Mike Collins moves closer to announcing a bid for Georgia Senate
Collins in January reintroduced the Laken Riley Act to Congress, which mandates the detention of any undocumented immigrant charged with theft or burglary and is named after a Georgia nursing student killed by a man who had illegally entered the country. The proposal became the first bill signed into law by Trump in his second term.
Collins' posts on social media have been blasted by the NAACP and drawn rebukes from Georgia Democrats and former Republican lawmaker Adam Kinzinger. In May 2024, he joked about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then an independent candidate in the presidential campaign, alluding to the assassination of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
The GOP primary to challenge Ossoff has already drawn Republican Rep. Buddy Carter, who is also courting the Trump endorsement and announced a run for Senate in May. Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King, a Republican, is also running for the seat.
The state's popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, was seen initially as the heavy favorite in the race. Georgia Republicans have been looking for a marquee recruit since he passed on a run in May.
Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage in the Senate. And just two of the 22 Republican seats up for grabs next year come from states the president won or lost by less than ten points in November.
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New York Post
12 minutes ago
- New York Post
New Yorkers are still unsure if they'd welcome a socialist mayor, even as Zohran Mamdani leads pack: poll
They're not sold on the socialist. A majority of New Yorkers are uneasy about the possibility socialist Zohran Mamdani will take over City Hall — as a new poll points to a potential mayoral horse race if the firebrand's opponents thin out the crowded field. The proudly far-left Democratic nominee, maintained his frontrunner status in a four-way race with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, according to the poll released Tuesday and paid for by Wick Insights. Advertisement 4 The majority of New Yorkers have concerns about electing Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York City. Paul Martinka But the race becomes neck-and-neck if Mamdani only faces Andrew Cuomo in a head-to-head contest, although the poll found the Queens assemblyman carries the highest favorability of any mayoral candidate. 'Understandably, Adams and Cuomo remain very unpopular,' said political prognosticator Ken Frydman. Advertisement 'Neither of them will become more popular before Election Day. In fact, they may become even more unpopular by then.' 'Voters tend to favor politicians with big smiles and winning personalities like Mamdani more than politicians with dour expressions and personalities like Cuomo.' 4 A poll released Tuesday paid for by Wick Insights shows Mamdani is the current frontrunner in a four-way race for mayor ahead of incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. James Keivom The poll — which surveyed 500 likely voters and did not include longshot independent candidate Jim Walden — provides a portrait of a New York City electorate not yet convinced about electing the untested Mamdani. Advertisement The lack of overwhelming support for the Democratic nominee, who has failed to gain the party establishment's backing, could be because New Yorkers are still uneasy about electing a socialist mayor. The poll shows just 46% of voters would welcome a socialist mayor, while 44% say they would oppose one in Gracie Mansion. 4 Political prognosticator Ken Frydman notes, 'Adams and Cuomo remain very unpopular.' John Roca for NY Post A further 10% said they were not sure whether they'd support or oppose electing a socialist mayor, the poll found. Advertisement And a slim majority of New Yorkers — 53% — said Mamdani's dreamy socialist vision for the Big Apple won't work in the real world, according to the survey. Mamdani, however, was viewed by roughly half of voters as the candidate most focused on the cost of living and to stand up for working people. He was also the only mayoral candidate whose favorability wasn't deep underwater, although the percentage of voters who viewed him favorably — 43% — was the same as those who did unfavorably. The fresh-faced Democrat Mamdani was the clear frontrunner with 39% support in the four-way race with two independents — Adams and Cuomo — and the Republican Sliwa, the poll found. 4 Mamdani leads the four candidates in the poll, receiving 39% of the vote with Cuomo in second place at 21%, Sliwa at third place with 18%, and Adams finishing fourth, recording a lacking 9% from voters in the upcoming general election. Michael McWeeney Cuomo, who was trounced by the upstart socialist in the Democratic primary in June, held onto his second-place status with 21%, while Sliwa came in third with 18%. In a distant fourth, the poll had Adams with an abysmal 9% of support. Mamdani would also handily beat Adams and Sliwa in face-to-face contests, but it was a different story with Cuomo, the poll found. Advertisement Cuomo came in just slightly ahead of Mamdani, 42% to 41%, well within the margin of error for the poll. But political insiders have been leery of taking too much stock in a single poll after the Democratic primary took nearly all of them off guard. Nearly every poll, save one, had Cuomo beating Mamdani in the ranked-choice primary — although they did show the socialist steadily narrowing the gap. Advertisement In the end, Mamdani trounced Cuomo by a 56% to 44% margin and garnered more primary votes than any Big Apple Democrat in more than three decades. Still, Cuomo's spokesman Rich Azzopardi welcomed the poll's finding. 'Make no mistake — this is a race and the governor is talking directly to voters about his practical plans to make New York City more affordable, safer and better run, in direct contrast to Zohran Mamdani's substance-free bumper sticker slogans and Adams' record of mismanagement, self-dealing and, according to his own former police commissioner, corrupting and demoralizing the NYPD,' he said.
