Essential Politics: Battling For Bragging Rights In California

Former President Donald Trump railed against the gag order Judge Juan Merchan put in place that bars Trump from talking about witnesses, jurors, prosecutors' staff, court staff and the family members of court staff and prosecutors.

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Rare is the member of Congress who represents a district that voted for the other party’s nominee for President. Gerrymandering has rendered those political survivors harder to find than unicorns while reducing the truly competitive House districts to so few they fit on a single whiteboard in strategists’ offices.

The rights of LGBTQ+ students will be protected by federal law and victims of campus sexual assault will gain new safeguards under rules finalized Friday by the Biden administration. The new provisions are part of a revised Title IX regulation issued by the Education Department, fulfilling a campaign pledge by President Joe Biden.

Colorado lawmakers have again rejected a bill that would have allowed supervised drug-use sites to open in willing cities — the third time in a year legislators have killed the proposal. On Thursday night, two Democratic senators joined with the Senate Health and Human Service Committee’s three Republicans in voting to kill House Bill 1028, two weeks after it passed the House.

With Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson struggling to hold onto the gavel in the face of eternal rebellion from some of his party’s most intransigent far-right members, Politico thought it would be a good idea to call up former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to ask him about the situation.

Biden's weakness has emboldened the crazies.