CBP asks judge for more time to work on tariff refunds

(WASHINGTON) — While the Democratic National Committee chose not to release its after-action report on the 2024 election, one prominent Democratic group is sharing feedback from a group of influential voters.

To some of them, Democrats can seem condescending, elitist and out-of-touch. And to win them over, candidates don’t need to take a specific policy position, but should communicate directly, authentically and with empathy.

Drawn from in-depth interviews and focus groups with more than 100 voters from battleground House districts and states, the “Baseline Report” released by MD PAC, a political action committee working to reshape Democratic Party, aims to help candidates and campaigns connect with voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 and either voted for Donald Trump or stayed home four years later.

The organization is affiliated with Majority Democrats, one of several groups working with candidates to remake and redefine the party’s image ahead of the midterms.

 “It’s not exactly a state secret that something went very wrong for Democrats in 2024,” Lis Smith, a senior adviser to Majority Democrats, told ABC News. “The responsible thing isn’t to bury our heads in the sand, it’s to figure out how to win their votes so we can move forward.”

Across the entire cohort, voters shared a sense of exhaustion and emotional burnout. They view both Democrats and Republicans skeptically, and they feel “unseen, unheard, and unrepresented by the federal government,” the group notes in its report.

According to the analysis and the group’s briefing on the findings, voters across the cohort felt a sense of economic strain, and a fear that the “floor could drop at any time,” as one of them told the group.

In 2024, Trump and Republicans won over a larger share of voters without college degrees, performing 4 points better than he did in 2020 among voters who are more economically vulnerable, according to ABC News exit polls.

Republicans also won more than half of voters whose total family income in 2023 was between $30,000 and $49,999, and $50,000 to $99,999, according to ABC News exit polls for the House of Representatives in 2024.

Smith recalled a conversation with a Democratic senator after the 2024 election that underscored how the party didn’t connect with voters’ concerns about the economy.

“They told me, ‘I would hear from voters about price of eggs and I thought it was a Fox News talking point,'” she said. “That suggested to me that a lot of members of Congress and their staffs are insulated from what voters are feeling. And this is a way to break through that.”

At a time when Democrats are grappling over the party’s positions on the U.S. relationship with Israel and whether to call for the abolishing or reform of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Majority Democrats’ report doesn’t recommend a specific set of positions for Democrats to adopt.  

“Voters were not demanding ideological purity. They expected leaders to be
flawed, change their minds, or even contradict themselves. What mattered was why — and whether the shift seemed honest,” the report reads.

While the report doesn’t dig into what went wrong for the party in 2024 and how Biden’s unsuccessful run for a second term impacted the fall results, the voters who participated expressed a desire to see politicians focus on issues that matter to them and show a willingness to disagree with their party.

“When voters were overwhelmingly telling us Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection, the Democratic powers that be responded, ‘Don’t believe your lying eyes,'” Smith said.

She also pointed to Democrats’ defending the Biden administration’s economic record by saying inflation was lower in the U.S. than in other countries.

“Democrats came off too often as defenders of the status quo,” Smith said. “That missed the mark, and going forward what we recommend is that Democrats understand the real, deep frustrations with economic and political systems.”

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(NEW YORK) — President Donald Trump’s redistricting push to preserve a Republican majority in Congress and allied voting rights cases in Texas and Louisiana could wipe out nearly a third of the 62-member Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) if all the electoral and judicial dominoes fall his way.

Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who has served 11 terms in the House, called the efforts as “blind, and sometimes even mean-spirited, political decisions that those who perpetuate it could easily deny it.”

Cleaver’s district is one of those in the crosshairs of Trump’s march to enlist statehouses and the courts to increase Republican seats in Congress at the expense of Democrats — many longstanding, dozens of them Black and Brown.

“There are probably some good and decent people who, but for their cult-like political attitudes, would not like something like this to happen,” Cleaver added as he tried to make sense of how he and his district are threatened by what he says is a double-barreled salvo aimed at the Voting Rights Act and state legislatures.

