Democrats in Congress have reintroduced a proposal to ban the harmful, anti-LGBTQ practice of “conversion therapy” as Republicans are ramping up legislative and ideological attacks on LGBTQ people across the country. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, introduced by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) and Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Patty Murray (D-Washington), would ban conversion therapy…
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The Delaware House has teed up a vote on a bill that would give businesses a vote in the town of Seaford, Delaware — a proposal with frightening implications for elections in a time when lawmakers are increasingly targeting voting rights. The bill allows Seaford — a town of roughly 8,500 people — to amend its charter to allow non-resident business owners to cast a vote in local elections…
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has ruled multiple times over the past year to slash climate regulations and aid the fossil fuel industry and developers — and new reporting finds that he may have an indirect personal financial stake in those rulings. As The Intercept reported on Monday, Samuel Alito’s wife Martha Ann Alito struck a deal with oil and gas company Citizen Energy III last year: She…
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In 1985, President Ronald Reagan nominated Charles Cooper, a deputy in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to become assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. In need of a deputy himself, hardline conservative Cooper reached out to fellow DOJ employee and now-Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, with whom he had become friendly, and urged him to apply.
An Indiana chapter of the far right hate group Moms for Liberty posted a newsletter on Wednesday featuring a quote from Adolf Hitler on the front page — and is now attacking the news outlet that first reported on the incident. As IndyStar reported this week, the Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty — a group most recently in the news for being labeled an extremist group by the Southern…
With the Supreme Court expected to hand down its ruling on student debt forgiveness any week now, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is vowing to continue fighting for relief for borrowers even if the Supreme Court strikes it down. In a press conference with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said that lawmakers in the caucus, as well as the Congressional Black…
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and a number of other progressives in the House have announced that they’re boycotting far right Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to Congress on Thursday, citing Modi’s abysmal human rights record and erosion of free press and religion rights in India. Modi is slated to speak before Congress as part of a trip to the U.S. on an invite from…
Democrats introduced a bill on Wednesday that would, for the first time, enshrine protections for LGBTQ people in a wide swath of situations and codify safeguards granted to the LGBTQ community under a landmark Supreme Court ruling. Rep. Mark Takano (D-California) — co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus and first openly gay person of color elected to Congress — and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D…
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Student debt advocates are urging Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from two key pending Supreme Court cases that could see the overturn of President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan after a stunning report has revealed a potential conflict of interest for the justice. GOP megadonor Paul Singer, who has suddenly found himself in the spotlight after ProPublica revealed his…
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In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took a fishing trip to Alaska on a Republican billionaire’s private jet and never disclosed it, which experts have said was illegal. Then, as ProPublica unveiled in a bombshell exposé on Tuesday, Alito refused to recuse himself when that same billionaire’s hedge fund had business before the Supreme Court at least 10 times. Experts have condemned the…
House Republicans have advanced a bill that would majorly restrict access to abortion pill mifepristone as part of a quiet effort to attack abortion rights at the federal level. Last week, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee advanced funding legislation regarding the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that would revoke an FDA decision finalized earlier this year that greatly…
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is launching a sweeping Senate investigation into Amazon’s “abysmal” unsafe warehouse labor practices after reports have found for years that the company is a uniquely dangerous place to work. Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Tuesday demanding that the company answer to…
Far right Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a bill last week that nullifies local laws mandating water and heat breaks for construction workers as work-related heat deaths in the state are rising and temperatures are hitting record highs. The provision is part of a bill called the “Death Star bill” by its opponents, which nullifies a host of local regulations that enact additional protections for…
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The Department of Justice has released a scathing, 89-page report of the Minneapolis Police Department conducted after the police murder of George Floyd, shedding light on the culture of unlawful police violence and rampant racism that laid the groundwork for Floyd’s murder three years ago. The report, released Friday, finds that the Minneapolis Police Department, referred to as MPD in the report…
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New data shows that the number of legal abortions plummeted by the thousands in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year, demonstrating the vast chilling effect that bans have had on people’s ability to access the procedure. According to data from #WeCount analyzed by FiveThirtyEight, states that had an abortion ban in place for at least one week…
The American health insurance system is expensive, actively antagonizes patients, and leaves millions of people without access to coverage — and, as a new poll shows, is often dysfunctional even for the majority of people who have an insurance plan. According to a new nationally representative survey of 3,605 people with health coverage released by KFF on Thursday, roughly 6 in 10 adults with…
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In a somewhat surprising ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), delivering a win to Native American communities by upholding a decades-old law aimed at keeping Native American children from being taken away from their families and tribes. In a 7-2 decision on Haaland v. Brackeen, justices struck down all challenges to the law, “some on the merits…
The Democratic staff on the House Education and the Workforce Committee announced on Thursday that they have filed a petition to form a union, the Congressional Workers Union (CWU), marking the first committee staff in congressional history to unionize. If the workers’ union is approved, they will be able to collectively bargain for provisions like salary, sick leave and better working conditions.
