Today's five.

Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn in the Texas GOP Senate runoff, which is what happens when an incumbent senator spends years being reliably boring in a party that currently rewards the opposite. Trump endorsed Paxton late — "eleventh-hour" is how the Texas Tribune put it — and it worked anyway. Paxton brings a trail of scandals into the general election. His opponent will be Democratic state Rep. James Talarico. Bloomberg noted Democrats are watching Texas closely, hoping to flip both chambers of Congress. The question isn't whether Trump's endorsement mattered. It's whether it'll still matter in November.

The Trump administration just proposed nondisclosure agreements for every federal employee — new and existing — which is a thing corporations do when they don't trust their staff and governments do when they really don't trust their staff. OPM filed the draft with the Federal Register, citing unauthorized leaks. Violators could face civil and criminal penalties. The government also wants any "royalties" employees earn from disclosing covered information — a detail The Guardian flagged; Bloomberg led with the leak-crackdown framing. The proposal is open for public comment, which is how you make a thing that's already decided feel participatory.

Three outlets, one argument: the right should stop ceding "human rights" and "education" to the other side and take the language back. The Washington Examiner makes the foreign policy case — that framing Cold War-era Latin American revolutionaries as the good guys was a progressive storytelling victory, not a factual one. The Daily Caller and Independent Journal Review focus domestically, pointing at schools and what they're calling divisive identity politics. What's interesting isn't the argument — it's the timing. When a political movement starts writing "we must reclaim" pieces, it usually means they've noticed something slipping.

The Supreme Court just told Florida it cannot sue California and Washington for issuing commercial truck driver licenses to undocumented immigrants, which is a fairly decisive answer to a fairly unusual question. Florida's argument was that the other states were making it too easy — no English requirement, no federal authorization. Bloomberg called it a "duck." NBC called it a "toss." Both are right, in different ways. The case was always a long shot, and the Court treated it like one. What it doesn't resolve is the underlying tension between states doing very different things with the same federal silence.

The group pushing to restrict transgender students' access to school bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams in Maine didn't lose a vote — they just didn't collect enough valid signatures to get one. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows made the call Tuesday. The effort needed a specific threshold to qualify for a referendum; it fell short. There's no indication from the excerpt how close they got, which is its own story. The measure can presumably be attempted again with a cleaner signature drive. Ballot initiative democracy: surprisingly bureaucratic.