Republicans are resorting to childish taunts to defend an uncommonly dishonorable state attorney general

It’s a bit like Lucy with the football. Every few years, Democrats convince themselves that a Texas Senate seat might finally switch from red to blue. On paper, it makes sense. Texas is a large and urbanizing state with an increasingly educated – and increasingly non-white – population.

Other one-time Republican strongholds that have undergone similar demographic shifts have turned purple or even blueish – think Georgia, for example. The border counties along the Rio Grande valley, with their deep poverty and big Latino populations, were long thought to be fertile ground to nurture a kind of anti-Trump populism that could be converted into pro-Democratic sentiment. The state Democratic party is anemic there, but a few talented candidates have emerged.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The raid is meant to cast an air of suspicion and criminality over Democratic candidates who, like Omar, are facing the voters in a matter of weeks

On Monday, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the Washington DC area home of Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman and a progressive Democrat, in the latest instance of Donald Trump’s effort to weaponize the national security state to harass, punish and embarrass his political opponents.

The raid, which was approved by a judge after a reportedly extensive back-and-forth with federal security officials, was nominally carried out in connection with a spurious criminal investigation into Omar’s childhood immigration to the US.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Lethal injection was a way for us to deny the reality of capital punishment. Pike’s experience shows us what it is

Christa Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.

The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist