The American Prospect

Affordability and war may be top of mind for many voters, but the fight for abortion rights still rages. In November, Virginia, Idaho, and Nevada will weigh in on ballot initiatives to protect abortion access. Virginia’s proposed constitutional amendment would enshrine a “right to reproductive freedom,” allowing women to make their own choices about their pregnancy barring a “compelling state interest.” Nevada voters approved the Right to Abortion Initiative in 2024, but constitutional amendm

This article was featured in the Today on TAP newsletter. Sign up for it here. The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, has likened shell companies to a “getaway car” for illicit actors. For transnational criminal networks and foreign kleptocrats alike, shell companies have been instrumental in hiding assets from the prying eyes of governmental authorities. This is precisely why Congress, with strong bipartisan support, passed th

The federal government is preparing a potentially multi-billion-dollar bailout for landlords who claim diminished income due to the national eviction moratorium declared by Congress and extended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the COVID pandemic. The “highly likely” windfall would end a five-year-long legal battle waged between the Department of Justice and a coalition of rental property owners that grew from a few dozen to several thousand. The potential beneficia

The Justice Department broke the law, and the remedy is getting what they want. That was the verdict from Judge Casey Pitts in the merger settlement involving Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, the first case that really put the pay-to-play corruption of Donald Trump’s antitrust enforcement in full view. A law called the Tunney Act was written to prevent merger settlements that are the product of backroom deals, by empowering judges to block those settlements out of respect for

In May, the Justice Department announced its findings that the Yale School of Medicine uses race in admissions reviews despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling striking down those race-based programs. After a nearly yearlong investigation, the department claimed that a Black or Hispanic student had “a substantially higher likelihood of being offered admission than a White or Asian student with the same academic credentials.” Yale recently announced that the university plans to negotiate changes w

During the high point of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, what the American right focused on wasn’t so much the current views or affiliations of the leftists it sought to vilify. It was what they may have believed or said 10 or 15 years earlier, when thousands of Americans flocked to the liberal-left Popular Front groups backed by the Communist Party, then seeking to present itself as merely the most zealous part of the pro-Roosevelt community. By the time Joe McCarthy began charging the Pentagon

Official Washington, and more surprisingly Donald Trump’s administration, is doing something that you almost never see: admitting policy failure. In late 2020, Trump signed the No Surprises Act, which was intended to prevent the intolerable situation of patients getting unexpected and enormous bills for medical treatment undertaken by “out-of-network” providers. Routine practices where patients didn’t have a choice like anesthesia or radiology services could suddenly trigger bills equal to an Am

Orders have come down from the Trump administration, almost certainly from Stephen Miller. Whether explicitly or not, they are tantamount to “get rid of the brown people.” That includes relatively obscure communities, like Asian Pacific Islander and Desi Americans (APIDA), whose targeting by ICE has radically accelerated under Trump. Between January 20, 2025, and March 10, 2026, there have been 14,678 arrests, 13,455 detentions, and 6,453 deportations of APIDA immigrants. This represents a sixfo

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org. After Barack Obama surged to the White House in 2008, his administration was hobbled by the perception that it had rescued the bankers who had crashed the global economy, held nobody accountable for the destruction that was unleashed, and left ordinary people to fend for themselves. Current events may soon rhyme with that fateful episode.

It was a mixed bag for the left in Tuesday’s primary elections. In Wisconsin, DSA candidate Francesca Hong, who was far ahead in the polls and expected to win easily, instead lost in a squeaker to David Crowley. But in Minnesota, the state’s lefty lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan easily whipped the moderate Rep. Angie Craig in the primary for that state’s U.S. Senate seat, by a nearly 20-point margin. While the Wisconsin result was disappointing, if progressives had to pick, it was likely m

Published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy In the escalating war on women and their right to bodily autonomy, some right-wing groups are pushing a peculiar claim about abortion-inducing drugs—namely, that the most commonly used synthetic steroid, mifepristone, is contaminating the country’s water supply. Yet reproductive rights groups, environmentalists, and scientists are quick to point out that claims of concern over “water purity” and “ecological degradation” a

This story was first featured in the Aftermath newsletter, a series from David Dayen exploring the economic consequences of the war in Iran. To have these stories delivered to your in-box as soon as they are published, sign up for the newsletter here. In one of America’s daily political subplots that would have been rejected from a pre-2025 Armando Iannucci script for being too silly, it turns out Donald Trump was recently smuggled out of Air Force One in a catering container for fear of

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here. How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University is many books in one. It is, first, a coming-of-age story about the author, Theo Baker, the child of two prominent Washington journalists. He comes to the hallowed, legacy-filled halls of Stanford University fascinated by technology, but discovers, while

With every release of economic data, the case for a wealth tax becomes ever more obvious. While The Washington Post documents how the median wage struggles to keep up with price hikes, The Wall Street Journal reports that corporate profits are at record highs, with one corporate analyst noting, “These profit margins are incredible.” In 1970, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans commanded roughly one-fifth of the nation’s wealth; today, they command one-third. If we are to get serious about f

Amazon’s chief lobbyist fighting a delivery worker protection bill in New York City recently endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani is Jessica Schumer, the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), according to public lobbying records and three sources with knowledge of the situation. The bill, the Delivery Protection Act, would establish safety, training, and labor standards for delivery drivers in New York. All delivery facilities and service providers would need to be licensed wit

Of all New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises, his plan for government-subsidized grocery stores has resulted in the strongest, and sometimes strangest, ire. Critics have called it bad policy, bad business, and even the tipping point on our slide toward Venezuelan socialist oblivion, oh no! Today on the show, we have one of the people who consulted with the mayor on his grocery plan: Errol Schweizer, grocery expert, host of the Grocery Nerds podcast. Schweizer argues that, far from

The wordless show of dissent that cost Dr. Feras Hamdan his job, a $50,000 cash surety bond, hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and the better part of his sanity lasted all of 24 seconds. It was June 19, 2025, the seventh day of the so-called “Twelve-Day War” between Israel and Iran and the first day of summer vacation, so traffic was sparse on Hamdan’s morning commute along Interstate 90 near Rocky River, Ohio, when at around 9:20 a.m. he noticed a black Dodge Ram that looked li

Last week, I reported that Seth Moulton, who is challenging incumbent Sen. Ed Markey for the Massachusetts Democratic Senate nomination, was given a sweetheart opportunity to buy into three lucrative defense-related stocks not available to the general public. Moulton is a top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. At last Monday’s debate with Markey, the second of three debates between now and the September 1 primary, Moulton claimed that these were really his wife’s investments, and

An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody. The Trump administration gave Our Rescue a no-bid $244,034,658 contract on August 7, according to the federal award notice posted late Friday night. The deal floods the organization with seven times the amount of money it had in 2025, according to its mos

Congress is scheduled for about three more weeks of work between now and the midterm elections, none of it before mid-September. Early Saturday morning, the Senate wrapped up its work for the summer, leaving a large to-do list for that brief pre-election period, when traditionally parties in power don’t want to vote on anything controversial if they can help it. Not only is it unlikely that the entire legislative pileup would be resolved before the election, but some of it—like the SAVE Ameri