Van Drew escalates

Good morning!

It’s 12 days until Election Day and House Republicans just escalated their fight with Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill over state voter registration records.

A group of GOP officials that includes Rep. Jeff Van Drew sent a subpoena to Trenton on Wednesday seeking a host of documents related to what Sherrill has called a software glitch that allowed thousands of people who said they were noncitizens to register to vote.

Van Drew and the others say they have been demanding records over this issue since Sherrill revealed over the summer, and to date the Sherrill administration has given them 12 documents.

“None of the documents offered any substantive insight into how the noncitizen voter registration issue was discovered or why New Jersey did not conduct any remediation efforts until 2026,” the letter says.

Sherrill says this is all “political theater.”

Van Drew is seeking a fifth term in Congress next month in the 2nd District, and one prognosticator just moved the race from “safe Republican” to “likely Republican.” Cape May Mayor Zack Mullock (D) is hoping to flip the seat to Democratic control again. Van Drew won the district as a Democrat in 2018 but then changed parties over the first Trump impeachment.

Read more from Dana DiFilippo.

Higher ed: An appellate court panel ruled in favor of Rutgers in the university’s yearslong dispute with state officials over whether the school has to get New Jersey’s OK before approving new academic degree programs. The decision comes five years after state lawmakers expanded academic oversight of colleges and universities by giving the state Office of the Secretary of Higher Education veto power over new majors.

Health: A group of Democratic lawmakers has proposed allowing hospitals to open micro-hospitals, smaller facilities with far fewer services than normal acute-care medical centers. The idea is to encourage hospitals in rural and other underserved communities, said bill sponsor Sen. Joe Vitale. “It could be a way for hospitals to do what they do best, without worrying about services few patients use,” he said.

Courts: Transgender inmates at federal prisons in Florida, Minnesota, and New Jersey won at the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday in their fight to get gender-affirming care behind bars. The court turned down an emergency request by the Trump administration to implement a rule to terminate this care.

Benefits: Here’s something that won’t surprise those of you with jobs: Employer-sponsored health insurance plans rose in cost again this year. The cost of individual health insurance plans rose to $9,804 on average, while family coverage reached $28,303, nonpartisan health organization KFF says. Both represented a 5% increase over the last year.

Atlantic City: Via Eric Conklin at NJ Advance Media, South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross has acquired the site of the former Trump Plaza Casino in A.C. “Tens of thousands of families in South Jersey depend upon the renaissance of Atlantic City and, with a new plan, it can become among the greatest destination cities in America,” Norcross spokesman Daniel Fee said.