This story is the result of a partnership between The Investigative Reporting Workshop and The Center for Public Integrity.

Osama Mohamed let out a sigh of relief as he and his wife stood at the steps of the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on the first day of September. Clutched tightly in his hands was the letter he’d been chasing for nearly a year and a half. “Congratulations!” its bolded words declared. “Your US Visa has been approved.” 

It had been 16 months since Mohamed, 28, had first applied to the United States Diversity Visa program. His petition became even more urgent in April, when political upheaval in his home country of Sudan prompted by an ongoing conflict that has resulted in thousands of casualties left Mohamed’s family home, near the capital in Khartoum, destroyed. 

The program has come to be known as the “green card lottery,” in which applicants submit to a laborious 10-step process of petitioning for entry into the United States. Once they arrive, they’re recognized as permanent residents, permitted to work, and enter the path of citizenship. It’s a longshot, by design, intended to open additional visas to would-be immigrants from countries that send relatively small numbers of people to the United States each year. 

The final step in the process is an in-person interview, often requiring applicants to traverse international borders to the nearest US Embassy. Mohamed and his wife traveled 700 miles to Addis Ababa for their interview, at which they were told in writing their visa had been approved. It was an “indescribable feeling,” Mohamed recalls, to hold a winning lottery ticket in hand. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Sewage collecting in crudely dug trenches. Failing septic tanks that send waste bubbling into backyards. These are some of the common sights across Alabama’s Black Belt, a strip of 24 continuous counties blessed with deep fertile soil but long plagued by inadequate wastewater infrastructure and the commensurate parasitic disease. 

It’s a problem, advocates say, that the state has the resources to address. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency opened a civil rights probe last week into the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and its implementation of a federal program designed to boost water infrastructure in communities across the country. The decision comes after advocates filed a complaint in March alleging that, for years, the state has hindered Black residents in rural areas from obtaining federal funds to update their wastewater systems. 

It’s a region where children play on sewage-laden soil and an overwhelming stench envelops some neighborhoods for weeks on end. “It’s really disgraceful and painful that people endure this, especially when we have the opportunity to fix it,” said Aaron Colangelo, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defence Council who has been working on the issue.

On Wednesday, a group of New York House Republicans announced that they will introduce a resolution to expel Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who was indicted yesterday on new charges that included campaign violations for a fake-donor scheme first reported by Mother Jones earlier this year. The resolution, which will be introduced by Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.), marks the first GOP-led effort to boot Santos from their ranks. It will require at least two-thirds of the House to pass.

Today, I’ll be introducing an expulsion resolution to rid the People’s House of fraudster, George Santos. The resolution will be co-sponsored by fellow #NewYork freshman @RepLaLota @RepMikeLawler @RepMolinaroNY19 @RepLangworthy @RepWilliams.

Our statement will follow.

— Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (@RepDesposito) October 11, 2023

House Democrats attempted to expel the disgraced Republican in May following Santos’ first indictment on 13 criminal counts related to fraud and money laundering crimes. Republicans quickly referred the motion to the House Ethics Committee, effectively killing the resolution.

On Saturday afternoon, after weeks of GOP squabbling in the House of Representatives, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) led his chamber in passing a bill to fund the government for 45 days. 

He did it, primarily, with the help of Democrats. The temporary spending bill passed 335–91; 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans voted in favor.

In order to garner enough Democratic support for the bill, which needed two-thirds of the chamber’s backing, McCarthy relented on his pursuit of 30 percent spending cuts across most federal agencies and additional immigration restrictions at the southern border, winning the okay of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). To get enough Republicans on board, the bill did not include continuing aid to help Ukraine fight Russia. The bill, which would fund the government through mid-November, includes $16 billion for federal disaster relief.

