senator dianne feinstein

Bulwark founder Sarah Longwell hosts weekly surveys with President Donald Trump supporters. And this week’s inquiry reveals a sea change that’s going to irreparably clobber Trump and the Republican Party in the next few months.

“We've done a series of focus groups in recent months with a bunch of Zoomers who identify as politically moderate,” said Longwell. “… With the ones that had voted for Trump, we saw a lot of evidence that the large gap between Trump's current approval rating and his vote share in 2024.”

“I grew up definitely more Republican, but just within the last few years, I've switched my opinion. I have a lot of liberal friends. We would get in just debates and such. And so my views were definitely more conservative. I have a hard time identifying with that group of people anymore just with how hardcore they've been on different things,” said one Trump voting young woman. “… I don't agree at all with how they're targeting the lower- and middle-class people to pay more and the rich get to keep more of their money. It's extremely unfair. They want to take away different things from the middle and lower class so they don't have to pay as much. It's not fair.”

Another Trump voter — this time a man — lamented at the Republican Party’s shocking careen into cult status.

“I grew up actually campaigning for Republicans, going door to door, asking people to vote for them. And after I saw the party go from a party to a one-man idolatry worship, I really just felt was not a space for me anymore,” he said.

Yet another complained that Trump had put on a “world police hat” and was following Israel leader Benjamin Netanyahu over a cliff while chasing “a Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Netanyahu … unfortunately, I think, is just using Trump for his own personal gain,” the voter told Bulwark.

“He's let me down … so now I’m more in the moderate position,” confessed another.

“I was a strong Republican in last few years,” said a second female Trump voter, "Specifically with women's rights, I used to be extremely pro-life, regardless of any situation, and now I have a four-week-old daughter and I cannot fathom her being in a situation where she couldn't make a choice for herself.”

That voter said she lives in a majority Muslim community in Dearborn Heights, Mich., where Trump visited to sell his policies to Muslim community leaders. His message was clear enough that new American citizens who never voted before came out to vote specifically for him.

That, she said, was a huge mistake.

“I extremely regretted it after the fact,” she said. “I definitely regret this was one of the first times that I was excited enough to go and vote and I deeply regret voting. I wish I would not have.”

Trump’s favor among young voters has already been collapsing, but the collapse among young Republicans is a new trend, Longwell said. And it’s not just because Trump has singlehandedly devastated their economy. Apparently, it also comes down to the Republican Party’s political inconsistency.

“I'm a Christian so I have a fair mix of Democratic and Republican ideas,” confessed another former Trump voter. “I'm pro-life, but the thing about that is that I think that we also need to do a better job at supporting kids while they’re growing up.”

Pamela Carlin, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery professor of Public Interest Law and a founder and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law school, has argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court. And during that time, she’s come to an assessment about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: the man is a partisan hack — and he makes no bones about it.

They don’t care if they make the court “look nakedly, openly political,” said Carlin speaking on Slate’s Amicus podcast with host Dalia Lithwick.

“They have just decided they have the power right now to undo the second Reconstruction, and they’re happy to do that,” said Carlin. “And they don’t care that it’s obvious that that aligns with a particular wing of the Republican Party … When you now have a Republican Party, especially in the south, that has no interest whatsoever in attracting Black votes. … [I]t’s a party that is not interested in being a multiracial, multiethnic party.”

Carlin took particular issue with the court’s recent move to “eviscerate the Voting Rights act of 1965,” which is a statute that President Johnson called the “most monumental act in the history of American freedom” when he signed it and which Carlin said President Ronald Reagan referred to as “a crown jewel” when he signed the reauthorization of the act in 1982.

Consider the court’s recent 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, wherein the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map drawn to include a second majority-Black district. The ruling found that intentionally creating districts to satisfy Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

But that’s the character of someone like Alito, said Carlin.

“[W]hen Justice Alito applied for a job in the Reagan Justice Department, he said that the thing that inspired him to go to law school and to care about constitutional law was his dislike of … the decision to apply one person, one vote to legislative elections and say, ‘you can’t have one district that has 100,000 people in it and another district that has 700,000 people in it,’ the way some states did prior to one person, one vote,” said Carlin. “So this is a guy who from very outset of his career has disliked the Supreme Court’s democracy protecting decisions and has decided to do something about it.”

And they did. With abandonment of precedent, the Roberts court with Alito in lead has “completely reversed” what the Supreme Court did 40 years ago, she said.

