DL Open Thread: Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Rep. Mara Gorman To Run For Sen. Sokola’s Seat. Some developments just won’t keep until the Delaware Political Weekly:
Newark-area Democratic Rep. Mara Gorman announced Monday that she will run for Delaware’s 8th Senate District seat, seeking to succeed Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola, who announced last week that he will not run for re-election.
Gorman’s decision makes her the first prominent candidate to toss her hat in the ring to replace Sokola, currently the longest-serving member of the state legislature, though she had not officially filed as of Tuesday afternoon. It also means her current seat representing the 23rd House District will be up for grabs.
Gorman has been the primary sponsor of 11 bills so far in her first term, and written amendments for a handful of others.
Most notably, Gorman sponsored a package of four bills aimed at federal immigration enforcement activity, including House Bill 182, which bans Delaware law enforcement agencies from formally partnering with ICE.
Gorman said she hopes to continue advocating for similar legislation if elected to the Senate. It is something that will continue to be more necessary than ever, she said, as Democrats at the state level work to blunt the impacts of policy decisions by the Trump administration.
Gorman also said she would like to “play a little more offense” on some of the issues impacting residents, saying specifically that she wants to increase the housing stock in the state, and drive down health care costs. Gorman further said she would like to find ways to expand Delaware’s economic engine beyond its corporate franchise.
Gorman also said, if elected, she wants to focus on expanding a pipeline for local journalism to thrive in Delaware and finding innovative ways to use the arts as an economic driver in the state.
Despite a couple of (what I see as) missteps in her first term, I think she’d be a worthy successor to Dave in that Senate district.
‘God Is Very Proud’. About Trump’s First Year. Anybody seen God and Trump at the same place at the same time?:
His staff had printed out a 31-page list of his accomplishments, but President Trump had other ideas for how he wanted to mark the anniversary of his return to office.
Standing at the lectern in the White House’s James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, Mr. Trump flipped quickly through the paperwork and tossed it on the floor.
Then he held court — airing old grievances, attacking perceived enemies, threatening allies — for roughly one hour 45 minutes.
“I think God is very proud of the job I’ve done,” Mr. Trump said as he neared the end of his remarks.
Yet another sane pronouncement from Our Hitler:
Mr. Trump explained why he had tied his recent threats to take over Greenland to his resentment that he had not won the Nobel Peace Prize. He had told Norway’s prime minister: “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, OK? It’s in Norway!” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday. The award is, in fact, awarded by the independent Norwegian Nobel Institute.
“They’ll say, ‘We have nothing to do with it.’ It’s a joke. They’ve lost such prestige,” Mr. Trump said of Norway’s government.
Halligan Exits. She served illegally for as long as she could:
Lindsey Halligan, a Trump administration lawyer who was named head of a key U.S. attorney’s office in Virginia last year with instructions to seek criminal charges against President Donald Trump’s perceived political adversaries, left her post at the Justice Department on Tuesday.
Halligan’s departure followed a pair of extraordinary moves by two federal judges who issued court orders hours earlier saying they intended to replace Halligan at the helm of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia and threatening disciplinary sanctions for any government lawyer who continued to refer to her as U.S. attorney in legal filings.
Meet The New Food Pyramid–An Environmental Disaster…:
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef, and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
…Which Fits Right In With The EPA’s Latest Outrage:
Last week, the E.P.A. stopped estimating the monetary value of lives saved when setting limits on two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone. Instead, the agency is calculating only the costs to companies of complying with pollution regulations.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, said in an email. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, E.P.A. is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
It’s a drastic change to the way the government weighs the costs of curbing air pollution against the benefits to public health and the environment. It could lead to looser controls on pollutants from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial sites across the country, resulting in dirtier air.
And it appears to shelve a powerful tool, known as the value of a statistical life, that agencies have used for decades in the cost-benefit analyses that justify new regulations.
Well, at least you now know what you’re worth.
WHYY Reports On The Wilmington Affordability Agenda:
Three Wilmington City Council members used the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to launch a comprehensive affordability agenda.
Coby Owens, Shané Darby, and Christian Willauer laid out a plan to help homeowners, renters and people experiencing homelessness by tackling high rents, water bill shutoffs and property reassessment errors.
“Our city is struggling, and I’ll be very blunt and honest about it,” he said. “Every single day, residents are waking up trying to figure out how to make ends meet. The message is clear across the board: Wilmington is becoming unaffordable for way too many people.”
The agenda includes introducing bills for City Council to consider this year and as part of the budget process.
What do you want to talk about?
Mara Gorman is as good as it gets. Criminal justice reform. Honed on educational policy. Good listener. Smart and steely without arrogance. ROY in ’25, could be MVP by ’30.
Ehh don’t get the Mara Gorman thing….shes alright. But we could do worse I guess…
Lotta wishcasting in that “things she’d like to do” section. We like to criticize Republicans for buying Trump’s bullshit promises, but we do the same thing.
If there were easy, or even moderately difficult, solutions to these problems we would have acted on them by now. If you think giving politicians control of health care spending is a good idea, ask yourself what Republicans would do if given that control.
Has anybody bothered looking at her legislative record? It’s not merely aspirational. She has prioritized and passed legislation, especially attuned to enabling Delaware to fight back against Trump’s insanity.
In just one year, she’s established herself as one of Delaware’s most thoughtful legislators. One who gets bills passed.
More on that record tomorrow in the Political Weekly.
Mara Gorman is not as good as it gets.
Thank you for your cogent, well-reasoned, analysis.
It’s no different from Mr. Manifold’s.