House Republicans Resurrect Plan to Gut Social Security and Medicare

While progressive politicians and unions are fighting to grant Americans four-day workweeks, Republicans are looking to achieve the complete opposite.

On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee (made up of more than 170 House Republicans) proposed a 2025 budget with an eyebrow-raising revision of Social Security and Medicare, increasing the retirement age to qualify for Social Security and lowering benefits for the highest-earning beneficiaries.

But don’t worry, Republicans want you to know that this will not take effect immediately, and will only impact everyone who isn’t already of age to acquire their earned benefits.

“Again, the RSC Budget does not cut or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement,” the caucus underlined.

Under the proposed plan, Medicare would operate as a “premium support model,” competing with private companies, giving subsidies to beneficiaries to pick the private plan of their choice. That stratagem is straight from former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s playbook, who proposed the policy while campaigning as Mitt Romney’s vice presidential pick in the 2012 election. At the time, President Barack Obama argued that the plan would “end Medicare as we know it.”

Outside of fiscal policy, the proposed budget also endorsed the controversial Life at Conception Act, which would grant rights to embryos and likely gut in vitro fertilization nationwide—despite a Republican press run last month to fake support for the procedure.

The budget is unlikely to pass through Congress, but its drafting still hints at the party’s follow-through on an age-old threat—and offers a glimpse into what kind of future it wants if it wins reelection, and if Donald Trump retakes the White House.

The whole thing is, notably, an odd choice during an election year.

A House Republican has finally admitted that it’s time to pack up the effort to impeach Joe Biden and move on.

Representative Tim Burchett told NewsNation Wednesday night he thought the House should vote on whether to impeach Biden or not so that they can all just move on.

“We’re not gonna have the votes … that’s clearly the case,” Burchett said. “And I don’t think we ever did.”

Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House, which has seemed to shrink on an almost weekly basis as GOP lawmakers retire midterm. One of the most outspoken impeachment opponents, Colorado Republican Ken Buck, said his decision to leave Congress at the end of this week was fueled by the pointless chaos of the impeachment investigation.

Other Republicans have begun to back away from the impeachment effort, as well. Even House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has changed what his goals are. Two weeks ago, he said he would be happy just making nonbinding criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.

Burchett’s comments came just hours after the House Oversight Committee held a sham hearing on Hunter Biden. The committee heard testimony from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s onetime work partner with a history of shady business dealings, and Jason Galanis, who called in from a federal prison where he is serving a 14-year sentence for financial fraud. Republicans claim both men can prove the Biden family’s guilt, despite the fact that Hunter says he and Galanis only met once.

Things quickly devolved when Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Bobulinski if he had ever actually seen the president commit a crime. When Bobulinski could not name a specific instance, Ocasio-Cortez tore into Republicans for their entire impeachment push.

“At this point, the story is not the fact that the basis of this impeachment inquiry is wrong. The story is why it’s proceeding anyway. Why is this committee proceeding based on false charges?” she demanded.

The Manhattan district attorney has decided that the 100,000-page document dump that delayed Donald Trump’s hush-money trial by a handful of weeks is, actually, a gigantic nothingburger.

After chewing through more than 31,000 pages of last week’s offload by the Southern District of New York, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg assessed that Trump already has the “overwhelming majority” of them.

“The people now have good reason to believe that this production contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case and that have not previously been disclosed to defendant,” the filing read, noting that only an estimated 270 documents are new and relevant to the case (and mostly imply guilt or corroborate existing evidence).

“The overwhelming majority of the production is entirely immaterial, duplicative or substantially duplicative of previously disclosed materials.”

That means that the trial will almost certainly move forward in April. Bragg noted that the current pause, which is scheduled to last until April 15, is “a more than reasonable amount of time for defendant to review the information provided.”

Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Trump is facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Cohen and Daniels are both expected to be star witnesses in the trial, though Trump had previously attempted to keep both of them far away from it on the basis that the two were “liars.” But on Tuesday, a judge nixed that effort, allowing them both to testify.

In a new documentary that intimately follows Daniels’s side of their yearslong legal battle, Daniels explains that she knew that she only had one real option when the $130,000 bribe was offered to her: take it, or risk being killed. In the ensuing years, she would be mercilessly harassed by Trump’s supporters, threatened by strange men insinuating they would kidnap her daughter, and stalked by creeps taking videos of her child.

