On Wednesday, as thousands of students staged walk-outs to protest gun violence in America, adults in the House of Representatives made a far less impressive attempt to reckon with the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last month.
On Tuesday, the House passed two significant and grossly overdue bills aimed at combating sexual harassment on the Hill. The bills prohibit sexual relationships between lawmakers and their staffers and seek to simplify harassment reporting procedures, while forcing lawmakers to pay their own settlement costs out of…
On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced that H.R. 36, otherwise known as the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” is scheduled for a House vote on October 3.
Politico reports that Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) is preparing to introduce the “Child Care for Working Families Act” on Thursday, a piece of legislation that, according to Politico, will focus on keeping down childcare costs and invest in early learning and the childcare workforce. This is meant as something…
On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump will deliver a statement on healthcare which, incidentally, Americans need more than ever seeing as we’ve all developed ulcers in the last six months. While efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act have—much to Trump’s chagrin—so far been unsuccessful, we can’t breathe easy yet.
Because we now live in a dimension that is two parts Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment and one part Alice Through the Looking Glass, absurdity now rules the day. And so, it falls to me to report that a bill inspired by Trump’s “covfefe” tweet is making its way through Congress.
A pornography bill that would force the makers of computers and phones to block all porn unless buyers pay a tax of $20 has been circulating in various forms in states across the country. The bill is being pushed by a particularly notable weirdo named Chris Sevier.
Last month, Republican state Rep. Lawrence Lockman introduced a bill in Maine’s legislature called “An Act To Protect Political Speech and Prevent Climate Change Policy Profiling,” which would ostensibly prohibit the state from discriminating against individuals based on their beliefs about climate change. The bill, …
Back in January, Republicans in the House and Senate introduced identical bills that would dramatically reduce restrictions on gun silencers, dubbed, incredibly, the “Hearing Protection Act.” Since a bunch of other terrifying shit was also going on around that time, this brazen gun lobby handout has flown a bit under…
Oh good! Health secretary Tom Price has offered a comforting endorsement of the GOP’s plan to replace Obamacare. Take heart, for he believes “firmly” that “nobody will be worse off financially” under the new—bleak—provisions.
On Wednesday, a trio of anti-abortion measures continued to wend their way through the Texas State Legislature, buoyed by Republicans’ expectations for a more conservative Supreme Court. A Senate Health and Human Services Committee hearing included testimony from NARAL Texas legislative intern Maggie Hennessy, whose…
On Tuesday, the first day of Kentucky’s 2017 legislative session—and the first day in nearly 100 years that the Republican party controlled both chambers of the legislature—Republicans moved quickly to introduce two anti-abortion bills: one, Senate Bill 5, to ban abortions after 20 weeks, and another, House Bill 2, to…
The Ohio legislature is currently pushing through two separate abortion restrictions bills that are vying to hit Governor John Kasich’s desk before the 2016 session comes to an end.
California Governor Jerry Brown has signed new legislation that imposes mandatory minimum sentences on some sexual assault crimes as well as expands the definition of rape under California law. Both bills—AB 2888 and AB 701—were introduced by the California legislature in response to the outcry following Brock Turner…
The Louisiana Senate is considering a bill this week that would treat violence against police, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians as a hate crime. It’s been dubbed the “Blue Lives Matter” bill, and it is a civil rights nightmare waiting to happen.
After a two year battle, MPs have passed a law that now outlaws paying for sex in France, with a penalty of almost €4,000 for offenders—but unlike legislation in other countries like the U.S., the “offenders,” in this case are clients, not sex workers.
For years, we’ve been hearing about a backlog of rape kits plaguing cities—in January 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department made its way through over 6,000 untested kits; in 2013, Memphis, Tennessee somehow lost almost 15,000 kits; multimillion dollar budgets have been put toward ameliorating the backlog in cities…
The Florida House of Representatives has decided to move forward with several bills that would all but ban abortions in the state, including one that would make performing an abortion a felony.
On Wednesday, every licensed physician in the state of Oklahoma received an email from the Oklahoma Medical Board reminding them about HB 1409, a law requiring all doctors either performing an abortion or referring their patient to abortion services, to obtain “informed consent” at least 72 hours before the abortion…
The Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, a crucial piece of environmental legislation that will phase out and eventually ban microbeads from soaps and cosmetics, has flown surprisingly easily through the Republican-controlled Congress over the past few weeks.
