Feds block League of Women Voters from registering new citizens after R.I. naturalization ceremonies

Part of Trump regime effort to make it harder to vote

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

You would think that newly naturalized citizens
would pass the Trump "proof of citizenship" test

For the past two years, Rhode Island League of Women Voters volunteers have helped over 1,700 new American citizens register to vote at weekly naturalization ceremonies at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Johnston.

“It’s a routine,” Christine Stenning, president of the Newport League of Women Voters, said in an interview Monday. “And it seems to work.”

But when volunteers arrived at the Johnston office the morning after Labor Day, they were told the Trump administration had ended their routine. 

A new policy quietly enacted the Friday before the holiday weekend prohibits all nongovernmental groups from registering voters at naturalization ceremonies.

The new rule, issued Aug. 29 by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), leaves voter registration duties at naturalization ceremonies solely with state and local election officials.

Confront or Cave? Federal Pressure Splits the Building Trades

Often conservative construction unions will have to decide what they will do

Natascha Elena Uhlmann, Keith Brower Brown for Labor Notes

Will prevailing wage be paid on ICE
concentration camp construction?

One of the last nationwide bastions of union jobs is getting jackhammered by the Trump administration. Members are languishing in ICE prisons without trial. Programs that protect members from racism and sexism are getting the axe.

In response, building trades officers are split: some are pleading, some are protesting, and others are surrendering without a fight.

Out of nine million construction workers in the U.S., one million had a union last year. Since the 1970s, when about forty percent of U.S. hardhats wore union stickers, anti-union developers have kicked unions out from most residential and private building sites.

The building trades took refuge in publicly funded construction projects and specialized industrial jobs. An old federal law that favors union hires for interstates and military outposts helps small locals of pile drivers and insulators straggle on even in rural Alabama or Wyoming, where unions are otherwise scarce.

‘Alternative Facts’ Aren’t a Reason To Skip Vaccines

Health Secretary Bobby Junior promotes bad medicine

Elisabeth Rosenthal

Donald Trump’s administrations have been notorious for an array of “alternative facts” — ranging from the relatively minor (the size of inaugural crowds) to threats to U.S. democracy, such as who really won the 2020 election.

And over the past six months, the stakes have been life or death: Trump’s health officials have been endorsing alternative facts in science to impose policies that contradict modern medical knowledge.

It is an undeniable fact — true science — that vaccines have been miraculous in preventing terrible diseases from polio to tetanus to measles. Numerous studies have shown they do not cause autism. That is accepted by the scientific community.

Yet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has no medical background or scientific training, doesn’t believe all that. The consequences of such misinformation have already been deadly.

For decades, the vast majority Americans willingly got their shots — even if a significant slice of parents had misgivings. A 2015 survey found that 25% of parents believed that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism. (A 1998 study that suggested the connection has been thoroughly discredited.) 

Despite that concern, just 2% of children entering kindergarten were exempted from vaccinations for religious or philosophical objections. Kids got their shots.

But more recently, poor government science communication and online purveyors of misinformation have tilled the soil for alternative facts to grow like weeds. In the 2024-25 school year, rates of full vaccination for those entering kindergarten dropped to just over 92%. In more than a dozen states, the rate was under 90%, and in Idaho it was under 80%. And now we have a stream of measles cases, more than 1,300 from a disease declared extinct in the U.S. a quarter-century ago.

It’s easy to see how both push and pull factors led to the acceptance of bad science on vaccines.

The number of recommended vaccines has ballooned this century, overwhelming patients and parents. That is, in large part, because the clinical science of vaccinology has boomed (that’s good). And in part because vaccines, which historically sold for pennies, now often sell for hundreds of dollars, becoming a source of big profits for drugmakers.

In 1986, a typical child was recommended to receive 11 vaccine doses — seven injections and four oral. Today, that number has risen to between 50 and 54 doses by age 18.

Now Christian Nationalists within the Trump regime are questioning women's right to vote

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leads the pack

By Mariel Padilla, Grace Panetta, Mel Leonor Barclay

“In my ideal society, we would vote as households,” a pastor tells CNN. “And I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”

Another agrees, saying he’d back an end to a woman’s right to vote: “I would support that, and I’d support it on the basis that the atomization that comes with our current system is not good for humans.” 

