What is Congress’s Job? – GovTrack.us

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July 25, 2025 · by Amy West

If you’re over 50 or know someone who is, you may think Congress’s job is as described in the Schoolhouse Rock video “I’m Just a Bill’ from 1975. Except for the way it leaves out lobbying activity, it’s a pretty good description of how Congress is supposed to work. At least, it is if you assume that Congress’s primary job is to pass or repeal laws including laws to fund the government (aka appropriations).

House

In that vein, the House passing six bills by large bipartisan majorities looks like a successful week:

• H.R. 3937: Wabeno Economic Development Act passed 410-1
• H.R. 4275: Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 passed 399-12
• H.R. 3351: Improving Access to Small Business Information Act passed 387-12
• H.R. 3357: Enhancing Multi-Class Share Disclosures Act passed by 381-31
• H.R. 1917: Great Lakes Mass Marking Program Act of 2025 passed 360-57
• H.R. 3095: To direct the United States Postal Service to designate single, unique ZIP Codes for certain communities, and for other purposes passed 278-121

But they were scheduled to vote on 21 bipartisan bills and five Republican priority bills.

What happened?

The ongoing controversy over Jeffrey Epstein and whatever might be in Department of Justice files that includes President Trump is what happened.

Because a purported coverup of a fictional Epstein client list has considerable traction among Republican voters, many Republican members of Congress want to do the opposite of what President Trump wants: they want to force the release of additional information about him that the Department of Justice has. Democrats, sensing an opening to weaken the President have joined the fray and offered amendments of their own on the topic in committees.

Speaker Johnson, forced to choose between pleasing the President or allowing votes that would get support from his own party, decided to shut down the House early for its August recess.

The result? 15 bipartisan bills did not get a vote nor did the five bills ostensibly reflecting Republican priorities.

The evidence of the week suggests that the current leadership of the House believes that the House’s job, and the most important Republican priority, is to please the President. If that involves passing bills, great. But if not, well, then there’s not much point in being in session.

Senate

The Senate does not leave for its August Recess until next week. Next week, like this one, they’ll be working through nominees in need of confirmation. They may not leave at all. With public pressure from the President to stay and confirm nominees and Democrats so far not allowing time saving methods of confirmation, it’s possible the Senate will stay for part or all of August.

Is it likely? Your GovTracker thinks probably not. Democrats have provided some key support for Trump nominees – most recently Sen. Shaheen for Michael Waltz – and many members of both parties already had plans set for August (some personal, but many work related).

Programming note

Whether the Senate stays in session or not, we’ll start our August Recess posts next week. Thanks for all the great suggestions! We’ll do our best to address them. If we don’t get to all of them during August, we’ll hold on to your suggestions and write about them the next time Congress is at a full or partial standstill. Which, for your planning needs, may be in October when the government’s fiscal year ends and a government shutdown might happen.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: What is Congress’s Job? – GovTrack.us

#2025 #America #CongressJob #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USCongress #USHouse #USSenate

The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate – Columbia Journalism Review

AP Photos / Illustration by Katie Kosma

The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate

As Paramount prepares for a merger, the Freedom of the Press Foundation stands to challenge the company for capitulating to Trump. Will it work?

July 25, 2025, By Kyle Paoletta

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Early this month, as soon as the news broke of Paramount’s decision to pay President Donald Trump’s foundation sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit against CBS News, the Freedom of the Press Foundation moved to take legal action. The FPF, as it’s known, tracks and resists government infringement on the news media. It’s also a Paramount shareholder, prepared to push for those interests with corporate muscle. Trump’s case, and the response of Paramount’s board, immediately set off alarm bells, as the company was in the midst of pursuing an eight-billion-dollar merger with Skydance, a Hollywood studio, that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission. “They’re essentially making a handshake deal with Donald Trump,” Seth Stern, the FPF’s advocacy director, told me. He and the FPF’s legal team believed that such a deal could be a violation of federal bribery laws. And, he noted, Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, stands to make two billion dollars from the merger. “I would think that, regardless of what Shari has to offer the rest of the board,” Stern said, “the prospect of potential prosecution for bribery would be something they would think quite hard about.”

