Congress

Tradition reigns in one of the richest congressional district. Or does it?

Published

4 weeks ago

June 4, 2026

NEW YORK — The Democratic primary for an open Manhattan congressional seat has attracted a slate of nationally relevant candidates, each boasting a unique and readymade inroad with voters: There’s the much-televised critic of President Donald Trump, the youthful Kennedy scion and the poster child for AI regulation who has drawn the ire of California computing giants.

And then there’s Micah Lasher.

Outside his district, only the most dialed-in voters would recognize the one-term state assemblymember as a player on Albany’s provincial stage. And at a time when Democrats are gravitating toward brash fighters and outsiders, the 44-year-old presents as bookish and the consummate insider. But he might just win.

After more than thirty years, Rep. Jerry Nadler is relinquishing the keys to a coveted fiefdom far from the front lines of intraparty Democratic strife. In one of the oldest and richest congressional district in the country, fiercely liberal voters look back fondly on fights for same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, issues now taken for granted as Democratic orthodoxy. Support for Israel, an issue painfully delaminating the party elsewhere, is largely uncontested here. And everyone really hates Trump.

“In this district, we’ve been progressive for so long they used to call us liberals,” said Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller who has represented the area in several capacities. “We’ve been through the wars, and that grounds you differently than areas with younger generations. They’ll have their wars, too.”

Given that backdrop, it’s little surprise Lasher is running a campaign that seems almost quaint in the era of upstarts and insurgents. He’s leaning on his policy acumen and extensive government experience while amassing endorsements from a majority of neighborhood political clubs and Democratic incumbents including Nadler, Lasher’s former boss.

He’s also receiving a multimillion boost from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another former employer, who remains highly regarded on the Upper East Side and beyond.

Yet Lasher’s base on the Upper West Side, across Central Park, is such a wealth of triple-prime voters, is so highly informed and has proven so consequential in propelling past candidates to victory that one starts to wonder why the race is close at all: In the only independent poll so far, Lasher is up by a marginal two points over Alex Bores, a fellow state Assemblymember from Manhattan’s East Side who has found himself at the heart of an AI proxy war. Jack Schlossberg, the digitally savvy son of Caroline Kennedy, and George Conway, the former Republican who became an arch Trump critic, were polling about half as well.

As Pax Nadler draws to a close, dominance of the West Side liberalism that has coursed through the avenues since the days of Bella Abzug — a philosophy that these days supports both the No Kings March and the NYPD officers monitoring it — will be on trial later this month along with Lasher himself. A win would reassure Democratic Party leaders the deepest foundational pylons remain intact. Voters turning away from the Upper West Sider and his coterie of prominent backers, however, would portend something else entirely.

To call Lasher a policy wonk would undersell his strangely prodigious resume.

The Upper West Side native was an adolescent magician who performed on The Today Show and David Letterman, entertained television audiences in Thailand and wrote a sleight-of-hand primer that traced the art’s history back to the 26th century B.C., when Dedi the magician of Ded-Snefru decapitated — and then re-capitated — a goose before the Egyptian king.

At 16, Lasher worked on his first campaign. Before his frontal lobes were fully developed, he was serving as an adviser to neighborhood politicos who have since risen to prominent elected offices. In college, he co-founded what would become SKDK, a national public affairs and political consulting firm. He was a cherubic aide to Nadler in Congress and Bloomberg’s young man in Albany. He was chief of staff to the state attorney general and, before winning an Assembly seat in 2024, the director of policy for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (who has also endorsed him).

After nearly three decades spent inside the vast machinery of New York government and its peripheries, Lasher emerged a middle-aged man. He has three children with his wife, and the first flecks of gray are appearing at his temples.

On Friday, he spent the morning and evening rush hours standing in his shirtsleeves outside an Upper West Side subway station and, later, a major housing development teeming with likely voters. These types of interactions — a quick hello, proffering a piece of literature — are part of the unglamorous but necessary work to build name recognition ahead of the June 23 primary. More than 30 percent of respondents in last months’ Emerson College and PIX 11 poll were undecided.

To those who stopped to chat, Lasher seemed eager to telegraph experience.

“I wrote the abundance plan before we called it abundance,” Lasher said to a man who inquired about housing development.

“You want to know something?” he asked a P.S. 452 student roughly a decade away from voter eligibility. “Many years ago, I worked at the Department of Education and helped create P.S. 452.”

Lasher’s pitch to voters can sometimes feel like whiplash. He touts his close ties to members of the Democratic Party in New York and the long years he toiled in city and state government. As Blue Light News has reported, some of that work was on policies, like supporting charter schools, that are out of step with his current campaign.

