Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: Republican doubts delay Trump's tax-cut bill in the House  Reuters Live updates: Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ moves to House after Senate vote | CNN Politics  CNN Live updates: House leaders scramble to secure GOP votes to pass Trump’s bill ahead of July 4  The Washington Post Freedom Caucus attacks Senate megabill in 3-page dissection  Politico The Senate bill and the social safety net  NPR

Preview: Bryan Kohberger admits to Idaho college killings in plea hearing  ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos Bryan Kohberger admits to Idaho student murders  CNN Bryan Kohberger Murder Details: How the Killer Broke Into the Victims' Home — and Who He Targeted  People.com Bryan Kohberger pleads guilty to murder after admitting to brutal stabbing deaths of 4 Idaho students  PBS Kohberger plea deal splits slain University of Idaho victims' families  New York Post

Preview: Ukraine fears increased Russian aggression after US halt of weapons supply  BBC U.S. Halts Key Weapons for Ukraine in New Sign of Weakening Support for Kyiv  WSJ Ukraine says Trump weapons freeze will intensify ‘war and terror’, as Russia hails move  The Sydney Morning Herald Pentagon halting some promised munitions for Ukraine  Politico Opinion | Jake Sullivan: Why Trump Should Not Halt Weapons to Ukraine  The New York Times

Preview: Trump announces trade deal with Vietnam  NPR Trump says U.S. struck trade deal with Vietnam that imposes 20% tariff on its imports  CNBC Stock market today: S&P 500, Nasdaq leap to fresh records as Vietnam trade deal boosts hopes ahead of key jobs report  Yahoo Finance US Stocks Flat as Private Jobs Data Sparks Growth Concerns  Bloomberg Nike, Lululemon, and More Retail Stocks Rise on Vietnam Trade Deal  Barron's

Preview: Paramount will pay $16 million in settlement with Trump over ’60 Minutes’ interview  AP News Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit  The New York Times Cowardly Paramount Just Waved the White Flag at Trump and Threw ‘60 Minutes’ Under the Bus  Esquire CBS is the latest news giant to bend to Trump's power  NPR Paramount, CBS forced to pay eight figures, change editorial policy in settlement with President Trump  Fox News

Preview: With Trump’s Policy Bill Teetering, Johnson Is in a Familiar Pickle  The New York TimesView Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Judge Rejects Trump’s Attempt to Stop Migrant Asylum Claims  The New York Times Obama-appointed judge strikes down Trump order preventing asylum requests, protections for illegal immigrants  Fox News Federal judge bars Trump administration from expelling asylum seekers  The Washington Post White House Reacts After Judge Randolph Moss Blocks Trump Asylum Order  Newsweek Judge blocks ‘sweeping’ asylum crackdown after Trump declared ‘invasion’ at southern border  Politico

Preview: Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority strikes down 176-year-old abortion ban  AP News Wisconsin Supreme Court Strikes Down 1849 Abortion Ban  The New York Times Abortion ruling elicits sharp contrasts from likely 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Wisconsin Supreme Court decides abortion case that prompted most expensive judicial election in US history  Fox News Civil War-era Wisconsin law is not a ban on abortion, says state Supreme Court  NPR

Preview: Trump administration withholds $169M from NC public schools amid review  WRAL.com Trump Withholds Nearly $7 Billion for Schools, With Little Explanation  The New York Times Trump admin's K-12 funding holds put summer and after-school programs at risk  Axios The Trump admin is withholding over $6 billion in education grants for schools  NPR California schools are scrambling as Trump administration withholds almost $811 million  CalMatters

Preview: House members brave weather, medical hurdles to vote on Trump's "big, beautiful bill"  Axios House left in limbo as megabill talks continue  Politico Live updates: Trump-backed ‘big beautiful’ bill moves to House after Senate Republicans make changes  NBC News House GOP leaders delay key vote on Trump megabill amid opposition, attendance issues  The Hill Trump, Johnson rush to get House GOP holdouts to back tax bill  The Washington Post

Preview: The Democratic strategist believes President Donald Trump will "see the writing on the wall" ahead of the midterms and do anything to stay in power.

Preview: Kohberger avoided the death penalty when he pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing four University of Idaho students.

Preview: The International Atomic Energy Agency has long monitored Iran's nuclear program, and said it was waiting to hear what the suspension meant.

Preview: The South Carolina Republican shared a social media post Tuesday that users are calling "disturbed," "vile" and "grotesque."

Preview: As part of a settlement with a faith-based conservative group, officials will not discipline counselors who engage in talk conversion therapy.

Preview: In addition to sex trafficking, Combs is charged with racketeering conspiracy and transporting sex workers across state lines.

Preview: Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse reminded GOP Rep. Jodey Arrington on Tuesday how he was singing "a different tune" about the national debt mere weeks ago.

Preview: “I do not believe the cruel cuts to Medicaid in this bill are what Jesus meant when He said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

Preview: The estimated direct cost could be potentially managed through price hikes, layoffs, hiring freezes or lower profit margins.

Preview: “The rest of the answer gets even worse.”

Preview: Musk and Trump are exchanging threats over the megabill, with Musk threatening to form a new party and Trump threatening to deport Musk.

Preview: The question was less about whether Paramount would settle with Donald Trump, and more about how much his lawyers would accept. That question now has an answer.

Preview: Donald Trump and his team are starting to talk about prosecuting journalists for running segments the White House doesn't like, the First Amendment be damned.

Preview: A federal jury in Manhattan convicted Sean “Diddy” Combs of transportation to engage in prostitution and acquitted him of racketeering and sex trafficking.

Preview: Colorado Democrats were feeling triumphant.

Preview: Remember the scandalous circumstances surrounding Mayor Eric Adams' corruption case? Donald Trump's new comments make the mess worse.

Preview: When Donald Trump publicly fantasized about alligators eating immigrants trying to escape a detention center, he was echoing words used in the past by avowed racists.

Preview: Today, the House is debating President Trump’s spending bill as Trump plans on meeting with holdout Republicans. NBC News’ Melanie Zanona reports more from Capitol Hill. Politico White House and Foreign Affairs Correspondent Eli Stokols, former Rep. Charlie Dent and former Sen. Jon Tester join Ana Cabrera to share their political analysis.

Preview: The "big beautiful bill" cuts to Medicaid, clean energy and food stamps will deeply harm America’s global competitive edge.

Preview: After casting the deciding vote for Trump’s megabill to kick millions off health care, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski told reporters she hopes the House doesn’t pass that version. “If you really believe that, then why the hell did you vote for the bill?” asks Dem Rep. Jim McGovern.

Preview: The speaker’s struggle to bring his party’s sprawling domestic policy bill in for a landing was just the latest in his string of near-death legislative experiences.

Preview: Under the new spending bill, the nation’s largest abortion provider would have to stop offering abortion in some states or lose millions in Medicaid funding for basic health care.

Preview: Contrary to the president’s assertions, records filed in a fraud case against him suggest that his riches were not the product of a steady and strong empire.

Preview: Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty to the 2022 murders that shook the University of Idaho campus. Under a plea agreement, he avoids the death penalty.

Preview: Dr. Katherine Ramsland was Bryan Kohberger’s professor before he moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he is expected to plead guilty to killing four University of Idaho students.

Preview: The host of “Somebody Feed Phil” and creator of “Everybody Loves Raymond” has become a global star with little more than fun-guy charm. That’s enough.

Preview: Such a path could drastically raise the stakes for federal investigations of state or county officials, bringing the department and the threat of criminalization into the election system.

Preview: Records show that a top U.S. regulator rejected the recommendations of agency experts and limited the use of Covid vaccines.

Preview: Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, cited “positive signs” in the long-moribund cease-fire talks to end the war in Gaza and free the hostages held there.

Preview: This could have been good news, if Trump had followed a different path.

Preview: No rationalization even required!

Preview: If your concern is really fairness in athletics, this is not the way.

Preview: A brief history lesson for the court's originalists.

Preview: Years after #MeToo, we still don’t know how to use the law to resolve the problems that explode inside our most intimate relationships.

Preview: The new Jurassic movie is so bad you might wish an asteroid would make the franchise extinct.

Preview: For decades, the state’s landmark environmental law made it easy to block home construction. A new law changes that.

Preview: I can’t escape these scents.

Preview: I'm not being selfish.

Preview: He says I'm on the wrong side of the class war.