The discussion of 19th Amendment rights was part of a news segment focused on Doug Wilson — a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor based in Idaho — that was reposted to X by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The secretary is among Wilson’s supporters, and his involvement with Wilson’s denomination highlights how a fringe conservative evangelical Christian belief system that questions women’s right to vote is gaining more traction in the Republican Party. 

Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” said Wilson’s broader vision of Christian nationalism has gotten more attention over the past several years, alongside President Donald Trump’s rise to power.

“He was a fairly fringe figure, but this moment was really his moment,” she said. “And then as part of that, also, I think he signaled and gave permission to others that they didn't need to hide some of their more controversial views, such as, should women have the vote? And that's something that you didn't hear proudly promoted from very many spaces, even just a handful of years ago.”

In the CNN interview, Wilson said he’d like to see the United States become a Christian and patriarchal country. He advocates for a society where sodomy is criminalized and women submit to their husbands and shouldn’t serve in combat roles in the military — a belief Hegseth has also publicly shared in the past though walked back during his confirmation hearings. 

Hegseth appeared to support the nearly seven-minute interview with the caption, “All of Christ for All of Life.” Wilson has built an evangelical empire over the past 50 years that is centered in Moscow, Idaho, and now spans more than 150 congregations across four continents — including a new church in Washington, D.C. 

Pediatricians call for stricter rules requiring vaccination for school children

There is no Constitutional right to infect other people

Chris Dall, MA 

Mandatory polio vaccinations ended
polio in the United States

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reaffirmed its call for an end to nonmedical exemptions for routine childhood vaccinations.

In a revised policy statement published July 28, the AAP said that it continues to support medical exemptions from immunization when granted appropriately and believes such exemptions should be available to children. 

But it's concerned that the growth in nonmedical vaccine exemptions, and the variation in how different states implement nonmedical exemption policies, is leading to disparities in immunization coverage and schools that are less safe.

The statement, which updates a 2016 policy that was reaffirmed in 2022, comes amid rising rates of vaccine exemptions in the United States and the worst year for measles the country has seen since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. Of the 1,319 confirmed US measles cases so far this year, 92% have been in individuals (primarily children) who are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status.

AAP argues that nonmedical vaccine exemptions "erode the safety of school environments" and limit the public health value of vaccine requirements for school attendance.

Since 1905, the Supreme Court has held that
vaccine mandates are Constitutional
because public health trumps individual choice

"Because medically recognized contraindications for specific individuals from specific vaccines exist, there continues to be a place for legitimate medical exemptions to immunization," the team of five AAP-affiliated physicians wrote. 

"However, exempting children for nonmedical reasons from immunizations is problematic for medical, public health, and ethical reasons and creates unnecessary risk to both individuals and communities."

Forty-five states allow nonmedical exemptions

The AAP said requiring proof of immunization as a condition for childcare and school attendance—as all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico currently do—is an effective means of protecting communities from vaccine preventable diseases because it helps protect those who can't be vaccinated for one reason or another.

If Democrats got off their asses, here’s what they’d be doing now

Nine critical steps NOW

Robert Reich

We have endured more than six months of the most despotic regime in American history.

Republican members of Congress have disgraced themselves and the nation by enabling it. They are traitors to the Constitution, the rule of law, and American democracy.

What of the Democrats? Individually, some have shown real heroism. But as a party they are disunited, ineffective, seemingly afraid of their shadows. “Epsteingate” offers a chance for Dems to derail Trump for a time, but it is not a strategy.

What would that strategy look like if the Democrats were bold and united? Here are nine critical steps (adding to those from someone named Pru Lee):

1. Don’t let Trump get away with his lies.

Have a truth squad that responds immediately with the facts and cites sources.

When Trump claims that Washington, D.C., is rife with crime, for example, get the truth out: that its crime rate is actually the lowest it’s been in 30 years. That Republicans have literally defunded the police in D.C. by stealing more than a billion dollars from the city. That Trump is dismantling the FBI and putting corrupt, unqualified jerks at the top of our federal law enforcement.

Point out that red states have higher murder rates than blue ones.

Make sure the truth gets out by repeating it over and over. If it’s not reported in the media, find out why.

2. Plan and announce ways to catch up with what we’ve lost on the environment, human rights, voting rights, labor rights, and safety nets.

Even when the orange Caligula on the Potomac is history and his lackeys are out of power, America will have a huge amount to repair, rebuild, and catch up on.

