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When President Joe Biden tried to enact student loan forgiveness programs, it was treated as an unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach of power. But now that Donald Trump is president, mucking around in student loan programs is perfectly fine and dandy—though this time the goal is to hurt people rather than help them.  Trump is preparing to turn the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program into yet another tool of retribution. Under PSLF, students who enter public service—including government and nonprofit jobs—have any remaining balance on student loans forgiven after 10 years of payments.  Public service jobs are often lower paying than their private-sector equivalents, especially for those requiring advanced degrees. Before PSLF was created in 2007, student loan debt would often act as a barrier preventing graduates from taking public-sector jobs.  But now, the Department of Education is gearing up to remove eligibility from any employer that it deems to be involved in “illegal activities.” The Trump administration’s warped sense of what constitutes an illegal activity is exactly what you’d expect. Trump’s March executive order requires Education Secretary Linda McMahon to redefine public service to exclude organizations that work on immigration issues or transgender rights, along with any employers that she determines are “aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” or violate state laws like trespassing, disorderly conduct, or blocking highways.  People rally outside of the Supreme Court in 2023, protesting against a lawsuit seeking to block President Joe Biden’s student loan relief efforts. In other words, organizations that focus on anything that Trump and McMahon don’t like will get yeeted from eligibility for the PSLF program.  Of course, it’s not illegal to work with immigrants, to help trans kids, or to engage in peaceful protests, but the Trump administration doesn’t care. The entire point is to make loan forgiveness unobtainable for filthy liberals. There’s no way that this won’t be used as a weapon, where the Trump administration can remove any organization it doesn’t like, for any reason, wiping out loan forgiveness for employees—regardless of the law. Contrast this with Biden’s detailed rulemaking efforts explaining his authority to enact student loan forgiveness and lengthy outlines of each proposed rule change. But honestly, it probably didn’t matter what Biden proposed: The Supreme Court was always going to rush to rule against him. Even when the Biden administration significantly narrowed the scope of relief after the ruling, red states kept suing to ensure that students would stay saddled with debt.  Watching Trump pretend that this is about “restoring” PSLF is ridiculous given his behavior during his first term, when only 7,000 people received loan forgiveness and the other 99% of applications were denied. While Biden fixed that deliberately broken process, Trump is wiping it out again.  When Biden exerted any presidential authority, no matter how well-grounded in law, it was deemed a historic crisis and a trampling of Congress. But when Trump throws up a lawless, bigoted executive order, it’s totally fine.  Who needs law when you’ve got Congress and the Supreme Court willing to let you do whatever you want?

In a sign Republicans are out of touch with regular Americans, Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday bragged that the Senate had “the longest continuous work period in 15 years.” “We’ve taken more roll-call votes so far this year than at the same point in any year since at least 1989,” Thune added in a speech on the Senate floor, as he tried to build support for Senate Republicans’ actions to strip health care and food aid from the poorest Americans in order to cut taxes for the rich and fund President Donald Trump’s masked deportation force. YouTube Video How long was this “continuous work period,” you might ask? The Senate was in session on weekdays from Jan. 3 through March 14, the chamber’s first scheduled weeklong break, according to the Senate’s official calendar. Of course, that time in session includes days off for federal holidays and days where they gaveled out early.  As of Wednesday, the Senate has had 111 days in session since Jan. 3, according to the secretary of the Senate. During that time, they’ve had 11 Fridays where they didn’t meet, in addition to various scheduled breaks. What’s more, Thune bragging about the number of votes taken is an odd choice. The GOP and its unified control of Washington have so far enacted just 49 pieces of legislation, according to GovTrack, which monitors actions in Congress. That’s far off track from the 117th Congress, when Democrats had unified control of the nation’s capitol. The Democratic-controlled 117th Congress had 1,234 pieces of legislation enacted over the course of two years. Republicans would have to seriously pick up the pace over the next year and a half to get to that level. And if Republicans want to talk about quality over quantity, Democrats have them beat there, too. In the 117th Congress, Democrats passed a sweeping COVID-19 relief bill, which gave Americans stimulus checks. They also expanded subsidies for Americans to obtain health care, passed $1 trillion in infrastructure funding, and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower prescription costs. What have Republicans done this Congress?  They passed a budget that will strip away health care and food stamps from millions of Americans. They made it harder for Americans to afford the cost of college, and beefed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make Trump’s deportation gestapo the largest police force in the United States. Republicans are also set to let the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire, which will cause millions to become unable to afford their health insurance.  But congrats on working a few full weeks in a row, Republicans. What a sacrifice.

