James.galbraith

Just because Judge Aileen Cannon gifted Donald Trump with a special master, and let him pick who he wanted to serve in that role, does not mean she’s done with stepping in to provide Trump another damn the law, full-speed ahead gift of a ruling. Just one day after Trump’s attorneys complained that they couldn’t meet the deadlines Special Master Judge Raymond Dearie had set, Cannon stepped in to not only give Trump more time—she actually extended her own deadlines, bumping the closing date all the way back to Dec. 16.

In addition, Cannon nixed a critical step of the plan that Dearie had laid out. In any special master proceeding, both sides have to agree on the inventory of documents to be reviewed. Otherwise, it’s not possible to be sure that everything that needed to be dealt with has actually been dealt with. But Cannon never ordered Trump to declare that the list given to him by the Department of Justice was accurate, or to claim that there were documents left off, or to say that there were some things that were on the list but should not be.

Just as they’ve been making noise about Trump declassifying documents without presenting one bit of evidence this ever happened, Trump’s legal team has also been insinuating that the Department of Justice might have planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago. Dearie’s insistence that Trump agree to the inventory, or state his objections, was designed to not only get the proceedings moving, but end any possibility that Trump would later claim some of the evidence was planted. Now Cannon has removed that obligation. The DOJ has to give an inventory and swear to its accuracy. Trump doesn’t have to swear to anything.

Once again, Cannon has given Trump even more than he asked for, and this is after the 11th Circuit called her to task for all the issues with her previous ruling.

This new ruling shows Cannon once again serving the joint roles of judge and Trump’s lead attorney as she rejects portions of Dearie’s plan. 

Upon review of the matter, the Court determines as follows. There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents. The Court’s Appointment Order did not contemplate that obligation; Defendant since has complied with the requirement to attest to its now-revised inventory and the parties and the Special Master now are situated to proceed forward with the review process pending exchange of the actual materials.

So the DOJ has verified the accuracy of its final inventory. And Cannon has relieved Trump of any obligation to say anything about the documents on the list. This isn’t just a gift for now: It’s one that Trump will still be unwrapping, in court and at his rallies, far into the new year.

But the biggest immediate present from Trump’s own judicial Santa is the gift of time. Plenty of time. Cannon repeats the groundless claim that Trump’s team made on Wednesday that the “11,000 documents approximate 200,000 pages of materials” and proceeds to push forward every date on Dearie’s calendar. And she doesn’t stop with her previous end date of Nov. 30.

… the Court hereby extends the end date for completion of the Special Master’s review and classifications from the prior date of November 30, to December 16, 2022. 

That’s a full two months after Dearie had planned to be through with everything. 

And there’s more. It’s not just that the end date has been pushed back. Dearie had planned for the process to move in stages, with some documents being cleared even as others were being evaluated. But Cannon recognizes that this might move things along too quickly to achieve all of Trump’s delay, delay, delay goals. So she casually burns that part of the plan.

The Plan also recommended that Plaintiff’s review and assertions of privilege be completed on a rolling basis. To avoid confusion … the Court determines that submission by Plaintiff to Defendant of one final comprehensive log is bettered suited to manage the process and resolve any disputes.

It’s certainly “bettered suited” to something. 

In setting her original date, it was clear Cannon intended to make sure that nothing could be determined about these documents before the midterm elections. With this extension, she’s making doubly sure that the message is getting across: She is slow-walking this proceeding until there is absolutely no way it can hurt Republicans in November. 

Having already been scolded by the appeals court, there is nothing Cannon can do to stop the DOJ from proceeding with criminal investigations involving the classified documents Trump held at Mar-a-Lago. But where it’s possible to give him assistance, she’s still doing everything she can … and then some.

Republican candidates are lining up to defend manly manhood.

After being scraped out of the White House and deposited back at Mar-a-Lago, it didn't take long for Donald J. Trump to begin holding for-profit events that looked and sounded a lot like campaign rallies but have, in fact, been nothing but personal cash grabs. Donald likes yelling his grievances at a live audience; if weird and sedition-friendly Americans want to pay Donald to complain at them inside sweaty arenas with other like-minded masochists, Donald's going to take the money and yell the things.

We're all accustomed to this game by now, so if you assumed that Donald Trump getting paid was going to turn out to be connected to nearly everyone else involved in the effort getting screwed, you get no prize. Sure enough, the "American Freedom Tour" has been failing to pay its bills, canceling events, and leaving speakers not named Donald Trump wondering if they're ever going to get their money.

The Washington Post brings us that news, and it's filled with the sort of details that really bring home what a thoroughly Trumpian operation this thing has been. American Freedom Tour is the company that's been organizing these Trump rallies, and the Post reports that Donald Trump personally appears to be getting paid his full amount for every appearance. The same isn't true for the company's "vendors, investors, and employees," as the company cancels events and promises everyone that the money's coming real soon now.

"In addition to Trump, the shows featured right-wing celebrities such as Candace Owens and Kimberly Guilfoyle, as well as motivational speakers offering personal finance courses," notes the Post, which immediately raises the question: How close do you have to be to Donald, personally, to get your money? Candace Owens probably won't be seeing any cash, but does dating one of Trump's children improve your odds?

Yeah, I'm betting no. I'm pretty sure Donald Trump would hate you forever if you proposed giving Donald Trump slightly less money so that you could pay anyone else, including Donald Trump Jr., a dime.

Those names are also a reminder that, despite the high ticket prices, these events weren't exactly posh affairs. Trump is the headliner, and everyone else is "people that you'd never, ever pay money to hear from."

What's not clear from the Post's story is why the company is canceling events. A company spokescreature cites "unforeseen scheduling issues," which might mean that Donald Trump keeps having to nix event dates because they've been conflicting with his ongoing series of crimes but could also mean that Trump's draw—recent pictures from attendees have shown venues that might be half full, if you're being generous—has so faded that it's become hard for the events to turn a profit.

In fact, it's almost certainly that. The company has been putting on Trump for-profit Trump rallies and yet can't pay its bills. That means it’s not selling enough tickets to make its business plan profitable.

Trump can draw a gaggle, but Trump can't draw a crowd. We also know that Trump has been demanding that donors and other suckers pay for his flights to and from events, and you know whatever speaking fee he's charging is one far steeper than what the ticket sales can justify.

So that's a little treat. Everything Trump touches dies; everyone who works with Donald Trump ends up getting stiffed. You'd think after decades of this, the world would run out of suckers, but no. No, there are always more people who think, "if I partner up with Donald J. Trump, I won't lose my shirt."

It would seem obvious to most Americans that outlawing or hindering any group of people’s medical rights would be morally wrong. Most Americans would consider it, at the very least, to feel unconstitutional. Virtually all Americans would consider outlawing or hindering any group of military veterans’ medical rights to be arguably the lowest form of spiritual bankruptcy available to the human race.

That is exactly how low the Republican Party has gone. In the GOP’s misshapen plan to gum up all government productivity, they find themselves stumbling over themselves to stop legislation that was once considered very easily bipartisan. In August, Republican senators like Ted Cruz decided to vote against the PACT Act, which was 100% dedicated to health care and benefits for veterans exposed to toxic agents. At that time, the Republican Party whined about “spending” in the bill. A strange load of horse manure even for the GOP at the time. We are approaching the end of September, and the House of Representatives is finally moving to vote on passing the Solid Start Act. This is another veterans program that hopes to provide much-needed outreach to veterans in their first years of transition back to the civilian world. 

One of the main factors that led to the Solid Start pilot program, a bipartisan effort begun during the Trump administration, was the high suicide rates veterans were seeing in their first years out of service. This expansion and codification of the program was introduced by Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Republican Rep. David Joyce of Ohio. It’s a softball piece of legislation to pass. On Wednesday, after going through the committees, the bill was suddenly thrown into a strange place where Republicans said they would not vote for it—if 16 specific words remained in the bill.

RELATED STORY: Republicans backed themselves into a corner on veterans care bill, and they're struggling to get out

Those 16 words? “Providing women veterans with information that is tailored to their specific health care and benefit needs.” It’s in the 6320 (F) section of the bill. It is not a long bill. It is a very simple thing to read and comprehend. But health that is “tailored” to women is equal to women’s health and reproductive health, and the GOP objects to women’s health beyond being a vessel for baby-making.

One of the main authors of the bill, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, stood up and gave the GOP in the House the what-for for about 5 minutes. Rep. Slotkin made sure to remind those in the chambers that “this language has been in the bill since its inception when we created this.” That was in April 2021. More than that, these 16 words speak to health care already “covered by the VA.”

Rep. Slotkin wanted to make sure people understand that women’s health care is health care. “But just so we understand what was meant with the idea of providing women and veterans with information tailored to them, pregnancy and mental health care, maternity care, mammogram, breast health, breastfeeding and lactation, menopause, gynecological cancer. Pre-pregnancy health. Chronic pelvic pain. Birth Control. Osteoporosis, prosthetics for women. Intimate Partner Violence, disordered eating, sexual assault. I can go on. There is a very long list of specific health issues that are specific to women.”

As the Michigan Representative explained, none of this is “controversial,” so what is really going on that, now, all of a sudden, the GOP has decided to add more deaths to their political party’s body count?

“Earlier today, a letter went out from Ranking Member Bost and the pro-life caucus saying that members, while they supported it previously, should now turn against it. After publicly supporting this, they are now leaving it. And why? Because they are concerned about VA policy. They are concerned about the VA's decision to provide veteran women with access to abortion when they have been raped, when they are the victims of family incest, or when a doctor confirms that the pregnancy is a risk to the health or the life of the mother.

Not abortion on demand, not extreme policies. These very basic, commonly accepted instances when a women veteran has gone through hell and has no other option. The other side of the aisle, to be clear, is objecting to this bill because they object to any exceptions whatsoever on abortion. It is a political game. It is literally putting politics ahead of the 18 million veterans and 200,000 each year that separate.

It is our responsibility to honor the veterans, male and female. And I find it disturbing that you would play politics in this way. I asked the other side of the aisle to reconsider and support this bill.”

We are trolling the depths of the moral ocean here, and somehow the Republican Party is searching lower. 

Rep. Slotkin was not done. After hearing Republicans wring their bloody hands and spout platitudes and bullshit, the Congresswoman went back up to hammer home the facts with a touch more emphasis. She first reminded the Republican Party how the government is technically set up to work: “I just I want to be clear, no one in this room is in the Judicial branch. And no one in this room that I'm aware of is a medical doctor. If you believe that the provisions that the VA has put forward have a legal problem, you have the right to take up that case and put it through the courts. We are the legislative branch. We make laws. We pass laws. We are not judge and jury. Take it to a court. If you're concerned, that is your right in terms of making decisions on behalf of women.”

Then she got down to brass tacks:

“If you want to take a veterans bill and make it about abortion, then let's do it. What you are saying, and you're saying in front of the American people, is that you believe a veteran who has been raped, who is the victim of incest, and who is or who is having a dangerous miscarriage.

“She does not deserve access to abortion. You are saying—unless you correct me and tell me—what you believe a woman deserves to have when she has been raped, the victim of incest, or is in the middle of a dangerous miscarriage. If you can't state it, then be clear you believe in no exceptions for women. A cold, heartless, violent approach to women's health.

“You want to ban all abortions. That is your goal. Many of you had been open about that. And if you flip the House, we know that you will put forward a full ban on all abortion for all states. You've been clear about it. You want to turn a veterans bill into an abortion bill. Let's do it. Not one of you are a medical doctor.

