Republican States Call on Congress to Block Pro-Abortion Shield Laws
In a July 29 letter to congressional leaders in both chambers, Republican attorneys general from 15 states described the laws as an affront to federalism and a challenge to the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling, which returned abortion policy to states.
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New York Post
40 minutes ago
- New York Post
Senate makes progress in averting a gov't shutdown much earlier than usual
The Senate took a significant step towards averting an impending partial government shutdown by passing a tranche of funding bills much earlier than usual. Senators approved three of the 12 appropriations bills Friday needed to forestall a partial shutdown, including ones to fund the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, new military facilities, and Congress itself. 'We are on the verge of an accomplishment that we have not done since 2018, and that is, pass appropriations bills across the Senate floor prior to the August recess,' Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins (R–Maine) cheered before the upper chamber reached the feat. 'That is exercising our constitutional responsibility for the power of the purse.' The three appropriations bills that clear the Senate are typically viewed as the less controversial ones to get across the finish line. Still, it comes amid significant hurdles toward preventing the looming autumn shutdown. 4 Sen. Susan Collins helped broker the deal to get the three appropriations bills passed through the Senate. REUTERS 4 Senate Majority Leader John Thune has eaten into the August recess to clear up the upper chamber's lengthy to-do list. Democrats widely see the shutdown fight as a rare instance in which they have leverage in Congress and have been vexed by President Trump's use of impoundment and rescissions to make spending cuts without their approval. Moreover, Congress hasn't actually passed the 12 appropriations bills to properly fund the government on time since 1997. Each fiscal year, which starts on Oct. 1, Congress is tasked with funding the government to prevent a partial shutdown. Congress has typically relied on a mechanism known as continuing resolutions, or CRs, to put government spending on autopilot for stretches of time. CRs and appropriations bills are subject to the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster in the Senate and must be bipartisan, which is why Congress typically struggles with the process. 4 Sen. Patty Murray said the deal will help prevent some of the cuts Democrats opposed. The current fiscal year is running on what turned into a yearlong CR, and there have been some murmurs in the House about doing so again for Fiscal Year 2026. Senators voted 87-9 on Friday for a two-bill minibus to fund the VA and Department of Agriculture. They then voted 81–15 on the third appropriations bill to fund Congress. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democratic appropriator, argued the small-scale deal 'rejects damaging cuts from Trump and House Republicans,' despite progressive complaints. The Senate still has nine more appropriations bills to take up: Commerce, Defense, Energy, Financial Services, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, State and Transportation. The Senate Appropriations Committee has already approved about half of those, inching them closer to a full chamber vote. 4 Oftentimes, government shutdown fights come down to the wire. REUTERS Those appropriations bills will need to be green-lit by the House of Representatives, which is on August recess, and signed into law by President Trump. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has eaten into the August recess while seeking to wrangle through key Trump nominations and chip away at the backlog. He is currently negotiating with Democrats on a deal to expedite that process.
CNN
41 minutes ago
- CNN
The Trump administration takes a very Orwellian turn
Donald Trump FacebookTweetLink Back in March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeted at the Smithsonian Institution that began as follows: 'Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.' Despite the high-minded rhetoric, many worried the order was instead a thinly veiled effort to rewrite history more to Trump's liking. The order, for example, cited a desire to remove 'improper ideology' – an ominous phrase, if there ever was one – from properties like the Smithsonian. Those concerns were certainly bolstered this week. We learned that some historical information that recently vanished from the Smithsonian just so happens to have been objective history that Trump really dislikes: a reference to his two impeachments. The Smithsonian said that a board containing the information was removed from the National Museum of American History last month after a review of the museum's 'legacy content.' The board had been placed in front of an existing impeachment exhibit in September 2021. Just to drive this home: The exhibit itself is about 'Limits of Presidential Power.' And suddenly examples of the biggest efforts by Congress to limit Trump's were gone. It wasn't immediately clear that the board was removed pursuant to Trump's executive order. The Washington Post, which broke the news, reported that a source said the content review came after pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director. In other words, we don't know all the details of precisely how this went down – including whether the removal was specifically requested, or whether museum officials decided it might be a good way to placate Trump amid pressure. The Smithsonian says an updated version of the exhibit will ultimately mention all impeachment efforts, including Trump's. But it's all pretty Orwellian. And it's not the only example. Trump has always been rather blatant about his efforts to rewrite history with self-serving falsehoods and rather shameless in applying pressure on the people who would serve as impartial referees of the current narrative. But this week has taken things to another level. On Friday, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This came just hours after that agency delivered Trump some very bad news: the worst non-Covid three-month jobs numbers since 2010. Some Trump allies have attempted to put a good face on this, arguing that Dr. Erika McEntarfer's removal was warranted because large revisions in the job numbers betrayed shoddy work. But as he did with the firing of then-FBI Director James B. Comey eight years ago, Trump quickly undermined all that. He told Newsmax that 'we fired her because we didn't believe the numbers today.' To the extent Trump did lay out an actual evidence-based case for firing McEntarfer, that evidence was conspiratorial and wrong, as CNN's Daniel Dale documented Friday. And even some Republican senators acknowledged this might be precisely as draconian and self-serving as it looked. Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, for one, called it 'kind of impetuous' to fire the BLS head before finding out whether the new numbers were actually wrong. 'It's not the statistician's fault if the numbers are accurate and that they're not what the president had hoped for,' said Lummis, who is not often a Trump critic. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina added that if Trump 'just did it because they didn't like the numbers, they ought to grow up.' Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both worried that Trump's move would make it so people can't trust the data the administration is putting out. And that's the real problem here. It's not so much that Trump appears to be firing someone as retaliation; it's the message it sends to everyone else in a similar position. The message is that you might want that data and those conclusions to be to Trump's liking, or else. It's a recipe for getting plenty of unreliable data and conclusions. And even to the extent that information is solid, it will seed suspicions about the books having been cooked – both among regular Americans and, crucially, among those making key decisions that impact the economy. What happens if the next jobs report is great? Will the markets believe it? We've certainly seen plenty of rather blunt Trump efforts to control such narratives and rewrite history before. A sampling: He engaged in a yearslong effort to make Jan. 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol in his name out to be sympathetic patriots, even calling them 'hostages,' before pardoning them. His administration's efforts to weed out diversity, equity and inclusion from the government often ensnared things that merely celebrated Black people and women. He and his administration have at times taken rather dim views of the free speech rights of those who disagree with them, including talking about mere protests – i.e. not necessarily violence – as being 'illegal.' A loyalist US attorney at one point threatened to pursue people who criticized then-Trump ally Elon Musk even for non-criminal behavior. Trump has repeatedly suggested criticism of judges he likes should be illegal, despite regularly attacking judges he doesn't like. His term began with the portraits of military leaders who clashed with him being removed from the Pentagon. It also began with a massive purge of independent inspectors general charged with holding the administration to account. All of it reinforces the idea that Trump is trying to consolidate power by pursuing rather heavy-handed and blatant tactics. But if there's a week that really drove home how blunt these efforts can be, it might be this one.
USA Today
42 minutes ago
- USA Today
Has Trump made it harder to become a doctor or lawyer?
After President Donald Trump approved major lending changes, some students are rethinking whether JDs or MDs are still options for them. Dalea Tran has dreamed of law school for years, but she's never known how she might pay for it. Unlike many aspiring lawyers, she wouldn't be following in her parents' footsteps. An accountant and a hair stylist, they arrived in San Diego with their families as child refugees from Vietnam. Tran, a 19-year-old rising sophomore at the University of California, San Diego, knew if she decided to go to law school, she'd have to work her way through a maze of student loans and financial aid packages. For people like her, navigating that maze just became far more challenging. Major changes are coming to higher education in the United States after President Donald Trump signed his major domestic policy bill into law. Among them is an end to Grad PLUS loans, a program that helps people pay for medical school and law school. Since Congress created the loans, direct from the federal government, in 2006, they have covered the full cost of attending graduate and professional school for nearly 2 million students. Beginning July 1, 2026, that won't be an option anymore. Trump's tax and spending law will eliminate the Grad PLUS program for new borrowers (students who take out loans before that date will be grandfathered in for up to three years). The measure imposes new borrowing caps – $50,000 annually and $200,000 overall – on the amount of federal direct loans students can take out for degrees in law and medicine. And it limits their repayment options after they graduate. Read more: Trump just made it harder to close the Education Department All those technicalities mean that some students like Tran may have fewer options for law school or medical school – or could be steered down a different career path altogether. "There's no way I can graduate early enough to avoid the Grad PLUS change," she said. The reforms represent the culmination of years of conservative efforts to rein in student lending. However, there has been bipartisan consensus about the causes of the underlying problem Republicans are trying to solve. Left-leaning groups and policymakers have also been highly critical in recent years of the crippling debt that some graduate programs impose on students. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a doctor from Louisiana and chairman of the Senate education committee, said the new legislation will put a stop to a vicious cycle that has kept college costs too high. 'The increasing availability of federal loans has resulted in skyrocketing tuition prices, trapping students in a cycle of overwhelming debt that they can't pay back,' he said in a statement to USA TODAY. 'By capping inflationary graduate loan programs, we prevent students from overborrowing and put downward pressure on rising college costs.' Read more: Is grad school worth the investment? Our exclusive data shows some surprising answers. In 2024, the average annual law school tuition at a private university was nearly $60,000, according to American Bar Association data analyzed by the Law School Admission Council. For in-state residents attending public institutions, it was roughly $32,000. It's hard to know exactly how the loan limits will impact law schools, said Austen Parrish, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. It's likely, in his view, that higher-ranked, more expensive schools will enroll a greater number of wealthy students who won't be as reliant on loans. Other, less privileged students may have to trade prestige for cost, he said. "You're going to see students having to make difficult decisions," he said. Medical schools brace for shift Watching from north-central Montana as Congress passed Trump's spending bill, Julianna Lindquist was happy she started medical school when she did. The 23-year-old, originally from Connecticut, is in her second year at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Montana. (Of the two types of medical schools, osteopathic programs are the less-common version; their coursework is similar to that of other medical schools, but instead emphasizes a more holistic approach to patient care.) This semester, Lindquist is taking out the full amount of Grad PLUS loans she's eligible for – roughly $24,000. "I would not be anywhere without student loans," she said. "There's financial aid, but it's not enough." About half of all medical students rely on the Grad PLUS program, borrowing more than $1 billion annually, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Graduates of osteopathic schools, the vast majority of which take on Grad PLUS loans, often go on to serve rural areas or become primary care providers. With federal support disappearing, it'll be up to the private lending market to make up the difference, said Jane Carreiro, dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at the University of New England in Portland, Maine. "How are students going to navigate that?" she said. "That's a question that we're all asking." Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@ Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @
