Summaru
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
Donald Trump’s incoming presidency is set to threaten millions of Americans’ healthcare plans. Millions of Americans are at risk of losing health coverage in 2025 under Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration. More than 20 million Americans rely on the individual private health insurance market for healthcare, private insurance which is subsidized by the federal government.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the former independent presidential candidate turned Trump surrogate, is reviewing candidate resumes for the top jobs at the US government’s health agencies in Donald Trump’s new administration, a former Kennedy aide and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
A Chinese national who had been recently released from a mental hospital was ordered held Friday on trespassing charges after police say he tried to enter President-elect Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the Associated Press reports. That entrance was in violation of a court order that he stay away from Mar-a-Lago following previous attempts.
Democratic US Representative Andrea Salinas has won reelection in Oregon’s 6th congressional District, beating Republican Mike Erickson to earn a second term in Congress after outraising him by millions of dollars. Oregon’s newest congressional district, the 6th was seen as leaning more toward Democrats, according to the Cook Political Report. That gave a slight advantage to the freshman Democratic incumbent, who also defeated Erickson in the 2022 election.
Women have won 60 seats in the New Mexico Legislature to secure the largest female legislative majority in US history, stirring expressions of vindication and joy among candidates who knocked on doors and found voters were ready.
A federal judge on Friday overturned Illinois’ ban on semiautomatic weapons, leaning on recent US supreme court rulings that strictly interpret the second amendment right to keep and bear firearms. Judge Stephen P McGlynn issued the lengthy finding in a decree that he said applied universally, not just to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit challenging the ban.
Speaking to the New York Times, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former House speaker who played a major role in the pressuring Joe Biden not to seek re-election, said she believed the president waited too long to exit the race, and erred in immediately endorsing Kamala Harris. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said.
Officials at the Pentagon are having informal discussions about what to do if Donald Trump were to give an illegal order, such as deploying the military domestically, CNN reports. They are also preparing for the possibility that he may change rules to be able to fire scores of career civil servants.
Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.
Donald Trump, during a call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, handed the phone to Elon Musk, the New York Times is also reporting, confirming an earlier Axios story. It is not clear what the three men discussed or whether they touched on any change in US policy toward Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s election victory, the Times said.
The Biden administration has decided to allow US defense contractors to work in Ukraine to maintain and repair Pentagon-provided weaponry, Reuters is reporting, citing US officials. The contractors would be small in number and located far from the frontlines and will not be engaged in combat, an official told the news agency.
The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case has granted a request from the special counsel’s office to pause proceedings in his trial on charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election. As we reported earlier, Jack Smith asked judge Tanya Chutkan to pause the case against the president-elect to “assess the unprecedented circumstances” in which the office finds itself.
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Updated
Oregon Democrat Andrea Salinas wins re-election to Congress
Democratic US Representative Andrea Salinas has won reelection in Oregon’s 6th congressional District, beating Republican Mike Erickson to earn a second term in Congress after outraising him by millions of dollars.
Oregon’s newest congressional district, the 6th was seen as leaning more toward Democrats, according to the Cook Political Report. That gave a slight advantage to the freshman Democratic incumbent, who also defeated Erickson in the 2022 election.
Salinas and Chavez-DeRemer became the first Latina members of Congress to represent Oregon when they were elected in the 2022 midterms.
This was Erickson’s fourth time running for Congress.
As of late October, federal campaign finance records showed Salinas had raised nearly $4.8m compared to Erickson’s roughly $460,000.
The boundaries of the 6th District were created during redistricting after the 2020 census. The district includes the state capital Salem and parts of Portland’s affluent southwestern suburbs. And while it also spans rural areas across a broad swath of the Willamette Valley, President Joe Biden would have carried it by about 13 points in 2020.
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