Category: The Hill
DC crews pile snow at RFK Stadium site as city slowly digs out of storm
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said on Wednesday that the city has resorted to piling snow at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium amid growing frustration over the slow response to the storm. “Ice and snow are not melting—so crews are hauling them to the RFK site,” Bowser wrote in a post on the social platform X,…
Fed holds firm
Welcome to The Hill’s Business & Economy newsletter {beacon} Business & Economy Business & Economy The Big Story Fed keeps rates unchanged The Federal Reserve declined to cut interest rates Wednesday, holding steady amid President Trump’s battle to exert more influence over the independent central bank. © AP The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)…
6-month HIV PrEP makes coverage gains with insurers
Click in for more news from The Hill {beacon} Health Care Health Care The Big Story 6-month HIV PrEP makes coverage gains with insurers Six months after its approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the latest advancement in HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is gaining coverage from insurers initially weary of its high price tag. © Gilead Sciences…
Trump, Iran escalate war of words
Welcome to The Hill’s Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story Trump, Iran escalate war of words Both President Trump and Iranian diplomats sent strongly-worded warnings as the arrival of the U.S. armada ramps up tensions in the region. Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP…
Duckworth fires back at Vance over Forrest Gump quip
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) fired back at Vice President Vance on Wednesday after he criticized her line of questioning at a Senate hearing, comparing her to the fictional character Forrest Gump, who is portrayed in the film as having a physical and intellectual disability. Duckworth — a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, who lost both…
Florida nurse wishes Karoline Leavitt agonizing, life-altering birth injury — red state delivers swift takedown
A delivery nurse was stripped of her ability to practice in Florida after she posted a video online wishing harm on a pregnant Trump administration official.
A video circulated on social media of Lexie Lawler, a then-nurse for Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital, stating that she hopes White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suffers a painful childbirth that leaves her with permanent injuries.
‘Making statements that wish pain and suffering on anyone, when those statements are directly related to one’s practice, is an ethical red line we should not cross.’
“As a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great joy to wish Karoline Leavitt a fourth-degree tear. I hope that you f**king rip from bow to stern and never s**t normally again, you c**t,” Lawler stated in the video.
Lawler was fired this week from her position with Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital.
“The comments made in a social media video by a nurse at one of our facilities do not reflect our values or the standards we expect of health care professionals,” a spokesperson for the hospital told the Palm Beach Post. “Following a prompt review, the individual is no longer employed by our health system.”
“While we respect the right to personal opinions, there is no place in health care for language or behavior that calls into question a caregiver’s ability to provide compassionate, unbiased care,” the spokesperson added.
Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier reacted to the Lawler video, stating, “Being fired isn’t good enough. Any healthcare worker who fails to uphold his or her obligation to provide adequate, safe healthcare should not be licensed in Florida. No excuses!”
Lawler responded to the public pushback in a separate video posted to social media.
“They murdered a man in Minnesota, and you motherf**kers are coming after me because I used bad language?” Lawler said, referring to the death of Alex Pretti. “F**k you. I’m on the right side of this. F**k you.”
James Uthmeier. Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Uthmeier announced on Wednesday that Lawler “is no longer allowed to practice nursing in Florida.”
“Making statements that wish pain and suffering on anyone, when those statements are directly related to one’s practice, is an ethical red line we should not cross. I’m proud of @FLSurgeonGen for taking this decisive action,” he wrote.
Lawler’s husband, Tim, created a GoFundMe requesting $14,000 in donations for his wife’s legal fund. As of Wednesday afternoon, the fund had raised over $10,000.
“Lexie Lawler was fired for political speech,” the GoFundMe post reads. “She is a liberal woman who used her personal social media — on her own time — to sharply criticize a public figure tied to a cruel, harmful administration. Her words were blunt, angry, and unapologetic. They were directed at power, not her workplace. That speech was lawful. The retaliation was real.”
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Even Harris Voters Oppose Biological Men in Women’s Sports, New Poll Shows
A new poll shows voters overwhelmingly oppose allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports—including a plurality of Kamala Harris’s 2024 voters—yet nearly all of the Democrats weighing presidential runs in 2028 dodged basic questions on the issue when Axios asked them earlier this month.
The post Even Harris Voters Oppose Biological Men in Women’s Sports, New Poll Shows appeared first on .
Appropriations talk, executive orders walk: The great MAGA budget betrayal
Money talks. Everything else is just BS. That is true in all areas of life, but it’s especially true in politics.
Trump is now repeating the modus operandi of his first term, in which he proclaims bold cuts, reforms, and changes to federal policies, programs, and agency spending levels in the form of executive orders. He summarily ignores his own policies by lobbying Republicans in Congress to pass annual appropriations bills that fund pretty much every spending level and most policies of his predecessor — so much so that most of these bills garner support from all but the most radical Democrats in Congress.
This bill is the crown jewel budget bill of the GOP trifecta at the peak of Trump’s power, and yet Democrats have no concerns voting for it.
