Senate plods along as Republicans negotiate key parts of Trump's bill

USA Today

20 hours ago

On Tuesday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: The Senate early this morning was still voting and negotiating on President Donald Trump's bill on tax cuts, Medicaid and more. USA TODAY Supreme Court Correspondent Maureen Groppe discusses the court's move to hear a GOP challenge to a campaign spending limit. The Justice Department sues Los Angeles to end 'sanctuary' immigration policies. Trump penned a handwritten note to Fed Chair Jerome Powell demanding lower interest rates. The man accused of killing four University of Idaho students in 2022 has accepted a plea deal in the case. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise tells us how some plastic bag bans appear to be working.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Tuesday, July 1st, 2025. This is USA TODAY's The Excerpt. Today Republicans continue to negotiate key parts of Trump's bill, plus the Supreme Court takes on campaign spending, and some plastic bag bans appear to be working. The Senate was still voting and negotiating early this morning on President Donald Trump's sweeping bill on tax cuts, Medicaid, and border security, after a marathon weekend of debate and political maneuvering. But the results still was not certain. 17 long hours after they began, Republican senators were trying to resolve disagreements over policies that would impact Medicaid, green energy tax credits, and carve outs to protect food stamps in Alaska and Hawaii, before bringing them up for a vote.
Republicans hold a 53 to 47 majority and face United Democratic opposition, and the defection of at least two of their members. If the Senate approves the bill, it heads back to the house where votes are scheduled to begin tomorrow. Trump last night pushed GOP senators to pass the bill while attacking his biggest campaign contributor and former Doge leader, Elon Musk, over his opposition. He can read more about that and stay up with all the latest on USAtoday.com.
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The Supreme Court will hear a major GOP challenge to a campaign spending limit. I spoke with USA TODAY Supreme Court correspondent Maureen Groppe to learn more. Hello, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Hello.
Taylor Wilson:
So starting here, how is the court planning on taking up the regulation of money and politics?
Maureen Groppe:
Well, the court agreed to hear a challenge from Republicans to federal limits on how much political parties can spend on advertising and other communication in coordination with a candidate. One thing that's unusual about this case is the Justice Department whose job it is to defend the laws, told the Supreme Court it was unable to do so in this case. So that means the Supreme Court will appoint someone else to defend the limits as the Republicans argue to the court in oral arguments next term, why these limits should no longer be in place.
Taylor Wilson:
So Maureen, just functionally speaking, who really are the major players here?
Maureen Groppe:
This case was initiated by Vice President JD Vance when he was a senator in Ohio, along with former Congressman Steve Shabbat, and with the campaign arms of House and Senate Republicans.
Taylor Wilson:
And you touched on this a bit, but just in terms of how we got to this point, what some of the things that listeners should know about?
Maureen Groppe:
The Republicans asked the Supreme Court to get involved after they lost in the lower courts. The last court to hear this, the six US Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Cincinnati, they said their hands were tied by a Supreme Court decision in 2001 that upheld these limits. And the Appeals Court said only the Supreme Court can overrule that decision.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, it seemed to grab a lot of headlines yesterday when it made news. What are the broader implications here, Maureen?
Maureen Groppe:
If the Supreme Court sides with Republicans, that could help political parties push back against the role that Super PACs have come to play in the campaign finance system, which some say has weakened political parties. Right now the parties are significantly regulated in how much they can work with their candidates while wealthy individuals can spend tens of millions of dollars through Super PACs. And we saw that in the last presidential election when Elon Musk contributed more than $238 million to a super PAC that was supporting President Trump.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, folks can read more with a link in today's show notes. Maureen Groppe covers the Supreme Court for USA TODAY. Thank you, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Thanks for having me.
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Taylor Wilson:
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit yesterday against the city of Los Angeles to end policies that restrict cooperation with President Donald Trump's enforcement of immigration laws. The suit comes after sometimes violent protests in Los Angeles earlier in the month against federal immigration and customs enforcement officials, which led Trump to mobilize the National Guard. It's the latest move to challenge so-called sanctuary policies where a state or local law enforcement do not collaborate with ICE, which the Trump administration contends are unlawful. The department has also sued New York state and filed criminal charges against a Wisconsin judge over immigration enforcement. It also sued federal judges in Maryland last week for blocking deportation orders.
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President Trump is publicizing a handwritten note he sent to Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell that comes as part of his months long campaign to pressure Powell to lower interest rates. In the note shared on Trump's social media app, Truth Social, he wrote, "You are as usual too late." The Fed last month held interest rates steady at a range between four and a quarter and four and a half percent for a fourth straight meeting, despite Trump's public lobbying for a lower rate. Powell told members of the House Financial Services Committee last week that the Fed plans to assess the effects of Trump's tariffs on inflation before lowering rates.
