Gas over $6 in California

US gas prices jump another 9 cents to $4.39 a gallon

By Chris Isidore

After a brief respite, US gas prices are officially surging again.

Prices at the pump jumped another 9 cents to $4.39 for a gallon of regular. It marked the biggest one-day jump in prices in the last six weeks.

US gas prices are now at their highest level since July 2022, according to the data from AAA.

Gas prices are up 33 cents, or 9%, in the last week — and they’ve gained 47% since the start of war in Iran.

Oil futures suggest higher prices lay ahead. Brent crude, the international benchmark, is up another 1%, just under $112 a barrel.

Gas prices fell for two weeks after the start of the ceasefire, taking the average down to $4.02 by April 22. But concerns over failure of peace talks to reach an agreement to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz have sent prices shooting higher once again.

$187 Billion Cut to SNAP

House Cements $187 Billion Cut to SNAP—But Hey, Free Chicken!

Abby Vesoulis

It has always perplexed me that the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)—known colloquially as food stamps—doesn’t allow recipients to use the benefit to purchase hot food items at grocery stores.

Bread, steak, fish, potato chips, bananas and nearly every other food item lining the shelves? Sure. The ready-made rotisserie chickens, mac-and-cheese, or mashed potatoes on warming racks near the check-out? Nope.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, nearly 80 percent of SNAP households include a child, an elderly individual, or someone with a disability—families that would plausibly benefit from having affordable and efficient meals and side dishes as dinner options. Until now, it’s been a no-go.

However, there was a tender development in the US House of Representatives on Thursday, when the legislative chamber voted to include an amendment on their broader $390 billion Farm Bill package that redefines “food” from an earlier law to cover rotisserie chicken too. (The other hot-and-ready dishes weren’t lucky enough to be included.) Before being folded into the Farm Bill, the idea was most recently touted as a stand-alone bill, the aptly named “Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act” by a bipartisan group of Senators earlier this month.

While the legislation still needs to move through the Senate, the House passed the Farm Bill mostly along partisan lines, 224-220. Just 14 Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in supporting it.

You may be wondering what kind of monster would want to deprive SNAP households—75 percent of which live below the poverty line—of such a convenient delicacy. But to vote for the rotisserie chicken would have meant to vote for other components of the Farm Bill, too. Namely, $187 billion in cuts to the SNAP program.

That part wasn’t as appetizing to most House Democrats.

True Partisan Colors

The Roberts Court Shows Its True Partisan Colors

A Republican power grab triumphs over minority voting rights.

Pema Levy

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority would have you think that its latest gerrymandering decision is a mere tweak to the legal rules governing political map drawing. No doubt hoping for mild headlines, the court’s 6–3 opinion framed its holding as hewing to “the plain text” of the Voting Rights Act and “consistent with” the 15th Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination in voting. In compliance with these two guideposts, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion styles itself as a humble “update.”

Don’t be fooled. This is a counter-revolution. Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requires that people of color have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Wednesday’s decision effectively strikes down Section 2—at least what this Supreme Court had left of it—and takes the country back to the dark days when Black and brown voters in many states cast meaningless ballots, having been diluted and gerrymandered into powerlessness. In the decades since the Voting Rights Act, southern states have sent Black representatives to Congress, state legislatures, and local political bodies because this seminal civil rights law demanded that minority voters have an equal voice in the political process. Congress has repeatedly defended and continued these protections. On Wednesday, a court majority watered them right down to nothing.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out the stakes of what the court had just done, and repeatedly chided the majority for downplaying the gravity of its holding. Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais “could destroy most of the majority minority districts that in the past 40 years the Voting Rights Act created,” Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The decision has “thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction. Under cover of ‘updat[ing]’ and ‘realign[ing]’ this greatest of statutes, the majority makes a nullity of Section 2 and threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”

This case is not the first that the Roberts court has taken to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, but it may be the last. It is likely the final nail in its coffin, and the lid is now so firmly in place that it is improbable that any plaintiff will be able to pry it open and avail themselves of the law’s protections. This court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, began its assassination of the law in 2013, striking down the requirement that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get pre-clearance for new maps and changes in voting rules. The court went on to make it harder to win cases against discriminatory voting laws that block minority voters from casting their ballots. And in a related line of cases, the justices green lit partisan gerrymandering and made it increasingly difficult to prove racially discriminatory map drawing had occurred. The Callais decision marries these two lines of cases, destroying the Voting Rights Act while elevating permission to conductpartisan gerrymandering above minority voting rights. 

The dissent opens with a hypothetical that illustrates the import of the majority’s decision: Imagine a state with a history of virulent racial discrimination, in which Black and white voters prefer different political parties. The population is 90 percent white, save a single county, shaped like a circle, which is 90 percent Black. The Black voters elect a representative of their choice because they belong to one congressional district. Then “the state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts,” Kagan writes. “The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.”

Congress, under the Voting Rights Act, forbid this kind of racial vote dilution. Under Callais, the Roberts court brings it back. Indeed, if the white majority in the dissent’s hypothetical seeks to hand all their state’s congressional districts to Republicans, then the Black population cannot have a meaningful vote because they would choose a Democrat. “The majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,” Kagan writes. “For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process? And with that, the majority as much as invites States to embark on a new round of partisan gerrymanders.” Notably, the majority does not dispute this. Alito does not counter that this hypothetical district—the paradigmatic Section 2 district—would survive Wednesday’s opinion. It’s a damning silence that tacitly admits just how sweeping his decision is. 

Partisan gerrymandering, the court’s preferred tool for dismantling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is not a constitutionally protected practice. In fact, it’s long been viewed as a big problem. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court appeared poised to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering and its obviously corrosive impact on democracy and individual rights. But two years later, after Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court swung in the other direction. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that federal courts could not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims because they were ill-equipped for the task. Rucho “did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding,” Kagan recalled in her Callais dissent. “To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ and ‘lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.’” But, seven years later, the majority has transformed partisan gerrymandering into a weapon with which to extinguish the political voice of minority voters.

Partisan gerrymandering—indeed any partisan concern that a legislature might raise—can now perform the same function that Jim Crow tactics did prior to the Voting Rights Act. There’s no need to resurrect poll taxes or literacy tests when legislatures can simply draw maps to exclude minority’s preferred candidate from winning. Against any accusations of discrimination against minority voters, legislators can simply invoke a political motive and prevail. The Voting Rights Act was “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Kagan wrote. Callais not only tramples the Voting Rights Act, it creates the scaffolding upon which to build a new discriminatory political system.

Defenders of the Roberts court chafe at the accusation by liberal critics that it is guided by partisan concerns rather than faithful application of the law. But on Wednesday, the Republican appointees literally elevated partisan concerns above the individual and collective rights of minority voters. They ruled that helping your preferred political party trumps the rights of Black and brown citizens. It’s hard to imagine a less justifiable decision—or a more precise representation of this court’s agenda.

General Strike

So You Want to Organize a General Strike

Trump opponents are marking May Day with walkouts, boycotts, and marches. What’s the next step?

Schuyler Mitchell

On Friday, International Workers’ Day, tens of thousands of people across the US will walk out of school, skip work, and refrain from shopping as part of a nationwide economic blackout against President Donald Trump’s agenda. Organizers with the May Day Strong coalition, a coalition of labor unions and community groups, are helping oversee more than 3,500 marches, rallies, and teach-ins. The coalition’s May Day action is inspired by the mass popularity of the Day of Truth and Freedom, in January, when more than 70,000 people took to the streets in Minnesota to demand ICE leave their state.

But are either of these events general strikes? And does it matter?

To better understand this moment, I spoke with Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and author of Organizing America and A History of America in Ten Strikes. We discussed the history of the general strike in America, the legal barriers hindering today’s labor movement, and how workers can use their strategic power to stand up to the Trump administration.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

What is a general strike, and how does it differ from a typical labor strike?

A regular strike comes out of a workplace. It’s usually affiliated with a singular workplace action by a group of workers who are angry about something going on in the workplace. They’re trying to form a union and the company won’t negotiate, or they have a union and the company won’t come up with a fair contract.

The idea behind a general strike is that the workers writ large, workers generally, will all come together and walk out in favor of some goal—a kind of broad-based revolution. It can be across sectors. Let’s say I go on strike as a college professor because my university is treating me really badly, and the hospital workers also walk out on strike with me. They’re trying to use their influence over their sector of the economy to increase the stress of the conditions so that I can win what I want to win. It doesn’t have to be about the workplace if a bunch of unions come together. Part of what they were trying to do in Oakland in 1946, for instance, was to overthrow the Republican political machine that controlled the city.

Has the US ever had a true general strike? What conditions preceded them, and what were the demands?

Basically every general strike in the US has come out of the established labor movement. We’re talking about Seattle in 1919, San Francisco in 1934, Oakland in 1946, New Orleans in 1892. These general strikes have been attempts by the labor movement that usually come out of a specific workplace issue but then explode as part of a general discontent with the system as it exists at that time—to place pressure on employers, the city, the forces of order.

In Seattle in 1919, it’s very much about employers not raising wages on docks after World War I, and the Seattle labor movement comes together as one to try to force a general increase in wages. In San Francisco in 1934, the longshoremen were led by the famed radical Harry Bridges, who had come out of the Industrial Workers of the World, in an attempt to form a union, which the companies and the police were very strongly resisting. In Oakland in 1946, it starts at a department store and spreads throughout the city of Oakland. In that case, it’s very much also about wages.

These have not always really been that radical. But the second thing you have to understand is that the general strike—or more specifically, sympathy strikes, where you strike in sympathy to try to put more pressure on the employer—were declared illegal by the United States as part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. A union cannot actually legally engage in what would be required to hold a [true] general strike today. They could do it, but they would break the law and face all kinds of penalties for doing so.

Some people were using the term “general strike” to describe Minnesota’s Day of Truth and Freedom in January, and other people were pushing back against that word choice. Is “general strike” the correct term, and how much do definitions matter?

I am one who is a little skeptical about the way this term is being used. I don’t think what happened in Minnesota is a general strike, and I don’t really think what’s going on May 1 qualifies either.

But maybe it doesn’t matter. People are using the terms and the ideas that they have access to through their education and trying to apply them to the presently terrible political situation, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s exactly what people should be doing. Whether or not it is technically a general strike is far less important.

If people can use these terms in order to push for a more just world, then that’s a heck of a lot more important than whether it technically is or is not a general strike.

In 2022, it felt like we were seeing an inflection point in the American labor movement. There were key unionization efforts with companies like Amazon and Starbucks. Do you think that momentum has continued, or has it been really diminished by Trump’s second term?

I think there’s a few things there. One is the anger over economic inequality is very real. I think that hasn’t changed at all. I think we’re seeing that with the increased success of more left-wing candidates in the Democratic Party. Trump may be a liar and a terrible human being, but one of his lies is that he’s good for the working man. A lot of working people believe that because they’re so angry about the system as it exists.

So the economic anger is still very much there. And then every time a union wins something these days, there’s a sort of liberal-left world of writers and readers that want to blow up every single small victory into the revival of the labor movement, and that’s more pressure than it can bear.

We saw this with the Amazon vote, which, let’s face it, was one vote in one factory. We saw this with the Starbucks workers. And we saw this with the successful organizing by the United Auto Workers at that one plant in Chattanooga.

