Politics

In the most predictable series of events, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that she feels duped by President Donald Trump for not sticking to the agreement they made in exchange for her cowardly vote for the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.” “I feel cheated. I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else,” she told the Alaska Daily News. Murkowski was referencing the Senate’s changes to the House version of the bill, which protected tax credits for wind and solar projects for 12 months as opposed to their immediate cancellation. But just 6 days after the Senate passed the bill—thanks to Murkowski’s vote—Trump issued an executive order declaring that, within 45 days, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could begin terminating wind and solar tax credits and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum could create new regulations on clean energy projects. U.S. wind turbines Burgum already heeded that directive, making a new rule that requires giving approval for any wind or solar project that is to be built on federal land—which could be an effort to slow those projects beyond the 12-month window to ensure that they are killed. Murkowski said that this “just pulls the rug out from underneath the deal. “I read it as just a total affront to what we had negotiated,” she said. “So now you have an executive order that goes against what the president himself signed into law, in my view.” Of course, anyone with half a brain knows that Trump’s promises are meaningless, and since he has a bizarre and notorious hatred of wind power—making insane false claims that wind turbines make whales “crazy” and cause cancer—it’s not shocking that he’s trying to stop wind energy projects. Aside from the fact that Murkowski feels “cheated,” Trump’s executive order will have negative effects for all Americans, who will see their energy bills skyrocket due to an increasing demand for energy. And of course, people in states that voted for Trump will experience the highest price increases. “The president and Secretary Burgum will then be responsible for raising electricity prices on every state in this country because that will be the end result of that kind of abuse of permitting,” Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico told Politico. “I would warn them if they create this as a precedent and it survives, a future administration could play the same game with oil and gas pipelines and leases.”

Tennessee GOP Rep. Mark Green resigned from Congress on Sunday to take a presumably more lucrative private sector job—leaving his 7th District vacant until a special election can be held. His exit from this seat—which includes parts of the educated Nashville suburbs—gives Democrats a pick-up opportunity, which if successful would portend a massive Democratic wave in the 2026 midterms.  Related |GOP House committee chair abandons politics for cushy private sector job President Donald Trump carried Green’s seat by 22 points in 2024, making it a safe GOP district in a normal year. Yet in a wave, Democrats could win here with the right candidate—an outcome that would send shockwaves through Congress that could both spook other Republican members into retiring and convince strong Democratic recruits to jump into other challenging House districts. And that would set Democrats up for even more success in the 2026 elections. In fact, a pair of U.S. House special elections in Florida already show that this seat could be vulnerable to a Democratic pick up. In those races, Republicans Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine underperformed Trump’s margin from just a few months earlier—Fine by 16 points, and Patronis by a whopping 23 points. If Green’s district swings left as much as those special elections in Florida did, Democrats would pick off this seat. Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis  Even more troubling for Republicans is that those two special elections in Florida were held at a time when Trump’s approval rating was barely under water, with 50% disapproving and 48% approving, according to The New York Times average. Today, Trump is nearly 10 points underwater, with voters disapproving of his handling of everything from immigration to inflation—making this seat even more vulnerable for the GOP. What’s more, a survey released Sunday from the pollster Atlas Intel found Democrats with a 9-point lead on the generic ballot—which measures what party voters want to see in control of Congress. A 9-point generic ballot lead portends a massive Democratic wave that would make seats like Tennessee’s 7th contenders for a pick up. Green, for his part, has endorsed a successor in former Tennessee Department of General Services Commissioner Matt Van Epps. But he’s facing a primary against a handful of other Republicans, including Montgomery County Commissioner Jason Knight, state Rep. Lee Reeves, and a Jan. 6 insurrectionist Stewart Parks.  On the Democratic side, three state representatives—Aftyn Behn, Vincent Dixie, and Bo Mitchell—have announced bids. A date has yet to be determined for the seat. But don’t sleep on this contest when it’s held.

Waleed Shahid Running New York City is brutal. But if he wins in November, there are key lessons from past mayors that Mamdani should learn from. The post How Zohran Mamdani Should Govern appeared first on The Nation.

Ben Schwartz The network claims it’s canceling The Daily Show for financial reasons, but the real bottom line here is Trump appeasement. The post How CBS Decided It Couldn’t Afford to Let Stephen Colbert Speak His Mind appeared first on The Nation.

Luca GoldMansour By placating House Republicans during a hearing on antisemitism, CUNY’s Chancellor left students and faculty to fend for themselves. The post CUNY’s Repression of Pro-Palestine Students Continues in Front of Congress appeared first on The Nation.