“Not one of you. What the VA guidelines say is that if you've been raped or the victim of incest or a medical profession deems that your pregnancy is a risk to your health. The one of four women in this country who has had a miscarriage, probably many women in this room, that you are a better judge of who gets to decide the future of their life and not a medical doctor.

“Who do you think you are? You are politicians. We are all on this floor. Elected officials and not medical professionals. If it was your wife, your daughter who was suffering through a miscarriage, are you going to tell her she can't until her fever gets high enough? Until she's bleeding harder? That's what's happening in the state of Texas right now.

“If that's what you want for veterans. Shame on you. Shame on you. I'm sorry. I we built this bill to be bipartisan, and I saw your support particularly, sir. And you're making it a political issue. Shame on you. You all have pictures of veterans in your office. Proud to show your pride in our veterans. It should be the most bipartisan issue in the world. And you're making it political. Shame on you.”

Amen to that.

Stop worrying about what happens if we let kids transition. Worry about what happens if we don’t.

When Mae Sallean was a teenager, her body and mind began to slip away from each other. Her body and face began to sprout thick hair, her voice dropped, and she felt dissociated from her physical form. Something had gone wrong, and she could not reconcile the person she was with the person the world perceived her as. The disconnect left her profoundly depressed and deeply lonely.

Mae knew, somewhere deep down, that she needed to be a girl. She lacked the language for it. In Mae’s heavily religious Texas community, the existence of queer people was barely acknowledged, and trans people, she says, were only seen “in pornography and on Maury.” But she knew, all the same.

When Mae was 15, her mother discovered a secret box full of women’s clothing that Mae wore when no one else was at home. Though very Christian, Mae’s mother didn’t freak out. She wanted to help. So she found a Christian counselor for Mae. The counselor, who had no formal training, tried to convince Mae that being trans was one of the worst things she could be and that if she didn’t change her ways, she would go to hell.

“He framed it on the same level as pedophilia,” Mae says. “That was the number one thing that stuck from those meetings until I started transitioning: I am on the same level as a pedophile.”

The conversation about trans kids right now is fundamentally broken. Because it is led, by and large, by cis people, it focuses on the potential regret children and adolescents might have after transitioning, and ignores the social, physical, emotional, and psychological costs of not transitioning. It ignores the reams of studies that underline the need to support trans kids. It ignores the lived experiences of many trans people, who despair that they were kept from transitioning as youths.

Until this year, this conversation about trans kids had mostly been carried out in the media, with publications from the New York Times to the Atlantic to the Los Angeles Times publishing stories that suggested medical practitioners aren’t doing enough to vet potential transitioners under the age of 18.

Lawmakers were listening, and the 2022 legislative session introduced a new spate of bills aimed at stopping children from accessing trans-affirming health care, among plenty of other anti-trans legislation, especially against an incredibly small number of trans kids playing sports in school. In all, 34 states have considered anti-trans legislation in some form.

Steps taken by the state of Texas to prosecute providing health care to trans kids as child abuse mark the most extreme end of this push. Entered as supporting evidence for Texas’s measure? A recent piece on trans kids from the New York Times.

But those stories weren’t about passing legislation, at least on their face; they were typically aimed at a presumed audience of parents. The Atlantic emblazoned on a 2018 cover the words: “Your child says [he’s] trans. [He] wants hormones and surgery. [He’s] 13.” Only it didn’t use the right pronouns to refer to the real trans boy who served as its model.

Parents have been receiving an onslaught of messages about what could go wrong if their child was to transition; they’ve rarely been asked to consider what could go wrong if they weren’t able to. We are running, in real time, an experiment on what happens when you don’t accept trans kids.

For Mae’s part, she struggled gamely through her teen years and early 20s, trying as hard as she could not to be trans. But her relationship with her mother, the only other person in Mae’s circle of family and friends who knew Mae’s “secret,” deteriorated. Mae remembers occasionally wishing her mother would die, as she was the only other person who knew of Mae’s trans identity. Today, they have a relationship, but they can’t get back what they lost.

While it is easy to view the conversation about trans youth on a statewide or even national scale, it’s important not to forget that it is also a very intimate conversation, one had in individual houses across the country. For trans children, the stakes of those conversations — whether held in statehouses or in living rooms — are literally life and death.

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“Life in a transphobic society is hard for trans people; therefore, I hope my loved one is not trans” might be a train of thought that makes perfect sense to parents like Mae’s mother. It also treats transness as something fungible, akin to an aesthetic preference or a changing fashion.

The risks inherent in treating a child’s trans identity as a temporary fancy can be considerable. Most obviously, keeping a teenager from transitioning before puberty can make a teen’s mind and body seem as though they are traveling away from each other at light speed.

“I felt alienated from everyone around me, and I was constantly terrified of people finding out that I wasn’t who they thought I was,” says Nat Hunter, who first came out as a teen in 2013, then was prevented from transitioning by their parents.

Lily Osler (who is, disclosure, a friend) perfectly captures the terror of puberty for trans kids in a Waco Tribune-Herald piece exploring Texas’s ongoing crackdown on trans youth:

Puberty blockers are reversible, but the puberty that transgender kids would go through without them isn’t. Puberty writes itself into your bones. Without blockers and, at an appropriate age, hormones, it forces transgender girls, who are girls like any other, to grow facial hair and broad, angular features, and forces transgender boys to grow breasts and wide hips. Its effects can only be reversed by very expensive and difficult-to-access surgeries in adulthood, and even then only partially.

“This is not experimental care. This is care that’s been around, in a very formal fashion, for over 50 years,” says Michelle Forcier, a professor at Brown University’s medical school and co-editor of Pediatric Gender Identity. “We know that there are studies that demonstrate efficacy and safety.”

The recent hyperfocus on trans youth is largely a media invention, says Jules Gill-Peterson, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University. “Trans people and trans youth were never really objects of the media [until recently]. I really don’t think most people ever encountered the idea that they shared the world with trans youth until the last 10 years.”

The recency of that hypervisibility powers the notion that trans health care is somehow still experimental, abstracting something that is fraught with life-and-death stakes. For a trans person, the changes dictated by the body they were born into might prove incredibly painful, destabilizing, or even life-threatening.

“The risks of withholding gender-affirming care vary from patient to patient but often involve things like worsening anxiety, depression, and suicidality,” says Jack Turban, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco. “Recent legislation to take gender-affirming medical care as an option away across the board is extremely dangerous and will lead to bad outcomes.” A 2022 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that trans teens were 7.6 times more likely to attempt suicide than their cis peers.

The risk of not allowing trans kids to begin living as themselves compounds the longer they are alive. In 2001, Anne Vitale, a California psychotherapist who has specialized in gender-nonconforming patients since 1984, published a groundbreaking paper in the journal Gender and Psychoanalysis surveying trans women at all stages of life who did not transition as young people. The picture she painted of these women in middle and old age is deeply sad. “This anxiety, if left untreated, is manifested in … confusion and rebellion in childhood, false hopes and disappointment in adolescence, hesitant compliance in early adulthood, feelings of self-induced entrapment in middle age, and if still untreated, depression and resignation in old age,” she writes.

There’s an existential component to going through unwanted puberty, too, because with every day that passes, it becomes harder to get the world to treat you as who you are instead of what it perceives. If you are a cis person, imagine for a moment that, all evidence to the contrary, everyone in the world becomes convinced your gender is not what it is. If you are a man, everyone starts using she/her pronouns for you and calling you by a woman’s name. One day, you start insisting to the world you are who you are, and the world insists otherwise, because it cannot conceive of a self that doesn’t begin from the body.

Are there people who later regret transition? Yes, but the data shows that the vast majority of people who pursue transition do not regret it. In the handful of studies conducted around this question, an average of about 2 percent of respondents express regret. A separate survey questioning why people detransition found the most common reason was social pressure, often from a parent. Many of those detransitioners retransitioned later, when it felt safe to do so. (See more on all of this data here.)

Not every trans person knows they are trans when they are young, and not every trans person decides to undergo medical transition. Decisions around how and when to come out as trans are private and can be made at any age. Ultimately, all medical decisions made should be between a patient and a doctor. However, for the trans people who know their gender identity from a young age and want to medically transition, every year spent not doing so often becomes all the more punishing.

“It’s hard to do this as an adult. I’ve had patients that have had 60 years of gender hormones affecting their body. They have that internal trauma of living in this physical entity that doesn’t necessarily reflect who they know themselves to be,” Forcier says. “If you look at the data of gender-diverse kids who grow up with parents who provide them the support and resources they need, their depression rates are equal to peers and siblings, and their anxiety rates are so much lower than what we’ve found for other gender-diverse persons [who aren’t supported]. It’s shocking.”

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What drives so many parents to insist their child simply cannot be trans? Turban theorizes that it stems from an overly rigid fear of gender nonconformity, one that arose from the gender exploration all children naturally indulge in being met with mockery or punishment.

“Those early experiences can stick with people and lead them to want to repress any nuance around gender, for fear that it may bring up difficult reflections about themselves,” Turban says. “Often, parents are afraid that their own children will be treated poorly by others due to their gender diversity, and so they may try to force their children to be gender-conforming, thinking they are protecting them.”

That insistence is also fueled by the idea that trans kids are a new phenomenon that has popped up extremely recently, thanks to the increasingly flexible ideas about gender that have become popular online in the 21st century. Yet that notion, too, is inaccurate.

“When we make the assumption that trans kids just showed up in 2015, the least generous version of that is that there were no trans children, period, before that. That’s empirically untrue and easily [disprovable],” says Gill-Peterson. “The more sophisticated version of that assumption is, ‘Of course, there were trans kids, but they didn’t medically transition. That didn’t start until really recently.’ That’s also flat-out untrue. Trans youth have been transitioning as long as there has been medical transition.”

Gill-Peterson wrote the 2018 book Histories of the Transgender Child, which traces the last 100 years of trans childhood and the hidden history of American trans children who transitioned either socially or medically from the 1920s onward. The medicine we use to treat trans children today — often dubbed “experimental” — has, in actuality, been used to help trans youths transition with the support of parents and doctors since the mid-20th century.

The processes for treating trans children vary from clinic to clinic or even patient to patient. At present, most clinics draw from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s seventh edition of its standards of care. The organization published its eighth edition standards in early September, though they have yet to be widely adopted.

For much of childhood, no medical interventions are pursued. Trans children first begin what’s called a “social transition,” meaning that they may dress differently, wear their hair differently, or use a different name and pronouns. No changes with any permanence happen at this point.

Around the age of 10, if these kids’ gender identities remain consistent, they are often placed on puberty blockers, which delay the arrival of puberty. (Puberty blockers were first developed for cis children, and they have been used for early-onset or what is called “precocious puberty” since the 1980s, gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 1993.)

It’s only after all of this that hormones that will trigger the changes the body goes through in puberty even begin to be considered. These hormones are not prescribed until well into adolescence, usually around the age of 16, long after most of the trans kid’s cis peers began puberty, though WPATH’s more recent guidelines suggest beginning hormonal transition earlier may be beneficial for some teens. Surgical interventions rarely happen before the age of 18, and the most common surgical procedure teens might undergo is “top surgery,” in which a transmasculine person undergoes a mastectomy.

Still, whether a trans person is able to access any of this care is dependent on a variety of factors, mostly stemming from parental approval and doctors trained in providing trans health care. The care is extremely similar to the care that already existed in the 20th century. Kids are just more likely to be aware of it now.