Tell the nation how you’d make up for the time and momentum we’ve lost. What sacrifices will be entailed. Explain what we must do to get back on track toward a just society, a strong democracy, and an environment that isn’t collapsing around us.

Tell us how you’ll rebuild the government that Trump and his Republican sycophants have decimated. How we’ll get back the talent we’ve lost — in science, health, the environment, worker safety, the foreign service. How we’ll build back morale.

3. Lay out a vision for the future.

Don’t stop there. Give us a vision of the future. Tell us where we could and should be, and how we can get there.

Medicare for all. Affordable child care and elder care. Affordable homes. Universal Basic Income. Paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy (including wealth tax), a tax on polluters, and a smaller military.

Also: All fossil fuels replaced by wind, solar, nuclear, conservation. Profit-sharing with employees. Living wage. Strict regulation of Wall Street including crypto, so we never again have to suffer a financial crisis and bail out the Street.

Challenge us. Tell us the truth. Demand much from us.

4. Tell us what you’d do to prevent this catastrophe from ever happening again.

Publicly lay out the laws and amendments you’ll pass to ensure this never happens again, the systems you’ll tear down, the safeguards you’ll enshrine, the plan to hold perpetrators of human atrocities accountable, the urgent commitment to immediately bring home those “disappeared” into prisons in El Salvador and other countries.

Set out the electoral reforms you’ll fight for to prevent a dictatorship from ever again forming under our very noses. Voting rights. Civil rights. Tell us how you’ll get big money out of our politics, even if it takes a constitutional amendment.

5. Mount an independent investigation.

Hold public hearings based on an independent, civilian-powered investigative coalition. Build a real-time archive of corruption, overreach, and executive abuse. Use experts, veterans, whistleblowers, journalists, watchdog organizations.

When the people now hurling us into fascist hell are held accountable, we’ll need every name, every signature, every illegal order, every act of silence — documented.

You’re not just preserving truth. You’re preparing evidence for prosecution. The more they disappear people and weaponize data, the more we need truth in the sunlight.

Investigate every author of Project 2025, every aide who defies court orders, every communications director repeating lies, every policy writer enabling cruelty.

6. Join the International Criminal Court.

You cannot control what the other side does, but you can control your own integrity. So call their bluff. Prove that the Democratic Party is still grounded in law, human rights, and ethical leadership. Join the International Criminal Court. If you’ve got nothing to hide — join.

Show the world who’s hiding bodies, bribes, and buried bank accounts. Force the GOP to explain why they’d rather protect a war criminal than sign a treaty, why they’re setting up detention facilities in an alligator-infested swamp.

And while you’re at it, publicly invite ICC observers into the United States. Make this administration explain — on camera — why they’re terrified of international law and oversight.

7. Create a digital safe haven for whistleblowers and defectors.

Not everyone inside this regime is a traitor to America. Some are scared. Some want out. Build channels for them to defect — encrypted, anonymous, and protected. Make it easy for the cracks in the system to become gaping holes.

Stop ostracizing MAGA defectors. Don’t push them back into the crowd. We don’t need purity. We need numbers. We need people willing to burn their red hats and testify against the machine they helped build.

8. Aim at the real culprits.

Don’t let Trump Republicans blame stagnant incomes and insecure jobs on immigrants, the “deep state,” transgender people, socialists, or communists.

Tell Americans the real reason why they’re working harder and getting nowhere: because big corporations are monopolizing the economy and they, and the super-rich, have amassed enough political power to rig the game for their own benefit.

Your corporate, Wall Street, and fat-cat donors won’t like you saying this, but you know something? You’ll do far better in elections by telling Americans the truth and stressing the importance of getting big money out of politics. You’ll get more small-donor support, too. And you’ll help stop Trump Republican fear-mongering and scapegoating.

9. Take back Congress in 2026.

Don’t just talk about it. Have a plan, a strategy. Mobilize us to focus our attention and resources on districts and states we have a chance of taking back. Set out measurable goals. Give us progress reports.

Stop Trump and his Republican stooge governors from super-gerrymandering their states to squeeze out even more Republican votes: have Democratic governors credibly counter-balance whatever they do — matching seat for seat, as California is attempting to do.

Recruit people to run who aren’t corporate Democrats or Wall Street Democrats but who know the economic stresses most Americans are facing, who respect working people, who speak their language, who know how to connect with voters. Tell us who you’re considering and why. Ask us for names.

