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Tag: Politico

  • Federal transportation officials consider plan to scrap DC’s traffic cameras – WTOP News

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    D.C. lawmakers push back on a reported push to remove the city’s automated traffic enforcement cameras, citing safety concerns and financial implications. Meanwhile, some in the region support the idea.

    Editor’s Note: This report originally misattributed quotes that were said by At-Large D.C. Council member Christina Henderson to another council member. This article has been corrected.

    The U.S. Department of Transportation is weighing a proposal to eliminate the District’s automated traffic enforcement cameras.

    The proposal was written by the DOT and sent to the White House, according to news outlet Politico, which obtained a copy of the plan. It would outlaw speed, red light and stop sign cameras throughout the city as part of the upcoming surface transportation bill, which Congress is hoping to pass this year.

    D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser issued a forceful rebuke of the plan. In a statement sent to WTOP, she said traffic cameras are “a critical tool in the work to save lives and make our streets safer,” adding that their removal would endanger people in the District.

    According to Bowser, the move would “create a $1 billion hole in D.C.’s financial plan, which would mean cuts to everyday city services.”

    At-Large D.C. Council member Christina Henderson echoed Bowser’s comments. Henderson partially credits traffic cameras for significantly reducing the number of traffic deaths in the District.

    “I would love nothing more than for us to not have any revenue from traffic enforcement because hopefully that would mean that people are slowing down around the city,” she said.

    However, Henderson noted that the removal may mean increased patrols by D.C. police, which is already stretched for resources.

    “People should understand that without automated traffic enforcement, it doesn’t mean that traffic enforcement simply ceases to exist, but then we do have to revert back to old methods,” she said.

    The proposal comes as traffic-related deaths decreased more than 50% last year in the District, with 25 reported fatalities compared to 52 in 2024.

    In an emailed statement, D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who chairs the Committee on Transportation and the Environment, credits the STEER Act — legislation he authored — for holding dangerous drivers accountable.

    “No one likes getting a ticket. But no one should have their life forever changed because someone couldn’t bother to show a little patience and drive safely,” Allen said.

    D.C.’s traffic cameras have come a long way since 1999, when a few red light cameras were installed. Currently, 546 cameras are spread across the city, catching everything from speeding to bus lane violations. The District has also brought in a lot of money from fines, from $139.5 million in 2023 to $267.3 million in 2025.

    Commuters believe traffic cams should go

    However, commuters WTOP spoke with overwhelmingly support eliminating the cameras.

    “I feel like it almost distracts drivers more sometimes because they slam on their brakes when they see them. I’ve seen that a lot,” said Betsy from Germantown, Maryland.

    The proposal steps up the fight over D.C.’s large network of traffic cameras. Last September, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, of Pennsylvania, pushed a similar bill, saying the cameras are more about making money than keeping people safe.

    “It really does feel like a money grab,” said Princess, who recently moved to the District from Texas. “It’s really expensive, especially with the cost of living out here. I don’t think it’s fair.”

    While most drivers said they would support removing the cameras, not everyone shared that opinion.

    “Personally, I don’t believe that it is the best idea in terms of just the safety of drivers,” said McKenzie, who lives in Northwest D.C. “Those cameras are necessary to catch people who are speeding.”

    “I think they do help regulate, in general, controlling traffic and making sure people are safe on the roads,” she said.

    WTOP has reached out to the Transportation Department for comment.

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    Alan Etter

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  • California’s age verification bill for app stores and operating systems takes another step forward

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    A California bill that would require operating system and app store providers to verify users’ ages before they can download apps has cleared the Assembly 58-0, and will now move on to Gov. Gavin Newsom, reports. The Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), introduced by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, does not require photo identification for verification, but puts the onus on the platforms to provide tools for parents to indicate the user’s age during a device’s setup, and use this information steer kids toward age-appropriate content and screen time.