Unfortunately, it is the government funding that matters when attempting to secure permanent change to federal agencies, not ephemeral executive orders or press releases.
On Friday, House Republicans passed a minibus bill with all but the 64 most progressive of the 213 Democrats voting yes. The fact that the 24 most conservative Republicans opposed it despite pressure from the administration should tell you that it does not reflect Trump’s campaign promises.
This minibus included Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development. Trump has proposed hundreds of policies throughout those departments that are extremely offensive to Democrats, yet they had no problem supporting the budget bill. Why?
They feel they dodged a bullet in this funding bill, especially while being out of power. The statement from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, says it all:
These bills invest in working people across the country and utterly reject President Trump’s plan to defund our kids’ education, evict millions of families, and slash lifesaving medical research nearly in half. The message to President Trump is: America will continue to fund cancer research, we are going to keep investing in affordable housing and tackling homelessness, Congress will not abolish the Department of Education, and the people’s representatives will have the final say on how taxpayer dollars get spent.
…
While there’s a whole lot more I wish these bills would have addressed, these compromise bills protect critical investments in the American people, reject truly heartless cuts that would have undone decades of progress — and they are a significantly better outcome than another yearlong CR. I look forward to ensuring they get signed into law.
This bill is the crown jewel budget bill of the GOP trifecta at the peak of Trump’s power, and yet Democrats not only have no concerns voting for it but enthusiastically support it. What gives?
The DOGE appears to be a fossil from a hundred years ago. The $1.25 trillion “minibus” bill reversed all the DOGE cuts to agencies like the NIH and CDC. Overall, spending will increase slightly over Biden’s final year — a year that was notorious for biblical levels of spending.
Here are some of the top concerns with the FY 2026 budget bill.
- It fully funds the Department of Education. Even as Trump “abolished” the entire department, this bill funds the department at Biden’s level of $78.7 billion. Worse, Democrats secured a provision prohibiting the administration from transferring Education Department funds to other agencies, which had been a point of contention in negotiations. Once again, appropriations talk, executive orders walk.
- According to a Democrat summary of the bill, the total funding for the Labor-HHS-Education portion of the bill is $224 billion, a slight increase in current levels. This is simply astounding given that Republicans never believed in even having these departments at the federal level. If we can’t cut from these agencies, then where will we cut?
- Section 8 galore! Well, what’s worse than locking in Biden’s education and health spending? Increasing Biden’s HUD spending by nearly $8 billion! If there was ever a department conservatives wanted to abolish, it was always HUD. This is something that should be determined at the local level. Once again, Trump promised to cut the department in half, yet increased spending for every program he planned to trim or eliminate.
The bill provides $38.4 billion in tenant-based Section 8 vouchers and a $2.4 billion increase from fiscal 2025. It also provides $18.5 billion for project-based rental assistance, a $1.7 billion increase from last year.
The bill also provides $1.25 billion for HUD’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program, after the Trump administration budget request and the original Republican House Transportation-HUD appropriations bill promised to eliminate the program. These programs provide grants to state and local governments and local NGOs to essentially seed red states with liberal voters and ruin the character of rural communities.
RELATED: Trump’s primary endorsements are sabotaging his own agenda
Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The bill also provides nearly $7 billion for the Community Development Block Grant Program and the Economic Development Initiatives for housing-related activities and $86 million for fair housing programs. Trump promised for years to eliminate the program altogether.
The only point of contention in the bill is the DHS portion, which Democrats are now threatening to oppose. But let’s be clear: Before the fatal shooting in Minneapolis, they were even willing to pass Trump’s DHS bill and did not perceive it as much of a threat.
At the time the bill was released, Senator Murray boasted that Democrats “defeated Republicans’ hard-fought push to give ICE an even bigger annual budget, successfully cut ICE’s detention budget and capacity, cut CBP’s budget by over $1 billion, and secured important, although still insufficient, new constraints on DHS.” She also lauded the rejection of “all Republican poison pill riders,” such as defunding sanctuary cities.
Democrats are, of course, forced to play to their base. However, on the specifics, this bill contains some horrendous provisions.
- Cheap foreign labor: It allows the secretary to double H-2B visas, going from 66,000 to 130,000 H-2B visas.
- Prohibits ICE from deporting illegal aliens who sponsor unaccompanied minors based on any information provided by HHS. So HHS is supposed to vet the sponsors, but if it determines they are here illegally and tells ICE that, ICE is prohibited from deporting them.
Why would we double foreign worker visas and make it harder to remove those literally engaged in trafficking children over the border by hiring cartel smugglers?
Well, despite all the rhetoric, press releases, tweets, and executive orders, good ol’ Joe Biden had it right when he proclaimed, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Evidently, we are now valuing almost everything all that he funded in his budget when he made that comment.
Crying Jimmy Kimmel’s Eyes Are Dry For Victims Of Violent Illegal Aliens
The clown crier has shed a lot of tears for radical activists fighting against federal law enforcement in peddling the left’s narrative.
