Untethered

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

BREAKING: Judge issues 2nd order blocking National Guard deployment to aid ICE in Portland, OR, after Trump sends CA Guard in & moves to send TX Guard, too. Judge Karin Immergut cites actions 'in direct contravention' of earlier ruling. w/@kyledcheney https://t.co/2wLz6IkcEV

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) October 6, 2025

Mark Berman and Derek Hawkins at WP:

A federal judge on Saturday blocked the Trump administration from deploying troops in Portland, at least temporarily thwarting President Donald Trump’s push to send the military into Oregon’s biggest city.

Oregon demonstrated that such an action would violate the state’s 10th Amendment right to control its National Guard, U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, a Trump appointee, wrote in her decision granting a temporary restraining order.

“This country has a long-standing and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote, later adding, “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.”

Immergut said her restraining order will expire Oct. 18, though she suggested it could be extended. She scheduled a hearing for Oct. 17 to address that question.

In her order, Immergut wrote that a president is entitled to deference, but that is “not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground.” She said Trump’s determination that the situation in Portland required a federal military response “was simply untethered to the facts.”

The judge's order confirms that  Trump's language undercuts his actions:

]The] President’s own statements regarding the deployment of federalized National Guardsmen further support that his determination was not “conceived in good faith” or “in the face of the emergency and directly related to the quelling of the disorder or the prevention of its continuance.” Newsom II, 141 F.4th at 1051 (emphasis in original) (quoting Sterling, 287 U.S. at 399–400). Despite the “minimal activity” outside the Portland ICE facility in the days preceding September 27, 2025, Hughes Decl., Ex. 22, ECF 46-22 to Ex. 26, ECF 46-26, President Trump directed Secretary Hegseth “to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Marshall Decl., Ex. 12, ECF 9-12. Two days before that directive, the President claimed that Portland has “professional agitators” who are “paid a lot of money by rich people,” “anarchists,” and “crazy people” who try to “burn down buildings, including federal buildings.” See Marshall Decl., ECF 9 ¶ 26. Whatever the factual basis the President may have for these allegations, nothing in the record suggests that anything of this sort was occurring “every night” outside the Portland ICE building or in the City of Portland in the days or weeks leading up to his September 27 directive. Id.

 

Nut Wins GOP Senate Nomination in Oregon

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Tess Riski at Willamette Week:

Hours before Jo Rae Perkins won 49.7 percent of Republican votes and the party's nod to face U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) in November, she posted on social media a now-deleted video of herself espousing support for the baseless right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon.

"Hi, my name is Jo Rae Perkins, candidate for the U.S. Senate in Oregon," Perkins says in the May 19 video, while seated in front of a bookcase. She then recites the QAnon slogan—"where we go one, we go all"—while holding up a sticker of an acronym of said slogan.

"I stand with President Trump," Perkins continues in the video, which was first reported by The Washington Post. "I stand with Q and the team. Thank you, anons, thank you, patriots. Together, we can save our republic."

Reached by phone Wednesday, Perkins said she did not have time to discuss the video, and instead referred WW to her communications team. Her campaign then sent out a prepared statement from Perkins, in which she partly disavowed the conspiracy theory.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce at The Atlantic:

To believe in QAnon is to believe, among other things, that a cabal of global elites are secretly harming children (think: 2016’s Pizzagate), that their behavior is propped up by members of the deep state, and that President Donald Trump is working to bring their crimes to an end. Adherents learned all this from Q, an anonymous figure who they believe has high-level military ties, who periodically leaves clues on the internet. He is their prophet.

Q-Anon is a pro-Trump conspiracy theory, yes, but it’s also more important than you might think. Adrienne LaFrance, our executive editor, spent more than a year trying to make sense of the movement and its followers. Her full, enthralling report is our latest magazine cover story.
Here are three ways to understand QAnon, as explained by Adrienne:

1. It’s a real-time participatory conspiracy theory.

The eventual destruction of the global cabal is imminent, Q prophesies, but can be accomplished only with the support of patriots who search for meaning in Q’s clues. … Surely there are people who know that Q is a fantasy but participate because there’s an element of QAnon that converges with a live-action role-playing game.

2. It’s a mass rejection of reason and Enlightenment values.

In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it.

3. It’s not going anywhere. In QAnon, we are witnessing the birth of a new religion.

Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

Good Ads

Republicans actually have some really good Senate challengers who are running really good ads.