Now it’s clear that Paramount’s board has decided the risk of prosecution is well worth a multibillion-dollar payday. On Thursday, the FCC signed off on the Skydance merger, clearing a path for its completion. “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change,” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, announced, praising the deal for its commitment to “unbiased journalism” and assurances that “discriminatory DEI policies” will end. But when I spoke to Brenna Frey, a lawyer for the FPF, in the wake of the settlement announcement, she was incensed. “This is an affront to the shareholders of Paramount, but it’s also an affront to CBS’s reporters and to the First Amendment,” she said. 

In Stern’s view, Paramount’s willingness to settle had been a calculated surrender. The premise of Trump’s lawsuit—that 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with Kamala Harris last fall represented “fraudulent interference with an election”—was unlikely to hold up to legal scrutiny. “The lawsuit was laughable,” David Snyder, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said. “What they were trying to attack here was CBS News’s choices about how they edited footage from an interview. That sort of editorial judgment is at the core of First Amendment protections, generally, but especially if it’s about public figures right in the middle of an election.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate – Columbia Journalism Review

#2025 #America #Books #ColumbiaJournalismReview #DonaldTrump #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #History #Journalism #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Inside the Library of Congress’s Collection – Library of Congress

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Photograph of digital display by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress.

Inside the Library of Congress’s Collection

The nation’s library is an ever-expanding temple of knowledge and creativity. Here are a few of its most incredible, unexpected, and otherwise historic jewels.

Written by Ron Cassie | Published on July 24, 2025

During the War of 1812, British troops famously torched the US Capitol, burning down the still-new home of the fledgling country’s legislative body. Also going up in flames? Roughly 3,000 books, largely about law, that made up the Library of Congress’s core collection.

Within a month, former President and noted bibliophile Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. His offer was warmly received by many in the House and Senate, but not by all. Massachusetts representative Cyrus King, an opposition Federalist, argued that Jefferson’s diverse holdings—which included works in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Old English, as well as a translation of the Qur’an—would foster his “infidel philosophy” while being “in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not.”

The bill narrowly passed, along party lines, and Congress paid almost $24,000 for Jefferson’s 6,487 books. On May 8, 1815, as a final wagonload of books left Monticello, Jefferson wrote to Samuel Harrison Smith, who had helped facilitate the sale, that “an interesting treasure is added to . . . the depository of unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the U.S. and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.”

Jefferson eventually got his wish. Today, the Library of Congress is a national jewel. Its main building on Capitol Hill, opened in 1897 and later named for the Founding Father, is home to a domed Main Reading Room that endures as one of Washington’s most elegant spaces. Within the library’s collection of more than 178 million items, the world’s largest, are a number of incredible treasures—and across the following pages, we’ve highlighted some of our favorites.

More incredible still? Most of what the institution has to offer is accessible with a simple library card.

In many ways, the modern library is the brainchild of former Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford, a visionary who lobbied Abraham Lincoln for the job and then stayed on through nine (!) Presidents. Spofford led construction of the Thomas Jefferson Building and a major expansion of the collection, working toward his broader goal of establishing a national library. He succeeded yet never lost sight of the institution’s original mission to serve legislators: For decades, the Jefferson Building and the Capitol were connected by an underground tunnel equipped with an electric book trolley and pneumatic message tubes. Lawmakers (or really, their staffers and pages) could send book requests to librarians via the tubes, and librarians could send books back via the trolley.

In the early 2000s, the book tunnel was demolished to make room for the underground Capitol Visitor Center. A separate, pedestrian-friendly tunnel now links the two buildings, where librarians can still be spotted wheeling book carts from time to time. That’s hardly the only way the library has evolved. Its physical collection is now housed in three Capitol Hill buildings and other facilities in Maryland and Virginia; its digital collection, begun in 1994, contains more than 900 million files; its collections of sounds, music, prints, moving images, and photographs date back more than 100 years and continue to grow alongside audiovisual media and communication.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Inside the Library of Congress’s Collection

#2025 #America #Books #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Monticello #Reading #Science #Technology #ThomasJefferson #ThomasJeffersonLibrary #UnitedStates