Stop AIPAC and the crypto crowd from spending money on Democratic primaries. They have no business there. Put resources where they’re most needed.

Then win!

**

Unless Democrats begin to take steps like these now, the nation’s peril will only deepen.

Trump orders homelessness to be treated as a crime

Calls for involuntary committal, imprisonment even though federal funding has been cut

Jessica Corbett for Common Dreams

Advocates for mental health and unhoused people blasted Donald Trump over his executive order titled "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets."

Trump's order directs U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to end policies that restrict the government from institutionalizing "individuals on the streets who are a risk to themselves or others." 

She must also work with other Cabinet members "to prioritize grants for states and municipalities that enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting, and track the location of sex offenders."

As a White House "fact sheet" highlights, the order also "redirects funding to ensure that individuals camping on streets and causing public disorder and that are suffering from serious mental illness or addiction are moved into treatment centers, assisted outpatient treatment, or other facilities." Further, it ensures grant money does not "fund drug injection sites or illicit drug use."

In a statement to USA Today, which first reported on the executive action, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that "by removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need."

Meanwhile, National Coalition for the Homeless executive director Donald Whitehead Jr. declared that "everyone deserves a safe place to live."

Trump's policies, he said, "ignore decades of evidence-based housing and support services in practice. They represent a punitive approach that has consistently failed to resolve homelessness and instead exacerbates the challenges faced by vulnerable individuals."

Providence City Council offers good advice on your rights whether you are a citizen or not

Many Americans, including Donald Trump and his father, were born to non-citizen immigrants

What does birthright citizenship mean in the United States

American Immigration Council

Donald Trump's father Fred (on the left in this 1915 photo) was
conceived in Germany but born in the US to his German parents. 
His father Friedrich (Trump's grandfather) was banished from Germany
for draft-dodging. Friedrich founded the Trump family empire on
the proceeds of his successful prostitution business in Alaska.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship to every child born “within the jurisdiction of the United States.” The 1898 Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in that it cemented birthright citizenship for children of all immigrants.

For over a century, anyone born on U.S. soil has automatically been conferred citizenship at birth regardless of their parents’ immigration or citizenship status. 

While most legal scholars across the political spectrum have maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment interpreted through Wong Kim Ark unequivocally extends birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States, anti-immigrant political factions have pushed to restrict birthright citizenship—primarily, attempting to deny it to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced to reporters that he was looking “very seriously” at ending birthright citizenship, a warning that lacked details and did not come to fruition.

On January 20, 2025, one of the first actions Trump took after being inaugurated was to issue an executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to children born of undocumented parents or whose parents are in the country on temporary status. Litigation ensued shortly after the administration issued the order, and its implementation has been blocked by the courts as of January 23.

What is Birthright Citizenship?

In law, birthright citizenship is simply defined as automatically granting citizenship (as a legal status) to children upon their birth. This status comes in two forms: ancestry-based citizenship (jus sanguinis, a Latin term meaning “right of blood”), or birthplace-based citizenship (jus soli, Latin for “right of the soil).”

Today, many nations use a combination of citizenship through ancestry and citizenship by place of birth to determine birthright citizenship—granting citizenship to some infants based on their parentage and others based on being born within their territory. 

However, both methods of conveying citizenship can be applied broadly or in more restricted ways. A government can restrict ancestry-based citizenship by imposing residency requirements on the citizen parents, capping the number of generations who can pass citizenship down to a child, or implementing more stringent rules when only one parent is a citizen. 

It can also restrict birthplace-based citizenship by granting citizenship to babies born on its territory only if their parents hold certain immigration statuses.

Birthright Citizenship in the United States

Currently, the United States uses a combination of unrestricted birthplace-based citizenship (jus soli) guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and restricted ancestry-based citizenship (jus sanguinis) granted through the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as amended by the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, to determine birthright citizenship. 

The first means that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen at birth irrespective of parents’ citizenship status. The second means that children born abroad to at least one U.S. citizen parent may be entitled to U.S. citizenship, if they meet certain statutory requirements. There are more requirements to qualify for U.S. citizenship based on being born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent than there are to qualify for U.S. citizenship based on birth on U.S. soil.