Chicago Tribune
12 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Columbia University agrees to pay more than $220M in deal with Trump to restore federal funding
NEW YORK — Columbia University announced Wednesday it has reached a deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220 million to the federal government to restore federal research money that was canceled in the name of combating antisemitism on campus. Under the agreement, the Ivy League school will pay a $200 million settlement over three years, the university said. It will also pay $21 million to resolve alleged civil rights violations against Jewish employees that occurred following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the White House said. 'This agreement marks an important step forward after a period of sustained federal scrutiny and institutional uncertainty,' acting University President Claire Shipman said. The school had been threatened with the potential loss of billions of dollars in government support, including more than $400 million in grants canceled earlier this year. The administration pulled the funding because of what it described as the university's failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Hamas war. Columbia has since agreed to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration, including overhauling the university's student disciplinary process and applying a contentious, federally endorsed definition of antisemitism not only to teaching but to a disciplinary committee that has been investigating students critical of Israel. Wednesday's agreement — which does not include an admission of wrongdoing — codifies those reforms while preserving the university's autonomy, Shipman said. Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the deal 'a seismic shift in our nation's fight to hold institutions that accept American taxpayer dollars accountable for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.' 'Columbia's reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate,' McMahon said in a statement. As part of the agreement, Columbia agreed to a series of changes previously announced in March, including reviewing its Middle East curriculum to make sure it was 'comprehensive and balanced' and appointing new faculty to its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. It also promised to end programs 'that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotes, diversity targets or similar efforts.' The university will also have to issue a report to a monitor assuring that its programs 'do not promote unlawful DEI goals.' In a post Wednesday night on his Truth Social platform, President Donald Trump said Columbia had 'committed to ending their ridiculous DEI policies, admitting students based ONLY on MERIT, and protecting the Civil Liberties of their students on campus.' He also warned, without being specific, 'Numerous other Higher Education Institutions that have hurt so many, and been so unfair and unjust, and have wrongly spent federal money, much of it from our government, are upcoming.' The pact comes after months of uncertainty and fraught negotiations at the more than 270-year-old university. It was among the first targets of Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protests and on colleges that he asserts have allowed Jewish students be threatened and harassed. Columbia's own antisemitism task force found last summer that Jewish students had faced verbal abuse, ostracism and classroom humiliation during the spring 2024 demonstrations. Other Jewish students took part in the protests, however, and protest leaders maintain they aren't targeting Jews but rather criticizing the Israeli government and its war in Gaza. Columbia's leadership — a revolving door of three interim presidents in the last year — has declared that the campus climate needs to change. Also in the settlement is an agreement to ask prospective international students 'questions designed to elicit their reasons for wishing to study in the United States,' and establishes processes to make sure all students are committed to 'civil discourse.' In a move that would potentially make it easier for the Trump administration to deport students who participate in protests, Columbia promised to provide the government with information, upon request, of disciplinary actions involving student-visa holders resulting in expulsions or suspensions. Columbia on Tuesday announced it would suspend, expel or revoke degrees from more than 70 students who participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration inside the main library in May and an encampment during alumni weekend last year. The pressure on Columbia began with a series of funding cuts. Then Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student who had been a visible figure in the protests, became the first person detained in the Trump administration's push to deport pro-Palestinian activists who aren't U.S. citizens. Next came searches of some university residences amid a federal Justice Department investigation into whether Columbia concealed 'illegal aliens' on campus. The interim president at the time responded that the university was committed to upholding the law. Columbia was an early test case for the Trump administration as it sought closer oversight of universities that the Republican president views as bastions of liberalism. Yet it soon was overshadowed by Harvard University, which became the first higher education institution to defy Trump's demands and fight back in court. The Trump administration has used federal research funding as its primary lever in its campaign to reshape higher education. More than $2 billion in total has also been frozen at Cornell, Northwestern, Brown and Princeton universities. Administration officials pulled $175 million from the University of Pennsylvania in March over a dispute around women's sports. They restored it when school officials agreed to update records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and change their policies. The administration also is looking beyond private universities. University of Virginia President James Ryan agreed to resign in June under pressure from a U.S. Justice Department investigation into diversity, equity and inclusion practices. A similar investigation was opened this month at George Mason University.
The Hill
12 minutes ago
- The Hill
Why are data nerds racing to save US government statistics?
The data nerds are fighting back. After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely. Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don't have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics. 'There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times,' Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Association of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference. The threats to the U.S. data infrastructure since January have come not only from the disappearance or modification of data related to gender, sexual orientation, health, climate change and diversity, among other topics, but also from job cuts of workers and contractors who had been guardians of restricted-access data at statistical agencies, the data experts said. 'There are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can't even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data,' Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Association of Public Data Users (APDU). 'But right now, they're sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data,' Park added later. 'Gender' switched to 'sex' In February, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) official public portal for health data, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau's most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was 'unavailable due to maintenance' before access was restored. Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been 'substantially altered,' with the majority having the word 'gender' switched to 'sex,' they wrote this month in The Lancet medical journal. One of the most difficult tasks has been figuring out what's been changed since many of the alterations weren't recorded in documentation. Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau, thought she was in good shape since she had previously downloaded data she needed from the National Survey of Children's Health for a February conference where she was speaking, even though the data had become unavailable. But then she realized she had failed to download the questionnaire and later discovered that a question about discrimination based on gender or sexual identity had been removed. 'It's the one thing my team didn't have,' Jarosz said at this week's APDU conference. 'And they edited the questionnaire document, which should have been a historical record.' Among the groups that have formed this year to collect and preserve the federal data are the Federation of American Scientists' which monitors changes to federal data sets; the University of Chicago Library's Data Mirror website, which backs up and hosts at-risk data sets; the Data Rescue Project, which serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts; and the Federal Data Forum, which shares information about what federal statistics have gone missing or been modified — a job also being done by the American Statistical Association. The outside data warriors also are quietly reaching out to workers at statistical agencies and urging them to back up any data that is restricted from the public. 'You can't trust that this data is going to be here tomorrow,' said Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project. Experts' committee unofficially revived Separately, a group of outside experts has unofficially revived a long-running U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee that was killed by the Trump administration in March. Census Bureau officials won't be attending the Census Scientific Advisory Committee meeting in September, since the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, eliminated it. But the advisory committee will forward its recommendations to the bureau, and demographer Allison Plyer said she has heard that some agency officials are excited by the committee's re-emergence, even if it's outside official channels. 'We will send them recommendations but we don't expect them to respond since that would be frowned upon,' Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans, said. 'They just aren't getting any outside expertise … and they want expertise, which is understandable from nerds.'
