Republicans Just Made It Easier for Banks to Screw People Over

Senate Republicans voted Thursday to overturn a $5 cap on bank overdraft fees, leaving working-class people vulnerable to exploitation from financial institutions.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau adopted the cap late last year. It was scheduled to take effect later in 2025.

The rule was meant to protect consumers from unreasonable fees levied by banks and credit unions, saving consumers an estimated $5 billion per year total.

Chuck Bell, the advocacy program director at Consumer Reports, warned that repealing the fee limits “will hurt working families who are already struggling with high prices and inflation.” While Donald Trump has made plenty of promises to make the cost of living more affordable, he has functionally rubber-stamped the efforts of Republicans to undermine that very promise.

The resolution to repeal the rule was introduced by Senator Tim Scott, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and done through the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to undo recently adopted regulations through a simple majority vote.

The resolution passed in the Senate on a nearly party-line vote of 52–48.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley was the only Republican to oppose the measure. “Why would we help the big banks at the expense of working people?” Hawley said, after the vote. “I just don’t understand it.”

Every Senate Democrat voted against the measure.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee who helped establish the CFPB, slammed her Republican colleagues for undermining the consumer to help big banks. “Senate Republicans would rather you didn’t find out they just voted to give the biggest banks billions in profits from overdraft fees that kick working people when they’re down. Disgraceful,” she wrote on X Thursday.

The resolution is now expected to move to the House.

Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg urged voters Thursday to contact their representatives to “ask how they’ll vote.”

“Moment of clarity today in the Senate where Republicans sided with big banks & against customers. Higher fees, lower transparency,” Buttigieg wrote on X.

The CPFB’s rule previously faced a legal challenge from the American Bankers Association, which claimed that the agency had overstepped its authority to impose the rule, which would ultimately hurt consumers. Rob Nichols, the trade group’s chief executive, issued a statement applauding the resolution’s passage in the Senate.

“If implemented, the C.F.P.B.’s 11th-hour rule imposing government price controls would force many banks to limit or eliminate overdraft protection as we know it,” Nichols said. “Many Americans would be driven to less regulated and higher risk non-bank lenders to cover unexpected or emergency expenses.”

The Trump administration seems interested in eliminating the CFPB altogether. “CFPB RIP 🪦,” Elon Musk wrote on X in February.

New York has blocked Texas from filing a legal action against a local doctor accused of prescribing and sending abortion pills to a resident in the Lone Star State.

“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office,” Taylor Bruck, the acting clerk of Ulster County, said in a statement Thursday. “Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Dr. Margaret Carpenter in December, accusing her of mailing the pills to a Collin County resident who allegedly consumed the medication when she was nine weeks pregnant. The lawsuit did not mention whether the woman was successful in terminating her pregnancy.

Paxton wanted Carpenter to cough up $100,000 for every violation of the state’s near-total abortion ban—a potentially relatively light sentence, considering that violators of Texas’s draconian abortion law can also face life in prison and have their Texas medical license revoked.

The lawsuit was Texas’s first attempt at suing an abortion provider across state lines, and is New York’s first use of its shield law, which protects doctors and providers providing abortion care from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions.

Abortion rights advocates have argued that banning the procedure only bans safe abortions, forcing women in need of abortion care to find alternative solutions. Last week, news broke that a Pennsylvania teenager and her mother were under investigation after fetal remains were reported in the family’s backyard following a self-managed abortion, reported Jezebel.

And recent reports have shown that the lack of access to abortion care has actually made pregnancies drastically less safe. In Texas, where abortion hasn’t been permitted despite the legislature’s medical emergency clause, sepsis rates have skyrocketed by as much as 50 percent for women who lost their pregnancies during the second trimester, according to an investigative analysis by ProPublica.

But Texas has still been brutal in enforcing its post–Roe v. Wade laws. In the last couple of weeks, two Houston-area abortion providers have been arrested and charged with providing illegal care, reported The Texas Tribune.

The prescription commonly referred to as the “abortion pill” is a two-step process of taking mifepristone and then misoprostol. The procedure accounts for more than half of all the abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits. It is more than 95 percent effective at ending pregnancies when used before 10 weeks of pregnancy, according to statistics by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Access to mifepristone has become an increasingly fraught political issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In October, the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho—a cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation—sued the federal government to limit access to the drug, arguing that the medication should be illegal for minors (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other conditions).

The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 12 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 69 percent believe that it should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy.

The Trump administration has decided that it will not investigate itself, even though the reckless actions of some of its key officials purportedly endangered the lives of American soldiers.

Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated Thursday that the Justice Department would not launch a criminal investigation into some administration officials’ use of Signal to communicate attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen earlier this month.

Bondi also declared that the details shared in the chat—which included down-to-the-minute scheduling for the launch of U.S. F-18 attack planes toward Yemen, “trigger based” strikes, and the launch of sea-based subsonic cruise missiles—were “not classified.”

Instead, Bondi praised the coordination among Trump officials, claiming that the nation’s focus should be on the mission’s success rather than the magnitude of the administration’s national security failures.

“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released,” Bondi said at a news conference in Virginia. “What we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission.”

National security experts have said otherwise.

“This information was clearly classified,” an unidentified former senior defense official told Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin.

“These were ‘attack plans,’” a second former senior U.S. defense official told Griffin. “If you are revealing who is going to be attacked (Houthis—the name of the text chain), it still gives the enemy warning. When you release the time of the attack—all of that is always ‘classified.’”

The Atlantic was the first to report on the Signal fiasco Monday after national security adviser Mike Waltz made another critical security error by accidentally adding the magazine’s chief editor to the chat.

Donald Trump has stood by Waltz in the wake of the scandal, reiterating his confidence in the former Florida representative, despite revelations that Waltz has made a string of careless mistakes.

But rather than take responsibility for actions taken entirely by their chosen representatives, conservatives have once again opted to deflect and misdirect blame onto some of their favorite targets, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden.

“If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was in Hillary Clinton’s home,” Bondi said Thursday. “Talk about the classified documents in Joe Biden’s garage that Hunter Biden had access to.”

But those scandals were not the same. Clinton was accused of using an alternative email server to conduct state business, while a 345-page Justice Department report on Biden’s classified offense predominantly fixated on the aging president’s health and mental bandwidth. Both Democrats were the subject of respective DOJ investigations. Trump was, as well, though the classified documents case against the forty-fifth president was dropped after he won reelection in November.

And the American public has noticed the difference, with the majority of people believing that the Signal scandal matters more than Republicans’ scapegoats.

A YouGov survey published on Tuesday found that 53 percent of nearly 6,000 polled Americans felt that the Trump administration’s Signal leak was “very serious,” while another 21 percent described it as “somewhat serious.”

Meanwhile, a survey conducted in the wake of Clinton’s email scandal by YouGov and The Economist in March 2015 found that 30 percent of polled Americans felt that Clinton’s server was “very serious.” Another 26 percent noted that it was “somewhat serious” to them.

At a press conference Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to give a specific justification for the arrest and detention of Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, by masked immigration authorities on Tuesday.

“A year ago [Ozturk] wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza war. Could you help us understand what the specific action she took led to her visa being revoked?” A reporter asked, referring to Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, co-authoring a column for her university’s student newspaper.

Rubio responded with a long-winded answer attacking vandalism and rioting but failing to say exactly what Ozturk was responsible for that resulted in her F-1 student visa being revoked and masked, plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcements brazenly arresting her on a public street.

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just ’cause you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa,” Rubio said.

“If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country,” added Rubio.

Rubio noted during the press conference that he has personally revoked dozens of visas, possibly “more than 300 at this point.”

“We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Guardian that “DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,” but did not offer any specifics either.

In a move reminiscent of ICE’s arrest and detention of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, Ozturk was sent to a detention center in Louisiana without speaking with a lawyer and despite a court order. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who initially ordered that Ozturk not be removed from Massachusetts, issued a new order Thursday requiring the government to justify Ozturk’s detention by Friday.

If Rubio’s words are correct, there are possibly hundreds of visitors in the United States who have had their visas revoked for pro-Palestine speech or activism, or any political speech and activism for that matter, without any due process. They may not even know that their visa status has been revoked. They could be disappeared off the street just like Khalil, Ozturk, or University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who has yet to be connected to any kind of political activism and whose whereabouts are unknown.

There have been plenty of fires blazing in the background as Signalgate dominates the airwaves this week.

Here are four stories you may have missed amid the fallout of that war plans group chat:

1. The Trump administration continues to disappear pro-Palestinian college students with no other justification. On Tuesday, Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, was abducted in broad daylight by masked ICE agents and later transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana. Ozturk had previously co-authored an op-ed for her student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later refused to explain why she was arrested or had her visa revoked.

2. The Department of Health and Human Services plans to fire 10,000 employees in a wave of massive DOGE-induced cuts. According to The Wall Street Journal, the cuts will include:

• 3,500 full-time employees from the Food and Drug Administration—or about 19% of the agency’s workforce.
• 2,400 employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—or about 18% of its workforce.
• 1,200 employees from the National Institutes of Health—or about 6% of its workforce.
• 300 employees from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—or about 4% of its workforce.

“We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.

3. Trump withdrew Representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination for U.N. ambassador to help the Republicans maintain their tiny House majority. Stefanik—one of MAGA’s favorite congressional attack dogs—is likely to return to defend her New York district seat, which Democrats view as vulnerable.

4. Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian Oscar-winning director of No Other Land, was blindfolded and brutally beaten by Israel Defense Force soldiers after they detained him for allegedly “hurling rocks” as Israeli settlers attempted to kill him on Monday night. Ballal recounted that he heard the IDF guards mention the word “Oscar” while beating him. “I realized they were attacking me specifically,” he said after being released to a hospital in the West Bank. “When they say ‘Oscar,’ you understand. When they say your name, you understand.”