Trump official says ICE cops can engage in racial profiling

Budget Bill Massively Increases Funding for Immigration Detention

Congress funds Trump concentration camps

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Brennan Center for Justice

Donald Trump’s budget bill will codify much of Trump’s immigration agenda, drastically changing the landscape of immigration enforcement and detention. 

Significantly, the bill funds a giant immigration detention apparatus that would likely be difficult to dismantle under future presidents. 

This new money comes as the administration is thwarting attempts at congressional oversight of detention conditions — and alongside new levels of cruelty directed at undocumented immigrants.

The legislation makes U.S Customs and Immigration Enforcement the largest federal law enforcement agency, giving it $45 billion for building new detention centers in addition to $14 billion for deportation operations. It also includes $3.5 billion for reimbursements to state and local governments for costs related to immigration-related enforcement and detention.

The bill funds an expansion to approximately double immigrant detention capacity, from about 56,000 to potentially more than 100,000 detention beds. Private prison firms — many of which were significant financial supporters of GOP candidates for Congress as well as the president’s campaign — will reap major financial benefits from this spending, as nearly 90 percent of people in ICE custody are currently held in facilities run by for-profit firms.

The Trumpist majority closed the term with a ruling that could rip the nation apart.

A corrupted Supreme Court sinks to new lows

Lisa Needham

With another Supreme Court term having drawn to a close, the rest of us begin the hard work of living under the profoundly anti-democratic decisions issued by the Court’s right-wing majority.

To be fair, under Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative justices were rolling back civil rights and rewarding powerful interests long before Donald Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015. But the MAGA era — and the three Trump appointees to the Court — has resulted in a new, gruesome project: giving Trump whatever he wants.

This toxic combination of bigotry and fealty has created a Court that uses all its might to attack the less powerful while coddling those who already have it all — particularly Donald Trump.

It’s a Court with a very clear vision of who matters and who needs protection.

A dystopian interpretation of the Constitution

The majority opinion in Trump v. CASA, the birthright citizenship case, was honestly inevitable, a culmination of all the ways in which the conservative justices have warped the Court in order to serve Trump. Indeed, the Court’s previous term will go down in infamy as the one in which they gave Trump a permission slip to do whatever he wants by inventing sweeping presidential immunity.

One year later, Trump needed his reliable pals on the Supreme Court to step in on the birthright citizenship case because four federal district courts and three federal appeals courts had enjoined him from implementing his executive order eliminating birthright citizenship. That shouldn’t be a surprise, or even remotely controversial. 

There’s simply no world where an executive order can undo the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and since the order was so obviously unconstitutional, the lower courts issued universal, or nationwide, injunctions to block the policy.

Those nationwide injunctions stopped Trump from stripping citizenship from babies, even in states that were eager to let him do so. Twenty conservative states filed an amicus brief urging the Court to let Trump’s executive order go into effect.

But the conservatives on the Court didn’t feel like grappling with whether Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional. Indeed, they very much want you to know that the administration’s requests did not ask the Court to rule on the birthright citizenship issue at all. Heavens, no. This is just about whether lower courts can issue universal, or nationwide, injunctions.

This is, to put it charitably, a self-serving lie, a way for the conservatives to soothe themselves, to pretend they aren’t responsible for Trump turning the immense machinery of his immigration crackdown on literal babies. No, all they did was strip the lower courts of the ability to issue universal injunctions. Of course, once those injunctions are narrowed, the administration is free to get started on its plans to deprive babies of citizenship anywhere the narrower injunctions don’t apply.

Over 70 percent of the immigrants kidnapped by ICE have no criminal record. Some are even U.S. citizens.

A Nation of Immigrants Under Attack

By Farrah Hassen

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses.

Mario Romero was among those arrested by ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him “chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.

“It was a very traumatic experience,” she told The Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families would endure.”

The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.

To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause, violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.

There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling. “We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”

In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.

In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens — one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE deported him without his medication.

The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails.

10 nasty little surprises in Trump's Big Beautiful Boondoggle

Zeros out Planned Parenthood, boosts Medicaid AND Medicare costs, squeezes student loan holders, gives venture capitalists a new tax break and more

By Colin Seeberger, Andrea Ducas and Natasha Murphy

Congressional Republicans passed a radical budget and tax bill—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—on a party-line vote. Many of the plan’s key elements will increase families’ costs for health care, food, and utilities—such as historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as terminating tax credits to produce more American-made energy—and are deeply unpopular according to recent survey data. Several provisions, however, remain less understood because they’ve received less media attention or were added during rushed negotiations that took place overnight and behind closed doors.

