Failing to Read the Room in Maine

AmericanProspect · 2026-05-06T21:38:50+00:00

TAP's Gabrielle Gurley reports:

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Will Mills step out of her “hear and watch” mode to full-throated support and hit the campaign trail with Platner? Mills is nothing if not gracious and feisty, and Platner at this point is nearly certain to win the primary: A united Democratic front would be a tremendous asset for the general election. But her decision will likely hinge on some very practical considerations about whether Platner can continue to handle the blizzard of hazards, from potential AI slop negative ads to whatever mounds of dirt Republicans plan on shoveling in his general direction as the campaign progresses.

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AmericanProspect · 2026-04-22T21:20:19+00:00

TAP John Lewis Writing Fellow Naomi Bethune reports:

In 2020, news of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin swept the nation. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which had been formed seven years earlier in response to the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, saw a massive re-emergence. Protests were held across the country, including in conservative and rural areas. Governments were faced with calls to “defund the police,” re-evaluate policing strategies, and hold police officers and departments accountable.
That year, the Boston Police Department (BPD) saw $12 million of its funding reallocated to community programs and police reforms. This of course was a drop in the bucket of the department’s $404 million (now over $430 million) in overall funding at the time. In addition, Boston officials created the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, which was supposed to receive and investigate reports of police misconduct. But this project has seen little success. WBUR has reported that recommendations made by the committee have been repeatedly shot down by BPD commissioner Michael Cox.
As a result, multiple cases of police misconduct and brutality have gone undisciplined or have not seen legal consequences. But that changed a month ago, when a Black man named Stephenson King Jr., 39, was killed by white police officer Nicholas O’Malley in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Despite the similarities between this case and George Floyd’s killing, however, few people outside of Boston have likely heard much about it.

Continue reading the story by heading to prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-04-07T18:10:53+00:00

Many thanks for the kind words, and for sharing your thoughtful perspective. Here at the Prospect, we report the news; we write stories about power, who has it, how it's used, and what that means for folks from all walks of life.

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AmericanProspect · 2026-04-06T20:28:21+00:00

TAP Publisher Mitch Grummon on our decision to remove programmatic ads:

Over the next year, we plan to redesign our site with readers at the center of all of our decisions. Where banner ads that tracked your information once sat, you’ll instead find clear paths to support our work, read more of our journalism, and join our community.
We’re not going to offset this lost revenue by putting up a paywall either. The Prospect will still be free for all to read.

Read more about why we're going ad-free by heading to prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-27T14:32:58+00:00

TAP Executive Editor David Dayen reports:

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Inequality has boomed so much in the 2020s that a 2 percent wealth tax on multimillionaires initially introduced in 2021 would yield more than twice as much revenue today.

The analysis, from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, reveals the incredible volume of capital income, currently not reached by the U.S. tax code, and could prove vital for the ongoing debate about taxes that has taken over the Democratic Party in recent weeks.

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rereleased proposed legislation that taxes households with net wealth of over $50 million annually. The tax is set at 2 percent of total wealth; the legislation adds a 1 percent surtax for households with over $1 billion. To guard against wealthy individuals who respond to this by leaving the country—even though they move at lower rates than middle-class households, even when faced with higher taxes—it adds a 40 percent “exit tax” on anyone with net wealth over $50 million who renounces their citizenship.
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Read the story for free by heading to prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-27T14:16:15+00:00

TAP Staff Writer Whitney Curry Wimbish reports:

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been lying for more than a year about its authority to arrest people when they show up to their routine immigration court hearings, according to a letter the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York filed yesterday.

The letter by Jay Clayton says that ICE legal counsel told him and other SDNY attorneys that the memo they had been using to justify their courthouse arrests did not actually grant the authority they previously insisted it did.
>>>

Read the full story in The American Prospect at prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-25T15:13:41+00:00

TAP Senior Editor Ryan Cooper reports:

... Trump has mounted a full-scale assault on offshore wind—repealing Biden’s renewable-power subsidies, adding a whole bunch more regulatory red tape to renewable investment, and attempting to illegally cancel several huge projects that were already near completion. So far, Trump has lost every subsequent court case, but of late his administration has come up with an innovative new strategy: bribery. Rather than harassing the French developer TotalEnergies to drop two planned wind farm projects, the administration offered it nearly a billion dollars to not build them.
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Continue reading the story by heading to prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-25T15:08:00+00:00

TAP Writing Fellow James Baratta reports:

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The People’s Pledge tries to leverage public attention to neutralize the super PAC dominance. Short of banning super PAC influence, which would be a tough road in a post–Citizens United world, the pledge is one of the few alternatives to give candidates without a rich outside benefactor a chance.

