Evening Wrap

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) bowed out of the House speaker’s race Friday after garnering fewer votes on a third ballot than on either of the first two, our D.C. bureau reported. Jordan conceded in a closed-door meeting after losing an up-or-down vote from his fellow Republicans, 25 of whom had joined Democrats to vote against him on the floor. 

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Thursday suspended his quest to become speaker of the House of Representatives and then unsuspended it hours later, opting to push for a third floor vote despite not appearing to have shored up any additional support after losing the first two, our D.C. bureau reported. The legislative whiplash came amid fury from Jordan’s far-right backers, who abhorred his initial decision to step aside and support a plan to install Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) as an interim speaker through Jan. 3. That proposal, hatched by Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans, would allow the chamber to consider legislation/be at least slightly useful while Jordan toils in the background, attempting to win the minds and hearts of everyone who has so far refused to support him.

I’m speaking in generalities because this is the general truth of things, though for now, Republicans are focused mostly on meddling with gender-affirming care. Last week, GOP attorneys general in 18 states signed onto Florida’s defense of a state law banning Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, the Florida Phoenix reported. The brief, filed Friday with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, framed the broad medical support for gender-affirming care as baseless posturing from medical organizations besieged by outside pressure.

Cleaning up radioactive waste sites in St. Louis will cost at least $406 million, more than twice the price tag cited by federal officials six years ago, according to a federal report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office. Most of the increase stemmed from additional contamination that forced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expand its investigation and cleanup efforts in Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River contaminated by radioactive waste leftover from the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, the Missouri Independent reported.

Today’s election results come to us from Louisiana, where voters headed to the polls Saturday (not a typo) for a winner-take-all statewide primary where candidates from each party compete head-to-head in hopes of winning a majority of votes and, with it, the election. If no one clinches a majority, the top two candidates advance to a run-off election six weeks later. Think of it less as a primary than a general election, with some run-offs sprinkled in as needed.

A federal judge last week declined to pause an Oklahoma law banning gender-affirming care for minors, clearing the state to begin withholding hormone treatments and puberty blockers from transgender kids. The physical effects of discontinuing treatment will vary by patient, providers said. But it will be universally devastating for trans kids’ mental health.

In the southeastern Colorado city of Pueblo, you’ll find a cutting-edge railroad testing facility, the world’s first and largest solar-powered steel mill, and the biggest wind-turbine factory on the planet. There’s a utility-scale battery project underway, and a federal grant could transform the city into a regional “carbon sequestration hub.” Pueblo is, basically, a green-energy boomtown — or it would be, if the spoils of that industry were boosting the local economy. So far, that hasn’t happened, Colorado Newsline reported.

Kari Lake, an election-denying Republican best known for denying her own failure to be elected governor of Arizona, launched a bid for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, the Arizona Mirror reported. Standing before a digital backdrop depicting an American flag waving in the digital breeze, Lake vowed to wield her congressional power to finish former President Donald Trump’s border wall, eradicate homeless encampments and ignore the ongoing war in Ukraine, among other things.

I am here for all of your substantive policy questions, and that is why we are going to talk about maple syrup — the real kind, as opposed to the sugary slime that restaurants try to pass off as authentic, only to disappoint you after you’ve based your entire breakfast order on the premise of maple syrup that actually comes from maple trees. It’s a massive bummer, said Wisconsin state Sen. Kelda Roys, who totes a bottle of maple syrup around in her purse just to avoid this upsetting situation.

Wolfe County, Kentucky is normally a pretty quiet place, residents say. The biggest headache is an ATV park that generates some noise during the summer. At least it was quiet until the spring, when someone began stringing new power lines to a nearby electrical substation. Then trucks started delivering huge construction containers to a property next to the substation in August.

Since we’re aimless anyway, we might as well start with a story about marijuana! Let’s puff on over to Missouri, where cannabis stores have been sitting on a stash of 63,000 products that were recalled by the state after regulators could not confirm that the marijuana was derived from in-state growers or that it had undergone proper testing. Vendors can’t sell the goods, and they haven’t been permitted to destroy them, either — until now, the Missouri Independent reported.

If you can get there, that is — and since the pandemic, a lot of kids aren’t making it to school. Before COVID-19 entered the popular lexicon, around 8 million were considered chronically absent, meaning they’d missed at least 10% of the school year. By spring 2022, that number had doubled. It still hasn’t recovered, which officials nationwide have attributed to the same handful of problems: Transportation, mental health, poverty, and a lingering wariness of sending kids to school when they’re not feeling well.