This article details several lesser-known provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that will increase costs and limit Americans’ ability to meet their basic needs; create a slush fund for Trump administration overreach; and waste taxpayer money.

Defunding Planned Parenthood clinics

The OBBBA includes a provision that would effectively defund Planned Parenthood clinics for one year. The bill would do this by prohibiting any health clinic that provides abortion care (even if that care is paid for privately) from accepting Medicaid funds for any other service they provide.

The Hyde Amendment already prohibits federal funds—including Medicaid dollars—from being used to cover abortion. This bill would go even further and prevent women on Medicaid from accessing any Planned Parenthood services, including sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening, Pap smears, breast cancer screenings, and prenatal care. 

This would be exceptionally harmful to Medicaid enrollees, as the majority of people with Medicaid receive contraceptives (85 percent) and STI services (57 percent) from Planned Parenthood clinics. Losing Medicaid funding would put 1 in 3 Planned Parenthood centers at risk of closure and would take away a vital source of health care for more than 1 million people.

Increasing health care costs for more than a million Medicare enrollees

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut Medicare benefits, the OBBBA blocks implementation of an existing regulation that makes it easier for eligible low-income Medicare beneficiaries to enroll in Medicare Savings Programs (MSPs) that lower Medicare premiums and out-of-pocket costs. 

MSPs make health care accessible for Medicare enrollees, who often live on very limited incomes and few assets. Without enrolling in the programs, even modest medical bills can be unaffordable and basic access to care can slip out of reach. Blocking the regulation would prevent states from streamlining and automating enrollment into MSPs.

As a result, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the earlier House-passed bill (with similar provisions also in the Senate-passed bill) would cause 1.3 million Medicare enrollees eligible for these programs to lose or forgo their Medicaid coverage and, therefore, be unable to access the assistance. 

The Center for American Progress previously estimated that Medicare enrollees eligible for two MSP programs—the Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB) Program and the Specified Low-Income Medicare Beneficiary (SLMB) Program—would be hit especially hard. These programs benefit Medicare enrollees living at or just above the federal poverty level (FPL). 

A couple on Medicare who are eligible for but no longer able to enroll in the QMB, making a combined $21,000 per year, could see their out of pocket costs skyrocket by $8,340. A single Medicare enrollee making only $19,000 per year and eligible for SLMB could see their out of pocket costs jump by $3,300 per year if they are unable to enroll in the program as a result of the bill.

Happy 4th from South County Resistance

It CAN happen here in South County

Don't wait until it's too late

South County Resistance

ICE tactics everywhere, especially in LA, are threatening our constitutional liberties.  It's only a matter of time until they show up here in South County to raid our restaurants, businesses, and courts with their thuggery, at the administration’s orders.

During the last Westerly Town Council meeting, Councilor Alex Healy spoke out against the aggressive tactics employed by ICE and questioned the police chief about his intention when ICE shows up. 

He seemed to skirt answering the question, saying they would cooperate with anyone with a warrant.  But we all know that the clandestine agents on a mission to meet Steven Miller's quotas rarely have warrants and often result in the disappearance of people with legal status and no criminal records. 

Since that discourse, Alex and supportive councilors have been targeted by Westerly supporters of the Administration's crackdown on immigration with accusations that Alex and others are advocating for illegal blocking of ICE actions.  

They are advocating for the legal treatment of humans in America who hold the right to due process. They are wondering how the local police department will react to such unprecedented violence from Federal officials.  READ MORE about the legality issue.

The Westerly Town Council needs our help! They need to see that there are people in Westerly who stand by the desire not to see local law enforcement wrapped up in executing the unilateral and patently unconstitutional orders of the presidential administration. 

The next Town Council meeting is July 7, 2025, 6:00 pm – come out to provide public comment or just show up in support of those councilors who are willing to stand up for your rights!

EDITOR’S NOTE: The threat posed by Trump to our fundamental civil liberties cannot be exaggerated. So far, just about anything that could happen has happened or seems likely to happen.

