James.galbraith

As Lorde said: “We live in cities.”

Much ink has been spilled on how Covid-19 will impact the urban geography of the United States. Early in the pandemic, some were even forecasting the death of the nation’s superstar cities as some urban dwellers fled for the suburbs.

As the year went on, demand for suburban homes fueled questions about whether these moves would be permanent. A June National Bureau of Economic Research paper by researchers from the University of Chicago estimated that 37 percent of jobs can be performed entirely remotely. It emphasized that jobs that can be remote tend to pay more than those that cannot, highlighting yet another disparity in how Covid-19 has affected the labor market.

But there’s a number of reasons so many humans and firms clustered into cities to begin with. Understanding why that is, and the pre-Covid-19 geography of employment, undercuts the likelihood that a significant amount of the American workforce will work remote in the long run.

To understand the economics behind why people cluster in these high-cost-of-living regions and how the pandemic could change that, I turned to Enrico Moretti.

Moretti is an economist and preeminent researcher in the fields of labor and urban economics at the University of California Berkeley. His 2013 book The New Geography of Jobs details the forces shaping where people live, where people work, and how those outcomes are inextricably linked.

In this interview, Moretti explains why high-productivity workers cluster in a handful of cities and why the strength of those forces means it’s unlikely that very many of us will be working fully remotely in the long run. We also discuss why such a small slice of the American labor force can determine so much about which cities dominate.

“I think everything that we know from the economic geography before Covid tells us that these forces of agglomeration are quite powerful. And there’s no reason to think that the same tendency to cluster will be all that different in a post-Covid world,” says Moretti.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Jerusalem Demsas

Something that a lot of urban economists discuss is this concept of agglomeration economies. Can you explain what that is and why it’s so important to the US economy?

Enrico Moretti

Agglomeration economies is one of the most important concepts to understand the geography of employment in the US and the geography of wealth in the US.

Agglomeration economies exist in all sectors, but they’re pretty pronounced in the newer industries, in the innovative industries. It’s the tendency of employers and workers to cluster geographically in a handful of locations. So it is the tendency, for example, of an industry like biotech to cluster geographically in three or four key cities. It’s the same whether you’re talking about social media or pharmaceutical or finance.

I have a new paper where I’m looking at high-tech clusters and I find a staggering amount of clustering when you look at a very narrow level of optimization. So, for example, if you look at all the inventors in computer science, the top 10 metro areas in the US account for 70 percent of all inventors in computer science.

Jerusalem Demsas

Wow.

Enrico Moretti

And that number is even larger if you look [at people who work with] semiconductors — 79 percent. If you look at biology and chemistry, that number is more like 56 percent; it’s still incredibly high. So what this is telling us is that there’s a deep-seated tendency of some sectors to cluster geographically. In some of my work and in some other people’s work, it’s emerged that the main reason is productivity.

I think this is one of the key defining features of the economic geography of the US of the past 20, 30 years — in fact, of the economic geography of most industrialized countries — because they all exhibit characteristics of agglomeration.

Jerusalem Demsas

And can you explain a little bit more about the mechanism by which agglomeration economies form? Is it that a large company, let’s say making semiconductors, forms and then someone who works for that company goes off and makes a startup that does the same thing and he’s already living in the same city?

Or is that all of these companies are consciously moving to be near one another? Or some other mechanism?

Enrico Moretti

Historically, the [first] pattern you described is the correct one. That’s what we’ve seen, for example, in Seattle, which is Microsoft. It is the same for Austin; in Austin there’s a different cluster with some people linked to Michael Dell. It’s the same for the research triangle, you know, Raleigh-Durham.

Now, you’re asking why, why do we see that there is this increased concentration? What attracts people and companies to that cluster? Yes, the channel that you describe is certainly one important one, whereby the alumni of a certain company leave that company and then open their own startup. There are studies that point to how many startups are in Seattle created by Microsoft alumni. But I think there are even deeper reasons; it’s not just that people are leaving the company and sticking around and opening another company.

One microeconomic reason is the matching between labor demand and labor supply, between workers and firms, especially when we’re thinking about very specialized firms and very specialized workers. In larger labor markets, in labor markets which are thicker, where there are many companies for employees and many employees looking for companies — there’s a growing body of evidence that points out that there’s better matching between an employee and a company.

So just to give you an example: If you are a biotech engineer who specializes in a certain branch of biotech and you move to Silicon Valley, where at any moment in time there’s a thousand biotech firms looking for biotech engineers, you might be able to find biotech firms that really value your branch of biotech. That same person moves to Chicago, when at that moment in time there’s a handful of firms looking for employees in biotech; well, you might have to settle for a less good match, a biotech firm that is not really looking for your area of specialization. Notice that it really favors both the firm and the worker. Firms move to the Bay Area and they’re really looking for somebody that is specialized in a certain branch of biotech; and vice versa, it’s much harder for them in Chicago.

And also notice this advantage is not there for unskilled or non-specialized labor. If you are a janitor or a secretary or a welder, the advantages of agglomeration don’t really mean much for you — but if you are a specialized scientist or mathematician or engineer or an innovator, that market thickness will provide a better match. So that’s one important channel that has been documented to improve the productivity both of the firm and the work.

Jerusalem Demsas

When people talk about high wages in cities, people often think of, you know, tech workers or other people who are working in high-wage industries — can you talk a little bit about the benefits that have been conferred to people not in high-wage industries, but that are still living in these metro regions?

Enrico Moretti

Sure, the vast majority of the US labor force in any city does not work in tech or innovation-intensive industries. Even the San Francisco Bay area, which is arguably the one that has the highest concentration of tech jobs, even here that accounts for a minority of jobs. Typically, in the average US city, about two-thirds of the workers are employed in local services. Whether you’re an Uber driver or a doctor, whether you’re a lawyer or a construction worker, what these jobs have in common is that they reflect local demand.

So they sell a service within the confines of that metro area. And so what you see historically is that when jobs in the innovation sector grow, you see a strong growth in the much broader group of jobs that are in the local service sector, a very large multiplier effect. Because those innovation sector salaries get spent on the local economy and therefore generate jobs for this much broader, much larger, and also much more diverse set of workers.

Jerusalem Demsas

Covid-19 changed a lot about how and where people work. Industries that thought they could not work from home are working from home. Is it your belief that it’s possible to get the benefits from agglomeration economies, in some industries at least, remotely?

Enrico Moretti

Personally, I don’t think so. I don’t think the economic geography of the US will be profoundly different in the long run, and I think the reason is that I don’t think that we can access those particular advantages that come from agglomeration remotely. When we talk about the long run — I don’t mean, like, next fall; I think about the next few years — I think that once we feel safe, once enough time has passed to give firms and employees time to readjust to the new normal, I do believe that the new normal will look a lot like the old normal.

Right now, if you look at San Francisco, for example, 89 percent of office workers are working remotely. So right now people are claiming that going forward, what you define as “superstar cities,” or high-cost cities, are doomed. I’m skeptical of that, I think everything that we know from the economic geography before Covid tells us that these forces of agglomeration are quite powerful.

So I don’t mean that nothing will be changed. I think that the share of work from home will be higher.

Jerusalem Demsas

How much higher do you think?

Enrico Moretti

Well I think we can probably agree that it will be higher than before Covid and will be lower than the 89 percent [that we’re seeing in San Francisco]. I think it’s going to be closer to the former — most likely, for the typical employer it’s going to take the form of one work-from-home day a week, or at most two days of work from home a week. And if that’s the case, then what that means is that the economic geography of employment after Covid will look a lot like before Covid.

If you have to show up at the office three or four days a week, you still need to live in the metro area where your office is. The link between place of work and place of residence will be restored and people will flock back to places like the Bay Area or Seattle or New York or Boston for the same reason that they were flocking to these places before Covid.

Jerusalem Demsas

But since the geography of American cities, as you’ve described, is dependent on a very small slice of individuals — these high-wage workers who are driving demand in a lot of these cities — isn’t what’s most relevant how these individuals will be able to behave?

Before Covid, it didn’t seem possible for me to bargain down my wages and up my ability to work full-time remote, because it was such a cultural taboo. But now that’s no longer the case, so some workers are able to bargain. Is that something that could affect the economic geography of the country even if only a small slice of workers are able to take advantage of it?

Enrico Moretti

My impression is that there’s going to be cases like the one that you described but the main question is that they’re not going to be the modal cases; they’re not going to be the majority of cases, for two reasons.

First of all, for the innovation sector broadly defined, I think they’re going to see quantifiable losses in productivity as measured by quantifiable losses in the amount of innovation these types of workers will be able to create. A lot of the existing research points to the fact that by clustering geographically, these inventors, before Covid, were significantly more productive in quantifiable ways. I have a paper where I quantify the number of patents that an inventor could gain by moving to a tech cluster and the quality of those patents as measured by patent citations. So we’re talking about quantifiable causal effect on productivity and creativity; the moment you start losing that creativity and productivity, that’s when both the employer and employee have something to lose from this decentralized application.

I think the notion of less productivity, less creativity, less innovation, and lower wages is not going to be so appealing for most of them.

Jerusalem Demsas

And when you say “for most,” you don’t just mean “most of the whole labor force,” but also most of the highest-wage workers?

Enrico Moretti

Correct. That said, I agree with you that some occupations can be probably managed in the long run remotely without huge losses in productivity. Probably that depends, from industry to industry and employer to employer. But I would also point out the second reason for why we saw such a growth in the concentration of high-skilled professionals in the decades before Covid.

So we’ve been talking a lot about labor demand — people moving to superstar cities to get these good jobs. There’s another facet, which is labor supply. A lot of young people actually want to live in these places — a lot of young people were attracted by the urban amenities. Right now it’s not too surprising that places like San Francisco and New York are deserted by a lot of these same people, because right now a lot of these urban amenities are shut down.

Assuming that we can go back to feel safe around each other and the vaccines can manage our safety effectively, I think it’s fair to assume that urban amenities will come back pretty much at the same level that existed before, so [the] labor supply of well-educated workers will keep flowing to these places.

Jerusalem Demsas

And you mentioned that if there is widespread work from home in these sectors, that it would take the form of a day or two off a week. If that happens, that could significantly reduce commuting time for some people, which may end up pushing people out into the suburbs or the exurbs. Is that what you think will happen, or it’s not enough of a change in commuting time to justify significant moves in that area?

Enrico Moretti

I think it’s a good question. I think if we’re thinking about the health of superstar cities, in particular in the urban core, I think there are two countervailing factors. One is the one that you just said, that it makes it easier for people to live farther away, and on the other hand, if the average worker works from home one day a week, that means 20 percent fewer workers on the freeway or on the subways and less congestion in the city streets. So that means increased attractiveness of the urban core.

So I think that both forces will be at play — one pushing people out and one making the core more attractive in the long run — and I think it’s really way too early. It’s going to take us years to see which one of these two forces prevail. So we will see, maybe in five years, what the data will tell us.

Shortly after Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson for an interview that was strange even by Carlson standards, he was raptured into conservative heaven, and has not been seen again upon this Earth. At least, that appears to be what has happened on Fox News, where the Republican representative hasn’t been mentioned in over 30 hours of programming.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Gaetz’s story just keeps on expanding in ways that make Gaetz seem a lot like less a bumbling Lothario, and more like a man who was deeply engaged in multiple crimes. Far from being the victim of a plot to smear his good name, new information from The New York Times puts Gaetz at the center of the kind of sex trafficking ring that QAnon followers believe only exists in the cellars of pizza shops. One in which he apparently recruited women online and provided cash payments. Those payments appear to have included not just paying women to have sex with Gaetz, but with Florida Republican official Joel Greenberg, and an unidentified third man. And as a reminder, one of the women that Gaetz supposedly paid to travel across the country for sex, was also 17.

The longer the story goes on, the more it appears that charges of sex trafficking are highly appropriate. But even as an unpleasant story gets even darker, there are still moments so jarringly ludicrous that they seem difficult to believe. For example, Gaetz is reported to have used Apple Pay, and paid women using the Cash app on his phone. Perhaps Matt Gaetz really is law-enforcement friendly, because he certainly seems to have made this case easy for them.

Sex work is an ancient profession, and sex workers need to be treated with dignity and protected rather than prosecuted. However, it doesn’t appear that Gaetz reached out to sex workers in any kind of usual sense.

Instead, Gaetz and Greenberg reportedly worked together to recruit women through dating apps and online relationship sites. Then Gaetz provided the women with “gifts, fine dining, travel and allowances” in exchange for sex. Allowances here meaning cash payments. 

In at least one case, the woman appears to have been someone that Gaetz and Greenberg knew through her association with Republican politics. That woman, with encouragement and payment from Gaetz and Greenberg, agreed to have sex with the unnamed third member of their sex trafficking ring.

On Thursday evening, ABC News reported that they had sources who confirmed much of the information in the Times article. That includes the information that Greenberg was indicted in 2020 for sex trafficking of a teenage girl in 2017. It’s unclear if this is the same girl who Gaetz reportedly paid to travel. Greenberg has pleaded not guilty, 

As the Orlando Sentinel reported on Thursday, the charges against Greenberg extend beyond allegations of sex trafficking, and into … just about everything. There’s stalking a political opponent; illegally obtaining $432,000 by creating a pair of front companies to grab up small business loans under the COVID-19 relief program; using funds from his official position as a tax collector to buy Michael Jordan memorabilia, and defrauding the county by embezzling funds to buy cryptocurrency. In short, Matt Gaetz’s pal appears to have never met a law he didn’t like … to break.

Gaetz and Greenberg appear have engaged in their online “recruiting” business for at least two years, working out arrangements for women to meet them at hotels and pre-negotiating payment.  

Gaetz and Greenberg’s relationship apparently goes back to the point where both Gaetz and his father were in the Florida legislature. According to sources at ABC, women referred to Matt as "Creepy Gaetz," and he was frequently seen trying to pick up students from a nearby college.

In an earlier interview with Axios, Gaetz admitted that he had broken out his billfold (or Cash app) on multiple occasions. "I have definitely, in my single days, provided for women I've dated. You know, I've paid for flights, for hotel rooms. I've been, you know, generous as a partner.” But Gaetz denied that he had done anything illegal. “I think someone is trying to make that look criminal when it is not."

In a statement released to the New York Times, Gaetz's office went heavily into the never suspicious third person: “Matt Gaetz has never paid for sex, Matt Gaetz refutes all the disgusting allegations completely. Matt Gaetz has never ever been on any such websites whatsoever. Matt Gaetz cherishes the relationships in his past and looks forward to marrying the love of his life."

It’s interesting that in the Axios interview Gaetz referred to his “single days” and the statement issued to the Times notes that Gaetz is looking forward to his upcoming wedding. Gaetz became engaged in December. But the FBI is reportedly interviewing women that Gaetz paid for sex “as recently as January.”

That would seem to indicate that Gaetz was still engaged in these acts a month after he became engaged to be married. It also shows that he was still carrying on more than six months after Greenberg was arrested and indicted.

Eventually, Fox will have to mention all this. But don’t worry. They’ve surely prepped the “Rep. Matt Gaetz (D)” chyron by now. 

Texas-based corporate leaders are trying to avoid the widespread criticism experienced by large Georgia-based corporations for not opposing the major voter restriction law passed by Republicans in the state until after the fact. With Texas Republicans pushing a bill making it harder to vote, American Airlines expressed its opposition.

“We are strongly opposed to this bill and others like it. As a Texas-based business, we must stand up for the rights of our team members and customers who call Texas home, and honor the sacrifices made by generations of Americans to protect and expand the right to vote,” the Fort Worth-based airline said in a statement. Michael Dell, founder and CEO of the Texas-based Dell Technologies, also came out against the bill, tweeting: “Free, fair, equitable access to voting is the foundation of American democracy. Those rights—especially for women, communities of color—have been hard-earned.”

Southwest Airlines and AT&T offered vaguer statements in support of voting rights without being specific about the bill that has passed the state Senate, a version of which is being considered in the state House. 

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered a howler of a response, saying: “Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy.” Funny how Texas Republicans are allllll about making businesses happy until businesses express opposition to something being done to cement Republican power in the state by making it harder for Democratic-leaning voters to cast their ballots.

The Texas bill would bar public officials from sending out mail-in ballot applications and eliminate drive-thru voting after more than half of the people to vote that way in 2020 were Black, Latino, or Asian. It’s one of 361 bills in 47 states aimed at making it more difficult to vote.

In Georgia, Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola spoke out strongly against the attacks on voting recently put into law—but not until it was too late to stop them from becoming law, and only after public pressure.

The Georgia law notoriously bans people from handing out water or food at the state’s very long voting lines—very long, at least, if you live in an area with a lot of Black or poor people—but it does so much more. It gives voters less time to request absentee ballots, which means local election offices have less time to send those ballots out. Like the Texas bill, it prevents election officials from sending out absentee ballot applications. It makes absentee ballot applications much more complicated, and adds a voter ID requirement to getting an absentee ballot. It dramatically reduces the number of ballot drop boxes allowed, and reduces their usefulness by preventing them from being available after business hours. Mobile voting centers—where in Fulton County 11,200 people voted in 2020—are banned unless the governor declares a state of emergency. In some counties, early voting will be expanded. But in the ones where early voting has been the most important method of voting, its hours will be cut.

This is the Republican approach to voting rights. Democrats, on the other hand, are uniting behind the For the People Act, with the goal of “(1) removing barriers to expanding access to voting and securing the integrity of the vote; (2) establishing public financing in House elections to level the playing field; and (3) banning congressional gerrymandering by requiring that every state create a nonpartisan redistricting commission subject to nonpartisan redistricting criteria,” as Stephen Wolf explains. This is a fundamental issue about the nature and extent of U.S. democracy, and the choice between the parties is very clear.

Note: I've been posting this data daily for over a year. I'll stop once all three of these criteria are met:
1) 70% of the population over 18 has had at least one dose of vaccine,
2) new cases are under 5,000 per day, and
3) hospitalizations are below 3,000.

According to the CDC, 157.6 million doses have been administered. 22.4% of the population over 18 is fully vaccinated, and 39.2% of the population over 18 has had at least one dose (101.8 million people have had at least one dose).

And check out COVID Act Now to see how each state is doing. 

In March, we celebrated the Trans Day of Visibility, an annual opportunity to center and celebrate transgender and nonbinary people and the incredible gifts they give to our world. In March, we also covered a growing number of anti-trans legislation cropping up around the nation. Even as we continue to battle the novel coronavirus, Republicans can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to pushing discriminatory legislation. In a recent example we have Montana, where state Republicans recently pushed not one, but two anti-queer bills.

First, on Thursday, April 1, the Montana House passed Senate Bill 215 with a 59-38 approval vote. The bill would essentially allow people or businesses to discriminate against anyone on the basis of religious refusal; if not, refusing the goods or services would cause them to violate their religious beliefs, as reported by the Associated Press. As the broad and sweeping bill already made its way through the majority-Republican state Senate, it next heads to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte’s desk. The second bill in Montana, House Bill 112, is one in line with what Daily Kos has covered in a number of states: trying to keep trans girls and women out of girls’ sports. Let’s check out both bills below.

First, the religious freedom bill. Republican Sen. Carl Glimm sponsored the bill and claims that it is not an attempt to attack anti-discrimination ordinances, but rather is all about preserving religious freedom. He cited past religious freedom measures meant to protect Native communities. While “religious freedom” pushed from the right more often than not is coded language for anti-queer discrimination, this concern became doubly obvious after an amendment to the bill failed to pass on Wednesday. 

House Minority Leader Kim Abbott tried to amend the bill to specify that it could not be used to challenge protections under the Montana Human Rights Act (which doesn’t actually protect against discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation), but that amendment ended in a 47-53 vote, failing to pass. 

On Thursday, Republican Rep. John Fuller said during the debate, “Do not make me NOT do what my God tells me to do,” as reported by the AP.

In a statement, Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David said Gianforte should “seriously consider vetoing this legislation, which would not just discriminate against LGBTQ people, but threaten to ward off the very businesses he is hoping to attract.” Interestingly, a similar message eventually led to some degree of change in the details of an anti-trans bill also moving through the state legislature, though that bill, unfortunately, is also still in motion.

Second, we have the anti-trans sports bill unsurprisingly titled the “Save Women’s Sports Act.” This bill passed a second reading in the Senate on Tuesday with a vote of 29-21. Like similar bills, this one would require that student athletes participate and compete on teams that align with their sex assigned at birth, not necessarily with their actual gender identity. This would apply to public schools from elementary school through higher education, as well as any schools that compete against public schools. This bill passed with an amendment that would void the legislation if the Department of Education took enforcement action. Why? Worries over losing business for the state.

Republican Rep. Dan Solomon, who introduced the amendment, expressed concern about potential boycotts from the NCAA and losing federal money. “If you want to take this chance on the educational future of hundreds of thousands of kids, this is your opportunity, and if you don’t ever want to watch a home football playoff game in Montana, again, your choice,” he stated as reported by the Montana Free Press. Not exactly an emotional support of trans rights, but perhaps a message that will get through to the governor. And at least he did speak against his fellow Republicans when it came to this discriminatory measure. 

In a statement to LGBTQ Nation, Executive Director of the ACLU of Montana Caitlin Borgmann said in reference to the bill: “There is no doubt that discriminatory laws like this will harm people, especially trans youth who just want to live their best lives without the government telling them what they can and cannot do.” Transgender folks face hardships and barriers at every stage of life. They need more protections and inclusions, not less. And where trans kids grow up should not affect the rights and opportunities they have, which is why these bills need to be stamped out across the nation. 