Preview: President Donald Trump signs a bill on June 12, 2025. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Republicans are close to passing President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut taxes, slash programs for low-income Americans, ramp up funding for mass deportation, and penalize the solar and wind energy industries. Oh, and it adds enormously to the nation’s debt — but who’s counting? (Independent analysts are, and they estimate it will add at least $3 trillion.) The sprawling, 887-page bill contains far too many provisions to name here. But to get a better sense of the bill’s impact, it’s worth running down what it does in a few key areas.  The big picture, though, is that Trump is targeting Democratic or liberal-coded programs and constituencies — programs for the poor, student borrowers, and climate change — to cover part (but nowhere near all) of the cost of his big tax cuts and new spending. Taxes: The current tax rates stick around – plus there’s some new tax cuts The bill makes a variety of changes to tax law, some of which are about keeping tax breaks set to expire soon, others of which are adding new goodies in the tax code. 1) Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent: In Trump’s first term, Republicans lowered income and other tax rates with his 2017 tax law. However, in a gimmick to make that law look less costly, the new lower rates they set were scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 — meaning that, if Congress did nothing, practically everyone’s taxes would go up next year. So the single most consequential thing this bill does, from a budgetary perspective, is making those 2017 tax levels permanent, averting their imminent expiration.  That saves Americans from an imminent tax hike, but notably, it just keeps the status quo tax levels in place. So, in practice, many people may not perceive this as a new cut to their taxes. 2) New “populist” tax cuts: The bill also creates several new tax breaks meant to fulfill certain Trump 2024 campaign promises, such as “no tax on tips.” There will be new deductions for up to $25,000 in tip income, $12,500 in overtime income, $6,000 for seniors, and a deduction for interest on loans for new US-made cars. The bill also creates savings accounts for children called “Trump accounts,” in which the government would invest $1,000 per child. 3) Tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses: Wealthy Americans wanting to pay less in taxes have the most to be happy about from this bill, because they benefit hugely from making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.  Other wealthy winners in the bill include owners of “pass-through” businesses (partnerships, LLCs, or other business entities that don’t pay the typical corporate income tax); they get their tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 bill made permanent. Some wealthy heirs stand to gain too, as the exemption from the estate tax was raised to inherited estates worth $15 million). Affluent blue state residents got a big win. The 2017 Trump tax law had sharply limited a deduction that typically benefited them — the state and local (SALT) deduction, which it capped at $10,000. (People in blue states tend to have more state and local taxes they can deduct.) The new bill raises that limit to $40,000. Businesses also get some big benefits, as the bill makes three major corporate tax breaks permanent: bonus depreciation, research and development expensing, and a tax break related to interest deduction.  All this, combined with the cuts for programs for poor people, is why many analysts calculate the impact this bill would be regressive overall — it will end up financially harming low-income Americans, and benefiting the rich the most. The safety net: Big cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans Trump has repeatedly promised that he wouldn’t cut Medicaid, and this bill breaks that promise bigly. Its new work reporting requirements and other changes (such as a limit to the “provider tax” states may charge) could end up cutting Medicaid spending by as much as 18 percent. The bill also makes changes to the Affordable Care Act individual insurance marketplaces. Altogether, these provisions would result in 12 million people losing their health insurance, per the Congressional Budget Office. Food stamps are another target. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could be cut by as much as 20 percent, due to new work requirements and new requirements states pay a higher share of the program’s cost. One bizarre last-minute provision, aimed at winning over swing vote Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), seemingly gives states an incentive to make erroneous payments, because states with higher payment error rates get to delay their cost hikes. Student loans also come in for deep cuts, as the bill overhauls the existing system, ending many repayment plans, requiring borrowers to repay more, and limiting future loan availability.  Clean energy: The bill singles out solar and wind for harsh treatment Three years ago, with the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats enacted a swath of new incentives aimed at making the US a clean energy powerhouse. Trump’s new bill moves in the exact opposite direction. It repeals many of Biden’s clean energy benefits, but it doesn’t stop there – it goes further by singling out clean energy, particularly solar and wind, for harsh treatment. Under the bill, new Biden-era tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency will be terminated this year. Biden’s clean electricity production tax credits, meanwhile, will be gradually rolled back, though solar and wind will see their credits vanish more quickly. The bill also requires clean power projects to start using fewer and fewer Chinese-made components, which much of the industry heavily relies on.  Things could be worse, though. A recent draft of the bill included far harsher policies toward solar and wind, which could have had truly apocalyptic consequences for the industry — but some of them were dropped or watered down to get the bill through the Senate. Trump’s new spending goes to the border wall, mass deportation, and the military Counterbalancing some of these spending cuts on the safety net and clean energy, Trump’s bill also spends a bunch more money on two of his own top priorities: immigration enforcement in the military. About $175 billion will be devoted to immigration, including roughly $50 billion for Trump’s border wall and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities, $45 billion for expanding the capacity to detain unauthorized immigrants, and $30 billion for enforcement operations. This is a lot of money that will now be devoted to Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda, and the question will now be whether they can put it to use. The military, meanwhile, will get about $150 billion from the bill, to be used to start construction on Trump’s planned “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, as well as on shipbuilding, munitions, and other military priorities. The debt: It goes up a whole lot In the end, Trump’s spending cuts were nowhere near enough to balance out the enormous cost of the tax cuts in this bill. So, estimates suggest, at least $3 trillion more will be added to the debt if this bill becomes law. Every president this century has come in with big deficit-increasing bills, dismissing concerns about the debt, and the sky hasn’t yet fallen. But all these years of big spending are adding up, and interest payments on the debt are rising. This could make for a significant drag on the economy in future years and make even more painful cuts necessary. Republicans are betting that the tax cuts in this bill will juice business and economic activity enough to keep the country happy in the short term — and that the cuts, targeting mainly low-income people or Democratic constituencies, are unlikely to hurt them too much at the ballot box.

Preview: The Senate budget bill pares back incentives for renewable energy and aims to boost fossil fuels like coal. The first solar cell ever made was built in the United States. Tesla, based in the US, was once the largest EV manufacturer in the world. The lithium-ion battery was codeveloped in the US. But today, China — not the US — is the largest manufacturer of solar cells and batteries. China’s BYD — not Tesla — is the largest EV manufacturer in the world. And China is starting to outrun the US on research and development investment.  The US has a long history of taking the lead in clean energy, and a long history of losing it. And President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which passed the Senate on Tuesday, would again leave the US on the margins of a global clean energy revolution that it could have dominated.  For years now, clean power has been the largest source of new electricity in the US. Solar, batteries, and wind are on track to make up more than 90 percent of new electricity capacity on the US power grid this year. Wind and solar now produce more electricity on the US power grid than coal. Almost twice as many Americans work in clean energy compared to fossil fuels, and the sector is still growing.  But thanks to the bill, that may not be the case for much longer.  Some of the more extreme provisions in earlier drafts of the bill have been removed, like an excise tax targeting renewable energy. But the latest version of the bill rolls back many of the investments from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the single-largest US investment to address climate change by giving the energy transition a boost. It calls for more rapid phaseouts of tax credits for wind and solar power and eliminates a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of a new electric vehicle. The spending bill working its way through Congress doesn’t just undo incentives for clean energy — it also creates a new tax credit for coal.   These provisions are in line with Trump’s longstanding antipathy toward renewable energy and disbelief in climate change. But they stand to hobble the US economy more broadly.  The US is facing significant load growth on the power grid for the first time in decades as the tech industry scrounges for electrons to power their electricity-devouring data centers. Energy demand is rising and the cheapest, most readily deployable supplies of energy are being throttled.  The alternatives, however, are not likely to make up the gap in time. Fossil fuels take longer to ramp up. The US is currently the largest oil and gas producer in the world, but it can take years to site, permit, and acquire the materials to build power plants that burn these fuels. Since these are internationally traded commodities, their prices can fluctuate based on factors beyond the US’s control.  Right now, oil prices are at four-year lows and natural gas prices are falling, and when prices are low, it’s much harder to make the business case for more mining, drilling, and power plants, even with incentives. Trump may have some levers to pull — he can, for example, open up more federally managed lands for energy production — but many of those leases sit unused because energy companies don’t want to create a supply glut. Meanwhile, employment in the oil and gas industry remains volatile, while coal jobs are continuing their decades-long decline.  “We’re in this moment of surging demand and you can’t build another gas turbine for at least five years beyond what’s already been booked,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director for modeling and analysis at the think tank Energy Innovation. “We have this demand growth that’s going to have to be met. The only thing you can build to meet it on the timeline needed over the next five to 10 years is solar, wind, or battery storage.” The Senate bill does extend tax credits and loan programs for nuclear energy and geothermal power. However, the cuts in the bill would also slow efforts to build up the domestic energy supply chain needed to bolster other zero-emissions technologies, from raw materials like lithium and rare earth minerals to battery factories. It would do little to relax the bottlenecks for connecting new power plants to the grid, which are adding years to project timelines. The US is also dismantling research and development that could yield the next energy breakthrough. On top of all this, Trump’s tariffs are raising operating costs not just for renewables, but also for the fossil fuels he loves so much. The net result is a policy suite that will not only hamper clean electricity, but energy overall, making it more expensive for everyone across the country. According to Energy Innovation, the Senate bill would reduce how much energy the US adds to the grid in the years to come compared to the current trajectory, thereby increasing household electricity prices on average by $130 per year, eroding almost a trillion dollars in economic productivity, and costing 760,000 jobs by 2030.  View Link While the US is putting clean energy in reverse, other countries are racing ahead. Clean energy technology investment is poised to increase to $2.2 trillion this year around the world. Renewables are on track to overtake coal as the biggest power source in the world this year. Wind, solar, and batteries are still getting cheaper. Effectively, the US is ceding one of the biggest growth industries in the world to China, particularly as developing countries industrialize and other wealthy countries look to decarbonize their economies.  View Link The case for more clean energy — lower costs, faster deployment, fewer greenhouse gas emissions — remains robust. Even with all the deliberate obstacles the Trump administration is placing ahead, there are some wind, solar, and battery projects still poised to come online in the US as they work their way through the pipeline, albeit at a much slower pace than before.  But without continued investment, the US will lose ground to the rest of the world and condemn itself to dirtier, more expensive energy while worsening a problem that will extract a dear toll from the economy.

