Author: Sky York Journal

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…

Sky York Journal Against the backdrop of immense pressure, primary threats from President Trump and physical threats from his supporters, Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, after much back and forth, announced that Indiana lawmakers would, in fact, convene to discuss whether to move forward with mid-cycle redistricting. The announcement came with a caveat. He said the state Senate would reconvene as part of the regular 2026 session in order to make a “final decision” on the matter.  The reversal, yet again, comes after Bray said earlier this month that lawmakers would not convene for a special legislative session…

Sky York Journal The administration governs by propaganda. There’s bluster, threats, and even real violence — all deployed to push a far-right agenda forward while dissuading as many people as possible from opposing it. But what happens when that all-out campaign to intimidate makes contact with reality? Nowhere has that approach been clearer than in Chicago. Spearheaded by deportation hype man Greg Bovino, federal law enforcement flooded the city in September. Under Bovino’s command, DHS officials used a military helicopter to raid an apartment building while apprehending undocumented immigrants and, in a single day, deployed more tear gas against protestors than…

Sky York Journal The original civil rights groups who challenged Texas’ new gerrymandered maps back in August of this year have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a lower court ruling that would temporarily block the use of the redistricted map in the 2026 elections.  The involvement of the Supreme Court in the dispute over Texas’s recently redrawn map is only one part of a larger redistricting war that the Trump administration has been waging across the country for months now. The Trump administration has been pushing red states to redraw their district lines to help Republicans flip seats…

Sky York Journal A federal judge has ruled that former insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan was invalidly appointed as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and has dismissed the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The dual rulings by U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of South Carolina are the most significant judicial rebukes yet to the politically motivated prosecutions driven by the White House of political nemeses of President Donald Trump.

Sky York Journal A federal judge ruled Thursday that Trump’s Defense Department illegally overstepped its authority in deploying 2,000 local and out-of-state National Guard to Washington D.C., part of President Trump’s crackdown on blue cities. While Trump has gotten mixed results elsewhere — a win at the appellate level in California, a loss in Illinois, a still-pending ruling from the Supreme Court — conventional wisdom has held that stateless D.C.’s was the weakest case.  But Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, found that while Trump may have powers akin to a governor’s over her state’s National Guard, those powers are…

Sky York Journal Federal prosecutors are beating a broad retreat from cases they had brought against people protesting the surge of CBP and ICE agents into Chicago. It is a stunning comedown. Prosecutors moved to abandon on Thursday three cases brought against protestors, two of which DHS described as being brought against “domestic terrorists” as part of a national media campaign to portray the situation in Chicago as demanding a military deployment. Now, the cases have come to nothing amid increasing scrutiny from the courts. In the case of Marimar Martinez, the 30-year old Chicagoan shot five ties in October…

Sky York Journal When Secretary of State Marco Rubio added four European anti-fascist groups to the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations last week, he failed to tell the public one thing: how, exactly, these groups threaten Americans. It’s a critical omission. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary of State can only label a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — a powerful tool that blocks access to the U.S. financial system and makes it a felony to provide support — if three criteria are met. First, the group must be foreign. That’s straightforward: of the four “violent Antifa” groups Rubio…

Sky York Journal Thanks to a 2009 medical breakthrough, researchers could be on the precipice of answering one reason why Black Americans are disproportionately diagnosed with kidney failure, and offering a solution to the issue. That discovery, doctors and researchers told TPM, may not have been possible without decades of analysis of federal race and ethnicity figures collected on every American citizen diagnosed with kidney failure. Now, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, have ceased collecting that information — data swept away  in President Donald Trump’s purge of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Dialysis is the…