We must act now to urge our senators to vote “yes” to the Equality Act.

Sign and send the petition: The Senate must pass the Equality Act and stop the discrimination against LGBTQIA people.

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The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it would be ending the use of an intentionally ridiculous policy implemented by the prior administration that used blank spaces on asylum applications and other forms as an excuse to outright reject paperwork. “[This may seem like a small bureaucratic change, but is actually a big deal,” tweeted Los Angeles Times reporter Molly O’Toole.

Some rejections were for leaving the middle name field empty, even if the applicant had no middle name. It was “[b]ureaucracy as a weapon,” The Guardian reported last year. But as a result of litigation, the previous administration backed down from enforcing the policy on certain documents. Now this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) confirmed the official end of the “Blank Space” policy.

“In a deviation from long-established agency policy, in fall 2019, USCIS suddenly began rejecting humanitarian benefit applications that left nonmaterial form questions blank,” the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) said in an October 2019 policy brief. “These rejections are particularly egregious as the majority of rejected applications left spaces blank for information that was not relevant to an individual’s eligibility, such as leaving blank the space asking for an individual’s name in a native alphabet when the native alphabet was the same as English.”

“’Middle name’ field left blank because the applicant does not have a middle name? Sorry, your application gets rejected,” The Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote last year. “No apartment number because you live in a house? You’re rejected, too. No address given for your parents because they’re dead? No siblings named because you’re an only child? No work history dates because you’re an 8-year-old kid? All real cases, all rejected.”

Advocates said that the policy further created critical delays for already vulnerable people seeking safety in the U.S. “These rejections occurred without adequate notice and primarily impacted particularly vulnerable populations, such as asylees, crime victims, and individuals who have been subjected to human trafficking,” AILA continued. In fact, “USCIS began by implementing this practice against the most vulnerable populations.”

“The rejection of an application by USCIS does not necessarily mean the client won’t get a chance to fix the application and send it back again,” The Guardian said last year. But it did mean that the process would be delayed, and delaying was yet another tool the previous administration wielded in it attacks on legal immigration. Migration Policy Institute Policy Analyst Sarah Pierce told CNN the policy "increased the chances that an applicant would be dissuaded from applying again altogether."

BuzzFeed News recently reports that USCIS officials are also planning to remove the dehumanizing term “alien” from the agency’s manual. That term had been inserted by former acting Director Ken Cuccinelli, an anti-immigrant loudmouth who was later found by a federal judge to have been unlawfully installed in the position. “Now, officials are looking to replace ‘alien’ with ‘noncitizen’ as much as possible throughout the manual,” the report said. “The move also comes just weeks after agency officials directed leadership to no longer use the terminology in agency communications.”

 “This change is designed to encourage more inclusive language in the agency’s outreach efforts, internal documents and in overall communication with stakeholders, partners, and the general public,” acting USCIS Director Tracy Renaud said according to BuzzFeed News.

Let’s stop pretending bills denying trans kids health care are something other than bigotry that will get children killed.

A lot of people do not care if trans people die.

Many of them are Republicans, passing laws in state legislatures that treat our lives as abstractions played out in vague hypotheticals. South Dakota’s Republican governor signed two executive orders banning trans kids from high school and collegiate sports. Even more horrifying, Arkansas’s Republican-dominated legislature passed a bill banning necessary trans health care for kids. And those are just the most recent examples of anti-trans legislation. Several others have already become law, and still more bills are winding their way through the legislature in many other states. (Both Alabama and Tennessee are also considering banning trans health care for kids.)

Others who don’t particularly care about trans lives include many right-wing pundits, smugly making easy, hacky jokes about trans women looking like big, scary men in dresses.

And at least some of the people who don’t care about our lives are in the media, covering issues that affect trans people without talking to actual trans people — or failing to recognize the stale arguments coughed up against us by astroturfed conservative advocacy groups as warmed over from the days when similar arguments were made about gay men and lesbians.

But none of them fundamentally care if trans people die.

I am aware of how dramatic this sounds. I cannot see into the hearts of every single one of these people to determine the precise degree of their transphobia (though at least some of them don’t make any effort to hide it). I am sure that if I asked them if they care about trans people dying, they would say something like, “Of course I do.” And yet they’re perfectly content to treat our existence as a ripe topic for debate.

So let me be blunt: The current wave of anti-trans legislation sweeping various state legislatures is an attempt to ostracize trans Americans. It is an attempt to cut off our access to necessary health care. It is an attempt to kill us through the indifferent cruelty of bureaucratic measures.

Most media attention has been focused on bills attempting to ban trans kids from playing high school sports, which has been covered effectively elsewhere. My quick rebuttal: Even if we were to grant anti-trans forces their position on high school sports — the shortsighted belief that “boys” will unfairly compete on girls’ teams, where they’ll naturally dominate — it’s not clear why anyone would jump through all of the hurdles of transition just to play on a high school girls’ basketball team. It fails the common-sense test.

I’m far more concerned about even more odious bills winding their way through various legislative bodies, designed to strip hormone treatment from trans teenagers. These bills will effectively force trans teens through a puberty that will cause them immense emotional and psychological harm. Some of these teens have been living as themselves for much of their childhood, without most people in their lives even knowing they are trans. But without access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments, trans girls will develop facial hair and deep voices; trans boys will grow breasts.

Numerous studies have shown that trans teenagers are more at risk of death by suicide than their cisgender peers. A 2018 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that trans boys showed a 50.8 percent rate of attempted suicide (compared to 9.8 percent for cis boys), while trans girls showed a 29.9 percent rate (compared to 17.6 percent for cis girls). Nonbinary teens reported a 41.8 percent rate and gender-questioning teens a 27.9 percent rate.

But when trans children receive gender-affirming health care and the support of family and peers, their risk of death by suicide declines substantially. (I don’t like to talk about it, but I spent most of my life consumed by suicidal thoughts until I began transition.) What’s more, trans children who are affirmed in their gender have less risk of anxiety and depression than trans kids who are not, and a 2014 study of trans youth showed that allowing them to transition as children led to positive outcomes.

There is a reason why every major American medical body recommends giving trans children the chance to transition. (Here’s an article from the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics making this argument 11 years ago.) Children first transition socially — with changes to their clothing, haircut, and name. Then, with a physician’s guidance, they can block the onset of puberty in early adolescence, and finally start hormone treatment in later adolescence.

This method works. We have records of trans children receiving hormone treatment as long ago as the 1930s. With this approach, trans kids can largely live lives that are indistinguishable from those of cis kids. (If you don’t believe me, consider the surprisingly large number of famous trans women who transitioned as kids, like Nicole Maines, Kim Petras, and Hunter Schafer.)

The concept of “passing” — a binary trans person being read as their gender, rather than as the gender they were assigned at birth — is a fraught one in trans circles, because it is too easy to use as a cudgel against those who seemingly don’t pass. But blocking trans kids’ access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments will indisputably affect their ability to pass, should that be a desired outcome for them. And that, in turn will increase their risk of encountering transphobia and transphobic violence as adults, particularly if they are Black or brown trans women. In 2020, at least 44 trans women were killed, the substantial majority of whom were Black or brown trans women. That was the highest number on record to date.

In contrast, trans teenagers who receive the right synthetic hormones will have options when it comes to disclosing their transness. I recently met a woman who transitioned as a teenager (in the 2000s, no less), and she is simply assumed to be a cis person within her field. Nobody has ever guessed otherwise. Too many people who don’t receive those hormones will always be “the trans one” in too many rooms.

Trans people are a lot harder to demonize when you can’t tell who we are, when we could just be another girl on the volleyball team or another lead actor in the high school play. Clinging to the harmful stereotype of “scary man in a dress” — which is the stereotype used to prop up so much of this transphobia — all but requires making it logistically impossible for someone to transition until they are well into adulthood. (But also, be nice to someone you think is a man wearing a dress. I’ve been her, and it’s really, really scary.)

The Arkansas bill specifically ties “gender” to reproductive organs. That move effectively defines “womanhood” as an ability to bear children, which is so self-evidently a hop, skip, and jump away from an attack on abortion rights that it should give anyone in support of those rights serious pause.

But even more egregious is the bill’s privileging of reproductive capacity and the idea that a presumed horror awaiting trans children as they grow to adulthood is an inability to have biological children. As an adopted person (who will likely have to adopt children herself for reasons unrelated to my transness), this particular argument waged by anti-trans forces is particularly offensive. It’s also a signal of how American society remains deeply biased in favor of cisgender heterosexuals who pair off and have children, despite the fact that we know how many queer people, of all stripes, exist within our world.

The arguments being advanced against trans people are the same ones used against gay and lesbian people, and they’re the same arguments that were used against women in the workforce in the 20th century, and they’re the same arguments that prop up structural racism: There is a certain way America looks, and it’s not like [insert out-group of choice].

These bills and most of the coverage of them are cis-sexist. Much of the opposition to trans people — or even the unstated icky feelings that many cis people have about us — originates in the feelings of cis parents who are trying to halt their trans kids’ transitions, or the idea that a trans person might someday regret their transition and wish they could take it back.

It is worth exploring the sadness of cis parents and especially the depth of feeling some detransitioners have. But the humans whose lives will be most affected should be the priority here — and we must not lose sight of the fact that they are real people, not intellectual thought exercises whose existence can be defined through the inconveniences they might cause the status quo. Conversations about the intersection of cis lives with trans lives or about detransition lose all value if they are presented within a specifically cis framework, starting from a foundational belief that transness is an aberration to be avoided at all costs and otherwise pitied. We are not aberrations. Being trans is just another way to be human.

There is a mistaken assumption among many cis Americans (at least the ones I talk to) that “trans people” equal folks like me — relatively affluent white trans women who transitioned as adults, seemingly on a whim, and now won’t stop talking about it. But the majority of trans Americans are working class or come from working class families. Many of us are not white. Most of us are barely scraping by.

The extremely thin social safety net that bears us up in the United States is, shockingly, one of the better ones for trans people. That’s only because the world is so weighted toward cis people that there are disastrously few places where trans people can find the care we need. That social safety net isn’t just worth preserving; it’s vital, as is creating better access to trans health care for all trans Americans.

But I am a relatively affluent white woman who transitioned as an adult, and I have a media platform, and I’m not going to stop talking about it. Saw away at the social safety net, and trans people — lots of us — will die. It is that simple, and it is worth thinking about whether that blood is worth so many hypotheticals that turn us into imagined monsters rather than people just trying to survive another day in a country that increasingly doesn’t care whether we live.

Those who question the stories of trans people — especially trans youth — rob us of our autonomy to define our lives. They argue, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that cis people are the true arbiters of who we are. They suggest that when trans people advocate for our interests, both as individuals and as a community, we are being selfish, naïve, and uncompromising. But it is not selfish to say you have a self, it is not naïve to believe that you know that self better than others, and it is not uncompromising to insist that you should live a life of dignity the same as anybody else.

Every day that cis people guide most of the conversations about trans people is a day that further suggests our lives are not worth living as they are. But if our lives are what we say they are, and if they are not worth living as they are, what are you trying to tell us? Where would you have us go? Answer that question. I’m waiting.

How the US education system perpetuates inequality and racism.

Education in the United States is broadly framed as meritocratic: If you work hard and achieve in your studies, you’ll get ahead in school and life. In this way, the country’s education system has historically been considered an equalizer, a mechanism by which poor people get on equal footing with the wealthy, and Black people — once prevented from going to school — catch up with white people.

While America claims this system of fairness is a core tenet of its education system, merit alone doesn’t help people advance. Instead, factors like one’s family income and wealth and one’s race and gender play a role in the opportunities available to help someone achieve. From the moment a child enters a school system to the time they apply for college or graduate schools, these factors can impact the kinds of programs and schools they’re accepted into and how they’re treated. Assessments like the SAT that are supposed to measure merit only replicate privilege and inequality.

In this episode of Glad You Asked, we explore how meritocracy perpetuates inequality and racism, helping meritocrats believe that they’ve won due to their hard work and effort while leaving already marginalized groups behind.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. Subscribe for more.

Further reading:

“Public Schools Admissions and the Myth of Meritocracy: How and Why Screened Public School Admissions Promote Segregation,” New York University Law Review

The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits

The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough

The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities by Natasha Warikoo

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Leman

“Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color,” the Atlantic

“What the College Admissions Scandal Says About Racial Inequality,” Vox

The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America by Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl

“Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, NY’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots,” the New York Times

The legal arguments in Kelley v. Becerra aren’t exactly good arguments, but five justices have signaled that they agree with them.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.

A team of conservative activists filed a lawsuit last year which asks the courts to strike down several key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The plaintiffs’ legal arguments are at odds with longstanding precedents, but the case is assigned to a very conservative Republican-appointed judge. And that judge has already signaled that he’s likely to rule in those plaintiffs’ favor.

Kelley v. Becerra is the fourth round of litigation attacking major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. It seeks to take out several provisions of Obamacare governing which forms of preventive care — things like birth control or vaccinations or cancer screenings — must be covered by health insurers. And it primarily relies on the kind of legal arguments that fell out of vogue in the federal courts more than 80 years ago.

But there’s a twist. Though the primary legal argument in Kelley is tough to square with existing legal precedents, five members of the Supreme Court recently signaled that they intend to abandon longstanding legal principles in favor of the same interpretation of the Constitution proposed by the Kelley plaintiffs.

The case, which was filed in a federal court in Texas, is being heard by Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Capitol Hill staffer who once ruled that the Affordable Care Act must be repealed in its entirety. (That case is now before the Supreme Court, and a majority of the Court appeared likely to reject key parts of O’Connor’s arguments when the case was argued last November.)

So the Affordable Care Act’s preventive care provisions could be in for a rough ride. Their immediate fate rests in the hands of one of the most partisan judges in the country. And a majority of the justices recently signaled that even fair-minded judges should look upon these provisions of Obamacare with extreme skepticism.

The Affordable Care Act’s preventive care provisions, briefly explained

Several provisions of the Affordable Care Act require group and individual health plans to cover various preventive treatments and to not “impose any cost sharing requirements,” such as copays, for them. When Congress wrote Obamacare, however, it did not itemize which treatments must be covered. Instead, it delegated that power to three different government bodies.

An expert panel known as the United States Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF), for example, has the power to place many health services on the list of services that insurers must cover without imposing out-of-pocket costs on patients. Another panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may add vaccines to the list. And the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, may require insurers to cover “preventive care and screenings” for women and children.

Congress had a very good reason for writing the statute in this way. If Obamacare had itemized which health services insurers must cover when the law was written in 2010, then Congress would have needed to pass an entirely new law in order to add new items to this list. Covid-19 did not even exist in 2010, for example. So, if Congress had decided to itemize which vaccines insurers must cover in 2010, it couldn’t have known to include the Covid-19 vaccine on that list. (The federal government is purchasing Covid-19 vaccines for public use, but once the initial vaccination campaign is over, it may make sense for private insurers to take over the burden of paying to vaccinate children or teenagers when they reach a certain age.)

The three federal panels and agencies have placed about 80 items on the preventive services list. That list includes things like blood screening for newborns, vision screening for children, contraceptive care, pap smears, and screening for conditions like depression, hepatitis, HIV, and some forms of cancer.

And yet, the plaintiffs’ theory in Kelley could potentially endanger patients’ access to all of these health services — although the full implications of this lawsuit are a bit nuanced. If the plaintiffs’ theory prevails, insurers could be free to refuse to cover preventive care services or, at the very least, to impose new costs on patients who seek those services.

So what are the Kelley plaintiffs’ arguments?

The plaintiffs in Kelley are an array of religious conservatives, and what Judge O’Connor labels as “Free-Market Plaintiffs,” who wish to purchase health plans that do not cover some of the preventive services that insurers are currently required to cover.

Some of these plaintiffs, for example, object to a requirement that insurers pay for pre-exposure prophylaxis (“PrEP”), drugs that are very effective in preventing the transmission of HIV, because those plaintiffs believe that PrEP “encourage[s] and facilitate[s] homosexual behavior.”

The plaintiffs raise a number of legal claims against Obamacare’s preventive care provisions, including a pair of constitutional arguments.

The first of these arguments claims that the PSTF and the ACIP, the two expert panels empowered to add items to the list of preventive services, are not composed of “officers of the United States” and therefore cannot wield regulatory power.

The Constitution provides that “officers of the United States” may only be appointed by the president, the “courts of law,” or the “heads of departments.” ACIP members — members of the panel that deals with vaccinations — are appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who unquestionably qualifies as a “head of department.” But members of the PSTF are appointed by the director of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the director of this agency may not qualify as a “head of department.”

This argument about whether the members of these two panels were properly appointed, however, could prove to be a bit of a sideshow in the Kelley litigation because the plaintiffs raise a different constitutional argument that is very likely to prevail in the Supreme Court.

Under current law, Congress has broad authority to delegate regulatory power to federal agencies. As the Court held in Mistretta v. United States (1989), Congress may permit agencies to regulate private entities so long as it “lay[s] down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise the delegated authority] is directed to conform.”

Dissenting in Gundy v. United States (2019), however, Justice Neil Gorsuch proposed replacing this longstanding rule with a vague new standard that would effectively empower the Supreme Court to veto any regulation promulgated by a federal agency. And, while Gorsuch wrote that opinion in dissent, five justices have since signed onto the general framework that Gorsuch laid out in Gundy.

The framework laid out in Gorsuch’s Gundy opinion is complicated, and important parts of that opinion are so vague that it’s not possible to predict its full implications. But the heart of Gorsuch’s approach is that there should be strict constitutional limits on Congress’s power to delegate regulatory authority to agencies.

A federal law permitting agencies to regulate, Gorsuch wrote in Gundy, must be “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”

And that brings us to the Supreme Court’s decision in Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania (2020). Little Sisters involved a Trump administration regulation that permitted employers with religious or moral objections to birth control to refuse to cover contraceptive care in their employee’s health plans. But, in his majority opinion upholding this Trump-era regulation, Justice Clarence Thomas also strongly suggested that the provision of Obamacare governing women’s preventive care is unconstitutional.

That provision, which permits HRSA to lay out “comprehensive guidelines” regarding which “preventive care and screenings” for women should be covered by insurers, gives HRSA “virtually unbridled discretion,” according to Thomas — a clear sign that Thomas and the four other justices who joined Thomas’s opinion believe that this provision is unconstitutional under the framework Gorsuch laid out in Gundy. (Thomas elected not to strike down the provision because “no party has pressed a constitutional challenge to the breadth of the delegation involved here.”)

The other preventive care provisions of the Affordable Care Act — the ones dealing with vaccinations, pediatric care, and other preventive care services — are similar to the provision dealing with women’s health care. And thus they are also potentially vulnerable under the approach that Gorsuch laid out in Gundy and that Thomas laid out in Little Sisters.

So what happens if the Kelley plaintiffs win?

In the short term, it is exceedingly likely that O’Connor will strike down the challenged provisions of the Affordable Care Act. O’Connor hears an unusually large diet of Obamacare-related cases, including the case where he ruled that the entire law must be repealed, because conservative litigants often intentionally file challenges to Obamacare in O’Connor’s court in the hope that the case will be assigned to him.

Yet, because O’Connor so frequently hands down orders benefiting anti-Obamacare litigants, his opinions sometimes reveal the limits of the judiciary’s power to diminish access to health care.

In 2018, for example, O’Connor issued an injunction forbidding the federal government from enforcing the requirement that health insurers cover birth control, at least with respect to individuals who “object to the Contraceptive Mandate for sincere religious reasons.” But, as O’Connor lamented in a more recent opinion, this injunction had little effect “because few, if any, insurance companies are currently offering contraceptive-free policies.”

So, even though O’Connor issued an order that permits insurers to offer contraceptive-free policies to people who object to birth control on religious grounds, the insurers themselves have elected not to do so.

A likely reason for this decision by health insurers is fairly straightforward. The cost of birth control is much less than the cost of a pregnancy. Indeed, one of the Obama administration’s arguments for requiring insurers to cover contraceptive care is that insurers would break even or even save money if they provide free contraceptive coverage to their customers.

For similar reasons, many insurers may still choose to cover many preventive treatments even if they are no longer required to do so. It may be cheaper, for example, for an insurer to pay for vaccines rather than to pay to treat the disease prevented by that vaccine.

But not all preventive treatments are likely to be cost-effective from the perspective of an insurance company driven solely by a profit motive. According to the National Cancer Institute, for example, the median age when a cancer patient is diagnosed with that disease is 66 years old — which means that the majority of cancer patients are over the age of 65 and therefore are eligible for Medicare.

For this reason, health insurers may not be willing to offer free cancer screenings to their patients, on the theory that the cost of paying for cancer treatments is likely to be picked up by the federal government.

The biggest victims of the Kelley litigation, in other words, could be patients who put off being screened for deadly diseases until after those patients are eligible for free care under Medicare — thereby risking that, by the time the disease is discovered, it may be too advanced to treat it successfully.

And yet, given the Supreme Court’s opinion in Little Sisters, there is a very good chance that this fate will await cancer patients and other people whose lives could be saved by preventive care.

Mitch McConnell on Thursday ruled out support from his Republicans for President Joe Biden's new infrastructure plan, all but ensuring that the proposal will have to pass with lockstep Democratic unity in the Senate.

At an event in Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader pilloried the $2.5 trillion infrastructure proposal as exacerbating the debt and raising taxes. McConnell said the bill would not get a single Senate GOP vote, despite the White House's bipartisan outreach.

"That package that they're putting together now, as much as we would like to address infrastructure, is not going to get support from our side. Because I think the last thing the economy needs right now is a big, whopping tax increase," McConnell told reporters.

Senate Democrats are already signaling they may set up the infrastructure bill to pass along party lines via budget reconciliation, a process that allows certain legislation to pass with a simple majority but comes with strict restrictions on what can be included. Already Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer helped Biden push a $1.9 trillion coronavirus spending bill through the 50-50 Senate via the blunt legislative maneuver, with not a single Republican supporting it.

Biden's blend of tax changes and infrastructure spending, to be followed by a health care-focused component, is likely to meet the same fate. McConnell said the White House's new proposal and the GOP reaction to it "underscores the principle difference between the two parties."

"You're either alarmed about the level of national debt and the future impact of that on our children and our grandchildren or you aren't," he said. "My view of infrastructure is we ought to build that which we can afford, and not either whack the economy with major tax increases or run up the national debt even more."

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp laid into President Joe Biden for his opposition to Georgia’s new voting restrictions, calling his push to get the MLB All-Star Game out of Atlanta “ridiculous.”

After Biden called the new Georgia law 21st-century “Jim Crow,” Kemp defended the restrictions in a Fox News interview Thursday, pulling out a side-by-side chart comparing voting regulations in Georgia and Biden’s home state of Delaware.

“When the president of the United States says something, you know a lot of people pay attention. But what Joe Biden needs to do is look at the side-by-side of Georgia and Delaware,” Kemp said. "He’s focused on trying to get Major League Baseball to pull the game out of Georgia, which is ridiculous.”

Kemp then went on to compare the two states’ voting regulations, at times without crucial context.

Kemp first said that Delaware doesn’t have in-person early voting, but Georgia does. In 2019, Delaware enacted a law that established in-person early voting starting in 2022. The Georgia law did expand in-person weekend early voting.

Kemp then pointed out that Georgia has no-excuse absentee voting, while Delaware doesn’t. Kemp was correct on Delaware, but GOP lawmakers in Georgia did consider rolling back no-excuse absentee voting, but that ultimately didn't make it into the law Kemp signed.

Kemp also claimed that Georgia allows drop boxes, while Delaware doesn’t. Georgia’s new law restricted drop boxes, requiring each county to have at least one but limiting any additional drop boxes based on the county’s population of registered voters. Delaware had drop boxes in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, but it's unclear whether that will be the case in the future.

Georgia’s recently passed law will create a new ID requirement for voters wanting to cast their ballot absentee, shorten runoff length and effectively hand the election board to the Legislature, while limiting drop boxes. The changes come after Democrats won two key Senate runoff races in Georgia, giving Democrats control of the chamber.

GOP lawmakers in Georgia and elsewhere, especially backers of former President Donald Trump, have backed new voting restrictions in the name of "election integrity" despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Democrats have pushed back, calling the efforts “voter suppression,” with Biden among the voices not holding back in their opposition, with the president calling it an “atrocity” last week.

On Wednesday, Biden said he’d back moving MLB’s “Midsummer Classic” out of Atlanta due to the new law.

"I think today's professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly," Biden said in an interview with ESPN. "I would strongly support them doing that. People look to them. They're leaders."

In wake of the new law, Biden has pushed Congress to pass election reform legislation, namely H.R. 1, which would reform ballot access and campaign finance, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore struck-down provisions of the Voting Rights Act. He's also suggested he's open to getting right of the filibuster for issues like voting rights.

Kemp has faced blowback from Biden and major Atlanta-based companies, including Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola. Kemp said Thursday that he wouldn’t bow to the corporate pressure, saying that corporations that have opposed the new law won’t get back on board due to activist pressure.

“There is nothing I can do about that,” Kemp said. “I not going be bullied by these people. But I’m also not running a public corporation. They'll have to answer to their shareholders. There is a lot of people that work for them and have done business with them that are very upset.”

Kemp has been all over the airwaves after signing the law last week, saying Thursday that he’s done more than 20 interviews in the past 24 to 36 hours, “pushing the truth out.”

"We ... want to make sure the election is secure and that all Georgians have confidence in it," Kemp said.

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose by 61,000 last week to 719,000, signaling that many employers are still cutting jobs even as more businesses reopen, vaccines are increasingly administered and federal aid spreads through the economy.

The Labor Department said Thursday that the number of claims increased from 684,000 the week before. Though the pace of applications has dropped sharply since early this year, they remain high by historical standards: Before the pandemic flattened the economy a year ago, jobless claims typically ran below 220,000 a week.

Still, the four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week gyrations, fell by 10,500 to 719,000 — the fewest since mid-March 2020, just before the pandemic began to cause widespread layoffs.

All told, 3.8 million people were collecting traditional state benefits during the week ending March 20. If you include federal programs that are meant to help the unemployed through the health crisis, 18.2 million people were receiving some type of jobless aid in the week that ended March 13. That's down from 19.7 million in the previous week.

Economists monitor weekly applications for unemployment aid for early signs of where the job market is headed. Applications generally reflect the rate of layoffs, which normally fall steadily as a job market strengthens. During the pandemic, though, the numbers have become less reliable as states have struggled with application backlogs and allegations of fraud have clouded the actual volume of job cuts.

Even so, measures of the overall economy show clear improvement from the collapse last spring, with the rising number of vaccinations encouraging people to return to airports, shopping centers, restaurants and bars. The number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases has dropped from an average of about 250,000 a day in early January to below 70,000, though it has begun to rise again in recent days.

Last month, consumer confidence reached a post-pandemic peak. And the $1,400 checks in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief plan have sharply lifted consumer spending, according to Bank of America’s tracking of its debit and credit cards. Spending jumped 23% in the third week of March compared with pre-pandemic levels, the bank said.

And even with the pace of layoffs still relatively high, hiring has begun to accelerate. In February, employers added a robust 379,000 jobs across the country. Last month, they are believed to have added even more: According to the data firm FactSet, economists expect the March jobs report being released Friday to show that the economy added a sizable 614,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate fell from 6.2% to 6%. Less than a year ago, the jobless rate had hit 14.8%.

Some economists are even more optimistic: Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the tax advisory firm RSM, is predicting 1 million added jobs for March.

The Federal Reserve’s policymakers have substantially boosted their forecast for the economy this year, anticipating growth of 6.5% for 2021, up from an estimate in December of just 4.2%. That would be the fastest rate of expansion in any year since 1984.

“With vaccination efforts increasing seemingly by the day, hope may finally be on the horizon," said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “Getting the public health situation back to normal is the only way to stop coronavirus’ economic damage. A robust recovery will only be able to flourish once the virus is under control.”

Still, the economic impact of the pandemic lingers. The data firm Womply reports that 63% of movie theaters and other entertainment venues were closed last week, as were 39% of bars and 39% of hair salons and other beauty shops.

Republicans around the country are waging all-out war on voting rights, with more than 250 bills in a huge majority of states—43 of them—to restrict the franchise. Georgia has been the most visible and extreme example, but it is certainly not the only state on a backward to the good ol' days when only white male property owners could vote.

The Democrats' For the People Act, along with the forthcoming John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, are intended to combat this resurgence of Jim Crow. As Stephen Wolf wrote when the House passed H.R. 1, its version of the For the People Act has three key aims: "(1) removing barriers to expanding access to voting and securing the integrity of the vote; (2) establishing public financing in House elections to level the playing field; and (3) banning congressional gerrymandering by requiring that every state create a nonpartisan redistricting commission subject to nonpartisan redistricting criteria."

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Or if you're The New York Times' Nicholas Fandos and Michael Wines, who decided to throw a whole bunch of editorializing into their supposed "news" reporting, the bill is "a sweeping liberal wish list that includes restoring voting rights to felons who have served their sentences, making it easier to register and vote, reining in undisclosed campaign donations, securing elections against cyberattacks and ending the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts." They could have just quoted Mitch McConnell there and saved themselves the professional embarrassment. Because all those things are part of the bill, yes, but they are all core democratic principles, with a small "d." They're also really popular and—yes—get bipartisan support among actual voters.

Historian Kathleen Frydl breaks it down in a tweet thread. Pew polling, she points out, has found "seven-in-ten (69%) Americans favored granting voting access to those convicted of felonies after they serve their sentences. Though majorities in both parties backed this, Democrats (82%) were far more likely than Republicans (55%) to support [it]." Further findings from late 2018 show 64% overall support for same-day voter registration and 65% support automatic voter registration for eligible citizens with 87% saying voter registrations should be updated automatically for voters who have moved house. Early and no-excuse absentee voting get 71% support, even 57% from Republicans.

But for the NYT this is all a "messaging" bill, "a statement of Democratic values during the last Congress," that is causing—of course—disarray among Democrats who have to "transform" it "into a viable piece of legislation." There is one Democrat who is really causing trouble. That's Sen. Joe Manchin, who has gone so far as to give credence to the Big Lie from Donald Trump and Republicans that the 2020 election wasn't valid.

He says that he will only support legislation that is bipartisan because that's what's essential "to restore faith and trust in our democracy." He points to "American's declining trust in government and each other" and says that the only way to fix that is to "transcend partisanship." That's Manchin saying that Republican lies about voter and elections fraud are valid. That's Manchin saying that the only way to fix democracy is to let Republicans—who want to make sure to the largest extent possible that the people who aren't voting for them don't get to vote at all—have veto power in the effort.

Manchin insists that some of the minor provisions of S.1 could get "bipartisan" support, and says those are the ones he'd agree to, but he's listing things that Republicans have routinely rejected, like a mandated 15 days of early voting. He ignores most of the major and critical provisions to restore democracy including gerrymandering reform, voter registration expansion and improvements, vote-by-mail access, voter purge prevention—all the things that Republicans have attacked in their voter suppression efforts.

Despite the best efforts of the NYT to inflate Manchin's opposition into a complete collapse of the bill in the Senate, Democrats there are going forward on S.1. "Right now, my focus is to keep this bill together as one package and get it through the committee," Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, told the Times. It has support of voting rights and good government advocates, too.

"There is baseline commitment to keeping this bill together and passing it as it is," said Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21 and a long-time champion of campaign finance and elections reforms. "With 49 co-sponsors of this bill, it's not a situation where one should be negotiating against themselves to satisfy the desires of opponents. We strongly support adopting this bill as whole, enacting it as whole and getting it signed into law as whole."

It’s 49 to 1 for Joe Manchin, unless he decides to join the white supremacists across the aisle. At some point. The largest parts of this bill have to pass or the "faith and trust in the government" that Manchin says he holds so dear will be gone forever.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's silly quote about Biden's plan highlights a sad truth.

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Investigations of what happened in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 are still ongoing in both the House and Senate. At the same time, hundreds of those involved in the assault on the Capitol have now been charged with crimes ranging from entering a restricted area to conspiracy against the United States.

