exaggerate it. I wouldn’t diminish it.”
Wicker’s comments came just hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged there had been “some progress” in ongoing negotiations with Iran. (Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“We’re not there yet,” Rubio added. “I hope we get there.”
Rubio said key issues remain unresolved, including Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and whether Tehran would be permitted any future uranium enrichment capability under a potential agreement.
“The issue of highly enriched uranium has to be discussed. Its disposition has to be dealt with. And of course, the issue of future enrichment has to be dealt with as well,” Rubio said.
He also indicated discussions involving the Strait of Hormuz remain part of broader negotiations.
The comments marked one of the clearest public signs yet that active diplomacy between Washington and Iran remains underway despite recent military escalation and fears of a wider regional conflict.
Trump himself recently signaled he remains open to giving diplomacy additional time before considering further military action.
Ships are anchored in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas in southern Iran on May 4. A report on May 15 said a ship was seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and is being brought toward Iranian waters. (Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP via Getty Images)
“If I can save war by waiting a couple of days, if I can save people being killed by waiting a couple of days, I think it’s a great thing to do,” Trump said in recent days.
PAKISTAN’S AMBASSADOR WARNS IRAN TOO ‘WAR-TORN’ TO RESPOND QUICKLY AS TRUMP EXTENDS STRIKE DEADLINE
The administration’s diplomatic push has coincided with intensified regional mediation efforts, including a high-profile visit by Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to Iran — a trip widely viewed as part of broader backchannel efforts aimed at reducing tensions between Washington and Iran.
The visit fueled further speculation that Pakistan is playing a quiet intermediary role as negotiators explore possible frameworks to avoid additional military escalation.
Still, Rubio repeatedly emphasized Thursday that negotiations remain fragile and could ultimately collapse.
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“We’re dealing with a very difficult group of people,” Rubio said. “It may not” happen
He added that Trump “has other options” if diplomacy fails, while stressing the president still prefers “the negotiated option and having a good deal.”
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