“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age | Willenborg | College & Research Libraries

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Home > Vol 86, No 4 (2025) > Willenborg

“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age

By Amber Willenborg and Robert Detmering*

This national qualitative study investigates academic librarians’ instructional experiences, views, and challenges regarding the widespread problem of misinformation. Findings from phenomenological interviews reveal a tension between librarians’ professional, moral, and civic obligations to address misinformation and the actual material conditions of information literacy instruction, which influence and often constrain librarians’ pedagogical and institutional roles. The authors call for greater professional reflection on current information literacy models that focus on achieving ambitious educational goals, but which may be unsuitable for addressing the larger social and political crisis of misinformation.

Introduction

Donald Trump’s unlikely presidential victory in 2016 has become inextricably associated with growing public concern about the potentially negative impact of false and deceptive information on democratic society (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Tenove, 2020). While media saturation and political distortion eventually rendered phrases such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” virtually meaningless, ongoing waves of COVID-19 skepticism, QAnon cultism, and 2020 election denialism suggest that various forms of misinformation and disinformation will continue to play a worrisome role in political discourse going forward. Misinformation—defined broadly to encompass disinformation and related concepts—is not a new problem for democracy; however, in today’s environment, online social networks facilitate the rapid and widespread circulation of misinformation into the larger media ecosystem, making verification exceedingly difficult and enabling interference in political campaigns and elections (Muhammed & Mathew, 2022; Tenove et al., 2018). Unsurprisingly, as long-time information literacy educators and advocates, many librarians feel professionally and morally obligated to address this crisis.

In recent years, innumerable scholarly works, think pieces, and statements from professional organizations have asserted that librarians have an especially important role to play in helping students and other library users evaluate information sources more effectively against the backdrop of civic discord and online propaganda (ALA, 2017; Batchelor, 2017; Cooke, 2017; Eva & Shea, 2018; Fister, 2021a; IFLA, 2018; Jaeger et al., 2021; Musgrove et al., 2018). Succinctly encapsulating what has become the consensus view, Beene and Greer (2021) state, “Librarians are uniquely poised to prepare learners for a lifetime of critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and information literacy” (p. 3). Based purely on the literature, the outpouring of classes, workshops, events, online guides, and other content focusing on fake news and related topics indicates that instruction librarians have largely accepted some measure of responsibility for combating misinformation as part of their efforts to advance information literacy on a broad scale (De Paor & Heravi, 2020; Revez & Corujo, 2021).

At the same time, while there appears to be general agreement that librarians should involve themselves in teaching students to identify misinformation, there is controversy surrounding the nature of that involvement. For example, librarians have been criticized for their apparent lack of engagement with research from other disciplines regarding the psychological and emotional dimensions of misinformation, specifically cognitive biases such as motivated reasoning, as well as imperfections in human memory, that can lead people to cling to false beliefs, even after they have been corrected (Sullivan 2019). Librarians have also been called out for their reliance on checklist heuristics that stress evaluating the superficial features of web sources in isolation, rather than thinking critically and holistically about sources in relation to one another (Beene & Greer, 2021; Faix & Fyn, 2020; Lor, 2018; Ziv & Bene, 2022). The popular “CRAAP Test” (Blakeslee, 2004) is perhaps the most notable—and now increasingly notorious—example of this problematic checklist approach. Additionally, to more fully understand how librarians and other educators are teaching students to evaluate information, several researchers have conducted content analyses of library and university websites (Bangani, 2021; Lim, 2020; Wineburg et al., 2020; Ziv & Bene, 2022). This body of scholarship consistently shows that such websites emphasize outdated, inadequate, and counterproductive evaluation guidance, as opposed to what Ziv and Bene (2022) refer to as “networked interventions,” (i.e., proven techniques such as lateral reading that focus on evaluation within the context of the larger web) (p. 917). Although providing a certain level of insight into the instructional approaches employed by librarians and offering fully justifiable critiques of those approaches as they appear online, these studies are necessarily limited by their dependence on websites, which, divorced from the context of lived experience, may ultimately tell us very little about how librarians actually teach their students about misinformation.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: “I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age | Willenborg | College & Research Libraries