In a statement, the White House said Biden will use the Defense Production Act to improve the domestic manufacturing of medicines deemed crucial for national security and will convene the first meeting of the president’s supply chain resilience council to announce other measures tied to the production and shipment of goods.

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The Defense Production Act of 1950, which was passed to streamline production during the Korean war, was last used in early 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic to accelerate and expand the availability of ventilators and personal protective equipment.

The plaintiffs’ arguments in Moore v. United States have little basis in law — unless you think that a list of long-ago-discarded laissez-faire decisions from the early 20th century remain good law. And a decision favoring these plaintiffs could blow a huge hole in the federal budget. While no Warren-style wealth tax is on the books, the Moore plaintiffs do challenge an existing tax that is expected to raise $340 billion over the course of a decade.

But Republicans also hold six seats on the nation’s highest Court, so there is some risk that a majority of the justices will accept the plaintiffs’ dubious legal arguments. And if they do so, they could do considerable damage to the government’s ability to fund itself.

The UAW won’t be fighting its next battle alone, either. One of the most interesting aspects of the new UAW tentative agreements at Ford, GM, and Stellantis is that they are all timed to expire on April 30, 2028. If those contracts expire without reaching a satisfactory new deal, the UAW will be ready to strike on May Day, otherwise known as International Workers Day.

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What’s more, the UAW hopes it won't be hitting the picket lines alone. Fain has called on other unions to time their contracts to expire during the same period and “flex [their] collective muscles.” No, you’re not imagining things — the head of a major US labor union is calling on the rest of the movement to come together and start planning a general strike.

Starting November 23, when the international sexual health organization MSI Reproductive Health Services opens the doors to its first Cancún reproductive health center, a pregnant American from a US state where abortion is banned could find the procedure to be both more affordable and more accessible in Mexico. Quintana Roo, the Mexican state where Cancún is located, has become one of at least a dozen Mexican states to decriminalize abortion in the last two years amid a series of judicial rulings that have strengthened reproductive rights, culminating in a September Mexican Supreme Court ruling that made state laws criminalizing abortion unconstitutional nationwide.

While $710 is not an insignificant sum for a pregnant person living near the poverty line in America, it could still turn out to be several hundred dollars less expensive than the costs associated with obtaining similar treatments in post-Dobbs America, where 14 states have banned abortion completely, and four more have restricted it to the first trimester. A surgical abortion alone can cost more than $1,000 in the US, on top of out-of-state transportation and lodging needs. All these factors came into play when MSI planned its Cancún annex, which is being funded by an anonymous US donor.

So far, 16 members of Congress—eight Democrats and eight Republicans—have announced they are retiring from public office before the next election. And there could be more as retirements tend to spike after the holidays.

While much of the retirement attention has been on the Democrats, who lost their only chance of holding on to a Senate seat in solidly red West Virginia, and a handful of House members who had success in swing districts, political experts say that the surge of retirements could spell bad news for Republicans.

When the public asks, “How did we get here?” after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond National Rifle Association lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like [Richard E.] Dyke. Long before his competitors, the mercurial showman saw the profits in a product that tapped into Americans’ primal fears, and he pulled the mundane levers of American business and politics to get what he wanted.

Dyke brought the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which had been considered taboo to market to civilians, into general circulation, and helped keep it there. A folksy turnaround artist who spun all manner of companies into gold, he bought a failing gun maker for $241,000 and built it over more than a quarter-century into a $76 million business producing 9,000 guns a month. Bushmaster, which operated out of a facility just 30 miles from the Lewiston massacre, was the nation’s leading seller of AR-15s for nearly a decade. It also made Dyke rich. He owned at least four homes, a $315,000 Rolls Royce and a helicopter, in which he enjoyed landing on the lawn of his alma mater, Husson University.

The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate fell for the fourth time in as many weeks, more positive news for prospective homebuyers who have been held back by sharply higher borrowing costs and heightened competition for relatively few homes for sale.

The latest decline brought the average rate on a 30-year mortgage down to 7.29% from 7.44% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Wednesday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.58%.

At this point in election season, the political press starts making forays into the wilds of so-called Real America to try to find out what the voters are thinking. It can be an interesting exercise in the hands of journalists who have a feel for more than the usual "breakfast crowd at the diner" type of stories and find some insight that's helpful to understand the cross-currents that shape the electorate in any particular cycle. All too often, however, it's just a series of cliches and conventional wisdom, unfortunately.

We see tons of coverage of Iowa and New Hampshire, for obvious reasons. But when it comes to picking the brains of swing voters reporters always seem to head up to Wisconsin, the quintessential swing state. Back in 2020, just before the election, the New York Times sent a couple of reporters there to take the temperature of voters in the Badger State that former president Donald Trump barely won in 2016 to see what undecided swing voters were thinking four years later.

This Thanksgiving, with wars overseas and fears heightening over the potential return to office of a would-be autocrat, it may feel as if there’s not much to be thankful for on the political front. However, President Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate deserve gratitude for a major success of his first three years in office: judicial appointments. Indeed, one of Biden’s greatest domestic successes has been to revitalize and improve smooth, fair processes to nominate and confirm well-qualified, mainstream judicial candidates who are diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ideology, and experience. When campaigning for president and governing since the election, Biden pledged to enhance selection by restoring and improving certain nomination and confirmation rules and customs that former President Donald Trump and two GOP Senate majorities had severely undercut. Biden also promised to counter his predecessor’s appointment of three extremely ideologically conservative justices, 54 similar circuit judges, and 178 comparatively analogous district jurists, even as Trump left 50 district vacancies, by confirming a diverse set of nominees. The president has honored these vows since January 2021.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision in Jarkesy isn’t particularly surprising. Indeed, it’s typical of a court that routinely hands down dubiously reasoned decisions that attempt to sabotage core functions of the federal government. We are less than two months into the Supreme Court’s current term, and it’s already heard two similar cases arising out of the Fifth Circuit — one of which declared a different agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, unconstitutional, and another which held that domestic abusers have a constitutional right to own a gun — neither of which the Supreme Court seems likely to affirm.

Jarkesy, however, could potentially end differently. None of the three rationales the Fifth Circuit offered for neutering the SEC are especially persuasive, but one of them is grounded in a pet project of the conservative Federalist Society known as the “unitary executive” — a project for which the current Court’s GOP-appointed majority has shown a great deal of sympathy.

A murder of leading law professors have argued that the Fourteenth Amendment is self-executing and requires local election officials to remove Trump from the ballot, as though he were a “stable genius” who had not reached the age of 35. Taking their lead, citizens’ groups have commenced actions in at least 21 states to disqualify Donald Trump from running for President because he engaged in an insurrection.

Trump has prevailed in three of these cases, but it is only the first lap around the track....

On Tuesday, Florida state Rep. Ryan Chamberlin introduced HB 599, a bill that would ban government employees from being required to use the preferred pronouns of their colleagues, prohibits the penalization of employees on the “basis of deeply held religious or biology-based beliefs,” and makes it unlawful for nonprofits or employers receiving state funds to require employees to undergo training on matters of sexual/gender identity or gender expression.