POLITICS

Gov. Gavin Newsom made headlines Friday for his comments about wrongfully deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, when he was trying to make news about tariffs.

Speaking at a Central Valley press conference announcing a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its wildly unpredictable trade policies, Newsom answered a question from reporters about Abrego Garcia. He called the controversy about whether the man is a gang member “the distraction of the day.”

Chaos ensued, including a Dem-on-Dem news cycle over the holiday weekend that neither Newsom nor the Democrats wanted, in which pundits debated whether Abrego Garcia and the due process crisis his extrajudicial deportation represents was indeed a distraction, or a constitutional crisis.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who traveled to El Salvador and was able to speak with Abrego Garcia, shot back at Newsom: “I think Americans are tired of elected officials or politicians who are all finger to the wind,” adding that, “anyone who can’t stand up for the Constitution and the right of due process doesn’t deserve to lead.”

Spoiler alert: I am pro-due process, and appalled that our executive branch is arguing for its suspension when it comes to immigrants — because, of course, that is the first step to curtailing everyone’s rights.

Calling Abrego Garcia’s plight a “distraction,” even if only on the narrow issue of gang membership, as Newsom’s office later clarified was his intent, is flat-out wrong. But the seeming split between Newsom and Van Hollen is both smaller than media is playing it, and also the most important question vexing Democrats right now: Do Americans care about the Constitution, or the stock market?

Americans largely can’t make up their minds about what worries them most. A good portion of people are currently zigzagging between terror that their life savings is disappearing before their eyes, and terror that their constitutional rights are in the same trash bin. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for Democrats, and there should be space to defend both the rights of Abrego Garcia (and by extension all of us) and push back against a senseless global trade war that threatens to put America into a recession.

But the controversy over Newsom’s inelegant statement goes to the heart of the Democratic divide right now. It’s a party in disarray that can’t decide whether to go all out against the attacks on democracy, or keep laser-focused on the pocketbook issues that seem to have ultimately handed Trump his second term.

Folks, it’s time to walk and chew gum, as the old saying goes.

Abrego Garcia is somewhere in a Salvadoran prison right now.

Maybe not the worst-of-the-worst Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where he began his deportation nightmare in a facility that human rights watchers contend has a history of torture, but he is still locked up in a Kafkaesque scenario that could leave him with what appears to be a life sentence in a foreign prison without committing a crime or being heard by a judge.

That kind of grab-and-vanish justice is common in El Salvador, where a three-year state of emergency declaration made by an authoritarian leader claiming he’s cracking down on gang crime has suspended due process rights, imprisoning about 83,000 people, according to Amnesty International.

That sounds a bit too close to home as President Trump deports and detains people using that same tough-on-crime talk without evidence, while Vice President JD Vance argues online that due process is just too cumbersome and needs to be scrapped for convenience if the United States is to be successful, as Trump has promised, at deporting millions of people in the next few years, whether they are criminals or not.

“To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors,” Vance wrote on social media last week. “Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?”

Yikes. Expediency over law.

“No process is the new due process,” Adam Winkler, a UCLA professor who teaches constitutional law, told me. “The Constitution is clear that any person in the United States in entitled to due process, it doesn’t matter if they are an immigrant.”

Newsom, in a more thoughtful interview with podcaster Bryan Tyler Cohen last week, called such flagrant disrepect for the law “the other side of the red line.”

“The founding fathers did not live and die for this moment,” Newsom said. “And so if you want this democracy, this democratic republic, to survive, that has to be called out with clarity and conviction, period, full stop.”

So Newsom and Van Hollen don’t disagree on the significance of Abrego Garcia’s case after all. They just can’t agree on how to best reach voters.

Most Americans don’t really know what due process is, or what losing it will mean to democracy. They do, however, understand when gas and groceries cost more, and when their retirement savings are sinking like a brick in a river.

As former Republican political consultant Mike Madrid put it, yes, we need to walk and chew gum, “but let’s not pretend that they’re equal, because they’re not.”

Walking, being the economy in this analogy, is far more important, he said.

In a recent poll, 55% of voters said they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy. Another poll by CNBC found Trump’s ratings on economic performance are currently the lowest they’ve ever been in his political career, after winning the election on economic issues.

“The fact that Democrats aren’t driving a tank through that issue is malpractice,” Madrid said, and he’s right. The economy won Trump the election, and the economy could lose Republicans the next one.

Fighting for the rights of Abrego Garcia?

“It’s a tough case, because people are really — are they defending MS-13? Are they defending, you know, someone who’s out of sight, out of mind in El Salvador?” Newsom said at the Friday news conference. “It’s exactly the debate [Republicans] want, because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs.”

But here’s where Trump’s chaos theory becomes so effective. Those who care about democracy have to fight on both the economy and due process — and so much more — because we may not make it to another free and fair election (as the last one was) if we allow the executive branch unlimited power. And, it should go without saying, there is a moral imperative to not abandon Abrego Garcia, or any of these people deported without due process.

Democrats seem to be stuck in a political mindset — how do they win elections — when the moment calls for something greater.

The ability to walk and chew gum, and explain to voters why both matter.

Mad as hell isn’t necessarily the best mood to take to a party, but when the event is political and everyone there feels the same way, a sense of community can carry the occasion.

In an effort to get as many people as possible to see filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s anti-administration documentary, “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,” a 1.4-million-member Internet-based liberal advocacy group organized simultaneous house parties throughout the country.

MoveOn encouraged its supporters to buy copies of the film on DVD or video, then welcome strangers into their homes for a viewing. By Sunday afternoon, when the parties began, more than 2,200 hosts had volunteered by posting their addresses on the Web site. Anyone interested could RSVP and attend free of charge.

The separate parties would be united in a mass conference call to celebrate the grass-roots effort and hear Greenwald answer questions about the film.

Ann Smith, who owns the New School of Cooking in Culver City, opened her Faircrest Heights home to 40 guests at sunset. She’d joined MoveOn last March, after she heard commentator and former gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington and former “Politically Incorrect” host Bill Maher recommend the group. “When MoveOn decided to organize the house parties, I thought, ‘Why not?’ I made a promise to myself to work politically this year, because this is the year it really counts,” she said.

A check of the more than 40 Los Angeles-area parties on the MoveOn Web site Friday showed that nearly all were at capacity. Smith’s guest list was filled in two days.

About one third of the guests were friends of Smith’s. The rest signed up online, choosing her party because it was geographically desirable. Leslie Robin, who lives nearby, said, “I like being among neighbors. This is more personal than it would be in a large lecture hall.”

Smith’s party was similar to the other local gatherings, except for the presence of Greenwald and his co-producer, Kate McArdle.

The evening was more like an adult education class than a social occasion. Guests wearing first-name-only identification tags initially hovered around a table of food. Liz Biber, a friend and student of Smith’s, made some of the hors d’oeuvres, including caramelized onion tartlets that could tempt an anarchist. Biber brought her brother, an architect visiting from New York. “I haven’t seen the film, but I’m sure I’m politically in line with it,” Jim Biber said.

The group fell silent when a speakerphone was set up on the dining room table and the conference call was broadcast before the film was screened. The disembodied voices of MoveOn staffers welcomed the partygoers. Campaign director Eli Pariser urged people to “show the film to your friends and to your enemies.” MoveOn estimated that 50,000 people watched the film in homes from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Miami.

While Smith’s guests listened in the dining room, Greenwald, in another room, took the phone and answered questions that had been submitted by e-mail from around the country. Then Smith’s guests, who ranged in age from late 20s to 70s, filled chairs set up in her darkened living room and watched the 56-minute documentary on her television. Half a dozen people who couldn’t find seats were invited to view a second copy on her laptop in another room.

For the most part, they were a rapt and polite audience. Geoffrey Pomeroy, an actor and musician who came with a friend, muttered an unprintable name for the president under his breath early on, but civility reigned. In the film, one of the former government employees voicing his opposition to the administration’s conduct quoted Mark Twain’s definition of patriotism: “Supporting your country all the time, and the government when it deserves it,” a remark that elicited a murmur of appreciation.

There’s always a kitchen party. In this case, it consisted of five people who’d already seen the film and preferred to talk about its message with one another while it screened. Their discussion gradually moved from criticism of the war to their antagonism toward the religious right. After the screening, Greenwald answered questions from the crowd and told them how making the film made him realize how effectively the administration exploited people’s fear of nuclear weapons. “Their message reaches you on a very emotional level,” he said.

Missing from the evening were opposing voices. “There’s an element of preaching to the choir here,” Smith said. “But the choir needs to sing a little louder. After seeing the film, a lot of people felt that they had a responsibility to get more involved. I’ve never had a party where I liked so many people! About 15 people stayed for about an hour and half after the screening, and they were going on and on about how great it was that this community of like-minded people had come together.”

In late March, Isael Hermosillo received an ominous message from his supervisor around 7 a.m. ordering him to cancel all his meetings scheduled that day.

Hermosillo rushed to notify several locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union as well as attorneys for Albertsons and Kroger that he would not be able to attend a session in Buena Park later that morning — the third consecutive meeting set to be held that week for labor talks between major Southern California grocery chains and unions representing their workers.

Two hours later, Hermosillo found himself on a video conference call where he was informed by his supervisor he would be put on a month-long paid administrative leave, and that his job would be terminated.

Hermosillo is among 130 federal mediators who were fired on March 26 after the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), effectively shuttered a 79-year-old federal agency that mediates labor disputes.

The terminations at the agency, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, have fueled concern among unions and employers alike about who will step in to help ease labor conflicts in Southern California and beyond.

Though relatively small and obscure, the agency plays a vital role in helping to settle disputes so as to avoid labor unrest that can disrupt the free flow of commerce, according to former federal mediators and experts.

Besides brokering negotiations for private employers, the mediators handle worker grievances; train joint labor-management committees; appoint arbitrators if a dispute cannot be resolved; and assist with negotiation impasses in the federal sector. These services are offered at little to no cost.

“We are the ones that come in quietly when people are having issues or contract negotiations aren’t working and are falling apart,” Hermosillo said. “We go in and assist, and then move on to the next group that may need our assistance. I think that’s a lot of why the American people don’t know who we are and what we do.”

Hermosillo works out of the agency’s Los Angeles office in Glendale, staffed by five mediators and a supervisor.

His termination caught employers and unions off guard — coming weeks after the labor contracts covering some 55,000 unionized grocery workers in California had expired — and threw a wrench in negotiations, said Kathy Finn, president of UFCW Local 770.

Finn said because Hermosillo has worked on negotiations for many years, on multiple cycles since around 2017, both sides trust him and they engage him very early on in the process — which has helped to avert strikes.

“We always have difficult negations with these companies … we’ve gotten very close to going on strike many times, ending or reaching a deal minutes or hours before a deadline — or after,” Finn said. “The help Isael has provided has been very valuable.”

UFCW Local 770 is among seven locals representing workers from San Diego to Santa Barbara in labor talks with Albertsons, parent owner of the Vons and Pavilions chains, and Kroger, which owns Ralphs.

Finn said mediators like Hermosillo are highly effective. Without them, negotiations can break down into finger-pointing rather than become productive sessions focused on the substance of a contract, Finn said.

Neither Kroger or Albertsons returned requests for comment.

DOGE and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget also did not respond to requests for comment.

Last week, UFCW joined a dozen major unions in bringing a lawsuit against the Trump administration to reverse the closure of the federal agency. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, argues that the Trump administration’s dismantling of the mediation service is in “clear defiance” of Congress’ constitutional powers to create and dissolve such agencies.