Preview: President Donald Trump, from left, Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., Masayoshi Son, chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., and Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 21. | Aaron Schwartz/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images To hear many smart AI observers tell it, the day of Wednesday, June 25, 2025, represented the moment when Congress started to take the possibility of advanced AI seriously. The occasion was a hearing of Congress’s “we’re worried about China” committee (or, more formally, the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party) focused on the US-China AI competition. Members of both parties used the event to express concern that was surprisingly strident and detailed about the near-term risks posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI) or even artificial superintelligence (ASI). This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) expressed fear of “loss of control by any nation-state” that “could give rise to an independent AGI or ASI actor” threatening all nations. Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) predicted, “AI systems will soon have the capability to conduct their own research and development,” and asked about the risks that might pose. Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) declared, “Anybody who doesn’t feel urgency around this issue is not paying attention.” Shakeel Hashim of Transformer, one of the best reporters working on AI today, summarized the hearing this way: “Washington seems to finally be waking up to the potential arrival of AGI — and the many risks that could accompany it.” Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy headlined his post on the hearing, “Congress Has Started Taking AGI More Seriously.” Yet even as that hearing was unfolding, the Senate was frantically putting the finishing touches on the One Big Beautiful Bill, the gargantuan deficit-exploding legislation to cut taxes, boost military and border spending, and cut to the bone various social programs. As part of their effort, culminating in Senate passage on Tuesday, Republican senators managed to worsen some of the safety net cuts in the House version of the bill and tried (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to add a new tax on clean energy that could make building the energy-hungry data centers AI requires substantially more expensive. The negotiations were a reminder that, even as some parts of Congress have finally started to appear to take AI seriously, others are on autopilot and taking a series of actions that will make the US less competitive on, and less prepared for, the future of AI. Recapping the beautiful bill As I wrote a month ago, the One Big Beautiful Bill, in general, is not the work of policymakers who take the possibility of powerful AI seriously. The House-passed provision stripping broadband funding from states that regulate AI suggested its authors do not think AI will be a sufficiently important technology that will need to be regulated the way telephones, electrical transmission, the internet, and other major technological breakthroughs have always been by state and local governments. Luckily, the Senate voted to strip this provision from its version of the bill on Monday night, but that hardly means the rest of the bill is harmless. The bill’s cuts to, and imposition of new work requirements upon, safety net programs, such as Medicaid and SNAP (aka food stamps), suggest the authors do not take the risk of automation-caused job loss at all seriously. If huge numbers of Americans are about to be displaced from their jobs due to technological advancements, the last thing we ought to do is condition more support programs on work. Yet that is exactly what the bill does, and the Senate version is in many ways worse than the House one. While the Medicaid work requirements in the House bill only apply to adults without children, the Senate bill extends them to parents with children 14 and over. It cuts Medicaid funding to states by changes to policies called “provider taxes.” Its food stamp work requirements are slightly less stringent than the House’s, but both bills open the door to states opting out of the food stamps program entirely if they so choose. How does this connect to a future with far more powerful AI? Imagine you lose your job as an Uber driver because of the increased popularity of Waymo and other self-driving services. You suddenly have no income. If, like most Americans, you live in a state that expanded Medicaid as part of Obamacare, you will be eligible for free health coverage as well as food stamps to help with grocery costs while you get back on your feet.  But this bill changes that. Your state might not offer you food stamps at all, and if it does, both them and your health coverage could lapse if you don’t swiftly get a new job, which will be that much harder in a world where AI eats up more and more labor.  This is not what a smart policy for people displaced by advances in AI looks like. The Trump energy drought But perhaps the most important AI-related changes to the Senate bill are found on the energy side.  The House bill’s cuts to sources like nuclear and geothermal, which can produce the constant stream of power needed for fueling data centers and AI model training, were so severe that even Energy Secretary Chris Wright asked for them to be tapered back. The Senate version indeed tapered those back a bit by allowing credits for projects that start construction before 2034, a few years later than the House deadlines. But it makes up for that by repealing wind and solar credits faster. In the House bill, wind and solar companies had to be operational by the end of 2028; in the Senate version, by the end of 2027. In its initial form, the Senate bill would have taken another hatchet to wind and solar by actively taxing them, proposing a provision to tax wind and solar farms coming online after 2027 if they use components from China. The thing is that essentially every wind and solar farm uses components from China, given how dominant that country is in supply chains for these sources, and that will not change any time soon. The energy tax was struck from the final version of the Senate bill. But its repeal of wind and solar credits remains a threat to AI as an industry. For one thing, the bill makes everyone’s electricity, including that for AI training, more expensive. The Rhodium Group modeled an earlier, less severe version of the bill and found it would increase energy costs for industry by 4 percent to 6 percent annually. Most of this comes in the form of increased spending on fossil fuels. Because the economic case for new wind and solar production is so much worse, natural gas and coal will have to be a bigger part of the energy mix, and because they can be more expensive than renewables, that pushes up costs. Wind and solar are intermittent sources (it’s not always windy, it’s not always sunny), which is not ideal for projects that need constant power, such as data centers. But with the addition of batteries, wind and solar can provide more constant wattage, and sure enough, data center users like Google have bet on wind/solar-plus-batteries as an energy source for their facilities. More to the point, AI is moving very quickly, and the buildout of these data centers and their power sources has to happen fast. Nuclear can provide clean baseload electricity, but the two most recent nuclear plants in the US took a decade to come online. Enhanced geothermal, the kind that can be installed anywhere and not just in seismically active places like Iceland, is still years away from deployment at scale, despite big recent strides. Solar/wind plus batteries is a technology that can be deployed fast. The Solar Energy Industries Association (hardly a disinterested actor, but I think it’s right on this) found that while solar and wind plants take on average less than two years from conception to coming online (as do battery plants), natural gas can take twice as long and coal three times. Small wonder that in 2024, 93 percent of new power capacity in the US last year came from solar, batteries, or wind. It’s just about the only electricity source you can get up quickly. If you can’t get fast, clean energy anymore, because Trump’s policies have made it uneconomical, then AI firms are going to have to rely on slow-to-build, dirtier energy. There is a huge shortage of natural gas turbines in the US right now, with waiting times doubling in the past year. That shortage will get worse if the tax bill shifts demand currently aiming for wind and solar toward natural gas. That will, in turn, slow the data center buildout. No one wins It might be tempting, if you’re skeptical of AI’s benefits or worried about its risks, to think that this is a positive. They’re slowing down progress, and progress in this field could be dangerous.  I fear this is failing to think an extra step ahead. The most likely result isn’t that no data centers get built, but that they get built in countries that do subsidize solar, wind, and batteries. It would be very good news indeed for China, for one thing, whose AI firms would gain a great opportunity to match US labs, which they’re not too far behind as it is. It would also be very good news for the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which are putting huge amounts of oil money behind data center projects for AI firms, projects that inevitably will be subject to the pressures of these dictatorships. The bill would not increase AI safety. It would simply cede leadership in the race to China, and/or force the US to rely on dirty energy and worsen climate impacts to keep up. If you put a bill before Congress stating that it is the policy of the United States to fall behind China in AI development and to put American firms like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic at a disadvantage to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Tencent, and Huawei, it would get no votes. But this is effectively what the One Big Beautiful Bill is offering.  What Congress seems ready to pass is less an industrial policy than an industrial suicide note. It is truly beyond me that any members of the House or Senate, let alone majorities, are signing it.

