Anti-Trump conservative Don Bacon will not seek re-election to Nebraska congressional seat eyed by Dems
Republican congressman and vocal Donald Trump critic Don Bacon is reportedly not going to seek re-election during the midterm races in 2026.
The conservative politician represents a swing district in Nebraska that includes Omaha, and word of his plans prompted Democratic figures to signal optimism that they could take the seat as the party tries to regain a House majority it has not had since 2023.
Bacon's decision was first reported on Friday by the outlets Punchbowl News and NOTUS before being confirmed on Saturday by the Washington Post. NOTUS and the Post cited anonymous sources familiar with the situation, with the former of those adding that Bacon would make a formal announcement in the coming days.
While Bacon had not immediately commented on the reports, his verified social media account did engage with multiple posts expressing 'good riddance' to him. He called the author of one such post 'an idiot' and told another who claimed he was a thinly veiled Democrat that he was 'the real Republican', having supported the party since he was 13 in 1976.
The second congressional district of Nebraska that Bacon represents voted for Kamala Harris when she lost to Trump during November's White House race. It also voted for Joe Biden when he took the Oval Office from Trump four years earlier. And in May, Omaha elected its first-ever Black mayor: John Ewing Jr, who defeated three-term Republican incumbent Jean Stothert.
Bacon's politics have come to reflect those realities in his district to some extent. The retired US air force brigadier general in May demanded the removal of Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, after he shared information about military strikes on Yemen in a Signal messaging app group chat that inadvertently included the editor of the Atlantic.
Though the president chose to keep Hegseth in place despite the so-called Signalgate scandal, Bacon told the Post in an interview that he 'would have been fired' at any point in his military career for doing what Hegseth did.
Separately, in a Post opinion column, Bacon criticized the brutal job and spending cuts that the Trump administration has inflicted within the federal government since the president retook office in January. He filed a bill aiming to hand Congress control over tariffs rather than continue leaving that power with the president as Trump upended financial markets by imposing substantial levies on some of the US's largest trading partners.
Furthermore, he stood as the lone House Republican to vote against a measure that would take Trump's executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the 'Gulf of America' and make it law. 'I'm not into doing silly stuff,' Bacon, who joined Congress in January 2017, wrote on social media. 'It is sophomoric.'
And he has said he and his family endured threats after he opposed Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan's unsuccessful 2023 bid to become House speaker, which at the time had been endorsed by Trump in between his two presidencies.
'I'd rather be a defender of the traditional conservative values than just be a team player,' Bacon said to Omaha's KMTV news station in May. 'I think – a team going in the wrong direction, you need somebody to speak up and try to stand for what's right.'
A statement distributed by Democratic congressional campaign committee spokesperson Madison Andrus on Friday said that Bacon's foregoing re-election marked a 'vote of no-confidence for House Republicans and their electoral prospects'.
'The writing has been on the wall for months,' Andrus's statement also said.
In a separate statement, the Nebraska Democratic party's chair, Jane Kleeb, said her party's prospective candidates 'truly represent the values of the district' Bacon's seat is in.