Children who transitioned in the 20th century often had to independently discover the terminology that helped them explain who they were to skeptical families and the medical establishment. Gill-Peterson says that what unites those kids with today’s trans youth is a relentless self-advocacy.

“Stuff that we think is a 21st-century mindset, there are trans kids in the 1960s espousing these things in handwritten letters to doctors,” Gill-Peterson says. “It shows how dogged and determined these kids were. They taught themselves the medical literature. They learned how to speak the lingo that adults needed to hear.”

Gill-Peterson points to a trans girl she dubbed Vicky for her book. Vicky lived in rural Ohio in the 1960s, and she learned of the pioneering New York endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, whose 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon made him someone Vicky hoped could help her. She wasn’t yet old enough to legally decide to begin transition without her parents’ consent, Benjamin informed her. When she asked, her father completely rebuffed her. She ran away to Columbus, where she roomed with another young trans girl. She was committed to a psychiatric ward, a fate that befell many trans people in the 20th century, before her father finally relented and allowed her to receive hormone treatment.

Gill-Peterson’s book is littered with stories like Vicky’s, those of trans people who found ways of being themselves, despite the system being stacked against them. She says Vicky’s story could easily take place in 2022. She just might find out about trans people from the internet rather than a newspaper story about a doctor in New York, and the forces keeping her from transition would most likely be her parents, but might also be the state she happened to live in.

Too often, parents make the assumption that, well, sure, maybe trans people exist, but it’s good to take a wait-and-see approach with kids, because that’s safer than those kids undergoing hormone therapy or more invasive procedures they might later regret. It seems to make intuitive sense in a society that privileges the cis experience, and it is natural for parents to want to protect their children at all costs.

Yet that protection can turn harmful if it removes the child’s agency. Leave aside, for a second, that the process for treating trans children does require extensive mental health screening to ensure the safety and certainty of the trans child.

“Number one, why would you ever toss aside your kid like that?” Forcier says. “Number two, not allowing your kid to transition or saying, ‘I’m not going to make a decision about this,’ that’s not a neutral decision. That’s a choice that has significant consequences.”

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For all the justified concern around the tenor of the media conversation and especially around anti-trans laws, the single biggest gatekeeper holding trans kids back from transitioning is their parents. In every story about a trans child trying to come out, there is a moment when they tell a parent. In most of the stories I have heard, that moment goes poorly, and that parent reacts badly. Given some of the dark statistics surrounding trans identities, a bad reaction by a parent might be understandable. Yet by far, the quality that most unites trans youth who are not at risk of suicide is parental support.

Alex Taylor, for instance, grew up surrounded by queer people, thanks to parents with a wide, diverse friend circle. But when they tried to come out to their parents at 13, they were rebuffed and sent to summer camps that, they say, toed the line of conversion therapy. Now, they no longer speak with their parents. Throughout their adolescence, Alex says, their parents kept asking them to be patient. Alex says that’s an undue expectation to place on any child.

“They’re my parents. I’m not supposed to need to have patience for them. And if I am going to have patience for them, that’s a gift, and they don’t get to expect that from me,” Alex says. “They were never going to be okay with me being my own person. And they forced me through a puberty that I didn’t consent to.”

Mae, the trans woman from Texas who tried to come out as a teen, can appreciate that everyone, from her mother to her Christian counselor, thought they were doing what was best for her. She also isn’t sure why they projected what they thought was best for her onto her without really talking to her about it first.

“Everybody wants what’s best for their kid. Even the most malicious reactions, I believe that, ultimately in their brains, somehow they’re rationalizing it as doing the right thing,” Mae says. “There’s a strong desire for a lot of people to mold their kids into being good people, but they’re not working with unformed clay.”

I talked to a half-dozen trans people prevented from transitioning as youths for this article, and in those conversations, I asked them to think about how the supersize anti-trans conversation being driven by lawmakers made them think back on their own teenage experiences. Yes, they said, the focus on anti-trans laws is important. Just as important, however, is recognizing that one of the implicit targets of those laws and of the trans skepticism in the media is parents who might otherwise be supportive.

Raise enough doubt about the effectiveness of trans health care for youth, and you can convince plenty of parents who might even live in otherwise progressive havens, says Nat Hunter. They tried to come out at 14 but were pushed back into the closet at every step by their purportedly progressive parents. Now they have a relationship with their parents, who finally accepted them after years of transition, but the damage was done in the moment they failed to accept their child.

“People create the scenario that they fear through their own actions. They don’t want to say, ‘I hate my child. I don’t accept them.’ They want to say, ‘I don’t want my child’s life to be worse, and I’m scared of them being trans,” Nat says. “But acting that way is what makes kids feel unloved, and that is what causes them to be hurt. People need to understand that once you open that door, that’s it for the rest of your kid’s life. They know that you won’t love them no matter what.”

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The conversation around trans kids has now stepped fully outside of the home. Anti-trans laws use the power of the state to strip both children’s and parents’ agency completely, and the media’s discussion of trans kids and trans people in general too often focuses on the wrong questions.

“The center-left media and the right-wing media are having the exact same conversation about trans people [right now], which is: Are there too many? What number of trans people is the right number? That’s a really strange question to be focused on,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America.

What might happen if, in this conversation, we centered the voices of those whom it’s actually about? As a society, we struggle to listen to children when they tell us what they need. This problem extends beyond trans kids to queer kids of all stripes, to children who tell us about abuse in their homes, to even the archetypal son who wants to play music when his dad wants him to play football. We claim to prioritize children, but we actually prioritize the idea of them, an imagined ideal that allows them as little autonomy as possible.

“We don’t listen to children. We treat children as manifestly inferior to adults. We give them less rights,” says Gill-Peterson. “We make them economically and politically dependent on adults. We put them in dangerous and vulnerable situations all the time. They have no control or participation in authoring the world they live in, the schools they go to, the doctor’s offices they visit, the adults they’re left alone with. And then we say they’re incapable of knowing anything. Therefore, they have no ability to hold adults to account. That’s a very disturbing way to treat a group of people.”

Fight the elite! By having billionaire-funded lawyers get Trump judges to strike down loan forgiveness for struggling borrowers.

If it isn’t bad enough that the Trump-endorsed Republican Georgia Senate nominee can barely string a sentence together, or keep himself from lying about virtually everything, now Herschel Walker is fomenting hatred against trans youth and athletes.

At a campaign event in Calhoun, Georgia, on Tuesday, Walker appeared alongside Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer infamous for her transphobic comments about the NCAA’s transgender policies. “Let’s get men out of women’s sports,” Riley said, according to the Atlanta Journal Consitution reports. 

Walker gave a rousing, hate-filled speech, obviously appealing to the state’s extreme conservative voters; the Heisman Trophy winner used the bible to decry both transgender athletes and transgender Americans.

RELATED STORY: To the surprise of no one, Herschel Walker seems to be lying about his companies' charitable giving

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The issue around transgender athletes has become a hot button in the state. In April, Gov. Brian Kemp signed House Bill 1084 into law. Both divisive and unnecessary, the measure “creates an athletics committee with the authority to ban transgender youth from playing on sports teams aligning with their gender identity,” the Human Rights Campaign writes.

Walker is grasping at straws to separate himself from Warnock, and this issue, among many, does precisely that.

“When I get to heaven, I want the Lord to recognize me,” Walker said Tuesday. “Because I can tell you right now, they’re telling the young kids in school, you can be a boy tomorrow even if you’re a girl.“

He added: “But I want the young kids to know you go to heaven. Jesus may not recognize you. Because he made you a boy. He made you a girl. Why are we talking about things like that?”

In an article for the Advocate in 2020, just as the nation was heading to the polls for the presidential election; Warnock, a senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, wrote about LGBTQ rights, saying that “it’s on all of us to make it known that we support the protection of LGBTQ people and to help build a better nation where all Americans can, without fear of retribution, be themselves authentically.”

In October, Walker will face Warnock in a debate—which the former NFL player agreed to only after he negotiated to get the questions ahead of time.

After months of back and forth, Walker agreed to debate Warnock in Savannah, Georgia, on Oct. 14, The Hill reported in early August.

“It’s time for Herschel Walker to stop playing games,” Quentin Fulks, Warnock’s campaign manager, said, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). “The job of a U.S. senator isn’t one where you know the topics ahead of time or get a cheat sheet, and Herschel Walker shouldn’t need one to find the courage to walk on a debate stage.”

Walker’s campaign, despite his support from the Republican party, has been a real hot mess. Lie upon lie has bubbled up from the lava pit of Walker’s pie hole since his announcement for candidacy, and he’s babbled about topics he either didn’t understand or didn’t understand.

Walker has also lied about everything from graduating from the University of Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, to hiding the fact that he had any children other than his one 22-year-old son Christian, to the mammoth exaggerations about his business acumen, to the tall tale about the time he founded (or co-founded) the veteran's organization Patriot Support—which he did not. He recently tried to deny that former President Donald Trump ever said the 2020 election was stolen, and the latest discovery of lies about his companies’ alleged charitable donations, of which nearly none were able to be verified by The Washington Post. 

The latest poll shows Walker trailing his Democratic rival, incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, by 5 points.

Democrats can build a blue wave if we get out every voter. Click here to find out all the ways you can help in the last days before Election Day.

Blake Masters's struggles with independents suggest Trumpism is a tough sell.

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Pace of Rent Increases Continues to Slow

A brief excerpt:

Here is a graph of the year-over-year (YoY) change for these measures since January 2015. All of these measures are through August 2022 (Apartment List through September 2022).

Note that new lease measures (Zillow, Apartment List) dipped early in the pandemic, whereas the BLS measures were steady. Then new leases took off, and the BLS measures are picking up.
...
The Zillow measure is up 12.3% YoY in August, down from 13.8% YoY in July. This is down from a peak of 17.2% YoY in February.

The ApartmentList measure is up 7.5% YoY as of September, down from 9.8% in August. This is down from the peak of 18.0% YoY last November.

Rents are still increasing, and we should expect this to continue to spill over into measures of inflation. The Owners’ Equivalent Rent (OER) was up 6.3% YoY in August, from 5.8% YoY in July - and will likely increase further in the coming months.
...
My suspicion is rent increases will slow further over the coming months as the pace of household formation slows, and more supply comes on the market.

There is much more in the article. You can subscribe at https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/

In support of the state’s near-total ban on abortion, which took effect in August, the University of Idaho sent a memo to staff last week warning employees not to provide birth control pills or reproductive health services. According to the memo, shared by the Idaho Press, under Idaho’s new law, staff cannot provide emergency contraception except in the case of rape.

Staff was advised against providing contraception or condoms for the purpose of preventing pregnancy and told they would only be able to provide them  “for the purpose of helping prevent the spread of STDs but not for purposes of birth control.”

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“Since violation is considered a felony, we are advising a conservative approach here,” the memo read, noting that the law on birth control and “prevention of conception” is unclear.

In addition to being told they could not provide protection, university staff were warned against referring or providing abortions. But that's not all, staff was also told not to provide reproductive health counseling services and limit discussion about abortion in the classroom.

“Proceed cautiously at any time that a discussion moves in the direction of reproductive health,” the memo read.

It continued its warning with: “Academic freedom is not a defense to violation of law, and faculty or others in charge of classroom topics and discussion must themselves remain neutral on the topic and cannot conduct or engage in discussions in violation of these prohibitions without risking prosecution.”

According to the memo, as per the No Public Funds for Abortion Act staff could face felony convictions and lose their state employment for any violations listed. The 2021 law prevents state officials and employees from counseling in favor of abortions, the Idaho Capital Sun reported.

Idaho’s trigger ban took effect on Aug. 25 following a judge’s approval, about two months after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. According to The Washington Post, it was the result of a law passed by state lawmakers in 2020, that bans abortions at any time after conception, except in instances where the pregnant person’s life is at risk or in cases of rape or incest— as long as the crime was reported to law enforcement.

According to the Associated Press, the ban makes providing abortions in any “clinically diagnosable pregnancy” a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. The state’s ban describes abortion as “intentionally [killing] an unborn human being.”

While the memo has come under criticism for its warning to staff, a spokesperson for the University of Idaho, Jodi Walker defended it in a statement to the Idaho Capital Sun, claiming that the university follows all laws and that the guidance is meant to help employees understand the legal significance and possible ramifications of the abortion law.

“This is a challenging law for many and has real ramifications for individuals in that it calls for individual criminal prosecution,” Walker said. “Employees engaging in their course of work in a manner that favors abortion could be deemed as promoting abortion. While abortion can be discussed as a policy issue in the classroom, we highly recommend employees in charge of the classroom remain neutral or risk violating this law. We support our students and employees, as well as academic freedom, but understand the need to work within the laws set out by our state.”

Since Dobbs, women have registered to vote in unprecedented numbers across the country, and the first person to dig into these stunning trends was TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier, who's our guest on this week's episode of The Downballot. Bonier explains how his firm gathers data on the electorate; why this surge is likely a leading indicator showing stepped-up enthusiasm among many groups of voters, including women, young people, and people of color; how we know these new registrants disproportionately lean toward Democrats; and what it all might mean for November.

The midterm elections are only 42 days away, and there are MANY ways you can get out the Democratic vote. Check them all out at our Daily Kos GOTV page, and plug into the activity that matches your preferences & skillset.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Senior House Democrats are poised to introduce long-promised legislation to restrict stock ownership and trading by members of Congress, senior government officials and Supreme Court justices. The bill would apply to the spouses and dependent children of those officials, according to an outline sent to lawmaker offices last week by House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren. The restrictions also cover "commodities, futures, cryptocurrency, and other similar investments," according to the outline. The legislation would require public officials to either divest current holdings or put them in a blind trust. Investments in mutual funds or other widely held investment funds and government bonds would be allowed. The bill may be released as soon as Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter. It hasn't been scheduled for a vote, though House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has said it's possible it could come to the floor this week in the middle of an already jam-packed schedule before lawmakers go on break ahead of the November midterm election. While conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats alike have been clamoring for restrictions on stock trades by members of Congress to avoid conflicts of interest, legislation has been hung up by questions about how broad to make the ban and whether to include family members. A group of senators is working on their own version of the legislation and there's little chance of Congress taking any final action before the midterms. [...] Another potential point of contention is applying the requirements to the Supreme Court. The Congressional Research Service in an April report said that Congress imposing a code of conduct on the judiciary would "raise an array of legal questions," including whether it would violate the constitutional separation of powers. Justices and lower court judges already file annual financial disclosures and are barred from participating in cases where there's a direct conflict of interest. Despite that, the CRS report says that the Supreme Court has never directly addressed "whether Congress may subject Supreme Court Justices to financial reporting requirements or limitations upon the receipt of gifts." "The current law doesn't prohibit lawmakers from owning or trading individual securities, but it bans members of Congress from using nonpublic information available to them for personal benefit," notes the report. "It requires any transaction be disclosed within 45 days." Further reading: TikTokers Are Trading Stocks By Copying What Members of Congress Do

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Mehmet Oz says John Fetterman's diabolical plan to destroy America is revealed by his hoodie, something is going on.

Clad in his trademark red sweater, Hall of Fame college basketball coach Bobby Knight introduced Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to an enthusiastic audience of supporters in late September 2016. “I’ll tell you one thing for damn sure,” Knight bellowed. “I know how to win and he’s going to be the best winner we’ve had in a long time.”

Trump emerged to the theme from Rocky, praised Knight’s incredible winning record, and then launched into a diatribe about elite colleges and universities. Two months earlier, Hillary Clinton had proposed to make public college free for middle-class families. Trump would have none of that. “Universities get massive tax breaks for massive endowments,” Trump said, to boos and catcalls. “These huge multi-billion-dollar endowments are tax free,” he explained. “But too many of these universities don’t use the money to help with tuition and student debt. Instead, these universities use the money to pay their administrators or put donors’ names on buildings or just store the money, keep it, and invest it.” The chorus of boos loudened. “In fact, many universities spend more on private equity managers than on tuition programs.”

Trump’s persistent attacks on elites were a major component of his electoral strategy and remained a key part of his message during his presidency and subsequent exile. Condemning elites — particularly in higher education — has long been a part of the GOP playbook, but it’s even more key today. Last November, Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance delivered a half-hour speech at the National Conservatism Conference titled, “The Universities are the Enemy.” Vance accused universities of pursuing “deceit and lies.” To applause, he said, “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance’s would-be Senate colleagues Josh Hawley — like Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School — and Ted Cruz — a graduate of Harvard — routinely attack elites and elite institutions.

To some extent, elite colleges are simply collateral damage in the culture war. Indeed, the thrust of Vance’s speech is about the need to break through the indoctrination of the liberal intelligentsia — via what he calls “red pilling,” a reference to The Matrix — where the “fundamental corruption” at the root of the system, as Vance put it, can’t be unseen once seen. “So much of what drives truth and knowledge, as we understand it in this country,” Vance said, “is fundamentally determined by, supported by and reinforced by the universities in this country.”

But that’s not the whole story. Another line of attack is about access. It’s about who gets to be part of the elite, and whether America has gotten a fair return on the massive investment that it has made in elite colleges. For, difficult as this might be for liberals to hear, almost everything Trump said to the crowd Bobby Knight had warmed up was true.

“I’ve gotten increasingly incensed at the inequality in American higher ed,” another critic of the private college tax exemption told NPR’s Scott Simon in 2015. “There’s a handful of schools that just have too much money. You just have to walk through the Yale campus to see what money will buy you, which is a country club, right?” Simon’s guest explained that endowments weren’t inherently bad — they could transform underfunded schools. “It’s one thing if a school has an endowment of $500 million that they are stretching a million different ways to meet the needs of its students, to say that as a society, we should allow them to escape taxes so they can spend their money on education,” he said. “But that logic does not hold when you’ve got $35 billion in the bank, as Harvard does.” (Today it’s $53 billion.) “I think they have to stand up and say, at the very least, ‘We do not deserve to have tax-exempt status for our endowments.’”

Sound like Trump?

Simon’s guest was Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling journalist, podcaster and public intellectual.

For generations, elite colleges have been given a pass in accounting for what they’ve done in exchange for the massive benefits that they have received. The bill has come due. Soon, elite colleges are going to have to answer two simple questions.

Why are they exempt from taxes?

And what has America gotten in return?

Anyone searching for an answer to the first question in the historical record will be sorely disappointed. Law professor John Colombo traces the exemption to a 1601 English law deeming “schools of learning” charitable in nature. In colonial America, colleges were generally spared from taxes because of their religious ties. Most — including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and William & Mary — were chartered with the aim of training ministers. When Congress imposed the first federal income tax in 1894, it maintained the exemption for religious and educational institutions without any debate.

Today, almost every state has a law or constitutional provision exempting colleges and universities from state, property and income taxes. Many so-called “need-blind” colleges also benefit from an antitrust exemption, which allows them to collaborate on how they determine student need and, hence, financial aid. That exemption, which is set to expire at the end of this month, is the subject of a lawsuit based, in part, on the apparent contradiction between claiming not to consider financial need while giving preference to the children of donors, faculty members and graduates of the college.

It’s easy enough to imagine why the tax exemption wouldn’t have been a source of controversy in the 1890s. Endowments were small potatoes. For most of its history, Yale, like its peer institutions, invested its modest holdings conservatively, chastened by an early toe-stubbing, when their leadership invested nearly the entire endowment in a bank run by former university treasurer and cotton gin-inventor, Eli Whitney. The bank promptly went bankrupt, costing Yale over 90 percent of its $23,000 endowment and plunging New Haven into depression. After that, it was pretty much all belt and suspenders. In 1980, Yale still had more than half its money in stocks, bonds and cash.

Then, David Swensen, a veteran of Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers, took over the university’s portfolio and changed the game. The so-called “Yale model” emphasized diversification. Within 20 years, only 10 percent of Yale’s endowment was invested in U.S. marketable securities. Their holdings included hedge funds, real estate and even timber. Yale’s competitors naturally followed suit. It may surprise you to know that Harvard’s portfolio includes 10,000 acres of California vineyard.

Over time, elite college management companies began to look more and more like Wall Street firms. Trump’s claim about private equity managers is entirely accurate. In 2014, Yale paid nearly half a billion dollars in management and performance fees, about triple what it spent on financial aid. While it’s not officially part of the Yale model, elite colleges also started to get quite aggressive about avoiding taxes. The “Paradise Papers” — a 2017 data breach at the international law firm Appleby that led to the leak of some 13.4 million electronic documents — exposed many elite universities for parking cash in offshore tax havens to cheat Uncle Sam.

The results have been stunning. In 1980, before Swensen got started, Yale’s endowment was worth $674 million. Last year, it was valued at $42.3 billion — representing a gain of approximately 6,275 percent. During the two years of the pandemic, Harvard’s endowment grew by approximately 30 percent. If it sustains the rate of growth it has maintained for the past several decades, Harvard’s endowment will top $1 trillion shortly after the turn of the century. If Harvard were a nation, its cash reserves would rank forty-second, just behind Romania, but ahead of Kuwait. Princeton has endowment assets of roughly $4.6 million per student. As the attorney-economist Bob Litan put it to me last year — before joining the legal team in the class action against the “need-blind” colleges — these endowments are “mind-fuckingly large.”

And it’s in significant part thanks to the generous support of the American taxpayer. University of California-Merced professor Charlie Eaton estimates that the tax break costs more than $20 billion per year. To put that into perspective, that revenue would cover between half and two-thirds of what the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the cost of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan to be, and about twice as much as the estimated cost of making community college free.

So what has America gotten in return?

Not an engine of class mobility. Elite colleges promote precious few kids out of poverty. Just 2 percent of Princeton students come from families in the lowest income quintile. In their groundbreaking study of the relationship between college and intergenerational mobility, Raj Chetty and John Friedman’s team ranked colleges by “mobility rate,” which they defined as the product of access — the percentage of students admitted from the bottom quintile — and success — the percentage of students from the bottom who made it to the top. Among colleges with more than 5,000 students, eight of the top 12 ranked schools are part of the CUNY system, the City University of New York. All but one is a public university. MIT topped the “Ivy-Plus” colleges (which Chetty and Friedman define as the eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago). It came in 1,288th.

Elite colleges are, rather, an engine of class stratification. The number of rich children they admit dwarfs the number of poor. At Harvard, for example, more students come from families making over $500,000 per year than under $40,000. (By contrast, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the CUNY college where I teach, the median family income is $41,900. Overall, 60 percent of CUNY’s 270,000 students come from families earning less than $30,000 per year.) When one looks at the Chetty-Friedman data through the lens of preventing downward mobility, a very different picture emerges. Roughly speaking, for every poor kid Princeton promotes out of poverty, it keeps 40 rich kids rich.

Moreover, these colleges act as gatekeepers to super-elite jobs that set the national agenda. As Northwestern University’s Lauren Rivera describes, attending an Ivy-Plus college is a prerequisite for landing a job at a top-tier investment bank or management consulting firm. This helps send their graduates into the stratosphere of wealth. Ten years after graduation, about 23 percent of Princeton graduates will be among the country’s wealthiest 1 percent — about 64 times as many as at my college.

Recognizing the power of elite degrees, many affluent, predominantly white parents flee cities for wealthy suburbs once they have children. They’re chasing access to lacrosse teams, science programs and the sort of “distinguishing excellences” that elite colleges arbitrarily choose to value, and which affluent suburbs are uniquely able to afford. Many of those who don’t move to fancy suburbs will send their children to a so-called independent school, where annual tuition approaches $60,000. Again, elite colleges drive the train by grossly favoring private school graduates in admissions. As Caitlin Flanagan reported last year in the Atlantic, while less than 2 percent of high school students attend an independent school, their graduates comprise more than a quarter of Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth’s entering classes.

To the extent that elite colleges acknowledge these gross inequities, the story they tell is that they’re reproducing the underlying conditions in American society. Elite colleges look the way they do, they say, because America looks the way it does.

What if the causal chain is reversed?

What if America looks the way it does because elite colleges look the way they do?

And we’ve been footing the bill.

This tax exemption might be justifiable if elite colleges did good in other sorts of ways. They don’t. One definition of doing good would be to steer college students into public service. Yet in a survey of Harvard’s class of 2020, 63 percent of seniors entering the workforce said they planned to go into consulting, finance or technology. Just 4 percent intended to enter public service or work for a non-profit organization. This is no accident. Research by the sociologist Amy Binder shows that the overwhelming majority of students enter college undecided on a career but gravitate toward finance after elite colleges show them no obvious alternative to working on Wall Street.

Promoting racial diversity would be another type of good, but elite colleges are overwhelmingly white. Overall, the Black population at elite colleges hasn’t significantly increased since the 1970s. In fact, the rate of Black admissions has so steadily hovered around 8 percent that Shaun Harper, the executive director of the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, has accused Ivy League colleges of collusion. “It just seems to me that there has been some determination about how many Black students are worthy of admission to these institutions,” Harper said. “It’s just too similar.”

Perhaps most importantly, they don’t teach humility. Elite colleges pretend as if the higher education system rewards merit rather than affluence. Recently, a cottage industry has arisen of intellectuals — mostly professors at elite colleges — exposing the construct of “meritocracy” as a myth. But that construct didn’t emerge from the ether. It’s cultivated by the colleges themselves, which insist they’re admitting the best and the brightest rather than the rich and the richest. Shortly after assuming office, former Stanford president John Hennessy offered a typical message to the school’s entering freshman class — where the mean family income is around $472,000. “Our admission office is one of the best in the country,” Hennessy said, “and we don’t make mistakes!”

Problem is, if Stanford doesn’t make mistakes, it implies not only that their freshmen deserved to be there, but that everyone else does not. This is the downside of the meritocracy myth. It implicitly frames disadvantage as a failure of skill and effort and leads to a sort of politics of humiliation that legitimizes grievances with the system. From here, it’s easy enough to draw a straight line to Trumpism.

If there were a title in education politics for Person Most Ahead of Their Time, it would belong to Michael Dannenberg. A former senior adviser in the Department of Education under President Barack Obama, Dannenberg is today a senior fellow with the College Promise campaign, a non-profit fighting for affordable post-secondary education. In the summer of 2001, as a young staffer to Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, Dannenberg audaciously proposed that his boss take on legacy preference at universities — the leg up in admissions that elite colleges routinely give to the children of their own alumni. Nearly everyone who worked for Kennedy opposed the idea, but Kennedy — a legacy and Harvard graduate — liked it. Soon thereafter, he became the first, high-profile elected politician to repudiate legacy, condemning it to the journalist Daniel Golden as an “anachronism.” Today, the practice is almost universally acknowledged as grossly inequitable by everyone except the elite colleges themselves.

Dannenberg, still youthful and optimistic 20 years later, says that the day of reckoning is coming for elite colleges. He has a close eye on the Ohio Senate race between Vance and Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. “I think whoever wins the race would be wise to take on the unfair admissions practices of so-called ‘elite colleges,’” Dannenberg told me. Vance, of course, has already tapped into the Trumpian antipathy for elite institutions. But Dannenberg thinks the issue is also a “natural” for Ryan. “Ryan has tried to position himself as a different sort of Democrat, one who’s in touch with the historic populist past of the party,” Dannenberg said. “As someone who wants to resurrect the Bobby Kennedy coalition, it’d be wise for him to take on this issue. Frankly, it’s good politics for anyone in either party.”

As Dannenberg sees it, the most effective way to challenge admissions practices is through the tax exemption. “Taking on the unfair admissions practices of the so-called ‘elite colleges’ via tax policy is the smartest political move because the members of the congressional committees that oversee taxes are less likely to be captured by the interests of elite colleges than the members of the education committees,” Dannenberg said. Indeed, Chuck Grassley, a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, has been on the issue since at least 2008, when he co-hosted a roundtable with liberal Democratic Rep. Peter Welch on college endowments. “Democrats,” Dannenberg says, “would be wise to get in front of the issue.”

Dannenberg has in mind the lesson of 2017, when the Republicans’ sweeping tax overhaul imposed a 1.4 percent excise tax on universities with assets of greater than $500,000 per student. The provision was widely perceived — like the law’s curtailment of the state and local tax exemption — as a beat down of the blue state, college-educated elite who rejected Trump and Trumpism most emphatically. Notably, even as wealthy colleges got slammed, socioeconomically disadvantaged kids got nothing. In fact, Trump repeatedly proposed cutting Pell Grant funding, at one point proposing to dip into the program’s reserves to subsidize NASA. Today, Pell Grants cover less than one-third of the costs of attending a public four-year college, and just 13 percent of the cost of a private institution.

If progressives are serious about shrinking economic inequality, they could use the tax exemption on college endowments as leverage for changes to make a meaningful difference in the lives of underprivileged students — rather than principally as a culture war cudgel like the GOP. The exemption could be conditioned on colleges being transparent with data about the socioeconomic makeup of their student bodies, which all currently guard like a state secret. (Chetty and Friedman relied on IRS data.) They might also be required to spend a minimum of their endowment on financial aid or to admit a minimum percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

These measures would neither individually nor collectively end the gross inequities of access in American higher education. They would only marginally change the incentives of the affluent to move to exclusive suburbs or to send their children to private schools. And they’d do nothing to change the damaging narratives of merit — or lack thereof — that elite colleges perpetuate by fostering the meritocracy myth.

But it’d be a start. Dannenberg likes to share an aphorism that he learned from his first boss — the late Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, for whom the federal aid program is named. “Sometimes,” Dannenberg recalled Pell saying, “you get a loaf of bread one slice at a time.”

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By Alvise Armellini and Chiara Rodriquez ROME (Reuters) – The LGBT community has “very real fears” after a conservative bloc dominated by the far-right won Italy’s general election, a leading gay rights campaigner told Reuters. The nationalist Brothers of Italy group, led by Giorgia Meloni, emerged as the largest party in the ballot and will lead the most right-wing government in Rome since World War Two. “Unfortunately there are very real fears” about an erosion of civil rights under the new administration, Fabrizio Marrazzo of the Gay Party said. Meloni is allied with the League, another far…

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Sackett v. EPA may prove to be the most significant attack on America’s clean water laws since the 1970s.

For decades, the Supreme Court struggled to define a key term at the heart of the Clean Water Act, the landmark 1972 legislation that forms the backbone of America’s efforts to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.”

It’s an admittedly difficult question, that is now in the hands of the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s. And the Court’s Republican-appointed supermajority seems poised to deal a severe blow to the clean water law, in a case that could do significant harm to America’s efforts to prevent floods and to ensure that everyone in the country has access to safe drinking water.

The Clean Water Act prohibits “discharge of pollutants” into “navigable waters.” But it also defines the term “navigable waters” vaguely and counterintuitively, to include all “waters of the United States, including the territorial seas.” In Rapanos v. United States (2006), the Supreme Court’s last attempt to define the key phrase “waters of the United States,” the justices split three ways, with no one approach winning majority approval from the Court.

Now, Sackett v. EPA brings this question to a Court that’s moved dramatically to the right after former President Donald Trump filled a third of its seats. Though the specific dispute in Sackett seems minor — it involves a couple that wants to fill in wetlands on their residential lot near an Idaho lake — the case still gives the Supreme Court everything it needs to hamstring much of the landmark anti-pollution legislation.

Even in the best-case scenario for environmentalists, the Court’s new majority is likely to embrace the narrow reading of the Clean Water Act proposed by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in his Rapanos opinion. That approach, according to an amicus brief filed by professional associations representing water regulators and managers, “would also exclude 51% (if not more) of the Nation’s wetlands” from the Act’s protections, and could potentially exclude an even greater percentage of the nation’s streams.

Meanwhile the plaintiffs in Sackett, no doubt feeling emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent hostility to environmental regulation, have come up with a reading of the Clean Water Act that is more restrictive than any of the approaches proposed by any justice in Rapanos. According to their brief, the “waters of the United States” are “limited to traditional navigable waters and intrastate navigable waters that link with other modes of transport to form interstate channels of commerce.”

If that approach prevails, huge numbers of streams, drainage ditches, and other small tributaries that may flow into major bodies of water — but that are not themselves large enough to be navigated by ships and other watercraft — could abruptly lose the Clean Water Act’s protections.

The stakes in Sackett are high because America’s waterways are so interconnected. Wetlands, even wetlands that do not directly border rivers or lakes, act as filtration systems that slow the seepage of pollutants into major waterways. And they also act as sponges that help control floods. Small streams, human-made drainage, and other narrow waterways typically empty into other bodies of water. So, if wetlands, streams, and the like are not protected from pollution, that pollution will inevitably poison major waterways.

But environmentalists have little reason to be optimistic about the Clean Water Act’s future after the law is interpreted by this Supreme Court.

The three approaches laid out in Rapanos, briefly explained

Once upon a time, Sackett would have been a fairly easy case. When federal laws are ambiguous, the Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) typically instructs the courts to defer to an expert federal agency’s interpretation of that law. And the Biden administration is currently finalizing an interpretation of the phrase “waters of the United States” that merges both Scalia’s narrow definition and a more expansive definition offered by Justice Anthony Kennedy in Rapanos.

Indeed, in an opinion joined by the 2006 Court’s liberal minority, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the Court should largely leave the question of which waters qualify as “waters of the United States” to executive branch agencies. The executive’s determination that certain wetlands are subject to Clean Water Act regulation, Stevens wrote in his Rapanos dissent, “is a quintessential example of the Executive’s reasonable interpretation of a statutory provision” which is entitled to deference under Chevron.

But Stevens’s deferential approach only received four votes. Four other justices, including three members of the Court’s current Republican-appointed majority, joined Scalia’s opinion calling for much stricter limits on the Clean Water Act.

“The phrase ‘the waters of the United States,’” Scalia claimed, includes only “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water.” His definition does not include “channels through which water flows intermittently or ephemerally, or channels that periodically provide drainage for rainfall.”

