The debt ceiling deal struck between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) throws student debtors under the bus by forcing student loan payments to restart at the end of this summer with recourse for the presidential administration. The bill mandates that the ongoing student loan payment pause, which has been in place since March 2020, will end on August 30…
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As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) scrambles to win the support of far right members of the Republican caucus for his debt ceiling deal, it is becoming increasingly clear that McCarthy may have to rely on support of Democrats to pass the package. Roughly 20 House Republicans have announced their opposition to the bill since it was released over the weekend…
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Amid the longest period in Congressional history without any raising of the federal minimum wage, new polling finds that the vast majority of voters not only support raising the minimum wage, but also nearly tripling it. According to polling by Data for Progress released last week, 74 percent of voters support raising the federal minimum wage to $20 an hour — almost three times the current level…
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The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Thursday that severely curtails the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate water pollution in the latest of the far right justices’ crusade against environmental regulations. In a 5-4 decision, with the three liberal justices and Brett Kavanaugh disagreeing, the Court ruled that the EPA’s jurisdiction over protecting the “waters of the…
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A staggering majority of the U.S. federal discretionary budget went toward so-called defense and other militaristic and carceral programs in the past year, a new report reveals, as U.S. defense spending continues to reach new heights. According to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released on Wednesday, the U.S. spent $1.1 trillion of the discretionary budget on militarism and…
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has condemned Republicans’ brinkmanship with the quickly approaching debt limit after GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz (Florida) openly admitted on Tuesday that his party is approaching the issue as a “hostage” negotiation. Political commentators and lawmakers have long observed that the Republican Party’s strategy toward the debt ceiling — of demanding that Democrats…
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One of the most comprehensive data sets on abortions yet released after the fall of Roe v. Wade, released Tuesday, has revealed that legal abortions fell by over 6 percent in the six months following the ruling as thousands of people have been forced to resort to illegal means or else put their bodies on the line as states across the country banned abortion. The research, released by the Society…
Horrifying new data shows that gun deaths among U.S. children have surged at an unprecedented rate in recent years, reaching an all-time high as conservatives have worked to loosen the country’s gun laws at a record pace. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of children under the age of 19 killed by guns increased by an astounding 46 percent when adjusted for population changes, according to a Pew…
Democratic governors in three states have announced that their states will be stockpiling abortion pills after a far right federal judge issued a sweeping ruling on Friday aimed at taking mifepristone — a drug used for abortions and management of Cushing’s syndrome — off the shelves nationwide. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced that the state has negotiated a contract to obtain…
Last week, Republicans in the North Dakota Senate killed a bill that would have expanded a program to provide children living close to the federal poverty line access to meals at school for free. The vote was met with outcry over its cruelty, as one Senate Republican asked, “Is [children going hungry] the problem of the state of North Dakota?” This week, 13 of the Republicans who voted to kill the…
Billionaire Republican megadonor Harlan Crow rocketed into infamy on Thursday after an explosive ProPublica investigation found that he has been giving lavish gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for decades now, as the Court, influenced by people like Crow, lurches further to the right. But, as a search of public donation information shows, Crow has also been quietly funding another…
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Calls for conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be impeached erupted again on Thursday after a bombshell report from ProPublica unveiled ethics violations at a level that experts say has never before been seen within the Supreme Court. According to an explosive investigation published by ProPublica Thursday morning, Clarence Thomas has accepted a huge number of lavish vacations…
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On Wednesday, Michigan became the first state to formally repeal an abortion ban after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) signed a bill on Wednesday afternoon that the state legislature passed last month, repealing crucial parts of a nearly century-old abortion ban in the state. The bill revokes the section of a 1931 abortion law that makes it a felony in nearly all cases to…
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The vast majority of the Senate Republican caucus united last week to introduce a bill that would permanently repeal the estate tax, targeting one of the few provisions in the U.S. tax code that solely affects the richest 0.1 percent of Americans. Led by Sen. John Thune (South Dakota), the top Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Taxation and Internal Revenue Service Oversight…
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Progressive Brandon Johnson won the Chicago mayoral race on Tuesday, triumphing over conservative Democrat Paul Vallas in a victory that serves as a rebuke to Vallas’s “tough-on-crime” platform and shows that candidates running on left-wing platforms can win. Johnson, a former labor organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), defeated his well-financed opponent on a platform of supporting…
