Congress
John E. Sununu expected to announce New Hampshire Senate bid this week
Former Sen. John E. Sununu is expected to launch a Senate comeback bid in New Hampshire this week, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the campaign-in-waiting.
Sununu has been exploring a run since September for the seat he held for a single term before being ousted by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in 2008. Shaheen is retiring next year.
He has been in contact with the White House and is expected to visit with President Donald Trump soon, according to a senior White House official granted anonymity to disclose details.
Trump’s endorsement will be critical in the GOP primary, even though the state’s broader electorate rejected him for president in all three of his campaigns.
Sununu has long opposed Trump, serving as a national co-chair of former Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign and backing former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley in 2024. He penned an op-ed ahead of the state’s GOP presidential primary last year lambasting Trump as a “loser.” Trump went on to win that primary by 11 points.
Still, the scion of a prominent Republican political dynasty in the state — his father is former governor and White House chief of staff John H. Sununu; one of his brothers is former Gov. Chris Sununu — would likely give the GOP its best hope of flipping the Senate seat.
National Republicans consider Sununu to be a strong candidate. He has previously discussed a potential bid with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who he served with in the House and Senate and who he remains close to, and former Sen. Cory Gardner, the outgoing Senate Leadership Fund chair. A spokesperson for Sununu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Former Sen. Scott Brown, who represented Massachusetts before moving to New Hampshire, is already running in the GOP primary. He is not expected to step aside for Sununu and is positioning himself as the more Trump-aligned candidate of the two. Another candidate, state Sen. Dan Innis, recently ended his campaign and preemptively endorsed Sununu.
While Sununu would start as the polling front-runner in the GOP primary, he trailed Democrats’ leading contender, Rep. Chris Pappas, in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup in a recent University of New Hampshire survey.
A Democratic trio attempted to pass an artificial intelligence bill via a unanimous consent request on Tuesday but were blocked on the Senate floor.
Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) sought to pass their Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act using the procedural mechanism, which allows expedited consideration of legislation but fails if one senator opposes it.
“The whole world has recognized that we’ve got to do something,” Warner said in a speech on the floor. “We should not miss the moment to put a safety protocol in place now.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) objected to the bill, preventing any chance of passage.
“Congress must not legislate on the issue of artificial intelligence hastily or in a closed manner,” he said on the floor, adding that it gave some in the government too much power to dictate the technology that could be permitted to be released.
As some lawmakers grow concerned over dire warnings from AI labs’ top executives about the technology’s risk to humanity, Congress’ attempts to legislate AI guardrails have largely stalled.
In the past few weeks, two other AI-related bills, the Ratepayer Protection Act and AI Emergency Button Act, were also nixed in an attempt to pass them unanimously.
Warner, Schatz and Kim’s new bill would have established a new safety board within the Commerce Department to vet models before they are deployed and set safety standards for the industry. It would also have created a reporting process for safety and security incidents.
Sen. Darline Graham sought to take up her brother’s mantle Tuesday, going after former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining the late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s phone data.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the South Carolina Republican told Smith as he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that the anguish the prosecutor caused her brother “makes me sick.”
Lindsey Graham, until his unexpected death in July, was among the most vocal in his outrage over revelations that Smith secretly collected electronic data from GOP lawmakers as part of the Biden-era investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The late senator was also unapologetic in his support for a provision tucked into a government funding package, which was later repealed, allowing senators to sue the federal government for $500,000 or more if they discover their electronic records were seized without notification — language specifically designed to compensate Smith’s targets.
But Smith replied that Lindsey Graham was not a target of his investigation and was not suspected of wrongdoing — in fact, he considered Darline Graham’s brother “a patriotic public servant” who likely would have been a “witness” in his case against Trump for attempted election subversion.
“Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making,” Smith told Darline Graham. “He found them to be false.”
The federal government’s internal watchdog told Congress Tuesday that it has concluded President Donald Trump acted unlawfully in unilaterally canceling $810 million in federal funding.
In a letter to congressional leaders obtained by Blue Light News, the Government Accountability Office’s top lawyer panned Trump’s declaration Friday that he is nixing money Congress appropriated through a controversial budget maneuver called a “pocket rescission.”
“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse,” GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez wrote,
adding that “Congress did not cede this important power” by enacting the 1970s impoundment law intended to stop presidents from withholding money Congress approves.
“Any withholding of appropriated funds beyond their date of expiration, regardless of size, subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” Perez added. “The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind.”
It is unclear what practical effect, if any, the letter will have on the interbranch funding fight. Outside groups sued the administration last year over a prior pocket rescission, but the Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling that they did not have standing to challenge the matter. The Trump administration has argued that only the head of the GAO is able to sue under the 52-year-old law governing rescissions.
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