According to President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Americans are jumping at the chance to work long, low-paid hours in the fields.  Lori Chavez-DeRemer appeared Wednesday on Fox News, where both she and the hosts challenged the silly leftist notion that U.S. citizens aren’t keen to take certain difficult jobs.  “What happened to the threat from the left that American citizens won’t do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do?” asked Todd Piro, co=host of “Fox & Friends First.” “Because when I look at these numbers, I think, ‘Nope, the American citizen is willing to do those jobs.’” “Americans are willing to do the job,” Chavez-DeRemer replied. “What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.” YouTube Video While there’s nothing wrong with putting more money back into the pockets of American workers, some of the positions Chavez-DeRemer and the Trump administration are hounding about have a long history of low pay and abusive work conditions.  Forty-two percent of crop farmworkers are foreign born and not authorized to work in the U.S., according to the Department of Agriculture. Undocumented immigrants have been known to live in bug-infested shacks as they work long hours on farms for little pay.  This push to put Americans in the fields comes amid the Trump administration’s brutal push to expel undocumented—and even some documented—immigrants from the U.S. And with the administration telling Americans to turn to the fields if they want to keep their Medicaid coverage, it seems as if Trump and his crew are aware of their dire need to fill the labor shortage they’re fomenting.

A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | MAGA world implodes after Trump cronies flip-flop on Epstein files

A growing number of U.S. citizens—many of them Latino—say they’ve been detained by immigration agents in what critics are calling blatant racial profiling and overzealous policing. Of course, citizens aren’t supposed to be arrested or detained unless agents believe they’ve broken the law. But across the country, reports are piling up of Latino citizens being stopped, questioned, and even jailed—just for looking “foreign.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t released statistics on these incidents in months, but the Department of Homeland Security is already doing damage control. Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Axios that claims of citizens being wrongfully detained are not true, and accused the media of “shamefully peddling a false narrative” to smear ICE agents. Protesters gather to denounce ICE operations in Los Angeles on June 10. “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE,” McLaughlin said. But anecdotal evidence paints a murkier picture. Axios reviewed news reports, social media clips, and complaints from advocacy groups and found several cases where citizens were taken by ICE, sometimes for days. In May, ICE detained Florida native Leonardo Garcia Venegas while he was on the job at a construction site in Foley, Alabama. They accused him of carrying a fake Real ID, ordered him to his knees, and handcuffed him, according to Noticias Telemundo. Then there’s Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who spent 10 days in ICE custody after agents arrested him in Arizona and refused to believe his citizenship. Last month, ICE briefly held Elzon Lemus, an electrician from Brentwood, New York, during a routine traffic stop, saying he matched the description of someone they were looking for. Related | Trump goons arrest another politician, laws be damned In California, plainclothes ICE agents briefly detained Jason Brian Gavidia, born in East Los Angeles, outside of a Montebello body shop and demanded to know where he was born. “I’m an American, bro!” he shouted, as captured on video. In Southern California alone, at least five more incidents have been reported, according to Guadalupe Gonzalez of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. And they don’t appear isolated.  ICE raids have continued aggressively across Latino-heavy regions like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego, and states like Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and New York—raising fears that the agency is targeting communities by ethnicity, not evidence. Civil rights groups are pushing back. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund plans to file a $1 million federal lawsuit on behalf of Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen and photographer who was allegedly detained while filming an ICE raid outside of a Hollywood Home Depot. Garcia had no criminal record and confirmed his citizenship, but he was still held for a day. Sen Alex Padilla is pushed out of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s news conference on June 12. “We do our due diligence,” McLaughlin insisted. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted and are not resulting in the arrest of U.S. citizens.” But advocates aren’t buying it. “Let’s just call it what it is: This is racial discrimination,” said councilmember Mario Trujillo of Downey, California.  Even Sen. Alex Padilla of California, who was physically removed from a Homeland Security briefing in June, weighed in on the matter. “Reports of American citizens detained by ICE purely based on their race are wholly unacceptable and run afoul of our Fourth Amendment rights,” he told Axios. “No one should feel unsafe because of the color of their skin, but in [President] Donald Trump’s America—where indiscriminate immigration raids are commonplace—this is the stark reality.” For now, ICE denies any wrongdoing. But to many Latino citizens, the message is clear: In Trump’s America, having the right papers isn’t enough.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals just did scuzzy businesses a solid by throwing out the click-to-cancel rule. Finalized during the Biden administration, back when the Federal Trade Commission was actually doing its job, the rule would have required companies to make canceling their services as easy as signing up.  This rule was a slam dunk, because literally no consumer is clamoring for the right to drive to the gym to cancel your free trial or to sit on the phone with a newspaper hell-bent on keeping you trapped in a subscription. But companies desperately want that, so they ran to a friendly court to whine about how unfair it was to rob them of the ability to drain consumer pocketbooks.  Going to the 8th Circuit was a pretty safe bet, as the court has only one Democratic appointee. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall Republicans eager to lend a helping hand to businesses. Five days before the rule was supposed to go into effect, the 8th Circuit obligingly blocked the rule, providing American consumers with the god-given freedom to have unwanted subscription charges hammer their bank accounts.  “On the Court” by Clay Bennett One of the bases for the ruling was that the FTC failed to do a preliminary regulatory analysis, required when a rule’s impact on the economy would exceed $100 million. Of course, the only way companies can complain that making it easier to cancel things would cost at least nine figures is to acknowledge that trapping people into paying for services they can’t cancel is a significant moneymaker. The Trump administration could always choose to restart the rulemaking process and do the necessary regulatory analysis, but these days, the FTC is not really all that jazzed about consumer protection. Instead, the agency is currently busy investigating Elon Musk’s enemies and making merger approvals contingent on companies agreeing to let the administration dictate what advertisers they choose to work with and what platforms they will advertise on. What company doesn’t love the idea of being forced to buy ads on Trump’s social media network or to have their ads appear alongside Grok’s open praise for Adolf Hitler over on X? Though the FTC did go to court to defend the rule, the Trump administration had already tipped its hand in mid-May when it delayed the implementation of the click-to-cancel rule for two months, which just happened to be long enough for the appeals court to issue its ruling. The word salad justification for the delay was “Having conducted a fresh assessment of the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose, the Commission has determined that the original deferral period insufficiently accounted for the complexity of compliance”—which sounds like giving businesses a pass because they said it’s just too darn hard for them to obey.  Since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC appointees months ago, there’s no real worry that any commissioners would come forward to say that maybe it is good to protect consumers from sleazy corporate tactics. So now, you can continue racking up unwanted fees with dirtbag companies whose business plan relies on keeping you trapped. Freedom!