Cleaver’s senior colleague from South Carolina was more blunt.

“These are people who are trying to rig the system, making it very clear that there are certain people who will not be represented in Congress,” said Democratic Rep. James E. Clyburn, who has worn multiple House leadership titles along with being a Presidential Medal of Freedom holder. He has represented the Palmetto State since 1993 and, like Cleaver, once led the CBC — a staple of Capitol Hill politics since 1971.

On Monday, a coalition of voters of color and civil rights advocates will ask the Supreme Court to maintain a lower court’s ruling that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s redrawn map is an illegal racial gerrymander.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the lower court’s order last week.

The Texas maps were set in motion by Abbott at the behest of Trump, who has openly called on Republican-controlled statehouses and governors to pass maps so that his party gains more seats and maintains control of Congress.

“A very simple redrawing; we pick up five seats. And we have a couple of other states where we’ll pick up seats also,” Trump said of Texas and other efforts in July.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act
The effect of the new maps in Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere puts at risk so-called “majority-minority” seats made possible by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents any voting procedure or practice which results in a denial of the right to vote using race, color, or even language minority status.

It is also the main legal tool used to challenge election laws, like district maps, which may have a discriminatory result, even if that wasn’t the intent.

Such a challenge under Section 2 may lead to the creation of a majority-minority district where a racial minority group makes up the majority of the voting-age population. The goal in the case of such a district is to give the minority, racial or language group a realistic chance to elect the representative of their choice.

Many of those majority-minority districts are held by African American and Latina/Latino members. Some political and legal analysts say up to 19 members of the CBC stand to be wiped out.

Cleaver, whose Kansas City-area district would be cut in two in a redrawn Missouri map, told ABC News that the effort is part of an overall step backward when it comes to racial representation.

“We are just tearing apart a district in order to satisfy someone’s desire for reelection,” Cleaver told ABC News in September.

Clyburn said “It’s pretty clear what it’s about: What they’re trying to do now is render Section 2 ineffective.”

He added, “You got to hope that the Supreme Court will not take it up … The Supreme Court can stay out of it, and then what the law court has already done, it will stand. And there are a lot of people who think that may be the case.

“I hope the Supreme Court collectively will come to understand that they have unleashed severe threats to those constitutional principles that have kept this country together for all of these years.”

Louisiana’s congressional map was redrawn in 2022 because it violated the Voting Rights Act Section 2 by discriminating against African American voters.

The Pelican State went back to the drawing board to create a new map to follow the law. The majority-minority districts are now in front of the Supreme Court as to whether they violate the Constitution.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, called that challenge “specious and wrong.”

Republicans contend their redrawn maps are not about race but are driven by a desire for partisan advantage — something the Supreme Court has ruled is constitutional.

Abbott defended Texas’ redistricting effort, saying race had nothing to do with it and calling a lower court decision “clearly erroneous.”

“The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences — and for no other reason,” Abbott said in a statement. “Any claim that these maps are discriminatory is absurd and unsupported by the testimony offered during ten days of hearings. This ruling is clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.”

Nelson said “Despite the Supreme Court’s permissiveness around partisan gerrymandering, this certainly is unconstitutional and is a case that they take up. I think the three-judge panel was quite clear on what the violations were. It was clear from the very beginning that the intention is to dilute the voting power of Black and Latino communities in Texas.”

Protecting vulnerable members
Cleaver acknowledged the reality of fighting it out in state legislatures.

“We’re minorities politically. So, it’s not like we can submit a piece of legislation to make it right,” Cleaver told ABC News. “We’re going to lose on all of the votes.”

He said Rep. Gregory Meeks, chair of the CBC’s political action committee CBC-PAC, has identified vulnerable members who the group aims to put on a “protection plan.” Some of those members include Louisiana Reps. Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, Alabama Reps. Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures, Georgia Rep. Lucy McBath, Texas Reps. Al Green, Marc Veasey and Jasmine Crockett, Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson, Florida Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Clyburn.