President Donald Trump sees the government as having two key functions: to enrich himself and his pals, and to hurt everyone else. His rollbacks of key consumer and worker protections—or his administration standing aside while federal courts roll those back for him—combine both those ignoble impulses. He gets to reward corporate interests and the ultrarich while making life worse for the rest of us.  What’s jarring about his moves is that there is no credible argument that doing so helps most Americans. The only underlying justifications are profit and cruelty.  For example, who benefits from the Department of Labor withdrawing a Biden administration plan to ban the practice of paying disabled workers a subminimum wage? The only use case for paying disabled employees as little as 25 cents per hour is that it ensures the employers make much more money by exploiting their labor. It isn’t surprising the Trump administration would ride to the rescue of just those types of employers, but it’s still depressing.  Or try to figure out a non-nefarious reason for canceling the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule to stop scuzzy data brokers from buying and selling your data without your consent. The vague explanation from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, Project 2025 drafter, and Christian nationalist, was that the rule did not align with the “current interpretation of the [Fair Credit Reporting Act],” which somehow CFPB was also still “in the process of revising.”  President Donald Trump, shown on July 16. At least the administration is being transparent about the fact that their interpretation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act does not involve protecting people. Killing CFPB rules is really a belt-and-suspenders approach here. The administration has thoroughly hamstrung the agency via mass firings. The employees who remain, meanwhile, have been instructed to do no work. While agency employees can no longer protect people from credit card or mortgage scams, agency heads are refunding or cancelling existing settlements, even those where the settlement required banks to return money to consumers.  When it comes to the brave new frontier of cryptocurrency crime, the administration’s stance is essentially “screw those suckers.” The Justice Department disbanded the team that had been tasked with investigating crypto exchanges and related entities to determine whether they facilitate the misuse of cryptocurrency to enable criminal activity. No longer, of course, because the president himself is entangled with the shadiest crypto stuff, so we can’t have a team focused on protecting people from crypto crime, now can we? Kicking Americans in the teeth isn’t a solo project from the Trump administration, though. Sometimes the courts help kick.  This month, District Judge Sean Jordan, a Trump appointee, obligingly tossed the Biden-era medical debt rule, which would have removed unpaid consumer medical debt from consumer credit reports. Apparently, it exceeds the CFPB’s authority to protect consumers from having medical debt destroy every aspect of their lives.  The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which now has only one Democratic appointee and is rapidly becoming as sure a bet as the 5th Circuit at giving conservatives favorable rulings, also just tossed the Federal Trade Commission’s click-to-cancel rule, which would have required businesses to make it as easy to cancel services as it is to sign up for them. As with the medical debt rule, this isn’t driven by the goal of protecting consumers. The only constituency that hates the idea of making it easier to cancel a gym membership is companies that make their money by trapping consumers in memberships.  For cases still moving through the courts, the administration is tipping their hand by telling courts they are “reconsidering” the rule they are supposed to be defending, and asking for the case to be paused. The Department of Justice told a Washington, D.C., federal court that it will not enforce part of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, erasing Biden-era protections requiring insurance companies to treat coverage for mental health and substance abuse the same as other medical coverage.  The DOJ also told the 5th Circuit that it is reconsidering a Department of Labor rule to increase the minimum salary threshold for the “white-collar” exemption. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, certain executive and professional employees are exempt from overtime pay. Currently, that exemption kicks in at $35,568 per year, meaning that businesses are not required to pay overtime for those white-collar employees with salaries above that amount. The rule promulgated under former President Joe Biden would have increased it in two steps, first to $43,888 and then to $58,656. Secretaries making $36,000 a year will no doubt be thrilled to learn that the Trump administration is making sure they don’t get overtime pay.  Speaking of the minimum wage, Trump wasted little time in overturning Biden’s executive order that had increased the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 per hour in 2022, with annual adjustments. No longer will federal contractors know the tyranny of a higher wage and can instead return gratefully to being paid a minimum of $13.30 per hour.  Not a single one of these actions benefits consumers or workers, but every one of them benefits the interests of those who make money by exploiting people. And since that is Trump’s natural constituency, he’s going to do everything he can to help them out.  And this is only the beginning. 

