On today's podcast:
1) Democrats swept the three major local elections in the US on Tuesday by wider-than-expected margins, giving the beleaguered party a much-needed boost 10 months into President Donald Trump’s second term. In New York, voters elected 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as mayor after he deployed a social media-savvy campaign and joined up with two progressive icons, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mamdani — who will be New York’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor when he takes office Jan. 1 — campaigned on making the global business hub more affordable by using higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for free buses and city-run grocery stores, overcoming many voters’ concerns about his pro-Palestinian views.
2) Abigail Spanberger, a 46-year-old former CIA officer who left the House of Representatives after three terms in January, will be the first female governor in Virginia, a state that’s front-and-center in the battle over the government shutdown and efforts to trim the federal workforce. Likewise in New Jersey, Representative Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, won a race in which pocketbook concerns about utility bills, health care and schools were more central than culture war issues or government giveaways. About 6 in 10 voters in Virginia and New Jersey described themselves as “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the current state of the country, according to an exit poll conducted by the Associated Press, compared to just one-third who said they were “enthusiastic” or “satisfied.” Meanwhile, California voters passed a ballot measure that could flip as many as five congressional seats to Democrats from Republicans, handing Governor Gavin Newsom a major political victory in his fight against President Trump.
3) The fate of the majority of President Trump’s tariffs is in the hands of the US Supreme Court after lower courts ruled that they were issued illegally under an emergency law. The tariffs have remained in place to allow the Trump administration to appeal to the highest court, which is scheduled to hear arguments today. The Supreme Court case doesn’t touch upon the duties imposed on certain product categories using different legal foundations. For example, the Trump administration has put in place levies on steel, aluminum, automobiles, copper products and lumber by harnessing Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. Those tariffs depend on Commerce Department investigations that concluded that imports of such products pose a national security risk.
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