The Latest: Supreme Court rebuffs Trump restrictions on medical care for trans inmates
The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to allow the Trump administration to immediately enforce new medical restrictions for transgender people in prison. An executive order by President Donald Trump had called on the Bureau of Prisons to revise its medical care policies so that federal funds aren’t spent “for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” The new policy, blocked earlier by a lower court, would halt surgeries, taper off hormones and end social accommodations like makeup and wigs.
Meanwhile, Trump plans to visit South Carolina on Wednesday to boost U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, whose stumbles in her first campaign since replacing her late brother have Democratic voters hopeful — but not necessarily optimistic — that their candidate can break Republicans’ grip on the state.
Here's the latest:
Referencing her Democratic opponent’s status as a physician, GOP Sen. Darline Graham said Annie Andrews is “spreading blatant lies about her record” in “slick ads.”
Graham also accused Andrews of being “the most radical liberal candidate to ever run for office” in South Carolina.
Campaigning to succeed her late brother, Graham called herself “a little bit tougher” than Lindsey Graham on immigration.
“It’s simple,” she said, to swelling applause. “If you’re here illegally, you’ve got to go.”
Trump is en route to the rally site in Pendleton to stump with Graham.
Voter turnout is soaring compared with the last midterm election in many of the states that are expected to decide control of the U.S. Senate, according to an Associated Press analysis of early voting two weeks before Election Day.
In Texas, early voting is up 74% compared with 2022. In Kansas it’s more than doubled. Maine, North Carolina and Ohio also have seen increases of more than 30% in early in-person and mail voting compared with the same point in 2022.
Democrats are trying to flip Republican-held Senate seats in each of those states. In most of them, Republicans are accounting for a smaller share of advance voters than they did four years ago.
Midterm elections typically favor the party out of power in Washington. With Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, it’s a distinctly different environment than 2022, when Democrats were in charge.
Speaking ahead of the president at Wednesday’s rally near Clemson, Gov. Henry McMaster thanked South Carolina voters for his 10 years in the state’s top spot, a timeframe he said “seems like it’s gone by so fast.”
McMaster was lieutenant governor in 2016 when he became the first statewide-elected official in the country to endorse Trump’s presidential bid.
They have been close allies ever since, and McMaster ascended to the governor’s office when Trump selected then-Gov. Nikki Haley to be his United Nations ambassador.
McMaster on Wednesday called Trump “the most incredible man I ever met in my life.”
The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to let it reconsider a major federal permit granted for a large offshore wind farm, making it the fourth project the Republican leadership has targeted in recent months.
The Interior Department wants to reconsider its own approval for the construction and operations plan for the New England Wind project off Massachusetts.
The plan was approved in 2024 during the Biden administration. The Justice Department said the approval ignored major adverse impacts of the project.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, warned that the administration now risks derailing a legislative effort to speed up permitting reviews for new energy and infrastructure projects. The Senate reached a bipartisan deal in September on a permitting bill, which has not yet been voted on.
The administration is using executive orders, agency actions and the courts to try to stop development of offshore wind, which Trump has attacked as “ugly” and unreliable.
About 7,800 voters in Central California received duplicate mail ballots because of a vendor error, but election and campaign officials expressed confidence that the mistake would not impact results on Election Day.
The bulk of the duplicate ballots arrived at homes in the city of Tulare in the state’s farm belt, most of which is located in the highly competitive 22nd Congressional District, where Republican Rep. David Valadao is being challenged by progressive Democrat Randy Villegas.
Tulare County election officials faulted a “printer vendor error” and instructed voters to submit one ballot and destroy the other.
Valadao campaign strategist Robert Jones said, “We are confident that this won’t impact the results of the election.” Villegas said in a statement, “I have confidence in our election process.”
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and his wife, Gabby Giffords, spoke to a crowd of Democrats preparing to knock on doors on behalf of state legislative candidates outside Phoenix.
He said the political system is geared toward the rich and powerful, not normal Americans, and called Trump the most corrupt person to ever hold public office in the country.
“When we win elections, we can hold them accountable,” Kelly said. “We can end the corruption in Washington, D.C., the corrupt president and his family.”
Kelly is a potential 2028 presidential candidate. Giffords was a member of Congress when she was shot in the head in an attempted assassination.
