Sunday, December 14, 2025 |
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Good morning,
Welcome to MS NOW’s Sunday Spotlight, where you can find a selection of the week’s most interesting and important stories.
First some breaking news: Two people are dead and nine others injured following a shooting Saturday afternoon on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In a press briefing following the attack, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley confirmed the two fatalities, and said several others were in critical but stable condition, although he cautioned that those conditions could change. Following an extensive overnight manhunt, police announced they detained a person of interest early on Sunday morning. Follow MS NOW for the latest updates.
Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is stirring up trouble one last time before she goes, Republicans are starting to suffer the consequences of not doing their health care homework, Democrats just won another post long held by Republicans, and a 2024 Democratic hopeful wants a different kind of normalcy. Plus, the college bowl season keeps getting messier.
Don’t forget to check out more top columns and videos from the week below. |
1. Parting gift: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene may be leaving Congress in January, but that doesn’t mean she can’t create one more headache for her colleagues. According to three sources, the controversial Georgia Republican has been working behind the scenes to see if there’s support to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, reports Mychael Schnell. Under House rules, only nine Republicans would be needed to trigger a vote on the speaker’s job. Read more.
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Affordable care inaction: After the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, conservatives vowed to “repeal and replace” it. But when they failed at the “repeal” stage during Trump’s first term, they seemed to have given up, writes Hayes Brown. Now, facing the imminent expiration of Obamacare subsidies that are aiding millions, they are trapped by their own inaction, unable to come up with a health care plan despite Trump’s promise in 2024 that he had the “concepts of a plan.” On Thursday, two different plans failed to advance in the Senate. Read more.
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Miami voice: Eileen Higgins handily won a runoff election on Tuesday, making her the first Democrat in almost three decades to become the mayor of Miami. But this isn’t just local news. The win has implications for national politics, as Miami-Dade County went for Trump in 2024 by a double-digit margin, writes Philip Bump. While some are tempted to credit the win to Trump’s loss of support among Hispanics, the truth is that he’s lost support across the board. The swing to Democrats is an indicator of Republican apathy and Democratic enthusiasm, among other troubles for the GOP. Read more.
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Unpacking ‘normal’: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely Democratic candidate for president in 2028, said recently that Democrats need to be “more culturally normal” if they want to win elections. Newsom didn’t explain his remarks, but they come as moderate Democrats, including him, have made clear in recent months that they think the party should abandon the fight for transgender rights, writes Nicholas Mitchell, author of “On Bigotry.” The problem with that approach is that it can signal to other people whose rights may be under attack that the party won’t be there for them. Read more.
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Notre lame: After being excluded from the College Football Playoff, the University of Notre Dame petulantly announced that it would refuse to play in any bowl game. Though there’s always grumbling about which teams don’t make the playoff, none of the teams left out in the past have taken their ball and gone home, writes “SportsWrap” host Jason Page. Unlike some other schools, Notre Dame doesn’t need the extra revenue that comes from bowl games. But it has also always played by a different set of rules than almost everybody else. Read more.
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Earlier this summer, MS NOW writer Zeeshan Aleem watched a friend take the oath of citizenship in a Brooklyn courthouse. Before the ceremony began, the judge “delivered a full-fledged sermon on multiculturalism and what it means to become an American” to a rapt audience, he wrote. Citing his own Italian ancestry, the judge told the assembled immigrants to hold their countries of origin close to their heart and not let anyone treat them as second-class citizens. Aleem notes that the judge at his mother’s naturalization ceremony 14 years ago didn’t make similar remarks, perhaps because the notion of America as a haven for immigrants wasn’t under attack. “The Trump administration is laying siege to the idea that citizenship is a democratic pact, and instead positing that it should be a function of ethnic heritage,” Aleem wrote. Read the column here.
— Ryan Teague Beckwith, newsletter editor |
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