The Issue Pitting Senate Dems Against Some Democratic Candidates

Democrats in rural swing states are getting hammered over their party’s opposition to the GOP-proposed Farm Bill. Democratic senators, meanwhile, are trying to keep food assistance programs from deteriorating.

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The issue pitting Senate Dems against some Democratic candidates

Senate Democrats lost a battle on Tuesday when the Senate Ag Committee voted to advance the GOP’s proposed Farm Bill without the SNAP protections Democrats have been pushing for. But while sitting Dems might be frustrated, a different group might be breathing a sigh of relief: For Democratic and independent candidates in agriculture-heavy states, this means their Republican opponents might stop hitting them over the Farm Bill.

Wednesday’s committee meeting came after the committee failed to advance the legislation to the Senate in August. Democrats have been withholding votes from the once-bipartisan bill in an effort to delay rollbacks to SNAP that were set in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA.

OBBBA’s policy forcing states to pay more for the administrative costs of SNAP takes effect October 1 of this year. Another measure, which forces states to pay for more of the cost of SNAP benefits based on their error rates, will take effect on October 1, 2027.

Experts say these policies are already hurting states and SNAP recipients. Five million Americans have lost access to SNAP since OBBBA was signed last July, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP. “We’ve been seeing some states taking some pretty extreme steps to try to lower their error rates very quickly,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the CBPP, “and those steps are making it much harder for eligible families to access the help they need to afford groceries.”

Senate Democrats have pushed for an extension, to allow states to take more time to fix their error rates and prepare to pay more for the program. In August, committee Chairman Senator John Boozman gave Democrats part of what they wanted—a one-year extension of the error-rate change. But Dems say that’s not enough and that it comes with a poisonous addition that would actually raise some states’ SNAP costs in 2031.

Jonathan Coppess, a professor of ag policy at the University of Illinois and former federal agriculture official, said that Boozman’s concession on the error rate shows that even some Republicans think the SNAP cuts are bad policy. “It certainly is some recognition by the committee that there’s a problem with what they enacted last year” in the OBBBA, he said.

While Democrats on the Senate Ag Committee are united in their opposition to this version of the Farm Bill, not every Democrat wants to see them blocking the legislation. In Iowa, for example, Republican House and Senate candidates have been hitting Democrats on their resistance to the Farm Bill. GOP Representative Zach Nunn, who is running against State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott in Iowa’s 3rd congressional district, complained about “partisan games” this week and said that “it is completely unacceptable to hold the Farm Bill hostage.”

After the bill failed to pass committee in August, Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate candidate in Iowa, posted on X that “Democrats in the Senate failed [Iowa farmers] by letting perfect be the enemy of the good.” He promised that, if elected, he would pass the Farm Bill. Dan Osborn, an independent running for Senate in Nebraska, told The New Republic in a statement that he would vote for the bill if elected. “Senate Democrats are hurting everyone, especially our farmers, by holding up the Farm Bill,” he said. “As always, they’re looking past the middle of the country, working only for the coasts, and using Nebraskans’ lives as a political football.”

Bergh, however, pushed back against the common trope of farmers versus SNAP recipients. “We hear a lot from farm state lawmakers about how a Farm Bill needs to deliver for rural America, but SNAP is how about one in seven rural households put food on the table,” she said. “Their needs should really be front and center in a Farm Bill conversation.”

Most of the backlash against data centers has focused on energy and water consumption, as well as noise and water pollution. But now there’s another reason to worry: The data center boom “will create a ‘tsunami’ of discarded electronics, putting the world on a course to triple its annual generation of toxic e-waste in the next 25 years,” and could “fill enough shipping containers to encircle the globe six times,” The Guardian reports. E-waste “typically contains toxics like lead, mercury, cadmium and forever chemicals, as well as valuable metals that are challenging to reclaim,” the paper’s Erin McCormick writes. The predictions about data centers turbocharging the e-waste problem come from a new report by environmental group Basel Action Network.

