ArchiveFebruary 2022

Republicans have spent the past several days promoting a false and misleading claim that President Joe Biden wants to distribute “crack pipes” to people who use drugs. On Wednesday, the White House shot back. The uproar began Monday after the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing blog, published a post headlined, “Biden Admin to Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) have released a letter to state governors telling them to ignore the Biden administration’s suggested guidelines for using funding allocated under the newly enacted infrastructure law on projects that are good for the environment. The Republican senators complained that a December memo from Stephanie Pollack, deputy...

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is refusing to urge a Wisconsin company to reconsider its decision to put 1,000 manufacturing jobs in South Carolina. The business, Oshkosh Defense, is one of Johnson’s top career campaign funders. In February 2021, the United States Postal Service awarded a 10-year, $482 million contract to the Oshkosh, Wisconsin-based company to build its next generation of...

Late last month, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued guidance to its members to help them center patients and their needs when providing contraceptive counseling. That guidance asks practitioners to keep a reproductive justice framework in mind when talking with patients about contraception and could help address entrenched health care inequities for people of color. ...

More than 900,000 people in the United States have died due to COVID-19 since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Congressional Republicans are continuing to argue that COVID-19 is not the main cause of their deaths, minimizing the role it played in many of them and claiming that underlying health conditions are instead to blame. On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Rep. Guy Reschenthaler argued that a...

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) announced last month he would break his term-limits pledge and seek a third term this November. He said days later that his sagging approval ratings — around 35% in recent polls — are entirely the media’s fault and claimed, “I’m not a polarizing figure at all.” On Tuesday night, several of his constituents joined his telephone town hall and made it...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced on Tuesday that he will not run for Senate this year, marking another setback for Senate Republican leaders who want to take back the majority. “I sincerely appreciate all the people who have been encouraging me to consider it,” Hogan told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “Just because you can win a race doesn’t mean that’s the job you...

Republican state lawmakers are continuing to push legislation in 2022 that targets transgender people, trying to ban them from using the bathrooms of their gender, participating in school sports, and receiving gender-affirming health care, and to restrict LGBTQ-related content in classrooms. Republicans governors are among those who have been particularly outspoken in championing such bills, with...

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade is concerned that former President Donald Trump’s fixation on false election conspiracy theories will make it difficult for Republicans to win elections in 2022. On his talk radio show “The Brian Kilmeade Show,” which is nationally syndicated by Fox News Radio, he said that, in a recent conversation with some of Trump’s friends, he discussed a...

Congressional Republicans are proposing a bill they claim would improve “teamwork” between workers and management. In reality, it would allow businesses to bring back the “company unions” used in the 1920s and 1930s to prevent workers from achieving meaningful gains. On Feb. 3, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act of 2022, a bill...