Headed into Saturday, a solution was far from promised. Far-right House Republicans have sparred with McCarthy, whom they have threatened to oust as Speaker, and publicly opposed passing a short-term continuing resolution over a longer-term appropriations package. No Congressional action by Sunday would have risked national parks closing, women and infants losing food assistance, and millions of federal employees going unpaid.

For those problems to be avoided, the Senate still needs to pass the continuing resolution before Saturday ends. Democratic senators’ support for additional Ukraine funding may be a source of contention, though the largest impasse to averting a shutdown seems to have been resolved.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has a tough decision to make: who he’ll appoint to temporarily replace the Senate vacancy created by the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who served in the upper chamber for more than three decades and wielded enormous influence over firearms policy, judicial selections, and more until her death Thursday.

Three Democratic members of Congress from the state have already announced their bids to replace Feinstein in 2024: Rep. Barbara Lee, a liberal who has served in Congress since 1998; Katie Porter, a rising star in the progressive coalition who was first elected in 2018; and Adam Schiff, who rose in prominence managing former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, and as a member of the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

But Newsom is unlikely to pick any of the three for the interim. Earlier this month, the governor said he didn’t want to give anyone an advantage in next year’s primary should Feinstein be unable to finish her term. “It would be completely unfair to the Democrats that have worked their tail off, he said on NBC’s Meet the Press as Feinstein publicly battled health issues. “That primary is just a matter of months away. I don’t want to tip the balance of that.”

His decision is complicated by a 2021 promise to name a Black woman to replace Feinstein should she leave the Senate early. That promise came after he appointed Alex Padilla to fill the vacancy left by Vice President Kamala Harris, who was the only Black woman in the Senate.

Lee, who is Black, was incensed by Newsom’s comments. “I am troubled by the governor’s remarks,” Lee said in a statement. “The idea that a Black woman should be appointed only as a caretaker to simply check a box is insulting to countless Black women across this country who have carried the Democratic Party to victory election after election.”

In the midst of hurricane and wildfire season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is preparing to withhold billions in disaster funding until Congress passes a budget bill that refills its dwindling cash stock, according to a footnote in a FEMA document first reported by E&E News.

In November, FEMA had roughly $23 billion in its disaster relief fund. As of September, that funding was down to about $4 billion. 

As a faction of far-right House Republicans hold up the congressional appropriations process and stonewall efforts by more moderate Republicans and Democrats to at least pass a temporary budget package before most funding for federal agencies runs out on Saturday, FEMA has begun freezing funds dedicated to long-term recovery projects to preserve its ability to respond to future catastrophic events.

The $8 billion FEMA expects to freeze includes $376 million for recovery projects stemming from Hurricane Laura, which hit Louisiana in 2020, and Hurricane Ida, which hit multiple states in August 2021. FEMA also plans to freeze $265 million in funding for continued recovery from Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm that ravaged Southwest Florida last September.

Puerto Rico, beleaguered by earthquakes and hurricanes in recent years, will be particularly affected by the pause. According to the Biden administration, 188 projects on the Caribbean island will be delayed. E&E News reports that Puerto Rico could have “up to $2.6 billion withheld for projects such as rebuilding critical facilities like hospitals and the electrical grid.”

This story was originally published by the Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died on Thursday evening at the age of 90, leaves behind a long and complex legacy on climate and environmental issues. Feinstein represented California as a Democrat in the US Senate for more than 30 years, becoming the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and during that time she brokered a number of significant deals to protect and restore the natural landscapes of the West. In recent years, as politics shifted, she found herself on the receiving end of criticism over her approach to tackling the climate crisis.

After taking office in 1992 following a decade as the mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein established herself as a champion for conservation. She worked to pass legislation that would protect millions of acres of California wilderness from development and extractive industry, using her deft skills as a negotiator to bridge disputes between competing interests. She succeeded in that conservation effort where her predecessors had failed, spearheading a 1994 bill that created the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks, which encompass millions of acres. She later passed bills to protect Lake Tahoe, the California redwoods, and the Mojave Desert.