Scalia added that wetlands are only subject to the Act if they have a “continuous surface connection” with a “relatively permanent body of water” that makes it “difficult to determine where the ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetland’ begins.”

As mentioned above, an amicus brief filed by experts on water regulation and management argues that Scalia’s definition would “exclude 51% (if not more) of the Nation’s wetlands.” It would also exclude many wetlands (and potentially, many streams and other bodies of flowing water) for completely arbitrary reasons. Because Scalia’s test requires a “surface” connection, for example, a wetland that connects to a major river via an underground channel would be beyond the Act’s ban on pollution — even though pollutants can flow through an underground stream just as surely as they can flow through a surface channel.

In any event, Scalia’s approach did not carry the day in Rapanos. The sole remaining justice, Kennedy, carved out a middle ground between Scalia and Stevens which called for less deference to federal agencies than Stevens advocated, but that also read the Clean Water Act more expansively than Scalia.

Under Kennedy’s definition, wetlands (and, most likely, narrow waterways) are subject to the federal law if they “significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of other covered waters more readily understood as ‘navigable.’” Thus, Kennedy’s rule looks at the nation’s water systems as a whole, and would prohibit pollution that meaningfully impacts important bodies of water — even if that pollution is discharged into a wetland that may be some distance from a major river or lake.

Why are wetlands so important?

The Sackett case is primarily a case about wetlands. In 2004, plaintiffs Chantell and Michael Sackett bought what a federal appeals court described as a “soggy residential lot” near Priest Lake in Idaho. The Sacketts have spent the last 14 years in litigation over whether they may fill in wetlands on this lot with sand and gravel.

(One reason why this case has gone on for so long is that it already took one trip up to the Supreme Court, in 2012, to determine whether the Sacketts filed their lawsuit prematurely. A unanimous Court determined that they did not.)

It’s reasonable to wonder why the government is fighting so hard to prevent the Sacketts from dumping sand and gravel — as opposed to, say, toxins — on their land. The answer is that even natural fillers like sand can destroy a wetland, and the government argues that wetlands play an essential role in maintaining a healthy national water system.

As the government explains in its brief, wetlands “provide flood control and trap and filter sediment and other pollutants that would otherwise be carried into downstream waters.” Similarly, the water managers’ brief explains that wetlands are particularly important because they are “more efficient at pollutant removal than other waters thanks to the slow, sometimes infrequent, rate at which water moves through them.”

Although maintaining wetlands does create costs — just ask the Sacketts, who were unable to develop their land for years — the water managers argue that preserving wetlands, headwaters, and other structures that efficiently filter the water supply “is less costly and more effective to prevent a loss in water quality than to treat contaminated water later on.”

In the likely event that the Court adopts Scalia’s proposed rule in Rapanos, that could place most of the nation’s wetlands beyond the Clean Water Act’s anti-pollution safeguards. And the Sackett plaintiffs ask the Court to go much further than Scalia would have gone, limiting the law’s protections to “navigable” waters. (The plaintiffs do concede that “non-navigable wetlands inseparably bound up with such waters” should also be protected.)

There are a few reasons to doubt that the Court will take this maximalist approach. Among other things, none of the justices in Rapanos, including the three current justices who joined Scalia’s opinion, took such an extreme view in 2006. And the government notes in its brief that the plaintiffs previously told the Supreme Court that they were “not disputing ‘the extent to which the Clean Water Act regulates tributaries of traditional navigable waters.’” So the Court may be reluctant to reward these plaintiffs for trying to expand the scope of the case midway through Supreme Court review.

Even if the Court does not accept the plaintiffs’ most expansive proposal, however, the stakes in this case remain quite high. Scalia’s rule would fundamentally alter America’s clean water regime, potentially removing the majority of wetlands from the Clean Water Act’s protections. And it would do so based on arbitrary distinctions such as whether the wetlands feed into larger bodies of water via a “continuous surface connection” or something more transient or subterranean.

And, without protection for these wetlands, America’s water system could lose much of its ability to filter pollutants out of our drinking water.

A biracial college student convicted of involuntary manslaughter was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday despite his claim that he only fired the gun that killed 17-year-old Haley Hutcheson because those she rode in a pickup truck with tried to run him off the road. WIlliam "Marc" Wilson—the son of former Coweta County Fire Chief Pat Wilson according to The Newnan Times-Herald—was riding in a car with his white girlfriend when he said he heard racial slurs coming from the pickup truck. His girlfriend, Emma Rigdon, testified that although she didn't hear the alleged slurs, the truck did try to run them off the road.

Still, a Georgia jury convicted Wilson on Aug. 31, and Superior Court Judge Ronald K. “Ronnie” Thompson sentenced Wilson to the maximum sentence.

RELATED STORY: 'Leave us alone': Then-girlfriend of man charged with murder says truck tried to run them off road

Rev. James Woodall, who's working on the case, tweeted: “The Court orders the following: #MarcWilson is sentenced to the maximum of ten years in prison, and will not be sentenced as a First Offender,” Woodall wrote. “He’s also granted time served for his time in pretrial detention.”

Thompson was the second judge to preside over the case. Woodall told journalist Roland Martin in February that the original judge, Michael Muldrew, was removed after holding Wilson’s attorney, Francys Johnson, in contempt of court, a public reprimand, while trying to establish chain of custody. 

Johnson said at a virtual news conference after the preliminary hearing that the teens in the pickup truck were "hanging out the truck windows, waving their arms and yelling phrases like 'n----r,' 'your lives don't matter,'" and "n----r lover."

Though also originally charged with felony murder, possession of a deadly weapon to commit a felony, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, Wilson was only convicted on the manslaughter charge, The Newnan Times-Herald reported.

Still, when compared to cases like that of the then0-17-year-old white protest shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, something about the Wilson case didn’t sit right with social media users following the trial.

Musicians Naeem and Amanda Blank tweeted: "So Kyle Rittenhouse gets away w murdering innocent people after inserting himself into a protest as an Op but Marc Wilson gets 10yrs for defending himself & partner against a violent attack? It’s INSANE how differently gun/self defense laws are applied to white & black people"

RELATED STORY: Rittenhouse makes mockery of justice system. Then, Proud Boys make mockery of NYPD

Woodall tweeted: “Black lives have always been used as a means to justify racists’ tears and white terror. Sickening. Evil. But wholly American.”

The Federal Communications Commission approved a long-delayed proposal to crack down on spam texts Friday night after Axios asked agency members why it hadn't moved on the issue. From a report: The number of spam text messages -- which can include links or other tricks designed to steal money or personal information -- has exploded, with the volume now exceeding that of robocalls.The proposal, which passed on a 4-0 vote, seeks comment on requiring cellphone companies to block texts from numbers known to be illegal or fraudulent. It had been awaiting a vote at the FCC for nearly a year. The FCC will review feedback on the proposal before writing final rules, a process that can take months. The measure also seeks comment on whether carriers should use third-party analytics providers to inform blocking efforts, and whether the agency should push the wireless industry to authenticate text messages like it does for phone calls to deter robocalls, a senior FCC official told Axios. "The American people are fed up with scam texts, and we need to use every tool we have to do something about it," chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, told Axios ahead of the agency's vote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New text messages obtained by CNN on Monday have exposed new depths to former President Donald Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election and, more specifically, the involvement of his chief of staff Mark Meadows to meet that end. 

The messages unearthed Monday were sent to Meadows by Phil Waldron, a retired U.S. Army colonel who became one of Trump’s most ardent peddlers of voter-fraud conspiracy theory ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Waldron was responsible for circulating a PowerPoint presentation to numerous lawmakers in Washington recommending that Trump declare a national emergency over the so-called “fraud” in order to stay in power. He also reportedly helped write a draft executive order to seize voting machines. That executive order was never formally issued.

According to CNN, Waldron texted Meadows just two days before Christmas in 2020. He was frustrated that a judge in Arizona had tossed a lawsuit calling on state officials to seize voting machines there.

To Waldron’s mind, the ruling was dangerous because it gave Trump’s opponents too much time to oppose them. 

The state of Arizona, Waldron wrote to Meadows on Dec. 23, was the “lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade.”

When Donald Trump lost the election to now-President Joe Biden both popularly and by way of the Electoral College, the former president and several of his closest allies, advisers, and attorneys had their eyes focused on seven battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

Trump insisted that his losses there were due to widespread voter fraud. As the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation and a subsequent mountain of court filings from Trump’s advisers like overturn architect John Eastman have shown, there was no voter fraud on a wide scale—but it didn’t stop the Trump White House from trying to suggest otherwise. 

Passing off bogus and unsanctioned pro-Trump electors to Congress was critical  to getting the overturn scheme off the ground. 

When Waldron lamented the court loss in Arizona to Meadows on Dec. 23, Trump’s then-chief of staff commiserated. 

“Pathetic,” Meadows wrote. 

Waldron has said publicly that he “contributed” to the 40-page proposal to seize voting machines entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” And he’s admitted to sharing the proposal with lawmakers in Congress before the Capitol attack.

He’s also not made much of a secret of his proximity to Trump insiders like Meadows. As noted by the government watchdog American Oversight (who helped CNN obtain the new records released Monday), Waldron told reporters in 2021 that he spoke to Meadows at least eight to 10 times after the election. He also said he went to the White House for visits, as well. 

Before the text to Meadows on Dec. 23, Waldron had spent weeks asking Republican state legislators if he could show them “evidence” of voter fraud. He also offered legislators the chance to let him analyze their results.

One of Waldron’s most well-known reviews of “fraud” was one he launched in Antrim County, Michigan. That assessment ended up being widely panned and completely debunked. 

But on Dec. 28, 2020, the newly obtained text messages show Waldron was undeterred by the loss in Arizona. There was data coming in from multiple counties, he wrote to Meadows.

Waldron dubbed the “irregularities” the “Southern steal” by Democrats. 

Meadows responded to the Dec. 28 text: “OK.” 

The former chief of staff’s replies may be succinct, but they also underline something important: Meadows responded to Waldron, meaning he had awareness of the push to overturn the election results after the safe harbor deadline for Congress. 

Waldron’s testimony has recently been demanded by a grand jury in Georgia examining Trump’s push to reverse election results there. Meadows has also been asked to testify in that state’s investigation. 

Whatever caused the recent increase in crime, it wasn't police budget cuts. Because that never happened.

The British pound on Monday briefly hit a record low against the dollar, extending losses after Britain's new government on Friday announced a sweeping economic overhaul centered around tax cuts and deregulation. Citibank called the move a "huge, unfunded gamble for the U.K. economy." From a report: The pound slumped as low at $1.035 on Monday, breaking the 1985 record, and although it bounced up from those depths it remains down about 19 percent this year. The pound has also fallen against the euro, although not by as much. In other markets, yields on British government bonds hit multiyear highs, meaning that borrowing costs are rising steeply as the government prepares to issue more debt to pay for subsidies on energy bills and other policies. What does the weaker pound mean for the British economy? The drop in the pound poses concerns, since a weaker currency makes imports more expensive. It also makes it more expensive for Britons to travel abroad, since their money doesn't go as far as it did before. British companies, many of which rely on materials imported from other countries, may raise prices to compensate for their higher costs -- putting pressure on inflation, which is already running near 40-year highs. [...] People and companies abroad buying goods and services from Britain could benefit from cheaper prices. And businesses in Britain that generate revenue elsewhere will earn more when that money is converted back into pounds. For Americans and others spending dollars or euros while traveling to Britain, their trips will be more affordable than they would have been even a few months ago. Further reading: Fed official warns UK tax cuts increase risk of global recession.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Brett Favre didn’t stop at lobbying for millions of dollars of Mississippi welfare money to go toward a new volleyball stadium at the university where his daughter was playing volleyball, or at taking $1.1 million in state welfare money for speeches he never gave. He followed that up by lobbying for millions more in state welfare money to pay for an indoor practice facility for the football team at the University of Southern Mississippi, texts between him and then-Gov. Phil Bryant show.

