4TR WEB EXTRA: Miller-Meeks addresses provision to weaken courts & potential town hall
Here we move away from the changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to a small provision titled Restriction of Funds that's in the Republicans' budget proposal. It has to do with the power of the courts.
Another provision is Section 70302 at the end of the immigration section. It essentially says the courts can't use government money to enforce a contempt citation for failing to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order unless the plaintiffs put up a security bond up front to cover the expense of enforcement.
That would basically enable the president and his team to ignore or defy court orders.
Host Jim Niedelman brings back Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
'As we learned when we made our trips to the border, people don't come back for their asylum hearing,' Miller-Meeks said.
To hear more, click on the video.
Local 4 News, your local election headquarters, is proud to present , a weekly news and public affairs program focused on the issues important to you. It's a program unlike any other here in the Quad Cities. Tune in each Sunday at 10:30 a.m. as brings you up to speed on what's happening in the political arena, from Springfield, Des Moines, Washington, D.C. and right here at home.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
3 minutes ago
- New York Post
Ghislaine Maxwell still mulling whether to testify before Oversight Committee, her attorney says
Ghislaine Maxwell is still weighing whether she will testify before Congress even though the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed her to do so. Earlier this week, the powerful Oversight panel subpoenaed Maxwell for a deposition on Aug. 11 due to the 'immense public interest and scrutiny' surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein case. 'Congress has asked her to testify, we have to make a decision about whether she will do that or not,' her attorney David Oscar Markus told reporters Friday. 'We haven't gotten back to them on whether we'll do that.' The statement signals Maxwell is still mulling whether to plead the Fifth Amendment or other privileges to fend off the subpoena. Should she take the Fifth, the Oversight panel could offer her some type of immunity in a bid to get her to talk. 4 Ghislaine Maxwell could plead her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid testifying before the House Oversight Committee. 4 Attorney David Oscar Markus has argued that Ghislaine Maxwell was unfairly convicted. AP On Thursday and Friday, Maxwell spoke with US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, President Trump's former defense attorney, about the Epstein case. The unusual meeting between Maxwell and Blanche for a type of interview that is typically left for lower-level Justice Department officials comes amid a public firestorm over the infamous pedophile, who committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019. Maxwell, a British socialite, was found guilty in 2021 of child sex trafficking and engaging in a scheme to exploit minors with Epstein and sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison. Markus, who previously did a podcast episode with Blanche before the latter became the US deputy attorney general, said he was proud of his client's performance when asked if the interview altered the calculus of whether she would comply with the Oversight Committee's subpoena. 'I think Ghislaine did a wonderful job. She literally answered every question. She didn't say that 'I'm not going to talk about this person,' ' Markus said. 'She was asked maybe about 100 different people. She answered questions about everybody, and she didn't hold anything back.' 4 Ghislaine Maxwell is serving out a 20-year prison sentence. REUTERS Markus also claimed 'there have been no asks and no promises' made to get her to agree to the interview with Blanche, including the possibility of a pardon from Trump. Earlier Friday, Trump said he hasn't yet contemplated a pardon, but noted, 'I'm allowed to do it.' Maxwell is currently serving out her sentence, something that her legal team has been appealing all the way up to the Supreme Court. Former Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz has publicly claimed Maxwell 'knows everything' about the convicted child sex offender's crimes. The Trump administration and Republicans have come under intense pressure from the MAGA base to give the public more answers about Epstein. The push for information comes after a July 6 memo from the DOJ and FBI memo said there was insufficient evidence to suggest Epstein even had an 'incriminating client list.' Democrats have sought to exploit the Epstein scandal and put Republicans on the spot with attempts to force a vote to publicly divulge the documents on the notorious sex predator. 4 House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has pursued testimony from Ghislaine Maxwell. Getty Images Those efforts resulted in the floor of the House of Representatives effectively becoming frozen due to GOP leadership's efforts to scuttle a Democratic effort to force a vote on Epstein. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his deputies have been keen to stick with Trump on the Epstein controversy. As a result, Republican leadership decided to send the lower chamber home for the August recess a day early. 'We want full transparency,' Johnson (R-La.) told CBS News' 'The Takeout with Major Garrett' Wednesday. 'We want everybody who is involved in any way with the Epstein evils — let's call it what it was — to be brought to justice as quickly as possible.' 'We want the full weight of the law on their heads.' Meanwhile, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have cooked up a discharge petition, which will allow them to get a vote without GOP leadership's blessing, on a bill to force the release of the Epstein files. That discharge petition is poised to ripen when the House reconvenes in September from the August recess. Trump has expressed support for additional public disclosures in what he has dubbed the 'Epstein hoax' and backed a push by US Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue court approval for releasing grand jury testimony.
Boston Globe
3 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
A Kennedy toils in Mississippi, tracing his grandfather's path
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Kennedy nodded to the history. 'I know a bit about my grandfather's visit to the Delta back in the '60s, and how it changed and outraged him to see this in the richest country in the world,' he said. 'I'm proud that my family has spent a lot of their years in office advocating for these people.' Advertisement Kennedy is on a mission to continue the legacy of an American political family that has in recent years lost some of its liberal luster. It angers him that his uncle Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, is a key figure in an administration that is overturning core values of his family. Advertisement The health secretary has defended work requirements for Medicaid recipients, 'which do not work,' the younger Kennedy said. 'The only thing they succeed at is kicking people off Medicaid who need it.' On the elder Kennedy's efforts to ban food dyes, his nephew dismissively replied, 'It's not the dyes that are making people obese.' Still, he shares with his uncle the belief that Democrats are increasingly captive to an urban elite. 'I think the Democratic Party has lost touch with this reality,' he said, staring out at the Delta landscape. Joe Kennedy III and his wife, Lauren Anne Birchfield, arrived at the JFK Library, Sunday, May 4, 2025, in Boston. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press Kennedy's response is not to run for president as his grandfather did and his uncle might, or at least not yet. Instead he has formed the Groundwork Project, a nonprofit that seeks to develop a network of grassroots resistance in four deep-red states -- Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma and West Virginia -- that have received little attention from left-leaning organizations. Without any meaningful opposition, Kennedy said, those states have become havens for right-wing initiatives, ranging from the evisceration of the Clean Air Act in West Virginia to legislation in Mississippi that banned abortions after 15 weeks and led to the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade. 'The only way to change the power structures in those states is to organize people,' Kennedy said. 'That's not a short fix. But what else can you do?' The slow grind of organization-building in hostile territory that Kennedy envisions has been done before, mostly by conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, which was formed in 2004, operates in 35 states and has an annual operating budget of more than $186 million. In contrast, the Groundwork Project operates on a relatively modest $2.8 million a year, much of it disbursed as $25,000 annual grants to about 40 local groups that have fought uphill battles in areas like environmental justice and reproductive rights. Advertisement But the famous name helps. During a three-day trip to Mississippi to observe the efforts that Groundwork Project is helping to underwrite, locals sometimes referred to its founder in awed tones as 'a Kennedy.' During one gathering of local officials, at a diner in Yazoo City, Kennedy addressed the subject of health care by invoking his lineage, saying, 'My family has focused on this for a long time.' In the next breath, Kennedy pointedly brought up another relative: 'My uncle is now part of an administration that is cutting Medicaid.' Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy of the centrist Democratic organization Third Way, speculated about the political subtext of Kennedy's criticisms of his uncle. 'It's all but certain that Bobby Jr. is going to run for president as a Republican in 2028,' Kessler said. 'Maybe part of what the younger Kennedy is doing is reclaiming the family legacy as a way to remind people, 'This is who we really are.'' Joseph P. Kennedy III spoke at Atlantic Technical University in Letterkenny, Donegal, Ireland on Oct. 2. Conor Doherty The Oral History of Family Lore Kennedy was not yet born when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's quest for the presidency was cut short by an assassin's bullet in California in June 1968. The 42-year-old candidate left behind his widow, Ethel, and their 11 children, among them Robert Jr. and Joseph, Joe Kennedy III's father, who would go on to serve in Congress from 1987 to 1999. Kennedy said that he has never read a book about his grandfather, since from infancy he marinated in the oral history of family lore. Inculcated in him were RFK adages such as, 'The gross national product can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.' Advertisement His own trajectory followed the meticulously laid Kennedy path of public service merging with political advancement. He spent his childhood in Boston before attending Stanford University and subsequently serving two years in the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer. He returned home to Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard Law School and then worked as an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County. It came as little surprise in February 2012 when he announced his desire to fill the congressional seat soon to be vacated by Rep. Barney Frank. Kennedy -- an earnest and energetic 31-year-old scion with a genetically distinctive aquiline nose, a toothy grin and wavy red hair that deviated from the family's physical template -- coasted to victory without serious opposition. The freshman won over many colleagues in the House, several of whom said in interviews that they had been braced for an entitled brat and instead encountered someone who was thoughtful and unpretentious. He set out to lead on mental health issues as his cousin, Patrick Kennedy, had done before retiring from Congress in 2011. But Kennedy said he grew dismayed by the chamber's partisan divisions and inexplicable lethargy, recalling, 'Even in the majority, I couldn't move my own bills.' By Kennedy's fourth term, restlessness had gotten the better of him. In September 2019, he announced his candidacy for the Senate, a body in which three Kennedy legends -- his grandfather; his great-uncle, the former president; and his great-uncle Ted -- had previously served. He garnered the support of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who was then the minority leader. Advertisement But the 73-year-old Democratic incumbent, Sen. Edward J. Markey, outfoxed his younger opponent by recasting himself as a rabble-rousing progressive in the manner of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who endorsed Markey. Kennedy, whose tendency is to speak in carefully constructed paragraphs, struggled to come up with his own pithy pitch to voters. Markey won the September 2020 primary by 11 points, and Kennedy became the first in his family to be defeated in a senatorial contest. President Donald Trump gloated on Twitter, 'Pelosi strongly backed the loser!' Being spurned and disparaged by liberal activists was unfamiliar terrain for a Kennedy, and he spent the remainder of 2020 contemplating his options. 'Losing sucks,' Kennedy said. 'But I made the decision to try to build something that keeps you engaged and energized. And if something comes up, perhaps you take it, but you're not sitting around waiting for that to happen.' Joe Kennedy delivered his election-night in Watertown on Sept. 1, 2020, in his unsuccessful Senate race against Ed Markey John Tlumacki/Globe Staff 'You Democrats Think We Don't Know How to Work?' Rejected by progressive activists, Kennedy turned to forgotten agrarian lands like the Mississippi Delta, which has only one major city (Jackson), and is therefore difficult to organize. It's 'what I call a hard-to-fight state,' said Charles Taylor, the executive director of Mississippi's NAACP chapter. Similar impediments exist in Oklahoma, where Republican legislators have passed severe restrictions on abortion and on what can be taught in public school classrooms about racism. Alabama, a third Groundwork Project state, benefits from a more urban population than Oklahoma or Mississippi. But Democratic get-out-the-vote organizers have been reluctant to operate in a state where there is no in-person early voting and where absentee ballots must be signed by a notary or two voting-age witnesses. Advertisement West Virginia is by far the most challenging for Kennedy. Its overwhelmingly rural and white population was long Democratic, but the collapse of the coal and steel industries in the state have spawned a profound distrust of party elites, Kennedy said. He recalled a visit to West Virginia just after he founded the Groundwork Project, when a bearded young man asked him, 'How come you Democrats think we don't know how to work?' To every such question, Kennedy's implicit answer was to organize. 'I think Mississippi has so much to teach our nation about resilience, never losing focus and not giving up when your government is actively working against you,' he said at an event in Indianola. Kennedy is applying the same calm resolve to his own political future. He and his wife, Lauren Birchfield Kennedy, an attorney and children's advocate, have a 6-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter. Kennedy laments having missed so much of their infancy while serving in Washington. 'The question is, is what I would get out of going back into elective office worth the sacrifice that I asked my family to go through again?' For now, Kennedy is content to leave the question unanswered. 'I'm 44,' he said. 'And at some point down the road, I wouldn't necessarily rule anything out.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Yahoo
'That kind of thing really dings Trump hard,' former Congressman Joe Walsh quipped of the opening episode to the show's 27th season.
A top former member of the Republican Party has explained why the opening episode of South Park's 27th season hit President Donald Trump where it hurts. 'Remember, a lot of Trump's base, they're not Republicans. They're just men—they're guys who typically don't belong to a party, they don't vote all the time, and they watch South Park,' former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh, who's since defected to the Democrats, told MSNBC. 'They watched an episode this week where Trump looked really silly and stupid—a big fat man with a teeny, tiny penis. I think that kind of thing really dings Trump hard, too,' he added. 'No pun intended.'