From Daniels’s perspective, she had become a target after Trump’s political career began: The Republican Party, she says, likes “to make their problems go away.”

House Republicans have released their proposed budget for 2025, and it includes giving rights to embryos—despite the GOP’s big statements about how much they support in vitro fertilization.

The budget, released Wednesday by the Republican Study Committee, or RSC, states that the party backs the Life at Conception Act, “which would provide 14th amendment protections at all stages of life.”

This bill has become highly contentious in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that classified fertilized embryos as human children. First introduced in 2021 with 166 Republican co-sponsors and then again in 2023 with 124, the Life at Conception Act would have established that life begins at fertilization.

Like the Alabama ruling, the act would have severely restricted—if not effectively banned—IVF treatments, because it grants “equal protection” to “preborn” humans, including embryos. Since it’s common for fertilized eggs not to survive the IVF process, the act would put doctors at risk of being charged for wrongful death of embryos. That risk would be enough to scupper the IVF industry.

In the weeks after the Alabama ruling, Republicans rushed to say that they support access to IVF. Seven House Republicans—five of whom represent vulnerable swing districts—introduced a resolution expressing their support for IVF and urging elected officials to protect the treatment.

But the resolution was nonbinding, meaning that those seven elected officials weren’t really doing anything to protect IVF. And now, the RSC, which comprises about three-quarters of the House Republican caucus, has explicitly stated that it supports legislation that would decimate access to IVF nationwide.

The RSC budget also took aim at abortion, backing another bill for a 15-week national abortion ban and recommending a measure that would ban the sale of mifepristone, one of the drugs used to induce abortions. The question of mifepristone’s decades-old approval for market goes before the Supreme Court next week.

The budget backed a bill that would ban abortion access on college campuses, as well as prohibit the Department of Defense from reimbursing travel costs for service members who have to travel for an abortion. The department policy has been a major Republican target of late, particularly from Senator Tommy Tuberville, who single-handedly held up hundreds of military promotions last year in an attempt to protest the program.

The RSC’s proposed budget is unlikely to pass unscathed. The government is currently avoiding a shutdown on a weekly basis due to Congress’s inability to agree on a federal budget. But the entire proposal highlights Republican hypocrisy on reproductive health.

Despite proclaiming themselves the “pro-life” party, Republicans continue to do everything they possibly can to limit access to IVF, a procedure that would allow people to have children, and to force people into life-threatening situations.

Judge Aileen Cannon has been moving alarmingly slowly in setting up a trial date for Donald Trump’s classified documents criminal case—but it may not be a bid to help out the man who appointed her.

As of Thursday, the Florida judge had lost at least two law clerks in the last six months, who up and quit on her rather than finish out their one-year terms, according to several sources within Cannon’s legal circuit that spoke with attorney David Lat.

It’s incredibly rare for multiple clerks to leave their posts, especially considering that judges typically hire just two or three clerks per annum. As Lat notes in his Substack Original Jurisdiction, “a law clerk’s role is substantive, not clerical or administrative.” Clerks are more like a judge’s right and left hands—they help the judiciary conduct research, prepare for trials, and draft opinions. Clerkships are highly competitive, and one serving a federal judge would otherwise be considered résumé gold, so it’s certainly curious that they seem to be fleeing her bench.

“Because a clerkship typically lasts one year and is an extremely valuable credential, most clerks will ‘ride it out’ instead of quitting, even if they’re miserable or have issues with their judge,” Lat posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, adding that it’s “highly disruptive to the work of a chambers when even one clerk quits, to say nothing of two.”

“Judges in busy districts like [the Southern District of Florida] have heavy caseloads. To be short-staffed can generate a backlog VERY quickly,” Lat wrote.

Both clerks reportedly quit in October and December 2023, around the time that Cannon made clear she was open to delaying Trump’s trial past its original May start date. Cannon’s chambers, as of now, are fully staffed. But details on the ones who left are still emerging. So far, one clerk vacated their position on personal terms—they left roughly halfway through their two-year term to raise their child. Another clerk’s exit is still shrouded in mystery, though Lat notes that “this person’s law-school classmates have been buzzing about the news.”