While texts released earlier show Bryant boosting the Mississippi Community Education Center, the criminal nonprofit run by Nancy New and her son Zachary New, as it spent public funds for the volleyball stadium, the new set of texts—included by Bryant’s lawyers in court filings—show him putting the brakes on Favre’s pleas for the football practice facility. His lawyers contend that Bryant did not know about the welfare money being used to build athletic facilities until texts from Favre in July 2019. In late June 2019, Bryant had raised concerns about possible fraud with the state auditor.

RELATED STORY: Mississippi officials misused welfare money to build NFL Brett Favre's daughter a volleyball stadium

Favre had texted with Bryant about the volleyball facility in 2017, asking for his help raising money for it. But in the July 2019 texts, he directly referred to New and to John Davis, who was appointed by Bryant as director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services in 2016 and forced out by Bryant … in July 2019. 

”I want you to know how much I love Nancy New and John Davis,” Favre texted. “What they have done for me and Southern Miss is amazing.”

In the newly released texts, Bryant warns Favre that spending welfare money on sports facilities would be illegal, saying that federal welfare funds are “tightly controlled” and “improper use could result in violation of Federal Law.”

At the time, Favre was both trying to get help cover debt on the volleyball stadium and in funding the football practice facility, which he said would give the Southern Mississippi program “instant credibility.” He met with Bryant on Sept. 4, 2019, texting Bryant after the meeting, “We obviously need your help big time and time is working against us” and suggesting that the volleyball facility could be named for Bryant. By this time, Bryant seems to have been getting nervous. He responded, “We are going to get there. This was a great meeting. But we have to follow the law. I am to old for Federal Prison.” 

Brett Favre was paid nearly $140 million in NFL salary through his career, in addition to a laundry list of endorsements and a key cameo in There’s Something About Mary. Since 2018, he’s hosted a weekly SiriusXM show (now on hold because of this scandal), and he continues to serve as a “brand champion” for athletic apparel maker Copper Fit. The man is extremely wealthy. But he spent years trying to get the state to pay for a lavish volleyball facility for a team his daughter just happened to play on, out of federal funds designated for Mississippi’s neediest.

Texts released earlier show that Favre was concerned about the media finding out about the $1.1 million in welfare funds he personally received, so he knew he was into some extremely sketchy stuff here. At the same time, the families the money was intended for were being turned away and forced to live in poverty.

“That same year, MDHS confirmed to the Clarion-Ledger that it had approved just 1.42% of poor families who applied for assistance through the TANF program, or 167 out of 11,700,” Ashton Pittman and William Pittman reported for Mississippi Free Press. “For those MDHS did approve for TANF benefits, a family of three would receive just $170 in assistance per month at that time. It has since risen to $260. To be eligible, a caregiver must either be pregnant or the parent of a child younger than 18; a three-person household must earn no more than $680 in gross monthly income.”

Brett Favre is definitely one of the bad guys here. A very bad guy. But while he and Nancy New broke the rules—broke the law—about what money intended for low-income families can be spent on, what’s allowed within the law is bad enough. Mississippi’s system does everything it can to avoid giving money directly to the people who need it most. It’s in that context that criminals are able to brand a volleyball stadium for a rich guy’s daughter as a “wellness center” that will be leased by a nonprofit for use on “educational services and training programs.” Mississippi was looking for ways to spend federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families money on things other than directly helping needy families—and that opened it up to this kind of scam. 

Pssst. Want to learn how competitive your House district is? Daily Kos Elections just released a massive new data set that breaks down the results of the 2020 presidential election for every last one of the nation's new congressional districts, so we're dissecting on The Downballot what it all means with longtime DKE writer Stephen Wolf. Wolf explains why these numbers closely predict the outcome of most House elections, how they show the way in which the overall playing field has grown even more tilted toward Republicans, what the most evenly divided district in the country is, and much more.

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same.

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The Republican justices who overruled Roe v. Wade are only getting started.

The headline of this piece is likely to turn a few heads. The Supreme Court’s last term, after all, was an orgy of conservative excess unlike any since the Court’s Great Depression-era attacks on the New Deal. And it culminated in the demise of Roe v. Wade, arguably the most closely watched Supreme Court decision since the justices declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954.

But this term, a potentially even more consequential issue than the right to an abortion is on the Court’s docket: democracy itself. A single case, Moore v. Harper, threatens to fundamentally rewrite the rules governing federal elections, potentially giving state legislatures (some of which are highly gerrymandered themselves) nearly limitless power to skew those elections.

A second case in the Court’s new term — which officially opens on Monday, October 3 — also places free and fair elections in the United States in grave peril. That case, Merrill v. Milligan, could usher in a new era of racial gerrymandering where states have more freedom to undercut Black and brown political power than they’ve had since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 — a law that the Roberts Court has spent the last decade dismantling piece by piece.

If both these cases go badly, it’s not that America will stop having elections. But the power to decide how elections are conducted — which ballots are counted, where district lines are drawn, and potentially even who is certified as the winner of an election — could rest with increasingly partisan officials, including the justices themselves.

And even if the Court were not hearing what could be two of the most significant election cases of the modern era, this would still be a term with enormous policy stakes.

Just in October, the Court plans to hear two different cases that could significantly undercut US efforts to protect the environment — building on a decision from last June that weakened the EPA’s power to fight climate change. In its November session, the Court will hear a pair of cases that are widely expected to forbid universities from considering race when deciding which students to admit, effectively ending race-based affirmative action programs at those schools.

Other cases on the Court’s docket could undercut Medicaid and erase legal safeguards intended to halt the cultural genocide of Indigenous people.

Bear in mind, moreover, that the Court has only begun to fill up its docket for the upcoming term. As the year progresses, the Court will agree to hear additional cases, some of which could be no less harrowing for liberal democracy than Moore, Merrill, and others that the justices have already agreed to take up.

With that said, here are nine cases that are already on the Court’s docket, and that could each shift US policy dramatically to the right.

1) The single biggest threat to US democracy since the January 6 attack

It’s difficult to exaggerate the stakes in Moore, which could neutralize the parts of state constitutions that protect the right to vote and give an unprecedented amount of power to state legislatures, some of which are heavily gerrymandered.

Moore involves the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a theory that the Supreme Court has rejected many times over the course of more than a century, but that at least four members of the current Court have signed on to in one form or another.

Two provisions of the Constitution state that the rules governing federal elections shall be determined by each state’s “legislature.” For more than a century, the Court has understood this word, at least when used in this context, to refer to whatever body within that state has the power to make laws — what the Court has referred to as the “legislative power.” So if a state ordinarily permits its governor to veto legislation, or if the people of a state can ordinarily enact laws via a ballot initiative, state laws governing federal elections are made in the same way.

Under the independent state legislature theory, however, the word “legislature” must be understood to mean the body of elected representatives which make up a state’s legislative branch of government. Indeed, under the strongest version of this theory, state governors are forbidden from vetoing bills governing federal elections (because the governor is not the “legislature”). And state courts are forbidden from striking down election laws that violate the state constitution (because courts are not the “legislature”).

It’s unclear if the Court will go that far, but even a less aggressive decision in Moore would fundamentally alter the balance of power between the states and the Supreme Court, and potentially give the Court’s GOP-appointed majority an unprecedented amount of say over how federal elections are conducted.

The ultimate power to interpret a state law, for example, rests with state courts, not federal judges. But even a relatively narrow reading of the independent state legislature doctrine would give the same Supreme Court that’s recently shown such hostility to voting rights laws the power to overrule a state supreme court’s interpretation of that state’s election law — on the theory that the state supreme court somehow misinterpreted an act of the state legislature, and this error must be corrected by the US Supreme Court.

Even if the Court does not issue a maximalist decision in Moore, in other words, it could still centralize authority over all presidential and congressional elections within itself — empowering the justices to read state election laws in ways that benefit their preferred party or candidates.

And, in the worst-case scenario for democracy, Republicans in key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where the GOP controls highly gerrymandered state legislatures, could gain an unlimited ability to decide how congressional elections are conducted, and who wins their state’s electoral votes.

2) A new age of racial gerrymandering

Last year, Alabama’s Republican legislature enacted congressional maps that give Black Alabamans far less US House representation than their numbers suggest they should receive.

African Americans make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population. But, under the gerrymandered maps, Black voters only have a real shot of electing their candidate of choice in one of the state’s seven congressional districts — so Black voters will only control 14 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.

A panel of three federal judges — two appointed by former President Donald Trump — ordered the state to redraw the maps, arguing that they violate the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law prohibiting race discrimination in elections.

Nevertheless, the Court voted 5-4 last February to reinstate Alabama’s map, at least for the 2022 election cycle. And, in Merrill v. Milligan, the Court will decide whether to make that decision permanent, effectively permitting the maps to remain in effect until the next redistricting cycle in 2031.

In fairness, the mere fact that Alabama’s maps give Black voters significantly less representation than their share of the state’s population suggests that they should have is not sufficient for the Merrill plaintiffs to prevail. Rather, under the Supreme Court’s decision in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), these plaintiffs have to demonstrate that other factors are present; among other things, they need to show that enough Black voters live in close enough proximity that it would be possible to draw a second majority-Black district, and that white Alabamans tend to vote as a bloc for candidates opposed by Black voters.

The lower court found that these factors were met in Merrill, although Alabama makes a plausible argument in its brief that Black voters in Alabama may not live sufficiently close together to justify a second majority-Black district.

But Alabama’s brief does not so much seek a narrow decision holding that it complied with Gingles, as it asks the Court to overrule Gingles and replace it with a new rule that would make it virtually impossible for voting rights plaintiffs to challenge any racial gerrymander. Under Alabama’s proposed test, a map may be struck down only if its configuration “can be explained only by racial discrimination.”

But that is not what Gingles held, and it is not what the text of the Voting Rights Act provides — the Act provides that any state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” is illegal, even if the law was not motivated by racist intent.

But, given this Court’s long record of hostility to voting rights plaintiffs, there is a very real risk that its Republican-appointed majority will accept Alabama’s proposal to effectively legalize most racial gerrymanders.

3) The end of affirmative action in university admissions

As a general rule, race-conscious policies are not allowed. The Constitution places strict limits on the government’s ability to consider race, and federal anti-discrimination laws impose similar restrictions on private universities.

In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), however, the Court held that universities may take limited account of race when deciding which students to admit, because ignoring racial diversity would lead to an inferior educational experience for all students. “Numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and ‘better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals,’” the Court explained in Grutter.

Nevertheless, two closely related cases — Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — are widely expected to overrule Grutter and forbid universities from considering race even if that will lead to worse outcomes for all of the university’s students.

Affirmative action has already had one close call before the Supreme Court and survived. In Fisher v. University of Texas (2016), Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in Grutter, surprised most Court observers by voting to weaken Grutter, but not to overrule it altogether.