Preview: Hundreds of people rally against US tariffs and threats of annexation at the Manitoba Legislature. | Lyle Stafford/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images I’ve always found something charming about Canada Day, the July 1 national celebration, landing just three days before America’s Independence Day. The two holidays are ideologically opposed: Canada Day celebrates the country’s 1867 confederation under British law, while July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution against the crown. Yet after centuries of peace, with the two countries now sharing the longest undefended border in the world, the timing normally feels less like dueling celebrations than a week-long joint birthday party. So leave it to Donald Trump to reintroduce tension to the holidays. Last Friday, just as Canadians were getting ready for the pre-holiday weekend, Trump declared that the United States is renewing hostilities in the briefly suspended trade war. “We are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” he wrote on Truth Social, adding that “we will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.” And then, in a Sunday interview on Fox News, he renewed the rhetoric that most infuriated Canadians: his claim that Canada should be annexed by the United States. “Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state. It really should,” he told anchor Maria Bartiromo. “Because Canada relies entirely on the United States. We don’t rely on Canada.” In thinking through all of this, I’ve found one voice especially clarifying: the Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant. In 1965, Grant published a short book — titled Lament for a Nation — arguing that Canada’s increasing integration with the United States was a kind of national suicide. This was, in part, a political matter: By hitching its economy and defense to those of a much larger neighbor, Canada effectively surrendered its ability to set its own political course. But it was also a kind of spiritual death: By embracing free trade and open borders with the United States, Grant argued, Canada was selling its conservative soul to the American ethos of never-ending revolutionary progress. It was, in effect, turning Canada Day into an early July Fourth. Given the Trump threat, Grant’s argument feels more vital than it has in decades — prompting a round of intellectual reconsiderations. Recent pieces by Patrick Deneen, a leading American “postliberal,” and Michael Ignatieff, a leading Canadian liberal intellectual (and Grant’s nephew), have highlighted elements of the argument that feel especially relevant in the current moment. Yet Lament for a Nation is also notable for what it failed to foresee. While Grant predicted America’s liberalism would swallow Canada, it is, in fact, the most philosophically illiberal administration in modern American history that threatens Canadian sovereignty. And Canadian resistance to Yankee imperialism has rallied under the banner of Liberal Party Prime Minister Mark Carney — a central banker who fully embraces Canada’s modern identity as the most tolerant and multicultural country on the planet. A conservative Canadian’s Lament Lament for a Nation takes, as its central event, the 1963 defeat of then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. His defeat, per Grant, was the moment that Canada’s fate was sealed. Diefenbaker was the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party (now more simply called the Conservative Party). Grant writes about him a bit the way that some on the intellectual right talk about Trump today: as an imperfect but basically necessary bulwark against the depredations of the liberal elite. A “prairie populist” raised in Saskatchewan, Diefenbaker was culturally and politically distinct from the traditional power elite in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. These elites, per Grant, believed that Canada benefited from increasing economic and military interconnections with the US, such as eliminating trade barriers and joint participation in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Diefenbaker, in Grant’s telling, took a different approach — one that valued Canadian self-determination over the material benefits of trade and security cooperation. On key issues, most notably the 1962–’63 debate over stationing American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, Diefenbaker resisted the intellectual and political elite’s “continentalist” approach — instead raising concerns that too much integration with the United States would threaten Canadian nationhood. It is this hesitancy, Grant argues, that brought the wrath of the elite class down on his head, ultimately leading to the Progressive Conservatives’ defeat in the 1963 election. With Diefenbaker cleared away, there was no longer any barrier to a policy of economic and political integration with the United States. “Lamenting for Canada is inevitably associated with the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His inability to govern is linked with the inability of this country to be sovereign,” Grant writes. It’s easy to ridicule this sentiment in hindsight. After all, Canada remains standing 60 years after Grant’s predictions of doom. Wasn’t he just wrong that integration with the US meant national suicide? But to take this line is to misunderstand Grant’s argument. His position was not that the integration with the United States would literally lead to Canadian annexation. Rather, it’s that Canada would lose the ability to chart its own course, surrendering its effective sovereignty and, more fundamentally, sacrificing what made it culturally distinct from the United States. The United States, per Grant, is the physical avatar of Enlightenment liberalism: a worldview that he described as celebrating the emancipation of the individual from whatever fetters society might put on them. The American ideology of capitalist freedom was a solvent dissolving local cultures and national borders, homogenizing everything into a single mass of modern technological sameness. Canada, by contrast, took its core identity from British conservatism — a sense that politics is not about individual freedom but rather conserving and incrementally improving the traditions and cultural inheritance that define its essence and maintain its good functioning. In Canada, Grant says, this conservatism was “a kind of suspicion that we in Canada could be less lawless and have a greater sense of propriety than those in the United States.” Partnering with the French speakers in Quebec (Lament for a Nation made scant reference to indigenous Canadians), the new country was in opposition to the American vision of frenetic capitalist change. Yet this conservative identity, Grant feared, was weakly rooted — and vulnerable to American imperial influence in the absence of a political class willing to wield nationalist policies in its defense. He narrated its ideological decline in three steps: First, men everywhere move ineluctably toward membership in the universal and homogenous liberal state. Second, Canadians live next to a society that is the heart of modernity. Third, nearly all Canadians think that modernity is good, so nothing distinguishes Canadians from Americans. When they oblate themselves before “the American way of life,” they offer themselves on the altar of the reigning Western goddess. Diefenbaker was, per Grant, the last gasp of authentic Canadian conservative resistance to this process. His defeat marked the moment that Canada’s spiritual death at American hands became inevitable. Grant in the age of Trump Today, Canada is facing a nakedly imperialist American president who is attempting to weaponize Canadian dependence on American markets into political submission. Grant, the liberal Ignatieff writes, was “the first to warn us that this was how continental integration would end.” Yet the circumstances are very different from what Grant might have expected. While Grant warned that American ideology was seductive, that Canadians risked voluntarily submitting to a liberalism that would subtly alienate them from themselves, they are today facing a brash American illiberalism led by a right-wing populist most Canadians revile. “Even in the fury of Lament for a Nation, America was seen as a benign hegemon — at least to us — who respected the fiction of our sovereignty. Today’s President disdains his allies and can’t stop telling Canada he wishes we didn’t exist,” Ignatieff writes.  For this reason, the anti-Trump resistance has been led not by Canada’s Conservatives but by the Liberal Party. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals won Canada’s April election on the back of anti-Trump resistance. This was not only because Carney took vocally anti-Trump positions, but because his chief rival — Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — was a right-wing populist whose political style seemed far too close to Trump’s for Canadian comfort. Carney won, in short, because Canadians saw conservatism as too American — and Carney’s liberalism a better representation of Canadianness in the current moment. This irony owes itself, in part, to Canada’s national reinvention since Grant’s original publication. In the past several decades, Canada has engaged in a collective nation-building project to redefine its national identity around ideas of tolerance and multiculturalism. This effort has been extraordinarily successful: Canada has a notably higher percentage of foreign-born residents than the United States, yet faces a far weaker anti-immigrant backlash. Grant would surely see this as vindication of his thesis: Canada has abandoned its traditional identity in favor of a Canadian copy of America’s Ellis Island narrative. Yet what Grant didn’t foresee is that this kind of liberalism could form an effective resistance against Yankee imperialism.  Canadian nationalism today is not just about symbols, like the flag or the crown, but about a sense that Canadians do not want their politics to take on the bitter ugliness of Trumpified American politics. Their attraction to what Grant identified as too-American liberal ideals of freedom and progress forms a key part of the hard ideological core uniting Canadians against American pressure. In this sense, and perhaps this sense only, Canadians have become more American than the Americans. This year, July Fourth may have come three days early.

