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Old typewriters don’t have a delete key, let alone autocorrect, so frequent typos are a stunning reminder of how much I lean on AI tools. Autocorrect is lowkey artificial intelligence. Generative AI is hitting the news workforce in a slow boil. Everyone uses it. Few would ever admit to it. Tagging your news with an AI assist is a bad look. Many institutional newsrooms include prohibitions that give an old guard a convenient excuse to not engage with the tools newer reporters leverage intuitively in secret.

Not AI

Typewriting forces me to engage with a deeper intelligence as far from AI and the internet and the infernal screens burn our eyes and rot away so much of what makes us human in the real world. For example, this dispatch from tonight:

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Let’s address the elephant in the newsroom right off the bat: Pablo Reports is supposed to be your morning newsletter and…

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The big one is Pablo Reports. In fact, the newsletter many of you read this AM for the first time, I’ve been writing off-and-on since Substack launched, in 2017. So the time has finally come for me to go all-in on Pablo Reports.

What’s that look like starting out? It looks like an AM newsletter in your inbox every weekday, Monday through Friday. Then in the afternoon it looks like a YouTube video published on our channel that gets shared in our AM newsletter.

The next day, same deal, an AM newsletter via Substack followed by an afternoon YouTube video — and we’ll keep producing Pablo Reports with the same care, vigor, and consistency as I’ve been privileged to observe from colleagues legendary colleagues like , , and more. LFG.

Graham died this month, at 71; and Defiance Act, his landmark bipartisan Ai civil rights bill, is slowly being killed in the House by Johnson and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan despite a sincere and deeply personal lobbying effort by Paris Hilton. First Lady Melania Trump could be the final nudge the bill needs, but so far the First Lady is mum on Defiance Act.

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Two Unanimous Consents

Killing the Defiance Act — the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act — is a choice by House GOP leaders, not an accident. The bill is straightforward, uncomplicated, non-controversial, creating a federal civil right of action for people whose likenesses are turned into AI-generated sexual forgeries: a minimum of $150,000 in liquidated damages, $250,000 if the forgery is tied to assault or stalking, the right to sue under a pseudonym, a decade to discover the harm and still sue over it.

Graham and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., passed a version of it by unanimous consent in the Senate during the last Congress, in July 2024. Johnson wouldn’t put it on the floor so it died when the term expired. So Durbin and Graham teamed up again, introducing Defiance Act fresh as S. 1837, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., carrying the House companion, H.R. 3562.

On Jan. 13, Durbin returned to the Senate floor for a second time with a unanimous consent request for Defiance Act. No one objected. The bill passed unopposed for a second time and twice, the bill went to the House to wait for either a floor vote where its sure to pass by a broad bipartisan margin, or to be slowly, quietly, politically killed again by Republican leaders, namely Johnson and Jordan, who have led their House GOP conference into what is expected to be an electoral bloodbath in November’s midterm election.

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Ms. Hilton Goes to Washington

Rep. Lee and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez brought Paris Hilton to the Capitol on Jan. 22 to make the case in person. Hilton was seventeen when a stolen sex tape made her a punchline before anyone thought to ask if she’d survived something.

From Hilton’s remarks — 

“People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse. There were no laws at the time to protect me. There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it. They called me names, they laughed and made me the punchline. They sold my pain for clicks, and then they told me to be quiet, to move on, to even be grateful for the attention.”

“These people didn’t see me as a young woman who had been exploited. They didn’t see the panic that I felt, the humiliation or the shame. No one asked me what I lost.”

“Too many women are afraid to exist online, or sometimes, to exist at all... This isn’t just about technology, it’s about power.”

“I would go to the ends of the earth to protect her [her daughter], but I can’t protect her from this, not yet, and that’s why I’m here, because this isn’t about just technology. It’s about power. It’s about someone using someone’s likeness to humiliate, silence and strip them of their dignity. But victims deserve more than after-the-fact apologies. We deserve justice.”

The Runaround

In March, I asked AOC for an update on Defiance Act:

On May 21, the bill was formally referred to the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who has basically ignored it since. I asked Jordan in June if the Judiciary Committee he leads will take up the bill. “I don’t know,” he said.

A month later, I checked in again with AOC:

“We’ve Had a Very Busy Week”

Last week, I asked House Majority Leader Steve Scalise about Defiance Act:

Minutes later, I ran into Laurel Lee on her way to an evening House vote and asked her the same question I asked Scalise:

In the end, the only person who can definitively answer a question about timing on a House vote is the Speaker, so I tracked down Mike Johnson that same night and put him on the spot as he was leaving his Capitol suite:

Two days later, Politico Playbook author Will Steakin reported that Republican leadership’s real objection isn’t the bill — it’s who gets credit for it. Handing Ocasio-Cortez a bipartisan win, the reporting suggested, is a bigger problem for Johnson than the deepfakes themselves.

Later that same day, Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent’s Eric Garcia she’d welcome help from an unlikely direction: First Lady Melania Trump. “She has absolutely been a champion on this issue. I think that this is a really great opportunity, just as we have in the House, to be able to champion and for women to uplift one another across party lines,” said AOC.

“Whip Smart and Not Reticent”

Graham and Durbin ran this same play twice — bipartisan Senate Judiciary leaders, opposite parties, one bill, two Congresses, two unanimous consents. I asked some of Graham’s Republican colleagues on June 27 what made that work.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo.: “The fact that he succeeded is just a testament to how far his reach was with his colleagues because he could work deals with Democrats, Republicans, conservative Republicans, moderate Republicans, and Defiance Act is a great example of how we was so effective.”

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.: “Lindsey was a small earthquake and I’m gonna miss him.” On what made Graham effective: “He was whip smart and he was not reticent in terms of telling you were he stood.”

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan.: “I don’t know that Lindsey had to work too hard to get me on board with [the Defiance Act]. I love it, especially to help any youth attacked in this way.”

Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind.: “He was very effective on the job. There was no one more skilled at it. I hope I get to that point one day.”

The Missing Nudge

So here is where it sits: Johnson does not need Jordan’s permission. He can bring the DEFIANCE Act to the floor under suspension of the rules whenever he wants, Judiciary Committee sign-off or not. A source on the committee tells me Jordan has no intention of ever taking it up on his own. That leaves Johnson holding a bill with 57 cosponsors and counting — 29 Democrats, 28 Republicans — that would pass by a wide margin the moment it’s called, and no apparent reason not to call it, except the one Politico already named.

Which is why the shape of what happens next may not run through the Capitol at all. A public nudge from the White House — Melania Trump, who has been the administration’s most visible face on synthetic image abuse through her advocacy for the TAKE IT DOWN Act, or even Ivanka, the president’s daughter — would hand Johnson exactly the cover Politico says he’s missing: a big chunk of the credit for the bill that doesn’t go to Ocasio-Cortez.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether the first lady would extend that advocacy to the Defiance Act specifically.

Without the right nudge, Defiance Act will mostly likely run the clock again, the same way it did the first time Graham and Durbin pushed it through.

The late-Sen. Lindsey Graham answered more than a hundred of my questions in five years on the Hill — including his last one on the record. This is what that access is for: knowing exactly where his last bill is buried, and who’s sitting on the shovel. If you want the next update before Politico gets it, this is the subscription that gets you there.

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