Republicans escalate their efforts to rein in judges: From the Politics Desk
Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
In today’s edition, we explore the latest way congressional Republicans are showing their loyalty to President Donald Trump: targeting the judiciary. Plus, Steve Kornacki writes that next week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race will test whether Democrats can maintain their Trump-era edge in off-year elections.
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— Adam Wollner
Republican escalate their efforts to rein in the courts amid rulings that have halted Trump’s agenda
Republican lawmakers are ramping up their attacks on the judiciary — and rushing to demonstrate they are in lockstep with President Donald Trump — amid court rulings that have blocked his agenda.
Feeling pressure on that front from his right flank, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Tuesday floated the possibility of Congress eliminating some federal courts, Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona and Rebecca Kaplan report.
“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things,” Johnson told reporters on Tuesday. “But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.”
Johnson, a former constitutional attorney, later clarified that he was making a point about Congress’ “broad authority” over the “creation, maintenance and the governance” of the courts. Article III of the Constitution established the Supreme Court but gave Congress the power to “ordain and establish” lower federal courts.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who plans to hold a hearing focused on district judges next week, said he’s speaking with GOP appropriators about what he called “legislative remedies.”
“We got money, spending, the appropriations process to help try to address some of this,” Jordan said, without adding further details.
While these comments may fire up the MAGA base, Republicans are a long way from making good on them. It’s far from clear that enough members of their caucus would support defunding courts in the House, where the party holds a narrow majority. And then there’s the issue of the Senate, where the 60-vote threshold comes into play and Republicans control 53 seats.
The same issues would also arise if Republicans pursued impeachment of judges such as District Judge James Boasberg, who halted Trump’s using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants. (The bar for conviction is even higher in the Senate, at 67 votes.)
House GOP leaders are pursuing one potential off-ramp for a vote that would be less politically precarious: Johnson backed a bill from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that would seek to limit district court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions, the sort of rulings that have hampered Trump from fully enacting his plans on issues from deportation to federal agency cuts.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said the chamber would vote on the bill next week, and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said he’d introduce similar legislation in the Senate.
“We have a major malfunction in our federal judiciary, and practically every week another judge casts aside the tradition of restraint from the bench and opts to be the Trump resistance in robes,” Issa told NBC News.
What to know from the Trump presidency today
- Trump stood by his national security adviser after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally added to a private, high-level chat on the messaging app Signal where military plans were being discussed. Trump told NBC News in a phone interview: “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.”
- During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe said they did not share any classified materials on the group chat.
- Trump’s nominee to lead the Social Security Administration, Frank Bisignano, got an earful from Senate Democrats at his confirmation hearing, in the wake of early actions by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to downsize the agency.
- The White House said that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to a ceasefire in the Black Sea and to implement a ban on attacks on energy facilities by the two neighbors, an apparent breakthrough after American negotiators held separate talks with both countries.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pulling back $11.4 billion in funds allocated to state and community health departments, nongovernment organizations and international recipients in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Trump selected Susan Monarez as his new nominee to head the CDC. Monarez, a scientist whose previous work looked at using artificial intelligence to improve health, has already been serving as acting director.
Follow live updates →
Wisconsin Supreme Court election will test a key Democratic advantage
By Steve Kornacki
Next week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election will reveal if what has been a Trump-era advantage for Democrats has endured despite the party’s defeat in November.
This is the type of contest in which Democrats have been excelling of late — one that’s oddly timed, for a lower-profile office and expected to be marked by modest overall turnout. Under these conditions, any differences in motivation and intensity between the two parties’ bases are magnified. And that has netted out to the benefit of Democrats, who rely increasingly on a set of highly educated and higher-income voters who have been the most politically engaged in the Trump era.
Just consider Wisconsin’s recent history. Despite being nominally nonpartisan, Supreme Court elections are shaped by unmistakably partisan contours. And, compared to four high-turnout general election races, the last Supreme Court election, also held in the spring, stands out as the lone blowout.
This has been the trend not just in Wisconsin but throughout the country, one that seemed to accelerate following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Between the summer of 2022 and the fall of 2024, 15 special elections for House seats were held. Democrats swept the three that were heavily contested by both parties and posted some eye-popping gains in others that were assumed to be noncompetitive.
The disproportionately high activation of more educated and affluent voters played a key role. In a February 2024 House special election for a Long Island-based district in New York, for example, turnout in areas with the highest concentration of white voters with college degrees tracked 15-20 points higher than in areas with the lowest concentration.
This was also evident in the 2023 Supreme Court election in Wisconsin that the Democratic-favored candidate won. In that race, turnout was disproportionately high in Dane County, home to the University of Wisconsin and the highest share of white voters with college degrees in the state.
Dane County has become a massive vote bank for Democrats in the state, and one they are increasingly reliant upon as Republicans have built strength in rural and small-town Wisconsin. And in the 2023 court election, it punched above its weight. Not only did the Democratic-favored candidate win Dane by 64 points, the county also accounted for just over 13% of all votes cast statewide. By comparison, in last year’s presidential race, it made up only 10.7% of the statewide vote pool.
More broadly, if you combine all of the counties in Wisconsin where the share of white voters with college degrees exceeds the statewide average, they accounted for just under 38% of total turnout in the 2023 Supreme Court race, compared to 34.7% in last year’s presidential contest.
The problem for Democrats, of course, is that their pronounced edge in off-year and special elections didn’t translate into victory last November, when the electorate was much larger. This reflects a role reversal for the two parties. Until recently, Democrats enjoyed an advantage with less-engaged voters and the general view was that an expanded electorate would favor them. But in 2024, it was Trump who won support from voters who don’t typically participate in nonpresidential elections, many of them younger and nonwhite.
That dynamic will be put to the test next Tuesday. If the upscale end of the Democratic coalition is still intensely and atypically engaged in Trump’s second term, it will be apparent in the results — and will serve as a signal of what may lie in ahead in similar lower-turnout races this year and next.
🗞️ Today’s other top stories
- 😨 Special election fears: Republican leaders have grown privately alarmed about the massive fundraising disparity their candidate, Randy Fine, faces in a special House election in a deep-red Florida district and have swooped in at the eleventh hour to help resuscitate his campaign. Read more →
- ➡️ Tesla fallout: The FBI has created a task force to investigate a spate of recent attacks targeting Tesla cars and dealerships, as the agency’s director calls such acts “domestic terrorism.” Read more →
- 💼 DOGE days: A new report from the job listing website Indeed shows job applications from workers at agencies targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency have spiked by 75%. Read more →
- 🔵 Lessons from 2024: Reaching male voters became a political necessity for Democrats after last fall’s election, when young men swung significantly toward Trump. Now, three Democratic governors have launched initiatives geared toward helping struggling boys and men. Read more →
That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner and Faith Wardwell.
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