Congress
Michigan’s Gary Peters to teach at USC after retirement
Sen. Gary Peters is heading to Los Angeles for a post at the University of Southern California after his term ends early next year, the university said Monday.
The retiring Michigan Democrat will be an endowed chair in practical politics and co-lead USC’s Center for the Political Future with longtime Republican strategist Mike Murphy. The university said Peters will teach courses at its Los Angeles and Washington campuses.
“I look at this as a capstone of my years in public service at the local, state and federal level,” Peters said in a statement. “It’s never been more important to bring people together, and there’s no better place to start than working with students and getting them engaged in civic activism.”
Peters, who was first elected to the Senate in 2014, announced his plan to not seek reelection in January 2025. Before his time in government, Peters taught classes in business and finance at several Michigan universities.
He said the opportunity to work with young people and engage them in politics, policy and civics drew him back to higher education.
“Gary Peters brings an extraordinary combination of public service, bipartisan leadership and real experience getting things done in Washington,” said James Bullock, dean of USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, in a statement. “He has spent his career showing that you can hold strong political convictions and still work productively with people who see the world differently.”
Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a senior Appropriations Committee Republican, questioned whether federal funds should be spent on construction of President Donald Trump’s triumphal arch, which the president claimed over the weekend could be used for military purposes.
“There’s a lot of things that we need the military funding for — in fact, we’re short on military funding right now,” Simpson told reporters at the Capitol Monday.
“If it was my choice, I wouldn’t put any of that money into the arch,” Simpson added, when pressed on whether Pentagon funding should be used at all.
Simpson spoke a day after Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that the arch — which he wants to build less than a mile from the Pentagon, just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial — would be used to store and deploy drones and snipers.
Given that rationale, Simpson said the arch is “something that needs to be debated” and that other Defense Department needs should take priority.
“I hope if they decide to do it, that they would come to Congress and ask for an appropriation for it if they’re going to use appropriated dollars to do it,” Simpson said.
Simpson also questioned Trump’s ban of three news outlets over the weekend, including Blue Light News, as well a recent comments from House Rules Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) suggesting members of the media should be barred from the the Speakers Lobby, a space just off the House floor. He called any such media ban “wrong.”
“Just because you don’t like what the press is reporting — or the fact that they wouldn’t call it the Gulf of America or something else like that — that’s not the reason to ban the press,” he said. “You should never ban the press. The press is what keeps us honest. So I don’t like what they’re doing.”
Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) endorsed GOP Rep. Mike Lawler in his reelection campaign in suburban New York, Golden wrote in an opinion article published on Monday.
Lawler is facing a tough reelection campaign against Democrat Cait Conley in one of the biggest House battlegrounds this November. The lawmakers have previously collaborated to advance the Northeast Lobsterman Protection Act, and are both members of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus.
Golden, who is not running for reelection, was one of two House Democrats to break with the party and twice vote in favor of the Republican legislative agenda earlier in September. He and Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) were the deciding votes in pushing through a pair of key procedural votes in a closely divided chamber. The GOP-led bills included a resolution condemning socialism that Republicans want to use against Democrats on the campaign trail.
House Democrats have since pressured Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to punish the defectors.
“Mike Lawler has been a true partner to me and a friend to fishing families he will never represent,” Golden wrote. “I strongly back him, and I hope voters send him back to work. Wherever you live, find the members who pass laws with the other party, and keep them.”
Gluesenkamp Perez is running for reelection in a red-leaning district.
The Lobsterman Protection Act passed in the House with bipartisan support in September. The bill would delay the implementation date for regulations meant to protect the endangered North Atlantic whale. The current rule is too onerous, Maine’s fishing industry and its advocates have argued.
Lawler represents a suburban New York district that is unimpacted by the regulations, but Golden praised the New Yorker for working alongside him to help the fishing community.
“That is how Congress is supposed to work: members of different parties set aside their disagreements, find a problem that matters to the country and fix it,” Golden said.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Conley and Jeffries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“While we are from different parties and different states, Jared and I have worked during our time together in the House to find common ground on issues that matter both to us and our constituents,” Lawler wrote in a statement.
A super PAC funded by the cryptocurrency industry is preparing to spend at least $30 million in the Ohio Senate race to try to block Democrat Sherrod Brown from returning to Washington, the group’s most aggressive move of the 2026 midterm cycle to date.
The move by Fairshake, a super PAC group bankrolled by a trio of leading crypto companies, comes just days after Democrats voted down an industry-backed digital asset bill on the Senate floor.
The group spent more than $40 million in 2024 to help defeat Brown, who was then the Senate Banking Committee chair and a leading critic of the crypto sector in the chamber. Brown is now mounting a comeback bid in the Buckeye State, where he is facing Sen. Jon Husted in a special election to replace Vice President JD Vance.
The Ohio race has long been seen as a top target for the crypto group, which has more than $120 million in the bank. But its money had been kept on the sidelines for months as the crypto bill, known as the Clarity Act, was pending in the Senate, where it needed Democratic support to advance. The $30 million campaign against Brown, which the group confirmed to Blue Light News, is by far its biggest play of the 2026 cycle thus far.
Brown was a key roadblock to industry-friendly crypto legislation when he served as Senate Banking chair — a perch he used to highlight risks associated with digital assets.
Ohio is one of several GOP Senate seats that Democrats are hoping to capture in order to chip away at Republicans’ majority in the chamber. Brown lost by about four percentage points in 2024 to GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno — who is now a leading crypto booster in the chamber — but Democrats hope he will perform better this year with President Donald Trump’s popularity lagging.
It’s unclear where else the crypto group will spend its war chest, which comes primarily from the crypto firms Coinbase and Ripple and the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz. It backed both Democrats and Republicans in key 2024 Senate races, but some Democrats fear that its spending will be more lopsided in favor of the GOP this cycle as the industry seeks to punish Democrats for voting down the Clarity bill.
The Ohio spending was previously reported by the New York Times.
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