Delaware District Judge To Trump: “No Voting Data For You”:
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice that sought Delaware’s unredacted voter registration data.
The justice department had filed suit in December seeking a court order to compel state Elections Commissioner Anthony Albence to produce those records after the state refused the federal government’s July 2025 request to voluntarily hand over the data.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Andrews said the federal government failed to make its case that it needed all of Delaware’s voter information to ensure compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The data included Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses.
Overreach, much?:
Tuesday’s legal decision is the DOJ’s latest defeat in its pursuit to obtain sensitive information on voters, said Elisabeth Frost, litigation chair at Elias Law Group, in a statement.
Frost represented Beth Jennings, director of Widener University’s Delaware Law School, and Middletown resident Gemma Lowery. They, along with several Delaware nonprofit organizations, were allowed to intervene in the case.
“With today’s ruling, every single one of the federal district courts with active cases — 28 in total — has rejected the attempt by President Trump’s Department of Justice to turn a law intended to protect civil rights into a tool to seize Americans’ private voter data,” she said.
Workforce Shortages Threaten Delaware Mental Health Care Services:
Mental healthcare in Delaware looked a lot different 15 years ago.
Delawareans had been chronically hospitalized within a state-run psychiatric facility, where they would often cycle in and out of treatment more than a dozen times with little effect.
That facility, the Delaware Psychiatric Center near New Castle, had also faced its own problems. Multiple employees were convicted of abusing patients, and the hospital faced years of scandals ranging from employee retaliation to a revolving door of leadership.
The situation deteriorated so much that the federal government sued Delaware in 2011, claiming it had simply warehoused residents with mental illness, providing them no meaningful on-ramp back into society.
At the time, the complaint warned that more than 17,000 Delawareans managing severe mental health issues, or nearly 2% of the state’s population, were at risk of “unnecessary institutionalization.”
Delaware and the federal government quickly settled that lawsuit, and Delaware was forced to reimagine its mental health ecosystem. The state developed robust services meant to keep people out of a never-ending cycle of hospitalization.
More housing for those with severe mental illness, stabilization centers meant to keep people out of emergency rooms and psychiatric hospitals, group homes for those with long-term care needs, and mobile crisis units fanned out across the state to reduce unnecessary inpatient admissions.
And by the end of 2016, those services had demonstrated a positive impact on residents. Robert Bernstein, an outside court monitor responsible for holding Delaware accountable to the terms of the settlement agreement, said that while the state’s new systems weren’t perfect, they made “substantial progress” in supporting those with mental illness.
A decade later, these programs still support Delawareans, but a Spotlight Delaware investigation found that some are beginning to falter.
Mobile crisis units are responding to a fraction of the calls they used to and staffing vacancies have plagued the state agency responsible for managing mental health services.
According to experts, when people have poor experiences with mental health programs, they are unlikely to seek out care again.
A spokesperson for the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health (DSAMH) acknowledged many of these findings, chiefly that staffing shortages have challenged its services.
But the state also says it is making investments to close those staffing gaps, and that it is one of many states across the country battling with turnover and vacancies.
Delaware is not alone in its struggle to staff its programs. Across the country, states have reported shortages within many of their mental health programs.
Amy Watson, a professor at Wayne State University in Michigan, said it is very common in state health departments to struggle to find and retain staff.
Watson also said pay often does not match the difficulty of the crisis work and that training often lacks for those in the most intense of situations.
Additionally, she said many of the roles require extra education, like a master’s degree, and for those with the additional education, they may not always want to work the difficult hours that come with working in crisis services.
“The hardest jobs are done by the least-educated, lowest-paid people,” Watson said.
In the NRI report examining nationwide staffing shortages, it pointed to some common initiatives between states to grow their mental health workforces. Among them were tuition reimbursement, hiring bonuses, as well as licensure support.
But the report said not every state had those initiatives, and Delaware only offers a few programs like tuition reimbursement and some apprenticeships.
My takeaway from this excellent article?: There appear to be no easy fixes. However, the General Assembly is now populated with several elected officials with expertise and interest in this issue. Here’s hoping that they can help address this problem.