A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | The Texas flash flood is a preview of the chaos to come

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump revives his tyrannical obsession with taking over DC Between this and New York, Trump really wants to take over cities he supposedly hates. Musk’s anti-woke AI chatbot goes full Nazi—then gets shut off Wait a second … the Nazi’s robot sidekick is also a Nazi?! 🤯 Remember when the president wasn’t supposed to touch student loans? Biden wants to help students? Unconstitutional. Trump wants to hurt them? Totally fine! Cartoon: Emergency alert! A light rain will become a weather emergency with this idiotic administration. Trump’s cruel purge of federal workers just got even easier The legislative branch caves to Trump, and the judicial branch is in his pocket. What do they call that again? GOP leader of Senate demands praise for working He did it, everybody. He went to work. 👏 Click here to see more cartoons.

On Monday, President Donald Trump’s private media company launched a streaming service that features content from another private media company, which just so happens to have a White House press pool spot. Seems fine! Truth+ is the latest offering from Trump Media, a company that purports to be a multi-channel powerhouse but is really just a vehicle for Trump and his family to launch low-rent grift after low-rent grift.  Truth+ joins Trump Mobile, a low-rent cell phone plan; Truth.Fi, a low-rent financial services firm that will offer “America First” investments; and whatever other low-rent crypto grifts the Trump family is pushing these days. Anything for Trump to profit off of the presidency.  The new streaming service will feature Newsmax as a “flagship channel”, whatever that means. It’s genuinely pathetic that Newsmax, an outlet that has roughly 10% the viewership of Fox News, is going to be the star of the show. It’s also genuinely problematic that Trump is entering into a business partnership with a media company that he rewarded with a press pool spot despite Newsmax’s meager viewership. Related | Trump family’s latest grift is coming for your phone If this absolute rat’s nest of conflicts of interest wasn’t enough, how about the fact that the announcement of the launch boosted the stock price of both Trump Media and Newsmax? Other outlets in the Truth+ lineup include luminaries such as Real America’s Voice, One America News Network, and Patriot TV. It’s good that OANN got a spot, since its viewership has been so low that it got booted from cable TV. Maybe the combination of Truth+ and primetime host Matt Gaetz will make the magic happen for the far-right network.  These outlets don’t have meaningful viewership or distinctive coverage, but they do have an in with the most corrupt president who is eager to make a buck. And make no mistake: Trump wants to affiliate with these tiny sycophantic outlets precisely because they are tiny and sycophantic. He loathes actual media coverage. The notion that a company might not praise Trump 24/7 is inconceivable to him.  He reacts to balanced—rather than subservient—news coverage by suing networks and demanding bribes—er, donations—to his nonexistent presidential library. He got $16 million from CBS News and $15 million from Disney by threatening the companies. Surely he’s happy about the rightward lurch of the Washington Post, once a venerable American icon.  The only real successes Trump Media has seen are in the crypto space, where buying the Trump family scam du jour is a quick and easy way to bribe the president. It’s not clear how Trump will make money off a streaming network of hard-right underperformers, but if anyone can figure out a way, it’s Trump.

PoliticusUSA is 100% reader-supported and needs your help. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Sen. Bernie Sanders chose to spend his time at a HELP Committee hearing discussing one of the most pressing issues in the country. Sanders discussed the healthcare crisis that the reconciliation bill, signed into law by Trump, is expected to cause. Sen. Sanders said: There is no question that cybersecurity and protecting the privacy of Americans’ health care records are important issues that we need to deal with. But, Mr. Chairman, let me be very clear. That is not the issue that is right now on the minds of the American people. What people are worried about is the catastrophic impact that the reconciliation bill that was passed last week will have on the health and well-being of the American people. And that is the issue that I’m going to be focused on today. That legislation, passed by one vote here in the Senate, will be making the largest cut to Medicaid in American history to pay for the largest tax break for billionaires in American history. At a time when our current health care system is broken, dysfunctional and cruel — 85 million today are uninsured or underinsured. This bill will make a horrible situation even worse. This legislation will cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by more than $1.1 trillion. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this bill, along with the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits, will cause 17 million people to lose their health insurance. Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and health care economists at the University of Pennsylvania have found that these health care policies would cause over 50,000 people in our country to die unnecessarily every year. That’s what happens when you can’t get to a doctor. I am delighted that one of the lead researchers of this report, Dr. Alison Galvani, is here with us today to talk more about that study. Mr. Chairman: it is not rocket science. You’re a doctor, you know this. If people don’t have access to health care, if they can’t get to a doctor when they need to, people will suffer and tens of thousands will die. It happens today and it will only get worse. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Make no mistake about it: This bill is a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans. Further, as a result of this bill, more than 300 rural hospitals are now at risk of closing down altogether or substantially reducing their services. That is not my estimate. That’s what the Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina recently estimated. And we are already beginning to see the devastating impact this bill will have on rural America: The Curtis Medical Center in Southwest Nebraska has already announced that it will be shutting down because it cannot withstand the cuts to Medicaid contained in this bill. It’s not just rural hospitals that are now in crisis as a result of this legislation. According to a recent survey from the American Health Care Association, as a result of this bill, 27% of nursing homes have indicated that they will be forced to close their doors and 58% will have to reduce staff. And it’s not just nursing homes. Health care researchers at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University have found that this bill will be a disaster for community health centers. They have estimated that as a result of the passage of this bill, over 40% of community health center sites will shut down. Today, there are over 15,000 community health center clinics throughout America. This could result in the shutting down of some 9,000 of them. And it’s not just community health centers, it’s not just nursing homes and it’s not just individuals. This legislation will substantially increase the uninsured rate in every state in this country. As a result of this bill, the uninsured rate in my own state of Vermont would go up from 3.3% to 6%. In Louisiana, the Chairman’s state, the uninsured rate will go up from 6.7% to 12.4%. In Florida, the uninsured rate will go up from 10.4% to 18.8%. In Texas, the second largest state in this country, the uninsured rate will go up to 20% — in the United States, in the richest country in the history of the world. Mr. Chairman, this is an issue that needs to be explained to the American people, and I look forward to discussing it with all of our panelists. Video: Republicans want to pretend like 17 million Americans getting kicked off of their healthcare is business as usual. Now that the GOP has caused the number of uninsured to skyrocket in the United States, they can go back to holding hearings about other topics. The American people aren’t going to move on and forget about what Republicans have done. Democrats and their allies like Bernie Sanders aren’t going to allow the crisis that Republicans have created to be forgotten. Trump and his party want the people who are losing food and healthcare to be forgotten. It is up to everyone else to make sure that it doesn’t happen. What do you think about Sen. Sanders’s remarks? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment