Hope turned to shock and anger on July 1, as Delaware labor leaders, who believed they were on the cusp of passing legislation they’d spent at least a decade pushing for, saw the House chamber adjourn without considering their bill.
“Every member in attendance at our July meeting was completely enraged by the fact that we didn’t even get a floor vote,” said James Ascione, treasurer of the local chapter of the International Union of Operating Engineers.
House Democrats running for reelection this year are facing a frustrated key constituency, who are prepared to make the midterms a challenging election cycle in hopes of reshaping the chamber.
The Delaware Building and Construction Trades Council, the umbrella organization for all of the state’s trade unions, has recently aggressively moved to try to oust several House Democrats it accuses of not supporting the legislation.
“They’re just half-assed Democrats, as far as I’m concerned,” council President James Maravelias said. “We need to find somebody that’s a true champion of unions and get them in.”
Can we pause right there? Yo, James, all of the building and construction trades guys who vote for Trump aren’t even ‘half-assed’ Democrats. They’re MAGAts.
Ascione said the bill was vital to Delaware construction unions, as PLAs are the “crown jewel of organized labor.”
Ascione sent a letter to House leaders on July 1, requesting the return of a $5,000 political donation. Speaker Melissa “Mimi” Minor-Brown has denied receiving that donation, but some say the letter could show evidence of pay to play.
Minor-Brown denied that Ascione gave the Delaware House Democrats PAC a $5,000 donation and that it would have had any impact on votes.
“Our members’ votes are not for sale,” she said in a statement. “We do not operate in a pay-to-play environment, and any suggestion that a political contribution entitles an organization to a particular vote is both false and offensive to the integrity of the legislative process.”
That is an outright lie. Democratic incumbents in the House and Senate are direct beneficiaries of their votes to throw out decades of Delaware corporate law in order to curry favor from Musk, Zuckerberg, and, more specifically, the corporate law firms who are bankrolling those same incumbents.
I want to make one more point before we move on–I doubt that many members of the trade unions read this blog. However, were I a member of a trade union, I’d be asking myself, “When was the last time that Maravelias spent our money on a successful competitive campaign?” I mean, all he’s succeeded in doing is making enemies needlessly. Just like he’s doing here.
A Louisiana state legislative committee was about to consider a bill in April 2024 when Richard Nelson, then the state’s revenue secretary, received an urgent message from Gov. Jeff Landry. Get the bill passed, the newly elected Republican governor told him, because they needed it for something else.
Mr. Nelson walked across a room in Baton Rouge’s towering State Capitol to the bill’s author, Chris Turner, a Republican state representative.
“‘Hey, we need to hijack your bill,’” Mr. Nelson told Mr. Turner. “I can’t really tell you what it’s about. All I can tell you is that it’s important.’”
Mr. Turner agreed. The bill had started out as a tax rebate for fiber-optic equipment. But when it was voted on by the state House of Representatives less than two months later, it had become a tax rebate for equipment used in data centers.
Mr. Turner had helped land the largest development in Louisiana’s history: A $50 billion data center for the Silicon Valley giant Meta that planners say could cover about six square miles and use seven times as much energy as New Orleans.
Meta wanted the rebate to build its data center in Richland Parish, an impoverished farming community in Louisiana’s northeast corner. The tech company also needed a secret deal done quickly, and state officials were eager to oblige.
Rewriting the bill was a critical part of a nine-month process that Meta used to cut deals behind the scenes, avoid local opposition and offload financial risk, according to interviews with more than 40 people and a review of corporate filings, tax records, property records and meeting transcripts.
The secrecy was agreed to by nearly everyone involved, from utility executives to the governor’s office to a local elected official who knew about the talks with Meta and sold 300 acres of his own property for the project.
The tax breaks, backroom negotiations and lack of public input do not appear to have broken any laws, but they raise ethics questions about the state’s negotiations with Meta, said Dane Ciolino, a professor of legal ethics at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.
“It goes to the basic, public confidence we need to have that state power is not being used to enrich insiders,” he said.
If that reminds you of what the Governor and General Assembly did in Delaware on behalf of Musk and Zuckerberg, dingdingding.
It’s becoming a cliche, but this administration has the kind of scandal that took up years of the Nixon administration on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis.
The latest emerges in a New York Times article flagging a court filing in a dispute between the federal government and researchers who work on grant-funded projects. In a stipulation, the administration admits that funds for various Biden-era clean energy projects were withheld from blue states, and blue states alone.
“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants),” it confesses.
Like much in this administration, the magnitude of the scandal is deadened somewhat by the fact that the White House Office of Management and Budget, under the direction of Russ Vought, has made a practice of finding creative and novel ways to impound congressionally appropriated funding, a topic TPM’s Emine Yücel has been diligently chronicling. Back in October 2025, Vought heavily insinuated what was going on with this specific funding by tweeting “$8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” adding that the projects “are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”
Elsewhere, the administration has withheld funds with the thinnest of justifications. Just last week, for example, the Trump administration announced it was withholding $1 billion in Medicaid funds from California and Minnesota, alleging fraud.
But the stipulation filed in court earlier this month contains no such fig leaf. It makes what is going on explicit. ”The inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State,” it says.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MA) called it an “imbecilic deep betrayal of America.”
It’s pretty clear that the octogenarian president is experiencing cognitive decline and had some kind of episode Sunday. It’s been evident throughout his second term as president, but as of late, he’s thrown a tablet across a room after a bad phone call with world leaders, rambled about the history of paper clips in the middle of a speech, and zoned out in the middle of a photo op. It’s a terrifying thought to realize that we still have two years of Trump occupying the Oval Office with his mental state only growing worse.
President Trump spent his entire Sunday on a bender, posting nonstop AI images to his Truth Social page for more than six hours.
It started at 11:16 a.m. with an AI image of CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins as transgender model Dylan Mulvaney holding cans of Bud Light, and escalated from there. Bruce Springsteen, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Representative Jerry Nadler, and Trump’s longtime nemesis Rosie O’Donnell were among those targeted in his posting binge. He also posted several flattering photos of himself in mock-up movie posters and, in one instance, standing next to former President John F. Kennedy.
None of the images had any text attached to them, and were interspersed with some of his campaign photos and pro-Iran war propaganda. At one point, he posted nine Iran war memes three times in a row in the span of just over an hour.