In fiscal 2024, the agency, which has a budget of $54 million, employed about 143 full-time mediators who conducted more than 5,400 mediated negotiations and provided some 10,000 arbitration panels. And recent estimates show that FMCS’ services save the economy more than $500 million annually, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit cites data from the agency’s website that have been scrubbed in recent weeks.

Just five mediators and a few support staff remain at the agency after the cuts, according to the lawsuit.

Some major employers and trade associations have been petitioning the Trump administration to reverse the decision, said Martin H. Malin, a professor emeritus at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and a mediator who served on the Federal Service Impasses Panel during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“No one will talk about this publicly,” Malin said. “They can see this hair trigger mentality in the White House. Everybody is afraid.”

DOGE has said the agency will limit its services to labor disputes that involve more than 1,000 employees. But Malin said even with those restrictions, the workload will be too much for the remaining mediators.

“It’s impossible for four mediators to cover the entire country,” Malin said. “The situation, it’s pretty dire.”

Tina Littleton, another federal mediator in the Glendale office who had worked at the agency for 15 years, was stunned by the decision.

“Do I feel this was done correctly or appropriately?” Littleton asked. “My answer is no.”

Littleton recently facilitated negotiations between some 200 workers and their employer, which manufactures plastic pouches used to dispense IV infusions in medical facilities.

“It doesn’t matter to us whether big or small, they still have some part that they play in making sure interstate commerce continues,” Littleton said.

Martha Figueroa, a field representative who helps the California Federation of Teachers negotiate contracts, said she has frequently relied on a federal mediator in discussions with Head Start, the child development nonprofit targeted by the Trump administration for funding cuts. She worries about potentially having to turn to private mediators, who are “really, really expensive.”

“When you have a private mediator, it’s very stressful to both parties,” Figueroa said. “The more you’re at the table, the more they get paid. And that’s not the case when you have a public mediator.”

Rather than saving money, dismantling the agency will create more inefficiencies, said William Resh, associate professor of public policy and management with USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy

“What you have without mediation are disputes that are going to be more prolonged, more contentious,” Resh said. “These are highly professionalized individuals with a lot of experience in bargaining and conflict negotiation.”

California and several other states are exploring how they might fill the gap.

California’s Public Employment Relations Board, which oversees disputes between state workers and their employers, also has the authority to offer mediation services to private employers, but it doesn’t have the budget to do so, said Lorena Gonzalez, head of the California Labor Federation. Labor groups have been pushing state lawmakers in budget talks to augment the board’s budget by several million, she said.

“In the long run the state does benefit. We don’t want people to go on strike. Sometimes, it’s needed, but for the most part, if mediation is able to help get a good resolution, we prefer that,” Gonzalez said.

Conservative commentator and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Hilton announced Monday that he is running for governor, the second prominent Republican to enter the 2026 race to replace termed-out Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“California means to America what America means to the world. Let’s make California the land of opportunity again — great jobs, great homes, great kids. Let’s make California an inspiration again, the very best of America,” he said in a nearly three-minute video posted online. “There’s only one way to do that. We’ve got to end the one-party rule that got us into this mess. It’s time to end the years of Democrat failure. It’s time for a new future. That’s why I’m running for governor, to make this beautiful state that we love so much truly golden again.”

Hilton, who plans an official campaign announcement event in Huntington Beach on Tuesday, faces steep odds in the gubernatorial race. Californians last elected statewide Republican candidates in 2006, and the state’s residents have become more liberal since then. However, there is mounting frustration about issues such as crime, inflation and the cost of living.

“Fortune favors the bold. It is an uphill battle for a Republican to win statewide office, but if bold people like Steve don’t emerge, Republicans aren’t going to win,” said Conyers Davis, an advisor to former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Davis first met Hilton when conservative leader David Cameron of England visited then-Gov. Schwarzenegger’s cigar-smoking tent at the statehouse in Sacramento in 2008 and worked with him on Cameron’s successful 2010 campaign to become prime minister.

Additionally, the state’s jungle primary system, in which the two candidates who receive the most votes in the June 2026 primary move on to the general election regardless of party, mean Republicans have a decent shot of securing one of the spots on the November ballot.

That’s partly because the Democratic vote may be fractured by the large number of Democrats running — Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, state schools chief Tony Thurmond, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, former state Controller Betty Yee, former Rep. Katie Porter, former state Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and businessman Stephen Cloobeck.

Additionally, former Vice President Kamala Harris is weighing a bid and expected to make a decision by the end of the summer.

On the Republican side, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is the sole prominent GOP candidate who previously announced he would run. So if Democratic voters splinter, Bianco or Hilton could win one of the top two spots, despite the state’s deep blue tilt.

Hilton, 55, is the son of Hungarian immigrants who fled their homeland during a revolution in 1956. He was born in England and after graduating from Oxford, Hilton worked in politics and advertising. He then founded “Good Business,” a consulting firm that advised companies such as Nike and McDonald’s about ethical capitalism.

Described as “part Svengali, part spin doctor, part strategist” by the London Standard in 2006, Hilton was a senior adviser and close confidant of Cameron, who served as Britain’s prime minister from 2010 to 2016.

Hilton was credited with modernizing the British conservative movement, remaining true to free-market ideals while also supporting liberal social policy, such as backing gay rights and fighting climate change.

News reports about Hilton’s time at 10 Downing St. paint him as a charismatic but eccentric and idiosyncratic figure, routinely wearing wrinkled T-shirts, jeans or tracksuit pants, cycling gear and no shoes as he wandered around the prime minister’s stodgy formal residence.

He also drew headlines for making about $450,000 per year in 2006, a salary that dwarfed Cameron’s compensation, according to the Observer. And he broke with Cameron by supporting Brexit, the successful 2016 effort to have the United Kingdom leave the European Union.

Hilton immigrated to California in 2012 with his wife, Rachel Whetstone, who has worked as a public relations executive at Google, Uber, Facebook and Netflix. He became a U.S. citizen in 2021. The couple lives in the affluent Silicon Valley community of Atherton and has two children.

Since he moved to the United States, Hilton has taught at Stanford University, hosted a Fox News show called “The Next Revolution,” and co-founded Crowdpac, a nonpartisan political fundraising website. He and the company parted ways in 2018 after his full-throated support of President Trump caused controversy. Villaraigosa cut ties with the company during his unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial bid because of the kerfuffle.

Despite positioning himself as a populist who has supported policy from both parties, Hilton’s vocal support of Trump, including calling for an investigation into potential voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and other controversial views will almost certainly be raised in the campaign.

But Hilton’s Silicon Valley relationships with billionaires such as venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya and former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt could be a boon to his gubernatorial campaign.

In 2023, Hilton founded Golden Together, a research group focused on restoring the California dream. Among the group’s policy focuses are the state’s business climate, homelessness, crime, affordable housing and wildfire management. Its advisory board includes Lanhee Chen, a former advisor to the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio; Gloria Romero, a former Democratic state Senate leader who is now a Republican; former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and Davis.

“He is somebody who is sincerely interested in working to address some of the challenges California faces,” said Chen, a Stanford lecturer who unsuccessfully ran for state controller in 2022 and has been floated as a potential statewide or congressional candidate. Chen said he is weighing his options, but is a supporter of Hilton because of his focus on policy and substance. “He is at his core a policy guy and has a lot of ideas to address these challenges.”

NEW DELHI — Vice President JD Vance held trade talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Monday as the South Asian nation looks to strike an early deal with Washington that spares it from President Trump’s additional tariff hikes.

The White House said in a statement that the talks yielded “significant progress in the negotiations” for a bilateral trade agreement, and that the sides had finalized a road map for a possible deal to reduce the tariff burden.

The pair also discussed cooperation in defense, critical technologies and energy, the prime minister’s office said in a statement. The two leaders “called for dialogue and diplomacy as the way forward” after discussing regional and global security issues, the statement said.

The meeting included bilateral talks between Vance and Modi, a larger meeting with staff, and a dinner with the vice president’s wife, Usha Vance, and their three children. A video released by the prime minister’s office showed Vance’s sons in traditional Indian outfits and Modi gifting the children peacock feathers.

Modi also said he looks forward to a visit by Trump to India later this year, referring to an invitation he conveyed to the American president during his visit to Washington in February.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting in New Delhi on Monday.

(Indian Prime Minister’s Office via Associated Press)

The meeting caps the first day of a four-day visit to India by Vance and his family, a trip that underscores India’s importance among countries seeking trade talks with the U.S. during the 90-day pause on Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs. Following the dinner, Vance departed New Delhi for Jaipur.

The U.S. has threatened to slap a 26% tariff on Indian exports — up from a baseline 10% covering exports from all nations — if no deal is reached during the tariff pause that stretches until July.

Trump administration officials have named India as one of several countries the U.S. is prioritizing negotiations with during the pause, and hopes are running high in New Delhi that the country can secure a quick agreement.

During a visit by Modi to the White House in February, the two sides said they planned to conclude the first tranche of a bilateral trade deal by fall. Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is in Washington this week and plans to meet U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to advance the talks. India’s chief trade negotiator will also visit the U.S. this week.

Modi has sought to pave the way for a deal with the U.S. in recent months by slashing Indian tariffs on a range of American goods, agreeing to buy more U.S. exports and accepting undocumented migrants sent back from the United States.

Dancers wearing traditional Indian attire stand in front of a poster depicting U.S. Vice President JD Vance upon his arrival in New Delhi on Monday.

(Kenny Holston / Pool photo)

Vance and his family arrived in New Delhi on Monday morning following a three-day trip to Italy, where the vice president met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. He also met with Pope Francis at the Vatican, just a day before the pontiff’s death.

In New Delhi, the Vance family was greeted at the airport by Indian officials before setting off for a visit to a Hindu temple. Interest in the family runs high in India, given that Usha Vance is a daughter of Indian immigrants from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

Vance’s visit will also include a bit of softer diplomacy, with the vice president’s family set to make stops at cultural sites in Jaipur and in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal.

The U.S. has long sought to cultivate a deeper partnership with India, in large part as a bulwark against China. India, meanwhile, has sought greater U.S. investment and deeper cooperation in technology-sharing and defense.

The South Asian country is also hoping to lure investment from White House advisor Elon Musk. The Tesla chief executive indicated he’d visit India later this year after speaking last week with Modi, signaling potential progress in the electric carmaker’s long-pending push into the world’s most-populous country.

Strumpf and Gardner write for Bloomberg.

WASHINGTON — A group of House Democrats flew to El Salvador on Sunday to push for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly removed from the United States last month to a maximum-security prison.

Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) led the effort. They were joined by Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) and Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.).

President Trump has refused to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. — despite a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his return — arguing he has no authority to do so.

The Abrego Garcia case has become a focal point in the debate around immigration and limits to executive authority. Trump has framed the Abrego Garcia case as an immigration issue, while critics say the real issue is upholding the Constitution and the right to due process.

“Trump is defying a Supreme Court order to bring Kilmar home,” Garcia said Sunday just before departing Washington for El Salvador. “We’re there to obviously demand his release and to continue the pressure on the administration.”

Democrats had hoped to organize a congressional delegation to visit Abrego Garcia. Trips that are organized in an official capacity grant legislators more security and resources.

On Tuesday, Garcia and Frost sent a letter to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) requesting authorization to fund an official visit to the Terrorism Confinement Center, also called CECOT, a mega-prison that can hold 40,000 people.

“A Congressional delegation would allow Committee Members to conduct a welfare check on Mr. Abrego Garcia, as well as others held at CECOT, such as Andry José Hernandez — a 30-year-old LGBTQ makeup artist who passed a ‘credible fear’ interview during his legal asylum process before being deported,” the lawmakers wrote. “In addition, congressional oversight is warranted following President Trump’s recent remarks in which he expressed a desire to send ‘homegrown criminals’—including U.S. citizens—to this facility.”

Comer denied the request Friday, stating in a letter that he would not “approve a single dime of taxpayer funds” for such a trip.

“It is absurd that you both displayed active hostility for over two years toward the Committee’s oversight of the Biden Border Crisis and the consequences of millions of illegal aliens entering the country,” Comer wrote, “yet now, you are seeking travel at Committee expense to meet with foreign gang members.”

House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) denied a similar request from Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.).

But House Republicans were granted official travel to El Salvador last week. Reps. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and Riley Moore (R-W. Va.) shared photos on X of themselves at the prison.

Garcia called Comer’s denial “shameful” given the approvals for Republican members. He said his trip — which is being personally funded by Garcia and the other legislators — would include a meeting with officials at the U.S. Embassy, local advocates who have been demanding the release of Abrego Garcia, and his legal team.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) was the first U.S. legislator to meet with Abrego Garcia. Van Hollen returned Friday from a three-day trip to El Salvador to push for his release, saying the case is about far more than one man.

““It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States,” Van Hollen said.

Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia told him he had been moved from CECOT to a detention center with better conditions. His status since Van Hollen left is unknown.

Garcia said his trip continues the groundwork that Van Hollen laid.

Abrego Garcia, who is from El Salvador, lived legally in Maryland. A 2019 immigration judge’s order prohibited his removal to El Salvador. But he was removed March 15 in what Immigration and Customs Enforcement acknowledged was an “administrative error.” White House officials allege that he is a member of MS-13, though he has not been charged with gang-related crimes.

Sam Rutledge and his wife have a baby due in mid-July, so they thought they had a few more months to research and buy the gear they’ll need.

But President Trump’s tariff announcement this month turned the couple’s slow walk into a sprint. In the last few weeks, they’ve bought two strollers, a car seat, a nursery glider, a crib and a high chair. All of them are made overseas.

“These are all pretty expensive under normal conditions, but when it became clear tariffs were coming, we decided to buy them in case they became prohibitively expensive,” said Rutledge, a high school physics teacher.

Raising a child in America has never been cheap. In the first year alone, it costs an average of $20,384, according to Baby Center, a parenting website. But tariffs — ranging from 10% for imports from most countries to 145% for imports from China — will make it much more expensive for new parents.

An estimated 90% of the core baby care products and the parts that go into making baby paraphernalia — bottles and diaper pails, strollers and car seats — are made in Asia, according to the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Assn., a U.S. trade group. The vast majority come from China.

“Overseas manufacturing has been the norm in our industry for decades,” said Lisa Trofe, the association’s executive director.

It wasn’t always this way. When Munchkin Inc. Chief Executive Steven Dunn founded his company in 1991, it made baby bottles in California with tooling from New Jersey. But over the years, the manufacturers he used shut down and the cost of doing business in the U.S. skyrocketed. Now, about 60% of Munchkin’s 500 products, from a $5 sippy cup to a $254 Night Owl Stroller with headlights, are made in China.

In response to the tariffs, Dunn halted orders from China and instituted a hiring freeze at Munchkin’s Van Nuys headquarters, where 320 people are employed. Dunn expects Munchkin will run out of some products within three months.

“There is no possibility of being able to pass on those tariffs” to customers in the form of price increases, he said.

Dunn said he tried to reduce his dependence on China in recent years, shifting some manufacturing to Vietnam and Mexico. He also spent a year communicating with American manufacturers to see if one could make Munchkin’s new Flow Nipple Shield, which allows a breastfeeding mother to see whether her milk is flowing. But most said they couldn’t make the complex silicone product, Dunn said. It’s now made in Vietnam.

“There’s not enough toolmakers and manufacturing expertise and automation and skilled labor in the U.S. to make the thousands of products the juvenile industry needs,” Dunn said.

Multiple baby brands and companies contacted by the Associated Press didn’t respond or said they weren’t commenting on the tariffs, including Graco, Chicco, Britax, Nuna, Dorel Juvenile, UppaBaby, Evenflo and Bugaboo.

The Juvenile Products Manufacturers Assn. said it asked the Trump administration for a tariff exemption, arguing that baby products are essential for children’s well-being. Trump exempted some baby products, including car seats and high chairs, from import taxes during his first administration. But he hasn’t said whether he would consider doing so again.

The AP left a message seeking comment from the White House.

Nurture&, a company that makes a popular nursery glider and other baby furniture, said it’s trying to be transparent about the effect of tariffs.

In a recent email, the company told customers it started lowering prices on some items when the tariffs hit. The company, which was founded in 2020, said it would keep those lower prices in place until April 30, but after that it may not be able to absorb the full cost of the import duties.

“These are large purchases, these are investments, and this is a very sensitive life stage,” Nurture& Chief Merchant Jill Gruys said. “We want people to make the best decision for their budget and their family.”

Elizabeth Mahon, the owner of Three Littles, a baby store in Washington, D.C., said she’s worried the tariffs will make essential products too expensive for some families.

Mahon volunteers twice a month at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where she teaches people how to buckle their kids safely into car seats. Some families still must be persuaded to use car seats, she said. Mahon fears higher prices would be another deterrent.

“No one is dying if they can’t buy a toy, but if they don’t have access to car seats, kids will get seriously injured,” she said.

At her store, Mahon is getting notices that some manufacturers plan to introduce steep price increases in May. She said she felt lucky she could rent a storage facility and build up inventory ahead of the tariffs. For many small businesses, she said, the extra costs are “a death sentence.”

At the Little Seedling baby shop in Ann Arbor, Mich., owner Molly Ging said she would normally be putting in Christmas orders at this time of year. Instead, she’s sorting through price increase notices from many of the vendors she works with.

“It’s a lot to manage, and I just have no idea how it’s going to play out,” she said.

Business is brisk right now, with customers hoping to beat tariff-related price increases. But Ging worries about her 13 employees — all moms who bring their kids to work — and about whether she can maintain enough inventory to meet future demand.

“Babies don’t stop being born because there’s tariffs,” she said.

Durbin writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — California residents are now eligible to buy naloxone — the generic drug for Narcan, a drug used to treat opioid overdoses — for $24 through the state’s prescription website CalRx brand, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said in a release Monday.

“Life-saving medications shouldn’t come with a life-altering price tag. CalRx is about making essential drugs like naloxone affordable and accessible for all — not the privileged few,” Newsom said in the release.

Naloxone is an easy-to-use nasal spray medication that reverses drug overdoses and can save lives. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that anyone who is at risk of overdose, or knows someone who may be at risk, should carry naloxone in case of an emergency.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that twin-packs of CalRx-branded over-the-counter naloxone HCL 4 milligram nasal spray are now available to all Californians for $24 per carton, almost half the standard market price.

(Governor’s press office)

The move expands a program launched last year that made naloxone available for eligible organizations such as nonprofits, universities and first responders in large quantities for free. The state pays $24 per two-dose unit, down from $41 charged by previous suppliers, and has saved $17 million since May 2024 according to its savings tracker.

Preliminary data through June 2024 showed a decrease in synthetic opioid overdose deaths in California for the first time since 2018, Newsom’s office said. Although the decrease could not be contributed to one factor, it said, a comprehensive effort to tackle the crisis involving fentanyl and other opioids seems to be making a difference.

The statewide decrease mirrors a plateau in overdose deaths among unhoused people in Los Angeles County as public health officials ramped up the distribution of naloxone last year.

Part of Newsom’s plan to address the opioid crisis included putting naloxone in middle and high schools across the state, along with making it widely accessible for a low price through CalRx. A bill Newsom signed last year may require workplaces to stock naloxone in first aid kits by 2028.

Newsom hopes to use CalRx to produce generic versions of insulin, naloxone and other drugs for an at-cost price, he announced in 2023 alongside a $50-million contract with a nonprofit manufacturer. Despite years-long setbacks on multiple healthcare initiatives and expected Medicaid cuts from the Trump administration, the governor still promises to make generic insulin available for $30.

Dana Perino, co-host of the popular Fox News panel show “The Five,” has never taken her success for granted.

Throughout her career that started with stints as a local TV reporter and a staff assistant in Congress, she’s acknowledged the guidance she’s received from people along the way, including former President George W. Bush, who asked her to become White House press secretary right when she was on the cusp of leaving government service behind.

The move was a major turning point for Perino, as standing behind the lectern in the White House briefing room has long been a fast track to a TV news job. She eventually became a Fox News fixture, advancing from a contributor in 2009 to co-hosting three hours daily between “The Five” and the daytime newscast “America’s Newsroom” with Bill Hemmer.

Perino has made mentoring part of her personal brand. In 2009, she co-founded Minute Mentoring, an organization that sets up rapid-fire meetings for young women seeking career help. She’s looking to reach a wider audience with her new book, “I Wish Someone Had Told Me … The Best Advice for Building a Great Career,” which draws on her experiences and those of her friends and Fox News colleagues. There are dozens of anecdotes about humbling first jobs and dealing with rejection.

Perino’s previous books also offered career advice. But she’s found the need for counsel doesn’t end after landing a big job. “Folks whom I mentored going into their first jobs are still asking me for advice as they take senior executive positions and juggle the work/life balance with multiple children and aging parents,” she writes in the introduction of the new Fox News Books title.

Perino, 52, is among the less strident Republican voices on Fox News. (She notably stuck to the facts on the 2020 presidential election results when other hosts indulged President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, leading to a settlement in a costly defamation suit against the network from voting machine company Dominion with a second one pending.)

The Colorado native’s analysis typically draws on her own White House experience rather than any loyalty to MAGA. She takes the same reflective approach in her book, which she recently discussed over a Zoom call.

There is a lot of very traditional career advice in this book, with instructions on how to dress and talk in the workplace (avoid clothes that are too tight, no vocal fry or uptalking, one drink limit at the office party). Is it difficult to mentor now because we’re in an age where younger people seem more than anything else to want to be themselves? Is there any risk today in trying to tell people how to do these things?

Right now, most of the bosses that young people are going to be working for are either baby boomers or Gen X and now it’s sort of aging millennials and they all think differently and they all grew up with a different way of communicating depending on what technology was available. But there are some fundamental principles that remain true no matter what. Let’s say you do something nice for a young person, maybe you meet with them and they write you a thank-you note. And all of these young people that were not taught to write in cursive and their handwriting looks to me like from a much younger person than what they are, I just have to keep in mind that they weren’t taught to write in cursive, so of course it looks a little different. So just trying to give people a little bit more grace depending on where they are in life. And that goes both ways.

Has the move toward working from home made it more challenging?

I am surprised and quite troubled about how many young people are self-isolating still and partly because it’s uncomfortable to go to a networking event or go out there and try to meet somebody. But they really want to meet somebody. You have to go out and participate in the world.

Is it trickier to be a mentor in the media business when there is so much contraction going on? How realistic do you need to be when there are clearly fewer positions out there like yours?

I do sometimes second-guess myself. When I meet young people who say they want to do what I do, I’m thrilled that they want that. A career like this isn’t instantaneous now. I had a young woman — she’s just graduating high school — she said to me that she’s going to Colby College and she wants to study journalism. I made a face and I said I don’t think you have to study journalism. Journalism will always be here I hope. But I think you could study something else and then maybe minor in journalism. The late Charles Krauthammer said study history or philosophy, learn how to think, learn how to write and then try to figure out a way if that’s still what you want to do. I don’t know whether everyone always feels this way, but Bill Hemmer and I talk about how we are glad we are in the careers that we are in now at the time that we’re in.

So if you were a mentor to President Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt and you heard her say something in a press conference that was not correct — such as when she said a tariff is not a tax — what would you say to her?

