Author: Sky York Journal

Sky York Journal ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been one of the most vociferous defenders of President Donald Trump’s expansive use of executive authority, withholding billions of dollars in federal funding to states and dismissing protests of the White House’s boundary-pushing behavior as the gripings of “disenfranchised Democrats.” But court documents reviewed by ProPublica show that a decade ago, as a House member, Duffy took a drastically different position on presidential power, articulating a full-throated defense of Congress’ role as…

Sky York Journal The Supreme Court was simply hamstrung, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, unable to knock down Texas’ hyper-partisan, likely racial gerrymander because the election it would govern is so close. Said election, though, is a whopping 11 months away. Yet that near year of time — plus a March primary, which Texas could delay — counts as the “eve of an election,” Alito wrote in his concurrence, so close to voting that changing the maps risks confusing voters. He’s referring to the Purcell principle, which stems from a 2006 case that concerned a change in Arizona photo ID laws…

Sky York Journal The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 order, has put on hold a lower court ruling that blocked Texas’ aggressive gerrymander, a maneuver the state legislature had carried out on orders from the Trump administration and the president himself, hoping to preserve Republicans’ majority in the U.S. House in 2026. In a brief order, the conservative majority argued, among other things, that the District Court had intervened to block the maps too close to next year’s midterm election. Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch authored a short concurrence. The court’s three liberals authored a far more…

Sky York Journal After nearly five years, the FBI arrested a Virginia man on Thursday on suspicion of planting two pipe bombs on January 6, 2021. A charging document showed that Brian Cole Jr. faces one count of transporting an explosive device with intent to kill and a second count of “malicious destruction or attempted malicious destruction by means of fire and explosive materials.” Cole bought several components used the pipe bombs, an FBI agent said in an affidavit filed in the case. Those allegedly include electronics, wires, pipes, and other parts of the bombs. The agent, who wasn’t named in…

Sky York Journal President Donald Trump’s foreign trade policy has been marked by contradiction from the beginning of his second term. He says he’s using tariffs to help close the U.S. budget deficit while increasing that deficit by $2.4 trillion with his signature tax cuts and defense spending package. He ran as a populist promising to decrease inflation, but made inflationary tariffs his signature economic policy. He has cited national security threats to justify his emergency tariffs, but then applied sharp levies to Brazilian grocery goods after the country convicted and sentenced its former president, a Trump ally, to prison…

Sky York Journal Jackie Bray has been thinking about how quickly things could spiral out of control. Bray is the New York state emergency leader whom Gov. Kathy Hochul tasked with averting a Chicago or Los Angeles-style surge of immigration agents and National Guard troops. At the core of the job is a dilemma that the Trump administration has imposed on blue cities and states around the country: How can the state respond to aggressive, spectacle-driven immigration operations without triggering the showdown with federal agents that the administration is trying to provoke? It’s a problem only made more acute by…

Sky York Journal This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. Texas’ massive new abortion law taking effect this week could escalate the national fight over mailing abortion pills. House Bill 7 represents abortion opponents’ most ambitious effort to halt telehealth abortions, which have helped patients get around strict bans in Texas and other states after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The law, which goes into effect December 4, creates civil penalties for health care providers who make abortion medications available in Texas, allowing…

Sky York Journal This story is part of a collaboration between FRONTLINE and ProPublica that includes an upcoming documentary. As the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet intensified in June, a nurse in Portland, Oregon, left work one midafternoon and drove to a nearby detention facility to voice his opposition. Federal agents had set off smoke grenades, driving away many protesters at the front of the facility, but Vincent Hawkins lifted his megaphone anyway. “You should stop and think about what you’re doing!” The shot came seconds later, a silver projectile launched through the small facility’s closed gate, hitting him in the face. The…

Sky York Journal This article was originally co-published by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Just last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined a bipartisan chorus of governors in denouncing a Biden administration plan they said would strip states of powers guaranteed to them under federal law. The plan would have transferred Air National Guard units from six states to the U.S. Space Force, the newly created military branch, stoking concerns about federal overreach…

Sky York Journal Maybe President Donald Trump is calling his economy “The Golden Age” because it’s expensive. Over the last week, there’s been a barrage of data trickling out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, a backlog of facts and figures after the longest U.S. government shutdown in history. The picture they paint, individually, is in many cases unremarkable. But together, they reveal an economy on the brink, experts told TPM.  That dark picture, experts said, does come with a kind of silver lining: That the agencies could even publish statistical reports and updated release schedules…