“I am very proud of my work in government, and I do think it matters,” he said. “I’m not a blank slate and you don’t get everything right when you’re in there every day trying to make a difference.”

Yet he is also selling himself as the person to shake up the House, as an agent of change in a party that has lost its way amid widespread concerns about democracy and affordability.

Lasher sees one as a prerequisite to the other. Between buttonholing passersby, Lasher argued his work on the inside has produced practical benefits for the public — he cited a push to raise the minimum wage and expanding child care as examples — and that his time absorbing the structural blueprints of American governance positions him well for attempts to disarm the Trump administration.

“I’m running a campaign that makes the argument that to push the Democratic Party to be more aggressive and to effectively take on fascism in the form of Donald Trump, you still need people who know what they’re doing,” he said.

Such an analytical approach to politics might not play well in many congressional districts, but the seat Lasher seeks is one of the most well-informed and politically active in the country. In 2022, the district was redrawn to combine Nadler’s old seat, which covered Manhattan’s West Side and several predominately Jewish sections of Brooklyn, with the district of former Rep. Carolyn Maloney on the East Side, forcing the two into a bitter primary Nadler won decisively.

The wealth and power concentrated within the latest iteration of New York’s 12th congressional seat is staggering. Ballpark estimates suggest its denizens collectively rake in tens of billions of dollars, enough money to run several state governments for a year.

Much of that comes from the Upper East Side, where Museum Mile and mansions of the old robber barons line Central Park along Fifth Avenue, giving way to tony doorman buildings farther east and then the imminently more affordable walkups of Yorkville. Farther south, Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village is the largest private rental development in the country, with more than 25,000 residents. There are several public housing developments in the district along with New York City’s longtime seat of LGBTQ political power in Chelsea and the West Village.

Lasher’s home turf, where the highest concentration of voters reside, used to be known as the People’s Republic of the Upper West Side. Few would use that term today, as the vanguard of the left has shifted to younger voters along the “commie corridor” in Brooklyn and Queens that propelled New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, into office last year.

Over sandwiches at Old John’s Luncheonette — diners being the de facto meeting ground for political discussions in upper Manhattan — Nadler reflected on some of those shifts and his decision not to run for reelection.

In another era, his votes on issues like same sex marriage once made him an outlier from the Democratic establishment. From his powerful position as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, he twice led impeachment proceedings against Trump. Now, at the age of 78, having witnessed the fallout of President Joe Biden’s aborted reelection campaign, he decided it was time for a new generation of leadership — preferably the protégé he first met when Lasher was just a teenager.

“One thing that made it easy for me to retire was that I knew I had someone who could do the job very well,” Nadler said.

Victory, however, is far from assured.

Bores, Lasher’s colleague in the Assembly, has gained tremendous exposure from a bill he proposed in Albany to regulate AI companies. That initiative has triggered millions of dollars in outside spending from companies both opposed to and supportive of the legislation and, in the process, has given the 35-year-old the type of earned media most candidates only dream of.

And while the two frontrunners occupy similar territory on the political spectrum, Bores has won some key support on Lasher’s turf, including from the Stonewall Democratic Club and the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club. (Conversely, Lasher has picked up two clubs on Bores’ side of the island.)

Bores, too, has the support of several major labor organizations including DC37, the city’s largest municipal union. The organization is already planning to assist with ground operations and an independent expenditure committee, according to its leader, Henry Garrido.

With many voters only now tuning in, it remains to be seen whether Schlossberg and Conway gain ground and — even if they fail to leapfrog the frontrunners — eat into their rivals’ respective bases of support. The hopefuls are all slated to meet Thursday night for a debate that is likely to provide more insight into the shifting dynamics of the race.

With all those unknowns, it’s tempting to apply a metaphor about Lasher’s past life as a magician versed in pulling off the improbable.

Optical illusions, though, only apply in one direction. What looks miraculous to an audience is actually the end result of rigorous rehearsal. In his 1996 book The Magic of Micah Lasher, written before his long stint in government and politics, the author warns of trying to pull off a trick without sufficient practice.

“Your confidence will fade, your performance will not be as smooth, and your audience will not be as entertained as they might be,” he wrote. “It is always worth taking a little extra time to be able to do the trick perfectly.”

Congress

AOC endorses El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race

Published

36 minutes ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) endorsed Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for Michigan’s open Senate seat on Thursday, a decision that comes as progressives look to capitalize off a series of recent high-profile primary victories in New York, Colorado and elsewhere.