The reality is that the barriers to successfully organizing, in part because of the Taft-Hartley Act, are enormous. The Starbucks workers have done one heck of a job, but what they’re facing is a company that simply refuses to negotiate a contract. The burden to win a union vote and then win a contract is enormous, and if anything, winning that first contract is even harder than winning that first union election, and so companies can wait for years before actually seriously negotiating.

The reality is American labor law is broken. It’s controlled by corporations. President Biden’s idea of the [union-supporting] PRO Act would have tried to reset the playing field on this. But that’s what we need to happen in order to see this kind of energy turn into wins. It really is about political power. The reason that the unions were able to succeed in the 1930s, yes, it was going out on strike and all of the actions they took—but that had happened before.

The difference was massively electing pro-union officials to office, and then those pro-union officials putting the laws into place that create a pathway for those union actions to succeed. You need both the action on the ground, the strike, and you need the electoral side. And we haven’t had that electoral side in many, many decades. And that often has been true under Democrats and is always true under Republicans. So I think the energy is there, and there’s a huge demand for unions. But I don’t think people understand just how hard it is, because labor law is completely captured by corporations, backed by the courts and with the full support of the Republican Party.

I’d like to dive into the Taft-Hartley Act some more. What led to its passage, and how does it shape what’s legally possible when striking today?

First off, the Taft-Hartley Act is one of the worst laws in American history. It continues to severely limit what unions can do today. 1946 is a huge strike year in America. You have all these workers who had struggled through the 1930s and the Great Depression, and even if they’re forming unions, there’s not a lot of money in the economy, so their standard of living is still pretty low.

Then World War II happens, and sure, everybody has a job, but the government’s controlling wages, and we’re not really making consumer goods because everything’s for the war. And so there’s all this massively pent-up demand for increased wages. People want to live a good life, and that’s what a lot of these strikes were about, right? And so it was an enormous strike wave. Over 5 million Americans go on strike in 1946—almost certainly the most in any year in American history.

At the same time, Congress and America generally were moving sharply to the right. We’re seeing the beginnings of Cold War anti-communism, and some unions were led by communists. They were seen now as the enemy, and a lot of employers hated everything that had happened since the unions had started forming in large numbers a decade earlier in the mid-30s and wanted to roll all of that back. So the Taft-Hartley Act bans almost everything that labor unions were able to do to succeed. The sympathy strike is banned. Wildcat strikes—in which you’re under a union contract, but the employer does something bad and you walk out [without a formal strike vote]—are banned.

States were then allowed, through this law, to create the so-called “right to work” laws, in which anti-union states basically incentivize people to not join unions. These have been used in more recent years to try to destroy the labor movement. Taft-Hartley also requires union leaders to pledge they’re not communists, which takes out many of the best-organizing unions in the labor movement [of the time]. It’s a horrible law that continues to have massive impacts on the American labor movement today and goes very far to explain why the movement has become weaker.

It often feels like workers in European countries are engaging in the types of mass strikes we haven’t seen in the US in a long time. Part of it, like you said, is because there’s a lack of the political conditions that that we need to have in the States.

But is there anything else we can learn from other countries that maybe have stronger labor movements?

I think the key is the cultural differences. And this goes back to the mythologies that Americans tell themselves about America: That this is a nation of the individual. This is a nation where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This is a nation where the poor man can become rich if he just works hard enough, and all this other bullshit. And you don’t see that in nearly the same kind of way in Europe, in which you have a much more defined system of class consciousness.

Not that European politics are an amazing utopia. But I think it’s always been a challenge in this country to overcome the cultural barriers within the working class that can be this kind of pro-capitalist pathology that lots and lots of people have. And the gig economy, or the rise of Uber, really builds on that—saying, You can make more money by your side hustle.