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Last week, House Republicans passed a sweeping energy bill containing so many pro-fossil fuel provisions that climate advocates and progressives noted it may as well have been written by the industry itself — and, as a new report reveals, Republicans parroted talking points lifted verbatim from industry lobbyists as they argued for the bill. “Energy security is national security.” That’s a quote…
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) has introduced a bill that would end corporate personhood with the goal of reversing Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the infamous Supreme Court decision that has unleashed a flood of corporate “dark money” into the U.S. election system, threatening to undermine democracy altogether. The We the People Amendment, introduced in the House with 26…
Lobbyists and the restaurant industry are the driving force behind a proposed child labor bill that Republicans are pushing through the Iowa legislature, a new investigation has revealed, as the GOP wages an extremist push to loosen child labor regulations across the country. According to an investigation by More Perfect Union, the extremely powerful restaurant industry group the National…
A new report by Stanford University researchers finds that just training the model behind the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT released emissions equivalent to those of 9 cars over the course of their lifetimes, adding another layer of scrutiny regarding the future of humanity on Earth to technocrats’ promised AI revolution. According to Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Index…
As Amazon Labor Union’s groundbreaking labor movement gained momentum — and, in some ways, faltered — in 2022, Amazon was busy shelling out millions of dollars to anti-union consultants in order to ensure that the union movement would fail, new filings show. As first reported by HuffPost, new financial disclosures filed on Friday with the Department of Labor show that Amazon spent $14.2…
Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a sobering report aimed in part at policy makers, saying in no uncertain terms that there is a “rapidly closing window” to act on climate in order to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Just 10 days later, Republicans in the House passed a bill aimed at slamming the window shut. On Thursday, the House passed H.R. 1…
A federal judge in Texas has struck down a major preventive care rule set by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that has allowed millions of Americans to access critical health care like cancer screenings, immunizations, and HIV treatment cost-free, in a decision that experts are saying will have devastating impacts across the country if upheld. Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush nominee…
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Just two days after three children and three adults were killed in a horrific school shooting in Tennessee, Republicans in neighboring North Carolina overrode a governor’s veto for the first time in five years in order to weaken gun laws in the state. In a party line vote on Wednesday, just 48 hours after the shooting at The Covenant School, the North Carolina House voted 71 to 46 to override the…
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Ex-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz testified during a much-anticipated hearing led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Wednesday, parroting what appeared to be blatant lies about the company’s fierce anti-union campaign and hundreds of labor law violations over the past year and a half. For the roughly two hours that Schultz was in the hot seat before Sander’s Health, Education…
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House Republicans are preparing to pass a sweeping energy bill that Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), have condemned as nothing more than a Big Oil wish list that would pilfer the public’s pockets to pad corporate profits. H.R. 1, dubbed the Lower Energy Costs Act, is a combination of several Republican energy and climate proposals that would roll back provisions of…
As the U.S. defense budget continues to soar to record heights, even the Pentagon is coming out against the requirement that defense officials submit mandatory funding “wish lists” each year, a practice that tacks on tens of billions of dollars to already sky-high budget requests. In response to efforts by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), Secretary of Defense Lloyd J.
As the country reels from news of yet another school shooting at an elementary school in Tennessee this week, one Tennessee Republican has vowed that Congress will never solve the U.S.’s mass shooting epidemic, and that only Christian nationalism can stop the violence. “We’re not going to fix it.” This was Rep. Tim Burchett’s response when asked by reporters about the U.S.
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Chipotle must pay nearly a quarter of a million dollars to workers in Maine after labor officials determined that the company illegally closed their store after workers announced their intent to unionize last year. The company will pay out $240,000 in front pay and back pay to 24 workers whose store was closed in July. Front pay is a type of remedy for workers issued when there is no order to…
Republicans’ major tax cuts for corporations and the rich are overwhelmingly the drivers of current issues over the national debt, which the GOP is using as an excuse to force through cuts to welfare and government spending that are not contributing nearly as much to the debt, a new report reveals. Over the past two decades, increases in the U.S.’s debt ratio, or the proportion of the national…
Kentucky Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed a sweeping anti-LGBTQ bill on Friday that would have banned gender-affirming care for trans children and put LGBTQ children in danger at school and at home. The bill, Senate Bill 150, would have banned medically necessary, life-saving care for trans children, forcing transitioning children to detransition and requiring them to use locker rooms and…
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