The Iowa Democratic Party is promising to rework its caucuses as party leaders begin a formal application process that will determine whether it can continue holding an early presidential nominating contest.

The state party submitted a letter of intent to members of the Democratic National Committee on Wednesday, notifying them that Iowa will be among the states making the case they should launch the presidential nominating process.

For the last 50 years, Iowa has kicked off that process with its first-in-the-nation caucuses. The DNC has long blessed the ritual, granting waivers to Iowa and three other states — New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — allowing them to hold their caucuses and primaries before the rest of the country.

But the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee voted in April to open up the process, allowing any state that wants to hold an early contest to seek a new waiver. States interested in obtaining a waiver were required to send a letter of intent followed by a full written application. The committee has scheduled meetings in June to consider in-person presentations from a select group of states it chooses to move forward in the process.

Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.

And some Republicans have also worried that some of the outlandish candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump could lose winnable races.

Yet conservatives must be honest. At this time, there is no moving past Mr. Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics.

In races across the country, Republicans who have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement mention it constantly. Even those who didn’t win his endorsement still mention him constantly. Mr. Trump might not have endorsed them, but they all endorse him.

I want to thank all of you across Greater Cleveland and so many more across the country who supported this upstart grassroots campaign with your time, your passion, and your dollars. I can tell you that this team left it all on the field.

We fought through the $3 million in outside money from every corporate interest you can name: the oil companies, the drug companies, the crypto speculators, and even Trump donors. We went door to door talking to the people of Greater Cleveland. But all the hours of our volunteers, the tireless efforts of our dedicated staff and the generosity of our small dollar donors, just could not – on this particular day – beat the onslaught of corporate spending that swamped this district and its people.

This election was never about me nor was it about Shontel Brown. These outside corporate special interests who not only invaded this community but who are doing it in community after community are trying to keep you from getting the higher wages you need. They are trying to keep you from getting relief from high gas prices, high food prices and high medicine prices. They are trying to keep you from getting quality, affordable health care or a higher education. But most importantly they are trying to rob this community and this nation of hope – hope that things can be better, fairer and more just.

The day after an election is when we ponder the what-ifs. The victors don’t, of course; a winning candidate’s aides spend the day after the election telling the media that the victory is a validation of whatever policy they want to highlight, and the winning candidate’s consultants spend the day sending out news releases about their mind-bogglingly great track record. Everyone else, though, wonders what pegs fell into which holes to lead to this particular result.

J.D. Vance’s victory in Ohio in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate offers just such an opportunity for rumination. For months, the venture capitalist and author was engaged in a muddy race to the right against former state treasurer Josh Mandel — both slipping and sliding, getting dirty but not gaining much traction. It was Tucker Carlson against Sean Hannity, in a sense: right-wing rhetoric with a corporate polish against coarser plays for attention and enragement.

The most important differentiator, it’s safe to assume, is that Donald Trump eventually weighed in for Vance. This is what much of the mud-wrestling was about, of course — a contest for Trump’s voters but more immediately for Trump’s endorsement. It came, fairly late in the process, and here we are with Vance as the nominee for his party.

But how much difference did that really make? What if Trump hadn’t endorsed? What if he had endorsed Mandel? What if anti-Trump state Sen. Matt Dolan weren’t in the race? What if Dolan — who also surged in the polls after Trump’s endorsement of Vance — had had a bit more time?

“In early 2020, many companies said the pandemic would change everything for consumers. And it did—for a while,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Now many Americans are resuming their prepandemic habits: rocking out at crowded concerts, doing deadlifts next to strangers at the gym and stocking a standard supply of toilet paper. Airlines, restaurants and child-care centers, which relied on government loans to stay afloat during Covid-19’s peak, can now hardly keep up with demand.”

“The resiliency of the American consumer has been a hallmark of modern history. After events such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or the attacks of 9/11, people have shown they will snap back to doing many of their favorite things, given time. Rarely has it happened so broadly and rapidly as now, two years after a devastating global pandemic began.”

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - A member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group intends to admit to engaging in seditious conspiracy during last year's attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to court papers, the latest in a string of courtroom victories for the Justice Department.

William Todd Wilson of North Carolina is due to plead guilty during a federal court hearing scheduled for 3 p.m. ET (1900 GMT) in Washington, according to a court filing. Wilson would become the third Oath Keepers defendant to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction charges.

Several other defendants are still on track for a trial later this year, including Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers. read more

An indictment against Rhodes and others unsealed in January is the only criminal case accusing participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack of engaging in seditious conspiracy, defined as attempting "to overthrow, put down or to destroy by force the government of the United States."

PROVIDENCE — The state Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the state’s Reproductive Privacy Act, a law passed in 2019 to safeguard abortion rights in Rhode Island.

The high court upheld Superior Court Judge Melissa E. Darigan’s November 2019 dismissal of a challenge to the law brought by the advocacy group Catholics for Life and several other activists. The groups had argued that the state Constitution bars the General Assembly's unilateral passage of a law confirming a fundamental “right” to abortion.

"Construing provisions in the state’s constitution is the function of this Court, and we have not been called upon to do so in the context of this case. But in no way has the General Assembly been prohibited from enacting the legislation at issue in the case at bar," the court said in a ruling written by Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg.

The ruling did not address the merits of the claims, but upheld Darigan's finding that the plaintiffs – including babies born while the case was pending – lacked standing to bring the claims.

WASHINGTON — Texas Democratic House candidate Jessica Cisneros is demanding her party's congressional leaders drop their support of her primary opponent, Rep. Henry Cuellar, over his opposition to abortion.

Her attack on Cuellar comes amid a blockbuster leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade is galvanizing Democrats to defend abortion rights and could shake up the midterm elections this year.

"As the Supreme Court prepares to overturn Roe v. Wade, I am calling on Democratic Party leadership to withdraw their support of Henry Cuellar who is the last anti-choice Democrat in the House," Cisneros said in a statement to NBC News Wednesday morning.

Cisneros added that "with the House majority on the line, he could very much be the deciding vote on the future of our reproductive rights and we cannot afford to take that risk."