The CBC-PAC will raise money for candidates who are “fighting for survival in these places where they were redistricted and left to win in a district that’s not normally responsive to us,” Cleaver said.  

Members of other ethnic groups who are vulnerable include Texas Reps. Vicente Gonzalez, Joaquin Castro and Julie Johnson.

Cleaver said campaigning in the proposed new districts amounts to surrender.

“If you start saying, ‘I want to go out and start campaigning in the proposed district,’ you are actually playing right into the hands of the people who are trying to eliminate you. If we think we’re right, we ought to act like we are right,” he said.

Clyburn, a big ground-game supporter, backs efforts to pass referendums such as one building signature support in Missouri to block the new congressional map recently passed and signed by Gov. Mike Kehoe. The new map takes effect in early December, or 90 days after the end of the state’s legislative session, unless opponents collect enough signatures to put the new map to a vote.

However, the effort by referendum advocacy group People over Politicians, which claims it has the necessary signatures to put the new map to a vote is being challenged in court by secretary of state and the state General Assembly, which contends on constitutional grounds that the legislature’s authority over redistricting cannot be overturned by referendum.

People over Politicians says the Republican-led government’s argument is an attempt to justify a “power grab. A federal judge he’ll the matter by Dec. 9, two days before the deadline for gathering signatures for a referendum.

Until then, Cleaver is comforted by those fighting on his behalf which includes an unusual and large coalition of multi-racial clergy, grassroots activists and business leaders who normally are silent. “So, you know we’re not, those of us who are in office. We’re not alone. We’re not alone.”

Effect of striking down majority-minority districts
So, what, at the end of the day, do the Louisiana and Texas Voting Rights Act-related cases mean for the law itself if majority-minority districts are struck down by the Supreme Court? Nelson explains both the practical and constitutional stakes.

Nelson said there are up to 19 districts that have been protected by or drawn in response to the Voting Rights Act. She explained the practical and constitutional stakes if majority-minority districts are struck down by the Supreme Court:

“And we expect that, you know, states that are opposed to, you know, shared power among people of all races and backgrounds will leap at the opportunity to redraw maps in a way that shuts out a significant portion of our electorate from ever being able to elect candidates of their choice.”

Nelson said such a move by the court “would be a colossal undercutting of power that would then translate into even more failed policies for some of the most vulnerable communities in our country. So the impact would be absolutely devastating,” she said. “This is not just, you know, political warfare or partisan competition. This is making a mockery of a representative democracy when you don’t have fair representation.”

Clyburn for his part would rather mobilize than wait for parties out of his control to act.

“We need to be involved, to turn out the vote and do what we can to make sure that people get to the polls, and hopefully do what is necessary to stop the redistricting at the polling places. That’s what we can do,” he said. “To sit around wringing our hands about what the court may or may not do is a waste of time, energy, and, I think, emotions.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Embattled Rep. Tony Gonzales announced Thursday evening that he will no longer seek reelection in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, following calls from House Republican leadership to drop out of the race after the congressman admitted to having a relationship with a staffer.

“After deep reflection and with the support of my loving family, I have decided not to seek re-election while serving out the rest of this Congress with the same commitment I’ve always had to my district,” Gonzales wrote in a statement on X. “Through the rest of my term, I will continue fighting for my constituents, for whom I am eternally grateful.”

Gonzales’ statement touted various accomplishments from his three terms in Congress, with an emphasis on his “absolute dedication” to the U.S.

“My philosophy has never changed: do as much as you can, and always fight for the greater good,” he wrote.  

Gonzales’ announcement came the same day House Republican leadership on Thursday asked Gonzales to drop out of the race.

“The Ethics Committee has announced an investigation into Congressman Tony Gonzales’s conduct, and we urge them to act expeditiously,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Republican Whip Tom Emmer and Republican Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain said in a joint statement.