Preview: Justice Neil Gorsuch, left, and Chief Justice John Roberts. There are two big winners in the Supreme Court’s most recent term. One is social and religious conservatives. In the last two days of its term, the Court imposed heavy new burdens on public schools at the request of religious conservatives, and it rendered much of federal Medicaid law unenforceable in a case lashing out at Planned Parenthood. It heard its first major pornography case in over two decades, upholding a Texas law that seeks to limit youth access to porn. And the Republican justices handed a historic defeat to transgender Americans, permitting states to block at least some trans people from receiving gender-affirming medical care. Four justices also voted that the Constitution requires most states to fund religious public charter schools. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was recused from this case, is likely to provide the fifth vote for religious public schools in the future. Indeed, as I’ll explain in more detail below, the Court’s Republican majority is willing to tear down major American institutions in order to advance the cultural right’s political goals. Another winner is President Donald Trump. One year after the Republican justices ruled that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, these same justices continue to treat him as the special favorite of the laws. The Court’s most high-profile Trump-related decision, Trump v. CASA, placed vague new restrictions on lower courts’ power to block Trump administration policies. This decision is defensible — the Biden administration sought a similar ruling while it was in power — but it is notable that the justices waited until a Republican was president before weakening lower courts’ power to rein in the executive. Even before the CASA decision, however, the Court frequently blocked lower courts that ruled against the Trump administration. When lower courts block Trump’s policies, the Republican justices routinely reinstate those policies on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices consider on an expedited basis. There was also one unexpected loser this term: the business and fiscal conservatives that have historically dominated the Republican Party. In the same week that the Court handed down most of its biggest decisions, it also rejected an attack on Obamacare. And it waved away a request to put drastic new limits on federal agencies’ power to regulate business.  So, while the Court now hands out victories to the cultural right as if it were passing out candy on Halloween, several of the GOP justices did show more moderation on the kinds of issues that preoccupied Republicans as recently as a decade ago. It was a lot to keep track of, especially given Trump’s ability to dominate the news, so here’s a quick rundown of how the Court reshaped the law during its recent term. The Court gravely wounded key American institutions to benefit social conservatives At least two cases this term did serious harm to institutions that millions of Americans depend upon, both in decisions that benefited cultural conservatives.  In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court’s Republican majority ruled that public schools must inform parents before their children are taught a lesson those parents might object to on religious grounds, and that those parents must be given an opportunity to opt their child out of that lesson. The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect. Mahmoud arose out of a dispute over queer-themed books — Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters that could be used in classroom instruction. But the First Amendment prohibits discrimination among people with different religious beliefs. So, if parents with anti-LGBTQ religious views have a right to notification and an opt-out, so too does every parent who might object to any lesson on any religious ground. This rule, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warns in a dissenting opinion, is likely to cause “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.” Requiring every public school teacher to anticipate which lessons might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs “will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” especially in a nation as diverse as the United States. In the past, courts have rejected similar lawsuits brought by parents who object to books or lessons that feature magic, women who have achievements outside the home, and include topics as diverse as divorce, interfaith couples, “immodest dress,” and “false views of death.” After Mahmoud, however, all of these parents now have a right to advance notice. Schools that fail to predict that a lesson about a Jewish woman with a career, a Hindu husband, or an immodest wardrobe will offend a parent’s religious belief will now face very serious financial consequences. Federal law often lets the “prevailing party” in a suit about constitutional rights collect attorney’s fees from the losing party. So lawyers can hunt for parents with idiosyncratic religious views, file a lawsuit against a school, and demand payment to avoid litigation that will be even more expensive for the school district. The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect, out of concern that the Constitution should not be read to prevent such an important institution from functioning.  Like the right to free exercise of religion, the right to free speech is also protected by the First Amendment. That is why the Court held in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) that public school students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” But Tinker recognized that free speech should not be used as a weapon that can shut down classroom instruction altogether — if any student could get up in the middle of class and start yelling, for example, their right to free speech would destroy every one of their classmates’ right to an education.  And so Tinker also held that public school students may not engage in speech that “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” The Court struck an appropriate balance between protecting free expression by young people, and making sure that public schools continue to produce an educated workforce that ultimately benefits every single American. That decision stands in stark contrast to Mahmoud, which establishes that the rights of religious objectors must be advanced at all costs, even if it would mean imposing such enormous burdens on public schools that every child receives an inferior education. A similar dynamic was in play in Medina, which pitted the GOP’s disdain for abortion providers against a federal law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own doctors. Just as in Mahmoud, the Republican justices handed a sweeping victory to social conservatives — seemingly without any regard for how their decision would damage Medicaid. Federal Medicaid statutes are riddled with provisions establishing who must be covered by Medicaid, how that coverage should be provided, and what minimum standards of care Medicaid patients are entitled to receive. South Carolina illegally forbade Medicaid patients from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health care provider. Rather than ordering South Carolina to comply with the law, in Medina the Republican justices effectively repealed the choice-of-provider provision. The question of which Medicaid laws can be enforced through federal lawsuits, and which provisions are essentially worthless, is one of the most important questions in American poverty and elder law and has been litigated for decades. But two years ago, in Talevski, the Supreme Court finally settled on a clear rule that judges could apply to identify which provisions are enforceable.  If you want to know more about these many decades of litigation, I explain many of those details here. But the most important thing to know about Talevski is that it established that Medicaid laws which are “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” and that “focus on the benefitted class” are enforceable. So, if a specific provision of Medicaid law mentions Medicaid patients, or otherwise names the individuals who are supposed to benefit from that law, it is enforceable. The choice-of-provider provision at issue in Medina refers to “any individual eligible for medical assistance.” So it was enforceable under Talevski. Medina should have been an open and shut case. Yet, instead of following Talevski, the Republican justices produced an incoherent opinion that does not even announce a new legal rule, beyond a vague statement that Medicaid laws are “especially unlikely” to be enforceable. Much of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina fixates on seemingly random facts about the choice-of-provider provision, such as the fact that it “appears in a subsection titled ‘Contents,’” as if that’s somehow relevant to the question of whether this provision is a meaningless husk. It is impossible to come up with a principled explanation for why, two years after Talevski, the Republican justices decided to abandon that decision and replace it with a new legal standard that renders much of federal law completely useless. But it’s certainly possible to come up with a political explanation. Unlike Medina, Talevski did not involve an abortion provider. Several of the Court’s Republicans appear to have flipped their votes between Talevski and Medina in order to lash out at Planned Parenthood. The worst thing about the Medina decision is that the Republican justices could have come up with some good-for-this-ride-only legal reasoning that denied Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, but that otherwise left Talevski intact. Instead, they appear to have overruled Talevski and replaced it with a vague new rule that does little more than tell lower court judges that Medicaid plaintiffs should nearly always lose. It seems that, in order to spite Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court stripped tens of millions of Americans of countless rights protected by federal law. Donald Trump’s fixers Many of the Court’s most consequential decisions were handed down on its shadow docket, a process that allows a party that lost in a lower court to seek an immediate Supreme Court order blocking that decision.  This term, the Republican justices used the shadow docket to temporarily nullify the Convention Against Torture, a treaty that is supposed to prevent the United States from deporting noncitizens to countries where they may be tortured. The Court also used its shadow docket to effectively repeal federal laws protecting the leaders of several federal agencies from being fired by Trump, and to prevent lower courts from interfering with the chaotic work of Elon Musk’s former office, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). (In an unusual liberal victory on the shadow docket, the justices also ruled that Trump must give certain immigrants due process before he ships them off to a notorious Salvadorian prison.) Traditionally, the Supreme Court takes months or even longer before it decides a case. With rare exceptions, a case must be heard by a trial court and at least one appeals court before the justices will even consider taking it up. And getting the justices to hear a case is a bit like winning the lottery.  Lawyers hoping the Court will review their case file over 8,000 petitions seeking such review in any given year, but the justices only grant about 60–70 of these petitions. Then, once a case is granted, that’s only the beginning of a months-long process where lawyers submit briefs, the justices review them and hold oral arguments, and then they spend months working on the final decision. Contentious suits can wait an entire year for a decision, even after the justices announce that they will hear the case. The reason for this slow, highly selective process is that the Supreme Court has the final word on questions of US law. So if it gets a case wrong, that mistake can linger uncorrected for decades. The Court’s plodding deliberation is supposed to minimize the risk of that happening. Beginning in Trump’s first term, however, the Court started relying heavily on a separate, much less cautious process to decide cases involving Trump and his government.  Historically, the Court’s shadow docket was used primarily for death penalty appeals, where the petitioner seeking Supreme Court review would be killed if the justices did not act very swiftly. Litigants in non-death penalty cases could seek expedited review on the shadow docket, but it was so discouraged, and shadow docket petitions were so rarely granted, that smart lawyers typically decided not to annoy the justices with them. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Justice Department sought shadow docket review about once every other year. Now, however, whenever the Trump administration claims that it must have a Supreme Court order blocking a lower court’s decision, the Court treats that claim as an emergency that must be tended to immediately.  In Nken v. Holder (2009), the Supreme Court held that a party seeking shadow docket relief must do more than simply show they are likely to prevail if the Court hears their case on the merits. Among other things, they must also show that they “will be irreparably injured” if the justices do not immediately block the lower court’s decision. But, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in a pair of opinions dissenting from two shadow docket orders, the Republican justices seem to have decided that the Trump administration is exempt from Nken, as they often grant shadow docket relief to Trump even when he cannot show irreparable injury. In Social Security Administration v. AFSCME, a case about whether DOGE may access highly sensitive Social Security data, Trump’s lawyers didn’t even make an argument that his administration would experience irreparable harm without Supreme Court intervention. Yet the Republican justices intervened anyway.  As law professor Steven Vladeck has pointed out, the Court granted, at least in part, “each of the last 14 [shadow docket] applications filed by the Department of Justice.” The federal government’s exemption from Nken, moreover, only appears to be in effect when a Republican occupies the White House. In one dissenting opinion, Jackson pointed to several Biden-era cases where the Justice Department sought shadow docket relief from lower court orders. In some of those cases, the Court left the lower court’s injunction in place for as much as a year, before finally concluding that the injunction was illegal after the case went through the much slower, traditional appeals process. The Republican justices, in other words, are manipulating the Court’s calendar to benefit Trump. When ordinary litigants — or a Democratic administration — seek shadow docket relief, the justices often apply the traditional rules and norms that prevent them from granting those requests. But when Trump asks the Supreme Court to do him a favor, the Republican justices swiftly oblige. The Republican justices did abandon some fights pushed by business and fiscal conservatives While the cultural right was one of the biggest winners in the Court’s recent term, the Republican Party’s traditional business constituency fared less well. On the final decision day of the term, the Court handed down a ruling upholding provisions of Obamacare that require health insurers to cover certain treatments, as well as a decision rejecting an aggressive attempt to limit federal agencies’ power to regulate business. Earlier in the term, a unanimous Court also rejected a suit challenging the FDA’s decision to pull many nicotine vaping devices off the market. The Court’s Obamacare decision, known as Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, aligns with broader trends within the Republican Party. During Trump’s first term, the GOP famously tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. Eight years later, the party has a more modest health care agenda, at least when compared to their ideas from 2017. Congressional Republicans are likely to enact deep cuts to Medicaid, but they are not pushing for full repeal of Obamacare. Decisions like Braidwood and Medina, in other words, closely track the Republican Party’s agenda in Congress. Like their counterparts in Congress, the Republican justices voted to drastically cut back on Medicaid in Medina. But many of them voted to uphold key provisions of Obamacare in Braidwood. One common element in the Braidwood, the agency power case (FCC v. Consumer’s Research), and in the vaping case, (FDA v. Wages & White Lion Investments), is that they all arose out of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court dominated by MAGA-aligned judges who routinely hand down decisions that are too extreme even for this Supreme Court.  In recent years, the Fifth Circuit has done everything from declaring entire federal agencies unconstitutional to attempting to pull a popular abortion drug from the market. It once ruled that Texas Republicans may seize control over content moderation at all of the major social media platforms. Many of the Fifth Circuit’s judges have taken positions that, if they were embraced by the Supreme Court, risk triggering a second Great Depression. The Supreme Court frequently balks at the Fifth Circuit’s decisions, but it does not do so all of the time. Just last week, for example, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify that their users are over age 18, despite a 21-year-old Supreme Court decision that struck down a nearly identical law. The Court took up the Free Speech Coalition case after the Fifth Circuit decided it wasn’t bound by that two-decade-old decision. The best lesson to draw from cases like Braidwood, White Lion, and Consumer’s Research, in other words, is that no matter how partisan or ideological the Supreme Court may be, there will likely be other voices within the judiciary pushing the justices to go harder. These voices will even sometimes succeed, as they did in the Free Speech Coalition case. If Trump gets to replace any members of the current Court, moreover, he could potentially replace relatively moderate justices with the kinds of judges who dominate the Fifth Circuit. No matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse.

