With polls demonstrating a potentially historic showing for Democratic candidates in next month’s midterm elections, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has a message for some in his party’s most enthusiastic base: Slow down. Should the Democrats take control of one, if not both, chambers of Congress next term, the party should not expend energy impeaching President Donald Trump. Instead, they should focus on a “comprehensive ethics package” that can be used for future accountability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Emanuel’s message of temperance has not been fully embraced by a party whose base is champing at the bit for change.

‘Food fight’
If Democrats take the House majority in November as they are widely expected to do, they should “pass an ethics package” rather than jumping straight into an impeachment effort, “because it’s not going anywhere,” said Emanuel on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” An impeachment push would simply be a “food fight,” signaling a “return to the politics of fighting.”

Polling last month showed government corruption “emerged as the second-highest-rated issue voters were concerned about,” said NBC News. “On the airwaves,” ads about “tackling government corruption and banning congressional stock trading” have been a “top issue” from both parties. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has not thrown his weight behind nascent impeachment efforts, and this “appeared to suggest this summer that it would not be a top priority,” said Fox News. Despite having impeached Trump “twice during his first term,” Democrats this time around “haven’t made much of an effort to impeach the president again,” said The Hill.

‘Laying the groundwork’ 
Moderate Democrats like Emanuel are “laying the groundwork” for ineffective governance by advancing “‘don’t impeach anymore and just get back to work’ messaging,” said Mark Copelovitch, a  political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on Bluesky. Rather than strictly running for office now, Emanuel is “using the midterms to build his base among future Democratic office holders” ahead of a likely 2028 presidential campaign, said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Substack. By framing himself as a “wised-up disciplinarian figure,” Emanuel offers the “same hoary consultant-brewed panacea” he introduced as “one of the initial class of New Democrats in the early 1990s.”

A national program called Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) is meant to help federal workers forgive their student debt after a decade of government service. But staffing shortages and other operational problems have left many of these workers behind.

‘Stuck and unsure’
PSLF, established in 2007, eliminates the “federal student debt of government and nonprofit workers after 10 years, or 120 qualifying monthly payments,” said CNBC. And the program was largely successful in the past. About 1.2 million people had their student loans forgiven, according to the Brookings Institution. But new government evaluations are “reducing the number of qualifying payments and pushing those individuals further away from debt cancellation,” said CNBC.

The changes revolve around a Biden administration buyback rule that gives borrowers with deferred payments a “chance to recover lost time” toward paying off their loans, said The Washington Post, because “time spent in forbearance or deferment typically doesn’t count” toward PSLF. “Coding errors” cited by the Trump administration have led to a “backlog of roughly 82,000 applications,” leaving “borrowers stuck and unsure.”

‘Already in shambles’
Overall, the student loan repayment system is “more confusing and chaotic during President Donald Trump’s second term,” said The 19th. Experts believe policy shifts like the buyback-rule changes have “broken a student loan system that was already in shambles, leaving nearly 45 million borrowers, disproportionately women, in financial and emotional distress.” At the same time, the White House has promised up to $60,000 in student loan forgiveness for people who join Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“After nearly a year of hearing nothing, I sent all of my documentation to the Student Loan Ombudsman,” said Christine Archer, a federal prosecutor in Hendricks County, Indiana, to The New York Times. “The entire packet was returned as ‘undeliverable.’” Archer graduated law school in 2014 and “tried 22 times over the past 20 months to erase her debt.” 

Archer assumes the government does not keep proper track of her payments, so she keeps her own records. “My husband knows that if the house burns down and he has to pick between getting the wedding album or the student loan file,” she said to the Times, “he should take the student loan file.”

Protesters are sprayed with a water cannon by riot police during a demonstration against government budget cuts affecting education and workers’ rights in Brussels, Belgium. Inspired by the “unrest of their peers in neighboring France,” Belgian students “joined trade union protesters” in a nationwide strike “against the planned cuts,” said The Guardian. 
Nicolas Tucat / AFP / Getty Images

Fall is when studios love to drop some of their juiciest awards-season contenders. And this month’s slate unsurprisingly features several buzzy, prestigious new offerings, with a movie for virtually all tastes.

‘Carrie’
In this new take on Stephen King’s novel from horror auteur Mike Flanagan, updated for the social media era, Summer H. Howell plays Carrie White, the shy student whose bullying results in supernatural tragedy. Flanagan’s take on the story makes “everyone a little more sympathetic,” said Katie Rife at Inverse. (on Prime Video now)

‘East of Eden’
Florence Pugh (pictured above) stars in this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel. She plays Cathy Ames, who shoots her husband, Adam (Christopher Abbott), and flees to run a brothel after delivering their twin boys. The series offers an “allegory of the moral corruption of a nation,” said Inkoo Kang at The New Yorker. (on Netflix now)

‘War’
Creator George Kay’s new drama tackles the divorce between actress Carla Duval (Sienna Miller) and tech tycoon Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) while foregrounding their warring law firms. The series is an “old-school adult drama,” said Michel Ghanem at The Cut. (on HBO Max now)

‘The Diplomat’ season 4
The beloved series returns with President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) and Vice President Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) scrambling to contain the fallout from a shocking act of espionage while Hal’s wife, Kate (Keri Russell), tries to salvage the international order. It’s a show that “treats politics as something deeply personal,” said Lucy Baugher Milas at Paste Magazine. (out Tuesday on Netflix)