President Donald Trump said Monday that he wants the Senate to prioritize confirming Dr. Heidi Overton, his nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, before the 2026 midterm elections, in which Republicans are defending a slim…
Page A3From§Eachthe early evening edition — 31 August 2026
Courts blocked his mail-ballot order and his FDA's 'sham' pill review; Senate told to confirm nominee first.
As it ran on the front
I had it here somewhere. Hang on. Here — August 31st, temporary block on the mail-ballot order, upheld by a federal judge. And right under it, I wrote down the FDA thing too, the one where the court let the abortion pill stay on the market until the review — his own agency's review — is finished, and the court's word for that review, not mine, theirs, was 'sham.'
I don't know much about medicine. I don't know much about ballots either, to be honest, my wife handles all that in our house. But I do know that if you tell your kid, 'go get ready for school, and by the way I'm timing you,' and then the kid tells you the clock is broken, you'd want to know whether the kid broke the clock or you did. That's just a household thing. Simple.…
…(cont) So I wrote this down, because it struck me. Two separate courts, two separate weeks, blocked two separate things this administration wanted before the midterms — one on how people vote, one on what a woman can get from a pharmacy while a review a court called a sham grinds along. And meanwhile — I've got this here too — a request to the Senate: confirm his FDA pick before the midterms. Before. That's the word they used. Before.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm sure there's an explanation. There's always an explanation. My notebook doesn't have opinions, it just has dates, and the dates are: block, block, before. In that order.
Excuse me — one more thing, before you go. Two orders blocked until after the election, one nominee they want confirmed before it — what would you call an administration whose timeline only runs in one direction?
“Two courts had to physically stop this administration from touching a ballot and a pill in the same stretch of weeks, and the ask on the table was rushing through the guy in charge of the agency behind both fights. You don't need a motive section for that, the calendar is the motive. Before the midterms is doing a lot of work in that sentence.”
“The administration is simply asking the Senate to do its job on a timeline, that's not a plot, that's a personnel calendar. As for the court stuff, those are just — procedural, temporary, normal, the kind of routine legal process that happens to land in the same news cycle as — okay, I hear it, I hear how that sounds.”
The receipts
A federal judge on Monday denied requests from the Trump administration and Republican-led states to lift a temporary block on key parts of a U.S. Postal Service rule implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order intended to secure…
Access to the abortion drug mifepristone will remain unchanged in the US for now after a federal district judge on Sunday paused a lawsuit aimed at overturning the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the medication. But he left the…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.