But Grutter was decided by just one vote, and Kennedy and liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have since been replaced by archconservative justices appointed by Trump. So the likelihood that Grutter will survive contact with the current Court is quite small.

4) Gutting protections for Medicaid patients

Current Medicaid law offers states a bargain. The federal government picks up a significant share of the cost of providing health care to poor people. In return, states and health providers that participate in state Medicaid programs must comply with certain rules intended to protect patients the federal government is helping pay for. State Medicaid plans, for example, must provide coverage to certain individuals, including children and pregnant patients who meet certain income criteria.

That brings us to Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana v. Talevski, a lawsuit that could render much of this bargain unenforceable.

Under current law, the rules governing when individual plaintiffs may sue to enforce federal Medicaid law are quite complicated, but such suits are allowed when states and health providers violate at least some of Medicaid’s requirements. The defendants in Talevski ask the Court to overrule longstanding precedents that permit these suits. If this position prevails, many of these rules could cease to function in Republican presidential administrations, as the federal government would become the only body capable of enforcing them.

Even in Democratic administrations, moreover, the government would likely struggle to keep Medicaid operating as it currently does, because the federal government only has limited resources to police violations of federal Medicaid law. And the ordinary remedy when a state does not comply with the conditions attached to a federal grant is to cut off those funds — something that a pro-Medicaid administration would be reluctant to do because it would mean punishing low-income patients for the sins of a state or health provider.

In a post-Talevski world, in other words, the only way to enforce Medicaid law may be to cut off federal health care funds to the states — which would lead to even more people losing health coverage.

It’s worth noting the immediate stakes in Talevski as well. The plaintiff alleges that her husband, who had dementia, experienced horrid abuse while he was living in a nursing home. Among other things, she claims that the home violated a federal law that prohibited this home from giving her husband “powerful and unnecessary psychotropic medications for purposes of chemical restraint.”

Now, however, the Supreme Court could render this federal law and many others a virtual nullity. And even if the Court finds a middle ground that only neutralizes some of these lawsuits, that would still mean many Americans would be helpless if they are denied care, or given care that falls far below the standard set by federal law.

5) Who is in charge of ICE?

Federal law provides that the secretary of Homeland Security — currently Alejandro Mayorkas — “shall be responsible” for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Under this authority, Mayorkas issued a memo instructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to prioritize enforcement efforts against removable immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being” — and, implicitly, to give a lower priority to enforcement against other immigrants.

Nevertheless, Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee with a history of handing down legally dubious orders undercutting the Biden administration’s immigration policies, declared this memo unlawful. Tipton’s order is at odds with the text of federal law, with Supreme Court decisions giving immigration officials broad authority to decide when to enforce the law, and with the basic liberal democratic notion that law enforcement must be under the command and control of political officials who are themselves accountable to someone who is elected.

In July, the Supreme Court announced that it would nonetheless permit Tipton’s order to remain in effect while the justices consider the case.

If the Court acts as it did in another recent immigration case, it’s likely a majority of justices will eventually reverse Tipton and restore Mayorkas’s lawful authority over immigration enforcement. But a decision in this case, United States v. Texas, may not come until late June of 2023.

In other words, Tipton is still likely to unlawfully wield many of the powers of the Secretary of Homeland Security for nearly a year.

6) New limits on the federal government’s power to fight water pollution

The Clean Water Act is not the most precisely drafted statute. It prohibits anyone from discharging a wide range of pollutants into the “waters of the United States,” but does not define what this term means.

While there is broad consensus that oceans, rivers, and lakes qualify, what of creeks or human-made drainage ditches that empty into major waterways? What of wetlands that border a river or lake, or that might be connected to one via creeks or drainage ditches? The Clean Water Act has long been understood to cover at least some of these relatively minor bodies of water, because of the reality that toxic chemicals dumped into a wetland miles away from a navigable waterway do not become less toxic simply because they take some time to make their way into that waterway.

Sackett v. EPA involves a difficult question of whether a wetland, which drains into a tributary, which itself drains into a creek, which in turn empties into a lake, is subject to the Clean Water Act. And it is likely that this Supreme Court will use Sackett to significantly reduce that act’s scope.

The last time the Supreme Court considered which waters constitute “waters of the United States,” in Rapanos v. United States (2006), the Court’s conservative bloc split on how best to define that term, and the Court as a whole split 4-1-4 on how to resolve the case — there was no majority opinion.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote an opinion for the four most conservative justices, claiming that the phrase “does not include channels through which water flows intermittently or ephemerally, or channels that periodically provide drainage for rainfall.” Scalia added that wetlands are only subject to the act if they have a “continuous surface connection” with a “relatively permanent body of water” that makes it “difficult to determine where the ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetland’ begins.”

Justice Kennedy applied a different test, arguing that wetlands can qualify as “waters of the United States” if they “significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of other covered waters more readily understood as ‘navigable.’” The federal appeals court that heard Sackett determined that it should apply Kennedy’s test, rather than Scalia’s.

Since Rapanos, however, both Scalia and Kennedy have been replaced by more conservative Trump appointees — as was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined a more liberal dissent in Rapanos. It is fairly likely, in other words, that whatever emerges from this Court in Sackett will be at least as restrictive as the test Scalia announced in Rapanos.

7) The fight over whether religious conservatives have a constitutional right to discriminate

Religious conservatives have twice sought a sweeping decision from the Supreme Court, holding that they have a constitutional right to discriminate against LGBTQ people. They’ve thus far had mixed success. While the Court has twice ruled in favor of conservative litigants claiming a right to discriminate, it has done so on narrow grounds.

One problem with these litigants’ previous lawsuits is that they presented difficult line-drawing problems. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), for example, the plaintiffs’ lawyers tried to reframe a baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex couple as an “artist” who was dragooned into producing a work of art celebrating a marriage he rejects on religious grounds.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court dodged this question, with Justice Elena Kagan noting that this same argument that “artists” have a right to discriminate could permit discrimination by hairstylists, makeup artists, jewelers, and, indeed, pretty much anyone whose job requires a degree of creativity.

Which brings us to 303 Creative v. Elenis, the case currently before the Supreme Court. Unlike a baker, who can only make a tenuous claim that they are engaged in First Amendment protected speech when they bake a wedding cake, 303 Creative involves someone who wishes to design wedding websites — but only for straight couples.

While the exact details of 303 Creative’s website design process might affect how this case should be decided, generally, a website is a medium that uses words to convey meaning, and thus the plaintiffs in 303 Creative present a much stronger case that their business is engaged in First Amendment protected speech than the plaintiffs in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Moreover, the current Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed majority, rarely rules against religious conservatives — even when they present much weaker arguments than the ones presented by the 303 Creative plaintiffs. So it’s not hard to guess who will prevail in this case.

A more uncertain question is whether the Court will hand down a sweeping decision giving many religious conservatives a broad right to discriminate, or whether the Court’s decision will be more limited to the facts of this particular case.

8) When can states pass laws that impact other states?

As a general rule, states may ban certain products within their borders, and different states can have different rules about which products are banned. Currently, recreational marijuana is legal in Virginia, but illegal just across the border in North Carolina. As a constitutional matter, that’s perfectly fine.

In 2018, California’s voters enacted Proposition 12, which bans the sale of pork produced from hogs confined in a manner that the state law considers to be inhumane. On the surface, this is no different from North Carolina’s marijuana ban. California voters wished to prohibit a certain product from being sold within their state, and they did so.

Nevertheless, in National Pork Producers v. Ross, trade organizations representing the pork industry, allege that Prop 12 violates constitutional safeguards against state laws that burden commerce in other states. The idea is that pork producers in other states will have to either produce all pork in compliance with California’s standards, even if that pork will never enter California, or they will incur significant expense from segregating pork that is destined for the California market from the rest of their operation.

Under existing precedents, a state law’s impact on other state markets needs to be pretty extreme before it becomes unconstitutional. Indeed, a right-leaning appeals court panel rejected the pork producers’ argument, explaining that “laws that increase compliance costs, without more, do not constitute a significant burden on interstate commerce.”

Should the Supreme Court disturb that holding, it could have sweeping implications not just for pork producers and consumers, but for many state laws that impose restrictions on commercial products that go beyond restrictions in other states.

As legal scholars Heather Gerken and James Dawson explained in a 2015 article, states frequently enact such laws. For example, Vermont “required food producers that use genetic modification to disclose this fact on the label of any food sold in that state, even if the producer has no facilities in Vermont. Minnesota has prohibited the purchase of electricity that was generated at new coal-fired power plants, even if those power plants are located outside Minnesota,” they wrote.

One surprising development in this case is that the Biden administration weighed in on the pork producers’ side — although they argue for a narrow ruling that California’s pork law is unconstitutional because it “is aimed at ‘cruelty’ to animals that occurs entirely outside California and has no impact within California.” It’s possible that this is an effort to convince the Supreme Court not to hand down a more consequential decision.

9) A truly massive case about the legacy of cultural genocide against Native Americans

Finally, the Court will hear a case questioning several foundational principles of US law related to American Indians, and targeting a landmark law enacted in response to many decades of attacks on Indigenous culture.

Since the Washington administration, the Constitution has been understood to give the federal government authority over relations with American Indians. (Federal law and legal opinions often use the word “Indian” to refer to Indigenous nations and their citizens; this piece includes quotes using that terminology.)

For much of its history, the United States used this authority to, as one federal judge described it, “‘Christianize’ the supposedly heathen Native peoples.” Beginning in the 1800s, for example, the federal government forcibly removed many American Indian children from their homes and enrolled them in boarding schools intended to eradicate their connection to their culture.

Bettmann Collection via Getty Images

To prevent this and similar attacks on tribal culture, Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978. Among other things, this law says if a state court determines that a child who is either “a member of an Indian tribe” or “is eligible for membership in an Indian tribe and is the biological child of a member of an Indian tribe” must be removed from their home, that the child should be placed with an American Indian family — and, if possible, a member of the child’s extended family or, at least, their own tribe.

The plaintiffs in Haaland v. Brackeen include non-Native American families who have adopted Native American children, and three red states that do not wish to comply with the ICWA’s requirements. They raise several constitutional challenges to the ICWA — challenges that call for a fundamental rethinking of the federal government’s relationship with tribes and with the states, and that could even potentially undercut the government’s ability to regulate the national economy.

All of these claims are at odds with existing law. Again, the ICWA was enacted in 1978, so it’s existed for more than four decades without falling to a constitutional challenge. But the Court’s current majority often treats following established precedents as merely optional, so there’s no guarantee that the ICWA will survive past the end of the Supreme Court’s term next summer.

Apple could decide to release its remaining products for 2022, which includes an updated iPad Pro, Mac mini, and 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, through a press release on its website rather than a digital event, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. MacRumors reports: In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman said that Apple is currently "likely to release its remaining 2022 products via press releases, updates to its website and briefings with select members of the press" rather than a digital event. Rumors had suggested that Apple was planning a second fall event in October that would focus on the Mac and iPad, but that may no longer be the case. Apple has three things on the roster for the remainder of 2022: an 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M2 chip, an updated Mac mini with the M2 and yet announced "M2 Pro" chip, and updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Apple announced the M2 chip in June for the redesigned MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro earlier this June at WWDC. Other than the new chip, the updates to the Mac and iPad will be relatively incremental upgrades with no major design changes rumored for the products. Apple has released products via press release in the past, such as the AirPods Max and the original AirPods Pro.

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