A growing body of research shows the cascading health impacts of wildfire smoke, from cognitive decline to heart issues. By Kiley Price for Inside Climate News The dog days of summer are synonymous with sizzling temperatures, longer nights and … wildfire smoke? As climate change supercharges wildfires, smoke from these blazes is becoming more pervasive, particularly throughout the peak months of the season in July and August. The health impacts of this haze go far beyond a pesky cough. In recent years, piles of research have helped piece together many of the short- and long-term risks of wildfire smoke, from lung problems to reproductive issues. Now, several new studies provide even more clues to this unsettling public health puzzle. Meanwhile, as wildfires rage across North America, government rollbacks and arguments between the U.S. and Canada are fanning the flames of controversy around wildfire smoke—and how best to combat it. A Long List of Risks Oftentimes, people see the smoke produced by a wildfire before the inferno itself. Tearing through forests, grasslands and even cities, wildfires release massive amounts of fine particulate matter, which are incredibly small at 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter. Once inhaled, these particles can wreak all sorts of havoc on the body. Wildfire smoke can penetrate deep into the lungs, where it causes difficulty breathing and exacerbates asthma. Recently released data showed a significant rise in asthma-related emergency visits in 2023 when wildfire smoke drifted across the border from Canada into southern New Jersey, where residents are concerned about the rising risks of smoke in the region, as Anna Mattson reported for Inside Climate News. New York City saw a similar uptick in asthma-related ER visits during that event. The Manhattan skyline shrouded in smoke from Canadian wildfires in June 2023. Smoke particles can also cross into the bloodstream and travel to different parts of the body, including the brain and heart. Data suggests that wildfire smoke can cause memory loss, worsen existing mental illnesses or inhibit cognitive development. Studies show that these emissions can also have profound impacts on reproduction, associated with decreased sperm motility and increased risk of preterm birth. Wildfire smoke affects some people disproportionately, especially firefighters and those who have pre-existing lung conditions, little access to proper filtration during a blaze or work outside. Kids are particularly at risk due to their more rapid breaths and smaller lungs, Mongabay reports. Recent UNICEF data revealed that haze from landscape fires caused 270,000 deaths in children younger than 5 years old, the majority in low-income countries. So what exactly is causing this slew of health problems? Scientists are still figuring this out, but a study published in June found that exposure to smoke can alter the immune system at a cellular level. The researchers found that blood from 31 smoke-exposed adults showed elevated levels of memory CD8+ T cells—suggesting an immune reaction—and biomarkers that indicate inflammation and immune activity. Their blood also revealed changes in more than 130 genes related to allergies and asthma, and more of their immune cells were polluted with toxic metals such as mercury and cadmium. Fiery Politics One of the most dangerous things about wildfire smoke is that it isn’t confined to its source. These hazes can travel hundreds or thousands of miles, worsening air quality across every region it passes through. Like many people, I’ve witnessed this phenomenon myself when smoke from the 2023 Canada wildfires traveled hundreds of miles to New York City, turning blue skies orange—almost as if a sepia filter had been applied to the entire region. People walk in the smoky haze along Park Avenue and Grand Central Terminal in June 2023. The same thing is happening this year as deadly wildfires tear through Western Canada and push smoke to states in the upper Midwestern U.S. In response, six Republican members of Congress from Wisconsin and Minnesota sent a letter to their Canadian neighbors with one main message: Keep the smoke away from this side of the border. “As we are entering the height of the fire season, we would like to know how your government plans on mitigating wildfire and the smoke that makes its way south,” the letter reads. It was addressed to Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States. “In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.” The letter blamed Canada’s wildfire problems primarily on arson and a lack of forest management, though experts say the vast majority of these infernos have been caused by lightning and dry vegetation, a problem worsened by the extreme weather conditions of a rapidly changing climate. The flames are primarily burning through remote areas where forest management techniques like prescribed burns are not feasible, The New York Times reports. San Francisco in an orange haze from wildfire smoke in Sept. 2020. Tarryn Elliott, a spokeswoman at the Canadian Embassy, said in an email to The New York Times that “Canada takes the prevention, response and mitigation of wildfires very seriously.” Meanwhile, Wab Kinew, the premier of Manitoba—where two people recently died in the wildfires—rebuked the letter. “This is what turns people off politics … when you’ve got a group of congresspeople trying to trivialize and make hay out of a wildfire season where we’ve lost lives in our province,” Kinew said at a press conference last Thursday. Beyond slowing or stopping a fire, there is no way to keep smoke from traveling to different countries once it starts to spread. That goes for America, too: Recent wildfires in California and Washington blew a haze into Western Canada. The U.S. monitors its own air quality levels through a network of countrywide sensors that feed into tools like the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow system. However, experts are concerned that recent staff cuts and proposals to ax funding at the agency could make it difficult to access data, communicate public health risks and continue long-term research projects on wildfire smoke, which Leigh Giangreco recently reported for Inside Climate News right after smoke pervaded