I’ve been friends with almost all of the White House secretaries and I always keep my advice to them private. Also I will never proactively reach out to say, “You should have said this or that” or “Here’s how to better handle that.” I will never do that, but I am here if they want to call me. I will tell you one piece of advice I gave Karoline at the beginning is that she’s got a great smile and she should use it and it is OK to lighten up every once in a while.

Former president George W. Bush sounds like he was a pretty good boss. How was he as a mentor?

He gave me some really good advice over the years and continues to this day. He loves career coaching. When I was struggling with what I should do after I left the White House and I was doing too many things at once, he encouraged me to start my own business. I had 100 reasons why I thought that wasn’t a good idea. I remember he said, “You have to ask yourself, ‘What is the worst thing that could happen?’” I use that advice and pass it on to a lot of people too. Especially younger women can kind of bubble up with anxiety and fear, it’s almost paralyzing, and when you start asking, “What is the worst thing that could happen?” they realize it’s actually not that bad.

Do you speak with him much about the current president?

No.

Why has he kept such a low profile?

He was very, very happy to step off the stage. I know there are some people that wish that he would maybe speak more. But he’s super comfortable with keeping any advice or commentary private. If President Trump were to call — which I don’t know if he ever does; I don’t ask that — he would keep it quiet. He doesn’t seek the limelight.

“The Five,” a daily roundtable on Fox News, was the most-watched cable news program for the second consecutive year.

(Fox News)

“The Five” is now one of the most–watched programs in all of television. What is the secret sauce that makes it work?

Story choice. A well-rounded hour of different types of topics. News of the day. Pop culture. Something funny. We have maintained an ability to keep teasing one another and respecting each other and still laughing. Even if we have a raucous fight about tariffs, and we do, we still laugh in the commercial breaks. That is consistently the same and I wish I could tell you what the secret sauce was because if we could bottle that and sell it, we would probably do very well financially.

SACRAMENTO — Give Gov. Gavin Newsom credit. You can call it grandstanding and opportunistic, but suing President Trump over tariffs was smart, bold and much needed.

Sure, it was political. Newsom adroitly leaped ahead of other potential 2028 presidential contenders by taking aim through the court system at Trump’s allegedly illegal actions on tariffs.

Someone needed to seek a judicial ruling on whether the president can raise tariffs himself without congressional approval.

Republican congressional leaders — Republican politicians generally — are too intimidated by their president to sneeze without his blessing. They’re meekly ceding their co-equal legislative power to the president. And that’s worrisome for democracy.

It’s about self-preservation. Republican members of Congress who must survive GOP primaries to win reelection fear getting on the bad side of the vengeful president and being “primaried.”

“Where the hell is Congress? Where the hell is Speaker [Mike] Johnson? Do your job!” Newsom proclaimed while announcing his lawsuit last week at an almond orchard near Ceres in the agriculture-rich San Joaquin Valley.

“They’re sitting there passively [as Trump] wrecks the economy of the United States.”

Actually, Newsom seemed to be crashing Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s party.

Newsom and Bonta jointly filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. But Bonta — often working with other states’ Democratic attorneys general — already had filed 14 lawsuits challenging Trump policies. Bonta’s staff had spent significant time drafting the tariff suit before Newsom publicly surfaced as a plaintiff.

“The president is acting as if he’s above the law. He isn’t,” Bonta said before introducing Newsom at the almond farm. “Congress has the duty to set taxes, duties and, yes, tariffs.”

For Newsom and California, challenging Trump in court is a bit risky. The president has threatened to retaliate against California by withholding federal funds if state policies conflict with his. That includes money to help rebuild fire-ravaged sections of Los Angeles.

That’s not just an idle threat, as Trump has shown in pulling back federal funds promised for universities and strong-arming law firms that have opposed him in court cases.

But as most of us learned as kids, you’ve got to stand up to a bully. And that’s what Newsom did.

“No doubt, Trump isn’t going to give California anything anyway,” says Democratic political consultant David Townsend. “This is a good political move by Newsom to position himself as anti-Trump on a solid policy issue.

“All Democratic voters are looking for a strong anti-Trump leader.”

OK, so Newsom is reading the tea leaves and realizes that lots of people are clamoring for a crusader to carry the fight against Trump’s policies.

That was demonstrated on the night before Newsom’s announcement when Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — two East Coast democratic socialists — attracted nearly 30,000 people at an anti-Trump rally in a Republican congressional district near Sacramento.

An essential ingredient of democracy is elected officials following the citizens’ will. And that’s clearly what Newsom is now trying to do on tariffs.

“I can’t imagine anything more unifying” for California than challenging Trump on tariffs, Newsom said. “We were hoping we didn’t need to go down this path. But we [are] prepared to go down this path.”

Trump’s “unlawful tariffs are wreaking chaos on California families, businesses and our economy — driving up prices and threatening jobs,” Newsom said in a prepared statement.

The lawsuit represents a shift in Newsom’s strategy toward Trump. Previously, he has been practically mute, seemingly trying to play nice to avoid Trump’s wrath that could cost California federal money for disaster relief, higher education and Medi-Cal healthcare.

Contrast that soft-tongue tactic with another Newsom announcement last week unveiling a lawsuit challenging Trump cuts to the AmeriCorps service program in California.

“We’ve gone from the New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society to a federal government that gives the middle finger to volunteers serving their fellow Americans,” Newson declared in a prepared statement.

Middle finger? Not exactly traditional gubernatorial lingo. But no bureaucratic bull, either.

Governors wouldn’t ordinarily file a court case contesting a president’s foreign policy. But this is not like suing Trump for cozying up to Russian President Vladmir Putin, puncturing our European alliances or bizarrely threatening to seize Greenland. On tariffs, California has judicial “standing” as an aggrieved victim.

“No state is poised to lose more than the state of California,” Newsom said.

“We talk about stupidity,” Newsom continued. “This [tariff action] is the poster child for that.”

Newsom noted that California’s gross domestic product was $3.9 trillion in 2023, which was 50% bigger than that of the next-largest state, Texas. If this were a country, it would be the fifth-largest economy in the world.

We’re the nation’s leading agriculture producer and there are more than 36,000 manufacturing firms employing 1.1 million people.

China, Mexico and Canada — special tariff targets for Trump — supply more than 40% of California’s foreign imports. They’re also the top three export countries. In all, California imported $491 billion in products last year and exported $183 billion worth.

What the tariffs add up to is an expected economic downturn in California that will cost the state government tax revenue and drive the budget deeper into red ink. That will stem from collapsing businesses that rely on foreign imports or exports — exacerbated by reduced consumer spending as prices rise on everything from food to cars.

Although Newsom and Bonta insist that Trump can’t impose tariffs without congressional consent, this isn’t a clear-cut case. The Trump-friendly Supreme Court undoubtedly will eventually decide.

Newsom did the right thing by being the first governor to seek a court answer.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: ‘The vibe shift is’ real. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie becomes his hometown’s hype man
The TK: The Harem of Elon Musk
The L.A. Times Special: More immigrants opt to self-deport rather than risk being marched out like criminals

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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Nearly 2 million California rooftop solar owners could lose the energy credits that help them cover what they spent to install the expensive climate-friendly systems under a proposed state bill.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier), is a former executive at Southern California Edison and its parent company, Edison International. She says the credits that rooftop owners receive when they send unused electricity to the grid is raising the bills of customers who don’t own the panels.

Her bill, AB 942, would limit the current program’s benefits to 10 years — half the 20 year-period the state had told the rooftop owners they would receive. The bill would also cancel the solar contracts if the home was sold.

Southern California Edison and the state’s two other big for-profit utilities have long tried to reduce the energy credits that incentivized Californians to invest in the solar panels. The rooftop solar systems have cut into the utilities’ sales of electricity.

The legislation, which applies to people who bought the systems before April 15, 2023, has outraged some Californians who invested tens of thousands to install the solar panels.

“We’re just trying to reduce our carbon footprint and you’re penalizing me for that?” said David Rynerson, a Huntington Beach resident who spent $20,000 to install the panels. “That’s just absurd.”

Until she was elected in 2020, Calderon spent 25 years at Southern California Edison and Edison International. Her last position was as a government affairs executive at Edison International, where she managed the utility’s political action committee.

Calderon declined to be interviewed. In a statement, she said that she wasn’t acting on behalf of the utility companies.

“I introduced this bill with one goal in mind: to help lower the cost of energy for Californians,” she said.

Calderon said if her bill was enacted it would reduce electric costs for customers who do not own the panels beginning in 2026.

According to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political spending, Southern California Edison and the other two big investor-owned utilities are among Calderon’s most generous corporate donors.

Last year, the the company gave Calerdon’s campaign $11,000. Sempra, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric, also contributed $11,000, while Pacific Gas & Electric provided $8,000.

Southern California Edison spokesperson Kathleen Dunleavy said that the company supports rooftop solar but it also supports efforts to reduce the amount of costs that have been shifted to customers who don’t own the panels.

She said the company’s political contributions to elected officials “are based on their shared interest in how best to safely serve SCE customers reliable and affordable energy.”

In her statement to The Times, Calderon said that “political contributions have no bearing on any policy decisions I make.”

Calderon is a member of a political dynasty that has held power in the blue-collar neighborhoods east of Los Angeles for four decades.

She is married to Charles Calderon, a former state Assembly speaker and former state Senate majority leader. She was elected to the Assembly seat that had been held by her stepson Ian Calderon.

Under California’s rooftop solar program, owners get a credit on their electric bills for the solar energy they produce but don’t use. The credit is based on the current retail electric rates. The value of the credits has increased rapidly as the state’s Public Utilities Commission approved rate increases requested by the companies.

In December 2022, the big utility companies successfully pressed the commission to slash financial incentives that rooftop solar owners could receive by about 75%, starting with those people purchasing the systems on April 15, 2023.

The commission left in place the program for owners who purchased the panels by that date. The agency says the value of the credits given to those owners is now a leading cause of the state’s rising electric bills — a claim that has been disputed by the rooftop solar industry and dozens of environmental groups.

In a February report to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the commission suggested reducing the number of years that rooftop solar owners can receive credits at the retail electric rate — similar to what Calderon’s bill would do — as a remedy for escalating power costs. California now has the country’s second highest electric rates.

The commission says the rooftop customers are not contributing their fair share of the costs to maintain the electrical grid, so the expense is shifted to those who don’t own the panels.

Dozens of environmental groups sent a letter this month to the chair of the Assembly Utilities & Energy Committee opposing Calderon’s bill and pointing out that the state has long said the solar contracts would last for 20 years, which is the expected useful life of the panels.

“The CPUC’s new proposal, to break energy contracts mid-stream, would be patently unfair,” the groups wrote. “It would punish the very people who California encouraged to invest in solar energy. And it would gut consumer confidence and trust in government.”

The groups pointed out that when Californians bought the systems, they signed a state-mandated legal agreement with their utility that details in the terms that the customer is eligible to receive the credits for 20 years.

In California, under a policy known as decoupling, utilities don’t make more money as customers use more energy. Instead they make most of their profit by building infrastructure, including poles, wires and the rest of the grid.

In their letter, the environmental groups pointed to an analysis that economist Richard McCann performed for the rooftop solar industry that found that electric rates had risen as the utilities spent more on infrastructure.

Even though homeowners’ solar panels helped keep demand for electricity flat for 20 years, the three utilities’ spending on transmission and distribution infrastructure had risen by 300%, McCann found.

“To address rising rates, California must focus on what’s really wrong with our energy system: uncontrolled utility spending and record utility profits,” the environmental groups wrote.

A hearing on the bill is scheduled in the Assembly Utilities & Energy committee on April 30.

Cherene Birkholz of Long Beach said that she and her husband spent $22,000 on panels for their home. The couple saw the solar panels, she said, as a way to control costs so they could stay in California after they retired.

Birkholz said she believed the credits would continue for 20 years. The proposed legislation, she said, “came as a shock.”

“If I had known, I may not have made these decisions,” she said.

Dwight James of Simi Valley said that he spent $35,000 on solar panels in 2018 and another $40,000 on batteries to store the power in 2021. He said he financed the purchase with a 20-year loan and that he found it “disturbing” that the state would now back out of what it had promised.

“If you follow the money, it gives you all the answers,” James said. “My thought is that this bill is a way for the utility companies to try to hold on a little bit longer and slow the adoption of solar.”

Los Angeles is experiencing a full-blown budget crisis. A month ago, the financial gap was estimated at just shy of $1 billion, delivering another headache for Mayor Karen Bass — as well as the public, which relies on city government to repave streets, fix sidewalks, maintain parks, collect trash and pay police officers and firefighters, among many services.

On Monday, Bass will release her proposed spending plan for 2025-26, spelling out her strategy for erasing the budget shortfall — one that will require her to cut the size of the workforce and carve into city services.

With that in mind, here are some things to watch out for:

How many city workers will be targeted for layoffs?

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, the top municipal budget analyst, warned a few weeks ago that layoffs would be “nearly inevitable.” But how many will actually show up in the mayor’s proposed budget?

A few weeks ago, Szabo’s office sent city departments a list of positions being considered for layoffs. Altogether, those positions exceeded 3,500. On Saturday, Bass told The Times that her budget team had shaved the number to fewer than 2,000.

Bass wouldn’t get more precise, other than to say it had been hovering above 1,500 a few days earlier.

On multiple occasions, Bass has said she’s searching for alternatives to layoffs — most significantly, state financial relief.

“I’m going to have to propose layoffs,” Bass said Friday at an event hosted by Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles. “But I don’t think it’s going to happen, OK? I don’t. I don’t. But I have to propose that, because by law the budget has to come out on Monday, by April 21, under the City Charter.

“I believe there are some solutions, like from the state, that will help us so that we don’t have to do layoffs ultimately,” she added.

The City Council has until the end of May to make changes to mayor’s budget and then approve it. By then, city officials should have a clearer idea of whether Gov. Gavin Newsom will come to the rescue.

Where will Bass make her cuts?

One thing we know for sure: Bass will not be seeking reductions to the Fire Department. She said so last week while visiting Pacific Palisades, which was ravaged by fire at the start of the year.

The city’s firefighter union has long argued that the department is woefully underfunded. That message grew louder after the January disaster.

So where else could Bass make cuts? The Police Department is one likely target, due to its enormous size when compared with most other city agencies.

The mayor’s budget team could slow the hiring of new police officers, allowing sworn staffing to fall below the 8,733 budgeted for the current fiscal year, down from about 10,000 five years ago. Such a move might be politically easier right now, since homicides and shootings are both down by double digits.

Bass also could reduce the number of non-sworn employees at the LAPD, such as clerical staff.

Meanwhile, some at City Hall have heard rumblings about major cuts to the planning department, which processes development applications and updates zoning plans, as well as the troubled Animal Services Department. Many other agencies could also face deep cuts.

What will happen to Inside Safe?

The moment she took office, Bass made the fight against homelessness a top priority. A huge part of that effort is Inside Safe, which moves people off the streets and into interim and permanent housing.

The program has been expensive, requiring leases with dozens of hotels and motels. Two years in, some city councilmembers have voiced concerns about its cost.

“We cannot afford to do everything via hotels and motels. We have to have other options,” said Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who serves on the council’s budget committee.

Bass told The Times last week that she has no intention of scaling back her signature initiative. She is looking to tap new funding sources, such as Measure A, the half-cent sales tax approved by voters last year to fund homeless services.

“I’m going to keep housing people. I don’t care what it takes,” Bass said at Friday’s Black Lives Matter event. “I’m going to keep doing that because I know that four people tomorrow morning are not going to wake up. They’re going to die on the street, and more than likely they look like you.”

What about Kenneth Mejia?

Since taking office in 2022, City Controller Kenneth Mejia has been among the most outspoken critics of spending decisions at City Hall. Last year, he repeatedly voiced alarm over Bass’ decision to eliminate more than 1,700 vacant positions, saying it would hurt city services.

Will Mejia’s megaphone grow even louder now that actual layoffs are on the table? And will his office be targeted with a new round of cuts?

Bass pushed last year for the elimination of 27 vacant positions in Mejia’s office. Ultimately, nine of those posts were kept on the books but with no money to pay for them, according to Mejia spokesperson Diana Chang.

“Without funding for them, we can’t hire or fill them,” Chang said in an email. “It’s unlikely that these positions will get filled this fiscal year.”

Some Mejia supporters have talked him up as a potential challenger to Bass in June 2026. Mejia said he’s not interested right now and is raising money instead for his own reelection.

One thing is for sure: If the mayor proposes new reductions to the controller’s office, Mejia will make sure the public knows about it.

Will the mayor shut down departments?

Every time the city faces budget troubles, smaller departments are placed on the chopping block, with the mayor or council members looking to merge them with bigger agencies.

This time around, agencies that oversee youth development programs, job training and services for senior citizens among the most vulnerable. The mayor could seek to combine any one of them with a larger department.

Bass could also take a page from her predecessors and seek to consolidate some larger agencies.

In 2013, his final year in office, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pushed for a merger of the Department of Building and Safety and the Department of City Planning, which he saw as a way of cutting red tape for real estate developers.

That effort was opposed by Eric Garcetti, who replaced Villaraigosa a few months later. The merger also became a major plot point in the federal racketeering and bribery prosecution of Raymond Chan, the onetime head of the Department of Building and Safety.

Chan, whose job was put in jeopardy by the merger, was accused of arranging a $600,000 bribe to then-Councilmember Jose Huizar in exchange for Huizar’s work opposing the merger. In October, Chan was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Chan, 68, is an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island, according to the Board of Prisons, with his release scheduled for 2035.

See? Budgets can be interesting!

SISKIYOU COUNTY, Calif. — In far Northern California, beneath a towering mountain ridge still covered in April snow, one of the state’s last cowboys stood in the tall green grass of a pasture he tends describing what he sees as the one blight on this otherwise perfect landscape: wolves.

“I hate ‘em,” said Joel Torres, 25, his easy smile fading as he explained what the apex predators do to the cattle in his care at Prather Ranch, an organic farm in Siskiyou County dedicated to raising beef in a natural, stress-free environment. “They’ve just been tearing into our baby calves, mostly our yearlings.”

Unlike predators that go for the throat and kill prey relatively quickly, wolves often attack from behind and rip victims apart while they’re trying to flee. Once they bring a cow to the ground, the pack will “kind of pick around a little bit, eat the good stuff” — particularly the rectum and udders — “and then just leave them and go on to the next one,” Torres said.

That’s how he has found dozens of mortally injured young cows, trembling and in shock, after wolf attacks. “It’s crazy, the endurance of these animals. They’ll just take it,” Torres said.

There’s no saving them. Their intestines often spill out through their hindquarters, and Torres shoots the cows to put them out of their misery.

He’d like to shoot the wolves, too, at least a few, to teach the pack that there are “consequences to coming around here and tearing into our cattle.” But the predators remain on the state’s endangered species list, and aggressive measures to control their behavior are strictly forbidden.

Instead, all Torres can do is grit his teeth and deal with the grisly aftermath.

A February video shows a wolf howling in Northern California. (Courtesy of Patrick Griffin)

Torres and many other ranchers in California live where two very lofty and environmentally satisfying ideas collide: all natural, free-range ranching and the government-assisted return of a predator our ancestors hunted to near extinction.

No matter how hard officials try to direct the wolves toward their natural prey, mostly deer and elk, they seem to find the bigger, slower, domesticated cows wandering through well-kept, wide-open fields a lot more appealing.

Things have gotten so bad so quickly — wolves have been back in California for only a bit more than a decade — that officials in Modoc and Sierra counties have declared emergencies. Leaders in Siskiyou and Lassen counties are calling on the state to do something about the devastating economic toll the wolves are taking on ranchers.

And while wolf attacks on people are almost unheard of, many in those counties are worried about potential risks to children and pets as the wild predators wander ever closer to houses and show signs of becoming accustomed to humans.

In response, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has approved what it calls increased “hazing,” which includes firing guns toward the sky, driving trucks and ATVs toward wolves to shoo them away and harassing them with noise from drones — but nothing that might injure the wolves.

Ranchers are skeptical. Other hazing methods approved by the department in recent years, such as electric fences with red flags attached that flutter in the wind, have done little to keep the wolves from their herds.

“The wolves just jump over those fences,” Torres said. “They do no good.”

Wolves are preying on cows at Jim and Mary Rickert’s Siskiyou County ranch. They want more options to deal with the predators than banging pots and hanging flags.

Mary Rickert, who owns the Prather Ranch with her husband, Jim, said the obvious solution is to let ranchers shoot problem wolves. “We’d just pick off a few of the bad actors, so the others would go, whoa, and back off,” she said.

A century ago, wolves in the United States were almost wiped out by ranchers who regarded them as lethal enemies. The last wolf legally shot in California was in 1924, and by 1930 they were gone from almost the entire country, except for a small pack in northern Minnesota.

But in 1973, then-President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, and his administration added wolves to the list the following year. In the decades that followed, wolves began a slow recovery, mostly in the northern U.S.

Then, in 2011, a wolf from Oregon known as OR7 — monitored by government biologists via an electronic collar — crossed the border into California and became the first known wild wolf to inhabit the state in almost 90 years. Like other notable transplants to the Golden State, he found pop culture stardom, becoming the heroic subject of a children’s book and a 2014 documentary.

Environmental advocates and cheerleaders for biodiversity were overjoyed that the wolves — who in their best moments look a lot like big, cuddly dogs — were making such an astonishing comeback. The hope was that they’d mostly eat other wild animals.

A video shows a wolf pack feeding on a dead cow in August. (Courtesy of Patrick Griffin)

But ask any rancher living in wolf country, and they’ll tell you that’s not what happened — and recent science backs them up.

In 2022-23, researchers from UC Davis analyzed more than 100 wolf scat samples collected in northeast California from the so-called Lassen pack. They found that 72% of the samples contained cattle DNA, and every wolf had at least one sample that contained cow, said Kenneth Tate, one of the researchers.

What’s more, there were 13 wolves in the pack, nearly twice as many as state wildlife officials believed at the time.

“These packs are not in the wilderness. They’re not up on Mt. Shasta or Lassen peak,” Tate said. “They’re establishing themselves down in the valleys, where the summer cattle graze.”

And they are thriving. In just 14 years since OR7 crossed the border, seven separate packs have established themselves in the state. They’re mostly in the north, but one pack has been confirmed in the southern Sierra Nevada, 200 miles from Los Angeles.

None of those packs has done as much damage to livestock as the “Whaleback” pack (named after a nearby mountain) that stalks the Prather Ranch in the remote Butte Valley.

That’s because Prather’s lush pastures back up against a secluded mountain ridge running from nearby Mt. Shasta north to the Oregon border. That land belongs to the U.S. Forest Service, and it’s covered in mature pine trees that provide nearly perfect cover.

From the top of the ridge, where the wolves are believed to make their den, there’s a commanding view of Prather Ranch to the east and of another ranch, Table Rock, to the west. At any given moment in summer, when thousands of free-ranging cattle are scattered across those pastures, the wolves can gaze down from their protected perch and take their pick.

“It’s like they’re deciding between McDonald’s and Burger King,” said Patrick Griffin, the “wolf liaison” for Siskiyou County, whose job is to try to mitigate conflict between the predators and ranchers.

“Wolves are beautiful animals, they’re just beautiful,” says Patrick Griffin, the wolf liaison in Siskiyou County. “But what they do? That isn’t so beautiful.”

There’s a “good-sized” elk herd ranging just north of the ranches, Griffin said, and he keeps hoping that the department’s nonlethal hazing tactics will persuade the wolves to turn their attention to their natural prey. But he doesn’t think the odds are very good.

“An elk is a lot more intimidating than a cow,” Griffin said. “Which would you pick?”

The bigger problem, Griffin said, is that the Whaleback pack is teaching its young to hunt cows. And when they head off to claim their own territory and start their own packs, they’ll take those lessons with them.

While other states, including Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, have allowed wolf hunts to resume, California still forbids ranchers from taking aggressive measures to stop the predators.

In addition to the nonlethal hazing, the department encourages ranchers to hire “range riders,” essentially cowboys, to sleep in the pastures with the cows. But that costs money, and the state doesn’t help with the added expense, Griffin said.

And even when people are present to harass the wolves, these ranches are so large that it’s impossible for them to be everywhere at once. One night, a “government guy” rode around Prather Ranch in his pickup with a spotlight, and the wolves still “tore into two cows that I had to put down,” Torres said.

Each cow the wolves kill represents thousands of dollars in lost revenue, so in 2021 the state set up a pilot program with $3 million to reimburse ranchers.

When they found a dead or dying cow with telltale signs of wolf “depredation,” ranchers could alert the state and a representative would come out to investigate. If the investigator concluded wolves were to blame, the rancher would get a check, about $5,000 on average.

But that money ran out in a hurry, state records show, with the majority of it, 67%, going to ranchers whose wolves were killed by the Whaleback pack.

Fladry — bright colorful flags hung from wire — are among the nonlethal methods the state recommends for warding off wolves.

And while the fund covered confirmed wolf kills, it did not compensate for all of the animals — especially newborn calves that are easier to carry — that simply disappeared into the forest.

Griffin, who investigates suspected wolf kills in the region for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, acknowledged that the 80 or so kills attributed to the Whaleback pack is an undercount. He cited studies from other states that estimate only about 1 in 8 wolf kills are ever confirmed.

“I know we don’t find most of them,” Griffin said.

And there’s no money to compensate for the damage that the mere presence of wolves does to cow herds. The cows lose a lot of weight from stress and from trying to stay away from the wolves. Tate, the UC Davis researcher, said GPS data from trackers attached to cows show some of them being chased around the pastures all night long.

“Cows don’t usually run 10 miles over four hours in the middle of the night,” Tate said. “That’s just not what they do.”

But wolves are persistence hunters. Weighing about 100 pounds each, they might struggle to take down a yearling cow that’s pushing 1,000 pounds. So they spook the cow and get it running, following behind at a comfortable trot until the cow is exhausted. Then they attack.

“It’s fun for [the wolves]; it’s like an adrenaline rush,” said Torres. “You can tell it really excites them.”

But it’s a nightmare for the herd, and not just the cows that get singled out. Researchers have found elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in herds exposed to wolves. Not only do the cows lose weight, but they abort pregnancies at increased rates, researchers found.

More than 40 cows have been killed on this ranch, hunted down by wolves who scout their prey from lookouts on Goosenest Mountain.

“Cattle actually react to wolves very differently, and in a much more extreme way, than they react to other predators,” Rickert said.

“We have bears around the ranch, and they’ll go and swim in the water troughs, and the cattle will just watch,” she said with a laugh. And the occasional mountain lion will stop by, maybe kill a calf, and then move on.

But the wolves set up shop and torment the cattle.

The UC Davis researchers estimated that, over the course of one summer, each wolf in their study cost ranchers between $70,000 and $163,000.

All of which has left Griffin, the Siskiyou County wolf liaison, with deeply mixed feelings about the return of the predators.

“There are a lot of people in California who love wolves,” he said, “but not very many of them live close to wolves.”

Griffin said he enjoys tracking the predators, climbing ridges to see how they use the landscape to their advantage, setting up cameras in the mountains to catch breathtaking images of them playing with their young or howling in the snow on a moonlit night.

But on a recent afternoon, walking through a pasture in the shadow of Mt. Shasta with puffy white clouds drifting across a cobalt blue sky, Griffin recalled one of his worst days on the job.

He’d seen buzzards on the hillside just ahead, where the terrain turns steeply upward and the forest begins. When he arrived to see what the birds were eating, he found a dead cow, its rectum and udders torn away — classic wolf kill.

Mixed with all the blood, he noticed a substantial amount of mucus. His heart sank as he followed the trail of bodily fluids about 60 yards downhill to the half-eaten remains of a newborn calf.

He figured the wolves had waited until the cow was in labor, straining so hard with the contractions that she couldn’t run, at least not very far.

“Wolves are beautiful animals, they’re just beautiful,” Griffin said, gazing up at the ridge where the predators parade in front of his cameras, sometimes with fresh kill in their mouths. “But what they do? That isn’t so beautiful.”

Reporting from Sacramento — A landmark law to abolish California’s money bail system has been put on hold until voters decide its fate in November 2020 after elections officials on Wednesday certified a statewide referendum backed by a coalition of bail industry associations.

Elections officials verified more than 400,000 signatures to qualify the referendum for the ballot, setting the stage for a campaign battle between bail companies fighting for their survival and state leaders who have pledged to protect indigent criminal defendants from unjust incarceration and fees.

Senate Bill 10, signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown last August, was slated to go into effect this fall. It would give judges greater discretion to decide who should remain in jail ahead of trial and eliminate the payment of money as a condition of release, a practice that critics say traps defendants in cycles of debt, even if they have not been convicted of a crime.

Bail groups fought the legislation since it was first proposed three years ago, saying it would result in the release of violent offenders to the streets and decimate a $2-billion national industry, including 3,200 bail agents registered in the state. A day after Brown signed the law, a national coalition of bail agency groups launched its referendum drive, raising about $3 million and collecting more than enough signatures to qualify the measure in just two months.

“We’re grateful to the hundreds of thousands of voters who signed petitions so quickly to qualify this referendum for the ballot,” Cesar E. McGuire, director of Bail Hotline Bail Bonds, said in a statement. “In passing this misguided bill, the Legislature ignored not only public safety and justice, but a fundamental of the criminal justice system — defendants must appear at trial for justice to be served.”

Bail companies will be able to continue doing business as usual until voters weigh whether to overturn the law. But court and government officials have pledged to defend the reforms and counter that the bail industry’s efforts will not stop momentum for changes to bail and other pretrial systems taking place in courts across the country.

Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys), who coauthored the legislation, said he was confident it would remain “the law of the land.”

“We know that private equity firms poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into this campaign — not to protect public safety, or decrease the number of innocent people in jail, but to protect their bottom line,” he said in a statement.

In California, state Supreme Court cases have significantly altered the way judges assign bail, with rulings to increase equal access to justice and prevent counties from burdening the poor.

At least 11 counties are employing roughly 40 different pilot pretrial programs to reduce the number of people cycling in and out of jail, and as many as 49 California counties are using risk assessment tools, or tech analyses that help courts determine which defendants are fit for release and which pose a risk to public safety or of not coming back to court.

California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, who helped craft the state’s bail law, has assembled a working group to evaluate pretrial programs and make recommendations on next steps now that the law is on hold. Gov. Gavin Newsom earmarked $75 million in his budget proposal last week for the Judicial Council, which is led by the chief justice and sets court rules, to give to counties over the next two years to implement and evaluate pretrial efforts in up to 10 courts.

State lawmakers have also turned an eye toward new legislation. On the first day of the 2019 legislative session, Hertzberg introduced a proposal that would require counties to report how they use the risk assessment tools in an effort to prevent improper and biased conclusions.

But as the bail industry’s campaign against the law gears up, some criminal justice and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, could find themselves in a difficult position: They supported the end of the cash bail system but moved to oppose the new law amid fears that it would grant judges too much power to put more people behind bars.

They have since sought to distance themselves from the bail industry’s referendum efforts, and are instead pushing for new court rules from the Judicial Council to prevent racial bias in the use of risk assessment tools.

Under the new law, only people charged with certain low-level, nonviolent misdemeanors — a list of charges that can be further narrowed by county — would be eligible for automatic release within 12 hours of being booked into jail.

All others arrested would have to undergo the risk analysis, a procedure that would sort defendants based on criminal history and other criteria into low-, medium- or high-risk categories. Courts would be required to release low-level defendants without assigning bail, pending a hearing. Pretrial services offices would decide whether to hold or release medium-risk offenders. Judges would have control over high-risk offenders and all prisoners in the system.

Human Rights Watch senior researcher John Raphling, whose organization supports a bail overhaul but opposed the final legislation signed by Brown, said his and other groups will work on proposing a different pretrial model in the Legislature that ends money bail and requires the release of more people based on the presumption of innocence.

“We will not be joining the bail industry’s efforts, but we are not fighting for SB 10,” he said. “We have a different vision of how to reform the pretrial detention system.”

More stories from Jazmine Ulloa »

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More than 200 Cherokees and other Native Americans have signed a letter urging Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren to fully retract her past claims to being Native and help dispel false beliefs held by many white people that they have American Indian ancestry.

The letter cites a Los Angeles Times investigation that found more than $800 million in government contracts reserved for minorities instead went to companies set up by members of groups with dubious claims to being Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes.

The letter describes The Times’ findings as an example of the harm done when white people rely on family lore and DNA tests to falsely assert Native American identity.

The criticism comes at an awkward time for Warren. The Massachusetts senator did not win any of the first three states in the nominating calendar and faces an uphill battle in the South Carolina primary this Saturday.

In response, Warren sent a 12-page letter to the Cherokee authors on Tuesday night. Her letter repeated past apologies, reiterated that she is a “white woman” and detailed a policy agenda that she said was good for Indian Country.

“I was wrong to have identified as a Native American, and, without qualification or excuse, I apologize,” she wrote. Warren’s campaign provided a copy to The Times.

She also distanced herself from the cases cited in The Times investigation, which she called an “injustice.” She said her “situation differs from these cases because I never benefited financially or professionally,” and cited a Boston Globe story that concluded her past identification as Native American never boosted her career.

Warren previously apologized for claiming to be Native American, and for publicizing the results of DNA test that showed she likely had a distant ancestor indigenous to the Americas. She has apologized to the chief of the Cherokee Nation, has said she is not a member of a tribe and expressed regret over causing “confusion” about tribal membership.

But the authors of the letter — Cherokee Nation citizens Daniel Heath Justice, Joseph Pierce, Rebecca Nagle and Twila Barnes — called those apologies “vague and inadequate.” They say she needs to state clearly that family stories she heard were false, and that it is wrong to use DNA tests to determine Native American identity.

“As the most public example of this behavior, you need to clearly state that Native people are the sole authority on who is — and who is not — Native,” wrote the authors, who are Cherokee citizens but don’t speak on behalf of the tribe.

After receiving Warren’s response, three of the authors — Justice, Pierce and Nagle — said Warren “made an effort” to address their points about DNA tests and who gets to determine who is Native, but noted that Warren hasn’t recanted her family story. “We hope that after further dialogue with the campaign, Warren will bravely and publicly tell the truth about her family,” they said in an email to The Times.

For years, Warren has contended with allegations that she falsely claimed to be Native American, specifically Cherokee and Delaware. The former Harvard University professor was identified as a minority law professor in a Harvard directory, and wrote that she was “American Indian” on a registration card for the State Bar of Texas.

