5 mins read

Funds to combat child exploitation added to reconciliation bill

The Homeland Security Department would get a new influx of funding to investigate child exploitation cases, including to identify victims of sexual abuse material online, under the GOP budget reconciliation bill.  The $108.5 million added in a substitute amendment Tuesday would support hiring additional investigators and forensic analysts within the department. The roughly $72 billion immigration […]

1 min read

Blanche says he won’t recommend pardoning Maxwell

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers Tuesday he would not recommend a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a federal prison sentence for her role in a sex trafficking scheme involving deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The head of the Justice Department made the remark during a budget hearing on Capitol Hill under […]

5 mins read

GOP senators push for challenge to House maps in Democratic states

Senate Republicans used a hearing Tuesday to push the Trump administration to file lawsuits challenging congressional maps in California, Illinois and other Democrat-controlled states in the wake of a Supreme Court decision rolling back the Voting Rights Act. The hearing comes weeks after the Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative majority in Louisiana v. Callais overturned a […]

3 mins read

Former Rep. Barney Frank dead at 86

Former Rep. Barney Frank, the first member of Congress to voluntarily announce he was gay, who rose to lead the House Financial Services Committee at a seminal moment in American economic history, died Tuesday night. He was 86. The progressive Frank had among the sharpest wits of members of the House and was known at […]

7 mins read

Tensions over prediction markets dominate Senate hearing

Senators at a Commerce Committee panel hearing aired concerns Wednesday about rapidly growing prediction markets, appearing largely unswayed by industry arguments that they are not a form of betting subject to state regulation.  Members of the committee’s Consumer Protection, Technology and Data Privacy Subcommittee were in agreement at a hearing that sports “event contracts” on prediction […]