The president doesn’t land in South Carolina for several hours, but dozens of people carrying anti-Trump signs are lining the road to the livestock arena where he will appear with Sen. Darline Graham, shouting at rally attendees as they enter the venue.
“This whole ‘Trump’ thing ain’t working,” read one sign. Another proclaimed that Trump’s “America First” policy platform is “un-Christian.”
Some of the people behind a barricade separating them from the roadway in rural South Carolina waved American or pride flags. One held a red and yellow flag of the former Soviet Union.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris rallied about 200 hospitality workers Wednesday afternoon in Las Vegas, encouraging them to campaign for Democratic candidates ahead of Nov. 3.
“Please keep fighting,” she said. “It’s making a difference. You are making a difference.”
The Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000 Nevada hospitality workers, is a critical political powerhouse for Democrats, knocking on thousands of doors every election.
She joined Democratic governor candidate Aaron Ford and Democratic Rep. Dina Titus at the union’s headquarters, where the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to Harris, whose birthday was yesterday.
Harris said for her birthday she wants Attorney General Ford and Titus to win. Ford hopes to oust Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo in one of the most competitive governor races.
“It’s going to be tight,” Harris said. “It will not be easy, but we don’t want to have any regrets on the 14th day about what we could have done these 13 days, right?”
Trump was asked about the widely criticized ad from Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calling her “a liar.”
“The fact is I know nothing about it. But I hear the mother went very rogue on the daughter,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House. Acton’s birth mother, Donna Arthur, “doesn’t have a lot of respect for the daughter. And I think the mother is a witness to things, also. So who knows,” he went on.
Arthur lost custody of her children after their stepfather was indicted for raping Acton as a child.
Still, Trump called it “a very unusual situation to have a mother hate a daughter that much,” adding: “I don’t think that has anything to do with Vivek.”
Ramaswamy has claimed credit for the ad and has said he will spend $4 million to promote it.
The president said criticism of his decision to put on hold the sweeping new sanctions package targeting the Russian economy is coming from “people who don’t know how life works.”
Trump argued that holding off enacting the legislation named after South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham helped pave the way for Wednesday’s release of Stephen Hubbard, an American who had been jailed for more than four years in Russia on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.
Graham, who had championed the tougher sanctions package, died in July.
“If you would have put those sanctions on or whatever you want to call them, you could forget about him,” Trump said of Hubbard. “You’d never see him again. He’d be back in jail for 25 years.”
Trump added that his team is also “very close to a deal” to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
“When you’re close to a deal and you have very delicate negotiations, you don’t put sanctions on,” he said.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to let it resume building a border wall project through the Big Bend region of Texas.
The government filed an emergency appeal asking the justices to lift a lower court decision halting construction. That ruling marked a setback to one of President Donald Trump’s signature projects.
The administration has been racing forward with construction on a border wall and other infrastructure from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
But in the Big Bend region, the administration has run into opposition from ranchers, residents, business owners and environmentalists who argue the projects are a waste of money in an area of historically low illegal immigration and say construction could harm the region’s beautiful landscapes.
Opponents have filed numerous lawsuits seeking to stop the project, which in the Big Bend consists of a mixture of walls, vehicle barriers and surveillance technology.
The $1,000 contribution on Monday from author Ron Chernow is listed among more than 160 donations in a report filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission by Democratic candidate Adam Hamilton’s campaign.
Chernow wrote the acclaimed, bestselling 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary under President George Washington, who also published dozens of essays defending the U.S. Constitution to help get it ratified in 1788. Chernow’s book helped inspire the acclaimed 2016 musical “Hamilton” on Broadway.
Adam Hamilton is trying to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall to become the first Democrat in Kansas to win a Senate seat since 1932. He is the founder and senior pastor of the nation’s largest United Methodist church.
U.S. Envoy Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian” after the Russian president freed a U.S. citizen, Stephen Hubbard, who had been jailed for more than four years.
When reporters asked Trump about Witkoff’s description of Putin as a humanitarian, the president said “well I guess you could say for that particular purpose” of releasing Hubbard, but added, “I wouldn’t say anything one way or the other.”
“We have been pretty happy with Russia” for staying out of the Iran war, Trump continued, noting that the U.S. is still trying to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
“So the last thing I want to do is upset an apple cart,” he said, “where we’re getting close to settling a war.”
Hubbard’s younger sister said she spoke with her brother on the phone after his release and described him as in disbelief.