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The man accused of killing four University of Idaho students has accepted a plea deal in the case that would spare him from the death penalty. The Idaho Statesman and Fox News reported, 30-year-old Bryan Kohberger is charged in the murders of Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. The four were found stabbed to death in their rental house close to the University of Idaho campus in November of 2022. Kohberger was arrested the following month and previously pleaded not guilty to first degree murder charges. According to ABC News, citing a letter sent to victim's family members informing them of the plea deal, Kohberger agreed to plead guilty to all counts in the killings of the four students.
ABC News reported that Kohberger agreed to four consecutive life sentences and waived his right to appeal. The letter according to ABC News said prosecutors expect Kohberger to be sentenced in late July if a guilty plea is entered as planned at a hearing tomorrow. His trial was expected to start on August 18th.
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Some plastic bag bans appear to be working. I talked through some of our recent studies findings with USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise. Thanks for having on Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Happy to be here.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so some good news. What did this research find about plastic bag bans?
Elizabeth Weise:
So this is something any of us who live anywhere where there are bans on plastic bags, where they charge you for them, have long wondered, "Do they really work?" And it turns out some researchers did the research, they actually found a wonderful natural experiment, and it does work. In fact, in places where plastic bag policies are in place, they see a between 25% and almost 50% reduction in the amount of plastic bags on shorelines. And here we're talking about those disposable thin film plastic bags that you'd often get your groceries in when you go to the grocery store.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, I know not all plastic bag bans are created equal. I mean, what type of restrictions on plastic bags are most effective according to this research? And are there types that don't seem to have as much of an impact though?
Elizabeth Weise:
So there are basically three ways. The most common is to just have a generalized ban. Though one variant of that Which is actually pretty common is that the really thin plastic bags, the kind that just blow in the wind, are banned, but they can give you thicker plastic bags, which the theory is that you're going to reuse them, but the truth is, unfortunately, most people don't. And then the third is that they charge you for a bag. Usually it's between five to 10 cents. In San Francisco where I live, it's 25 cents, but that's really high.
Taylor Wilson:
What is the most effective, just the all-out ban?
Elizabeth Weise:
No, surprisingly, the most absolutely protective, if you want to lower the amount of plastic bags in the environment, is to charge for them, because that gives people an economic incentive to actually use something else, generally speaking, a reusable bag. And the worst possible way to do it is to say that you are banning the really thin film plastic bags, but you're going to let people use the thick ones. And they contain a lot more plastic, and so you end up with more plastic on shorelines than you do if you just allow those thin plastic bags.
Taylor Wilson:
In terms of the methodology here, listeners might be curious, how did researchers come to these conclusions we're talking about?
Elizabeth Weise:
Yeah, that was brilliant. So people kept thinking, "Well, how do we know if these things work?" And these researchers realized that if you have kids, you've probably done this, if you live anywhere near water, there's this group, The Ocean Conservancy, and they sponsor tens of thousands of beach, river, and lake cleanups every year. So you get a bunch of people together, it's your boy scout group, your girl scout group, your local community group, a bunch of high schoolers, and you go and you pick up trash on the shore. They looked at, it was like 45,000 of these shore cleanups. So Ocean Conservatory has this app called Clean Swell that allows these cleanup groups to actually record how trash they're collecting and what they're seeing. And so these scientists realized they could crowdsource that. This is all citizen scientist data, but it's 45,000 shoreline cleanups.
And they looked at places that have had shoreline cleanups, so that told them how much plastic and other trash is there on the shorelines. They mapped that to the zip code data of where those cleanups were, and then they mapped that to where they knew that there were some sort of plastic bag regulation in place. And by that, over time, I mean this all goes back to 2016 to 2023, they were able to see, does having one of these policies in place affect how much trash people were finding, did it change after one of these policies went into effect, and depending on which policy a given area had, did that affect how much plastic they were finding?
Taylor Wilson:
We all know that plastic bags are bad for the environment, but really what is that issue here? What's at stake and why are they just such an environmental nuisance?
Elizabeth Weise:
The problem, and especially those, the really thin-film plastic bags, is they're really light. I mean, and that's good because they use less plastic, but they blow everywhere and they kind of bounce around the landscape. They often end up in waterways. They unfortunately, for a marine animal, they look like food. You kind of see this clump of white stuff floating in the water, and to a lot of things that looks like food, and so they eat them, there's all these dreadful reports, they find fish and marine mammals and turtles where they're starving to death because their stomachs are full of plastic. But the other thing is they can entangle the animals. Then of course plastic doesn't compost, but it does break down into smaller and smaller pieces, and then those smaller pieces of plastic end up in the environment, they end up in the fish, we eat the fish, they end up in our bodies. And then there's a whole nother bunch of stories I've written about how we've got all this microplastic in the environment and in us.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, this is another interesting piece from you, Beth. Folks can find it with a link in today's show notes. Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thanks, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Great. Happy to be here, as always.
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Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for listening to the Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and as always, you can email us at podcastsatusatoday.com. I'm Taylor Wilson, I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.