What Happened Today - 19 Dec 2025
What Happened Today – 19 December 2025
Epstein files and Bondi
Brown shooter found dead
Defense bill and IVF
Weed rescheduled to Schedule III
Kennedy Center renaming drama
ACA vote and “MAGA Mike”
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Epstein files and Bondi
The Epstein circus is hitting a hard deadline today, and Pam Bondi is right in the crosshairs. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with near-unanimous support, and it tells DOJ to dump essentially everything they’ve got on Epstein and Ghislaine: travel logs, communications, grand jury material, the whole universe, with only narrow redactions to protect victims and active investigations. Bondi, as Trump’s attorney general, is the one sitting on the files, and House Democrats are openly floating inherent contempt and even impeachment if she blows the deadline or games it with excessive black ink. Khanna and others have been crystal clear: if DOJ slow-walks or ignores the law, they’re treating it as obstruction of justice, not just bureaucratic foot-dragging. There’s also real concern that Trump’s push to have Bondi “investigate” Epstein’s ties to Democrats becomes the excuse to withhold damaging material about his own circle, even though multiple judges have already ordered broad disclosure. Everyone is basically waiting to see if there’s a late-afternoon/early-evening document dump and whether it’s real transparency or another heavily redacted cover-your-ass release.
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Brown shooter found dead
On the Brown/MIT shooter, the headline is simple: the guy is dead, and it looks like suicide in a storage unit after a multi-state manhunt. Authorities identified him as 48‑year‑old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown physics grad student from about 25 years ago and a Portuguese national/legal permanent resident. He’s accused of killing two Brown students and injuring nine others in a campus shooting, then murdering an MIT professor he apparently knew from his old academic life. Cops tracked him through tips, surveillance and online sleuthing, zeroed in on a New Hampshire storage facility, breached the locker, and found him dead from a self‑inflicted gunshot wound with firearms and a satchel nearby. Six surviving victims were still hospitalized but in stable condition as of Thursday, and law enforcement is now trying to piece together motive from his academic history, personal grievances and any digital trail he left behind.
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Defense bill and IVF
On the defense bill, Republicans just made it painfully clear that all their “we support IVF” talk stops the second it has to be written into law for actual families in uniform. The big Pentagon policy package moving through Congress authorizes roughly $900 billion and gives troops a pay bump, but House leadership stripped out the provision that would have required Tricare to cover IVF for active‑duty service members and their dependents. That IVF coverage had been added earlier and actually passed both chambers at one point, but Speaker Mike Johnson quietly worked behind the scenes to yank it from the final text, even though Trump campaigned on making IVF free and Republicans love to posture as pro‑family and pro‑military. Pro‑life groups cheered the removal, which tells you exactly whose priorities won, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who literally relied on IVF herself, is blasting the move as Republicans doing performative support while blocking concrete benefits when it counts. Bottom line: troops struggling with infertility are still on the hook financially, because the “family values” crowd decided culture‑war optics mattered more than taking care of their own.
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Weed rescheduled to Schedule III
On weed, Trump just did something that would’ve been unthinkable for a Republican president a decade ago: he ordered marijuana moved from Schedule I to Schedule III under federal law. The DEA’s process began earlier, with a proposed rescheduling in 2024 and hearings through early 2025, and now an executive order signed December 18, 2025 directs the attorney general to finalize cannabis as a Schedule III drug—putting it in the same bucket as testosterone, ketamine and Tylenol with codeine instead of heroin. Practically, that means the federal government is admitting cannabis has medical use, it should ease research, and it should make it far easier for legitimate businesses to operate without the same crushing tax penalties that come with Schedule I status. But this is not federal legalization: state laws still rule, people already convicted under old laws don’t automatically walk free, and there will be a messy, drawn‑out fight over how this interacts with “hemp bans,” CBD products and banking rules. Expect a boom in medical and pharma‑style cannabis operations and a lot of pressure on lagging states to modernize, while hard‑liners scream that Trump just “caved to the pot lobby” even as he tries to thread the needle by praising medical use and hand‑wringing about everything else.
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Kennedy Center renaming drama
On the Kennedy Center mess, the short version is: they cannot just slap Trump’s name on it by fiat, and everyone who knows the law is saying so. The Kennedy Center is not just a performance hall; it’s a congressionally designated official memorial to John F. Kennedy, and the statute that governs it effectively locks in that status and bars new memorial plaques or rebranding without changing the law. Former Kennedy Center board members and legal experts are saying outright that renaming the center for Trump (or Melania, or anyone else) without congressional action would violate the very statute that created it, and that any attempt to do it administratively would have zero legal basis and invite an immediate court challenge. Hakeem Jeffries has been blunt: the board and the administration do not have the authority to rebrand a congressionally named memorial, so unless Republicans pass a new law—which they’re struggling to do on basic budgeting—this is mostly a trolling stunt and a loyalty test for MAGA, not a serious policy move. The wildcard is whether Trump decides to ignore the law, throw a renaming ceremony anyway, and dare the courts and Congress to stop him, because that’s exactly his style.
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ACA vote and “MAGA Mike”
On the ACA front, MAGA Mike’s move was to punt and run, not to solve anything. A Republican health care package just squeaked through the House 216‑211, and it deliberately does not extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. Moderates in his own party are furious, enough that four of them joined Democrats on a discharge petition to force a separate vote on extending the subsidies, but procedurally that likely can’t happen until January at the earliest, after the cliff hits. Johnson and House GOP leadership blocked amendments to add the subsidy extension, refused to allow a clean up‑or‑down vote, and then effectively sent everyone home while telling people to “stay tuned,” which is D.C.‑speak for “we’re going to let the subsidies lapse and then maybe talk about it later.” The same enhanced subsidies were at the center of the record 43‑day shutdown earlier this fall, so this is not some obscure line item; it’s a live grenade for millions of people whose premiums are about to jump while House leadership tries to keep the base happy by gutting anything tied to Obamacare
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Have a decent weekend everyone.
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.