I agree with South County Resistance’s assessment that it’s only a matter of time before repression starts to occur here. You are vulnerable if you have spoken or written against Trump. If you have a Hispanic or Middle Eastern sounding name. If your parents or grandparents were foreign-born. If your skin is the “wrong” color. It doesn’t matter whether you are a citizen or have committed no crimes.

Trump’s jackboots have already scooped up totally innocent people and without due process, shipped them off to third-world gulags – with the blessing of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees.

So the time to prepare is now. Don’t wait until you get that knock on your door, or as happened recently, having your door blown in with explosives.    – Will Collette

What I fear Trump will do with his war

Centralize even more power and curtail even more civil liberties

Robert Reich

Friends,

One of my goals in writing this letter to you every day is to alert you to dangers to our democracy so you can alert others, who then alert others, and by this means we enlarge and strengthen our bulwark against the tide of fascism.

Wars pose particular challenges to democracy because nations at war often become more xenophobic and willing to give those in power extra leeway to protect the homeland. That’s an underlying danger in Trump’s war with Iran.

Trump has already tried to use three pretexts to usurp power — terrorism, national emergency, and war itself — to justify his mass deportations, universal tariffs, and consolidations of power. And he has tried to use these to gain legal legitimacy under laws that give presidents additional power when the nation is threatened.

Federal courts and public opinion haven’t allowed him to go as far as he wished. But if Trump’s war with Iran escalates — which it’s almost certain to do if Iran retaliates — courts may be reluctant to impede a commander-in-chief and the public may be willing to go along.

I fear that Trump’s war with Iran will enable him to use these three pretexts — terrorism, national emergency, and war — to further suppress dissent at home, narrow freedom of speech and expression, make warrantless searches and arrests of Americans, imprison opponents, and put more military onto our streets.

Aaron Regunberg offers perspective on the fight for democracy

This is how we beat Trump

Aaron Regunberg

Aaron and 4-year old son Asa at a rural Vermont No Kings rally

It has been a good news, bad news kind of week for America.

The bad news, of course, is that Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States is entering a new stage of what can only be described (or at least accurately described) as outright fascism. To name just a few developments:

• Trump sent the U.S. military to occupy Los Angeles, where Marines arrested a civilian — an act that is explicitly illegal for U.S. troops to do on American soil.
• A Democratic Congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, was indicted by Trump’s DOJ on utterly specious charges for attempting to visit an ICE detention center.
• A Democratic Senator, Alex Padilla, was forcefully manhandled and placed in handcuffs by Trump’s DHS goons for asking Kristi Noem a question.
• In Minnesota, where Democrats hold (or maybe now held) a one-seat majority in the state legislature, a MAGA extremist murdered a Democratic state representative — the beginnings of what was meant to be a spree of political assassinations, based on his shooting of another state senator and list of 70 additional Democratic targets.
• Perhaps even more chilling than the assassination itself was the right’s response, with MAGA leaders immediately launching an extreme disinformation campaign attempting to frame the shooter — who, according to his roommate, was a “strong Trump supporter” who listened to InfoWars and “would have been offended if people called him a Democrat” — as a leftist.

Let’s not sugarcoat it — this is scary, scary stuff.

And yet, as horrifying as it’s been to watch the MAGA machine swing into increasingly violent gear, this week also lit a spark of hope in me that’s stronger than anything I’ve felt in months.

First, of course, was No Kings. (Shoutout to members of the democracy team at my organization, Public Citizen, who’ve been going all out the last few weeks to support local rally organizers around the country.) With turnout estimates ranging from four to six million, this was almost certainly the largest single-day political protest in U.S. history. In fact, the numbers from No Kings begin to approach the ballpark of the “3.5% rule” — the principle, proposed by social scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, that once a national protest movement engages 3.5% of a country’s population, it becomes increasingly likely to achieve its political goals.

Personally, I got to experience No Kings from a new (for me) perspective. I usually participate in these nationwide protests in Providence, where I live, but for Father’s Day we took a weekend trip to a tiny town in Vermont. Despite having a population of just a few hundred people, at least 150 demonstrators came out to Saturday’s rally, which converged on the town’s single traffic light. In the photo above, you can see my four-year-old son, Asa, showing these nice Vermonters how we belt out our chants in Rhode Island.) Of course, No Kings also occurred in the aftermath of a week of demonstrations against Trump’s ICE raids in Los Angeles, and the solidarity protests they inspired all across the country.

Not to worry

MAGA posters suitable for framing