'We are ready for change,' Kleeb said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BreakingNews.ie
an hour ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Senate pushes ahead on Trump's tax break and spending cut plan
Capping a tumultuous night, the Republican-controlled US Senate advanced President Donald Trump's package of tax breaks, spending cuts and increased deportation money, with more weekend work ahead as Congress races to meet his Fourth of July deadline for passage. By a 51-49 tally and with vice president JD Vance at the Capitol to break a potential tie, the Senate cleared a key procedural step on Saturday as midnight approached. Advertisement Voting had come to a standstill, dragging on for more than three hours, with holdout senators huddling for negotiations and taking private meetings off the Senate floor. In the end, two Republicans opposed the motion to move ahead on Mr Trump's signature domestic policy plan, joining all 47 Democrats. 'Tonight we saw a GREAT VICTORY in the Senate,' Mr Trump said in a social media post afterwards. Republicans are using their majorities in Congress to push aside Democratic opposition, but they have run into a series of political and policy setbacks. Advertisement Not all Republicans are on board with proposals to reduce spending on Medicaid, food stamps and other programmes as a way to help cover the cost of extending some 3.8 trillion dollars (£2.77 trillion) in Trump tax breaks. Mr Trump had threatened to campaign against one Republican, senator Thom Tillis, who had announced he could not support the Bill because of Medicaid cuts that he worried would leave many without health care in his state. A new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the Senate version of the Bill would increase by 11.8 million the number of people without health insurance in 2034. Mr Tillis and senator Rand Paul voted no. Advertisement Renewed pressure to oppose the 940-page bill came from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who called it 'utterly insane and destructive'. Ahead for senators now will be an all-night debate and amendments. If they are able to pass it, the Bill would return to the House for a final round of votes before it could reach the White House. With the narrow Republican majorities in the House and Senate, leaders need almost every lawmaker on board. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Republicans released the bill 'in the dead of night' on Friday and were rushing through before the public fully knew what was in it. Advertisement He forced a full reading of the text that began late on Saturday and continued into Sunday morning. At its core, the legislation would make permanent many of the tax breaks from Mr Trump's first term that would otherwise expire by year's end if Congress fails to act, resulting in a potential tax increase on Americans. The Bill would add new breaks, including no taxes on tips, and commit 350 billion dollars (£255 billion) to national security, including for Mr Trump's mass deportation agenda. But the cutbacks to Medicaid, food stamps and green energy investments are also causing dissent within republican ranks. Advertisement Senator Ron Wyden said the environmental rollbacks would amount to a 'death sentence' for America's wind and solar industries.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Flint's still-unfinished lead pipe replacement serves as cautionary tale to other cities
Jeffrey Bell watched as crews dug up and replaced neighbors' lead water pipes, hoping his mother's house would be next. Workers told him it wasn't on their list but probably assigned to another contractor. With Flint 's lead pipe replacement program winding down this year, Bell and his elderly mother worried the home they share was forgotten. Betty Bell repeatedly called the city while continuing to buy bottled drinking water, as she had for years. Finally someone called to say the water line was fine — records indicate it was checked in 2017. But the Bells hadn't known that, exemplifying residents' confusion over a process marred by delays and poor communication. 'I have even more questions now,' Jeffrey Bell said. About a decade after Flint's water crisis caused national outrage, replacement of lead water pipes still isn't finished. Although the city recently said it completed work required under a legal settlement, the agreement didn't cover vacant homes and allowed owners to refuse, potentially leaving hundreds of pipes in the ground. The state agreed to oversee work on those properties and says it's determined to finish by fall. Flint's missteps offer lessons for municipalities that face a recently imposed federal mandate to replace their own lead service lines. The Trump administration is expected to soon tell a federal appeals court if it will stand by that mandate. 'I think other cities are racing not to be Flint,' said Margie Kelly, a spokesperson with the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which reached a settlement with the city to force it to replace lead pipes. Flint falters Flint's crisis was set in motion in 2014, when a state-appointed emergency manager ended a contract with Detroit's water system and switched to the Flint River to save money. But the state didn't require treatment to prevent corrosion that caused lead to leach into the water. High levels of lead eventually were detected in drinking water and children's blood. Outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease that killed a dozen people were also linked, in part, to the city's water. In 2017, Flint entered into a settlement requiring it to replace all lead pipes and fix dug-up yards for free within three years. Funds were directed first toward homes with known lead lines at the NRDC's insistence, which meant workers couldn't tackle neighborhoods systematically. And finding those homes proved challenging because many records were missing or inaccurate — some handwritten on notecards dating to the early 1900s. 