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Julia Rock is a reporter for the Lever.
Amid extreme heat and wildfires, President Joe Biden could free up disaster relief funds and slash carbon emissions by declaring a climate emergency. But last month, a group of GOP lawmakers introduced a bill to prevent him from making such a declaration.
In the early 1980s, Chief Justice John Roberts, then a young lawyer, worked with the Reagan administration to strip power from a liberal judiciary. Today he has reversed course to shield the Supreme Court’s absolute power.
The Supreme Court has just agreed to hear a case designed to preemptively block a wealth tax — another potentially lucrative gift for the conservative justices’ billionaire benefactors.
The hedge fund Elliott Management, whose owner has lavishly entertained Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, has argued that recent anti-fraud rules from the SEC are unconstitutional — and could try to bring a case before Alito to strike them down.
Republican senator J. D. Vance quietly amended his rail safety bill to allow the same unsafe tank cars that leaked chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, to continue circulating through US cities until as late as 2028, just as rail and chemical lobbies asked.
As part of the debt ceiling deal, Joe Biden forfeited his authority to help student debtors and set a ticking time bomb for tens of millions of Americans whose student loan payments are about to restart.
The deal struck by Joe Biden and congressional Republicans to avert a default on the national debt includes provisions that expedite construction of a greenhouse-gas-spewing pipeline and even attempt to block courts from hearing challenges to its legality.
In the debt ceiling standoff, Republicans have held the global economy hostage, demanding a ransom payment that consists of cuts to the US social safety net, rapid approval of fossil fuel projects, and more. Joe Biden is mostly letting the GOP get its way.
Republican lawmakers are refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats accept sweeping spending cuts and expanded work requirements on social programs — an agenda borrowed from a dark money–funded think tank that has pushed to loosen child labor laws.
The Biden administration has laid the groundwork for a financial firm to use the fragile Colorado River as a route for oil trains — amid heightened concerns about derailments that could cause untold environmental damage in a drought-prone area.
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has abandoned his own stated principles and changed his position on one of America’s most significant regulatory doctrines. Why? A dark money network of conservative billionaires is making his family rich.
A Supreme Court case brought by six Republican attorneys general to kill Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan is neglecting key evidence. The dark money–backed court appears willing to disregard its judicial principles and strike the measure down anyway.
Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly declined to use his position to impose a code of ethics on the highest court. Now, he’s punting investigation of Clarence Thomas’s corruption scandal to a panel of lower court judges whose identities are secret.
While billionaire real estate mogul Harlan Crow was lavishing Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas with luxury gifts, Thomas voted to strike down federal tenant protections that might hurt the profits of Crow’s company.
After its hosts repeatedly lied about voting machine company Dominion rigging the 2020 elections, Fox News agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion to settle a defamation lawsuit. Fox can deduct over $200 million in taxes because of the settlement payment.
While receiving lavish gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow and then failing to disclose them, Clarence Thomas pushed to invalidate all disclosure laws, insisting that donors have a right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash.
Governor Kathy Hochul is pushing to gut New York’s signature climate law to effectively allow more methane emissions. She is doing so after receiving nearly half a million dollars in donations from energy corporations and lobbyists advocating for the move.
The corporate lobbying group fighting a minimum wage raise in New York argues it will throw more than 100,000 people out of work. But independent studies show an increase wouldn’t substantially impact employment.
Five years before customers fled Silicon Valley Bank en masse, federal regulators acknowledged that the nature of the bank’s deposits made it especially susceptible to such bank runs — but did nothing to reduce the risk.
In 2021, the Fed approved a merger application from Silicon Valley Bank with Boston Private Bank and Trust, believing that the newly enlarged institution presented no danger to the financial system. After SVB’s collapse, the Fed is changing its tune.