Democrats Figuring It Out

Today’s notice: What’s happening in Texas. Big Defense expects a grilling if the Democrats take Congress. The people who warn AI is getting dangerous. Violating campaign rules in Nevada and norms in Wisconsin. And: What happened to Rubio’s corporate transparency law?

THE LATEST

On doing the right thing in Austin: The electoral wind is at Democrats’ back as the DNC meets for its summer gathering this week. But the party machine is still stuck in some awkward conversations. For example, about coffee.

DNC Chair Ken Martin urged members of the national committee to avoid the Starbucks next door to the hotel.

“Just downstairs is a Starbucks, and I see some of these Democrats walking around with their cup of coffee and forgetting the fight that Workers United is engaged in right now, forgetting that this is one of the largest companies in the world that continues the union-busting tactics,” Martin told delegates, NOTUS’ Alex Roarty reports from Austin. “None of us while we’re at this conference over the next few days should be frequenting Starbucks.”

Also awkward: figuring out what’s “Woke 1” or not. At a Resolutions Committee meeting yesterday, members picked up a debate from earlier in the cycle: should Democrats call on Congress to “abolish” ICE or use another term? First, the committee members voted on a resolution from Martin that “condemned” immigration enforcement actions in Trump 2.0.

Later, they picked up a second resolution that said it. One member tried to amend it to “completely restructure” ICE but she was called out by abolish-ers who said that phrase was the same as “reform,” a term they found unacceptable. Around and around they went.

“I hate to be kind of the wet blanket here, but we’re doing what Democrats often tend to do, which is engage in an internal semantic argument when the fight is external,” said committee member Yvonne Reeves-Chong of Missouri.

Eventually, the Resolutions Committee voted 26-12 to send the abolish ICE language to the full DNC for a vote.

The primaries left Democrats with many prominent abolish-ers. Senate nominees Troy Jackson (Maine) and Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan) say it. Peggy Flanagan (Minnesota) said “rip ICE apart.” Polling throughout the summer has found Americans do not like ICE and do not trust it. When one supporter of the abolish language spoke up at the Resolutions Committee meeting and said “voters have moved left” on ICE, she was not wrong.

But was she doing the right thing?

Open tabs: Trump Orders Navy to Restore Older Tech on Aircraft Carriers, Costing Billions (WSJ); White House says more than 40 nations help China dodge tariffs (WaPo); Trump encourages U.S. companies to retaliate against cybercriminals (NYT); The U.S. Surveilled Left-Leaning Groups During Minnesota Immigration Crackdown (NOTUS)

From a potential future

The defense industry prepares for a potential Democratic majority: “My advice to companies right now is, if you don’t understand what it’s like to testify before Congress, you better learn pretty quick,” a former aide to the House Armed Services Committee told NOTUS’ Joe Gould. Donald Trump’s Pentagon is expected to shut out congressional requests in a potential future Congress where Democrats control the committees that oversee the department’s budget, and so Joe reports that many in the defense world expect scrutiny to fall on industry leaders to provide answers to investigators’ questions.

The industry is paying attention. Last month, the K Street firm Invariant hired David Weinberg, the former Democratic staff director of the Senate’s homeland security committee, in part to help clients prepare for heightened scrutiny. His take? “I wouldn’t be shocked to see some of the first oversight letters going in the first week of the new Congress,” Weinberg said.

From Silicon Valley

Officially time to be really afraid of AI? “We’ve had people way back to Alan Turing in 1951 warning about the loss of control, that artificial intelligence will start breaking out and lying and deceiving,” Max Tegmark, an AI expert at MIT, told NOTUS’ Jeff Stein. “What’s really new is this is now actually starting to happen. This is one of those moments where a lot of people need to see it.”

Jeff takes a deep dive into recent instances of high-profile “rogue agents” hacking and causing security incidents outside of their human operators’ control. At this stage of their development, researchers say there is no reason to believe AI agents could coordinate a hack that humans would not be able to eventually regain control over, Jeff writes. But the last few weeks have dramatically raised the level of concern.

From the campaign trail

Meet the next Rep. from Nevada’s 2nd? Retired Air Force Lt. Col. David Flippo is the Republican nominee in the district, which Trump won by 14 points in 2024, so the odds are well in his favor in November. NOTUS’ Jenna Monnin took a look at his financials and found the self-funder appears to already be violating a federal transparency law, having never filed required personal financial disclosures.

“Mr. Flippo is in the process of closing one of his businesses to focus on serving the people of Northern Nevada, while he moves his other businesses, investments and landholdings into a blind trust,” Thomas Datwyler, Flippo’s campaign treasurer, told NOTUS. “That is a complicated process, and his financial disclosure will be filed once that is complete.” If you think you’ve heard that name before, it’s because Datwyler was widely believed to be former Rep. George Santos’ shadow treasurer, though Datwyler denied it.

Francesca Hong should have bought TV ads: That’s the general consensus from the postmortem of her gubernatorial run in Wisconsin. “It’s a mistake to not communicate with a part of the electorate,” Democratic strategist Jared Leopold told Jenna. “There’s still a lot of people, particularly older people, who watch a lot of TV.”

NOTUS METRO

Sign up for our local newsletter, written by Martin Austermuhle and Zara Norman.

Local news: In Northern Virginia, a Confrontation With ICE Sparks Questions About Cameras and Transparency, by Martin and Zara

NEW ON NOTUS

Change in focus: Then-Sen. Marco Rubio once dubbed a corporate transparency act he sponsored “the most significant anti-corruption & money laundering law in decades.” It passed Congress in 2021 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Now, NOTUS’ Anna Kramer and Natalie Alms report, the Trump administration has axed the main tool of that law requiring businesses to report who their owners are — especially with regard to shell companies often used in illicit finance schemes — and plans to delete the data the government has collected. Cue the lawsuits.

“This is an abject failure of the executive branch to fulfill the will of Congress,” said Erica Hanichak, co-director of The FACT Coalition, a group that advocates for corporate transparency reforms. “So there are certainly grounds for a legal challenge.”

NOT US

• Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing, by Jesse Coburn for ProPublica
• Wes Moore’s Media War, by Paul Farhi for New York magazine
• Boats, picket lines, ‘Jersey Pride’: Trump tax breaks inspire wave of copycats, by Brian Faler for Politico

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Spring chicken.

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The newsletter was produced by Thomas Burr and Andrew Burton. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez/AP.