THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

There are a few ways to think about Iowa. You might imagine America’s 29th state as the land of corn and pigs (20 million hogs can’t be wrong, reads my favorite T-shirt for sale at the Eastern Iowa Airport). Maybe you associate it with Field of Dreams, Caitlin Clark, or the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.You might also picture Iowa as flat, like a pancake. But you would be wrong. Iowa is not even in the top five flattest U.S. states, which is a fact I was considering last month as I watched Josh Turek size up a daunting set of stairs in a hilly Cedar Rapids neighborhood. After a moment’s consideration, the 47-year-old Democrat, who uses a wheelchair, shook his head, deciding against it. It would be the only house that Turek would skip that afternoon as he knocked on doors in the warm spring sunlight. At all the other homes, he followed the same elaborate routine without appearing to break a sweat: lowering his body out of his chair and onto the ground; hoisting himself backwards up a step using just his arms; yanking the wheelchair up after him; and repeating that until he reached the doorbell, which is when he would announce, “Hi! I’m Josh Turek, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate!”In his bid to replace Republican Senator Joni Ernst, Turek is hoping to correct what he believes is another popular misconception about Iowa: that it is a red state. For the past decade, if not longer, many Americans have thought of Iowa this way—and for good reason. Although voters here famously helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency by choosing him in the 2008 Democratic caucuses, they later chose Donald Trump in three consecutive elections. Every member of Iowa’s congressional delegation is, at present, a Republican. Terrace Hill, the governor’s mansion in Des Moines, has housed a member of the GOP for the past 15 years.But lately, a sense of deep frustration—with rising costs, with Trump, with Republican leadership in general—is rippling across Iowa.As a result, Iowa Democrats have found themselves in an unusually charmed electoral position. This year, they’ve got a more-than-decent chance of winning back not just a Senate seat, but at least two seats in the House, plus the governor’s office. The November midterms could, in other words, mark the beginning of a shift for Iowa, a turn back toward… [TheTopNews] Read More.

One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.But then came Kash Patel. President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a Fight With Kash Punisher scarf ($25).One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.Last month, I reported that FBI personnel were alarmed by what they said was erratic behavior and excessive drinking by Patel. (The FBI director has denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against The Atlantic and me.)After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)The AtlanticPatel’s signature and “#9” appears on the bottle obtained by The Atlantic. The “#9” is presumably a reference to his place in the history of FBI directors.Patel has given out bottles of his personalized whiskey to FBI staff as well as civilians he encounters in his duties, according to eight… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Nearly three weeks after The Atlantic reported that some government officials were alarmed by FBI Director Kash Patel’s behavior, including conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences, MS NOW reported this morning that the bureau has “launched a criminal leak investigation” that focuses on the Atlantic journalist who wrote the story, Sarah Fitzpatrick.MS NOW reported that there is concern among FBI agents assigned to the investigation, citing two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity. Leak investigations are typically focused on government officials, not on journalists.“They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told MS NOW. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”The FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the investigation and said in a statement, “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all.” The White House referred me to the FBI.The MS NOW report said that it was unclear whether internal interviews have taken place to determine who would have had “the kind of information” that appeared in the Atlantic story. It also said it was not known what steps investigators have taken in the case, including whether the FBI had sought to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records, examined her social-media contacts, or run her name and information through FBI databases.“If confirmed to be true, this would represent an outrageous attack on the free press and the First Amendment itself,” The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said in a statement. “We will defend The Atlantic and its staff vigorously; we will not be intimidated by illegitimate investigations or other acts of politically motivated retaliation; we will continue to cover the FBI professionally, fairly, and thoroughly; and we will continue to practice journalism in the public interest.”This is not the first time in recent months that federal law enforcement has targeted traditional news-gathering practices in ways that seem designed to intimidate journalists and discourage critical news stories. In January, FBI agents executed a search warrant at the home of the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her phone and other devices as part of an investigation into a government contractor who was charged with unlawfully transmitting and retaining classified information. Weeks earlier, Natanson had published an essay about how she had connected with more than 1,000 sources about the Trump administration’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The very short list of constraints on partisan gerrymandering has gotten even shorter. Until last week, the Supreme Court had interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require states to draw some majority-minority districts. But in Louisiana v. Callais, it overturned that requirement and held that the VRA prohibits gerrymandering only if it’s done with the explicit goal of racial discrimination. If the intent behind disenfranchising minority voters appears to be merely partisan, the gerrymander is now legal. The ruling will allow Republican state legislatures in the South to erase most if not all of the region’s few blue House districts without fear of being blocked in court.And so the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse. Democrats will respond to the Republican response to Callais; Republicans will respond to the response to the response; voters will lose in the process. In a few years, almost every seat in the House of Representatives could be safely occupied by a hyper-partisan incumbent, beholden only to primary voters. The chamber could become something like the Electoral College: Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president.Because of the timing of the ruling, the effects are likely to be modest for the upcoming midterms. On Thursday, Louisiana suspended its primary election to give the state time to redraw the map. The legislature might eliminate just the one seat at issue in Callais, or it could try to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black, Democratic-leaning districts. A few more seats could be in play elsewhere in the South. On Friday, after saying two days earlier that she would not do so, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced that she would call a special legislative session to redraw the state’s maps. Donald Trump has claimed that he has the Tennessee governor’s promise to do likewise. In other deep-red states, key deadlines have already passed, making last-minute map-drawing difficult or impossible.The implications for 2028 and onward are more dramatic. Trump’s successful push to get Republican states to do off-cycle redistricting this year already blew past one long-standing impediment to gerrymandering maximalism. The removal of the VRA will make the arms race even more cutthroat. “It’s gonna be awful,” Sean Trende, a prominent districting expert, told me. Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the Center for Politics at the University… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The Democratic wilderness is starting to look awfully sunny. Gone, for the most part, are the blame-casting, hand-wringing, and paralysis-by-analysis that gripped the party after Donald Trump’s reelection. Same with the constant grousing about how the party is fractured, leaderless, locked out of power in Washington, and unloved across the country.Actually, that might all still be true. But you don’t hear about it as much. Democrats are too busy being giddy with anticipation for the midterms. Examples of this hyper-confidence began popping up at the beginning of the year (“Democrats will cruise to victory, including Senate control,” the writer Brian Beutler predicted) and have proliferated since then. Nearly every day seems to bring another Democratic overperformance in a special or off-year election, or another great poll for the party, improved House or Senate forecast, or headline about how Republicans are bracing for a brutal November. Is a blue wave coming? A blue tsunami? Or another blue mirage?The causes for Democratic optimism are legitimate. The president’s approval ratings—historically a solid predictor of a party’s midterm outlook—have now dropped consistently into the 30s. Trump was already underwater on his two most important issues, the economy and the cost of living. Then he launched a protracted, unpopular war of choice with Iran that sent gas prices soaring, the Middle East into turmoil, and his numbers ever further south—all while he dismissed Democrats’ talk of affordability as a “good line of bullshit” and spoke nonstop about the need for an extravagant ballroom at the White House.According to The New York Times’ polling average, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s overall performance, the highest share since right after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A recent Fox News poll also showed that, by four percentage points, Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on the economy, the first time since 2010 that Democrats have prevailed on that question.[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]Yet to hear some bullish Democrats talk, the idea that the party might merely win the few seats it needs to flip the House—which was widely expected to begin with—feels needlessly cautious. In many cases, Democrats have become unnervingly unrestrained in expressing their higher-end hopes. “Your viewers need to know that the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 seats,” the unnervingly unrestrained James Carville told Fox News in January. “Maybe as high as 45.”Until recently, arguing that… [TheTopNews] Read More.