Alarm bells are going off all across America as the Republicans in the Senate push forward with their secret bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Despite a repeal of the ACA being disastrously unpopular, the Senate GOP are going full steam ahead. To get around the unpopularity of Trumpcare, they are drafting the bill in secret and using the “reconciliation process” to iron out any differences between this version and the House version to pass the bill into law. Reconciliation is another one of the Senate’s many arcane processes but we are here to explain what it means.
The White House’s “Infrastructure” “Plan” “Rollout”
Between Comey’s upcoming testimony and Trump’s endless tweets, you may not have noticed, but according to the White House, this is “infrastructure plan rollout week.” Right after the election, prominent Democrats had suggested they might be able to work with Trump on an infrastructure plan for all Americans. This means it’s particularly important for folks with liberal representatives to get informed about the drawbacks of the administration’s approach.
Courts in Session’s DOJ
Before Trump’s election, a bipartisan consensus had been emerging that racialized mass incarceration is ineffective and unjust. Add this to a decline in the federal prison population over the course of the 2000s, and criminal justice policy seemed to be taking a turn in the right direction. But with Jeff Sessions at the helm of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Nixon-era “law and order” mentality is back, and measures are being taken to send more people to prison—and for longer.