“What he has said is, essentially, as long as the Republican Party is willing to screw over white Democrats, it’s free to screw over Black people as well, because Black people vote overwhelmingly in the south, in particular for candidates who are Democrats,” said Carlin, adding that Alito has warped the court to thoroughly that now it is proclaiming “not only aren’t we gonna protect you, but we’re not gonna let Congress protect you either” with response laws.

“[What] Justice Thomas and Justice Alito and the chief learned is you’ve got the power now, but you may not have the power five or ten years from now. You’ve got justices, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito, in particular, who really dislike the second Reconstruction,” she said. “I mean, they really, really dislike it. And they have the power to get rid of something they really, really dislike. Why not take it? Especially if your view of American institutions is as cynical as theirs seems to be.”

The last time President Donald Trump got stomped in a midterm election, in 2018, his unpopularity cost his Republican Party more than three dozen House seats.

But the New York Times reports even that wasn’t a true stomping because “the bottom never truly fell out for the Republicans that year.”

This year is gearing up to be the real stomp.

“The party actually gained ground in the Senate — as working-class white voters largely kept their faith in Mr. Trump’s economic know-how,” reports NY Times national political correspondent Shane Goldmacher. “Today, that once-deep reservoir of good will has largely evaporated.”

Trump’s crucial bloc of blue-collar white voters are, for the first time, extremely doubtful of Trump’s handling of the economy, and a NY Times review of polling is showing “an extraordinary swing on that issue among white voters without college degrees between his first midterm election and now.”

In 2018, working-class white voters still approved of Trump’s management of the economy by margins of 30 percentage points or even more. Now, recent polls reveal them disapproving of him by 14 to more than 30 points, depending on the survey.

To be sure, Trump’s approval on the economy has dropped across practically every group, but the Times reports his “cratering support” among his most loyal, most white demographic means a pivotal foundation of his political coalition for more than a decade is potentially “the most consequential developments of 2026,” according to interviews with strategists in both parties who are involved in the midterms.

Trump’s people and GOP strategists see the yawning cavern where their floor used to be, and they’re freaking. But they have no lifesavers to grab, according to surveys.

Trump’s advisers are trying to sell voters on the policies in last year’s tax cut package, but the American public does not appear to be biting.

“It’s working-class voters who are not happy with the Republican Party, and they may not come out and vote,” John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who has worked for Trump for years, warned in an interview.

He added that he’s also seeing backsliding of Trump’s gains in 2024 among working-class Black and Hispanic voters.

At this point, one of the only groups that still support him on the economy in polls are hardcore Republicans, but that’s not nearly enough to salvage Republicans’ midterms — not when blue-collar white voters, who voted more than two to one for Trump in 2024 stay home or turn to Democrats.

“It’s critical,” said McLaughlin, of mobilizing the white working class. “If they don’t, we lose the House and the Senate.”

Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins announced her reelection campaign in February by posting a video that showed her opening a box of New Balance running shoes.

“This is perfect for 2026,” she said to the camera as she held up a sneaker. “Because I’m running.”

The video didn’t mention that New Balance’s owner and chairman, billionaire Jim Davis, gave $1 million to the super PAC supporting Collins’ campaign seven months prior. The company is based in Boston and has manufacturing facilities in Maine. It was one of four donations Davis made last year to the network of committees raising money for Collins.

Davis, who is worth an estimated $6.1 billion, is one of at least 79 billionaires who donated to Collins’ network between January 2025 and May 20, 2026, according to a Maine Monitor analysis of Federal Election Commission campaign finance data. If billionaires’ spouses are included in the tally, the number rises to 97.

Collectively, the group of nearly 100 billionaires and spouses has donated $9.8 million to the Collins network since the start of 2025, representing a third of what groups supporting Collins raised from all donors.

The total from billionaires stands in stark contrast with the fundraising of her opponent, Democrat Graham Platner, whose campaign has mostly attracted smaller amounts of funds but from many more people. Platner, who won his party’s primary election Tuesday, has received at least $24,000 from five billionaires, a fraction of 1 percent of his total haul.

The breadth of billionaire funding for Collins shows how the race, which could decide control of the U.S. Senate, has drawn national interest and funding from some of the wealthiest people in the world, a group that has made up a growing share of election spending in recent years. Billionaires accounted for 19 percent of all federal election contributions in 2024, up from just 0.3 percent in 2004, according to a New York Timesanalysis from earlier this year.

Billionaires and their spouses gave $529,000 to the Collins campaign directly; $370,000 to the Collins Victory Committee, a joint fundraising committee that has disbursed funds to the other committees; $100,000 to Dirigo PAC, the leadership committee Collins uses to raise money for other candidates; and $24,000 to Susan Collins for Maine, a joint fundraising committee. But the billionaires have mostly opted to send their donations, nearly $9 million, to Pine Tree Results PAC, a super PAC dedicated to electing Collins that, unlike the others, is not subject to contribution limits.

Pine Tree Results PAC has financed attack ads against Platner since April and has booked $24 million in ads leading up to the general election in November, according to data from AdImpact.

The network of five groups supporting Collins is linked through a series of joint fundraising agreements, which are legal arrangements that allow them to raise money together and then disburse the funds according to a predetermined formula. For the first time in Collins’ career, a super PAC — Pine Tree Results — is linked to her fundraising apparatus through those agreements, an arrangement made possible thanks to a 2024 advisory Federal Election Commission opinion. The super PAC also shares a treasurer with the Collins Victory Committee and Dirigo PAC.

Counting all her donations, including both from billionaires and others, the Collins network has raised about $30 million since the beginning of last year, with $12 million going to her campaign.

The Platner campaign, meanwhile, raised $16.3 million over that time. The total does not include the $200,000 his campaign said it raised in the 24 hours after The New York Times published a story last week detailing what it described as Platner’s “unsettling” behavior with three former girlfriends. The Platner campaign has no joint fundraising agreements with any other committees, according to federal campaign finance filings, and no super PAC dedicated to supporting his candidacy. (Platner has said that super PACs “should be outlawed.”) Experts speculated, however, that big outside money will likely move toward Platner now that he has clinched the Democratic nomination.

The Monitor counted billionaire donors by comparing the names on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaire List to Federal Election Commission donor information, which included reviewing location and occupation information to eliminate the possibility of erroneous matches based on similar names.

The Collins campaign did not respond to a request from The Monitor for an interview with the senator and then declined to answer questions over email.

The amount billionaires gave in support of Collins is similar to the amount that small-dollar donors — those giving $200 or less — contributed to the Platner campaign. Billionaires gave $9.8 million in support of Collins, while small-dollar donors gave $9.6 million to support Platner. The Collins campaign raised about $980,000 from small-dollar donations.

“While Susan Collins’ campaign is backed by billionaire donors, our campaign is built on a movement funded by the people, with an average donation of $26,” wrote Ben Chin, Platner’s campaign manager, in an email.

The majority of the billionaire donations to Collins this cycle are from billionaires who made their money in alternative investments, including hedge funds and private equity. Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel LLC, donated $2.5 million to the Pine Tree Results Super PAC, the largest individual donation backing Collins since 2025. Stephen Schwarzman, the founder and CEO of Blackstone dubbed “the king of private equity,” donated $2 million. Schwarzman and the private equity industry were some of Collins’ biggest boosters in her last campaign in 2020.

Other billionaire Collins donors include Palantir co-founder Alex Karp; Melinda French-Gates, ex-wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; and Elizabeth Uihlein, husband of Richard Uihlein, the main financial backer of the effort to place a referendum question about trans athletes on Maine’s ballot this year.

The billionaire donors supporting Collins have a net worth of $888 billion, or nearly nine times Maine’s entire economic output in 2025. None are Maine residents.

The Platner campaign received donations from at least five billionaires. It received $1,500 from Jennifer Pritzker, a cousin to fellow billionaire and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker; a total of $12,000 from Jon and Pat Stryker, heirs to the Stryker medical equipment empire; $3,500 from Christy Walton, who married into the Walton family; and $7,000 from Democratic megadonor and hedge fund founder George Soros. Together, they are worth an estimated $42.3 billion.

The difference between billionaire contributions to the two candidates is not surprising given Collins’ long Senate tenure, her position as chair of the powerful appropriations committee and Platner’s anti-billionaire message, said Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine.

“We generally know that, in contemporary American politics, big money from wealthy donors generally tends to head in the direction of Republicans more than Democrats,” he said.

Meanwhile Democrats dating back to Howard Dean and Barack Obama have shown the possibility of raising huge sums from small-dollar donations, he added.

“It’s two different ways to get there, but you both get there,” Brewer said.

Just 3 percent of the total that Collins’ groups raised came from donors who gave $200 or less. In comparison, about 60 percent of donations to Platner’s campaign came from those smaller donations.

It’s not possible to track the state where smaller, “unitemized” donations came from. Committees are required, however, to provide the Federal Election Commission information about donors who contribute more than $200 across all federal campaigns, including their state of residence. These donations are called “itemized donations.” Both campaigns have relied heavily on out-of-state money for their itemized donations.

Of those larger donations to the Collins network, about 3 percent came from Maine.

Platner’s trackable donations were more likely to be from Maine: About 22 percent were from the state, according to the Federal Election Commission.

That’s actually a large percentage of in-state donations for a Senate campaign, said Nicholas Jacobs, a professor of American government at Colby College who has studied out-of-state donations in Senate campaigns. Maine contributed more itemized funding to Platner than any other state through May 20, according to the Federal Election Commission.

“That’s rare in general and exceptionally rare for a small state,” Jacobs said.

But now that Platner has won his primary, big money may start flowing his way. Jacobs predicted that Platner will likely get the backing of a super PAC at some point this summer.

“That’s just the way politics works,” Jacobs said.

In the wake of Citizens United

This is the first time that Collins has been running for reelection since the Federal Election Commission issued an advisory opinion that allowed super PACs to join joint fundraising efforts, and Collins has taken advantage of the change.

Before 2024, campaigns — which are subject to donor limits — could not be connected to super PACs, which are not subject to limits on donor contributions. Super PACs were created in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which ruled that groups independent of campaigns have a First Amendment right to raise and spend money supporting or attacking candidates without limits, so long as they aren’t coordinating with campaigns.

In 2024, the Federal Election Commission issued an advisory opinion allowing South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s campaign to enter into a joint fundraising agreement with the super PAC supporting his candidacy. Commission members voted, 5-1, to permit the arrangement because Graham and his campaign told the commission they “will not discuss the nonpublic campaign plans, projects, activities, or needs of Senator Graham or his campaign with [the] Super PAC,” according to the advisory opinion.

Critics, including the Democratic Party’s House and Senate fundraising arms, argued the arrangement was a clear violation of the ban on coordination, a ban that they argued has been regularly circumvented since the creation of the super PAC in 2010.

In her dissent, former Democratic Federal Election Commission member Ellen Weintraub wrote that “the Commission has already created far too many holes in what should be a solid wall dividing candidates and their committees from the super PACs that support them.” In 2025, Trump fired Weintraub from the commission shortly after she became chair and didn’t name a replacement. Shortly after that, the agency lost a quorum of commissioners, effectively sidelining it from its election watchdog duties since April 2025.

The 2024 advisory opinion opened the door for the Collins campaign to connect with the Pine Tree Results Super PAC. The campaign and the PAC each have a joint fundraising agreement with the Collins Victory Committee, which has transferred funds to both organizations. Most of this money, a total of $2.4 million, has gone to the Collins campaign.

The Pine Tree Results Super PAC and the Collins Victory Committee share a treasurer, and all three groups have paid the same fundraising and event planning consultant, the Morning Group, based in Washington, D.C., Federal Election Commission records show.

Other outside groups are also spending large amounts on the race. For example, the Senate Leadership Fund, which is the main fundraising vehicle for Senate Republicans, has raised $175 million since the start of 2025 and has booked $29 million in ads for the race pitting Collins against Platner.

Many of the donors to the Senate Leadership Fund also donated to parts of the Collins fundraising network, including Schwarzman and hedge fund manager Paul Singer. Other billionaires have donated large sums to the Senate Leadership Fund as well, including casino magnate Miriam Adelson, who donated $30 million, and Elon Musk, who gave $10 million.

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic super PAC WinSenate has booked $25 million in ads in Maine’s Senate race. WinSenate is funded by the Senate Majority PAC, the main fundraising vehicle for Senate Democrats. It has raised $115 million this cycle, and includes funds from billionaires such as Cable TV magnate Amos Hostetter Jr., who gave $2 million, and Netflix cofounder and chairman Reed Hastings, who contributed $1 million.

Both the Republican Senate Leadership Fund and the Democratic Senate Majority PAC are beneficiaries of large amounts of funds contributed by 501(c)4 nonprofits that aren’t required to reveal their donors. That type of funding has been dubbed “dark money” due to the lack of transparency about its sources.

This cycle, the Senate Leadership Fund has raised $46 million from conservative dark money group One Nation, while the liberal dark money group Majority Forward has donated $33 million to the Democratic Senate Majority Fund. It’s unclear how much of that money came from billionaires.

The Florida Supreme Court has declined to suspend the Florida law license of Kenneth Chesebro, convicted in Georgia of filing a false list of electors there to undermine Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Instead, the justices issued a reprimand over the objection of Justice Jorge Labarga, the sole member of the court not appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Former Gov. Charlie Crist placed him on the Supreme Court in January 2009.)

“In my view, the intentional commission of fraud upon the court is one of the most egregious ethical transgressions a lawyer can commit, and such serious misconduct necessitates the imposition of severe professional sanctions,” Labarga wrote.

Labarga said a written reprimand is “disproportionate to the severity of Chesebro’s grave ethical violations” and called Chesebro’s actions “an intolerable breach of professional ethics.”

Chesebro was a key figure in the plot to submit fraudulent certificates claiming that Trump won the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, instead of Biden.

He was among 77 people pardoned by Trump for any federal crimes shortly after Trump resumed office. The pardon would not preclude any state charges.

Chesebro pleaded guilty in October 2023 in Fulton County, Ga., Superior Court to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents for his role in the fake electors plan, Phoenix affiliate Georgia Recorder has reported. He was sentenced to five years’ probation.

“However, because the conviction was entered pursuant to Georgia’s First Offender Act, and Chesebro’s probation was later terminated early, he was ultimately ‘exonerated of guilt’ and now ‘stand[s] discharged as a matter of law.’ Indeed, upon entering a consent order terminating probation, the Georgia trial court declared that Chesebro ‘shall not be considered to have ever had a criminal conviction,’” Florida’s high court noted.

‘Unique’

The unsigned majority opinion said the court was “bound to respect the judgments of sister states under principles of comity.”

However, “we must fashion a remedy appropriate to the unique facts of this case and, after careful deliberation, find that a reprimand is appropriate,” the opinion says. “Suspension or a more serious sanction would have been fitting had Chesebro not been exonerated under the distinct circumstance presented here; Chesebro’s full discharge under the Georgia First Offender Act, however, is a fact we do not ignore.”

Florida’s attorney ethics standards hold a reprimand appropriate “when a lawyer negligently engages in conduct that is a violation of a duty owed as a professional and causes injury or potential injury to a client, the public, or the legal system,” Labarga wrote.

“Because the discharge of Chesebro’s conviction pursuant to Georgia’s First Offender Act does not undo his admitted act of misconduct, I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that suspension is inappropriate,” he concluded.

HOUSTON — Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Friday said Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Rep. James Talarico will “go to hell” for his interpretations of the Bible, as Talarico has made his Christian faith a cornerstone of his campaign.

Speaking at the Republican Party of Texas’ convention in Houston, Patrick accused Talarico, an Austin state representative, of introducing faith into the contentious Senate race, expected to be expensive and brutal as Democrats seek to capitalize on anti-Trump sentiment to claim the minority party’s first statewide victory in more than three decades.

"It's James Talarico who decided to bring the Bible into this election. And let me tell you, that's not a Bible I've ever read. I've never seen so much blasphemy from anyone running for office,” Patrick said to an uproar of applause. “Let me tell you what, I'm going to pray for that guy, because when he loses the Senate race, if he campaigns against God as he's been doing, he's going to Hell, for sure. That's what we're up against. That's the darkness. That's the light. That's why we must be one."

In a statement Friday evening, Talarico responded saying that Patrick had "sold out the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable to enrich his donors" for decades.

"Love feels like blasphemy when you worship power," Talarico wrote in a social media post.

Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico's general election opponent, also spoke at the convention.

A GOP leader, Patrick has also been a staunch advocate for Christian values — often championing proposed legislation as the presiding officer of the Texas Senate that historically failed in the Texas House until recent victories, like requiring the display of Ten Commandments in public schools.

President Trump also tapped Patrick, a close ally, to lead the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission tasked with drafting policy proposals regarding religious freedom.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

Melinda French Gates says she immediately recognized pure evil when she met Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaking with the Guardian, French Gates said one of many things contributing to her decision to divorce Bill Gates in 2021 after 27 years of marriage was his unfaithfulness to her and that he maintained contact with Epstein, despite her objections.

But then, in January, the U.S. Justice Department released a tranche of Epstein emails which contained messages drafted by Epstein alleging that her then husband had caught an STI after having extramarital sex with “Russian girls” and was planning to sneak antibiotics to his wife.

Gates denied these claims, saying: “Apparently, Jeffrey wrote an email to himself. That email was never sent. The email is false…” but French Gates told NPR soon after that she was happy to be away from “all the muck” and that the men involved. These men, including her ex-husband, would have to answer for their own behavior, she said.

“He was an abhorrent human being, a horrid man, and so in these situations,” French Gates told the Guardian. “This is a hard topic for me, you need to know that – my heart goes out to the young girls. I just spoke the truth, which is they deserve some peace, and they deserve some justice.”

Gates said she remains frustrated at Epstein’s male cohorts who are clamming up while Epstein’s victims demand justice and answers.

“What I know is that bad things happen in darkness. We need to have more transparency,” she told the Guardian. “… “The justice system didn’t do its job. It did not do its job. Full stop. This could have been stopped. And so again, I think that’s why, finally, we are having a reckoning in society. If we don’t want children to be harmed, the justice system has to work.”

Gates added that when she met Epstein she found him so repugnant that he gave her nightmares.

When asked was set her off, Gates demanded “Have you ever in your life been around somebody that you just know is evil? There you go. You just have your answer. We need to listen to our feelings about people.”

At one point while asked to explore her Epstein experience, Gates became so emotional she couldn't complete sentences: “Any woman who has ever been around somebody who is evil or had an experience and then if you’re around somebody else who is evil. Just no, no.”

“We have to put women, far more women, in positions of power,” she added after regaining her composure. “It’s why I do the work that I do,” she says. “When women step into their full power, we have a different lens on society. We are the bedrock of society. We are the bedrock of the family.”

The Guardian reports that Gates is committing $215 million in new funding towards women’s health care this month, and she laments the degradation of women’s rights in the modern U.S. political climate.

“My granddaughters are growing up with fewer rights than I had,” she said.

The US and Iran stepped back from the brink of returning to all-out war on June 11. Hours after saying the US military would carry out strikes against Iran for a third consecutive night, Donald Trump postponed the attack. The Iranian military had said the US would “receive a more severe response than before” if it followed through on its threats.

The trustees of the Social Security fund said Tuesday that the fund will be depleted by late 2032, a year earlier than the trustees’ projection last year of 2033. If nothing is done, benefits will automatically be cut six years from now.

The common understanding is that Social Security’s shortfall is due to the huge postwar baby boom, now retiring, and to America’s increasing life expectancy. The usual recommended fix is to reduce Social Security benefits or raise the age of eligibility. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, warned Monday, “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed.” He said Republicans will introduce a plan to do that. Brace yourselves.

I used to be a Social Security trustee, and I call bull ----

The baby boom can’t be blamed for Social Security’s shortfall. The Greenspan Commission, which in 1983 recommended the reforms that Congress then made — raising Social Security payroll taxes and also raising the eligibility age for collecting Social Security benefits — knew all about the baby boom and figured it into its calculations. (Early boomers like me can now start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 have to wait until they’re 67 to collect full benefits.)

Americans’ increasing life expectancy isn’t at fault, either. While wealthier Americans are living longer, that’s not the case for lower-income Americans. The Urban Institute estimates that life expectancy in the top 20 percent of income-earners is 91 years for people born in the 1990s, four years more than people born in the 1950s. Yet the life expectancy in the lowest 20 percent of income-earners is fewer than 80 years.

So what’s the real cause of the Social Security shortfall? What did Greenspan’s commission fail to predict? Widening inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain cap. This year, that cap is $184,500. Earnings at or below this amount are taxed at 12.4 percent. The cap rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the cap was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of total income in America. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Greenspan commission assumed that, as the cap rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 83 percent of total income in America. It went from 90 percent to 83 percent because a steadily larger portion of the nation’s total income has gone to the top.

In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today, the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

This year, someone earning $1 million in wages stopped paying any Social Security payroll tax at the beginning of March. Jeff Bezos probably stopped a few minutes past midnight on January 1. Elon Musk, a few seconds after midnight on January 1. (In point of fact, Bezos, Musk, and other robber barons of this Second Gilded Age get all the cash they need by borrowing against their fortunes, rather than bother with pesky wages, so they probably pay a pittance in Social Security taxes.)

Logically, then, to get back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax has to be raised.

If all income in excess of $400,000 were subject to the Social Security payroll tax, Social Security’s solvency would be guaranteed forever. We could also expand Social Security benefits.

So there’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical and necessary response is simply to raise the cap, Mike Johnson and other Republican shills for the oligarchs to the contrary notwithstanding.

---

Social Security is America’s most effective anti-poverty program. Last year, it lifted 23.5 million Americans out of poverty, including 16.5 million seniors. Before its creation, about half of our nation’s seniors were living in poverty. Today their poverty rate is just 10.3 percent. Without Social Security, nearly 4 in 10 seniors would have had incomes below the official poverty line.

Hollowing out of private pensions makes Social Security all the more important. One in 5 Americans 50 and older have zero retirement savings. Meanwhile, the average Social Security benefit at the start of last year was $1,975 a month ($23,700 annually).

Social Security is also the federal government’s biggest children’s benefit program through its disability and survivors’ benefits. In 2024, 1.7 million children received Social Security benefits, and the vast majority are eligible to receive survivors’ benefits if a parent were to pass away. Additionally, millions more children are part of a household where all or part of the household income comes from Social Security. Social Security is estimated to lift close to 1 million children out of poverty each year.

Other fixes that have been introduced in Congress:

1. The Social Security Expansion Act

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have introduced this plan for several Congresses. (It is cosponsored by Budget Committee Members Merkley, Whitehouse, Van Hollen, and Padilla.)

The bill imposes Social Security taxes on wages above $250,000 and applies the same 12.4 percent rate to capital gains and business income. That would boost benefits for almost all retirees by $200 per month, using a more generous measure of inflation to calculate the cost-of-living increase, and setting a minimum benefit at 125 percent of poverty. When estimated in 2023, it achieved 75-year Social Security solvency solely by increasing taxes on incomes above $250,000.

2. Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act

Sen. Whitehouse and Rep. Boyle introduced this bill starting in the last Congress. Budget Committee Member Van Hollen is a co-sponsor. It adopts the tax increases of the Sanders bill, adjusted to start at $400,000. The bill has no benefit increases, so it significantly overshoots solvency, and there would be extra revenue. The bill achieves 75-year solvency for both Social Security and the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

CNN reports gas is currently at $4.11 a gallon, on average, in the U.S. But the nation is just one month away from gas pump devastation if President Donald Trump fails to reverse the damage he’s done to the pivotal international oil corridor in the Strait of Hormuz.

America has become the supplier of last resort for nations who used to get their oil from the Middle East, reports CNN correspondent Ed Lavandera. And this has caused the oil supply here to get dangerously low, almost to the point of sending gas prices soaring even higher.

“I'm afraid that it could be some difficult times coming,” said Steve Crowder, president of Little River Energy Company in Cushing, Okla. “If the conflict is resolved, the Strait is open, shipping resumes, we'll dodge a bullet and we'll avoid some real problems. And if it drags on, it could be really tough. Yeah, real tough.”

Cushing lies between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, where a vast spiderweb of underground pipelines feed into one of the world's largest privately owned storage hubs for U.S. crude oil.

“As far as the eye can see, dozens of massive storage tanks dot the landscape. Oil industry analysts closely monitor how much crude oil is in these tanks. And right now, alarm bells are ringing,” said Lavandera.

Generally, the Cushing tanks can hold about 75 million barrels of oil, but the levels now have dropped to below 22 million because of Trump’s voluntary Iraq war and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. And analysts say that if these tanks are not replenished fast enough, in the weeks ahead Americans will be paying more for gas at the pump as international buyers and market forces price U.S. customers out of their own locally-produced oil.

Worse, when these tanks reach the 20 million mark, Lavandera said “it's like scraping the bottom of the barrel. The crude oil becomes an unusable sludge.”

From above, the ceilings of the tanks have dipped precariously.

“In the last 20 years. Anytime oil inventories at Cushing have reached levels this low, it's triggered historically high oil prices,” Lavandera added. “Energy executives at companies like Exxon and Chevron are warning that the United States is less than a month away from seeing gas prices shoot up.”

Lee Denny, a Cushing native and a former Oklahoma state representative, said she’s witnessed many oil booms and busts in Cushing. She only hopes Trump will end his war, open the Strait and allow oil producers to replenish inventories soon to prevent a price spike.

When asked, Denny could not say $5 a gallon gasoline could be avoided, however.

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