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The Trump administration’s far-reaching war on immigration is threatening America’s already-fragile child care system, where immigrants play a critical role. In New Mexico, which is leading the nation in child care policy, immigrants who run child care businesses say immigration policy is already hitting close to home. By Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report, for The 19th ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Maggi’s home in a suburban neighborhood here is a haven for local families. It’s a place where after just a few weeks in Maggi’s family-run child care program this spring, one preschooler started calling Maggi “mama” and Maggi’s husband “papa.” Children who have graduated from Maggi’s program still beg their parents to take them to her home instead of school. Over the past few months, fewer families are showing up for care: Immigration enforcement has ramped up and immigration policies have rapidly changed. Both Maggi and the families who rely on her — some of whom are immigrants — no longer feel safe. “There’s a lot of fear going on within the Latino community, and all of these are good people — good, hard-working people,” Maggi, 47, said in Spanish through an interpreter on a recent morning as she watched a newborn sleep in what used to be her living room. Since she started her own child care business two years ago, she has dedicated nearly every inch of her common space to creating a colorful, toy-filled oasis for children. Maggi doesn’t understand why so many immigrants are now at risk of deportation. “We’ve been here a long time,” she said. “We’ve been doing honest work.” Immigrants like Maggi play a crucial role in home-based child care, as well as America’s broader child care system of more than 2 million predominantly female workers. (The Hechinger Report is not using Maggi’s last name out of concern for her safety and that of the families using her care.) Caregivers are notoriously difficult to find and keep, not only because the work is difficult, but because of poverty-level wages and limited benefits. Nationwide, immigrants make up nearly 20 percent of the child care workforce. In New York City, immigrants make up more than 40 percent of the child care workforce. In Los Angeles, it’s nearly 50 percent. The Trump administration’s far-reaching war on immigration, which includes daily quotas for immigrant arrests, new restrictions on work permits and detainment of legal residents, threatens America’s already-fragile child care system. Immigrant providers, especially those who serve immigrant families, have been hit especially hard. Just like at Maggi’s, child care providers nationwide are watching families disappear from their care, threatening the viability of those businesses. In America, 1 in 4 children under the age of 6 has at least one foreign-born parent. Some kids who could benefit from experienced caregivers are now instead at home with older siblings or elderly relatives, losing out on socialization and kindergarten preparation. Some immigrant workers, regardless of status, are too scared to come to work, exacerbating staffing shortages. “Anti-immigrant policy can and will weaken our entire caregiving infrastructure,” said Karla Coleman-Castillo, senior policy analyst at the National Women’s Law Center. Home-based programs in particular will feel the squeeze, she said, since they tend to serve more immigrant families. “Anything that threatens the stability of families’ ability and comfort accessing early childhood education — and educators’ comfort entering or remaining in the workforce — is going to impact an already precarious sector.” Related | Trump’s racist immigration policy comes for education and food banks For Maggi, the fallout has been swift. In February, just a few weeks after the first changes were announced, her enrollment dropped from as many as 15 children each day to seven. Some families returned to Mexico. Others became too nervous to stray from their work routes for even a quick drop off. Some no longer wanted to give their information to the state to get help paying for care. By May, only two children, an infant and a 4-year-old, were enrolled full time, along with six kids who came for before- or after-school care. She accepts children who pay privately and those who pay with child care subsidies through the state program for low-income children. She brings in about $2,000 a month for the infant and preschooler, and a couple hundred more each week for after-school care — down significantly from the $9,000 to $10,000 of late 2024. For parents who don’t receive a state subsidy, she keeps her rates low: less than $7 an hour. “They tell me that I’m cheap,” Maggi said with a slight smile. But she isn’t willing to raise her rates. “I was a single mom,” she said. “I remember struggling to find someone to care for my children when I had to work.” *** Like many child care providers who emigrated to the United States as adults, Maggi started her career in an entirely different field. As a young mother, Maggi earned a law degree from a college in Mexico and worked in the prosecutor’s office in the northern Mexico state of Coahuila. Her job required working many weekends and late evenings, which took a toll on her parenting as a single mother. “I really feel bad that I was not able to spend more time with my daughters,” she added. “I missed a lot of their childhood.” For a year when her girls were in elementary school, Maggi enrolled them in a boarding school, dropping them off Sunday nights and picking them up Friday afternoons. On some weekends, she took the girls to her office, even though she knew it wasn’t a place for children. Maggi longed for a different job where she could spend more time with them. She started thinking seriously of emigrating about 15 years ago, as violence escalated. Her cousin was kidnapped and police officers she worked with were killed. Maggi received death threats from criminals she helped prosecute. Then one day, she was stopped by men who told her they knew where she lived and that she had daughters. “That’s when I said, ‘This is

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | DOJ’s latest firing ensures Epstein scandal won’t go away