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Ro Khanna: Democrats lost 2024 because they became the ‘party of war,’ overlooked inflation

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Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) blamed the Democratic Party’s poor performance in the 2024 election on unpopular positions on foreign policy and ineffective messaging on inflation in an interview with Blue Light News.

Khanna said in an interview on “The Conversation” with Dasha Burns that Democrats became “the party of war” by standing with Israel amid the country’s ongoing war in Gaza.

“I think the Gaza situation really hurt us with a lot of young people, certainly in Wisconsin and Michigan,” Khanna told Blue Light News. “We would have won those two states, but for that.”

Khanna, who has represented the San Francisco Bay Area since 2017, also pointed to his party’s failure to take decisive action on supply chain shortages and other causes of rising prices as a key factor in Democrats’ failure to woo voters.

“We were too late in recognizing how much people were hurting,” Khanna said in the interview, which was taped Wednesday and is set to air in full on Sunday. “We kept calling it transitory. We didn’t have the urgency of a plan of what we were gonna do to tackle inflation.”

Khanna also weighed in on Elon Musk’s recent fallout with President Donald Trump and whether the Democratic Party should welcome the billionaire back into its fold.

Khanna served in the Commerce Department for the Obama administration, and he said that administration helped Musk’s SpaceX secure key federal contracts to compete with industry heavyweights like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Musk also wrote a testimonial for Khanna’s 2012 book “Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America’s Future,” calling the future lawmaker “a leading thinker on how to make U.S. manufacturing more competitive across this country.”

But Khanna, who has known the former DOGE leader for over a decade, told Burns “I don’t recognize what happened to him,” condemning the Tesla CEO for politicizing the recent assassination of a prominent Democratic state lawmaker and her husband.

“The far left is murderously violent,” Musk wrote in a June 14 post on his social platform, X, reposting a commenter who erroneously claimed that the left was responsible for the Minnesota shooting and was a “full blown domestic terrorist organization.”

Khanna said Musk has “done so much damage” — but credited him for criticizing the GOP’s advocacy of stiff tariffs, harsh crackdown on international students and proposal to deepen the U.S. deficit by about $2.8 trillion over the next decade.

“My hope is just that he’s not going to continue to enable an extreme agenda that hurts innovation, which is what the Trump administration has pursued,” Khanna said in the interview.

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Congress

Florida Republicans make peace with proposed new House map

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Some House Republicans spent weeks warning against a drastic redraw of Florida’s congressional map.

Now that it’s out — with Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting as many as four Democratic seats for a GOP takeover — they’re mostly keeping any criticism to themselves.

“I think they did a pretty good job,” said Rep. Gus Bilirakis, who said he was one of the Florida Republicans whose district changed “quite a bit.”

“But I think they could touch it up a little bit, too,” he added.

Rep. Scott Franklin said he is set to represent his third constituency in four terms. He still lives within the confines of the 18th district, he said, though it is much smaller in area.

“Mine gets significantly less red than it was,” Franklin said. “But it’s still a conservative performing seat.”

DeSantis’ map still has to be approved by the Florida legislature, and it’s almost certain to face challenges in court. But many of the states’ 20 Republicans are already making peace with new districts that will be at least slightly more competitive.

Many warned that redrawing the existing GOP-favored map to pick up more than one or two Democratic seats could dangerously dilute the Republican vote. And at least one, Jacksonville-area Rep. John Rutherford, said targeting four “could be a bit much.”

Down the Atlantic coast, the reviews were more positive. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar’s Miami-area district remains largely untouched under the new maps, while her neighbor Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart could see his safe Republican seat only slightly diluted.

“Not bad, right? I’m used to those lines, so I’m happy,” Salazar said. “And I was one of the people that could have been highly damaged.”

She declined to comment on whether she expects the new map to net the four seats the GOP is craving: “God knows what’s going to happen.”

Several of the Florida Democrats who are now in danger expressed more concern. They now face running in unfriendly districts or switching districts and possibly running against a current colleague.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a South Florida Democrat, said he plans on running again and that he believes DeSantis’ effort will backfire by creating more tossup districts. Rep. Darren Soto called the map a violation of state and federal law but said he plans to run in his current Orlando-area district nonetheless.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a veteran Democrat representing a district south of Fort Lauderdale called the new map “a completely unconstitutional partisan gerrymander” and said she was waiting to review detailed data on her redrawn district.

“But the main thing is that this is illegal, and we’re going to sue,” she said.

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Charles to argue for a strong US-UK partnership in address to Congress

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King Charles will use his speech to Congress to help repair the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Britain that has been under strain over the Iran war.

The king plans to focus on reconciliation and renewal in a speech Tuesday before the House and Senate that is expected to run about 20 minutes, according to royal aides.

Charles will celebrate “one of the greatest alliances in history,” which has been tested as President Donald Trump complains about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s reluctance, along with other NATO allies, to provide assistance to the U.S.-led attacks on Iran, the aides said.

He will reference the shared national security interests of the U.S. and the U.K., including NATO, the Middle East, Ukraine and the trilateral AUKUS pact with Australia.

Starmer’s handling of some of those issues has provoked criticism from Trump, who derisively referred to the prime minister as “not Winston Churchill” after the U.K. initially didn’t allow the U.S. to use its bases to bomb Iran at the beginning of the war.

When asked earlier in this month about his relationship with Starmer and the state of the U.S.-U.K. partnership, Trump told ITV News it was “not good at all.”

Charles is expected to acknowledge that tension by noting that the two nations have not always seen eye to eye, but that “time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come back together,” according to royal aides.

In his address, Charles also plans to tout the need to respect the rule of law and democratic traditions, and argue for the importance of trade and technology deals — a message that may go over less well with the administration.

Royal aides said the king’s remarks will also include a brief message of sympathy for Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Dan Bloom contributed to this report.

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Oversight of WHCD ramps up on Capitol Hill

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The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, following a briefing Monday from U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran, said he saw “no indication” of a security lapse at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“It’s a challenge to bring that many people, 2,500 or whatever the number was … but they gave us a good explanation,” the Illinois Democrat told reporters of Curran’s presentation to himself and the panel’s chair, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

Curran is currently making the rounds on Capitol Hill after a shooter attempted to blow past the magnetometers outside the hotel ballroom where President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Speaker Mike Johnson and several Cabinet members were in attendance.

The incident has prompted members of leadership and key committee chairs to request briefings with Curran. He also met Monday with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.), according to a panel spokesperson, who added that they were trying to set up a briefing for all members take place later this week.

An aide with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said the office had been in touch with Secret Service and the FBI and that the top Democrat, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, expected to be “briefed soon.” Spokespeople for Sen. Rand Paul, the committee’s chair, did not immediately respond to a question about if he would also be briefed.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter Monday asking Paul to hold a hearing in the wake of Saturday’s shooting, saying it could be used “to assess the adequacy of presidential security arrangements and resources in the current threat environment.”

Paul didn’t address whether or not he would hold a hearing when talking to reporters Monday, but said that his panel would investigate the security posture around Saturday’s dinner.

“We’re looking into it,” Paul said.

Durbin, meanwhile, said it was not clear whether Grassley intended to call for a hearing with Curran, and that his counterpart had not committed to next steps his committee might take.

“I appreciate Secret Service Dir Sean Curran coming 2my office 2day 4 bipart briefing w me+Sen Durbin USSS is closely reviewing its security posture+the attacker’s bkground Overall Secret Service response has been swift&transparent I commend their bravery + ongoing work,” Grassley wrote on X.

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