But while the actions of the insurrectionists are being investigated, so are the actions of the police and other agencies involved in protecting the Capitol and everyone who works there. On Thursday, CBS News released portions of a report made by the inspector general for the Capitol Police. That report, which dates to March 1, doesn’t really have a lot of new information. However, it underlines the most critical points: The Capitol Police consistently downplayed the threat of violence on Jan. 6, appeared to ignore both FBI warnings and violence at previous events, and failed to develop a comprehensive plan for dealing with the day that ended in insurgency.

It’s a portrait of a department that was both inadequate for the task and unprepared. And the lack of concern about the potential for large-scale violence again raises concerns about how the authorities failed to take appropriate action, even when they knew white supremacists and militia groups were going to play a major role in Donald Trump’s “wild” event. Not only did police turn a blind eye to threats in violence in their own city, they completely ignored what had been happening across the nation in the months leading up to the insurrection.

The timeline of events leading up to Jan. 6 includes violence that took place across the country and dated back over a year. In January 2020, even before the pandemic began, armed militia members invaded the Kentucky state capitol and waved their weapons in a “Second Amendment rally.” In April 2020, gun-carrying militia members swarmed the state capitol in Michigan. In August, armed extremists forced a congressional session to be halted in Idaho’s capitol. In December, armed invaders occupied Oregon’s capitol, which had been closed because of the pandemic. 

As the Associated Press wrote on Jan. 7, all of these events were clearly “dress rehearsals” for what would take place in Washington, D.C. as Trump supporters gathered to disrupt the final count of the electoral votes. Trump extremists in Idaho smashed windows, pushed past police, and forced their way into congressional chambers. Insurgents in Oregon carried AR-15s into the building and deployed pepper spray against the police who to tried to get them to leave.

In the days following the election, hundreds of armed Trump supporters tried to halt counting in Arizona and Nevada. Hundreds of militia members threatened officials in Michigan. Armed men threatened an assault on vote-counters in Pennsylvania. 

On Nov. 14, the first pro-Trump rally in Washington following the election brought thousands of white nationalists wearing tactical gear and body armor. Included were members of the Proud Boys and multiple state militias. A second rally on Dec. 12 also brought at least 200 members of the Proud Boys, along with other militia members decked out in camo, helmets, and vests. Violence led to multiple arrests on both occasions.

That’s a far from complete catalog of events leading up to what was clearly going to be a much larger gathering on Jan. 6. However, it’s certainly enough to make it clear to the Capitol Police that Washington, D.C. was about to be invaded by thousands of white nationalist Trump supporters who had already demonstrated that they were willing to initiate violence, push pass police lines, and invade government buildings. Even without the FBI bulletin that arrived on Jan. 5, there was every reason to believe that the threat of extreme violence was real.

The Capitol Police seemed to recognize this threat. According to the inspector general’s report, an internal assessment on Jan. 3 warned that the Trump supporters were facing a "sense of desperation and disappointment” that could “lead to more of an incentive to become violent." That same assessment recognized that "Congress itself is the target on the 6th."

But, somehow, despite this knowledge, leadership in the Capitol Police failed to create a unified plan for actions on Jan. 6. And even though they were being given exactly the opposite message in their own internal assessments, officers were told that "acts of civil disobedience/arrests" were "improbable." 

In the wake of the insurrection, Police Chief Steven Sund resigned. However, since then Sund has said he regrets his resignation and complained that calls for his replacement were premature. But the inspector general report not only makes it clear that Sund failed to prepare his team or seek the necessary resources, it also makes serious allegations about the planning done by acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman, and about Pittman’s openness with Congress in discussing that planning.

Following the issue of the report, Pittman continued to insist: "Although we knew the likelihood for violence by extremists, no credible threat indicated that tens of thousands would attack the U.S. Capitol ...” But the nature of that threat should have been—and in fact was—obvious. This was a larger version of the state-level protests that had already demonstrated the willingness of armed white supremacist militias to assault police, push through security lines, smash doors and windows, and invade restricted buildings with the intent of disrupting government. They had already done all those things on a smaller scale. This was the big stage.

The violence on Jan. 6 was not an aberration. It was just the largest in a series of events that had, with Trump’s incitement and encouragement, raged across the nation for a year. To issue statements that violence was “improbable” or to complain that there was “no credible threat” … is incredible.

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A recent essay in a prominent right-wing outlet gives an unusually clear window into the modern right’s anti-democratic worldview.

The right-wing rebellion against American democracy is often subtle, expressing itself through tricky changes to election law without a full-throated acknowledgment of what lawmakers are actually doing. But sometimes, the mask slips — and someone in the conservative movement openly tells you what’s really going on.

One such slippage took place last week when the American Mind — a publication of the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank based in California — published an incendiary essay arguing that the country has already been destroyed by internal enemies.

“Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,” Glenn Ellmers, the essay’s author, writes. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

These seditious citizens are opposed, according to Ellmers, by “the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism.”

If Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and fight “a sort of counter-revolution,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured. See you in the gulag.”

What exactly this counter-revolution entails is unclear, but Ellmers has some tips. “Learn some useful skills, stay healthy, and get strong,” he writes. “One of my favorite weightlifting coaches likes to say, ‘Strong people are harder to kill, and more useful generally.’”

Ellmers’s essay has been widely discussed in American media and intellectual circles, due to its bracing honesty about the modern right’s worldview and the prominence of the outlet that published it. Claremont is an influential institution of the right; one of its publications, the Claremont Review of Books, published the notorious “Flight 93” essay arguing that the 2016 election was a choice between Trump and national extinction. (“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” that essay declared in its opening line.)

In the post-Trump era, the type of hard-right politics preached in Claremont publications “is simply conservatism writ large,” as Jane Coaston writes in a Vox essay on the California right. They’ve become the intellectual organ of Trumpist conservatism — an organization whose mission looks more and more like manufacturing an intellectual justification for the GOP’s right-wing populist.

The rhetoric of national emergency and decline that you hear in Claremont publications permeates mainstream GOP rhetoric. Minutes before the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump told his assembled supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” In a 2019 speech, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned that “we have come again to one of the great turning points in our national history, when the fate of our republican government is at issue.” In a 2020 Facebook post, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared that “Democrats want to defund, destroy, and dismantle our country.”

As absurd as it may seem, Ellmers’s essay should be taken seriously because it makes the anti-democratic subtext of this kind of conservative discourse into clearly legible text. And it is a clear articulation of what the movement has been telling us through its actions, like Georgia’s new voting law: It sees democracy not as a principle to respect, but as a barrier to be overcome in pursuit of permanent power.

The right against “conservatism”

Inasmuch as there is a central argument in Ellmers’s piece, it is this: The label “conservative” no longer accurately captures what the American right should be about. This is because “conservatism” implies preserving or protecting something already in place, when in fact America is so hopelessly corrupted that there’s little worth saving.

“The US Constitution no longer works,” Ellmers writes. “What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.”

Many traditional conservatives, in his mind, are blind to this fact. Trump’s victory represented the true people rising up against an establishment that was unwilling to openly state how precarious the country’s situation is:

The great majority of establishment conservatives who were alarmed and repelled by Trump’s rough manner and disregard for “norms” are almost totally clueless about a basic fact: Our norms are now hopelessly corrupt and need to be destroyed. It has been like this for a while—and the MAGA voters knew it, while most of the policy wonks and magazine scribblers did not… and still don’t. In almost every case, the political practices, institutions, and even rhetoric governing the United States have become hostile to both liberty and virtue. On top of that, the mainline churches, universities, popular culture, and the corporate world are rotten to the core. What exactly are we trying to conserve?

Trump’s main failing, on Ellmers’s telling, is not that he was destructive — but that he was too ignorant and poorly advised to attack the right targets.

“As if coming upon a man convulsing from an obvious poison, Trump at least attempted in his own inelegant way to expel the toxin,” Ellmers writes. “By contrast, the conservative establishment, or much of it, has been unwilling to recognize that our body politic is dying from these noxious ‘norms.’”

Ellmers is not all that interested in the mechanisms of how and why the country has become so broken. He doesn’t really explain in any detail the nature of the nefarious forces that have polluted most American minds; he rails against “the progressive, or woke, or ‘antiracist’ agenda that now corrupts our republic” and takes it as a given that his audience will agree that this threat is apocalyptic.

He is more interested, instead, in rallying the forces of Real America against enemies he describes in strikingly dehumanizing terms.

“If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman,” Ellmers writes. “Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.”

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Ellmers is hardly the only person on the right to see the opposition in a starkly negative light. A February poll found that a solid majority of Republicans, 57 percent, preferred to describe Democrats as “enemies” rather than as the “political opposition.” One of the central attitudes underpinning democracy — that sometimes the other side wins, and that’s okay — is buckling on the right.

The implications of Ellmers’s worldview are chilling. In a January 2020 essay, he predicted — more in sorrow than in anger, of course — that a civil war is coming.

“Not for the first time in our nation’s history, if this state of affairs continues force may be embraced as the only alternative when reason fails,” Ellmers writes. “We must fervently hope that things will change before they become violent. But if the clueless attitudes of our sclerotic elite remain unaltered, it is not hard to see what’s on the horizon.”

Freedom against democracy

If the extremism of Ellmers’s essay strikes you as similar to what you’ve heard from authoritarian political movements of the past, you’re not alone.

John Ganz, a perceptive critic of American conservatism, recently wrote that Ellmers’s essay should properly be termed “fascist.” Excommunicating a large percentage of the population from the body politic, describing once-idyllic society hopelessly corrupted by the forces of change, describing one’s enemies as animals or diseases, invoking the threat of physical force in a political context — these are all historically hallmarks of fascist rhetoric.

This analysis holds despite the fact that Ellmers speaks in a democratic idiom, portraying himself as a defender of the American democratic tradition against its enemies. Ganz notes that calls to restore “freedom,” “liberty,” and even “democracy” were used by fascist intellectuals and movements in interwar Germany, France, and Italy because they were culturally powerful — a way of recruiting the people to one’s way of thinking by speaking their language.

“In the US context it also makes sense that the reactionary mind would inevitably mythologize a ‘truer’ version of our republican and democratic traditions as the author does in this piece, because those are the basic symbols of our political tradition,” he writes. “In the French context, many fascist and para-fascist groups declared fealty to the ‘republican’ tradition, which is as nearly predominant in that country as it is in our own.”

One does not need to go to Europe to see political oppression defended in democratic terms. In 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace delivered an inaugural address in Montgomery, casting the South’s long tradition of oppression of African Americans as integral to southern freedom:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom- loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Ellmers’s essay is in line with this tradition, identifying freedom as a right that only a certain section of the population deserves. Those outside of it, either because they come from the wrong background or think the wrong way, have no just claim on our political system. When they wield power, it is by definition oppression.

In some ways, this is the central animating idea of the broader conservative movement in America. Ellmers is a radical who sees himself as opposed to “establishment” conservatism, but in reality, many on the broader right share a more attenuated version of his worldview — and pursue the disempowerment of their political opponents.

Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, and the attendant talk of a coalition of minorities and young voters creating a “permanent Democratic majority,” helped spread anxieties about declining electoral power on the political right. After the 2010 midterm elections, which swept Republicans into power in statehouses across the country, they acted — drawing gerrymandered maps and passing laws, like voter ID, seemingly designed to suppress Democratic-leaning constituencies.

Megan Varner/Getty Images

The state-level Republican lawmakers were often quite honest about their aim of locking Democrats out of office.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” former North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who chaired the state’s recent redistricting committee, once said. “So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

The January 6 attack on the Capitol was a pure expression of Ellmers-ism, a violent lashing out against a system that conservatives believe to be fraudulent and corrupt. The new round of voter suppression bills represents the more subtle 2010 variant of Republican anti-democratic attitudes: that the system can be rigged such that the Democratic threat is locked out of power for good.

There are at least eight proposals from Republican lawmakers in state legislatures around the country to seize partisan control over electoral administration. One of the most egregious examples, in Georgia, was passed into law last week. More broadly, there are over 250 state bills under consideration that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.

That these proposals are justified in the language of “restoring confidence” in elections and “preventing fraud” does not make them actually defensible in democratic terms — anymore than Ellmers’s thinly-veiled pining for a civil war is “democratic” because he wants to wage it in defense of a warped conception of liberty.

In a sense, Ellmers is right that America’s political system no longer works. He’s just wrong about who broke it — and why.

If the GOP won't wage all-out war to defend low corporate taxes, what is the world coming to?

In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out. From a report: The pandemic has made fools of many forecasters. Just about all of the predictions whiffed. Anthony Fauci was wrong about masks. California was wrong about the outdoors. New York was wrong about the subways. I was wrong about the necessary cost of pandemic relief. And the Trump White House was wrong about almost everything else. In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we've surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can't protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can). Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News' most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham's show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel's experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S. The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic's finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong: * He has blamed the vaccines for causing spikes in severe illness, by pointing to data that actually demonstrate their safety and effectiveness. * He has blamed the vaccines for suppressing our immune systems, by misrepresenting normal immune-system behavior. * He has suggested that countries such as Israel have suffered from their early vaccine rollout, even though deaths and hospitalizations among vaccinated groups in Israel have plummeted. * He has implied that for most non-seniors, the side effects of the vaccines are worse than having COVID-19 itself -- even though, according to the CDC, the pandemic has killed tens of thousands of people under 50 and the vaccines have not conclusively killed anybody. Usually, I would refrain from lavishing attention on someone so blatantly incorrect. But with vaccine resistance hovering around 30 percent of the general population, and with 40 percent of Republicans saying they won't get a shot, debunking vaccine skepticism, particularly in right-wing circles, is a matter of life and death.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Georgia Republicans try to punish a private company for criticizing voting restrictions.

[LGBTQ students sue Department of Education to require that federally-funded religious colleges "respect the sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression of their students."]

Obergefell v. Hodges was decided about 6 years ago. During the oral argument, Justice Alito posed a critical question to Solicitor General Don Verrilli. He asked whether religious colleges that favor traditional marriage could lose their tax exempt status. Verrilli was unwilling, or perhaps unable, to answer the question. Bill Eskridge and Chris Riano write in their excellent new book that "the issue had never come up in his preparation for the argument." Here is the exchange.

Justice Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­-exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­-sex marriage?

General Verrilli: You know, ­­I don't think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it's certainly going to be an issue. I don't deny that. I don't deny that, Justice Alito. It is –it is going to be an issue.

Six years later, Alito's question is no longer "going to be an issue." It is "an issue."

This week, 30 LGBTQ students filed a class action complaint against the Department of Education in the District of Oregon. The plaintiffs allege:

The U.S. Department of Education is duty-bound by Title IX and the U.S. Constitution to protect sexual and gender minority students at taxpayer-funded colleges and universities, including private and religious educational institutions that receive federal funding. The religious exemption to Title IX, however, seemingly permits the Department to breach its duty as to the more than 100,000 sexual and gender minority students attending religious colleges and universities where discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is codified in campus policies and openly practiced….

Religious exemptions may be constitutionally permissible, or even compelled, when the government regulates private action, even where some amount of harm to members of the community is involved. However, when the government provides public funds to private actors, like the colleges and universities represented by Plaintiffs, the Constitution restrains the government from allowing such private actors to use those funds to harm disadvantaged people. This Constitutional principle remains true even when the private actors are operating according to sincerely held religious beliefs, and it remains true whether the people they are harming are racial or ethnic minorities, sexual or gender minorities or those who reflect multiple, intersecting identities.

The plaintiffs seek sweeping relief:

a. Prohibiting Defendants from granting further religious exemptions to Title IX as applied to sexual and gender minority students;

b. Rescinding all prior religious exemptions to Title IX as applied to sexual and gender minority students;

c. Mandating that Defendants treat Title IX complaints from sexual and gender minority students at all taxpayer-funded religious colleges in the same manner as complaints from sexual and gender minority students at taxpayer-funded nonreligious colleges.

d. Requiring the Department to ensure that all federally-funded educational institutions respect the sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression of their students.

The effect of this suit would be comparable to withdrawing tax exempt status. How many of these institutions can afford to abjure all federal money? Perhaps BYU and Baylor. Maybe Liberty University. I doubt others could swing it. If this suit is successful, most religious colleges will have to comply, or close. Bob Jones, of course, is the first college listed in the complaint. But Notre Dame, quite conspicuously, is not mentioned. The Fighting Irish are not far behind. All schools with any codes governing sexual relations are at risk.

And make no mistake. We are not simply talking about traditional four-year colleges with religious missions. One of the plaintiffs attended the Fuller Theological Seminary. The complaint states that he "only attended for several days before the school expelled him for being gay and married to a man." If the Plaintiffs are successful, even theological seminaries would have to decline all federal funding–and perhaps state funding. Espinoza would be diluted. The government will fund religious schools, so long as they eschew traditional teachings on sexuality.

We are looking at a potential revolutionary change in how religious colleges function. Tax-exempt status is next. Barely six years after Obergefell, the courts will soon have to confront these issues. And, I fear, Justice Gorsuch's Bostock opinion has already settled the Title IX statutory issue. The Plaintiffs assert that the current exemptions violate substantive due process. As a formal matter, RFRA would not trump the 5th Amendment. Perhaps if the Court overrules Smith, there would be a direct conflict between the 5th Amendment and the Free Exercise Clause. The stakes of Fulton grow greater by the day.

For those curious, the case was assigned to Judge Ann Aiken. She was also the judge who presided over the Juliana class in the juvenile climate change litigation. Judge Aiken found there was a fundamental substantive due process right to a clean environment. This assignment is not auspicious for religious colleges.

Currently, the Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education is Suzanne Goldberg, formerly a professor at Columbia Law School. She founded Columbia's Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic. I suspect she may be sympathetic to this claim. I worry about a "sue and settle." For example, the Department of Education would enter into a consent decree with the class, forcing the federal government to accept new responsibilities without going through the formal rulemaking process. And once that consent decree is in place, it will be very difficult for other groups to challenge the arrangements.

I expect religious colleges will try intervene. I have not researched this issue, but the class will likely argue that intervention is not appropriate. If intervention is denied, then "sue and settle" becomes even more likely. And Judge Aiekn would preside over those proceedings.

Northeast governors built their climate agendas on the promise of offshore wind. The only problem: They’ll need help from Washington to realize their goals.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo boasts of making the Empire State a "global wind energy manufacturing powerhouse." His New Jersey counterpart, fellow Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, dreams of making his state the "national capital" for offshore wind. And Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, is banking on an offshore wind boom capable of powering his state's net-zero climate ambitions.

Offshore wind has the potential to slash greenhouse gas emissions, create union jobs and breathe billions of dollars into rusting ports along the Atlantic. But the industry and the governors backing it face a series of formidable obstacles ranging from opposition from the fishing community and beach dwellers to logistical challenges like building out port infrastructure and connecting to the Northeast's collection of aging grids.

Offshore wind isn't just a jobs boon for Northeastern states. It's the clincher for ambitious policies aimed at tackling climate change and expanding the economy, a solution to the problem of building renewables in a densely populated region where power demand is high but open land is scarce. Success means the Northeast goes from energy buyer to energy supplier.

"None of that comes to pass unless it's clear from the get-go that the Biden administration is going to be supportive of this industry," said Stephanie McClellan, who worked with the Biden campaign to develop its offshore wind strategy and founded the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind at the University of Delaware.

President Joe Biden has signaled he intends to do just that. On Monday, the White House announced it was opening up new tracts of ocean for leasing off New York, investing $230 million in port upgrades and making $3 billion in federal loans available to offshore wind and transmission developers. The White House hopes those moves will spur construction of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity along the U.S. coasts by 2030, growing the industry from almost zero today to the size of New England's entire power sector in a decade.

The flurry of early moves comes after two years of permitting delays under former President Donald Trump. As states along the Eastern Seaboard announced plans to build new offshore projects, permit applications piled up at the Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the lead permitting agency. Off the Massachusetts coast, Vineyard Wind initially planned on generating electricity this year. Instead, it is just now on the cusp of receiving its federal permit.

"I recognize over the past few years the federal government's approach to offshore wind would probably seem like a chicken with its head cut off, no direction, no consistency, but it is a new day under the Biden administration," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Monday in a call with three other Cabinet secretaries, White House climate czar Gina McCarthy and offshore wind executives. "It is going to be a full-force gale of good-paying union jobs that is going to lift people up."

Offshore wind represents a test of Biden's attempt to marry his climate and economic agendas, and of the ability of governors from both political parties to see aggressive policy goals through to the end. The American Clean Power Association, a wind industry trade group, estimates it could create as many as 80,000 jobs by 2030. And unlike Biden's legislative agenda, which must survive the gantlet of an evenly divided Senate, Biden does not need congressional approval to help propel the industry forward.

"Most people who have looked at the Northeast have concluded you don't get to net zero without a very strong offshore wind component," said Ken Kimmell, a former Massachusetts environmental regulator and director of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But a series of obstacles means developers are years away from installing turbines in the sea. Commercial fishermen and women are fiercely opposed to the industry. Wealthy homeowners on Long Island are fighting plans to land a transmission cable on a local beach. Beach communities in New Jersey and Maryland are worried about the sight of towering turbines on the horizon. Such concerns ultimately sank Cape Wind, the country's first offshore project, after years of lawsuits.

Some allies of the president worry Biden will move too quickly, steamrolling the concerns of the fishing industry in an attempt to pave the way for offshore turbines.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has taken up the mantle of the commercial fishing industry's concerns. In an interview, he said federal agencies should require developers to identify all ocean users and attempt to address their concerns at the onset of a project, arguing it would ultimately accelerate the process by avoiding lengthy and costly lawsuits.

