Happy Wednesday! We’re not sure what it says about society that it takes an ancient sign of the end times to get us off our phones.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Joe Biden on Tuesday criticized Israel’s strike on World Central Kitchen vehicles earlier this month and called on the country to implement a six-to-eight-week humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. “I think it’s outrageous that those four, three vehicles were hit by drones and taken out on a highway, where it was along the shore, it wasn’t like it was a convoy moving,” Biden said in an interview with Televisa-Univision. “What I’m calling for is for the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow, for the next six [to] eight weeks, total access to all food and medicine going into the country.” Administration officials have since clarified that the remarks didn’t mark a change in U.S. policy toward the war, despite the president’s failure to mention the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. Meanwhile, ongoing ceasefire and hostage deal negotiations hit another roadblock after Hamas informed mediators that, in order to satisfy Israel’s request for the release of another 40 living hostages, it would have to free male Israeli troops—which the terror group is unwilling to do. Representatives for Hamas have reportedly told negotiators the group no longer has 40 living elderly or female hostages in its possession.
• The Arizona Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that all abortions in the state will soon be banned, with the exception of those necessary to save the life of the mother. The 4-2 decision held the state’s 15-week limit, adopted in 2022, doesn’t supersede an 1864 abortion ban that had long been preempted by Roe v. Wade because the state “legislature has never affirmatively created a right to, or independently authorized, elective abortion.” Enforcement of the old ban isn’t set to begin for at least two weeks, and Arizona voters could effectively reverse the decision in a November vote on a ballot measure. Several prominent Republicans in the state—including likely Senate nominee Kari Lake and former Gov. Doug Ducey—distanced themselves from the court’s decision, with Lake saying in a statement that the “pre-statehood law is out of step with Arizonans” and that she will oppose any “federal ban(s) on abortion” if elected to the Senate.
• A New York state appeals court judge rejected another last-ditch attempt by former President Donald Trump to delay the start of his hush money criminal trial, set to begin Monday, while he challenges a gag order imposed on him by the judge overseeing the trial. The rejection came only one day after a different appeals court judge shot down a separate attempt to delay the trial related to hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, which is set to begin on April 15.
• Rail company Norfolk Southern agreed on Tuesday to a $600 million settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit related to the February 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled and burned hazardous chemicals. The agreement settles class-action claims for residents and businesses within a 20-mile radius of the train crash and personal injury claims for residents within a 10-mile radius, providing payouts the plaintiffs can use “in any manner they see fit to address potential adverse impacts from the derailment.” The settlement still needs to be approved by a judge. 
• GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene circulated a letter to her House colleagues on Tuesday doubling down on her threat to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. “I will not tolerate this type of Republican ‘leadership,’” she wrote, citing his stewardship of the government funding bill passed before the Easter recess. In March, Greene filed—without requiring an immediate vote on the question—a resolution that could trigger procedures to remove Johnson. She described the motion last month as a warning, and didn’t indicate a timeline in her letter yesterday for bringing it to the floor. 
• New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Tuesday that Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman—two far-right operatives—agreed to pay a $1.25 million settlement over a voter suppression robocall scheme targeting black voters that the two orchestrated in 2020. Last March, a federal judge found that Wohl and Burkman “set into motion a full-scale voter suppression operation during the summer of 2020 to discourage eligible voters from voting by targeting mail-in voting in the 2020 Election.” 
• Peter Higgs—the Nobel Prize-winning British physicist who inspired the search for the subatomic ‘God particle’—died Monday at the age of 94. To help explain the Big Bang, Higgs theorized in 1964 about the existence of a particle that is responsible for how larger particles acquire mass. His theory was proven correct in 2012 when scientists announced the discovery of the particle through experiments using the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization Nuclear Research—the scientists dubbed the new discovery the “Higgs boson.”

Student Loan Debt Jubilee 2.0 

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Or, if you’re President Joe Biden trying to redistribute federal student loan debt, try, try again, and again, and again. 

Biden on Monday introduced his latest major effort to fulfill a key 2020—and now 2024—campaign promise: a five-pronged, broad-based effort to “cancel” the student debt of millions of individual borrowers. The Biden administration argues the policies will serve minorities overburdened by student debt and help the economy overall, but critics of this and similar efforts argue—as they did in the first go-’round—it’s an inflationary and unfair handout to the richest and best-educated citizens. Even the Biden administration is hedging on the likelihood these plans come to fruition fully intact.

Once a relatively fringe progressive idea, “forgiving” federal student debt has moved firmly into the Democratic mainstream in the Biden era. Biden’s first attempt—which would have “canceled” between $10,000 and $20,000 for certain borrowers making less than $125,000 annually—was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in June 2023. The legal justification for the effort—the post-9/11 HEROES Act that allowed the secretary of education to “to ‘modify’ or ‘waive’ student debt repayment provisions for borrowers affected by war or national emergencies,” as we put it in July—didn’t pass the Supreme Court sniff test. Or, as Biden described the episode in his State of the Union address a month ago, “I was told I couldn’t universally just change the way in which we did—dealt with student loans.”