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The surprising issue dividing Senate Dems right now
While Americans worry about sky-high gas prices and AI safety, the Senate has its sights trained on something entirely different—the world of college sports. Though it might seem like an odd focus for the upper chamber in the last few weeks before the October recess, a bill is sparking substantive disagreements over antitrust policy, racial justice in sports, and workers’ rights.
The bill dividing Democrats is the Protect College Sports Act, which the Senate voted to advance on Thursday. The bill attempts to regulate the lucrative world of college sports by setting a cap on payments to athletes, placing a five-year limit on playing eligibility, and giving the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, an antitrust exemption. Supporters of the bill say that it will bring order to the world of college sports, setting rules on how athletes can use the transfer portal, stopping a “spending spiral” by schools, and putting an end to lawsuits on these issues.
The bill easily passed the vote to consider it, with 77 votes for it and just 22 against it; 19 Senate Democrats voted against the bill alongside three Republicans, moving them closer to a final vote on the legislation. “I think the bill is necessary, and it’s not a perfect bill,” said Michigan Senator Gary Peters, who voted for it. “I don’t think we’d ever be able to come up with a perfect bill.”
Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, an outspoken Democratic supporter of the bill, agreed that the bill does more good than harm. “On balance, this is a compromise that secures a lot of significant benefits and protections for college athletes,” he told The New Republic on Thursday. When asked what he thought about his colleagues who were concerned about the antitrust exemption, he mumbled wryly: “Good for them.”
Anti-monopoly advocates worry that the antitrust exemption takes power away from student athletes, who in recent years have benefited from competition between schools trying to woo them onto their teams with cash deals. In 2025, the settlement of a 2020 lawsuit gave Division I schools the right to pay players directly. But before student athletes gained the right to make money from their work on the court or field, coaches and athletic directors took home the most cash. “The players were getting pennies on the dollar,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, the legal director at the anti-monopoly organization Open Markets Institute. “Even though they were the ones really generating all this money.”
Vaheesan, along with lawmakers like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, are concerned that this legislation could reverse these recent financial wins for student athletes. “I think we’re going to rue the day we gave an antitrust exemption this big to the colleges,” Murphy said. “It’s going to result in a huge cost increase for consumers and for folks who follow college sports on TV.”
Asked why he thought the bill was passing with the support of some of his fellow Senate Democrats, Murphy said: “The Power Five schools have a lot of influence. They’ve spent millions and millions of dollars on lobbying.”
Coons argued that the bill isn’t too deferential to the interests of colleges. “They did not get the definition of college athletes as never being employees, which was one of the top asks of the conferences and colleges,” he said. “That was a concession to those of us who are strong supporters of organized labor and want to retain the possibility to organize.”
Meanwhile, all five of the Senate’s Black members—Republican Tim Scott and Democrats Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Angela Alsobrooks—opposed the bill. The NAACP’s president and chief executive strongly opposes the legislation. “Sharecropping is over,” he said on a media call this week. “We should not ask athletes, particularly Black athletes, to generate revenue on the football field or basketball court and then share in none of the revenue.”
“It does raise concerns about how committed members of the Senate, including Senate Democrats, are to the well-being and welfare of workers,” Vaheesan said.
—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
Surging gas prices are dominating headlines this week, particularly across the Midwest. In Michigan, gas prices jumped 22 cents from Wednesday to Thursday, drawing worryingly close to $5 a gallon, with further hikes predicted. (Average prices in Minnesota rose 14 cents in the same 24-hour period. In Cincinnati, Ohio, prices jumped 25 cents overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday.) At the Detroit Free Press on Thursday, Frank Witsil reported new calculations from Brown University professor Jeff Colgan estimating that since the start of Trump’s war on Iran, American households have paid on average $826 more on gas than they would have without the conflict. Susan Tompor of the same paper reported a troubling new trend of free gas and free groceries scams. “This summer,” writes Tompor, “the Better Business Bureau Scam Tracker page received reports from consumers who complained that they received postcards claiming they qualified for valuable gas and grocery gift cards and vouchers,” from the mysteriously named “AAPP”—which can look like “AARP” if people are reading quickly. Those who followed the instructions “complained that they lost money once they paid a $5 processing fee. Some consumers saw additional unauthorized charges of $46 or more being taken out of their accounts.” Analysts predict that prices will remain high for months to come—with record diesel prices rapidly affecting the rest of the economy via their impact on trucking and farming.
