JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Sunday said Democrats should act on the debt ceiling before Republicans take over the House in the next Congress.

Asked by “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan whether the government should take action during the current lame-duck session in the last few weeks of their control of the lower chamber, Dimon said on CBS that he’d encourage it.

“They should because the catastrophic effects of an actual default, not the debates. I understand both sides why we want it, how they want to use it is, that’s catastrophic, or potentially catastrophic. I would never take that risk. So for me, yes, I’d get it done now. Take it off the table,” Dimon said.

Democrats have been pushing to raise the debt ceiling, or the top amount the federal government can borrow, in order to avert a debt default, which many have warned could wreak havoc on the country’s economy, already strained under inflation and recession woes.

Since his takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk has insisted, over and over again, that one of his major goals for the massive social media platform is to protect free speech on the site. That’s a noble aspiration. The problem is that his behavior increasingly suggests either that he has no idea what that means, or, even worse, he does, and he’s just not being honest. Either way, Musk (and those who have somehow been persuaded that he knows what he’s talking about) could use a crash course in what does — and doesn’t — violate the First Amendment.

Let’s start with the so-called “Twitter Files.” Thursday, we got a second installment of the files courtesy of Bari Weiss. Last week Musk, together with Matt Taibbi, released the first installment: a trove of documents supposedly demonstrating that Twitter had inappropriately suppressed material relating to Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election at the request of individuals associated with the Biden campaign. In his own tweets reacting to Taibbi’s thread, Musk made two claims about the First Amendment. First, he wrote that “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.” Second, in response to another tweet about one of Taibbi’s supposed bombshells, Musk rhetorically asked “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” In both cases, Musk’s claim is that the Biden campaign’s requests to have tweets taken down constituted not just a violation of the First Amendment, but an egregious one. In every possible respect, Musk is dead wrong.

The free speech clause of the First Amendment, like virtually every provision of the Constitution (except the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery; and the Eighteenth Amendment, imposing prohibition), applies only to “state action.” A private business no more violates the First Amendment by banning particular types of speech in its operations than I violate the First Amendment by not allowing particular types of speech in my home. And although some have suggested in recent years that social media platforms, like Twitter, ought to be treated as if they were government actors for purposes of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court, in its one recent chance to endorse that argument, declined to do so. Thus, it is settled law that Twitter, at least acting by itself, cannot violate the First Amendment no matter what it does.

Dec. 7, 2022

Last week, the Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari “before judgment” in Biden v. Nebraska, which will determine the legality of the president’s student loan debt relief program.

What this means is that the court will hear this case on the merits before it makes its way through lower federal courts of appeal. This is unusual. Traditionally, the Supreme Court hears a case only after it has gone through a federal trial court (the “district” court) and a federal appeals court, except for cases where it has original jurisdiction. As the legal scholar Steve Vladeck notes in an article on this subject in his Substack newsletter, “The longstanding statutory and normative preference is for appeals to be taken only after ‘final judgments,’ i.e., when all of the factual and legal issues have been resolved to the maximum extent possible.”

As the Supreme Court itself has often said in its own opinions, it is a “court of review, not first view.”

Biden v. Nebraska marks the 18th time since 2019 that the court has granted certiorari before judgment. It is, as Vladeck writes, a “remarkable shift.” He hazards a few guesses as to why the court has made this change. Perhaps it is a response to the rise of nationwide injunctions from district courts (although this accounts for only five of the 18 cases in which the court has granted certiorari before judgment). Perhaps it is a response to the rise of state lawsuits against the federal government, although, again, only a few of the cases involve the states as plaintiffs. Or maybe it’s just a sign that the justices are in a “hurry” and have a “lower bar when it comes to the kind of ‘emergency’ that justifies such an early-stage intervention.”

There is another possibility. According to Mark A. Lemley, a law professor at Stanford, the Roberts court, with its conservative majority, is an “imperial” Supreme Court, undermining the power and authority of the other branches of government, as well as weakening the power of lower courts to act and make decisions. “The court,” Lemley writes, “has taken significant, simultaneous steps to restrict the power of Congress, the administrative state, the states and the lower federal courts.” It gets its way, he continues, “not by giving power to an entity whose political predilections are aligned with the justices’ own, but by undercutting the ability of any entity to do something the justices don’t like.”

“People have said Donald Trump is like Jason: He goes through with a chainsaw and he kills everybody there," Florida state Sen. Lauren Book (D) said. "Ron DeSantis is like Hannibal Lecter: He’s going to enjoy you with a glass of Chianti."

Things were chaotic for Democrat Lauren Book in the hour before she was sworn in as minority leader of the Florida state Senate. She was getting her hair touched up and helping her 5-year-old daughter pick out shoes for the occasion.

The chaos will only intensify. As Book spoke with HuffPost on the phone while getting ready, she warned of a bitter fight over abortion rights in the next session, with existential stakes for reproductive health care in Florida — and beyond. She was exceedingly clear that it’s time for Democrats to fight tooth and nail to ensure abortion remains legal in her home state.

“This is it. It’s devastating. It’s all-encompassing,” Book said of what’s to come in the 2023 legislative session. “We have to be better and stronger and tougher, but even still, we’re outnumbered.”

Florida, once a safe haven for abortion care in the Southeast, is on the precipice of becoming no different than deep-red states like Texas or Oklahoma on reproductive rights. After a 15-week abortion ban went into effect earlier this year and the U.S. Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, anti-choice lawmakers in the Sunshine State are poised to restrict abortion even further. And with a Republican supermajority in both chambers and a vocal anti-choice leader in Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), it’s a given that Florida will lose access to abortion ― it’s just not clear to what extent.

“People have said Donald Trump is like Jason: He goes through with a chainsaw and he kills everybody there," Florida state Sen. Lauren Book (D) said. "Ron DeSantis is like Hannibal Lecter: He’s going to enjoy you with a glass of Chianti."

Things were chaotic for Democrat Lauren Book in the hour before she was sworn in as minority leader of the Florida state Senate. She was getting her hair touched up and helping her 5-year-old daughter pick out shoes for the occasion.

The chaos will only intensify. As Book spoke with HuffPost on the phone while getting ready, she warned of a bitter fight over abortion rights in the next session, with existential stakes for reproductive health care in Florida — and beyond. She was exceedingly clear that it’s time for Democrats to fight tooth and nail to ensure abortion remains legal in her home state.

“This is it. It’s devastating. It’s all-encompassing,” Book said of what’s to come in the 2023 legislative session. “We have to be better and stronger and tougher, but even still, we’re outnumbered.”

Florida, once a safe haven for abortion care in the Southeast, is on the precipice of becoming no different than deep-red states like Texas or Oklahoma on reproductive rights. After a 15-week abortion ban went into effect earlier this year and the U.S. Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, anti-choice lawmakers in the Sunshine State are poised to restrict abortion even further. And with a Republican supermajority in both chambers and a vocal anti-choice leader in Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), it’s a given that Florida will lose access to abortion ― it’s just not clear to what extent.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Friday announced he will let Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) keep her committee assignments after she dropped her affiliation with the Democratic Party and said she would identify as an Independent.

Schumer added Sinema’s decision will not affect Democratic control of the Senate’s committees, including the power to issue subpoenas and discharge legislation without Republican support — powers the Democratic majority gained after winning the Senate runoff in Georgia this month.

“Sen. Sinema informed me of her decision to change her affiliation to Independent. She asked me to keep her committee assignments and I agreed,” Schumer said in a statement.

“Kyrsten is independent; that’s how she’s always been. I believe she’s a good and effective Senator and am looking forward to a productive session in the new Democratic majority Senate,” he said. “We will maintain our new majority on committees, exercise our subpoena power, and be able to clear nominees without discharge votes.”

A 70-year-old school bus attendant was spit on by a student, and the man’s response amounted to felony child abuse, according to the York-Poquoson Sheriff’s Office in Yorktown, Virginia.

The dispute happened on a York County bus as it was transporting elementary school students, officials said. York County is about 25 miles north of Norfolk.

“It was reported that a 7-year-old student spit on (the suspect),” the sheriff’s office said in a Dec. 7 news release.

“In turn he sprayed the student with a cleaning solution.”

The suspect, who lives in York County, was “employed as a bus assistant for the York County School Division” at the time. He is no longer working for the district, officials said.