24 million Americans will see their insurance premiums skyrocket. “This is absolute bullsh*t.”
Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
December 17, 2025
This morning, four vulnerable Republicans signed onto the discharge petition all House Democrats have signed to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring a bill to extend the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) markets to the floor for a vote. The proposal extends the credits for three years.
Republicans who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want the extensions have been fighting their colleagues who want to get rid of the ACA and slash government spending in general. Instead of extending the credits, House leadership is proposing a package of policies popular among their conference; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that it will drop about 100,000 people a year off health insurance through 2035 but will save the government $35.6 billion.
Without the extension of the premium tax credits, which Republicans permitted to lapse at the end of the year when they passed their July budget reconciliation bill that they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the 24 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplace will see their insurance premiums skyrocket, and millions will lose their health insurance altogether. And yet, Republicans oppose the extensions, which will cost the government about $350 billion over the next ten years. The Republicans’ extension of the 2017 tax cuts in that same bill will cost about $4 trillion over the same period.
Yesterday, Johnson dismissed the members of his conference who wanted to vote on the extension, saying that “many of them did want a vote on this Obamacare covid-era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be.” Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) told reporters: “This is absolute bullsh*t.”
Bridget St John – The Reason John Peel Started His Own Record Label
Ahead of Bridget St John’s gig at The Trades Club, we zipped back in time to 1969 – the year John Peel fell in love with Bridget’s velveteen folk voice and launched a label to pro…
There are many words you could use to describe the late broadcaster and DJ John Peel. Passionate. Obsessive. Instinctive… One thing’s for sure, he was a man who knew his own mind. When Peel liked something, he went all-in. He had the gumption to commit.
On its release in 1978, Peel famously played The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks twice in a row on his radio show, hailing it “the perfect pop song”. The opening line – “Teenage dreams so hard to beat” – is etched on his gravestone in Great Finborough, Suffolk.
Peel was always fiercely devoted to the subjects of his admiration. He granted 24 BBC Peel Sessions to his most treasured band of all time, The Fall. And his gushing promotion helped boost a catalogue of other artists in their raw infancy, not least The Smiths, Marc Bolan, The White Stripes, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Kanda Bongo Man, Joy Division and, of course, Half Man Half Biscuit.
In the late 60s, when he moved from pirate radio to the BBC, Peel stumbled across a young folk singer, Bridget St John, and instantly became a colossal fan. So much so, in fact, that he felt the burning desire to start his own record label, largely in order to capture Bridget’s work and get it distributed to a wider audience.
Speaking years later he explained “nobody else was going to record her stuff.” Through artistic endeavour, he felt he had to.
So, in 1969, Peel set up Dandelion Records – named after his pet hamster – with business partner Clive Selwood. The label’s first release was Bridget’s debut album Ask Me No Questions, recorded in just 10 hours and produced by Peel himself.
No one will ever pay for this
No one will ever pay for this.
By Jonathan V. Last
Someday this will be over.
I can’t tell you how it will resolve, or in which direction. Maybe America sinks into illiberal democracy, like Hungary. Or maybe we roll back the autocratic push and re-establish a stable democracy. But three years from now, or seven years from now, or twelve years from now, this intermediate period will end.
Here’s what I can tell you: If we get lucky enough save democracy, then the people who did this to America—the people who excused, and covered, and enabled Trump’s autocratic attempt—will take it as proof that Trump was never a real danger to begin with.
Look how overwrought you were, they’ll say. You spent a decade telling us that Trump was trying to overturn democracy. But the fact that we don’t live in a dictatorship proves that Trump was normal and that we should never listen to you hysterics.
Our success will be used to discredit us, like a quantum theory of suicide:1 If democracy survives, then that is proof that it was never under threat in the first place.
That’s just something for you to meditate on this holiday season. The people who did this to America will never pay a price. And if we defeat them, our success will be used as an argument against us.
It will be an approximation of our post-COVID experience. The Americans who made it through COVID took their survival as proof that the pandemic was never that serious and the real villains were the people and protocols that saved, and thereby inconvenienced, them.
Merry Christmas.