January 2026 - POLITICAL NEWS

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President Donald Trump is ruling out a pardon for former Sen. Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat serving an 11-year prison sentence on corruption charges. Trump, who has made broad use of his clemency powers, dismissed the idea of a pardon for Menendez as well as several other notable figures in an interview published Thursday by The New York Times.

A Catholic legal group is asking the Supreme Court to block enforcement of a California law that protects transgender students from being outed to their parents. An emergency appeal filed Thursday asks the high court to reinstate a judge’s ruling late last year that allowed parents with religious objections to opt out of the law’s provisions that require public school teachers not to tell parents if a child asks to use different pronouns or adopt a different gender identity.

Spencer Pratt says party labels don’t matter in his bid for Los Angeles mayor. But the former reality TV personality, who has long dodged questions about his political affiliation, is a registered Republican — a liability in this heavily Democratic city.

Pratt, 42, made the surprise announcement that he’s running for mayor this year from the stage at a “They Let Us Burn” rally in Pacific Palisades — held one year after a massive wildfire leveled the community. Pratt and his wife, fellow reality star Heidi Montag, lost their home in the blaze, which killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes. 

California and four other Democrat-run states are planning to sue the Trump administration over $10 billion in cuts to welfare programs. California Attorney General Rob Bonta told POLITICO he and attorneys general for New York, Colorado, Minnesota, and Illinois will file a lawsuit on Thursday to challenge the funding freeze announced earlier this week by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services.

The U.S. announced it will abandon the world’s largest climate fund a day after President Donald Trump moved to withdraw from 66 international organizations, including the world’s benchmark climate treaty.

The Green Climate Fund was established in 2010 and serves as the main financial mechanism for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.

Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Calif.) will not seek reelection after representing a Ventura County-area district for seven terms, she announced Thursday. Brownley’s decision adds to a wave of retirement announcements ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, with more than three dozen members of the House already deciding not to seek reelection. She’s the second California House Democrat to announce this cycle that she will not seek reelection.

Just as Democrats are finding their footing by focusing on affordability, their differences on Israel are threatening to tear them apart.

Spurred by polling that shows support for the Jewish state slipping among voters nationally, congressional challengers are lining up across the country to take on stalwart Israel supporters in an attempt to energize left-leaning voters.

A cadre of congressional Republicans dealt President Donald Trump significant defeats Thursday — a series of rebukes that demonstrate how his iron grip on Capitol Hill has weakened at the start of a critical election year. The defiance kicked off in the Senate with a stunning vote, backed by five GOP senators, to move ahead with a measure that would constrain Trump on a matter he has presented as a signature triumph — his military intervention in Venezuela.

Minneapolis has been thrust back in the center of a national political convulsion following the fatal shooting of a local woman by an ICE official — and its mayor has been returned to the heart of the storm. Just hours after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey had an expletive-laden message for the federal government: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul wants expanded legal options for New Yorkers negatively impacted by President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement efforts — and is poised to push for them in the coming days. “Let’s start holding these people accountable,” Hochul said Thursday morning during an appearance on MSNOW’s “Morning Joe.”

The Energy Department has added “climate change,” “green” and “decarbonization” to its growing “list of words to avoid” at its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, according to an email issued Friday and obtained by POLITICO. 

Wes Moore took his strongest swipe yet at President Donald Trump’s efforts to redraw maps to give Republicans an advantage in next year’s midterms — by painting the GOP’s efforts in explicitly racial terms.