‘Working Very Hard to Protect Them’

The Trump administration has been salivating for something — anything! — that could help feed President Trump’s belief in the myth that noncitizens are illegally voting en masse for Democrats. The unfortunate situation in New Jersey this week, involving a software error at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission during Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration, sadly gives them at least one datapoint rooted in reality to point to to justify Trump’s singular fixation with the otherwise widespread conspiracy theory. And perhaps also offers a new rationale for his attempts to try to jam a voter suppression/documentary proof of citizenship bill through Congress to throw the midterms — and hope of Dems taking back power — into chaos.

His Justice Department was never not going to seize on the moment, especially as the DOJ faces loss after loss after loss in its crusade to try to force states to give their voter rolls to the federal government, supposedly for the purpose of purging noncitizens from the rolls, something that states already do themselves and an occurrence that is vanishingly rare, even in light of the news from New Jersey this week.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) announced Tuesday that her administration had found that a software glitch at the MVC had allowed 6,600 noncitizens to be added to the New Jersey voter rolls. About 400 of them have voted in at least one election since 2023. Sherrill said the people had disclosed they were noncitizens while trying to get a license or ID and were mistakenly registered to vote. The people were removed from the voter rolls, likely had no impact on overall election results in the state, and the state is cutting ties with the software company behind the error. Sherrill placed blame for the issue on her predecessor and said her administration was “working very hard to protect” the people who were placed on the rolls through no fault of their own.

Nonetheless, and of course, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, and Trump’s former personal lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon sent a letter to Sherrill on Tuesday demanding that she hand over the identities of the 6,600 noncitizens who were placed on the voter rolls within five business days. She requested the names, nationalities and residential addresses for each of them, Politico reported.

Dhillon reportedly said that she was interested in the information as part of a DOJ investigation into whether New Jersey was following federal law, but she has since hinted publicly that the DOJ might want to make a big show of deporting or bringing criminal charges against the noncitizens on the rolls.

“The consequences of voting when you’re not allowed to in a federal election can mean removal to your home country and worse — it’s a crime,” Dhillon said during a conversation with far-right influencer Benny Johnson Wednesday. “And you know people need to just stop cold in their tracks and not enable it. And shame on New Jersey for its sloppy and incompetent handling of this issue, or worse.”

Additionally, the DOJ is trying to use the incident to bolster its genuinely unbelievably disastrous campaign to seize voter records from states ahead of the midterms. The DOJ has lost every single case that has made its way through court thus far after suing 44 states and Washington, D.C. to try to obtain these records. In fact, in dismissing the lawsuits, every judge has shot down the DOJ’s legal theory, as TPM has reported. Per Politico:

Separately, the DOJ is also using the disclosure of noncitizen voters to bolster its case in court to obtain New Jersey’s unredacted voter registration files. The Trump administration is suing New Jersey, seeking access to the state’s full voter file which includes nonpublic information like the drivers license ID numbers and partial Social Security numbers of New Jersey voters.

Seems Like Thune’s the One Whose ‘Patience Is Running Out’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) got testy when presented with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s recent remarks — that President Trump’s “patience is running out” with Senate Republicans, who both don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE Act or the interest in nuking the filibuster in order to jam through Trump’s voter suppression bill ahead of the midterms.

“Maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes. Right? It’s 50 around here,” Thune said, when reporters asked him about Leavitt’s remarks.

“Instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats,” he continued. “And if there are Republicans they think are gettable, get on the phone.”

Obviously, Thune is one of the few roadblocks standing in the way of Trump having his delusions fulfilled by fall, but it’s not just Thune and Senate GOP leadership’s disinterest in changing filibuster rules for the sake of disenfranchisement. There are several other Senate Republicans who are not on board with the legislation, one of whom has been very vocal about the fact that it would be impossible to implement Trump’s documentary proof of citizenship and voter ID laws just months out from a major federal election.

Even Fox News Poll Finds Trump’s Approval Rating Won’t Stop Tanking

New stats from a new Fox News poll conducted between July 17-20:

Several findings in the latest Fox News Poll show voters are unhappy and want major change, which bodes well for Democrats in November: President Donald Trump’s job approval remains near a record low, more Democrats are motivated to vote, Republicans join Democrats and independents in rating the economy negatively, and 4 in 10 voters want “dramatic” or “revolutionary” change. Plus, more view the GOP as tied to elites than the Democratic Party.