The controversy started in 2012, when questions arose about her university listing. Barnes researched Warren’s genealogy and found that, despite Warren’s claims, she had no ancestral ties to Cherokee tribes.

The senator doubled down on the claim after attacks from President Trump, who derisively called her “Pocahontas” and challenged her to take a DNA test. She did and released the results in late 2018. The test showed she likely had an ancestor indigenous to the Americas between six and 10 generations ago.

The test was condemned by some American Indians who said Warren undermined tribal sovereignty by equating racial science with tribal affiliation and Native American identity.

Barnes, one of the letter’s coauthors, said in an interview that she and other Cherokees often encounter Warren supporters who insist that the DNA test proved Warren’s claims and that her recounting of family history was harmless.

“It’s totally misrepresenting who Cherokees are and ignoring our voices in it,” Barnes said. “There are so many people using our Cherokee identity to defraud or trick other people for their own benefit. It’s just an incredibly huge problem.”

Kinship with a tribe is key to how Native Americans identify themselves. There are many groups calling themselves tribes, often comprised of people who have unproven family legends of an American Indian ancestor, that Native Americans consider to be illegitimate.

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg, it seems, was a puzzle wrapped in a paradox inside a surprise.

On Oct. 29, when President Reagan put forward his name, the 41-year old federal appeals judge was a man about whom almost nothing was known. Then, as details of his life came to light, some proved to be startlingly unexpected.

Paradoxically, the more that was learned about him, the more elusive Ginsburg became. He emerged a man whose life and record were not all of one piece. Instead, they formed a patchwork–all too human, perhaps–of actions, styles and values that did not fit smoothly together.

What eventually proved fatal to his hopes was the fact that some elements of Ginsburg’s background–particularly his use of marijuana several times while a member of the Harvard Law School faculty–seemed incompatible with his assigned role as a representative of strict traditional values, stern regard for law-and-order, anti-permissiveness and other tenets of the Reagan Administration’s credo.

Not a Darling of Left

And, if he proved to be someone outside the rigid stereotype of conservative morality, Ginsburg also turned out to be no one the liberal left could love. When the November winds of controversy began to blow, he was a man standing alone–still a figure somehow out of focus.

Who is the justice-who-might-have-been?

Warm, witty, tolerant and sympathetic, some friends call him, a man remembered for gently shepherding a friend who had been raped through the painful necessities of medical treatment, and for spending weekend after weekend reading to his young daughter when his first marriage failed.

“Soft-spoken and a little shy,” a Cambridge, Mass., neighbor remembers. “Not the kind of person who makes enemies at all,” recalls another.

Not so, insist some who remember Ginsburg bitterly from his days as head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. To those colleagues, he is an arrogant, aloof bureaucrat–a cold ideologue so lost in abstract theories and out of touch with reality that he once suggested that his effort to slash government regulation of business was a pro bono effort on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged.

‘Brittleness to Him’

A former colleague on the Harvard Law School faculty who knew him well contends he is “a very self-constructed personality, and he skates pretty close to the line. There’s a brittleness to him that verges on phoniness.”

Similarly incongruous:

Ginsburg was portrayed by classmates as a brilliant but bookish scholar who toiled in the library at the University of Chicago Law School when others went out for beer, as someone who developed a passion for the intricate theories developed by “the Chicago school” about the economic dimensions of legal and social issues.

“During my entire career in the law,” Ginsburg said when he was being considered for a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “my principal activities have been in the service of the public interest, as opposed to personal advantage”

Yet if all that suggests an ivory-tower scholar and public servant with little interest in worldly goods, Ginsburg’s life is also marked by plunges into business ventures–leaving college to found a nationwide computer dating service, taking time from his duties on the Harvard Law School faculty to launch a bank consulting service, parlaying the modest salaries of a professor and government official into real estate and other holdings now worth more than $800,000.

Ran Afoul of Restrictions

So vigorously did Ginsburg and his partner, fellow-professor Hal Scott, pursue their bank consulting business in Cambridge during the early 1980s that they ran afoul of Harvard’s restrictions on such outside dealings and were required to stop.

There are other paradoxes:

Although he grew up and went through college and joined the Harvard faculty in the 1960s and 1970s–an era of student revolt that shook the nation–Ginsburg wore suits and ties to class and appeared totally untouched by the social and moral issues that wracked his generation–civil rights, the Vietnam War, Watergate, radical politics and the environmental movement.

So far as many of his friends can recall, he almost never discussed such matters. “The remarkable thing was that he was extremely uninvolved in all those things,” says Martha Field, a colleague on the Harvard Law School faculty.

But in the details of his personal life, Ginsburg seemed to reflect elements of that period–its unconventional, even iconoclastic attitudes, its impulse to set aside time-honored customs and ways of living.

He dabbled with marijuana, not only as a college student but much later as a teacher. He married, separated, lived for a time with the woman who would become his second wife, a medical student who–Ginsburg’s conservative supporters learned with dismay–performed several abortions during her residency at a Boston hospital.

There was also a time during his first marriage to Barbara M. deSecundy when, by her own account, she experienced a kind of identity crisis and pronounced herself dissatisfied with everything about herself.

‘I Shall Call You Claudia’

“Then I shall call you Claudia,” she says Ginsburg declared, conferring on her a name she later adopted legally. It was a gesture from the Age of Aquarius, suggesting a poignant impulse to believe that the gritty problems of life could be swept away with a romantic flourish.

If the lives of most people are a similar patchwork of impulses, styles and values, most people are not candidates for the Supreme Court, and not under the singularly demanding conditions that prevailed for Ginsburg.

Douglas Howard Ginsburg was born in Chicago on May 25, 1946, the third and last child of Maurice and Katherine Goodmont Ginsburg. His father was “a self-educated man” who “would read the encyclopedia from A to Z and then start again,” according to the nominee’s sister, Sandra Stein, but he prospered as founder of a small loan company and a mortgage firm.

The family lived in a high-rise apartment on North Lake Shore Drive, and Douglas attended private schools, graduating as valedictorian of the select Chicago Latin School.

“The funny thing about Doug Ginsburg is that no one remembers what he thought,” says Mary Ann MacFarlane, longtime secretary at Latin. “I remember a lot of kids from his class and could tell you about them, but not Ginsburg.”

Ginsburg enrolled at Cornell, in Ithaca, N. Y. “I remember him pretty well,” said Dean Rink, who lived in Ginsburg’s dormitory during his freshman year. “In comparison to him, I felt like a country boy. . . . I was always amazed at his sophistication. He was very articulate, cultured and interested in a wide variety of subjects–not just politics, but art and literature, too.”

After barely a year at Cornell, Ginsburg suddenly quit and–unsure what he wanted to do with his life–joined three Harvard undergraduates in a new computer dating venture, one of the first of its kind in the nation. Operation Match took off, grossing nearly $300,000 in its first nine months. The firm opened offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and Ginsburg moved to New York.

It was there–at an economics class at Hunter College–that he met Barbara.

Ginsburg later returned to Cornell, finished his undergraduate degree and entered the University of Chicago Law School.

If he was still a bookworm, Ginsburg by now could be intellectually aggressive, even brash, in the classroom. In an antitrust class taught by law school dean Philip Neal, Ginsburg and a classmate boldly strode to the front of the room one day to draw a graph on the blackboard and tutor the dean on law and economics.

They’re Cut Short

Amused, Neal nonetheless cut them short, saying: “If the professors of economics will return to their seats, the professor of law can continue.”

In 1975, Ginsburg joined the Harvard Law School faculty. A lanky, ascetic-looking assistant professor with a thick black beard and a curly halo of prematurely graying hair, he looked like a radical poet but was actually a retiring grind whose only diversion seemed to be going to movies in Harvard Square.

“We were in the mood of ‘let’s diversify the faculty, let’s stop being such a homogeneous place,’ ” says Richard Parker, a law professor, who was friendly with Ginsburg.

When he moved to Cambridge, Ginsburg separated from his wife; she and their 5-year-old daughter, Jessica deSecundy, lived in Washington.

Jessica–her name at birth was Jennifer Julianne Early Ginsburg but her parents renamed her soon afterward–would spend weekends with him. He doted on his daughter. Neighbors remember the two taking walks along the river and Ginsburg reading aloud to her on the roof deck of his building.

Gradually, Parker and other friends say, Ginsburg seemed to become dissatisfied at the Law School. “He was more conservative than the rest of the faculty, and he found it uncomfortable in the last several years,” said law professor Robert Clark, a friend and neighbor. He was also embittered when he was initially denied tenure, in 1979, because he was judged not to have published enough scholarly articles. He wrote a 200-page monograph on interstate banking and was awarded tenure in 1980.

Remarried in 1981

During this period, Ginsburg and deSecundy were divorced, and he became involved with his current wife, Hallee Perkins Morgan, whom he married in May, 1981. They have a daughter, Hallee.

Ginsburg left Harvard in July, 1983, to become a deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. He was primarily an administrator, personally appearing in court on only one case.

After a year at Justice, he moved to the Office of Management and Budget to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs–a stint that provoked bitter controversy and led to a congressional investigation.

The most contentious case involved the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to eliminate new products containing cancer-causing asbestos. Ginsburg and his aides blocked the move.

What OMB analysts did was assign a value of $1 million to a life saved, then “discounted” that amount because a person exposed to asbestos would not die of cancer for 20 to 30 years. In one calculation, OMB concluded that the net value of human life should be figured at $22,500.

“He was a proponent of the most callous regulatory approach imaginable,” charges David Vladeck, who battled OMB as a lawyer at the Public Citizen Litigation Group.

Ginsburg and his staff also derailed a scheduled EPA regulation on toxic chemical leaks from underground storage tanks, a decision that was angrily overturned by a federal judge. And without any publicity, his office squelched a planned Public Health Service study of the impact of federal budget cuts on infant mortality.

Admired for Ability

The Douglas Ginsburg who joined the Justice Department from Harvard in 1983 was admired both for his ability and for his deft manner during a time when the new Reagan philosophy of unfettering business was producing drastic changes in the antitrust division.

But in September, 1985, when he returned to the antitrust division from OMB not as junior executive but as chief executive of the entire division, Ginsburg by many accounts–although by no means all–was a changed man.

The top-heavy division needed pruning, but there is enormous bitterness over the way Ginsburg got rid of senior career officials: by surprise, in his first week, without staff advice or consent.

“The fact is, he had to make some very tough calls. . . . Doug is one of the most civil human beings I’ve ever known,” says Charles F. Rule, his successor in the post.

Ginsburg’s detractors, however, accuse him of having “had a vision of himself in a black robe;” of having “had one agenda, and that was Doug Ginsburg.”

WASHINGTON — The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, neighboring Caucasus nations at war for nearly a month, pleaded their cases Friday to the Trump administration but emerged with no sign of having found common ground.

It was the first public effort by the U.S. to intervene in the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Negotiations led thus far by Russia have failed to halt the bloodshed in a conflict that could swiftly engulf much of the region.

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, saying he wanted to “hear what they’re seeing on the ground,” met separately with the two senior diplomats for about 40 to 50 minutes apiece.

In Friday’s meetings, Pompeo “stressed the importance of the sides entering substantive negotiations” and called for the conflict to be resolved “based on the Helsinki Final Act principles of the nonuse or threat of force, territorial integrity and the equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said.

President Trump in recent months has stepped up his administration’s attempts at international diplomacy after largely avoiding it for much of his term. In addition to Armenia and Azerbaijan, his administration has sought to improve ties between rival Balkan nations Serbia and Kosovo, and shepherded the diplomatic openings between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

On Friday, Trump added Sudan to that list, announcing at the White House that Israel and the North African nation have agreed to open diplomatic ties. Earlier this week, Trump told Sudan it would be removed from the U.S. list of “terrorism-sponsoring” nations if it agreed to compensate American victims of Al Qaeda attacks.