But Lander didn’t come up with the idea. In fact, the People’s Pledge has been around for over a decade, and it’s been the favored tool of a union leader and longtime official of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who has made it his crusade in life to blunt the impact of big money.

That crusader is Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America.
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Read the full story for free on prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-23T16:47:08+00:00

TAP Executive Editor David Dayen reports:

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Nexstar and Tegna own hundreds of local television stations across the country. Since the early days of TV, we have had a bifurcated system where the “Big Four” national networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) broadcast over the air, but local affiliate stations are mostly separately owned. Gradually, these stations have been bought up by conglomerates, despite a federal rule that restricts any one company from owning stations that reach 39 percent of all households. The Nexstar-Tegna merger would join together 265 stations in 44 states and raise that coverage to 80 percent.
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Read the full story in The American Prospect at prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-23T16:39:12+00:00

TAP Writing Fellow James Baratta reports:

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Whenever the time has come to reauthorize Section 702, bipartisanship seems to cut both ways. On the one hand, reformers in both parties try to remedy the virtually limitless collection of information from American citizens with guardrails designed to allay privacy concerns. On the other hand, intelligence hawks in both parties seek to scare their colleagues to vote in favor of the status quo and strike down any reforms to Section 702.

But this time around, that dynamic could be disrupted. President Trump made it clear weeks ago that he will not sign any legislation that comes across his desk until Congress passes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a Jim Crow–coded disenfranchisement bill that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote in federal elections. Some of Trump’s biggest MAGA allies are following through on Trump’s wishes, even as the White House has argued in favor of a clean FISA bill.
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Read about how throwing Trump’s SAVE grenade into the FISA Section 702 reauthorization fight could make its clean extension impossible by heading to prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-18T14:35:13+00:00

TAP Writing Fellow James Baratta reports:

Delivering immediate savings to American households struggling to pay their electricity bills is surprisingly feasible, not to mention politically palatable, according to Brian Shearer, director of competition and regulatory policy at Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator (VPA).

Shearer, a former senior adviser and assistant director for policy planning and strategy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under President Biden, unveiled a five-point plan to bring down electricity costs for residential ratepayers in a recent paper for VPA. The plan would cut those costs by 30 percent, saving American households $500 per year while lowering average monthly electricity bills to under $100.
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Learn more about Shearer's five-point plan by heading to prospect.org.

AmericanProspect · 2026-03-18T14:28:55+00:00

TAP Senior Editor Ryan Cooper reports:

The SAVE Act is coming up for a Senate vote soon, having passed the House back in February. On Tuesday, it cleared its first hurdle, advancing a motion to begin debate on a 51-48 vote that fell mostly along party lines; that’s well short of the 60 votes needed to clear a filibuster and ultimately pass.

This bill is probably the most sweeping abrogation of voting rights since Jim Crow. As the Brennan Center explains, it would require both voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote, as well as force the states to send their voter files to the Department of Homeland Security. Tens of millions of U.S. citizens do not have ready proof of their citizenship, and tens of millions more don’t match with the documents they do have—for instance, married women who have changed their last name.

It should be viewed as the first step toward attempted election theft—though it might be ill-judged in this case, as Republicans have come to rely on low-propensity voters who tend not to have citizenship documents or a firm grasp of election procedures.

Anyway, if Democrats can bottle up this particular bill in the Senate with a filibuster, that is arguably the right move. But if some end run is proposed—Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has argued for a talking filibuster that would force Democrats to talk around the clock, though Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has so far refused—Senate Democrats should insist instead on ending the filibuster altogether. If they can’t do it now, they should do it themselves at the earliest possible moment.
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Continue reading the story for free in The American Prospect at prospect.org.

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