Racial divisions also absolutely have been a major issue in American labor history. In the past, American workers have often chosen to divide themselves by race. And on top of that, the power of evangelical Protestantism and religion has been a real issue too, in that you have many, many Americans being told messages at churches about individualism, about getting rich, about power structures, about listening to your employer, about obeying. Religion has often been used to crush and bust American strikes as well. So politics is a piece of it, but the biggest difference between here and Europe are cultural issues around class consciousness.

I think a lot of people are looking for strategic actions to take to resist the Trump regime outside of just going to protests and see the general strike as one potential pathway. Given the state of the labor movement, do you think a general strike is the most useful tool to deploy in this moment? Or are there other more strategic pathways?

I think that people want to have one thing that they do and it stops Trump. That’s not going to happen. Everybody’s looking for a shortcut, and I think a lot of general strike rhetoric is a shortcut—if only we come together, we could solve this problem—but I’m not sure that’s really true unless it’s a very real general strike, where the American labor movement leads millions of workers off the job and says they’re going to keep it up for days with clear demands against an anti-worker Republican Party.

Unfortunately, the labor movement is doing nothing. A few unions are even Trump-supportive. The labor movement as an actual organized movement continues to not rise to the occasion. Some state federations have done a pretty good job, but at a national level, it’s been very poor.

So in the absence of that strong labor movement, what do we have?

We have people doing the best they can. And I think that that’s really noble in its own way. We can’t just snap our fingers and stop Donald Trump, and I think this is where learning from other historical movements really makes a difference— thinking about the ways in which people were organizing in the American context in tremendously difficult conditions.

We’re talking about civil rights organizers from the 1920s through the ’50s and ’60s pushing back on Jim Crow. We’re talking about the early organizers in the gay rights movement in the ’70s and ’80s, and the hate and murderous violence that they faced. These are people that we could be inspired by. It might not happen overnight, but we have to understand that struggle happens over the long term, and we have to commit ourselves to that struggle and continue to try to move these conversations forward through our actions, through our organizing.

Whether or not what’s happening on May 1 is a general strike, people using those terms to come together and try to put more pressure on a terrible situation is really a positive thing. And people should take heart from whatever happens out of that and use it as the next moment to continue to build the struggle.

Markarian's Chain

Near the heart of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, a string of galaxies known as Markarian's Chain stretches across this telescopic field of view. Anchored in the frame at bottom right by prominent lenticular galaxies, M84 (bottom) and M86, you can follow the chain's gentle arc up and toward the left. Near center you'll spot the pair of interacting galaxies NGC 4438 and NGC 4435, known to some as Markarian's Eyes. An estimated 50 million light-years distant, the Virgo Cluster itself is the nearest galaxy cluster. With up to about 2,000 member galaxies, it has a noticeable gravitational influence on our own Local Group of Galaxies. Within the Virgo Cluster at least seven galaxies in Markarian's Chain appear to move coherently, while others may appear to be part of the chain by chance.

Louisiana election delay

Mike Johnson backs Louisiana election delay, urges other states to redraw maps

The Supreme Court invalidated the map in the speaker’s home state Wednesday.

Meredith Lee Hill

Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday he supported delaying House elections in his home state of Louisiana after the Supreme Court invalidated the state’s congressional map Wednesday.

“The governor has no choice but to suspend it,” Johnson told reporters. “The court has ruled our map unconstitutional.”

He spoke as GOP Gov. Jeff Landry announced that Louisiana could not carry out elections under the current map and would be working “to develop a path forward.” Any new map is likely to threaten the seats of Democratic Reps. Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, who are both Black.

The Supreme Court ruling narrowed the impact of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on the longstanding practice of requiring line-drawers to protect racial minorities’ voting power.

The exact timing of the rescheduled elections is “not my decision,” Johnson added, but said “the way it was typically done” was to hold an all-party “jungle” primary in November, with a runoff in December, and “it looks like it may be that way again.”

“But again, my fingerprints aren’t on it,” Johnson added. “It’s a decision of the state Legislature.”