After the meeting with Pompeo, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov issued a statement saying that his country wanted peace but that “the illegal Armenian occupation” had to end and Azerbaijan’s “territorial integrity restored.”

“Armenia must stop avoiding meaningful negotiations and choose lasting peace,” he said.

The Armenian foreign minister, Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, said later at a speaking engagement that an immediate and enduring cease-fire was essential “to stop the appalling situation” in Nagorno-Karabakh and that Pompeo seemed “optimistic” it could be established.

Both he and his Azerbaijani counterpart, however, accused each other’s nation of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” and other brutal violations in the conflict.

Trump has shown little interest in getting involved in the messy conflict, which has also drawn in NATO ally Turkey in support of Azerbaijan. Armenia has a defense alliance with Russia — which is often at odds with Turkey internationally — and is backed by an enormous Armenian diaspora in the United States.

Trump’s indifference has been criticized by his election rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, who accused the president of ceding leadership to Moscow and failing to defend civilians in the region, including a sizable population of Armenian Christians.

“Inexplicably, the Trump administration has been largely passive and disengaged … even as the region goes up in flames,” Biden said in a statement last week.

Foreshadowing how a Biden government would handle the crisis, Biden called on the U.S. to hold robust talks aimed at a political settlement between the two countries. Biden said it is important to make clear that a military solution is not tenable, to stop “coddling” Turkey, and to warn Turkey and Iran to stay out. Iran borders both Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Mediation over Nagorno-Karabakh seems unlikely to produce an enduring resolution.

Ahead of Friday’s meetings, Pompeo did not offer concrete proposals for what the administration might envision as a solution to the conflict, which dates back decades, if not centuries. U.S. officials demanded neighboring powers halt any transfer of weapons or mercenaries into the battle zone but have not publicized any diplomatic plan.

Even before Friday’s meetings, Pompeo seemed to tip the U.S. hand in favor of Armenia, a majority Christian nation, against largely Muslim Azerbaijan.

“We’re hopeful that the Armenians will be able to defend against what the Azerbaijanis are doing, and that they will all, before that takes place, get the cease-fire right, and then sit down at the table and try and sort through … what is a truly historic and complicated problem set,” Pompeo told a radio interviewer Oct. 15 in Atlanta.

Asked whether Azerbaijan thought Pompeo and the U.S. were showing bias in favor of Armenia, the Azerbaijani ambassador, Elin Suleymanov, told reporters the secretary of State assured Bayramov of U.S. impartiality and interest in serving as an honest broker.

Analysts say Russia might actually be interested in prolonging the conflict as a way to remind countries of their dependence on Russian-controlled supply lines of oil and gas.

“Until now the United States has taken a back seat,” said Margarita Assenova, senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank that specializes in Eurasia. “More U.S. action would provoke Russian action. The United States could end up with a very hot potato.”

The fighting that erupted in late September has claimed the lives of scores of civilians and military fighters, according to both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and is considered some of the deadliest in years. The conflict dates to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh is a large region within what are today’s borders of Azerbaijan but with an ethnic Armenian population of roughly 150,000.

“Our view remains, as does the view of nearly every European country, that the right path forward is to cease the conflict, tell them to deescalate — that every country should stay out, provide no fuel for this conflict, no weapons systems, no support,” Pompeo said.

Most negotiations over Nagorno-Karabakh have been led by the so-called Minsk Group, a diplomatic effort formed in 1992 and co-chaired by the U.S., Russia and France. But it has failed to provide a resolution or even a durable cease-fire, diplomats said.

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth created another Signal messaging chat that included his wife and brother in which he shared similar details of a March military airstrike against Yemen’s Houthi militants that were sent in another chain with top Trump administration leaders, the New York Times reported.

A person familiar with the contents and those who received the messages, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, confirmed the second chat to the Associated Press.

The second chat on Signal — a commercially available app not authorized to be used to communicate sensitive or classified national defense information — included 13 people, the person said. They also confirmed the chat was dubbed “Defense Team Huddle.”

The New York Times reported that the group included Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer; and his brother Phil Hegseth, who was hired at the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior advisor. Both have traveled with the Defense secretary and attended high-level meetings.

The White House late Sunday dismissed the report as a “non-story,” suggesting that disgruntled former Pentagon employees were spreading false claims.

“No matter how many times the legacy media tries to resurrect the same non-story, they can’t change the fact that no classified information was shared,” Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary, said in a statement. “Recently-fired ‘leakers’ are continuing to misrepresent the truth to soothe their shattered egos and undermine the President’s agenda, but the administration will continue to hold them accountable.”

The revelation of the additional chat group brought fresh criticism against Hegseth and President Trump’s wider administration after it has failed to take action so far against the top national security officials who discussed plans for the military strike on Signal.

“The details keep coming out. We keep learning how Pete Hegseth put lives at risk. But Trump is still too weak to fire him,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York posted on X. “Pete Hegseth must be fired.”

The first chat, set up by national security advisor Mike Waltz, included a number of Cabinet members and came to light because Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, was added to the group.

The contents of that chat, which the Atlantic published, shows that Hegseth listed weapons systems and a timeline for the attack on the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen last month.

The National Security Council and a Pentagon spokesperson did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment about the additional chat group.

Hegseth has previously contended that no classified information or war plans were shared in the chat with the journalist.

The Times reported Sunday that the second chat had the same warplane launch times that the first chat included. Multiple former and current officials have said sharing those operational details before a strike would have certainly been classified and their release could have put pilots in danger.

Hegseth’s use of Signal and the sharing of such plans are under investigation by the Defense Department’s acting inspector general. It came at the request of the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee — Republican Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi and ranking Democratic member Jack Reed of Rhode Island.

Reed urged the inspector general late Sunday to probe the reported second Signal chat as well, saying that Hegseth “must immediately explain why he reportedly texted classified information that could endanger American service members’ lives.”

“I have grave concerns about Secretary Hegseth’s ability to maintain the trust and confidence of U.S. service members and the commander in chief,” he added.

The new revelations come amid further turmoil at the Pentagon. Four officials in Hegseth’s inner circle departed last week as the Pentagon conducts a widespread investigation for information leaks.

Dan Caldwell, a Hegseth aide; Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg; and Darin Selnick, Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff; were escorted out of the Pentagon.

Though the three initially had been placed on leave pending the investigation, a joint statement shared by Caldwell on X on Saturday said the three “still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with.”

Caldwell was the staff member designated as Hegseth’s point person in the Signal chat with Trump Cabinet members.

Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot also announced he was resigning last week, unrelated to the leaks. The Pentagon said that Ullyot was asked to resign.

Copp writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — New York’s $9 congestion toll on most drivers entering the busiest part of Manhattan remained in effect Sunday, despite an Easter deadline from the Trump administration to halt the first-in-the-nation fee.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency overseeing the tolls, confirmed Sunday that its system of traffic cameras continues to collect the fee assessed on most cars entering the borough below Central Park.

President Trump’s Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, rescinded federal approval for the program in February, calling it “a slap in the face to working-class Americans and small-business owners,” and initially gave New York until March 21 to comply.

The MTA challenged Duffy’s decision in federal court, and he pushed the deadline back a month, to April 20. The Transportation Department insisted that it would not back off the deadline even as the court case plays out, saying it would “not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal” if the state failed to stop the toll.

“In case there were any doubts, MTA, State and City reaffirmed in a court filing that congestion pricing is here to stay and that the arguments Secretary Duffy made trying to stop it have zero merit,” John J. McCarthy, the MTA’s chief of policy and external relations, said Sunday.

Spokespeople for the Department of Transportation didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment Sunday.

The fee began Jan. 5 and is meant to not just reduce traffic jams but also raise billions of dollars in revenue for New York’s subways, commuter trains and public buses.

Trump, whose namesake Trump Tower and other properties are within the congestion zone, had vowed to kill the plan as soon as he took office.

The transit authority, meanwhile, has continued to tout the benefits of the tolling program, saying fewer vehicles are coming into the heart of Manhattan.

Around 560,000 vehicles per day entered the congestion zone in March, a 13% drop from the roughly 640,000 that the MTA projects would have driven through the area without the tolling scheme, according to data the agency released this month.

The agency has previously said it’s on track to meet the $500 million in revenue initially projected this year from congestion pricing.

The toll varies depending on type of vehicle and time of day and comes on top of tolls drivers pay to cross bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.

Other big cities around the world, including London and Stockholm, have similar congestion pricing schemes.

On Thursday, a Manhattan federal judge dismissed a series of lawsuits brought by the local trucking industry and other local groups challenging the toll.

Most of those lawsuits had argued that the fee was approved by federal transportation officials without proper scrutiny and that the court should order the completion of a more comprehensive environmental impact study.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court acted “literally in the middle of the night” and without sufficient explanation in blocking the Trump administration from deporting any Venezuelans held in northern Texas under an 18th century wartime law, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a sharp dissent that castigated the seven-member majority.

Joined by fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, Alito said there was “dubious factual support” for granting the request in an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union. The group contended that immigration authorities appeared to be moving to restart such removals under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

The majority did not provide a detailed explanation in the order early Saturday, as is typical, but the court previously said deportations could proceed only after those about to be removed had a chance to argue their case in court and were given “a reasonable time” to contest their pending removals.

“Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law,” Alito said in the dissent released hours after the court’s intervention against the Trump administration.

The justices’ brief order directed the administration not to remove Venezuelans held in the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, “until further order of this court.”

Alito said that “unprecedented” relief was “hastily and prematurely granted.”

He wrote that it was not clear whether the Supreme Court had jurisdiction at this stage of the case, saying that not all legal avenues had played out in lower courts and the justices did not have the chance to hear the government’s side.

“The only papers before this Court were those submitted by the applicants. The Court had not ordered or received a response by the Government regarding either the applicants’ factual allegations or any of the legal issues presented by the application. And the Court did not have the benefit of a Government response filed in any of the lower courts either,” Alito wrote.

Alito said the legal filings, “while alleging that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, provided little concrete support for that allegation.” He noted that while the court did not hear directly from the government regarding any planned deportations under the Alien Enemies Act in this case, a government lawyer in a different matter had told a U.S. district court in a hearing Friday evening that no such deportations were then planned to occur either Friday or Saturday.

“In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order,” Alito wrote. “I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate. Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law.”

The administration has filed paperwork urging the high court to reconsider its hold.

On Friday, two federal judges refused to step in as lawyers for the men targeted for removal launched a desperate legal campaign to prevent their deportation. Early Saturday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also refused to issue an order protecting the detainees from being deported.

The ACLU had already sued to block deportations of two Venezuelans held in the Bluebonnet facility and sought an order barring removals of any immigrants in the region under the Alien Enemies Act.

In the emergency filing early Friday, the ACLU warned that immigration authorities were accusing other Venezuelan men held there of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which would make them subject to President Trump’s use of the law. Trump says the “invasion” of gang members constitutes a war on the U.S., and therefore the wartime law is applicable.

It has been invoked only three previous times in U.S. history, most recently during World War II to hold Japanese American civilians in incarceration camps. The administration contends that the law gives them the power to swiftly remove immigrants they identified as members of the gang, regardless of their immigration status.

Following the unanimous Supreme Court order on April 9, federal judges in Colorado, New York and southern Texas promptly issued orders barring removal of detainees under the law until the administration provides a process for them to make claims in court.

But there had been no such order issued in the area of Texas that covers Bluebonnet, which is 24 miles north of Abilene in the far northern end of the state.

Some Venezuelans subject to Trump’s use of the law have been sent to El Salvador and housed in its notorious main prison, known as CECOT.