Her endorsement could provide El-Sayed with a critical boost just over a month before the state’s Aug. 4 primary. The former public health official is locked in a heated contest against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow for the right to take on Republican Mike Rogers in the general election.

It also comes as El-Sayed has risen to the top of the pack in recent public polling.

Virtually any Democratic path to flipping the Senate in this year’s midterms would see the party hold the open Michigan Senate seat, with two-term Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) retiring at the end of his term.

The race has emerged as perhaps the largest battleground over the ideological future of the party. El-Sayed, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2018, has collected endorsements from progressives, while Stevens has the tacit backing of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, with AIPAC also boosting her candidacy.

El-Sayed, Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with The New York Times, is her party’s best chance.

“Despite our ideological differences and whatever disagreements there are in the party, every single one of us sees this moment as existential,” she said. “And I think many people are willing to put aside differences in order to give us the best chance at winning. And I think that Abdul gives us that right now.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: The GOP confronts its lost summer

Published

2 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Congress is settling in for a do-nothing summer.

House leaders lost control of their chamber with just eight legislative days before a planned five-week summer recess. And President Donald Trump’s demands for action on a stalled elections bill — along with his series of mercurial power moves — have left Senate Republicans frustrated and morose as major legislation piles up.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are confronting the reality that ticking items off their pre-midterm to-do list is looking increasingly unattainable.

Wednesday’s events only made that clearer:

— RECON 3.0: Key rank-and-file House members and chairs huddled in Johnson’s office Wednesday to plot a path forward on a long shot policy bill under the party-line reconciliation process.

Those who attended — including Rep. August Pfluger, an avowed cheerleader for the bill — acknowledged hope is fading fast. Members are mired in fights over how to pay for the package, and their goal of advancing a budget blueprint for the bill this week is dashed.

“After this recess, if it doesn’t happen in the first couple of days, then I think it’s in real trouble,” Pfluger, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said in an interview.

— EMERGENCY IRAN FUNDING: Trump has asked Congress to direct billions of dollars to cover the war with Iran — but support for the emergency funding is in serious doubt.

Key Republicans left a classified briefing from senior Pentagon officials Wednesday frustrated by unanswered questions. They want to know how the requested $67 billion would be spent — and whether servicemember paychecks and munitions stockpiles might be at imminent risk.

“We need more information,” said Rep. Ken Calvert, the top House Republican responsible for shepherding the supplemental bill, which also includes farm assistance, disaster and Ebola aid.

— IMMIGRATION: As hard-liners continue to gum up the GOP agenda over the SAVE America Act, some are similarly incensed over Johnson’s failure to act on an immigration measure he promised weeks ago to take up.

Johnson held a call Wednesday with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and other members to try to find a path forward but didn’t make much progress, according to five people granted anonymity to discuss the details.

Some centrist Republicans don’t want to vote on it before the midterms, they said, and farm-state members are demanding GOP leaders add guestworker visa provisions — something immigration hard-liners sharply oppose.

And while only a handful of potential developments appear capable of pulling the GOP majorities out of their summer torpor, the contemporary Congress tends to act only when deadlines force it to. That has made the early part of this summer especially languid on Capitol Hill.

It didn’t help, some members noted this week, that lawmakers were sent home early rather than hash out their differences in person.

“We shouldn’t be leaving town,” Rep. Ralph Norman said. “We ought to be working, and we’re not doing it.”

What else we’re watching:

— THE GOP’S DIRTY LITTLE SAVE AMERICA SECRET: House conservatives bristled this week over the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act, shutting down the floor in protest. But their outrage has obscured an inconvenient truth for the Republicans locking arms with the president to push for his election security bill: It can’t even pass the House — at least not the version Trump wants. Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded be added to the legislation.

— TRUMP’S CLAYTON REVIVAL: Trump threw Senate Republicans a rare bone Wednesday — telling reporters that Jay Clayton would have a hearing for his director of national intelligence nomination in two weeks. The president’s remarks were welcome (but in several corners, surprising) news for GOP leaders, who had watched in frustration as Trump scuttled both Clayton’s nomination hearing and passage of a key surveillance tool renewal last month.

Meredith Lee Hill, Mia McCarthy, John Sakellariadis and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

Congress

Congress is settling in for a do-nothing summer

Published

5 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Republican congressional agenda is melting in the summer heat.

Intraparty fights, tight margins, election-year pressures and an indifferent president have grounded the pre-midterm legislative plans of GOP leaders on Capitol Hill, with just a handful of days left to do anything about it.