He also encouraged other states with VRA-mandated minority districts to act quickly and potentially redraw their maps before November, even though many have their election processes well underway already.

“All states that have unconstitutional maps should look at that very carefully, and I think they should do it before the midterms,” he said.

They don't care if you die... Remember that...

House strikes pesticide language from farm bill

The vote notched a major win for the MAHA movement on their highest-profile agriculture priority.

By Grace Yarrow and Rachel Shin

The House voted 280-142 to remove controversial pesticide labeling language from the farm bill Thursday morning after a revolt from Make America Healthy Again activists.

The vote is a major win for MAHA-aligned Republicans and Democrats who argued that the provisions would protect pesticide makers that have faced hundreds of thousands of lawsuits from plaintiffs alleging they weren’t informed about health risks associated with the products.

The amendment, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), was the subject of contention within the GOP after she threatened to “BLOW UP the farm bill” over the issue. House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) and other Republicans pressured GOP colleagues to reject Luna’s move.

“It would prevent frivolous lawsuits if it’s in compliance with the science that the EPA has put forward,” Thompson told POLITICO. “I think this is a tool that’s really important for food affordability, because these are tools are important for yield, to be able to feed the nation, feed the world.”

Six Democrats voted to keep the pesticide language: Reps. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (N.C.), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Adam Gray (Calif.) and Hank Johnson (Ga.).

And 73 Republicans voted with Luna to deliver MAHA a victory in an ongoing fight over pesticide use.

Luna said during debate that she’d faced fierce opposition from her own party, saying on the House floor Wednesday night that one of her colleagues called her a “damn liar.”

“I never thought I’d have to be debating liability protections for pesticide companies,” Luna said. “Yet here I am today.”

Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), who has fought for years against Republicans’ previous efforts to include similar language in funding and farm bills, backed Luna’s amendment.

“This amendment is not extreme,” Pingree said Wednesday. “It would not ban pesticides or require any additional regulatory burden on the manufacturers. Quite literally it would preserve the status quo and allow the Supreme Court to examine this issue separately and the complicated legal issues at its core.”

House Epstein probe

Maxwell’s former boyfriend testifies in House Epstein probe

Democrats say they didn’t learn anything new; Republicans said Democrats just asked about Trump.

Hailey Fuchs

Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said they left an interview Thursday with Ted Waitt, Ghislaine Maxwell’s former boyfriend, largely empty-handed after an hourslong grilling as part of the panel’s ongoing Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

The committee was interested in what Waitt knew about Epstein’s crimes during his relationship with Maxwell, a former British socialite who is now serving 20 years in prison for her part in Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme. Waitt amassed his wealth founding the computer company Gateway and has become a philanthropist supporting ocean conservation. He has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the late convicted sex offender.

“Epstein was committing some of his crimes while Waitt and Maxwell were in a romantic relationship, so [we] want to understand what if anything he knew about that,” said Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), a member of the Oversight panel, before entering the interview room Thursday morning, adding, “I find it very hard to believe that they had no knowledge or indication of it.”

But the interview did not appear to be fruitful. Partway through the interview, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) claimed that the committee had learned nothing new.

“I’m interested to see what the Republicans want to know from this,” Subramanyam told reporters. “Maybe it was to connect [President Bill] Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell a little more, because [Waitt] came up in the Clinton deposition.”

Waitt, whose communications with Maxwell appear in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department, also happens to be a friend of the former president and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He brought Maxwell as a plus-one to the wedding of their daughter, Chelsea Clinton, in 2010 and she appears in at least one photo taken during the ceremony.

Hillary Clinton said she did not recall speaking with Maxwell at the wedding during her deposition before the committee in February.

A GOP committee spokesperson countered the claim that the interview was ineffective in producing new information, saying in a statement that Democrats “made today’s interview as they always do all about President [Donald] Trump, and Ted Waitt had no information about him.”