Preview: President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has big Medicaid cuts. | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images Senate Republicans have passed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing a work requirement for the first time and restricting states’ ability to finance their share of the program’s costs. If the bill ultimately becomes law after passing the House and receiving Trump’s signature — which could all happen before Friday — American health care is never going to be the same. The consequences will be dire.  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would slash Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion and that nearly 12 million people would lose their health insurance. Republicans added a last-minute infusion of funding for rural hospitals to assuage moderates skittish about the Medicaid cuts, but hospitals say the legislation will still be devastating to their business and their patients. When combined with the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year, which were not addressed in the budget bill, and the other regulatory changes being made by the Trump administration, the Republican policy agenda could lead to an estimated 17 million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, according to the health policy think tank KFF. Fewer people with health insurance is going to mean fewer people getting medical services, which means more illness and ultimately more deaths.  One recent analysis by a group of Harvard-affiliated researchers of the House Republicans’ version of the budget bill (which included the same general outline, though some of the provisions have been tweaked in the Senate) concluded that 700,000 fewer Americans would have a regular place to get medical care as a result of the bill. Upward of 200,000 fewer people would get their blood cholesterol or blood sugar checked; 139,000 fewer women would get their recommended mammograms. Overall, the authors project that between 8,200 and 24,600 additional Americans would die every year under the Republican plan. Other analyses came to the same conclusion: Millions of Americans will lose health insurance and thousands will die. After a painful legislative debate in which some of their own members warned them not to cut Medicaid too deeply, Republicans succeeded in taking a big chunk out of the program to help cover the costs of their bill’s tax cuts. They have, eight years after failing to repeal Obamacare entirely, managed to strike blows to some of its important provisions. So, for better or worse, they own the health care system now, a system that is a continued source of frustration for most Americans — frustrations that the Republican plan won’t relieve. The next time health care comes up for serious debate in Congress, lawmakers will need to repair the damage that the GOP is doing with its so-called big, beautiful bill. How the Republican budget bill will drive up health care costs for everyone The effects of the budget bill won’t be limited only to the people on Medicaid and the people whose private insurance costs will increase because of the Obamacare funding cuts. Everyone will experience the consequences of millions of Americans losing health coverage. When a person loses their health insurance, they are more likely to skip regular medical checkups, which makes it more likely they go to a hospital emergency room when a serious medical problem has gotten so bad that they can’t ignore it any longer. The hospital is obligated by federal law to take care of them even if they can’t pay for their care. Those costs are then passed on to other patients. When health care providers negotiate with insurance companies over next year’s rates, they account for the uncompensated care they have to provide. And the fewer people covered by Medicaid, the more uncompensated care hospitals have to cover, the more costs are going to increase for even people who do have health insurance. Republicans included funding in the bill to try to protect hospitals from the adverse consequences, an acknowledgement of the risk they were taking, but the hospitals themselves are warning that the funding patches are insufficient. If hospitals and doctors’ offices close because their bottom lines are squeezed by this bill, that will make it harder for people to access health care, even if they have an insurance card. The effects of the Republican budget bill are going to filter through the rest of the health care system and increase costs for everyone. In that sense, the legislation passage marks a new era for US health policy. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats have primarily been held responsible for the state of the health care system. Sometimes this has been a drag on their political goals. But over time, as the ACA’s benefits became more ingrained, health care became a political boon to Democrats. Going forward, having made these enormous changes, Republicans are going to own the American health care system and all of its problems — the ones they created and the ones that have existed for years. The BBB’s passage sets the stage for another fight on the future of American health care  For the past decade-plus, US health care politics have tended to follow a “you break it, you buy it” rule. Democrats discovered this in 2010: Though the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions did not take effect for several years, they saw their popularity plummet quickly as Republicans successfully blamed annual premium increases that would’ve occurred with or without the law on the Democrats and their new health care bill. Voters were persuaded by those arguments, and Democrats lost Congress in the 2010 midterms.  But years later, Americans began to change their perception. As of 2024, 44 million Americans were covered through the 2010 health care law and two-thirds of the country say they have a favorable view of the ACA. After the GOP’s failed attempt to repeal the law in 2017, the politics of the issue flipped: Democrats scored major wins in the 2018 midterms after successfully campaigning against the GOP’s failed plan to repeal the ACA. Even in the disastrous 2024 election cycle for Democrats, health care policy was still an issue where voters trusted Kamala Harris more than Trump. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is already unpopular. Medicaid cuts specifically do not poll well with the public, and the program itself is enjoying the most popularity ever since it was first created in 1965. Those are the ingredients for a serious backlash, especially with government officials and hospitals in red states railing hard against the bill. Democrats have more work to do on explaining to the public what the bill does and how its implications will be felt by millions of people. Recent polling suggests that many Americans don’t understand the specifics. A contentious debate among Republicans, with several solitary members warning against the consequences of Medicaid cuts, have given politicians on the other side of the aisle good material to work with in making that case: Democrats can pull up clips of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on the Senate floor, explaining how devastating the bill’s Medicaid provisions would be to conservative voters in Republican-controlled states.  Republicans will try to sell the bill on its tax cuts. But multiple analyses have shown the vast majority of the benefits are going to be reserved for people in higher-income brackets. Middle-class and working-class voters will see only marginal tax relief — and if their health care costs increase either because they lose their insurance or because their premiums go up after other people lose insurance, then that relief could quickly be wiped out by increased costs elsewhere. That is the story Democrats will need to tell in the coming campaigns. Medicaid has served as a safety net for tens of millions of Americans during both the Great Recession of 2008 and since the pandemic recession of 2020. At one point, around 90 million Americans — about one in four — were covered by Medicaid. People have become much more familiar with the program and it has either directly benefited them or helped somebody that they know at a difficult time. And difficult times may be coming. Economists have their eyes on concerning economic indicators that the world may be heading toward a recession. When a recession hits — that is, after all, inevitable; it’s just the normal cycle of the economy — people will lose their jobs and many of them will also lose their employer-sponsored health insurance. But now, the safety net is far flimsier than it was in previous crises.  Republicans are going to own those consequences. They took a program that had become an essential lifeline for millions of Americans and having schemed to gut the law ever since the Democrats expanded Medicaid through the ACA more than a decade ago, have finally succeeded. This Republican plan was a reaction to their opponent’s most recent policy overhaul; the next Democratic health care plan will need to repair the harms precipitated by the GOP budget bill. In the meantime, the impetus is on Democrats and truth tellers in the media to help Americans understand what has happened, why it has happened, and what the fallout is going to be.

Preview: President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and the stakes are high. The bill has four major pillars: renewing his 2017 tax cuts, implementing new tax cuts, spending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the military, and increasing the debt ceiling. The bill itself is a smorgasbord of policy and could also affect clean energy programs, student loans, and food assistance, but perhaps the most consequential changes will be to Medicaid. The bill was approved by the House in May and passed a key Senate vote on Saturday. Republicans are divided over competing priorities; some want to extend Trump’s tax cuts and boost immigration and defense spending, while others worry about the $2.6 trillion cost and cuts to Medicaid. Republican lawmakers aim to pass the bill by Friday using budget reconciliation, but it’s unclear if all 53 Republican senators will agree. This is a developing story. Follow along here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis. Trump’s plan to replace clean energy with fossil fuels has some major problems The One Big Beautiful Bill is one big disaster for AI Republicans now own America’s broken health care system The Republican tax bill, explained in 500 words The Republican spending bill is a disaster for reproductive rights The most surprising victim of Trump’s terrible tax agenda The devastating impact of Trump’s big, beautiful bill, in one chart The economic theory behind Trumpism Trump’s big, beautiful bill, explained in 5 charts The big, beautiful bill is bad news for student loans The big, bad bond market could derail Trump’s big, beautiful bill Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” briefly explained The ugly truth about Trump’s big, beautiful bill Trump wants “one big, beautiful bill.” Can he get it?