More From TPM Today

Kate Riga covers the latest fallout from Callais: A panel of judges blocked Black Tennesseans’ attempt to challenge Republicans’ racial gerrymander in Tennessee where, after the Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, state Republicans moved to carve up the state’s one Democratic district: Tennessee Gerrymandering Challenge Fails, Just as Supreme Court Intended

In this week’s edition of The Franchise, Khaya Himmelman digs in on election denier wins in Arizona’s Republican primaries this week and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin escalating the admin’s threats against state election officials: Election Deniers’ Grip on the Republican Party Strengthens in Arizona

“A new and ironic development in the first-of-its-kind legal challenge to President Trump’s U.S. attorney scheme gives me a chance to pull back the lens a bit to show the full scope of the corruption involved and why it matters,” David Kurtz writes in today’s Morning Memo: What’s Really Behind Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme

Yesterday’s Top Story

New Attack Launched Against Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme

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Sex work or starve: Aid workers in Nepal left jobless by USAID cuts turn to sex work to survive

Government withdraws subpoenas of 3 reporters for The New York Times after admitting legal errors 

Trump Badly Screws Susan Collins as Maine ICE Death Takes Darker Turn 

American voters desperately want relief from rising prices — especially the increasingly unaffordable cost of healthcare. Democrats have a plan for that.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently introduced the Break Up Big Medicine Act with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a bill that would split up the huge conglomerates that have made the current healthcare system so expensive and frustrating to navigate. Businessman Mark Cuban recently quipped that breaking up these near-monopolies could bring costs down by 40%.

If Democrats run on this healthcare affordability agenda, we stand a good chance of flipping not just the House, but the Senate too.

Insurers like UnitedHealth or Cigna don’t just sell coverage. They’ve consolidated power over virtually every part of our healthcare system, operating hospitals, clinics and pharmacy networks. And they use that control to generate billions in profits — by pushing patients toward care at the facilities they control.

UnitedHealth Group, for example, generates about 40% of its revenue — about $180 billion — from transactions between its thousands of subsidiaries. Its insurance branch steers patients to its roughly 90,000 affiliated doctors, and pressures those physicians to refer patients to its affiliated hospitals and clinics rather than lower-cost independent providers. And that’s not all. The company’s pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) arm pushes patients to affiliated pharmacies. Those pharmacies frequently upcharge patients for medicines, sometimes by 10 times the acquisition cost.

UnitedHealth Group is the largest of these conglomerates, but it’s hardly the only firm that operates this way. CVS Health owns Aetna, one of the nation’s largest insurers, in addition to the more than 9,000 CVS pharmacies it’s best known for. It also owns CVS Caremark, one of the nation’s largest PBM.

In theory, PBMs exist to save employers money by overseeing all the drug-related details of health insurance plans, and using their bulk-buying power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for big discounts and rebates. PBMs often tell employers that they pass along all the discounts and rebates they receive to the employer, minus a small fee for their services.

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What they typically don’t mention is that many PBMs are affiliated with foreign-based entities called “group purchasing organizations.” In 2025, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into whether PBMs are using these overseas entities to skirt government oversight. Lawmakers have raised concerns that these arrangements allow PBMs to retain rebate-related revenue and fees within opaque corporate structures, rather than transparently passing those savings on to employers and patients.

Meanwhile, insurers continually deny coverage for treatments and procedures that patients need. They often force doctors to get insurer approval — known as prior authorization — before prescribing, or they force patients onto less effective drugs. That places an immense administrative burden on physicians, who can spend an average of 12 hours per week completing prior authorizations, time that they’d certainly rather spend with patients.

Prior authorization can have dire consequences for patients. More than eight in 10 patients that face prior authorization simply give up on treatment. About a quarter of doctors say that prior authorization delays have led to a serious adverse event for a patient in their care — whether that’s hospitalization, permanent damage or death.

Breaking up the healthcare conglomerates that have enriched themselves by immiserating patients and cheating employers is good policy.

Polls show that voters overwhelmingly support bold healthcare reform. According to a recent poll, nearly seven in ten insured Americans identified either lowering out-of-pocket costs or nixing prior authorization as the single most important change they want from their health insurance. It would be a mistake for Democrats to content themselves with merely tweaking the Inflation Reduction Act, the party’s last major healthcare reform, which primarily focused on reducing the federal government’s pharmaceutical spending.

That kind of incrementalism won’t work — Democrats cannot win by being Republican-lite. We need to target the insurer and PBM practices that directly drive up Americans’ out-of-pocket costs and force too many people to choose between filling their prescriptions and filling their gas tanks.

If Democrats are looking for a 50-state strategy for the midterms — something I insisted on as chair of the Democratic National Committee during the 2006 blue wave — Sen. Warren’s bill offers a great place to start.

The post Democrats’ key to winning the midterms appeared first on Salon.com.