The NAACP is warning President Joe Biden that failing to deliver on student debt relief if the Supreme Court strikes down his forgiveness plan will be tantamount to breaking his promises to narrow the racial wealth gap. In a letter sent to Biden on Wednesday, first reported by NBC, the group expressed frustration over Biden’s recent move to end the student loan payment pause at the end of this…
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On Tuesday, Republicans voted to pass legislation that would prohibit the Consumer Product Safety Commission from banning gas stoves — a proposal that was never quite on the table for the Biden administration, but that became a major moment in Republicans’ culture war nonetheless. The legislation, which passed with all Republicans and 29 Democrats voting “yes,” is largely symbolic.
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A group of Democrats is launching a push to force a vote in the Republican-dominated House on a proposal to ban assault weapons and enact other gun control initiatives as gun violence reaches a record high in the U.S. With the support of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), three Democrats have each taken the helm of a discharge petition to force votes on three different proposals…
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After spending months threatening to tank the economy over the federal deficit, Republicans have unveiled a set of new tax proposals that would cost the government billions of dollars — by handing tens of billions of dollars of tax cuts to the richest 1 percent of Americans, as a new report reveals. On Friday, just a week after the conclusion of the debt ceiling showdown…
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has fired a shot across the bow to the White House in his latest move in his quest to lower prescription drug prices in the U.S. Sanders has vowed to oppose all health-related nominees, including President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), until the Biden administration presents a “comprehensive” plan to address the prescription…
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New research based on the latest publicly available data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention finds that 2021 was a record year for gun deaths in the U.S., with deaths hitting a record high for the second year in a row. The report by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions finds that 48,830 people died due to firearm-related causes in 2021, the highest number on record.
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A key Republican witness in a recent House subcommittee hearing may have lied to Congress about his ties to far right propaganda group Project Veritas in a recent testimony dubiously accusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of being biased against the right, potentially constituting a breach of federal law, Democrats are saying. Republicans had presented suspended FBI agent Garret O’…
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Amid numerous scandals that have revealed the deep corruption on the Supreme Court bench, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) have reintroduced a bill seeking to reverse the relative impunity that Supreme Court justices enjoy and enact a set of binding ethical rules. The Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act would ensure that, like every other federal…
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President Joe Biden has vetoed a conservative-backed bill that would have repealed his plan to deliver up to $20,000 of relief to student debtors across the country. The bill would have nixed the plan (to provide up to $10,000 of forgiveness to student debtors making under $125,000 a year and $20,000 to Pell Grant recipients), which hasn’t yet been able to take effect. Currently…
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As unprecedented, climate change-fueled wildfires in Canada are resulting in record-breaking pollution in cities and towns across the U.S., marking not only a climate event but also a major public health event, a coal-funded lawyer went on Fox News on Wednesday night to spread a particularly dangerous lie: that breathing wildfire smoke doesn’t have any negative health effects. Appearing on “The…
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