Senate Democrats to oppose House-passed GOP funding bill as shutdown looms

The math is tight for Thom Cheston. Standing in the walk-in fridge that stores the beer to be shipped across the Washington, D.C., area, he runs through a few numbers.

He says his business, Right Proper Brewing, has to sell more than $6,000 of beer just to cover the taxes on his brewery. He’s hesitant to raise prices because his competitors, most notably the big breweries, might not. And so having to pay more for the aluminum cans that ship his brews is a scary proposition.

Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum took effect today, and one of the places Americans touch aluminum most directly is in canned drinks. The increase in the price of canning material could dramatically hit the bottom lines of many businesses, such as craft breweries.

“We can’t raise our prices just because our costs have gone up,” Cheston said. “We may be on the shelf next to breweries that are much larger than us, that may be in a better position to absorb those costs, whereas we are not.”

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U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan today ordered Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to produce documents requested by more than a dozen state attorneys general in a lawsuit that alleges Trump gave him “virtually unchecked authority ... without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities.”

Chutkan, who oversaw the criminal case against Trump in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, granted a motion for expedited discovery while she narrowed the scope of discovery and ordered the defendants to turn over the requested documents within 21 days. 

“The court recognizes that discovery into the Executive, particularly the White House and Senior Advisors, imposes a heightened burden. Accordingly, the court does not authorize all the discovery that Plaintiffs request, imposes several additional restrictions on the scope, and extends Defendants’ time to respond," she wrote.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, said he plans to hold a town hall in neighboring Iowa this week.

"I’m going Friday. I think I’m headed [to] Iowa. I've been asked by these folks," Walz told MSNBC's Chris Hayes tonight. "I'm going to go use the platform that I have and hand them the megaphone to talk about this."

Walz first teased plans to host events in red districts last week, after the chair of the campaign arm for House Republicans advised GOP lawmakers to nix in-person town halls over blowback to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.

Massive layoffs initiated this week at the Education Department could hamstring the federal government’s efforts to assist students with disabilities, former officials and education experts said, citing blows to the agency’s civil rights and research divisions.

Yesterday, the department began laying off around 1,300 employees, cutting nearly half the staff in its Office for Civil Rights and over 100 from the Institute of Education Sciences, according to information released by American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union for department staff.

The cuts in those two divisions mean there will be far fewer staff members to finish the 12,000 pending federal investigations into allegations of civil rights violations at schools — roughly half of which involve disability issues — and fewer employees to review and distribute government-funded research into effective ways to educate children with autism or severe intellectual disabilities.

The layoffs are the first step toward dismantling the department, a goal espoused by Trump and his education secretary, Linda McMahon. Experts say they raise concerns about what the future will look like for civil rights enforcement as the Trump administration continues chipping away at federal oversight.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom today defended his decision to invite people he called "right-wingers" onto his podcast amid backlash from some Democrats.

In a letter emailed to his supporters, Newsom called the podcast interviews a “critically important” effort to “understand how the MAGA-right organized itself during the last election and what they are thinking about in the weeks, months and years ahead.”

Newsom, in an earlier episode of the "This is Gavin Newsom" podcast, interviewed right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. Today he released an episode featuring former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon.

Senate Republicans tonight indicated that was little to no time to pursue a Democratic alternative to the House-passed GOP funding bill before this week's shutdown deadline.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Appropriations Committee and had publicly advocated for a short-term alternative stopgap funding bill that would allow more time to finish individual spending bills, pointed to limited timing and the House’s departure.

“At this point, I think it’s too late,” Collins said, adding that Trump said he would veto a short-term funding bill like the one being offered by Democrats.

Promising to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin today outlined plans for an aggressive rollback of environmental regulations.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece and an EPA news release, Zeldin announced that he intends to reconsider more than a dozen core EPA rules and regulations, including those pertaining to emissions standards for vehicles, pollution from power plants and the finding that provides the scientific basis for addressing climate change.

“Today marks the death of the Green New Scam,” Zeldin wrote in the Journal, arguing that his deregulation plan would create an environment in which “businesses can thrive and infrastructure can be built.” He added that he wants to reassess rules that, in his view, “throttled oil and gas production and unfairly targeted coal-fired power plants” and suggested that his proposed actions would roll back “trillions of dollars in regulatory costs.” 

The EPA announced that it will revisit water pollution limits for coal plants, air quality standards for small particles and the mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions by large emitters like oil and gas companies, among other rules.

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A top official at the U.S. Agency for International Development said in a court filing today there was nothing nefarious about her directive to staffers yesterday to shred and burn classified documents.

Erica Carr, USAID's acting executive secretary, said she'd ordered the destruction of "outdated and no longer needed derivatively classified documents" as part of the decommissioning of the agency's space in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.

“The vast majority of the removed documents were either (1) copies of classified documents that were originally classified by other government agencies, or (2) derivatively-classified documents that were created for the purposes of, but not limited to, high-level meetings, official government travel, and intelligence briefings, which USAID no longer has a need to retain," Carr said in the court filing.

Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin praised Trump for the "unrelenting focus and energy" he has brought to securing peace deals to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

"In my view, there is nothing more noble ... than the pursuit of peace, and this is what you are doing," Martin said today at a St Patrick's Day reception in the White House. "Ireland is ready to work with you and our international partners to end conflict and especially to bring just, lasting and sustainable peace to the people of Ukraine and the people of the Middle East."

Martin outlined the human toll of the war, noting in particular the effects of battle on the "most vulnerable."

"Many children, in particular, have died in Gaza, in Israel, in Sudan, and too many children have been abducted in Ukraine. Let us together never cease to strive for peace, prosperity and opportunity for all the world's children," he said.