Dr. Monica Wehby, is running for the GOP Senate nomination in Oregon:



At The Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel tells why it's so effective:

Political commentators are praising the ad for its positive message, though the spot contains a more subtle power. Ms. Wehby's main opponent in the primary is Jason Conger, a GOP state legislator. She's highlighting her fiscal conservatism and her opposition to ObamaCare, though Mr. Conger is attacking her for her more libertarian social views. The unsaid message of the Wehby ad is that while she may be pro-choice, she clearly cares deeply about life and put her skills to work to help a mother avoid a termination.

In Arkansas, Tom Cotton has a clever response to an attack by incumbent David Pryor:




Remember, this race is in the Deep South.  In the 1960s, could one have imagined an ad in which an African American authority figure scolds a white candidate?

Obamacare Problems Persist into February

The New York Times reports:

With the federal online insurance exchange running more smoothly than ever, the biggest laggards in fixing enrollment problems are now state-run exchanges in several states where the governors and legislative leaders have been among the strongest supporters of President Obama’s health care law.

Republicans have seized on the failures of homegrown exchanges in states like Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon — all plagued by technological problems that have kept customers unhappy and enrollment goals unmet — and promise to use the issue against Democratic candidates for governor and legislative seats this fall.

“People see incompetence when they look at this,” said Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “Everyone that’s associated with it is going to have to deal with the consequences of this terrible law, including the state legislators who created these exchanges and the governors in charge of running them.”

Last month, the Republican National Committee filed public-records requests in Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon seeking information about compensation and vacation time for the exchange directors, four of whom have resigned. All five states have Democratic governors whose terms end this year. Three of them — Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota and Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon — are seeking re-election.

Amy Goldstein reports at The Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors.

Roughly 22,000 Americans have filed appeals with the government to try to get mistakes corrected, according to internal government data obtained by The Washington Post. They contend that the computer system for the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely.
...

The Obama administration has not made public the fact that the appeals system for the online marketplace is not working. In recent weeks, legal advocates have been pressing administration officials, pointing out that rules for the online marketplace, created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, guarantee due-process rights to timely hearings for Americans who think they have been improperly denied insurance or subsidies.

But at the moment, “there is no indication that infrastructure . . . necessary for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings has even been created, let alone become operational,” attorneys at the National Health Law Program said in a late-December letter to leaders of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees HealthCare.gov. The attorneys, who have been trying to exert leverage quietly behind the scenes, did not provide the letter to The Post but confirmed that they had sent it.

Senate Elections: Good Signs for Team Red

At National Journal, Beth Reihhard totes up signs that the Senate field is expanding in the GOP's favor:

-- Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman with an enviable fundraising network, announced he would challenge Democrat Mark Warner. Warner is popular and has $7 million in the bank. But Virginia is shaping up to be a true swing state and Gillespie doesn't have to worry about a competitive primary. On Monday, one possible rival dropped out and another declined to jump in.

-- Michigan Republican Terri Lynn Land proved she could keep up with Peters' fundraising and put in $1.6 million of her own money to boot. Polls show a tight race. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder will also be on the ballot. "Everyone is bullish about Michigan right now," said Republican strategist Rick Wiley.

-- Democrats are so worried about the possibility of former Sen. Scott Brown challenging New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen that they ran a pre-emptive attack ad against him on television. The former Massachusetts senator moved into his vacation home in the Granite State last year.

"I think it will be a barn burner if he gets in," said Democratic pollster John Anzalone. "Boston is the dominant TV market in New Hampshire, so he is universally known. He has a national fundraising base at well."

-- In North Carolina, one of the bellwether Senate races, two automated polls this month show Sen. Kay Hagan trailing one Republican opponent, state House Speaker Thom Tillis. One of those surveys is from North Carolina-based Democratic pollster, Public Policy Polling. The state backed both President Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. Hagan has been a prolific fundraiser, but is a first-term senator who isn't particularly well-known throughout the state.

-- Americans for Prosperity, the conservative juggernaut bankrolled by the Koch family, broadened its televised attacks on Obamacare to two states carried by Obama -- Michigan and Iowa. The group has spent $22 million already this cycle. A tongue-in-cheek post by the Center for Public Integrity noticed that the subject lines of the fundraising e-mails from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have gotten increasingly hysterical, from "deep trouble" to "doomed" to "catastrophic."

-- Oregon Republican Monica Wehby announced she raised $500,000 last year. It's a solidly Democratic state, but she's a pediatric neurosurgeon who supports abortion rights and immigration reform. If she wins the GOP primary, she will face Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley.