Today’s notice: Pointing fingers in Maine. MAHA is having a great week. The acting secretary of labor is expected to remain acting for a while. Maximum redistricting after the SCOTUS ruling? And: President Chuck Grassley?

THE LATEST

The Maine event: How much responsibility does Chuck Schumer bear for the party establishment’s utter faceplant in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary? And what does it mean that his top recruit for the ’26 cycle, Gov. Janet Mills, failed to excite Democratic voters in the party’s premier flip opportunity?

A team of NOTUS reporters set out to answer these questions in the hours after Mills dropped out of the race and the Democratic establishment reluctantly rallied around Graham Platner, the populist sensation who had just cleaned its proverbial clock.

Team “Schumer blew it” sounds like this: Mills “got utterly fucked over,” one Democrat said. She was heavily recruited to run by Schumer, and her supporters expected a lot of help from his forces. But as Platner picked up steam, outside ad spending from establishment groups to blunt his rise never materialized. “She never should have had to go negative on [Platner] on her own,” the Democrat went on. “That is insane. He abandoned her after begging her to run. Shameful.”

Team “Mills never had it” has a different take, but one that also casts some blame on Schumer. Mills took a long time to get in the race, struggled to raise money and never really had an answer for the fact that if elected she would have been the oldest freshman senator in American history. “I understand why, in January 2025, she was a recruit we wanted to get,” one national Democratic operative said. “But the minute she started dragging her feet, it’s too important to have someone who didn’t want it. That, and her age, was a recipe for disaster.”

What Team Schumer says: “After years of allowing Trump’s abuses of power, Senator [Susan] Collins has never been more vulnerable and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her,” Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand said.

The bottom line: “It’s going to be a lot harder to flip now,” Democratic strategist Kevin McKeon, one of the few not sucked into one side or the other of this Senate primary, said.

Open tabs: No Secrets in America’s New Surveillance Dragnet (WSJ); Immigrants File Suit Over Trump’s Catch-22 Biometric Data Policy (NOTUS); Medicare portal database exposed health providers’ Social Security numbers (WaPo); 60 Minutes journalist decries ‘spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear’ at CBS News (Guardian)

From the Hill

MAHA’s big day: On Wednesday, we told you about the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wing of the Republican Party holding up the farm bill over legal protections pesticide firms enjoy in the current law. It was a big moment for MAHA vs. the traditional GOP — and MAHA won. An amendment from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna was included in the final bill, which cleared the House yesterday, that Luna’s office said “restores Americans’ right to take these companies to court when their products cause harm.” It now faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

There’s more: The end of controversial MAHA figure Casey Means’ nomination for surgeon general appeared on its face to be a win for traditional Republicans, who have been particularly skeptical of her. But as NOTUS’ Margaret Manto reports, Means’ replacement is radiologist Nicole Saphier, who published a book in 2020 called “Make America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion-Dollar Crisis.” So she owned the phrase years before RFK Jr. and Trump picked it up.

Is there a new bipartisan tech regulation push coming? That’s one way to read a unanimous vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, NOTUS’ Helen Huiskes reports. The GUARD Act would strictly limit how AI chatbot services can interact with minors, and is backed by a bipartisan slew of senators including Republicans Josh Hawley and Katie Britt and Democrat Chris Murphy.

There have been a number of tech regulations proposed this Congress, but Helen reports on the pushback they’ve received from the industry. Tech companies spent a combined average of $226,000 per day on federal lobbying in the first three months of the year.

From the White House

They can’t all be Todd Blanche: The acting attorney general has leveraged his moment in the spotlight to become one of the top contenders for nomination to the job permanently. The same apparently cannot be said for acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling. He’s a longtime attorney with deep connections in the business community and served in the Department of Labor in Trump’s first term. Sonderling was reportedly the effective head of the department during the distracting scandals that led to former Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer exiting her post. Sonderling has the connections, the experience and the politics to do the big job full time, just like Blanche does.

But Sonderling is not picking up the same momentum. He met with Trump recently, NOTUS’ Kadia Goba reports. The president liked him, but Sonderling will remain acting — for now, a White House official said.

From the near future

Redistricting until there’s nothing left to redistrict really does seem to be where we’re headed over the next few years. After the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to new lines in Southern red states, more blue states are readying their own redistricting drives. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told NOTUS’ Manuela Silva she’s urging fellow Democrats in the state to put a measure on the ballot this year that would allow redistricting by the 2028 cycle.

Up to 20 Black Democrats could be drawn out of office in the South after the court ruling, the Congressional Black Caucus said yesterday. Rep. Terri Sewell, a CBC member from Alabama, told reporters she thinks Republicans should be drawn out of office in response: “I’d take 52 seats from California, I sure would, and 17 seats from Illinois, because at the end of the day, they’re rigging this election to try to win and we just can’t sit back here and do nothing.”

ON NOTUS PODCAST

From your favorite podcast app: House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries thinks Democrats will win the redistricting wars — or, at least, Republicans won’t gain much from them. “Republicans started this redistricting fight, and we’ve made clear we’re going to finish it. And so Republicans expected that they were going to net 10, 12, 15 seats. Right now, they’re not up. They’re down,” Jeffries told Kadia on today’s episode of On NOTUS. They also talked about ethics investigations in the House, why he has no regrets about kicking out George Santos and their hometown of Brooklyn, New York.

NEW ON NOTUS

Just imagine the presidential tweets with this guy in charge: NOTUS’ Paul Kane writes that 92-year-old Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley was the only one of the first eight people in the line of presidential succession not to be in the Washington Hilton ballroom when a potential assassin tried to storm past security at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Grassley is Senate president pro tempore, a position he gets because he is the longest-serving member in the majority caucus. If the president, vice president and House speaker all cannot serve, Grassley would become our nation’s oldest president immediately.

Does this succession plan make sense? “If changing the Succession Act won’t happen, the Senate should consider adopting a rule that sets an age limit for a president pro temp,” political scientist Steven S. Smith told Paul.

More: Judge Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump’s Supreme Court Battle Used to Work for Him, by Jose Pagliery

Defense Contractors Pump Big Money Into Congressional Campaign Accounts Amid Iran War, by Samuel Larreal

Young Money: Ohio’s Newest Federal Lawmakers Are Among the State’s Richest, by Tyler Spence and Christa Dutton

NOT US

• The Era of Normie Extremism Is Here, by Ali Breland for The Atlantic
  
• He Was One of the Texas GOP’s Biggest Donors. Where Did He Go? By Robert Downen for Texas Monthly
  
• A blue-state governor leans into fights — with Trump and her own party, by Matt Friedman and Daniel Han for Politico

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