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(WASHINGTON) — In a rare appearance on C-SPAN on Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson heard from one military mom who begged him to bring the House back to session to pass a standalone bill to provide military troops pay during the government shutdown.

The person was identified on the call as “Samantha” — a Republican from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, who said she’s “very disappointed” with the Republican Party over the shutdown.

She said her “kids could die” if her family experiences a lapse in pay on Oct. 15.

If a government shutdown continues into next week and Congress does not pass a measure to pay the troops or reopen the government, that date will mark the first time in recent history when service members missed a paycheck amid a shutdown.

“I think that it is awful, and the audacity of someone who makes six figures a year to do this to military families is insane,” Samantha told Johnson.

She acknowledged feeling “very shaky” over the situation.

“Just want you to hear a little bit about my family. I have two medically fragile children. I have a husband who actively serves this country. He suffers from PTSD from his two tours in Afghanistan,” she said during the call. “If we see a lapse in pay come the 15th, my children do not get to get the medication that’s needed for them to live their life, because we live paycheck to paycheck.”

She pressed Johnson on the standalone bill.

“I’m begging you to pass this legislation. My kids could die,” Samantha said. “We don’t have the credit because of the medical bills that I have to pay regularly. You could stop this, and you could be the one that could say military is getting paid.”

The speaker — a Republican — expressed sympathy for Samantha and her family.

“Samantha, I’m so sorry to hear about your situation,” Johnson said, adding stories like hers is “what keeps me up at night.”

“The reason I’ve been so angry this week, and they’ve been calling me out on media — ‘Johnson’s angry.’ I am angry because of situations just like yours,” the speaker said.

However, when asked at a news conference in the Capitol on Wednesday if he would bring the House back to session and move a bill on the floor to pay military troops if the shutdown drags into next week, Johnson suggested he would not do so. 

“We already had that vote. It’s called the [continuing resolution],” Johnson said at the news conference, referring the House GOP stopgap bill to fund the government until Nov. 21. The measure has failed to advance in the Senate.

Johnson also pointed to the continuing resolution while speaking with Samantha, arguing another vote on the floor to pay the troops would also fail in the Senate.

“We had a vote to pay the troops. It was the continuing resolution three weeks ago. Every single Republican but two voted to keep the government open so that your paycheck can flow. Every Democrat in the House, except for one, voted to close it. The Democrats are the ones that are preventing you from getting a check,” Johnson said.

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(WASHINGTON) — In two courthouses on opposite sides of the country, Donald Trump’s attempt to send troops into Democratic-led cities will face a critical legal test on Thursday.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is set to hold oral arguments at noon on whether to lift a lower court’s order blocking the deployment of troops into Portland, while a District Judge in Chicago has a hearing at the same time to consider stopping the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois.

The dueling hearings sets the stage for one of the most high-profile legal battles since President Trump took office, as local governments turn to the courts to stop what some judges have described as blurring of the line between military and civilian rule.

Chicago
Ahead of the Chicago hearing, U.S. District Judge April Perry set a midnight deadline for the Trump administration to confirm when National Guard troops are set to arrive in Illinois, where they are set to be deployed and the scope of their activities.

Lawyers for the city of Chicago and state of Illinois have argued that the deployment of National Guardsmen will decrease public safety, exacerbate tensions in the city and infringe on the state’s sovereignty.

“By design, state and local governments operate closer to the people they serve, allowing them to tailor their activities to their communities’ needs. Federalism is not merely an administrative arrangement; it is a structural protection of liberty,” they wrote in a filing. “When the federal government assumes a role traditionally reserved to the States, it blurs the constitutional lines that define who is responsible for public safety.”

Portland
Meanwhile, as the Chicago hearing takes place, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments about whether to lift a lower court’s order blocking the deployment of 200 federalized members of the Oregon National Guard into Portland.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit issued an administrative stay of that order to preserve the status quo as the lawsuit moves through the court.

Oregon argues that the deployment of troops is “part of a nationwide campaign to assimilate the military into civilian law enforcement” and is based on “inaccurate information” about the conditions in Portland.

“Defendants’ nearly limitless conception [the law] would give the President discretion to repeat this experiment in response to other ordinary, nonviolent acts of civil disobedience across our Nation. The public interest is served by a judicial order preserving the rule of law in the face of unprecedented and unlawful Executive action that threatens grave and irreparable damage to our State and the Nation,” lawyers for the state said in a recent filing.

A federal judge on Sunday expanded her order to bar any state’s National Guard from entering Portland after concluding that the Trump administration was attempting to work around her temporary restraining order by using troops from other states.

That second order has not been formally appealed yet, although the broader issue may arise during the hearing as the Trump administration challenges judicial limits on the president’s authority to deploy the National Guard.

“Congress did not impose these limits on the President’s authority to federalize the Guard, nor did it authorize the federal courts to second-guess the President’s judgment about when and where to call up the Guard to reinforce the regular forces in response to sustained and widespread violent resistance to federal law enforcement,” lawyers for the Trump administration wrote in a filing earlier this week.

In an amicus brief filed on Thursday, a group of former secretaries of the Army and Navy and retired four-star admirals and generals encouraged Judge Perry to express caution about the broader use of the National Guard in domestic operations.

“Domestic deployments that fail to adhere to [Posse Comitatus Act] threaten the Guard’s core national security and disaster relief missions; place deployed personnel in fraught situations for which they lack specific training, thus posing safety concerns for servicemembers and the public alike; and risk inappropriately politicizing the military, creating additional risks to recruitment, retention, morale, and cohesion of the force,” lawyers for the former military leaders wrote.

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(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.

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(WASHINGTON) — A majority of the Supreme Court signaled on Wednesday that it would allow candidates for federal office to more freely challenge state elections laws without having to prove that the rules would significantly harm their chance of winning.

The case has the potential to clear the way for a wave of legal challenges ahead of the midterm elections at a time when many Republicans and allies of President Donald Trump hope to roll back laws that allow the counting of late-arriving mail-in ballots and other voter accommodations. 

During oral arguments on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by Illinois Congressman Michael Bost, the justices appeared open to letting him contest a state law that allows the counting of mail-in ballots up to 14 days after voting ends, provided they were postmarked on or before election day. 

Bost’s lawsuit was originally thrown out after a federal district and appeals court concluded he lacked a large-enough stake in the election to establish a right to bring a lawsuit. The eight-term Republican won 75% of the vote in 2022 and 74% in 2024.

To bring a lawsuit in federal court, a plaintiff generally needs to establish that a particular action injures them, that the action stemmed from the person he or she is suing, and that the court’s solution would resolve the harm. 

Bost’s attorney Paul Clement argued before the justices that candidates – regardless of the outcome – are not “mere bystanders” in an election and spend “untold time and energy” on their campaigns, giving them a concrete interest in accurate vote tallies.

“If the campaign is going to be two weeks longer, you’ve got to keep the campaign staff together for two weeks longer, and that’s going to be more expensive,” Clement argued. 

Preventing Bost’s lawsuit from moving forward, Clement argued, would turn the “federal courts into federal prognosticators.”

All of the Court’s conservative members appeared receptive to Clement’s argument, and even some of the Court’s liberal justices signaled a willingness to embrace a middle ground advocated by the Trump administration. 

“Let me ask about the pocketbook injury,” Justice Samuel Alito said of Bost’s right to sue. “Why isn’t that straightforward?” 

Alito also suggested that a difference in a vote count from the contested ballots would also be sufficient basis to bring a case.  “Isn’t a smaller margin of victory an injury in fact?” he asked Illinois Solicitor General Jane Notz, who was defending the law. 

“Unless it’s coupled with something else, a smaller margin of victory has no real-world consequence,” Notz said. 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh voiced concern about steering more election law challenges until after an election which could in turn disenfranchise voters and create “chaos.” 

“So let’s say the losing candidate sues, challenging this rule…and the Court, post-election, finds it illegal. We faced this in 2020 in some of our many cases pre-election,” Kavanaugh asked. “What’s the remedy?” 

Chief Justice John Roberts echoed similar concerns that curtailing lawsuits based on a more stringent view of candidate standing would result in lawsuits being filed closer to elections during the “most fraught time to be involved in politics.” 

“What you’re sketching out for us is a potential disaster,” he said. 

Justice Elena Kagan seemed open to a middle ground that could allow Bost to pursue his case without automatically setting a precedent that would give standing to any candidate who wants to challenge any election rule for any reason. 

She suggested that the Court could require a candidate to claim “substantial risk” that a new election law would put him or her at an “electoral disadvantage” compared to the old rule. 

“What you have is a voting rule that harms somebody relative to what’s come before,” Kagan said.  

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was more circumspect about her views. 

“Our case law and our standing law requires some form of substantial harm that can be articulated and shown. And what you’re talking about is a desire to implement the law with a generalized grievance because it doesn’t really particularly harm you,” Sotomayor said. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the most skeptical of Bost’s position, openly questioning whether a simple difference in vote margin constitutes harm to a candidate and casting doubt on the view that spending money to monitor the counting of ballots was a mandatory expense. 

“I’m a little concerned about in your argument is the idea that a candidate who wins and who wins by some margin is harmed by a regulation of this nature because of the potential decrease in his margin of victory. I don’t understand the harm that necessarily comes from that,” Jackson said. “You might be disappointed, but that’s usually not what we look at when we’re determining whether or not someone is actually harmed.” 

A decision in favor of Bost would not only revive his challenge to mail-in ballot counting but also widen the ability of any candidate for federal office to sue over voting policies ahead of Election Day. 

“The stakes of this case are not just about the standing rules, it’s about how candidates, political parties, and even voters, think about challenging the rules governing elections going forward,” said Matthew Shapanka, an election law expert at Covington & Burling LLC. 

“It’s also about how courts intervene in elections, and whether it’s appropriate for courts to have to make judgments about how strong a candidate is or how likely they are to win or lose, when deciding whether to hear a case about the constitutionality or legality of an election rule,” Shapanka said.  

The case, Bost v. Illinois Board of Elections, is expected to be decided by the end of June 2026. 

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