“Congressman Gonzales has said he will fully cooperate with the investigation. We have encouraged him to address these very serious allegations directly with his constituents and his colleagues. In the meantime, Leadership has asked Congressman Gonzales to withdraw from his race for re-election,” they added.

Johnson told reporters later that the GOP’s call for Gonzales to drop his reelection bid — rather than resign from Congress — amounts to “a death penalty” for Gonzales.

“Leadership put out a statement. It speaks for itself. We’ve encouraged him to drop out of the race for reelection,” Johnson said. “Politically, that’s a death penalty.”

Gonzales on Tuesday night advanced to a runoff primary election on May 26 against conservative activist Brandon Herrera.

The next day, Gonzales spoke with talk show host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo who asked if he had a relationship with his district director, Regina Santos-Aviles, who later died by suicide.

“Was there a relationship with this young lady, um, who was working in your office?” Pagliarulo asked Gonzales at the outset of the interview on Wednesday.

“I made a mistake, and I had a lapse in judgment, and there was a lack of faith, and I take full responsibility for those actions,” Gonzales answered. “Since then, I’ve reconciled with my wife Angel. I’ve asked God to forgive me, which he has. And my faith is as strong as ever. When you make mistakes like this, you know, it’s never easy. It humbles you.”

Gonzales said he looks forward to the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into the allegations.

The panel said it has established an investigative subcommittee to examine allegations that Gonzales “may have: (1) engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual employed in his congressional office; and/or (2) discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges.”

“I appreciate the opportunity to be able to provide all the facts and all the details that lead to exactly what occurred in the entire situation,” said Gonzales, who has declined to withdraw from his reelection bid.

The congressman had previously denied the relationship with Santos-Aviles.

Despite now admitting his relationship with her, Gonzales distanced himself from her death, claiming that he had not spoken with her since June of 2024, before she ultimately died the following year.

“You know, the facts are, I hadn’t spoken with Ms. Santos since June of 2024. She passed September of 2025. That was over a year ago. So, this is what I think is important as well — is this whole notion that I had anything to do with her death. I had absolutely nothing to do with her tragic passing. And in fact, I was shocked just as much as everyone else,” Gonzales said.

Congressional payroll records show that Santos-Aviles was still employed in Gonzales’ office on the date of her death, Sept. 14, 2025.

Gonzales insisted that Santos-Aviles was treated well in his office and showed no signs of distress leading up to her death, claiming that she was “thriving at work.”

“I’ve always highlighted the great work that she had done for our office and the community,” Gonzales said, before pinning blame on the media coverage of the matter.

ABC News previously obtained explicit text messages from May of 2024 appearing to show Gonzales repeatedly request photos and ask Santos-Aviles about her sexual preferences.

Asked by Pagliarulo about the text messages, Gonzales insisted that there is “a lot more to the story that isn’t out there,” without commenting further on the content of any other communications with Santos-Aviles.

Asked if he understands the issues surrounding a boss having a relationship with his subordinate, Gonzales acknowledged that it’s an “important” and “serious issue that we have to talk about,” before again emphasizing the need for “all the facts.”

ABC News has obtained the Uvalde police report on Santos-Aviles death through a records request, but the report has not been posted publicly.

During Wednesday’s interview, Gonzales brushed off concerns from fellow House Republicans that have called for his resignation, saying, “you’re always going to have political enemies.”

“I don’t speak with those two on a regular basis, that we operate in different … groups, if you will,” Gonzales said, referring to Republican Reps. Nancy Mace and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who have voiced concerns over the allegations against him. “But what I will say is you can never let those people slow you down in any form or fashion.”

Gonzales, who maintains President Donald Trump’s endorsement despite the allegations and ethics inquiry, said he has not spoken directly with Trump about the matter.

“I appreciate the president’s support,” Gonzales said.

“I was just actually in Corpus [Christi] when he came down to Texas. That was an incredible event. Everybody was energized,” Gonzales added, referring to the president’s trip last week where Trump gave the congressman a shoutout and congratulated him before the crowd.

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