Feinstein also supported action to reduce carbon emissions for much of her Senate career, and she was a key backer of a cap-and-trade bill that failed to pass the Senate during the first years of the Obama administration. She also authored successful legislation on automobile fuel economy standards, and pushed forward new regulatory standards for oil and gas pipelines following a 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people.

Even so, as a compromise-oriented legislator from California, she often had to weigh the competing interests of farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists, and at times she angered all of them. This tendency toward centrism was evident in her legislative work on water in the state’s Central Valley. She brokered a monumental restoration agreement on the valley’s overstressed San Joaquin River in 2009, but then helped override species protections for fish on that same river in 2016.

New York City is underwater. As heavy rainfall hits the northeast, making the city’s roads impassable and halting train and subway service, social media videos show flooding through holes in subway walls and water rushing into buses and cars—as well as sewage pushing up into homes. Twenty-three million people in the area are on flood watch, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy all issuing states of emergency and deploying rescue teams.

New York’s battle with rain and floods isn’t new. The city has a devastating history of flooding in disasters like 2021’s Hurricane Ida, which broke city records for amount and intensity of rainfall. Friday’s floods mark the wettest day in New York City since Ida—from 1958 to 2016, Climate Central reports, the northeast saw the country’s biggest increase in heavy precipitation events.

Rainfall and floods are only expected to worsen due to climate change, and the city’s wastewater and drainage infrastructure isn’t equipped for the pressure. A FEMA report from this summer concluded that most cities’ drainage systems “were not built to handle the amount of runoff from increasingly intense storms.”

Those infrastructure problems are set to worsen, compounding the impact. Erika Smull, a municipal bonds analyst at Breckinridge Capital Advisors, is a  water utilities expert and former environmental engineer. She explained to me earlier this year that US water infrastructure “is reaching or has reached the end of its usable life. It’s been there for longer than it should be. We are entering into a new era.”

Ida also led to scrutiny of New York’s illegal basement apartments: thirteen residents trapped in the unregulated dwellings were killed by its floods. “Ida will not be the last flash flood that puts the lives and homes of basement-dwellers at risk,” city Comptroller Brad Lander wrote in a 2022 report, highlighting the fact that such apartments are generally occupied by low-income people, people of color, and immigrants.  

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

If you’re not familiar with term “stochastic terrorism,” now is a good time to bone up, for the leading Republican candidate is a stochastic terrorist.

Stochastic terrorism is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonization of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence. Scientific American recently put it this way:

Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims. At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

In addition to disgust, fear and hatred can work, the point being to depict a person or set of people as a loathsome other undeserving of respect or acceptance, and a dangerous threat. Establishing such a framework boosts the odds that a lone individual or group will violently assault the deprecated.

“As president of the Board of Supervisors, it’s my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. The suspect is…Supervisor Dan White.” —Dianne Feinstein, Nov. 27, 1978

Unlike the murders that were the catalyst for her national political career, Dianne Feinstein’s death shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise. She was very old and very sick and for the last year the entire country had been on a death watch of sorts. Her passing is not a shock, and one of the reasons she stayed in office until the end—the possibility that Republicans could use her departure to strip Democrats of a key seat on the Judiciary Committee, enabling them to deny President Biden the ability to appoint judges and potentially even a Supreme Court justice—remains.

She had become a source of speculation and rage, a Weekend at Bernie’s punchline, and she could yet be another cautionary tale, a la Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of how aging leaders who refuse to step aside unspool their own legacy and accomplishments.

Even in this moment, when 10,000-word obits are being slapped up on front pages across America, it can be hard to remember just how historic, how symbolic, those accomplishments were. And how emblematic of the currents in San Francisco’s politics.

Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco because of assassination. Because of a workplace shooting. Because of an aggrieved white dude who saw himself as a “defender of the home, the family and religious life against homosexuals, pot smokers and cynics,” as the New York Times would put it, and who shot the first openly gay Californian to ever hold elected office and a progressive mayor determined to bring social services to San Francisco’s downtrodden. White and Milk had both been elected just a year earlier, when the city moved from at-large supervisors to a system where each supervisor was elected by their district alone. It was a revolution best remembered for Milk’s historic win, but it also ushered in the board’s first Chinese American (Gordon Lau), the first Black woman (Ella Hill Hutch)…and the first firefighter, Dan White. The board had previously been mostly rich and white and straight, and suddenly it was not. 

House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani.

Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick.

But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.)

As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full statement to the House committee, which recently became public.) 

Dianne Feinstein, the five-time senator from California, has died, according to multiple reports. She was 90.

A towering figure in both California and US politics, Feinstein was the longest-serving female senator in US history. Our 2017 feature on the trailblazing Democrat:

People who know Feinstein say the [2016] election has been transformative for her. “Trump injects an entirely new level of outrage,” Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society and a longtime Feinstein friend, told me. With the president going after institutions that Feinstein has historically been aligned with—chief among them the intelligence establishment—Schell believes she will find a middle-of-the-road position increasingly untenable.

“Dianne is like the canary in the mine shaft,” he says. “The last bastion of bridge building in the Senate may be giving up.”

But burning a few bridges may also be the only way for Feinstein to survive politically. Nearly a quarter century into her Senate career, she has remained popular with voters, who reelected her in 2012 with a 62.5 percent majority. But progressive Democrats have been frustrated with her old-school style and steadfast defense of the security state. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By the time superintendent David Smith decided to close Joshua Tree national park on January 7, 2019, the list of problems was already long. Tire tracks wove through the wilderness mapping a path of destruction where rare plants had been crushed and trees toppled. Charred remains of illegal campfires dotted the desert, and historic cultural artifacts had been plundered. Trash piles were growing, vault toilets were overflowing and park security workers were being pushed to their limits.

It was week three in what would become the longest shutdown of the US government, and the famed California park was feeling the consequences of operating without key staff, services and resources. To protect the park and its workers, it would have to close, Smith thought.

But the Trump administration, which demanded national parks remain accessible throughout the shutdown, wasn’t willing to change course. In a controversial move, David Bernhardt, who had only recently been appointed acting secretary of the interior, called Smith and ordered him to keep the gates open.

By the end of the 35-day shutdown, irreversible damage had been inflicted on Joshua Tree’s ecosystems, its wild, remote landscapes thrust into the political turmoil unfolding thousands of miles away.

When 70 percent of Texas House Republicans voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton in May, commentators expressed hope that the scandal-plagued lawyer would finally be held accountable for a multitude of alleged crimes—and perhaps most importantly, by members of his own party, who hold large majorities in the state legislature and who seem to have no limit of their tolerance for malfeasance commited by Republicans. 

As Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy wrote after the vote in May:

The hearing that preceded the impeachment vote was remarkable—less because of what it uncovered, but because of who was uncovering it. For nearly a decade, Republicans in Texas have been Ken Paxton’s enablers. He has been under indictment for a felony securities fraud-charge since 2015—accused of breaking a law that he himself helped pass. A significant number of Texas Republicans, it’s true, have at times backed primary challengers promising to clean house, but conservatives have ultimately been willing to look the other way—or even gleefully join Paxton’s cause—because he’s ruthless about using his power to advance the conservative agenda. But Wednesday’s hearing was something new: A detailed accounting of his petty corruption, unprofessionalism, and abuses of power, brought to life by the only people in Texas with the clout to rein him in—his fellow Republicans.

Paxton’s impeachment came about after some of his staff members, all conservative Republicans, reported him to the FBI for alleged unethical and unusual behavior towards a real estate developer and major donor. (For a full rundown of the allegations against Paxton, read Murphy’s profile.) When they told Paxton what they’d done, he fired them. They filed a wrongful termination suit. In February this year, Paxton asked the legislature to cover the more than $3 million settlement his office negotiated with the whistleblowers, an ask that legislators rejected. Instead, they decided to investigate in secret, to see whether the complaints had merit. Turns out they did, and in May, after the release of their investigative report, the House voted to impeach Paxton. 