Preview: Christina Vallice. Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma and vice president of development Nisha Chittal announced today that veteran video journalist Christina Vallice has joined the brand as head of video. She begins her new role on July 7.  “I’m thrilled to welcome Christina to Vox. She is an exceptionally talented video journalist and newsroom leader who will be instrumental in shaping the next chapter of Vox video,” Chittal said. “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and understands how to break down complex topics in an accessible way. I can’t wait to see how she will take Vox’s explanatory video journalism to new heights.”  In her role, Vallice will oversee Vox’s award-winning video department, continuing the brand’s signature explainer videos as well as leading expansion and experimentation with new formats in vertical shortform video and podcast video. She will oversee video strategy and publishing across all of Vox’s platforms, including Vox’s flagship YouTube channel with over 12 million subscribers, Instagram, TikTok, and website and owned platforms.  Vallice joins Vox after serving in leadership roles at the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, and Vice, following more than a decade producing at NBC News.   Most recently, Vallice was the director of video series and events at Yahoo Finance. There she led a team to deliver in-depth, original reporting on the investments that are leading to advancements in tech, science, and AI, newsmaker interviews with prominent CEOs and business leaders, and spearheaded the cross-newsroom coordination for major coverage events.   At the Wall Street Journal, Vallice served as the senior executive producer of news and specials, directing a global team spanning New York, London, and Singapore to produce daily news videos, in-depth explainers, international  features, video investigations and documentaries across various platforms. Under Vallice, the Journal earned two national Emmy nominations for its first feature-length documentary and  its first video investigation.  Before her time at Yahoo Finance and the Journal, Vallice was a supervising producer at Vice, and helped launch the award-winning HBO broadcast, Vice News Tonight. Prior to that, Vallice spent 11 years at NBC Nightly News, delivering fast-turn stories under tight deadlines both in edit and in the field, producing coverage on a wide variety of major news stories. Vallice received her master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications after earning her undergraduate degree at Binghamton University.

Preview: A group of doctors join abortion rights supporters at a rally outside the Supreme Court on April 24, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images By the time Republican Rep. Kat Cammack arrived at a Florida emergency room, she was facing an urgent medical crisis: Her pregnancy, then five weeks along, had become ectopic and now threatened her life. It was May 2024, and though Florida’s new and particularly restrictive six-week abortion ban did allow abortion in cases like hers, Cammack said she spent hours convincing hospital staff to administer the standard treatment for ending nonviable pregnancies. Doctors expressed fears about losing their licenses, prompting Cammack to pull up the legislation on her phone to show them that her case fell within legal parameters.  Now pregnant again, Cammack recently described her experience to the Wall Street Journal, accusing the political left of “fearmongering” and creating confusion among health care providers that ultimately puts patients at risk. Her view — that confusion stems from abortion rights advocates, not the laws themselves — has become a rallying point for anti-abortion leaders. Christina Francis, the head of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, blames mainstream medical groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) for misleading doctors about when they can provide abortions in states with bans.  “They’ve…stated that doctors couldn’t intervene in those [life-threatening] situations or they would face prosecution, and in fact, they’re still peddling that lie,” she told Vox. “They [just] put out posts on the anniversary of Dobbs saying the same thing, and they have a ‘Blame the Bans’ campaign where they’re actively lying to practicing physicians and telling them that they have to wait until their patient is actively dying.” But doctors argue they’re scared for good reason. The laws create genuine legal risk in complex medical situations, particularly when state officials contradict the courts’ interpretations of medical exceptions. That uncertainty played out dramatically in late 2023 in the case of Kate Cox, a Texas woman whose pregnancy developed fatal fetal abnormalities; a judge ruled the law’s exception permitted her abortion, but the state’s attorney general threatened to prosecute any doctor who performed the procedure. (Cox ultimately crossed state lines to end her pregnancy.) Other high-profile cases of doctors hesitating to provide emergency care have surfaced in the media, adding significant pressure on anti-abortion lawmakers who insist there’s no legislative ambiguity to be found. Partly in response, red state lawmakers have been moving to address — or at least signal they’re addressing — gray areas in their laws, passing “clarifications” to give doctors more concrete guidance on when they can provide emergency abortions and how criminal penalties would kick in. The Guttmacher Institute found that this is one of the top legislative trends for reproductive health care this year, with 42 bills introduced across 12 states. Three of those bills — in Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee — were signed into law, and Texas’s took effect earlier this month.  Most Americans — across parties, genders, and regions — favor allowing abortion when the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life or results from rape or incest, and strong majorities also back exceptions for severe fetal anomalies or serious health problems. All state abortion bans currently include exceptions to “prevent the death” or “preserve the life” of the pregnant patient, and many also include some sort of health exception, typically to prevent “permanent” damage to a “major” bodily function. The new clarification bills could help prevent the death of some patients but do little to expand access to some of the abortion exceptions voters support.  Clarifying laws that were supposedly clear The new bills proposing amendments to abortion bans are fueling debates over whether incremental improvements are worth the risk of creating false confidence that major legal obstacles have been resolved. This year’s fight in Kentucky clearly captured that disagreement.  The state’s local ACOG chapter helped craft the legislative language and supported the proposed clarification bill, calling it an “acceptable short-term solution.” However, the national ACOG organization, along with Planned Parenthood and some OB-GYNs with Kentucky Physicians for Reproductive Freedom, successfully urged Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, to veto it. “Although supporters of House Bill 90 claim it protects pregnant women and clarifies abortion law in Kentucky, it actually does the opposite,” Beshear declared. (The legislature overrode the governor’s veto two days later.)  As confusion mounts, supporters of abortion restrictions have doubled down on the argument that this is really not a big deal. Francis, the head of the anti-abortion OB-GYN group, argues that the bans are clear and don’t need to be rewritten — doctors simply need better education. “So many of these state laws have been in place for either three years or close to three years, and there’s not been a single doctor prosecuted for intervening when a woman’s life would be in danger,” she said.  But Francis also acknowledged that physicians were left without reliable guidance from hospitals, state agencies, and professional associations, institutions with attorneys who are themselves uncertain. A Washington Post investigation from late 2023 found that hospital lawyers and compliance teams often hesitated to advise doctors definitively, leaving physicians unsure when and how they could legally act. Some anti-abortion leaders have gone so far as to allege that physicians are deliberately withholding abortion care to make a political point. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee argued it wasn’t his state’s ban that was harming women, but “other factors like doctors’ independent choices not to provide permissible abortions.” Still, even as conservatives double down on their accusations of fearmongering, Republican-led states have been quietly adjusting their laws to ease doctors’ fears of being prosecuted for providing emergency care.  Utah lawmakers rewrote their emergency exception so doctors do not need to wait for an “immediate” threat to a patient to provide an abortion. Some states, like Idaho, have moved to scrap their “affirmative defense” provisions — meaning doctors would no longer have to be charged with a crime first and then prove in court that the abortion was medically necessary. Tennessee moved this year to provide specific examples of what constitutes a permissible exception, including PPROM (the rupture of fetal membranes before 24 weeks of gestation), severe preeclampsia (a high blood pressure disorder), and other infections risking uterine rupture.  Texas’s changes to its abortion law took effect on June 20. Its legislation, like Utah’s, clarifies that doctors can perform abortions when a pregnant patient faces a life-threatening condition caused or worsened by pregnancy without waiting for that risk to become “imminent.” The law also standardizes the definition of “medical emergency” across various state statutes, and it requires training for doctors and lawyers to learn more about these exceptions. “We all thought it is important that the law be crystal clear,” state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who introduced Texas’s clarification bill this year, said in the legislature. Last fall he defended his state’s abortion ban, which he also authored, as “plenty clear” and blamed news organizations for muddying the waters. The new Texas bill was backed by the Texas Medical Association, the Texas Hospital Association, and leading anti-abortion groups like the Texas Right to Life. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the largest national anti-abortion lobbying groups, praised the passage of Texas’s law, stating it will “end the confusion caused by the abortion lobby through direct education to doctors.”  Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America also championed a South Dakota law passed last year that required the state to produce a video on how doctors can legally perform abortions to save the life of a pregnant woman. In the state’s subsequent six-minute video, the South Dakota Department of Health secretary says a patient does not need to be “critically ill or actively dying” for a doctor to end a pregnancy. (Abortion rights supporters have blasted the video, which they say provides no real guidelines or legal clarity to practicing physicians.) Some legal advocates for abortion rights warn the reforms will fail to resolve the underlying confusion. The bills are “not to clarify anything. This is just so politicians can say they fixed it,” Molly Duane, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Vox. “The reason I know this is because the anti-abortion lobby has been pretty open about the fact that they were the ones drafting the bills. For a lawyer like me that spends all day, every day, looking at these, it’s quite obvious that there’s no additional language here that addresses the questions the doctors actually have.” ACOG also opposed Texas’s bill, and the group’s general counsel Molly Meegan wrote last month that “the solution to a bad law is not to further legislate that law. It is to get rid of the law.” The tough choices abortion rights supporters face One of the hard realities abortion rights advocates face is that in order to secure more legal protection for physicians working under vague abortion bans, they often must accept language crafted by anti-abortion lobbyists that could make things worse in the future. That controversial language can limit what types of procedures get classified as abortion or can introduce ideological terms like “maternal-fetal separation,” which are not standard in mainstream medical practice and can help justify or require medical alternatives to abortion, like cesarean deliveries and inductions of labor, that carry greater risk for patients. While such semantic distinctions may offer doctors some short-term legal protection, activists warn they risk reinforcing a false moral hierarchy between “good” and “bad” abortions and stigmatize some forms of care rather than helping the public understand that all these procedures fall under the same broader category of abortion.  Some of the bills also codify new “fetal personhood” language, which is part of an effort to extend constitutional protections to embryos. Abortion advocates warn this sort of language could help anti-abortion lawmakers strip patients and doctors of additional rights down the line. Beshear echoed these concerns in his veto announcement, blasting the clarification bill for using “new definitions that have been advanced by advocates who oppose in vitro fertilization and birth control.” He warned that using such language sets “a stage for future legislation and litigation” that put health care options at risk. Many physicians say they do not feel reassured by these clarifications. If anything, they feel more confused and nervous.  The push for clearer laws reveals a fundamental tension: Abortion rights advocates say exceptions like “ectopic pregnancy” with no further detail are too vague, yet also argue that the practices of medicine are too complex to codify in law. Republican lawmakers point to legislative language granting deference to physicians’ “reasonable medical judgment,” but advocates say that standard is still too open-ended. More precise language might help in typical cases but risks excluding the edge cases where doctors need protection most. Given these trade-offs, abortion rights supporters are left grappling with a basic strategic question: whether imperfect progress is worth the potential costs. “I think that’s the age-old question,” said Kimya Forouzan, a state policy researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, which has been tracking legislative trends. “If one person could get help getting an abortion that’s great but at the same time these [clarification] bills are not causing the problem that abortion bans create to go away.” Sarah Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine physician in Tennessee, captured the challenge of working with patients facing high-risk pregnancies in a state with a strict abortion ban. Writing in the New York Times in 2023, she explained why she supported modest changes to her state’s abortion ban, even as she understood the arguments of fellow abortion rights supporters that such imperfect amendments come with risks. “I worry that reproductive rights advocates may be digging into untenable positions and failing to listen to those affected most by the current reality,” she wrote. “Do we support incremental changes that provide minimum safety for pregnant women and physicians?” Ultimately, lawmakers drafting clarification bills have been careful to not expand access to care in any significant way. Many still exclude abortions for rape and incest — despite polling showing that majorities of Americans want those carve-outs — and almost no state allows abortion for mental health reasons, despite mental health conditions accounting for over 20 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in the US. Many European countries permit mental health as an acceptable health exception to abortion bans. Looking ahead, Americans should expect to see more incremental legislative tweaks coupled with state-mandated training, as anti-abortion leaders hail the passage of such medical education, or “med ed,” laws. Whether this strategy proves durable may depend on how much evidence accumulates that the core problems — criminal penalties, prosecutorial discretion, hospital risk management — run deeper than confusion about legal language.  The med ed campaigns represent an acknowledgment that something needed fixing. The remaining question is this: What happens when the fixes don’t fix it?

Preview: President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the US Capitol in May to promote his signature bill. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Republicans are barreling ahead to try to pass President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” — legislation that somehow manages to combine massive fiscal irresponsibility with devastating spending cuts. The bill would keep the “Trump tax cuts” originally passed in 2017 in place, while adding some new tax breaks and new spending on immigration enforcement and the military. It would also make deep cuts to government spending on Medicaid, the clean energy industry, student loans, and food stamps, though exactly how deep these cuts will be isn’t yet clear, as the GOP continues to debate the bill. Yet under any scenario, these cuts will be insufficient to get anywhere near covering the bill’s massive cost — one estimate suggests it will add $3.9 trillion to the debt. Republicans are trying to rely on only their party’s votes to pass it through Congress and hope to send it to Trump’s desk this week. Democrats are uniformly opposed. On Monday, the Senate began considering amendments on its version of the bill (the House passed its own version last month). But much remains unsettled as they attempt to hammer out a final compromise. Why does Trump want to pass this bill so much? Trump is pushing hard to ram this bill through because he wants to take care of four things at once. First, if Congress does nothing, the lower income tax rates Trump signed into law in 2017 are set to expire at the end of this year. That would mean higher taxes for practically everyone — a political disaster. Second, the bill fulfills a few Trump campaign promises by creating some tax breaks, such as new tax deductions for tip wages and overtime pay. Third, the bill includes new spending on immigration enforcement (such as Trump’s border wall) and certain military priorities (like his planned “Golden Dome” missile defense shield). Fourth, the bill raises the US debt ceiling — the limit on new debt the government can issue, which Congress periodically squabbles over raising — by $5 trillion. Who gets hurt by the bill All of this tax cutting and new spending is very expensive — it amounts to about $5 trillion over the next decade. So the bill also does some spending cuts: about $1 trillion. These cuts are overwhelmingly targeted at Democratic or liberal-coded priorities and constituencies. For one, Medicaid would be cut deeply — perhaps by as much as 18 percent, due to new work reporting requirements and other changes that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would push 12 million people off the program. The clean energy industry would also be hammered. The current Senate bill not only rolls back Biden-era tax credits but also imposes a painful new tax on wind or solar projects using Chinese components. Student loans and food stamps are the other areas that would face particularly steep cuts.  The exact extent of all these cuts is yet to be determined. Some in the GOP are seeking to soften the Medicaid and clean energy cuts at least somewhat, but conservative hardliners are pressing to slash spending even more.  The public spectacle this week will be on the Senate floor as amendments get votes, but the real action will happen behind the scenes as GOP leaders attempt to cut a deal that can win over nearly every House and Senate Republican.

Preview: LOS ANGELES—Revealing new details about the highly anticipated film, actor and producer Jared Leto teased Wednesday that the villain in Tron: Ares would be a teenage girl who lies for attention. “If you thought Clu was scary in the last film, just wait until you meet Kaylee,” said Leto, who shared that the antagonist would […] The post Jared Leto Teases ‘Tron: Ares’ Villain Will Be Teen Girl Who Lies For Attention appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Satellite Images Reveal Drunk Father Stockpiling Fireworks appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Tinder is rolling out a mandatory Face Check feature in California, prompting users to undergo a biometric face scan to verify their identity before they can use the app. What do you think? The post Tinder To Require Face Verification For New Users appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: SILVER SPRING, MD—Issuing a public warning for Americans to watch or they might miss out, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reportedly recalled three navel oranges Wednesday to prove that they could juggle. “Toss ’em here,” said spokesperson John Lavietes, adding that American consumers who had recently purchased navel, Valencia, or blood oranges should not […] The post FDA Recalls 3 Oranges To Prove They Can Juggle appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Highlighting a growing wealth gap nationwide, the Pew Research Center published a report Wednesday that revealed the average American’s plan for retirement now involves Richard Gere falling for them after paying for sex. “Our findings suggest that the vast majority of people are now hinging their retirement on Mr. Gere spotting them on the street, […] The post Report: Average American’s Retirement Plan Involves Richard Gere Falling For Them After Paying For Sex appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: NEW YORK—Calling it a “historic moment” in women’s basketball history, the WNBA announced Wednesday that the league would expand into three more cities as its Caitlin Clark cloning experiment neared completion. “Soon, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia will reap the rewards of our effort to bioengineer several perfect replicas of Caitlin Clark,” said WNBA commissioner Cathy […] The post WNBA To Expand Into 3 More Cities As Caitlin Clark Cloning Experiment Nears Completion appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Dad Carrying 2-Person Inner Tube Up Waterslide Steps Like Christ Bearing Cross appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Cold plunges, also known as ice baths, are an increasingly popular wellness trend. The Onion examines the myths and facts surrounding cold plunges.  MYTH: Cold plunges are only for celebrities and athletes. FACT: They’re also for people easily influenced by them. MYTH: People with heart conditions should avoid cold plunges. FACT: People who hate cold […] The post Cold Plunges: Myth Vs. Fact appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Windows will no longer display the operating system’s infamous “blue screen of death” when something goes wrong, removing the signature frowning face that accompanied the crash notice in favor of a shorter message and plain black screen. What do you think? The post Windows To Phase Out ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ appeared first on The Onion.

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