Conventional wisdom says the party that holds the White House is fated to suffer midterm losses. It’s tough to come out ahead when the election is framed as a referendum on the sitting president, in a political system that guarantees no president can get his agenda through Congress unscathed.
President Joe Biden finally announced his student debt relief plan on Wednesday, and it exceeds the expectations of recent reports on his thinking. Biden will cancel up to $10,000 in debt for all student borrowers with incomes under $125,000 ($250,000 for married couples). That number had been widely reported. But in addition, Biden is cancelling up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients at the same income levels.
Aug. 24 is Ukrainian Independence Day. It also marks six months since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin began an illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. And now it marks the biggest U.S. military aid package since the war began.
President Joe Biden has made note of this occasion both by congratulating the Ukrainian people on their continued independence and by announcing a package of military aid designed to see that Ukraine stays a free and independent nation.
Republicans didn’t even wait for President Joe Biden to announce up to $20,000 in student debt relief before they started screeching about how terrible it would be for people who don’t have student debt and people who already paid off their student debt. The screeching has been going on for as long as debt cancellation has been discussed, but it reached a fever pitch as Biden’s announcement approached.
The Fox News host said “I didn’t have to take out loans” and called debt relief for people who did “disgusting.
The federal government’s challenge represents one of its most aggressive actions to preserve abortion rights.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Although today’s big news from the White House is about student-loan forgiveness, we should note that it is Ukrainian Independence Day, which usually passes unnoticed outside of Ukraine.
People who received Pell Grants to go to college can have $20,000 knocked off their balance.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekObservers disagree about law enforcement’s case against Donald Trump, the former president whose Florida mansion was recently searched by federal officials in pursuit of classified documents.
For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.
The report by House Democrats examining the pandemic says Trump officials sought vaccine approvals to sway voters before the 2020 election.
The transition from Monkeypox Inoculation Plan A to Monkeypox Inoculation Plan B has been a smashing success—at least, if you ask federal officials. Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. had nowhere near enough of the Jynneos vaccine to doubly dose even a quarter of the Americans at highest risk of monkeypox, roughly 1.6 million men who have sex with men.
We remember the legendary historian, author, professor, playwright and activist Howard Zinn, who was born 100 years ago today. Zinn was a regular guest on Democracy Now! from the start of the program in 1996 up until his death in 2010 at age 87. After witnessing the horrors of World War II as a bombardier, Zinn became a peace and justice activist who picketed with his students at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and joined in actions such as opposing the Vietnam War.
It’s the latest hiccup the administration is facing amid broad criticism over its monkeypox response, its messaging to LGBTQ communities about the virus’s risks and its failure to supply enough vaccines to immunize those most susceptible to contracting it.
He said in a statement that he would leave his government post in December to “pursue the next chapter of my career.
As lawmakers debate how much to restrict access to abortion, doctors are becoming increasingly vocal.
The Senate Aging Committee is conducting oversight to get agencies to comply with the rules.
The Biden administration is responding, working to shore up reproductive health policies it can control in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
As the U.S. central banks raises interest rates, the rest of the world is feeling the squeeze.
We speak with one of the more than 650 workers calling on Google’s parent company Alphabet to protect the location and browser history of people searching for information on abortion. A petition led by the Alphabet Workers Union also demands the company block advertisements that misleadingly direct users to so-called crisis pregnancy centers, a tactic employed by anti-abortion activists to lure patients to discourage them from seeking abortions.
The Internal Revenue Service says it is conducting a comprehensive review of safety at its facilities.
Democrat Pat Ryan scored a huge special election upset for his party by defeating Republican Marc Molinaro 51-49 in New York’s 19th District, a swing seat in the Hudson Valley that Molinaro appeared poised to flip until polls closed on Tuesday.
The win for Goldman, a moderate, disappoints progressives hoping to fill a rare open seat in New York City.
Paladino has praised Hitler and hoped for Obama to die of mad cow disease.
Pat Ryan’s special election victory helps Democrats argue that the abortion rights fight is improving the party’s political prospects.
The retooled vaccines would target highly transmissible omicron subvariants and hopefully prevent a surge in cases in the winter.
Three states are holding primaries tonight. Oklahoma voters already went to the polls on June 28, but the state is now hosting runoffs in primaries where no one took a majority of the vote. New York also held primaries that day for statewide races, the state Assembly, and local office, but because the courts redrew the maps for the U.S. House and state Senate, those nomination contests are only taking place now.
Any notion that Donald Trump’s move of highly classified national security documents to his private golf club was “accidental,” after his failed coup attempt and subsequent relinquishing of the White House, has gone by the wayside with the news that over 300 such documents were recovered by the FBI team sent to Mar-a-Lago to recover them. There’s no way that’s an oversight.
If a (Ukrainian counterattack) storm is in the cards sometime in the next month, this is the calm before it. If Ukraine still doesn’t have the ability to engage in a major combined arms operation, then it’s just … the calm. Here, thanks to Def Mon’s new interactive map, are Russia’s operations yesterday in the Donbas, the only place anyone tried to move at all.
When a Michigan jury last April acquitted two of the key players in the plot by a group of far-right militiamen to kidnap and execute Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, it appeared that federal prosecutors once again had bungled a clear case of far-right criminal behavior in the mode of previous failures like the Malheur standoff and Hutaree militia cases.