That burst of Republican integrity was short lived, as the Senate on Saturday refused to vote to impeach the AG on any of the 16 counts against him. In a statement released after the vote, Paxton thanked his wife Angela, who serves in the legislature and sat through his trial, which included lengthy testimony about an alleged affair he was having. (His mistress was on hand to testify but was never called.) And he promised to address Texas and the nation on Tucker Carlson’s show next week.

When Sen. Mitt Romney replaced Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in 2018, he was continuing a long tradition of relatively moderate Republican senators from Utah who were able to cross the aisle and get things done. (Utah hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1970.) That tradition is likely to end with him. Now that Romney has announced that he’s not running for reelection, the Utah GOP primary free-for-all is officially underway, with the full craziness of the party’s rightward shift already on display. 

After Hatch retired, 12 candidates jumped in to fill the Senate seat that Romney ultimately won by a large margin. Now, virtually every member of the Utah House delegation, along with Lt. Gov Deidre Henderson, seems to be mulling a campaign to replace Romney. Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson created an exploratory committee for the seat in July, and Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs declared his candidacy in May. 

In an early indication of where the race is headed, Staggs is holding a fundraiser Monday that will be headlined by Kari Lake, the failed Senate candidate from Arizona who tried to overturn both her own election loss and promoted the lie that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. First reported by Bryan Schott at the Salt Lake Tribune, Lake’s planned appearance was fortuitous, coming on the heels of Romney’s retirement news. Her presence will help cement Staggs’ populist bona fides early in a race that promises to be full of candidates trying to out-MAGA each other now that they no longer have Romney to beat up on. 

Also reportedly considering a run for the seat is Tim Ballard, a Mormon former Homeland Security agent and founder of an anti-human trafficking organization whose work inspired the sleeper hit movie Sound of Freedom, which has been popular with the QAnon crowd. Ballard’s campaign to replace Romney, however, may have some trouble getting off the ground. This week, the LDS church officially rebuked him after Vice reported that he had misrepresented his relationship with M. Russell Ballard, the acting president of the faith’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, to help his business ventures—the church called this “morally unacceptable.” Ballard is not related to the LDS church official. 

Utah House Speaker Wilson comes to the race with low numbers—a July poll found him winning the support of just 7 percent of voters in a Senate race without Romney—but he has by far the best fundraising record. Wilson already has more than $2 million in his campaign chest, of which about half came from his own pocket. He has been positioning himself as Romney’s heir apparent, taking the lead on efforts to save the dying Great Salt Lake, a popular cause.

In dueling presidential campaign speeches to Evangelical leaders Friday, former President Donald Trump sounded like the moderate Republican in the room, at least when it came to abortion.

At the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand conference in DC, the former president ticked off a long list of his pro-life accomplishments from his time in the White House, most notably nominating three conservative Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade last year. And he invoked the false trope that Democrats support “post-birth abortion,” claiming that “They’ll kill babies in the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth month, and they’ll even kill babies in some cases after birth. They are the radicals.”

But he also warned the fervently pro-life crowd that Republican extremism on abortion was losing them elections. “Like President Ronald Reagan before me, I support the three exceptions: for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. And again, that’s a decision that you’re going to have to make for yourself, and you have to go by your heart and what you feel,” he said. “But I do, and I will say politically, it’s very tough. It’s a very tough decision for some people. But very, very hard on elections—very, very hard…We had midterms and this was an issue.”

He went on to gently criticize Republican politicians for their extreme anti-abortion rhetoric. “They just don’t know how to talk about this issue,” Trump said. “It’s a complex issue…And if they don’t speak about it correctly, they’re not going to win.…I watch some of these politicians speaking and it’s so bad. They don’t understand what it is that they’re talking about, and they lost a lot of elections, and we can’t let that happen.”