    It comes after and both adopted app store age verification laws earlier this year that have been criticized as posing potential privacy risks, and faced opposition from the likes of Google and Apple. The California bill has been received more positively by Big Tech, with Google, Meta and others putting out in support of it in the leadup to a Senate vote on Friday. Kareem Ghanem, Google’s Senior Director of Government Affairs & Public Policy, called the bill “one of the most thoughtful approaches we’ve seen thus far to the challenges of keeping kids safe, recognizing that it’s a shared responsibility across the ecosystem.” Gov. Newsom now has until October 13 to sign or veto the bill, according to Politico.

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    Cheyenne MacDonald

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  • Democrats scramble for a redistricting counteroffensive against Trump

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    Democrats are scrambling to keep their nascent crusade against President Donald Trump’s national redistricting push from fizzling out.

    House Democrats are considering establishing an organization to raise and spend for their remapping efforts as they look to counter an aggressive Republican move that could determine control of the chamber next year, according to three people granted anonymity to describe private conversations. And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has privately discussed redistricting with blue-state governors, according to another person.

    The Center for American Progress is urging blue states to abandon their independent redistricting commissions. And, through private strategy sessions and public appeals, Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu is asking Democrats across red and blue states to take a no-holds-barred approach to resisting GOP redistricting. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin praised Wu during a meeting in Minneapolis last week for “igniting a national movement within this party.”

    “This is an all-out call to arms,” Wu, who helped lead Texas Democrats’ quorum break, said in an interview. “That chorus of ‘everyone needs to get off their ass and do something’ is growing louder and louder. And more and more elected Democrats who are seen as doing nothing — their commitment to our country is going to be questioned.”

    But Democrats face a lopsided fight.

    They’re hamstrung by constitutional restrictions or independent commissions in some states, while Republicans are generally free of those legal barriers and have leadership trifectas in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, promising state lawmakers fewer restrictions to draw Democratic rivals out of their seats.

    Against this backdrop, Democrats are grasping for ways to counter Trump’s maximalist campaign to redraw congressional maps to protect Republicans’ three-seat House majority in the midterms. With a counteroffensive already underway in California, Democrats are turning to other blue states to take up the charge — and finding some open-minded participants in governors with 2028 ambitions.

    Democrats see the promise of netting three seats in Maryland and Illinois, whose governors — Wes Moore and JB Pritzker, respectively — have spoken with Jeffries about redistricting, according to one person granted anonymity to describe those private conversations. The minority party is also eyeing a pickup opportunity in Utah, after a judge ruled the state must redraw its map. Jeffries has also spoken with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, though any changes in the Empire State are unlikely before 2028 and thus wouldn’t impact the upcoming midterms.

    The blowback started as a tit-for-tat response to Trump’s efforts to grow the GOP’s majority next year, kicking off with a push for five more red House seats in Texas. Now Missouri is moving ahead with a new map as the White House bears down on Indiana.

    One national Democratic operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the tumultuous situation, described jumping into the redistricting arms race as “the price for entry to the 2028 presidential primary.”

    Caifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose popularity is soaring as he emerges as Democrats’ remapping champion, has been encouraging his counterparts to follow his lead, saying at POLITICO’s California Summit Wednesday, “We’re going to have to see other governors move in a similar direction.”

    An array of party officials and organizations are lining up.

    The National Democratic Redistricting Committee is fielding calls, providing technical support and legal expertise to state leaders looking at their own congressional maps, according to a person directly familiar with their efforts.

    Wu, the Texas House Democrats leader, discussed messaging and other tactics with legislators from seven states where Republicans are eyeing redistricting during a Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee strategy session last week, per a summary of the call provided to POLITICO. And former President Barack Obama called Texas state Rep. James Talarico — a potential U.S. Senate candidate — to voice support for his role in his state’s redistricting battle.

    But in some states, messaging is all Democrats can do. Republicans in Indiana, for example, hold a supermajority and can pass any map without a single Democrat in the chamber.

    It’s not just Democratic officials who are getting involved. Unions that banded together to condemn Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas are now pledging to put manpower behind Newsom’s ballot campaign in California and holding strategy discussions about combating Trump’s next moves in other states. And activists affiliated with the progressive group Indivisible have made roughly 5,000 calls to governors and lawmakers across 15 states with Democratic trifectas urging them to responsively redistrict.

    “This isn’t something we had to go pitch people on the importance of. This is something people were banging down our doors about,” said Andrew O’Neill, Indivisible’s national advocacy director.

    And it “does seem that this is something that has broken through with these governors and has the potential to create what I’ve been calling a productive ambition,” O’Neill said. “These people might be thinking about future job prospects for themselves and they view being a leader in this fight as a route to do that.”

    Democrats’ pressure campaign is struggling in Colorado, Washington and Oregon, whose governors have all but closed the door to redistricting, and the party lacks the legislative means or the interest to change their maps.

    Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib sent a recent memo to county officers outlining the near-insurmountable challenges in mimicking California’s ballot campaign, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO. Petitions attempting to circumvent the state’s independent redistricting commission are being filed without the state party’s backing.

    Washington Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen shut down the possibility in a letter to a concerned constituent shared with POLITICO, noting Washington’s Democratic-heavy congressional delegation already does not reflect the political makeup of the state. And state Democratic Party Chair Shasti Conrad acknowledged “lots of pressure and desire” to take up redistricting, but pointed to a broad recognition that it’s “practicably impossible.”

    On the East Coast, New Jersey Democrats are similarly hamstrung by state constitutional issues and though Moore told POLITICO “everything’s on the table” when it comes to redistricting, a state court tossed Maryland Democrats’ previous attempt to gerrymander.

    But Democratic activists are increasingly discontent to let anyone in their party sit on the sidelines as they fight what they view as Trump’s latest power grab.

    “These are serious times, and I’m not sure how much more serious things have to be for [Democratic governors] to get off their ass and get in the batters box and swing for the fences,” said California-based Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo. “This is infuriating.”

    Natalie Fertig and Brakkton Booker contributed to this report.

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  • Gavin Newsom teases he’s launching his own memecoin

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    SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom told POLITICO on Wednesday he is “about to come out” with his own memecoin in a jab at Donald Trump’s own cryptocurrency ventures as the California Democrat expands his online troll campaign against the president.

    “By the way, I’m about to come out with a coin on my Patriot site. So you may want to look into that,” Newsom said with a laugh, referencing his online parody merchandise shop created to poke fun at Trump. “I think we’ll add a coin, maybe a Trump corruption coin or something.”

    The memecoin idea builds on Newsom’s weeklong campaign parodying Trump’s signature MAGA branding. His “Governor Newsom Press Office” account on X has trolled the president’s brash, all-caps social media blasts. And earlier this week, Newsom launched the “Patriot Store” featuring MAGA-style merchandise, such as red hats reading “NEWSOM WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”

    Newsom’s latest remarks came during an interview at POLITICO’s inaugural “The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit,” as he spoke about his now-infamous phone call with Trump earlier this summer about the president deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles.

    The governor said Trump mentioned his “crypto grift” and his own memecoin, $TRUMP, in a previous conversation with the president.

    Other Democrats have raised concerns about Trump’s entanglements with the crypto industry. Trump earlier this year held a private dinner with buyers of his memecoin. His business empire, Trump Media and Technology Group, announced last month it had acquired about $2 billion in bitcoin and other digital assets.

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  • Meta is launching a California super PAC

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    Meta is throwing its resources behind a new super PAC in California. According to Politico, the group will support state-level political candidates who espouse tech-friendly policies, particularly those with a loose approach to regulating artificial intelligence. The budget behind the social media company’s new super PAC, dubbed Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California, is reported to be in the tens of millions of dollars, but no exact figure has been disclosed.

    California has made several efforts, with varying degrees of success, to enact protections against potentially harmful AI use cases. The state passed a law in 2024, but has faced challenges to a bill that blocked and to one that more broadly sought caused by AI.

    This creation of the super PAC puts Meta into a prominent position to influence races in 2026, when California will have midterm elections and vote for a new governor. “Sacramento’s regulatory environment could stifle innovation, block AI progress, and put California’s technology leadership at risk,” said Brian Rice, vice president of public policy at Meta. Politico reported that Rice and Meta policy executive Greg Maurer are likely to lead the political fundraiser.

    Meta hasn’t been shy about throwing money into politics to advance its business interests. According to OpenSecrets, the company has spent on lobbying to date this year. Its roughly $8 million lobbying spend in the first quarter of 2025 vastly that of other tech majors.

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    Anna Washenko

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  • Is the Media Finally Waking Up to a New Kind of Supreme Court Coverage?

    Is the Media Finally Waking Up to a New Kind of Supreme Court Coverage?

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    Josh Gerstein says he didn’t expect Politico’s leaked Dobbs draft opinion to be an inflection point in Supreme Court coverage. When Gerstein, Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter, and national security reporter Alexander Ward obtained and published the initial draft majority opinion ending federal protections for abortion last year, “I thought they would just sort of batten down the hatches and pretend like nothing was going on—and I guess I kind of felt like the press would respond in the same way,” he tells me. After the historic scoop came out—never in the modern history of the Court had an entire draft decision of this magnitude been leaked to the press—Gerstein remembers “at least one editor” saying to him, “Oh, no, this is gonna change the way the Supreme Court is covered from here on out.”

    Indeed, in the year or so since the Dobbs leak, and amid increasing calls for deeper, more sustained coverage, we have seen “a dramatic increase in the amount of resources that they put into it,” Gerstein notes. The job of the Supreme Court reporter has traditionally been to track cases, and translate the final opinions to readers. But this term, as the conservative supermajority ruled on hot-button issues including affirmative action, LGBTQ+ rights, and student-debt relief, reporters both on the SCOTUS beat and beyond took a broader approach, with more scrutiny of the justices’ business dealings, relationships, and ethical issues. ProPublica published a series of revelatory stories about Justice Clarence Thomas’s undisclosed gifts from billionaire GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow and Justice Samuel Alito’s undisclosed luxury fishing trips with billionaire GOP mega-donor Paul Singer, who later had cases before the Court. Politico reported how Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017 failed to disclose a property sale to a CEO whose law firm has since argued at least 22 cases before the Court. The Associated Press examined the ethics practices behind Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff prodded colleges and libraries to buy her books.

    “To some extent this coverage has existed, just not on a consistent basis,” says investigative reporter Jesse Eisinger, the editor of ProPublica’s SCOTUS coverage. Back in 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported on the “wealth of gifts” that Thomas had disclosed. Some details of his relationship with Crow have emerged over the years too. “People understood that the Court had politicking, but not politics,” says Eisinger. “The end result of the coverage focused on the opinions, and not the influence and politics that went into the making of those opinions.” The Court’s most recent session highlighted these gaps in coverage as well; just days before the high court essentially gave some businesses the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ patrons, The New Republic published a remarkable article that raised the possibility that the plaintiff’s lawyers—a conservative anti-LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group—had falsified evidence. (The reporter Melissa Gira Grant called up the allegedly gay man cited in the Court filing as a client who requested a same-sex wedding website from a website design business owner, only to find the man claiming to have never made such a request, and married to a woman.) The eleventh hour report begs the question: Shouldn’t mainstream outlets give similar scrutiny to the origins of cases in the Supreme Court’s docket from the get-go?

    Perhaps now, Eisinger wonders, the post-Dobbs public is more primed for this kind of coverage. “Maybe the reason why it’s resonating has nothing to do with us, but just the moment—that people were ready to read it and see it and acknowledge it. Sometimes you just have to have that. The reporting is much less important than the readers.”

    The press has treated the Supreme Court with a unique reverence compared to the other two branches of government. Among the legal experts who have made this point is Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, who in a recent essay, titled “Imagine if the Press Covered the Supreme Court Like Congress,” noted that the SCOTUS press corps “has been largely institutionalized to treat anything the court produces as the law, and to push everything else—matters of judicial conduct, how justices are chosen and seated, ethical lapses—off to be handled by the political press.” Lithwick points to scoops related to the Court, aside from Gerstein, largely coming from reporters not directly on the beat. “It speaks volumes about the way the Court has been covered that only in the past year have some legacy news outlets hung out ‘Help Wanted’ ads seeking reporters to cover the Court as though it’s an actual branch of government and not the oracle at Delphi.”

    To Lithwick’s point, The New York Times indicated it was rethinking its approach to the beat in hiring Abbie VanSickle of the Marshall Project to, as the announcement put it, “cover the world of the court including its role in politics and the lives of the justices.” The role, Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told me, “is new, expanding the Times’ coverage of the court.” Earlier this month, the Times’ Sunday front page was devoted to an investigative piece—co-bylined by VanSickle—into Thomas’s ethical standards and relationship with an elite circle of “extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members,” to whom Thomas granted “unusual access to the Supreme Court.” The Washington Post, too, has been putting more energy into SCOTUS ethics reporting, from scoops on the tens of thousands of dollars that conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo told Kellyanne Conway to pay Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence, to analysis of justices’ long-running tensions over ethics.

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • ‘Dark Wars’ Podcast Releases Official Trailer, Exposes New Details On Border Crisis as Immigration Takes Center Stage Ahead of Midterms

    ‘Dark Wars’ Podcast Releases Official Trailer, Exposes New Details On Border Crisis as Immigration Takes Center Stage Ahead of Midterms

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    Premiering Oct. 25, the podcast docuseries hosted by Sara Carter will reveal previously unreported revelations about the border

    Press Release
    –

    Oct 20, 2022


    ARLINGTON, Va., October 20, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Today, Radio America released the official trailer previewing its new podcast, Dark Wars: The Border, set to premiere on Oct. 25, exactly two weeks before Election Day. Hosted by award-winning investigative journalist Sara Carter, the podcast follows Carter on her perilous journey to expose how the porous U.S.-Mexico border has facilitated a deadly trail from America’s foreign adversaries to your hometown; with cartels, slavery, and death in between. Watch the trailer HERE. 

    “I am excited to release this podcast, which is a culmination of my on-the-ground investigative reporting of our border crisis,” said Dark Wars host, Sara Carter. “I embedded with border patrol agents via foot, horseback, car, and helicopter – talking to coyotes and migrants alike – to reveal chilling stories about the opioid crisis and human trafficking that you haven’t read about in the news. I traveled to the native countries of these migrants to understand how cartels use social media to recruit migrants under the guise of easy passage and a better life. In reality, they encounter abuse, rape, and death. I’m telling the stories of those being ignored by the media.”  

    Dark Wars: The Border documents an investigation that delves deeper than any previous U.S.-Mexico immigration story to date and comes at a time when Customs and Border Protection and other government agencies have come under serious scrutiny for negligence at the border, as Politico reports. The premiere episode features a wide range of perspectives, from U.S. Senators such as Rand Paul and Marsha Blackburn to Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei to coyotes that work for the cartel among others, all to reveal a border crisis that is more serious and disturbing than what is reported in media, in a shocking portrayal of money and power that connects Mexican cartels to the neighborhoods of everyday Americans.

    Visit DarkWarsPod.com for more information on the podcast, which releases on Oct. 25 and can be heard on every podcast platform. To interview Sara Carter or for other queries, please email KennyCunninghamJr@gmail.com.

    About Dark Wars Podcast: Dark Wars: The Border is a new podcast series, hosted by award-winning journalist Sara Carter, that conducts in-depth investigations to expose what you are not being told about what’s happening at our 2,000-mile-long border with Mexico. It uncovers how this crisis touches you and every other American across the country. Dark Wars is a joint production of Radio America and The Dark Wire (www.darkwarspod.com).

    Source: Radio Amerca

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