Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
President Donald Trump got the voter identification vote he demanded, and every Republican who showed up backed it. The Senate tally still ended in defeat because 52 votes were not enough to clear a 60-vote procedural wall. Democrats and the chamber’s two voting independents held together, blocking the Senate from even taking up the bill…
Andy Ogles had the president’s endorsement, a seat on two committees, and a Freedom Caucus membership that made him one of the loudest conservatives in the House. He lost anyway, to a retired state agriculture commissioner running on the slogan “Hire a Farmer.” Between those two facts sits a super PAC that was ten months…
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee spent Thursday morning doing something the Senate does only a handful of times in a generation. It voted to hold a former federal official in criminal contempt of Congress. Then its chairman announced he was not going to bother asking the rest of the Senate whether it…
The Pentagon has finally put a number on how long President Donald Trump intends to keep soldiers on the streets of the nation’s capital, and on what it will cost to do it. The answer is January 2029 and roughly $1.4 billion, and it arrived not in a press conference but in a written answer…
Governor Gavin Newsom is leading California into a new court fight against the Trump administration’s election-security conditions on homeland-security grants. The lawsuit does not claim that Trump’s policy has already been struck down. It asks a federal court to stop the conditions before states must surrender 20% of their Homeland Security Grant Program awards to…
President Donald Trump spent Saturday evening telling the country that a five-month war might be winding down. In a social media post, he said Mideast allies had reached the parameters of a deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end Iran’s nuclear threat, and that he had therefore agreed to cancel a strike…
A group of at least 17 Senate Democrats introduced the American Homeownership Act on February 24, 2026, targeting private equity firms and hedge funds that have been buying up single-family homes across the country. The legislation, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley, would strip tax breaks from large institutional landlords and…
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker demanded an $8.7 billion tariff refund from the White House, turning a simmering legal dispute into a direct financial confrontation with the federal government. The demand targets duties collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which a coalition of state attorneys general has challenged as unlawful. With private…
ExxonMobil is pressing the U.S. Supreme Court to force Cuban state entities to pay more than $1 billion in compensation for oil and gas assets seized during the Cuban Revolution, a claim rooted in a 1960 confiscation that has gone unresolved for over six decades. The case, which reached oral argument on February 23, 2026,…
The War Department has signed an agreement to bring Elon Musk’s xAI and its Grok chatbot onto the military’s internal AI platform, GenAI.mil, with initial deployment targeted for early 2026. The deal, which carries a $200 million ceiling, has already drawn sharp criticism from at least one U.S. senator over procurement concerns and the chatbot’s…