“Now we can win elections on this issue,” Trump continued. “But it’s very delicate, and explaining it properly is extremely important.”

On Tuesday, the Pulitzer Prize Board expanded the eligibility for the books, drama, and music awards by including artists who are not US citizens. The new policy, which begins in the 2025 cycle, will include “permanent residents of the United States and those who have made the United States their longtime primary home.” Over 2,500 entries are submitted to the Pulitzer’s 23 categories every year, and only 8 receive the $15,000 cash award for books, drama, or music. There was some irony in the fact that the prestigious prize established in 1917 in the will of Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer to celebrate American art and journalism would exclude noncitizens. However, this policy has been a defining feature of eligibility for all the Pulitzer categories since their respective inceptions. 

Writers have denounced the Pulitzer’s citizenship requirement in the past but failed to solicit a response. But then, Javier Zamora, poet, and author of Unaccompanied and Solito, petitioned the Pulitzer Prize Board to open its literature awards to noncitizens in a searing Los Angeles Times op-ed in July. His 2022 memoir, which hit the New York Times bestseller list, was nonetheless ineligible to receive one of literature’s highest honors because of Zamora’s citizenship status. “After 19 years here without a green card, then four years with an EB-1 ‘Einstein Visa,’ after earning a master’s degree in writing from New York University and fellowships from Harvard and Stanford, I still wasn’t enough to be equally considered among my literary peers,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

Zamora, who traveled from El Salvador to the US without his parents as a child in the late 90s, was soon joined by a coalition of high-profile authors who publicly petitioned the Pulitzer Prize Board and denounced the use of citizenship requirements. “Whether undocumented writers are writing about the border or not,” they wrote in Literary Hub, “their voices are quintessentially part of what it means to belong and struggle to belong in this and to this nation.” In response, the Board amended the citizenship policy and pledged their commitment to “ensuring that the Prizes are inclusive and accessible to those producing distinguished work in Books, Drama, and Music.” The same week the Pulitzer Prizes changed its policy, a federal judge in Texas declared DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created to protect thousands of undocumented youth from deportation, illegal. To Zamora, the two announcements—and the continued enforcement of restrictive citizenship policies at organizations such as the National Book Awards and PEN Amerca—are linked.

I caught up with Javier via Zoom to talk about Pulitzer’s announcement, nationalism in the literary world, and the work that remains to be done.

When did you first realize you were ineligible for the Pulitzer Prize for literature due to your citizenship status?

Rational 360, a high-powered Washington, DC-based strategic communications firm and digital agency, promises to use “innovative” means and a network that extends “deep into the Halls of Congress, the White House, and Fortune 500 boardrooms across the country” to advance the “mission-critical goals” of its clients, a roster of corporations, trade associations, military contractors, policy advocates, and others. The company—one of the many inside-the-Beltway firms that crafts messaging and peddles influence—promotes itself as a purely bipartisan operation, though its top leaders are mostly Democrats with White House experience earned during the Clinton and Obama years. Yet despite these Democratic roots, Rational 360 plays the field, having recently set up a company to help elect Republicans, while also creating an offshoot to assist Democratic campaigns. Moreover, it has advised No Labels, a dark-money and self-professed centrist group that is preparing to possibly run a third-party presidential candidate in 2024 in an effort that could help Donald Trump.

With these activities, Rational 360 looks as if it is trying to profit from all partisan sides—right, left, and middle.

The company was formed in 2009 when Rational PR and the Stevens and Schriefer Group, an advertising outfit, created a firm to pitch large corporate clients. The eight partners at the time included Patrick Dorton, who had been a top aide in the Clinton White House and the chief spokesman for  Arthur Andersen LLP during the accounting firm’s 2002 collapse, which occurred due to its role in the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals. 