“The average Maine household has paid an average of $4,300 more for goods and services since President Donald Trump began his second term,” the Maine Morning Star announces, based on recent analysis from the Maine Center for Economic Policy. Susan Collins probably isn’t thrilled with this headline. The long-standing GOP senator, currently polling a couple points behind Democrat Troy Jackson, has been trying to distance herself from the president in recent weeks.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

At the Center for American Progress, Weadé James, Paige Shoemaker DeMio, and Olivia O’Connell release a report on “5 Evidence-Based Strategies to Improve U.S. K-12 Math Achievement,” following news that international tests show America’s 2025 average math score at an “all-time low,” significantly lagging behind those of other rich countries. The report emphasizes standard-setting, “high-quality instructional materials,” and investments in “teacher preparation,” alongside other recommendations. The authors also point to Massachusetts and Alabama as examples of states that have implemented policies significantly boosting average test scores.

As home insurance costs continue to rise, Public Citizen releases the results of a survey sent to state and territorial insurance commissioners: “Only 28 percent of responding offices said they support publication of homeowners insurance data at the ZIP-code level,” the watchdog reports. The reason this data is important, Public Citizen’s press release suggests, is in part to be able to figure out how much of the increase in prices is being driven by the climate crisis, and how much is being driven by profiteering and “regulatory capture.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On the subject of stupid things said by vice presidents: What fairly recent vice president once said, “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure,” and famously misspelled potato on a school visit? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

What Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon Have in Common

The growing backlash to AI is creating strange bedfellows across the nation.

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The conversation around regulating artificial intelligence has rapidly become so wide-reaching that on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon, and Ashley Judd all wound up at the same conference dedicated to tackling the technology’s risks. But while the event showed that there’s a real hunger to take on AI oligarchs, it’s still not clear how that will translate into concrete action.

The “Pro-Human Assembly,” hosted by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Washington, D.C., brought together AI industry researchers, policymakers, and civil society organization leaders in a particularly fraught moment, following a week of dire warnings about AI risks and alarming disclosures about recent safety incidents.

House members’ short speeches opening the conference illustrated just how divided Congress is on the right approach to regulating AI. Representative Greg Casar delivered the most stirring remarks, garnering multiple rounds of applause. “The answer is simple,” he said of the solution to AI threats. “We ban AI systems that are too powerful for humans to control.” The room applauded vigorously. That comment previewed legislation that he and Senator Bernie Sanders are set to release next week, which would ban the development of artificial superintelligence.

Casar also directly called out Leading the Future, the AI industry-funded PAC that has spent millions to elect candidates it thinks will advance its agenda for relatively loose federal regulations on AI. Later in the afternoon, Sanders joined Casar’s criticism, directly addressing the CEOs of AI companies: “If you believe in democracy, if you believe that the people have the right to determine their future, stop pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs,” he said. Later in the day, Leading the Future’s most prominent victim, Alex Bores, spoke to the crowd. Bores championed state-level AI regulations during his time in New York’s Assembly, and Leading the Future spent millions to defeat his bid for Congress earlier this year.

In his speech, Sanders presented his familiar anti-oligarchy messaging. “Virtually all of the decisions regarding the development of AI have been made by a handful of the richest people in the world,” he said, “whose chief goal is to achieve even more wealth and more power than they already have, no matter what the impact their work has on ordinary people.” Sanders used the opportunity to plug his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would distribute the wealth of AI companies and give the public a role in their management, and his call for a data center moratorium alongside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Representative Lori Trahan, who recently has positioned herself as a leader on AI, outlined a more moderate position. Much of her speech focused on the philosophical concerns of AI development—at one point, she quoted Hannah Arendt; at another, she called human beings “ends in ourselves.” Only toward the end did she mention her bipartisan legislation on AI, introduced with GOP Representative Jay Obernolte, and she was careful to frame it as a small incremental step that should be easy for everyone to get on board with. “We need a long sequence of small correct decisions, and we need to start making them today,” she said.........

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