It was a classic bait and switch. On Thursday, in the hours before the Oval Office was set to host President Donald Trump’s ceremonial signing of a farm bill — one which had been lauded by anti-hunger advocates for sparing the food stamps program of deep funding cuts — the Trump administration quietly announced its […]
The Trump administration is implementing a new policy to force asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their case is processed, a move an immigration advocacy group says would endanger the lives of vulnerable people seeking violence. The new policy was announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during a fiery House Judiciary Committee […]
A Texas lawsuit trying to declare the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unconstitutional won’t go over well with the public if it prevails. While it took a while for folks to warm up to the 2010 health law, recent polling finds a majority of the public now favors Obamacare. Notwithstanding the real problems with the U.S. […]
The U.S. immigration system is a complex entity. Partly constructed by international laws, federal laws, executive orders and rulings by the Attorney General, it’s an unstable process that is complicated to discern. Only Congress can amend U.S. immigration policy. But to bypass it, the Trump administration has focused on asylum, over which the executive branch […]
Late last week, Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Senate staffer with a history of poorly reasoned opinions striking down Democratic policies, struck down the entire Affordable Care Act. On Wednesday, one of the lawyers behind this suit attempted to defend O’Connor’s opinion. It did not go well. The political-operative-turned-judge’s opinion is widely viewed as […]
There are less than 100 days to go before the U.K. leaves the European Union and the British government still does not have a clear idea of how it will do so. In November, Prime Minister Theresa May presented the full draft of her Brexit deal, which immediately proved wildly unpopular with both Remainers (who […]
In a move that took many U.S. allies and White House staff by surprise, President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he is planning a full withdrawal of the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, triggering a wave of criticism from members of his own party. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason […]
A day after the Senate passed a short-term spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown, the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus and its talking-head supporters rushed to some of the president’s favored platforms — Fox News Channel and Twitter — to urge him to veto the bipartisan stopgap. Conservatives are very upset about growing evidence […]
Two airmen have filed a federal lawsuit against the Defense Department and Defense Secretary James Mattis after learning last month that they would be discharged for their HIV status. According to the complaint filed by Lambda Legal, both men were diagnosed with HIV in 2017, both immediately began treatment, and both had undetectable viral loads within […]
Fetal heartbeat bills aim to outlaw abortion when a “heartbeat” is detected and, in recent days, it’s the ban Republican state lawmakers have been coalescing around — a trend signaling the anti-abortion movement is ready for a complete ban if the Supreme Court is. There was a rise in state legislatures considering fetal heartbeat bills […]
As lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week advanced a criminal justice bill through the Senate, the state of Florida was considering its own move to grant posthumous clemency to the Groveland Four, four black men who were wrongfully accused of raping a white woman in the late 1940s. In July 1949, Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, […]
President Donald Trump promised that his administration was going to build a border wall and Mexico would pay for it. But Trump’s desired wall is no closer to becoming a reality as the midway point of the president’s scheduled four-year term approaches. After threatening last week to shut down the government unless Trump got funding for […]
At the outset of his presidency, Donald Trump pledged to refrain from opening any new business deals in foreign countries. So much for all that. As a new undercover report from pro-transparency watchdog Global Witness uncovered earlier this week, the Trump Organization has been exploring the construction of a new beachside resort in the Dominican […]
Two nuns skimmed $500,000 over a decade from their Catholic school employer and gambled away the cash in Las Vegas, an internal investigation by the school revealed last month. While the incident seems unbelievable, it’s common, as churches often fall prey to fraud and embezzlement by employees. And though the fix is easy, Congress has […]
President Donald Trump unilaterally declared victory over ISIS on Wednesday morning. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 The announcement of a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria was met with surprise by Trump’s own State Department […]
It’s nearly 2019, and lynching is still not a federal crime in the United States. Congress has tried — and failed — to change that almost 250 times over the past century. But the long-pursued effort to make lynching a federal hate crime has now cleared the Senate for the first time in history, after […]
We’re still several weeks away from learning what, exactly, happened in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district. The state’s board of elections postponed a hearing originally scheduled for this Friday until the second week of 2019, meaning the district’s congressional seat will remain vacant when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3. Much of […]
Doctors who violate their patients’ trust in the grossest imaginable fashion can haunt their lives long after they’ve been caught and chased out of the medical professions. But new legislation to be introduced Thursday in New York City aims to begin to fix that. The proposal would allow sexual assault victims to obtain fresh copies […]