In case you missed it: Arizona Republicans are pushing ahead with subpoenas for Governor Katie Hobbs, state Attorney General Kris Mayes, their staff, and others over events from 2022 that The Arizona Republic first reported in 2024. Specifically: The state’s Department of Child Safety, per Axios reporter Jeremy Duda’s retelling of the somewhat tangled tale, “granted a previously rejected rate hike to Sunshine Residential Homes after the group home provider gave $400,000 to Hobbs’s inauguration fund and the Arizona Democratic Party.” Mayes’s office concluded a two-year investigation last month finding no “evidence of the necessary quid pro quo to support a bribery charge,” per the final memo. But GOP State Senator Jake Hoffman says the investigation was phony and incomplete, and now the hearing at which Hobbs and others will be compelled to testify is scheduled, Duda reports, for “eight days before early voting begins and five weeks before the election.” Hobbs and her running mate, former GOP Mesa Mayor John Giles, have consistently led Republicans Andy Biggs and running mate Sine Kerr in recent polls, but the margins have varied widely from poll to poll. While the Cook Political Report moved the race from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat” in July, their race summary still rates Hobbs “the most endangered Democratic incumbent.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the Trump administration “for withholding public records detailing the efforts of politically appointed industry insiders at the Environmental Protection Agency to reapprove the dangerous, drift-prone pesticide dicamba,” according to the org’s press release. Dicamba is typically applied to crops that have been genetically modified to resist it, so that it kills the weeds but not the crops. But it also has a habit of “drifting” from its initial area of application and killing other crops, as well as wildlife. Plus it’s repeatedly been linked to increased risk of cancer in humans. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have no reason to withhold public documents,” CBD’s environmental health science director Nathan Donley said in the press release. CBD was also part of a coalition of groups that sued the Trump administration in February, challenging the initial reapproval.
Friday at 1 p.m., a webcast at the Center for Strategic and International Studies asks: “Is U.S. Economic Diplomacy Up to Speed?” The question may feel bleakly comical against the backdrop of Trump tariffs, the economic shocks of the Iran war, and speculation that Canada might join the EU just to piss Trump off. But Enoh T. Ebong, Allison Lombardo, and Jonathan Gandomi, according to CSIS’s event summary, will focus on a broader, more process-oriented issue: whether the State Department is ready to participate in a new era of negotiations over “critical minerals supply chains … technology standards,” and more. “While the State Department’s role has expanded significantly,” the organization’s event summary states, “its internal structures have not kept pace, leaving expertise fragmented across nearly 20 agencies without strong coordination.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
Good Week/Bad Week
Good Week: Macklemore
Sure, the middling rapper got booted from his supporting slot on Ed Sheeran’s tour because of his pro-Palestinian statement during a performance at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium—that’s bad news for him financially. But his righteous stance is being applauded worldwide, and other Sheeran opening acts followed suit. Plus, when was the last time everyone was talking about Macklemore? (Never.)
Bad Week: Ed Sheeran
We knew his music was an abomination. Now we know that his politics are too. Booting an artist from your tour because he said “Free Palestine” does not make you “apolitical”; it makes you an explicit opponent of Palestine’s self-determination, and a craven lickspittle of the corporate entertainment complex.
—Ryan Kearney
Political Trivia Question of the Day
With Texas on our minds: Three speakers of the House in the twentieth century, all Democrats, hailed from Texas. Who were they? One is really hard—he was speaker for just one term. One was speaker for nearly two decades. The third’s tenure ended in (ginned-up) scandal. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)
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