“In fact, he said Maxwell never brought Trump up,” the spokesperson continued. “Unlike Democrats, Republicans asked substantive questions and gained new information. We will have follow up actions soon.”

During the interview, Democrats only asked about Trump once, according to a person familiar with the questioning who was granted anonymity to describe the closed-door conversation.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said Waitt could not recall the answers to many of the panel’s questions.

In her interview with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in July, Maxwell said she began dating Waitt around 2003 after her relationship with Epstein and stayed with him until around 2010. She met him at a dinner with Bill Clinton in Hong Kong, she told Blanche.

Maxwell also maintained that her former paramour was the subject of blackmail because of her association with Epstein. She stated that Waitt “was asked for $10 million to keep me out of any of Epstein’s civil suits” in 2009, when the convicted sex offender was in litigation.

“He had everything. He was way, way more wealthy than Epstein, if anyone cares,” Maxwell said last July, of her former boyfriend.

A lawyer for Waitt did not return a request for comment.

Workforce data bill

Anthropic, OpenAI back Warner-Budd workforce data bill

Support from industry heavy-hitters is a good sign for a bipartisan framework.

Gabby Miller

A bipartisan Senate bill that would create a federal framework to track how artificial intelligence is reshaping the U.S. workforce has won backing from Silicon Valley tech giants including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ted Budd (R-N.C.) introduced the Workforce Transparency Act on Thursday, which intends to give Washington the real-time information needed to develop policy solutions for economic disruption and job losses associated with the technology.

The legislation would direct the Labor Department to collect and publish anonymized data on AI adoption across the public and private sectors. Data collected would include how workers use the technology and how that usage evolves over time.

The proposal comes as anxiety rises in Washington about the long-term effects of AI on the labor market and as both political parties craft messaging to respond to public concerns about the technology.

It would also establish a voluntary reporting system where companies and agencies can submit AI adoption data, and would then make anonymized versions of the data available to businesses, researchers and agencies.

Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of U.S. Government Affairs Fred Humphries said the framework is helpful for “understanding AI deployment, productivity gains, and the creation of new jobs.”

“We know AI is beginning to transform work, but we don’t have enough data to understand how,” said Joshua New, director of policy at SeedAI, a nonprofit focused on American AI readiness that’s backing the bill.

The proposal is also supported by Alliance for Secure AI, Business Software Alliance, SCSP Action Program and Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

Warner has made this issue a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, launching an ad in December highlighting how the rise in AI adoption is coinciding with steep job losses and an affordability crisis in the U.S.

Senate bans senators

Senate bans senators from prediction market trading

The prohibition would apply to senators and staff.

Jordain Carney

The Senate Thursday unanimously voted to ban senators and their staff from trading on prediction markets, a practice that has come under growing scrutiny on Capitol Hill in recent months.

The resolution, spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), prohibits senators and staff from using prediction markets. It goes into effect immediately.

“United States Senators have no business engaging in speculative activities like prediction markets while collecting a taxpayer-funded paycheck, period,” Moreno, who spearheaded the resolution, said in a statement.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it was “a good thing that the Senate is moving swiftly” and urged the House and the administration to enact similar rules.

“Speaker Johnson should immediately do the same thing in the House,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.

He added that once the Senate returns from a one-week break in mid-May that he will work to ensure administration officials also “can’t get rich off betting markets.”

The development received swift applause from Polymarket itself, which wrote on a social media post, “We’re in full support of this. Our Rulebook & Terms of Service already prohibit such conduct, but codifying this into law is a step forward for the industry. Happy to help move this forward however we can.”

Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) wrote on X he hoped this wasn’t the end of progress on the Hill in putting guardrails on use of prediction markets by members of Congress and aides.

“This applies to senators and Senate staff and is a good first step in response to concerns I and others have raised. I encourage the House to follow suit,” he said. “At a minimum, we should pass my bill with [Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.)] to prohibit all federally elected officials and government employees from using insider information to bet on a prediction market contract.”