Dorton is now the CEO of Rational 360, and the other top officers of the company include notable Democratic veterans. Brian Kaminski, a managing director and co-founder, notes in his company bio that before he joined the firm he “gained communications experience on Capitol Hill in the Office of [Democratic] Senator Barbara Mikulski, in the Office of the First Lady, and at the Democratic National Committee.” Melissa Green, a managing director and senior counsel for the company, was an aide in the Clinton White House and began her career at the political consulting firm of prominent Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala. Joe Lockhart, another managing director, was a press secretary for President Clinton. The firm, true to its bipartisan pitch, also includes officers and staffers with Republican pedigrees.

According to Federal Election Commission data, Rational 360 has done no work for federal candidates or political action committees, except a modest bit of consulting in 2020 for Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, a Republican super PAC, for which it was paid $5,000. But in 2021, it created an offshoot entity to provide digital media services to Democratic candidates—without identifying this group’s link to Rational 360. 

For the first time in US history, UAW members at the Big Three automakers are on strike at the same time. The walkout began when the union’s contract expired early Friday morning.

UAW President Shawn Fain announced the initial strike targets during a Thursday night speech. The short notice is part of a new strategy under which the union is striking at targeted sites, rather than across a company. The goal is to maximize leverage by keeping automakers guessing about when and where workers will withhold their labor.

The initial targets are the General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, the Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) assembly complex in Toledo, Ohio, and part of a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. Roughly 13,000 UAW members are striking at those facilities. All three make trucks and SUVs, which have been key to US automakers’ profitability.

The UAW has more than 145,000 members across the Big Three. Fain said on Thursday that the union is prepared for everyone to go on strike if needed—stressing that all options remain on the table.

The UAW and the Big Three remain far apart in their negotiations. The union is pushing for a more than 30 percent increase in pay over the course of the four-year contract. Members also have been fighting for guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments, an end to tiered-pay systems that put new hires at a disadvantage, a return to defined-benefit pension plans, a four-day work week without a reduction in pay, and a right to strike over plant closures. The auto companies have offered to increase pay by between 17.5 and 20 percent, but remained opposed to the UAW’s top demands, Fain said earlier this week.

A new bill has reached the desk of California Gov. Gavin Newsom that would bar the state’s public and charter schools from suspending or expelling students in sixth through twelfth grades for “willful defiance,” a largely undefined violation frequently meted out to students of color. The statewide ban, in force until 2029 once signed by Newsom, builds on the state’s efforts to slowly phase out this form of suspension and expulsion. If it’s enacted, California will be the first state to go from using the practice to banning it outright.

Already, in 2014, California became the first state to pass a partial ban on “willful defiance” suspensions—which are permitted in 25 other states, according to research by Temple University’s Policy Surveillance Program. The 2014 ban, which only applied to students in third grade or younger, was followed by a 2019 bill  that covered fourth and fifth graders permanently and middle schoolers through 2025. Newsom signed that bill, and appears poised to sign the new, broader ban, but his office hasn’t confirmed if or when that’ll happen.

ACLU California Action, which supports the ban, has said that the definition of willful defiance is too “subjective and overly broad,” with some students being suspended for “dancing, dress code violations, or not paying attention in class.” School officials’ judgment of whether a student is “talking back,” another common ground for willful defiance suspensions, can also be shaped by biases. The bill, introduced by State Sen. Nancy Skinner, does not limit other types of suspensions, such as those related to violence.

At an April hearing of the California Senate’s education committee, Skinner pointed to the use of willful defiance suspensions for small infractions like not taking a hat off or smirking at a teacher. The bill encourages teachers and administrators to de-escalate conflict with students and emphasizes that suspensions are a punishment of last resort.

“I completely appreciate a teacher could have a particularly bad day…this kid sets them off,” Skinner said in the hearing. “But we have other alternatives. We don’t need to kick the kid out.”