News & Brews June 17, 2025
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Pa. lawmakers address political violence
In the wake of the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, over the weekend, along with the shooting of MN state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, Pa. state lawmakers spoke about security at yesterday’s meeting of the House Bipartisan Management Committee. They also addressed the culture of political violence. House Majority Leader Matt Bradford said leaders must “condemn it without equivocation, without false equivalency.” And House Republican leader Jesse Topper said, “We cannot become so consumed with what we see in the hatred and the evil in the world that we lose that sense of relationship and that purpose with one another.”
NYC mayor’s race and the Democrats’ future
New York City political news usually doesn’t make it into News & Brews, but I’m making an exception here. The Hill has an interesting piece on how the NYC Democrat mayoral primary is becoming “a proxy war for Democrats’ future.” Beyond highlighting the ideological battles among the candidates, the story notes that NYC uses ranked choice voting, a disastrous and confusing method that could mean the candidate who doesn’t win might actually win.
More details on Trump’s terms of U.S. Steel deal
The AP reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has released additional details on how the Trump administration would control U.S. Steel under the recently announced deal between the iconic American company and Japan-based Nippon Steel. “Under the government’s terms,” the story notes, “it would be impossible without Trump’s consent to relocate U.S. Steel’s headquarters from Pittsburgh, change the name of the company, ‘transfer production or jobs outside the United States,’ shutter factories, or reincorporate the business overseas, among other powers held by the president. Lutnick also said it would require presidential approval to reduce or delay $14 billion in planned investments.”
Kenyatta elected DNC vice chair (again)
After weeks of drama surrounding the Democratic National Committee’s voiding the election of its vice chairs, Pa. state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta is back in a vice chair role. Kenyatta was ousted from the role, along with former co-Vice Chair David Hogg, supposedly over a technicality (but really because the DNC doesn’t like Hogg). But Kenyatta ran for election again and won. Hogg did not run again, and his role is now being reserved for a woman—which, ironically, the DNC can’t define.
Lower Merion data breach not isolated incident
A few weeks ago, I shared the story of the Lower Merion School District data breach in which “‘highly sensitive’ documents were inadvertently published online.” But it turns out this was not an isolated incident. The Inquirer reports that the vendor—Diligent Corp., which manages the software BoardDocs— “has acknowledged that it experienced a national data breach that may have left more than 60,000 confidential school district documents accessible to the public for an unknown period of time.”