According to data from the U.S. Census, in 2024, states with Republican governors issued 4.66 permits for housing units per 1,000 residents, while the same statistic for states with Democratic governors was at 3.60. AllSides highlights content from Gigafact, a network of newsrooms that respond to online claims. View the full fact brief on Econofact.

Attorney General Merrick Garland made an impassioned plea Tuesday for an end to attacks on the Justice Department that he said have become routine and undermine democracy in the U.S.

Why it matters: Threats against the Justice Department and its employees have ramped up in recent weeks and the department is "under attack like never before," Garland wrote in a Tuesday Washington Post op-ed.

The big picture: The latest spate of attacks go beyond mere scrutiny or criticism and are "baseless, personal and dangerous," Garland wrote.

One of the most remarkable findings from Yahoo News’s new poll is not exactly a new one.

Respondents to the poll, conducted by YouGov, were asked whether they thought a set of concerns applied to President Biden or Donald Trump. Was either of the two general-election candidates too extreme on the issues to be president? Too corrupt? Too incompetent? Too dangerous?

During Thursday night’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden issued an unmistakable warning about the threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy. The speech also implicitly made a more subtle point about democracy: that defending it can require uncomfortably blunt talk.

A majority of Americans who tuned in had a positive response to President Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday evening, a CNN flash poll found.

More than 6 in 10 Americans who watched the speech had a positive reaction to the president’s message, the survey conducted by SSRS shortly after the address found.

One would be forgiven for mistaking President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday night as a campaign speech. It was overtly political, with the president making more than a dozen references to his “predecessor” and current rival, former President Donald Trump, and several dozen more about the supposed “threats to democracy” Trump poses.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has sued Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows after election officials barred the independent presidential candidate from collecting ballot access signatures inside polling places during the March 5 presidential primary.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Bangor, Maine  Wednesday, slams Bellows as a “Democrat partisan hack” who is “disinterested in the rule of law, basic constitutional protections, in favor of peacocking around as the lap dog of an incompetent, desperate, senile president.”

New House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Fox News on Thursday night that he sees a “cognitive decline” in President Biden, echoing one of the network’s frequent criticisms of the president.  

“Do you see in Joe Biden a cognitive decline? And if so, is that a danger to the country?” Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Johnson.

“I do, I think most of us do,” the 51-year-old Speaker responded. “That’s reality. It’s not a personal slight to him, it has to do with age and acumen, and everyone’s different. Everyone ages differently.”

President Joe Biden issued one of his most dire warnings yet that Donald Trump and his allies are a menace to American democracy, declaring Thursday that the former president is more interested in personal power than upholding the nation’s core values and suggesting even mainstream Republicans are complicit.

“The silence is deafening,” he said.