Trump says he will go out with police, military to patrol DC Thursday night
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump announced that he is “going out” with police and military in Washington, D.C. on Thursday to oversee the surge in federal law enforcement and National Guard, who are responding to what he says is a crime emergency in the district.
“I’m going to be going out tonight, I think, with the police and, with the military, of course. So we’re going to do a job. The National Guard is great. They’ve done a fantastic job,” Trump told radio host Todd Starnes on Thursday.
The president mobilized the National Guard one week ago to assist the police, claiming crime was out of control.
The plan came a day after Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller visited the National Guard at Union Station, where they were drowned out with boos from protesters.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., conducts a news conference in the U.S. Capitol on the inclusion of solar tax credit legislation in reconciliation on Tuesday, September 28, 2021. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)/Jack Ciattarelli and Matt Servitto attend 2025 Paisan Con at The Williams Center on May 10, 2025 in Rutherford, New Jersey. (Photo by Bobby Bank/Getty Images)
(NEW JERSEY) — New Jersey’s gubernatorial candidates face off in their second debate, hosted by New York City’s WABC-TV and Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV less than a month out from Election Day.
Polling shows Democratic nominee Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, has an edge over Republican former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli. A recent survey from Quinnipiac shows Sherrill leading in a head-to-head matchup, 51%-42%.
This is not Ciattarelli’s first go around — he narrowly lost a bid to unseat Murphy in 2021. But this time, he faces wider margins and is expected to try to dodge Sherrill’s attempts to link Ciattarelli with President Donald Trump on every issue. Trump has endorsed Ciattarelli’s bid.
Outside groups have infused large sums of cash into this race. Democrats, looking to defend control as term-limited Phil Murphy leaves office, are writing fat checks: Greater Garden State, a super PAC supported by the Democratic Governors Association, reserved over $20 million in ads to support Sherrill. And the Democratic National Committee has invested $3 million into the governor’s race, a sum it says is its largest in an off-cycle race in New Jersey.
Republicans have thrown in far less: Restore New Jersey, a Republican Governors Association-backed group, invested $1 million in ads supporting Ciattarelli in September.
New Jersey has not elected the same party three straight terms since 1961, with affordability and taxes central to the race. Trump’s inroads with Jersey voters could be tested in November, as Republicans point to last year’s presidential results as a sign the state has gotten more favorable for the GOP.
Late last month, Sherrill ‘s unredacted military records were released by the National Archives that revealed she did not walk at graduation. In 1994, more than 130 Midshipmen were implicated in a cheating scandal. No documents released or obtained by news outlets have shown that Sherrill was involved in the cheating, but because she did not report her classmates, she was not permitted to walk at graduation.
CBS News, which was the first to report about the release of Sherrill’s unredacted military records, reported that the request came from Ciattarelli ally Nicholas De Gregorio, who was tasked with doing so by political operative Chris Russell.
Sherrill said this was a 30-year-old widely reported incident that does not reflect on her military service and accused the Trump administration of leaking the records in concert with the Ciattarelli campaign and asked for them to stop distributing them as they contained protected personal information.
Sherrill’s campaign communications director Sean Higgins said in a statement: “This disrespects the service of all military veterans, jeopardizes the safety of their records, and shows that Jack Ciattarelli will say or do anything to get elected, no matter the dishonor he brings upon himself — and that should frighten everyone.”
Ciattarelli disagreed.
“For eight years, Mikie Sherrill has built her entire political brand around her time at the Naval Academy and in the Navy, all the while concealing her involvement in the scandal and her punishment. The people of New Jersey deserve complete and total transparency,” the Ciattarelli campaign said in a statement.
Another likely animating issue in the debate will be the impacts of the government shutdown and White House funding freezes in the Garden State. The Hudson Tunnel Project, which White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought froze funding for on Oct. 1, is meant to expand rail links between New York City and New Jersey.
After the announcement, Sherrill slammed the Trump administration for “attacking” the project and wrote in a post on X that Ciatterelli “said there’s not a single issue where he disagrees with Trump, and he promised to never take them to court.”
Ciatterelli, meanwhile, told NJ Advance Media/NJ.com that the hold “doesn’t stop what’s going on today with regard to the construction. And I think it’s a large negotiation that’s taking place.”
-ABC’s Oren Oppenheim and Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. government shut down at midnight on Wednesday, beginning funding stoppages that are expected to ripple through federal agencies, disrupting many government services and putting perhaps tens of thousands out of work.
The closure came amid an bitter impasse between congressional Democrats and Republicans, who are backed by President Donald Trump, over whether an extension of federal funding should include health care provisions.
The Senate late on Tuesday rejected in a 55-45 vote a 7-week stopgap funding measure supported by Republicans that would have allowed the government to continue operations. That was their second attempt of the night, after voting on a bill supported by Democrats. Hours later, the shutdown began.
As the government closed, rhetoric became heightened from both sides of the aisle, with each party and their allies pointing the blame at their counterparts — each claiming the opposing party “owns” the shutdown.
“Democrats have officially voted to CLOSE the government,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, said on social media, following the Senate vote.
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said the shutdown amounted to “the clearest sign yet that Republicans are inept, incompetent, and lack any respect for the American people.”
Democrats mostly hung together to deny the votes necessary to keep the government funded as they continue to say that any funding solution must include health care related provisions. Several Democrats crossed party lines and voted in favor of the clean-funding bill.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said after the vote and prior to the shutdown that Democrats wanted to “sit down and negotiate, but the Republicans can’t do it in their partisan way, where they just say it’s our way or the highway.”
“It’s the Republicans who will be driving us straight towards a shutdown tonight, and at midnight, the American people will blame them for bringing the Federal Government to a halt,” he added.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris in social media post said, “Republicans are in charge of the White House, House, and Senate. This is their shutdown.”
Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters meanwhile pointed the blame at Democrats, saying they were “solely responsible” for the shutdown.
“Democrats are holding up critical funding for our veterans, seniors, law enforcement, and working families because they want to pass a far-left wish list costing more than $1 trillion,” he said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the committee, Sonali Patel, echoed Gruters, saying the Democrats in the Senate “caved to the far-left, played partisan politics, and forced this shutdown.”
“They own it,” Patel said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said at a press conference after Tuesday’s failed votes that Republicans are now in the hunt for a few additional Democrats to support their clean, short term funding bill after three Democrats defected during tonight’s vote.
Sens. John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto and Angus King — an independent who caucuses with Democrats — had bucked their party leader and voted with Republicans on a short-term funding bill aimed at keeping the government open for 7 more weeks.
Thune said he intends to bring that bill forward for a vote again tomorrow. And he believes more Democrats might be willing to support it.
“There are others out there, I think who don’t want to shut down the govt but who are being put in a position by their leadership that should make them, ought to make all of them very uncomfortable,” Thune said.
He added, “So we’ll see. I think that tonight was evidence that there was some movement there and will allow our democrat colleagues to have additional opportunities to vote on whether or not to keep the government open, or in the case of tomorrow now probably to open it back up.”
(WASHINGTON) — Justice Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should take a more critical approach to settled precedent, saying decided cases are not “the gospel” and suggesting some may have been based on “something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
Thomas made the comments during a rare public appearance Thursday evening at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., just over a week before the high court starts a new term that includes challenges to several major, longstanding decisions.
The Court is poised to revisit Humphrey’s Executor v U.S. — a 90-year precedent that limits a president’s ability to remove members of some independent federal agencies without cause. The justices will also consider whether to overturn Thornburg v Gingles, a landmark 1986 decision governing the use of race in redistricting under the Voting Rights Act.
For the first time, the Court is also considering a petition for writ of certiorari asking them to explicitly revisit and overturn the 2015 decision in Obergefell v Hodges, which extended marriage rights to same-sex couples.
“At some point we need to think about what we’re doing with stare decisis,” Thomas said Thursday, referring to the legal principle of abiding by previous decisions. “And it’s not some sort of talismanic deal where you can just say ‘stare decisis’ and not think, turn off the brain, right?”
The Court’s senior conservative suggested that some members of the Court over the years have blindly followed prior judgments, comparing them to passengers on a train.
“We never go to the front see who’s driving the train, where is it going. And you could go up there in the engine room, find it’s an orangutan driving the train, but you want to follow that just because it’s a train,” Thomas said.
“I don’t think that I have the gospel,” he said, “that any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel, and I do give perspective to the precedent. But it should — the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country, and our laws, and be based on something, not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
Thomas has long been an outspoken advocate for revisiting some of the Court’s significant landmark opinions. In a 2022 concurring opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health — which overturned Roe v Wade — Thomas urged his colleagues to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — cases involving rights to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and marriage.
