2025

WASHINGTON, Dec 30 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump vetoed a major drinking water project in Colorado, drawing immediate condemnation from Colorado Republican lawmaker Lauren Boebert, a former loyal MAGA ally who also recently challenged Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The White House announced Trump’s veto of the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC) Act, which was approved unanimously by both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and a second measure affecting a Florida project, late on Tuesday. They were the first two vetoes of Trump’s second term.

The veto of the Colorado project came after Trump’s vow to retaliate against the state for keeping his ally Tina Peters in prison, despite his attempt to pardon her earlier in the month, and Boebert’s action to force the release of the government’s files on the late convicted sexual offender Epstein.

Peters, a former Colorado county clerk, is serving a nine-year prison term after being convicted on state charges for illegally tampering with voting machines in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s pardon covers only federal charges and the state has refused to release Peters.

Boebert, who sponsored the bill, condemned Trump’s veto of what she called a “completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill” in a statement on X, adding her hope is that “this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability.”

The bill was aimed at funding a decades-long project to bring safe drinking water to 39 communities in Colorado’s Eastern Plains, where the groundwater is high in salt, and wells sometimes unleash radioactivity into the water supply.

In his letter to Congress, Trump said he vetoed the measure to prevent “American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies.”

It was not immediately clear if the Republican leaders in Congress would allow a vote to override Trump’s veto.

Boebert was one of four Republican lawmakers, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who played a key role in forcing the release of Justice Department files on Epstein. Trump had fought the release of the files for months before ending his opposition.

The White House said Trump had also vetoed a measure to spend $14 million to protect an area known as Osceola Camp within the Everglades National Park that is inhabited by members of the Miccosukee tribe of Native Americans, which has fought Trump’s makeshift immigrant detention center “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades. A federal judge has now ordered the detention center to be shut down.

Trump said the tribe was never authorized to inhabit the Osceola Camp area, and his administration would not support projects for special interests, especially those “unaligned” with his immigration policies.    

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Kanishka Singh; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Lincoln Feast.)

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If history is a guide, Republicans stand a good chance of losing control of the House of Representatives in 2026. They have just a slim majority in the chamber, and the incumbent party usually gives up seats in midterm elections.

President Donald Trump, whose loss of the House halfway through his first term led to two impeachments, is trying to keep history from repeating — and doing so in ways his opponents say are intended to manipulate next year’s election landscape.

He has rallied his party to remake congressional maps across the country to create more conservative-leaning House seats, an effort that could end up backfiring on him. He’s directed his administration to target Democratic politicians, activists and donors. And, Democrats worry, he’s flexing his muscles to intervene in the midterms like no administration ever has.

Democrats and other critics point to how Trump has sent the military into Democratic cities over the objections of Democratic mayors and governors. They note that he’s pushed the Department of Homeland Security to be so aggressive that at one point its agents handcuffed a Democratic U.S. senator. And some warn that a Republican-controlled Congress could fail to seat winning candidates if Democrats reclaim the House majority, recalling Trump’s efforts to stay in power even after voters rejected him in 2020, leading to the violent attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol.

Regarding potential military deployments, Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told The Associated Press: “What he is going to do is send those troops there, and keep them there all the way through the next election, because guess what? If people are afraid of leaving their house, they’re probably not going to leave their house to go vote on Election Day. That’s how he stays in power.”

Democrats sounded similar alarms just before November’s elections, and yet there were no significant incidents. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent Trump antagonist who also warns about a federal crackdown on voting in 2026, predicted that masked immigration agents would show up at the polls in his state, where voters were considering a ballot measure to counter Trump’s redistricting push.

There were no such incidents in November, and the measure to redraw California’s congressional lines in response to Trump’s efforts elsewhere won in a landslide.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the concerns about the midterms come from Democratic politicians who are “fearmongering to score political points with the radical left flank of the Democrat party that they are courting ahead of their doomed-to-fail presidential campaigns.”

She described their concerns as “baseless conspiracy theories.”

Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, denied that Trump was planning to use the military to try to suppress votes.

“I say it is categorically false, will not happen. It’s just wrongheaded,” she told Vanity Fair for an interview that was published earlier in December.

DNC litigation director Dan Freeman said he hasn’t seen an indication that Trump will send immigration enforcement agents to polling places during the midterms, but is wary.

He said the DNC filed public records requests in an attempt to learn more about any such plans and is drafting legal pleadings it could file if Trump sends armed federal agents to the polls or otherwise intervenes in the elections.

“We’re not taking their word for it,” Freeman said in an interview.

November’s off-year elections may not be the best indicator of what could lie ahead. They were scattered in a handful of states, and Trump showed only modest interest until late in the fall when his Department of Justice announced it was sending federal monitors to California and New Jersey to observe voting in a handful of counties. It was a bureaucratic step that had no impact on voting, even as it triggered alarm from Democrats.

Alexandra Chandler, the legal director of Protect Democracy, a group that has clashed with Trump over his role in elections, said she was heartened by the lack of drama during the 2025 voting.

“We have so many positive signs we can look to,” Chandler said, citing not only a quiet election but GOP senators’ resistance to Trump’s demands to eliminate the filibuster and the widespread resistance to Trump’s demand that television host Jimmy Kimmel lose his job because of his criticism of the president. “There are limits” on Trump’s power, she noted.

“We will have elections in 2026,” Chandler said. “People don’t have to worry about that.”

Under the Constitution, a president has limited tools to intervene in elections, which are run by the states. Congress can help set rules for federal elections, but states administer their own election operations and oversee the counting of ballots.

When Trump tried to singlehandedly revise election rules with a sweeping executive order shortly after returning to office, the courts stepped in and stopped him, citing the lack of a constitutional role for the president. Trump later promised another order, possibly targeting mail ballots and voting machines, but it has yet to materialize.

Still, there’s plenty of ways a president can cause problems, said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor.

Trump unsuccessfully pushed Georgia’s top election official to “find” him enough votes to be declared the winner there in 2020 and could try similar tactics in Republican-dominated states in November. Likewise, Hasen said, Trump could spread misinformation to undermine confidence in vote tallies, as he has done routinely ahead of elections.

It’s harder to do that in more lopsided contests, as many in 2025 turned into, Hasen noted.

“Concerns about Trump interfering in 2026 are real; they’re not frivolous,” Hasen said. “They’re also not likely, but these are things people need to be on guard for.”

One administration move that has alarmed election officials is a federal demand from his Department of Justice for detailed voter data from the states. The administration has sued the District of Columbia and at least 21 states, most of them controlled by Democrats, after they refused to turn over all the information the DOJ sought.

“What the DOJ is trying to do is something that should frighten everybody across the political spectrum,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “They’re trying to use the power of the executive to bully states into turning over highly sensitive data — date of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license, the Holy Trinity of identity theft — hand it over to the DOJ for who knows what use.”

Voting rights lawyers and election officials have been preparing for months for the midterms, trying to ensure there are ways to counter misinformation and ensure state election systems are easy to explain. Both major parties are expected to stand up significant campaigns around the mechanics of voting: Democrats mounting what they call a “voter protection” effort to monitor for problems while Republicans focus on what they call “election integrity.”

Freeman, the DNC litigation director who previously worked in the DOJ’s voting section, said his hiring this year was part of a larger effort by the DNC to beef up its in-house legal efforts ahead of the midterms. He said the committee has been filling gaps in voting rights law enforcement that the DOJ has typically covered, including informing states that they can’t illegally purge citizens from their voter rolls.

Tina Barton, co-chair of the Committee on Safe and Secure Elections, a coalition of law enforcement and election officials who advise jurisdictions on de-escalation and how to respond to emergencies at polling places, says interest in the group’s trainings has “exploded” in recent weeks.

“There’s a lot at stake, and that’s going to cause a lot of emotions,” Barton said.

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Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to reflect the correct name of Alexandra Chandler’s organization, Protect Democracy.

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By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, Dec 30 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to enforce in some Democratic-led states a provision of his signature tax and domestic policy bill that deprives Planned Parenthood health centers that perform abortions of Medicaid funding.

A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at the administration’s request put on hold an injunction issued by a lower-court judge who barred the law from being enforced in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

It marked the latest instance of the appeals court lifting an order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani preventing the law from being implemented, after the 1st Circuit on December 12 overturned a ruling she issued in another case brought by Planned Parenthood declaring that the law violated the U.S. Constitution.

Representatives for Planned Parenthood and the states that pursued the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by the Republican-led Congress, bars Medicaid funding for tax-exempt organizations that provide family planning and reproductive health services if they perform abortions and received more than $800,000 in Medicaid funds during the 2023 fiscal year.

Planned Parenthood says the law was passed with it in mind and has contributed to at least 20 of its health centers closing since Trump signed the measure into law in July.

After the 1st Circuit earlier this year paused Talwani’s initial injunction in Planned Parenthood’s favor, a group of Democratic attorneys general in states including California, Massachusetts and New York asked her to block the law’s enforcement again, but on different grounds.

Talwani, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, agreed to do so on December 2, saying the states were likely to succeed in establishing that the law constitutes an unconstitutional retroactive condition on their participation in the Medicaid healthcare program for low-income people.

Talwani held the law did not give the states clear notice as to which entities it covered and imposed a restriction they could not have anticipated after the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved their state Medicaid plans.

But Tuesday’s 1st Circuit panel, comprised only of judges appointed by Democratic presidents, said the Trump administration had demonstrated it was likely to prevail on appeal in establishing the law was not ambiguous and that Congress had the power to make such changes.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Lincoln Feast.)

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