What's going on in Maine?

So Susan Collins has a real enduring appeal, and everyone thought she was going to lose last time around.

Remember, she was running six years ago against her opponent, was the former Democratic Speaker of the State House, Sarah Gideon.

I went up there for that race at that time.

The common wisdom when I was up there, and it was in late September, early October, was that Collins was toast.

It took me about 36 hours on the ground to see that I thought she was going to win.

And she ended up winning.

Amanda, could you just give us a quick explanation about what we have learned so far out of this story?

If you have birthright citizenship, it means if a person comes here nine months pregnant to go look around at some things, in a couple of weeks, that is the mother of a lifetime American citizen.

And so you really saw kind of an escalation in how members of the administration were talking about so-called birth tourism, suggesting a shift that could be far more encompassing than we've seen to date.

It's been a priority of the president since the early days of his second term.

They released a memo that they were going to crack down on this.

As recently as this summer, his State Department announced that the US Embassy in West Africa had uncovered what it called a sophisticated birth tourism network, and this is one of many investigations they've launched into this.

How are people there preparing for the official end of TPS for Haitians?

To be quite candid, they're preparing for a massive humanitarian crisis.

The city is only about 60,000 overall.

As many as 12,000 Haitians are living in the area.

They started coming kind of in larger numbers around 2016, and then it picked up kind of a year or two into COVID.

There are at least a couple thousand children who are U.S. citizens who were born to Haitian parents here, either on TPS or asylum in some cases.

The future of those children and what will happen to them if for some reason their parents are picked up when they're not with them is unclear.

So Amanda, what is Springfield saying about the potential loss of Haitians on TPS status, the impact on their communities and businesses?

What similarities did you and your team find between Trump's second term and what has been outlined in the 900-plus pages of Project 2025?

920 pages, I think, to be exact.

And so let's think back to the election, right? So this 920-page document came out.

This is something that the Heritage Foundation has actually been doing since the 80s, but it wasn't always so extreme.

And so the reason it got so much attention this time is because it was taking a very clear Christian nationalist direction.

And so that's why it was in the news so much during the 2024 campaigns.

Now, Trump repeatedly disavowed this, said he didn't know anything about it, despite the fact that it had been written by dozens of people who either served in his first administration, were linked to him in some way, were advising him on the campaign.

So can you talk to me about what those worries and what implementation and half of it being implemented really means?

So, who would have access to vaccines and who wouldn't?

So right now, if all these changes become permanent, uh, which is looking like the case right now, it would only be adults over 65 who are, you know, de facto eligible, should, are recommended to get the vaccine.

Everybody else, children included, you would need some sort of preexisting condition or exacerbating medical condition.

Now, it's the pregnant people that are really kind of raising eyebrows right now, because the CDC's own list of medical conditions that put people at risk of high CO- uh, high risk of COVID included pregnancy.

Um, and then this week we heard that they're no longer recommending it for pregnant people or, uh, healthy children.

Now, also, in addition to, you know, the pregnant person themself, it was the shots and the vaccines during pregnancy that were giving immunity to newborns as well.

So, this is also kind of making parents more concerned about that window where they're not even old enough to get a vaccine.

Amanda, how else are we seeing what J.D. Vance is saying play out, that crypto has a champion and an ally in the White House?

Go ahead.

Yeah.

So we're starting to see some signs of bipartisanship in a Congress that we haven't seen much of that so far.

On Wednesday, uh, four Republicans joined with Democrats in the Senate to revoke Trump's, uh, tariffs on Canada.

Then on Thursday, uh, Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa joined with, uh, Maria Cantwell of Washington to introduce a bill that would require Congressional approval for new tariffs.

And, you know, if they, if they didn't approve it, it would block them going into effect.

So this is inspiring, I think, worry among some of the Republicans from these states that are gonna be hit hard.

So when you consider that alongside the amount of money that was spent in this race, uh...How significant is this victory for Democrats and (laughs) when you consider the questions that are go- going to be come- come up for the Supreme Court in Wisconsin moving forward?