'The city's overall management of the program was ineffective,' and it could have better coordinated work geographically, said Sarah Tallman, an attorney with the NRDC. That stalled the program and, ultimately, the city had to check every pipe anyway. COVID-19 also slowed work. Flint Department of Public Works Director Kenneth Miller, who was hired last year, said the city didn't know how many homeowners had opted out of lead pipe replacement or how many properties had simply been missed as contractors came and went. 'Just like any other organization, people get lax, people stop doing things, people get laid off and the person that used to do it doesn't do it anymore,' he said. Because the city didn't keep accurate records of repairs, a judge ordered officials to visually check thousands of properties that had been excavated. Yards torn up by contractors sometimes sat that way for months or years. For months, Danyele Darrough's lawn was a mess and the sidewalk and driveway were covered, she said. Grass seed that workers applied never grew. Finally this spring, nearly three years later, she bought bags of topsoil and seed to fix her lawn herself. 'It was like, yeah, we knew it; we couldn't trust them,' said Darrough. Miller said the city now has robust data management, which he recommends to other communities tackling lead lines. Steep population loss left thousands of vacant homes that will require contractors to cap lead lines where they're found, said Eric Oswald, drinking water director at Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. 'The state and the city wanted to absolutely make sure that ... we leave no stone unturned,' he said. Trust is key In Flint, government at every level caused the lead crisis or delayed fixing it, according to an EPA inspector general report. The scandal damaged trust in government — nearly 700 Flint homeowners declined free lead pipe replacement, the NRDC said. Flint finally adopted an ordinance last year to prevent homeowners from opting out. 'It's very difficult to get across the finish line unless you've got something to enforce,' Oswald said. Benton Harbor, across the state, implemented a similar provision early on, helping its work move smoothly. Now officials are working from a list of more than 4,000 properties where there could be a lead line, sending letters and making in-person visits to homes, if needed. Miller said he hopes the outreach will show that customer service is now a priority, but it will take time to rebuild trust. Some also distrust the Environmental Protection Agency, which in May lifted a long-standing emergency order for Flint water. The agency said it's now safe to drink from the tap after years of tests showing sharply reduced lead levels. 'We don't know what to believe,' resident Aonie Gilcreast said at a recent community gathering. 'We don't trust the system' because officials have said 'time after time after time .... that everything was fine.' As other cities and towns start replacing their own lead pipes — there are roughly 9 million in the U.S. — one thing should be top of mind, experts say: Digging them up isn't just a construction job, but also a test of community trust. To replace the lines that connect the water main in the street to homes, workers usually must dig in the street and yard, and enter the home. When residents trust local government, they're more willing to grant that access. 'With lead, as with everything else, the first time people hear from their water utility can't be when there is a concern,' said Greg Kail, spokesperson at utility industry group American Water Works Association. Instead, it is important for utilities to reach out to residents about what they plan to do and enlist trusted community groups in the effort. Newark charges forward Newark, New Jersey, avoided Flint's pitfalls when facing its own lead crisis. In 2019, about two years after elevated levels were revealed and with funds available, the mayor said the city would replace more than 20,000 lead pipes at no cost to residents — and do it within three years. But a challenge soon emerged: Newark has lots of renters who couldn't approve the work. 'We couldn't get into the houses. We couldn't find the owners,' said Kareem Adeem, Newark's water and sewer director. 'They don't live there. They had no interest in taking care of the lead service line.' So the city passed an ordinance making lead pipe removals mandatory and giving renters permission to approve the work. Then contractors moved quickly through the city block by block — a lesson learned from Flint. For the most stubborn holdouts, officials told them when they'd start replacement work and said they'd turn the water off until the resident allowed them to complete it. The threat was enough. They never had to actually turn off anybody's water, Adeem said. Sometimes, people would recognize Adeem from TV and he could start a conversation — a crack in a resident's determination to say no. He worked with trusted community groups, too. And the decision that ensured people's property was cleaned up afterward? The contractors weren't fully paid until they finished the work and fixed any damage. ___
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The big idea: should we give babies the right to vote?
Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn't let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination. Her case was thrown out, but it wasn't the first time the voting age was challenged and it won't be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children's author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it. Both Wall and Beauvais report that a common first reaction to the concept of ageless voting is laughter. Then people start to think, and often they end up saying that they can't find any serious objections. Wall first confronted the question 20 years ago, when he took on a PhD student who had been researching children's parliaments in India. He soon came round to the idea that it was unjust that up to a third of the population was excluded from the democratic process, since political decisions affected them, too. As he became better informed, he realised that excluding the young was bad for society as a whole. Beauvais agrees. In her tract she highlights evidence that larger electorates produce better decisions. Younger people's gaze is fixed further in the future than that of older people, for obvious reasons, but older people have more experience, so they complement each other when it comes to prioritising societal issues. And children are observant and can ask questions that are troubling because they are so fundamental: questions about war, meat, money, love and death, for instance. When Greta Thunberg started campaigning for urgent climate action at the age of 15, Beauvais writes, many adults criticised her, but her position is now mainstream. Children can also be silly and naive, of course. But if silliness and naivety were reasons to deprive people of the vote, many adults would come a cropper. In fact, although the human brain takes years to mature, it hasn't completed that process by 16, 18, or even – for some parts of the brain – the early 30s. And however you define competence to vote, you'll find that it doesn't start or stop cleanly at any age. This line of thought led Wall to conclude that the only criterion for eligibility to vote should be wanting to vote. Again, Beauvais agrees. But they disagree on the practical implications of this. Wall assumes that wanting to vote is the default and proposes that someone else should vote for the young person by proxy until they are able to do so themselves – as already happens for certain categories of adult in many countries, including the cognitively impaired. Most often, the proxy voter in the case of a very young person would be a parent. Beauvais considers proxies risky – what if a five-year-old changed her mind and her parents refused? – and also difficult to implement, for example in the case of divorced parents. She would rather societies accepted that, though a person would have the right to vote from birth, it would be some time before they exercised it. In that time – the length of which would depend on the individual – the right would be purely symbolic. It would still mean something, just as it means something that everyone in the UK has the right to marry a person of the same sex even if many of them will never exercise it. Acommon objection to ageless voting is that individuals who can't be trusted to drink, drive or have sex shouldn't be trusted to vote. But Harry Pearse, research director at the Centre for Deliberation, part of the UK's National Centre for Social Research in London, says that's a red herring. We don't allow the very young to indulge in those behaviours because we want to protect them from the potentially harmful consequences, but voting isn't harmful to the voter. It's not as if we're asking babies to make policy. They may vote badly, whatever that means, but again, so do many adults. Some countries, including Scotland, already allow 16-year-olds to vote, so data exists on 16-year-olds' voting habits. Five-year-olds are an unknown quantity, on the other hand, and Pearse thinks that's a good thing: 'Some healthy chaos gets chucked into the system.' For him, the beauty of democracy – for all its flaws – is its simplicity. When the rule is one-person-one-vote, politicians feel pressure to serve all constituencies. In practice, Beauvais says, because we know so little about how the very young would vote, the voting age would probably have to be lowered incrementally. That way society could address any vulnerabilities the new regime exposed – the risk of a charismatic teacher capturing large numbers of young votes for a given political cause, say – before advancing to the next stage. The goal would still be to abolish the age threshold completely. Many people feel that modern democracies have become calcified. In the past, when that happened, societies sought to expand the franchise, and in time, Pearse says, the expansion reinvigorated democratic life. At this point in history, the only way we can expand, short of violating the species barrier, is downwards in age. Beauvais sees that as much more than a political project. It invites us to stop thinking about participation in terms of competence or productivity, she says, and to focus more on our lived experience and interdependence. It's about what it means to be an individual in society. In her view, we should all want Alisa Perales to vote – and not just for her sake. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Suffrage for Children by Mike Weimann (Common Threads, £18) A Minor Revolution by Adam Benforado (Crown Forum, £24) Give Children the Vote by John Wall, (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