“He was just laughing because he was just, he said ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’” Patricia Hubbard Fox said during a phone interview as she headed to Denver’s airport to catch a flight to San Antonio to meet her brother.
“He really thought he was going to die in prison,” she added, saying her brother suffered beatings and starvation in prison.
Hubbard Fox said her brother was in perfect health when he was “kidnapped” in 2022 and accused of fighting alongside Kyiv’s forces following Russia’s invasion. Now, she said, he likely has post-traumatic stress disorder from the ordeal and suffers from an enlarged heart.
The State Department is ordering some diplomats and the families of U.S. government employees to leave Saudi Arabia following a series of deadly attacks in the country by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels and rising fears of an escalation in hostilities.
The department said Wednesday it had ordered the departure of nonessential staff at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh and its satellite consulates. The embassy had been badly damaged at the start of the Iran war and had been operating with only a skeleton staff for months, although in recent weeks some diplomats had returned.
“Iranian-supported Houthis have engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure resulting in civilian casualties and severe travel disruptions. The hostilities have the potential to escalate rapidly beyond that immediate area,” the department said in a new travel alert.
Speaking to reporters at an unrelated White House event, Trump said the release of Stephen Hubbard came together quickly after Trump asked Vladimir Putin to release Hubbard during a phone call last week.
“I hear he’s in pretty good shape,” Trump said. “He went through a lot. I spoke to him this morning. He is the happiest man around.”
Trump called the 74-year-old Hubbard a “very high quality, innocent man.”
A retired teacher from Michigan, Hubbard was jailed in Russia for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.
The president, sitting at a table with Attorney General Todd Blanche and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth among others, said that every American with an aging parent or young child feels “anxiety” about their loves ones’ vulnerability to online criminals.
Americans reported losing $20 billion to cyber-enabled crimes last year, but that’s likely an undercount, the president continued, touting the government’s “national campaign to destroy this menace.”
That includes “fraudsters, hackers and scammers,” as well as perpetrators of sextortion. That’s when a scammer gets ahold of a someone’s — often a teenager’s — sensitive photos, and use them as blackmail for money.
“It sounds so sinister,” he said, “I guess it is.”
The Treasury Department on Wednesday sanctioned Karnakis and Karnakis, a Greek and Panamanian-based law firm it accuses of supporting Tehran’s illicit shipping activity and allowing it to generate revenue to fund its military, weapons and nuclear program.
Also targeted were Singapore and UAE-based shipping agents that U.S. officials say directly aid Iran’s shadow fleet network.
“Whether you are conducting illegal oil transfers at sea or sitting in the corner office of a law firm, if you are supporting the Iranian regime, we will find you and sanction you,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
These are the latest targets as part of the Trump administration’s wider-ranging economic campaign against Iran, which after months has failed to make Tehran capitulate to U.S. terms regarding its nuclear ambitions.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Wednesday on X that Iran remains open to diplomacy, if the United States demonstrates a willingness to build trust and reach a resolution.
“But if US chooses war over diplomacy, it’ll certainly result in an even greater strategic failure,” he added.
He echoed remarks he wrote in the Financial Times but gave no details of talks with Washington through mediators on Iran’s recent seven-day proposal to end the war and fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Wednesday that mediation efforts are welcomed, but that the final decision on acceptable terms rests with Trump.
“The United States will not support any deal that creates a pathway for Iran to ever have a nuclear weapon. As long as President Trump is in office, they will never have a nuclear weapon,” he added.
The Democratic candidate was speaking at a rally in Houston, hitting the point he’s repeated throughout this race, that “billionaire megadonors are trying to buy this election” by donating to his opponent, Republican Ken Paxton.
But this time, Talarico got more specific. “Actually, it’s just one billionaire megadonor.”
“In all likelihood,” Talarico continued, if the audience had seen a television attack ad against him, or received negative mailers or texts, “that was Elon.”
Just before Talarico’s rally, Musk posted on his social media platform X, “There is something deeply wrong with Talarico.”
The barbs followed reporting that Musk contributed $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which gave $158 million to Texas PAC, the largest contributor to Paxton’s campaign.
Musk also provided $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, which supports Paxton.
“On Nov. 3, we are going to send a clear message to the world’s first trillionaire,” said Talarico. “Texas is not for sale.”
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