Rethugs Reject Hegseth Impeachment Effort. All D’s voted for it. Only one R, the sponsor Thomas Massie, joined them. Guess what? All this changes in January…assuming, that is, that D’s show up:
The 11 Dems who did not vote were: Julia Brownley (CA), Luis Correa (CA), Laura Gillen (NY), Steven Horsford (NV), Jonathan Jackson (IL), Nancy Pelosi (CA), Brittany Pettersen (CO), Melanie Stansbury (MN), Haley Stevens (MI) (they wouldn’t let her out of the Rethug cloak room?), Marilyn Strickland (WA), & Frederica Wilson (FL).
An End To The Christian Right? The answer, at least in Texas, appears to be ‘Yes’:
With the blue tsunami that inundated Texas on Election Day, the Christian right has lost the state that made it one of the most powerful forces in modern American politics. Since forging an unbreakable pact with the Republican Party in the Reagan era, for decades the Christian right purposefully notched its national successes by building robust state-level legislative and electoral machinery across the country. Texas was the crown jewel of this strategy, where operatives and elected officials together hatched plans to kill off church-state separation, Christianize the public schools, criminalize abortion, and eviscerate the civil rights of LGBTQ people.
For three decades, Republicans with close ties with the Christian right — George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and the outgoing Greg Abbott — have occupied the governor’s mansion. The latter two, in particular, have worked hand in glove with the Christian right to make the country’s second most populous state the proving ground for a white Christian nationalist agenda. Abbott’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who was first elected to the office in 2014, wielded enormous power over the state legislature to enact it. Like Abbott, he went down to defeat, on Tuesday, losing, like Abbott, to a woman.
This article is worth a deep dive to see just how integrated the Christian Right became with the government of Texas. BTW, here’s a tidbit for you to enjoy:
As it became clear that the Supreme Court would strike down bans on same sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Texas once again became the bellwether for finding new and devious ways to deprive LGBTQ people of their rights. In just one example, Ken Paxton, the outgoing attorney general who was handily defeated by James Talarico in the U.S. Senate race, spearheaded this effort by immediately issuing a legal opinion giving county clerks the right to refuse to issue same-sex couples marriage licenses. Accusing the U.S. Supreme Court of “manufacturing” the right to marriage equality, he wrote that “Texas must speak with one voice against this lawlessness.”
(On Tuesday, Texas voters elected Maggie Ellis chief justice of the state supreme court, the first woman elected to the post, and the first out LGBTQ person to be elected to statewide office.)
Is ‘The New South’ For Real This Time?:
The elections of 2026 could be remembered as the moment when the Republican Party’s “red wall” of Southern states came tumbling down.
Recall that Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 set off alarms among Democrats when he won the industrial states in the “blue wall” that had rejected G.O.P. nominees over the previous 24 years. Republicans now have to worry that their Southern bastion is gone, meaning that political competition will spread far beyond a narrow collection of swing states that have dominated recent elections.
The Democrats’ 2026 Southern coalition reflects a potentially stable philosophical alliance, marked by economic populism that appeals across racial lines, a form of cultural moderation that emphasizes respect for religious voters and a passionate commitment to civil rights.
The implications of this coalition’s emergence are large. The national movement of people southward in recent decades, which Republicans thought would give them long-term advantages in the Electoral College and Congress, has transformed the places they were counting on into battlegrounds.
Historically, as former Representative David Price of North Carolina told me, he and other analysts tended to divide the rapidly changing “upper South” from a more traditional “lower South.”
States such as North Carolina and Virginia, Mr. Price said, had begun to break away from old Southern patterns long ago, because of their large influx of Northern migrants and diverse economies. Georgia shifted next, owing to many of the same factors, augmented by a significant remigration of Northern Black voters to the South.
But Mr. Colom’s Mississippi breakthrough — if he prevails, he’ll be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction — suggests that the upper and lower South distinction could turn obsolete as the forces pushing Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia the Democrats’ way become, as Mr. Price put it, “universal” across the region.
OK. We know it’s only one election. But I admit that my paucity of imagination did not anticipate what looks like it well could be a ‘realignment’ election. We must not allow a paucity of imagination to self-limit what this could mean.
What do you want to talk about?
