Author: Sky York Journal

Sky York Journal The Supreme Court will weigh in a third time on Missouri Republicans’ attempts to ram through a maximal gerrymander after twice rejecting those efforts.  An 8th Circuit Court of Appeals panel circumvented the Supreme Court’s temporary restraining order blocking the state legislature’s 2025 map Monday evening. The aggressive gerrymander would likely give Republicans 7 seats in Congress and Democrats only one. The appeals panel — composed of two Trump appointees and one H. W. Bush — directed the lower court to enter a preliminary injunction blocking the use of the 2022 map, a 6 Republicans to 2…

Sky York Journal This story was originally published by ProPublica,  a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.…

Sky York Journal NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Greg Bovino knows Minneapolis is a problem.  The former CBP sector chief, who now styles himself “The Commander,” burst into the limelight last year with a series of city operations that ratcheted up in their level of aggression and violence — Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and more, culminating in Minneapolis’ Operation Metro Surge.  At an event hosted by the New York Young Republicans in Manhattan on Thursday night, Bovino was alternately braggadocious and defensive. He used far-right catchphrases like “remigration,” and called for the deportation of 100 million people. He relived the…

Sky York Journal Leadership at the Census Bureau has ordered staff to halt all external events related to the 2030 Census amid the agency’s release of a controversial, unprecedented rule proposal aimed at excluding immigrants from the U.S. population count, according to a copy of an email obtained by TPM. The events moratorium is set to last until the end of the 30-day public comment period allotted for the sweeping proposal, which seeks to transform how the U.S. Census defines “usual residence” and end the collection of race and ethnicity data for the first time since the Census began in…

Sky York Journal President Donald Trump painted a terrifying picture during his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night. Standing on stage at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Trump offered a dramatic retelling of a brutal murder that took place in the state last August. Iryna Zarutska’s death made headlines around the country, but the killing that Trump weaved into the Republican Party’s midterm pitch has also emerged as a persistent fixation and rallying cry for racist extremists on the far right.  As he told Zarutska’s story, Trump spared no gory or dramatic details. “A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful 23-year-old woman — a…

Sky York Journal This article was first published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This week, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s plans to impose new rules for mail-in voting for the midterm elections in November.  In a March executive order, President Donald Trump had instructed the U.S. Postal Service to create rules for election officials sending mail-in ballots to voters. If a state didn’t comply with the new rules, the Postal Service wouldn’t deliver the ballots to voters. State officials said it would have…

Sky York Journal Before the Trump administration issued its rule aiming to reshape the Census around accruing political power for the right, it had a problem: internal dissent. Per records obtained by TPM, the Treasury Department pushed back on a portion of the rule that contains some of the proposal’s furthest-reaching ambitions. The Trump administration wants to change what the Census means by “usual residence.” In the past, the Census has defined a respondent’s residence as where the person might “live and sleep most of the time.” Under the new rule, the Census would narrow it to a place “consistent…

Sky York Journal This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. As Republicans gathered in Dallas, Texas for their pre-midterm convention last week, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico focused on survivors of Jeffrey Epstein.  Talarico got a tour of the Reading Room, a traveling exhibit of the nearly 3 million files that the Department of Justice released from its investigation into the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender — the result of a hard-fought battle by survivors of Epstein’s abuse who are still…

Sky York Journal International companies are getting tariff refunds — with added, taxpayer-funded interest. People in America who have paid higher prices as a result of President Donald Trump’s relentless tariff maneuvering are stuck footing the bill. That’s according to reports from Asian business trade publications, including Nikkei Asia, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which have detailed the ways publicly-listed Chinese companies have netted about $160 million since April, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Treasury Department started reissuing more than $166 billion in tariff refunds. Some of those refunds represent more than half of the companies’ net…

Sky York Journal National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the Trump White House’s memo directing federal law enforcement to consider progressive beliefs as indicators of domestic terrorism, has done a lot of things. It’s brought a broad conspiracy case against nonviolent protestors in Minneapolis, netted half-century sentences on terrorism charges for a Texas anti-ICE protest that turned violent, and sparked what one former counterterrorism prosecutor described to TPM as a COINTELPRO-like law enforcement war on opposition protestors. It’s also causing trouble for those extremely aggressive and extremely online people who might be inclined to make extremely inadvisable social media posts. Recent…