House leaders, in particular, appear to have lost control of their chamber with just eight session days before a planned five-week summer recess. They discarded two of those days this week, sending members home early for Independence Day after a member rebellion left them unable to move major bills.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s demands for action on a stalled GOP elections bill and a series of mercurial power moves have left Senate Republicans frustrated and morose as major legislation piles up — including the annual defense policy bill, fiscal 2027 spending measures, an extension of government spy powers, the farm bill and more.

“Who needs Democrats when you have your own party derailing the Trump agenda?” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) lamented Tuesday as members unexpectedly scattered for the upcoming holiday.

Absent strong leadership or presidential intervention, the contemporary Congress tends to act only when deadlines force it to, and that has made the early part of this summer especially languid on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers blew past a supposed June deadline for the surveillance program’s renewal, with spy agencies able to rely on existing wiretaps into early next year. The Pentagon bill doesn’t have to get done until the end of the year, and government funding expires Sept. 30, when it is likely to be extended beyond the November election — along with the farm bill.

Still, frustrations are mounting among the lawmakers who toil at the committee level to prepare bills for a dysfunctional House floor.

“We lost four bills that we might have been able to get across the floor,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said Tuesday. “We’re losing time, and time is a very precious commodity.”

The one major piece of legislation passed in recent weeks, a bipartisan housing bill, remains unsigned by Trump, who recently called it a “big yawn.” And the GOP’s chances of passing a new policy bill under the party-line reconciliation process are looking increasingly remote.

House GOP leaders hoped a Trump administration request for defense funding would jump-start plans for that longshot bill, which could carry other Republican priorities ahead of the midterms. Instead, members are mired in fights over how to pay for the package, and hopes of moving forward with a budget blueprint for the bill ahead of the July 4 recess collapsed last month.

Key rank-and-file members and some House chairs huddled in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office Wednesday to plot a way forward on a reconciliation package, but another meeting with Budget Committee Republicans was canceled after GOP leaders sent lawmakers home early.

Those who stayed — including Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), an avowed cheerleader for the party-line bill— acknowledged hope is fading fast.

“After this recess, if it doesn’t happen in the first couple of days, then I think it’s in real trouble,” Pfluger, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said in an interview.

Only a handful of potential developments appear capable of pulling the GOP majorities out of their summer torpor.

In the Senate, members are on guard for a potential Supreme Court confirmation fight — especially after National Public Radio mistakenly published a false report about Justice Samuel Alito’s retirement.

Otherwise the chamber is set to debate its version of the defense policy bill and process a handful of Trump nominations later this month before starting its summer recess. Other bills, including those dealing with college sports and cryptocurrency regulations, could also come to the floor.

Republicans in both chambers believe they could be forced to act on an emergency Pentagon funding request that the White House transmitted to Capitol Hill last week to cover the expense of the war with Iran. Farm assistance, disaster aid and other bipartisan priorities could ride along on that bill.

But the military funding request is facing serious doubts as GOP lawmakers bristle at a lack of information from the Trump administration on how the requested $67 billion would be spent — and whether servicemember paychecks and munitions stockpiles might be at imminent risk. Key Republicans left a classified briefing from senior Pentagon officials at the Capitol Wednesday frustrated at the unanswered questions.

“We recognize that the department needs more money fast,” said Rep. Ken Calvert of California, the top Republican responsible for shepherding the supplemental bill through the House. “We’ve got to figure out exactly how much that is, and we’ve got to do that as fast as possible.”

Asked as he left the briefing when exactly the Pentagon needs the money, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said, “Now.”

“This is really, really, really crucial,” he said.

But even if the administration coughs up the details appropriators like Calvert and Diaz-Balart are demanding, there is no sign the hard-liners holding the House floor hostage are willing to end their blockade — to say nothing about a potential Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

The 13 Republicans who tanked a procedural vote Tuesday had a variety of grievances. Some wanted to pressure the Senate to take up the elections bill, the SAVE America Act. Others wanted to protest Johnson’s failure to act on a border security measure, as they claim he promised to do weeks ago.

“When leadership is making promises and not following through and then you don’t do anything about it, then it’d be, shame on me,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.).

But the proposed border bill is entangled in other intra-GOP conflicts, according to five people granted anonymity to describe internal conversations. House GOP leaders and leadership staff huddled in a series of closed-door meetings Wednesday over the various issues, with still no solution to reopening the floor.

Johnson held a call Wednesday with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other members to try to find a path forward without making much progress, according to the five people.

It didn’t help, some members noted this week, that members were sent home early rather than hash out their differences in person.

“We shouldn’t be leaving town,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said. “We ought to be working, and we’re not doing it.”

Calen Razor and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.