"There's no reason to come into this like a bunch of gangbusters ready to take the whole place over. It's a public ocean for Pete's sake," Whitehouse said. "Have a little humility for people who've been in it for generations, when you're just showing up."

Green jobs and electrons

Northeastern governors, several of whom have set aggressive goals for reducing carbon emissions over the next two decades, are quick to tout the industry's economic impact. They face the potential for embarrassing, agenda-toppling stumbles if the new industry fails to make progress in the coming years.

Cuomo used his State of the State address in January to talk about jobs, pointing to the development of a tower manufacturing facility at the Port of Albany and a staging facility and maintenance hub at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal.

In New Jersey, the state is pushing the development of the country's first port dedicated to the offshore wind industry along the Delaware River. Smaller states like Connecticut are also piling on, investing in port infrastructure to serve the industry in Bridgeport and New London. The state has signed contracts to buy roughly 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind power, enough to meet about 20 percent of the state's energy supply.

"Our efforts to decarbonize our economy are creating one of the largest opportunities of the generation," said Katie Dykes, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

An analysis for New York's independent grid operator estimated the state needed 21 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2040 to meet its climate goals. That amounts to more than half the power plant capacity installed in New York today. A recent Massachusetts study estimated achieving net-zero emissions would require 15 gigawatts, while a New Jersey consultant pegged the Garden State's offshore wind needs at 11 gigawatts.

The massive build-out has created concerns about where to place all the turbines. State and federal officials say there is currently not enough ocean leased to support the build-out called for in state plans.

Doreen Harris, who leads the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, estimates there is a gap of 6,000 megawatts between the available lease areas and the goals of New York, New Jersey and neighboring states. She said the federal government's approach to future leases in the New York Bight, the area of shallow waters between Long Island and New Jersey, will be particularly important. Without new lease areas, the states' ability to achieve their wind development goals remain constrained.

The Biden administration committed Monday to leasing a new area of the New York Bight, saying it intended to announce a new lease sale by the end of 2021 or early 2022. Overseeing that process is Amanda Lefton, a former New York environmental policy official whom Biden tapped to lead the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM.

"Success at BOEM is going to mean that we created a more certain process that allows for transparency and efficiencies for reviewing offshore wind projects," Lefton said in an interview.

Fishing groups and shifting markets

The prospect of leasing large amounts of ocean for wind development has drawn fierce opposition from fishing groups. Earlier this month, lobstermen in Maine encircled a survey vessel working off the state's coast, according to local news reports.

Fishing groups balked at Biden's big offshore energy plans.

David Frulla, a Washington-based attorney who represents the Atlantic scallop fishery industry, warned it could end up as "collateral damage" in the administration's push for more development.

The fishing industry fears offshore wind developments will result in radar interference, an inability to fish in certain areas, and changes in currents and larval distribution, among other problems. Those issues are typically addressed on a state-by-state basis. That doesn't work for the industry, said Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which represents commercial fishing interests. She called for more federal oversight.

"We haven't seen too much grassroots cooperation," Hawkins said. "Compensatory mitigation can't be state by state. ... You need a little more top-down, heavy-handed regulation of this if we want to make progress on the fishing issue, or an entirely bottom-up [approach]."

Hawkins cited New York for taking a regional approach to address fishing concerns. The Vineyard Wind developer is also working with fisheries associations in Massachusetts and Rhode Island on data collection. But she said projects appear to be moving forward despite issues around marine life and industries, risking the viability of the seafood supply chain.

"What tends to get overlooked is all of the shoreside jobs," Hawkins said. "For every job on a boat, there's six or eight on shore. Any change in product availability and processing will change the markets."

Even some supporters of the industry are concerned about the prospects of moving too fast.

But lessons learned from Europe and preliminary research in the United States provide a solid foundation to get moving on wind projects, environmentalists say, as long as government officials and wind developers maintain flexibility to make changes and incorporate new information as they move ahead.

"The urgency of the climate moment demands that we move offshore forward as quickly as responsible development will allow," said Catherine Bowes, the offshore wind program director for the National Wildlife Federation.

Wind developers contend the impact will be far less than fishermen and women fear, and they're willing to work with the fishing industry to address concerns.

In Vineyard Wind's case, the company agreed to change the orientation of its turbines to address the fishing industry's concerns about navigation, move the landing point of its transmission cable to a community willing to accept it, eliminate tower locations visible from Nantucket and reduce the number of turbines proposed from more than 100 to 62.

"I honestly feel that we have been extremely receptive to what has been going on," said Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Pedersen, though he noted some remain opposed to the project. "But if the ultimate ask is that we should never be there, of course we can never agree to that."

Administration officials said they were attuned to concerns about offshore wind's impact on fisheries. They pointed to a newly signed memorandum of understanding between NOAA Fisheries and Orsted, a Danish developer with five projects along the east coast, to share biological data from the company's lease area.

NOAA will also fund $1 million in grants to study the industry's impact on fishing and coastal communities, said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who oversees NOAA and championed offshore wind during her tenure as Rhode Island governor.

"There are natural tensions, sometimes between fish and fisheries and what you want to do," said Raimondo, who stepped down as governor of Rhode Island this month. "We will work through those tensions together based on data and science, and collaborations at this time are core to that."

'I call it a wind factory'

Along the East Coast, vocal residents plan to challenge the region's offshore wind goals by seizing on local opportunities to weigh in on electric transmission lines tied to the projects.

The recent battle between town planners and wealthy homeowners in the ritzy East Hampton, N.Y., enclave of Wainscott may portend what's to come as states aim to erect massive turbines off the shorelines of beach communities.

Called "Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott," the well-financed group amassed roughly $1 million in donations during its first year to fight the planned South Fork wind project, raising consternation about the cable (and ensuing construction) that would snake through the residential area.

Run by powerful figures — such as Daniel Neidich, who co-founded Dune Capital Management with fellow Goldman Sachs alum Steven Mnuchin — the group has pushed for the cable to instead land at Hither Hills State Park in Montauk. The state Public Service Commission and local planning boards have since approved the cable landing, but the group has already filed a lawsuit.

Experts said the biggest threat these groups pose comes less from the challenges themselves, but the delays they could cause wind developers working on rapid timelines.

"Time is money," said Jeremy Firestone, a legal studies professor at the University of Delaware, who specializes in offshore wind litigation. "Delay is a real cost."

A similar fight is brewing in southern New Jersey, where homeowners are calling on town leaders to reject a cable landing for the proposed Ocean Wind project. They raise concerns with a variety of issues, but mostly they don't want to see turbines from the beach.

"They call it wind farms. I call it a wind factory," said Joe Balkovec, a Pennsylvania resident who spends summers in his home in Ocean City, N.J.

Well-funded opposition from the shoreline has sunk offshore wind ambitions before. Cape Wind was proposed off the coast of Cape Cod in 2001 but died a slow death thanks to lawsuits filed by opponents of the project.

State regulators have sought to downplay visual concerns. Joe Fiordaliso, president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, noted that Ocean Wind is 15 miles from shore. "You're barely going to see them unless you have Superman vision," he said.

Block Island, the project off the Rhode Island coast, succeeded through a combination of compromises and court battles, said Jeff Grybowski, who oversaw the development as the CEO of Deepwater Wind LLC. Grybowski is applying the lesson once again as the head of U.S. Wind, which is seeking to build a 32-turbine project 17 miles off the coast of Maryland. The proposal has encountered opposition from the state's most popular beach town of Ocean City.

"You're always thinking about how do you reduce your litigation risk and how do you prepare yourself for the lawsuit that may or may not come," he said. "Sometimes you need to go beyond the regulations to kind of address areas that could be weaknesses later on."

What can Biden do?

Industry representatives and state officials say the single biggest thing Biden can do to jump-start the industry is provide certainty around the permitting process.

Before Vineyard Wind received its final environmental impact study earlier this month, many developers said they were unsure of what the government would require of a permit application.

Now, it is more a question of timing. Developers have filed 13 construction and operation plans. Industry representatives say there is a real need for White House leadership to coordinate with all the federal agencies involved in permitting.

Raimondo acknowledged interagency disagreements tied up permits in the past. A 2019 dispute between BOEM and NOAA Fisheries over Vineyard Wind's draft environmental impact statement threatened the project.

"I hope you, our partners in industry and labor, are feeling hopeful by seeing the entire Cabinet together in the same meeting, working in a coordinated, transparent fashion," Raimondo said.

The infrastructure challenges are also considerable. Many ports along the East Coast are not deep or wide enough to accommodate large vessels and lack the staging areas needed to assemble and move the bulky equipment sent out to sea. Finding locations to plug into the Northeast's collection of power grids can be a challenge.

On top of that, much of the onshore supply chain does not yet exist in the United States. The first projects built are expected to rely on turbines and towers manufactured in Europe.

"I'm building a supply chain, I'm building ports, I'm building boats, and I'm upgrading the grid," said David Hardy, who leads U.S. operations for Orsted. "People don't realize how much all that adds up."

In their comments Monday, administration officials made clear they were intent on capturing onshore jobs. DOE has funding available for large blade manufacturing, floating turbines and transmission studies, among other things. The Department of Transportation is offering $230 million in grants for port upgrades.

If federal infrastructure incentives would be helpful, federally approved projects are essential for the growth of a U.S. supply chain, wind executives said.

A growing number of manufacturers ranging from a foundation fabricator in New Jersey to a cable maker in South Carolina have already taken root in anticipation of an offshore wind boom. Yet many onshore plans will remain on standby until more projects are approved.

Orsted is one example. The company has ordered a 260-foot service operations vessel from a Louisiana boat builder, but construction hasn't started yet. Hardy said the company is waiting to receive its federal permits.

This story was reported and written by E&E News reporters Benjamin Storrow in Vermont and Heather Richards in Washington, and POLITICO reporters Danielle Muoio, Marie French and Samantha Maldonado in New York.

so bad

Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known. However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes. Now, scientists have identified seven genes that can be added to tame the cells' unruly nature, causing them to neatly divide into uniform orbs. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports: Scientists at JCVI constructed the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. They didn't build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome. They called it JCVI-syn1.0. Since then, scientists have been working to strip that organism down to its minimum genetic components. The super-simple cell they created five years ago, dubbed JCVI-syn3.0, was perhaps too minimalist. The researchers have now added 19 genes back to this cell, including the seven needed for normal cell division, to create the new variant, JCVI-syn3A. This variant has fewer than 500 genes. To put that number in perspective, the E. coli bacteria that live in your gut have about 4,000 genes. A human cell has around 30,000. NIST's role was to measure the resulting changes under a microscope. [...] The result was stop-motion video that showed the synthetic cells growing and dividing. This video shows JCVI-syn3.0 cells -- the ones created five years ago -- dividing into different shapes and sizes. Some of the cells form filaments. Others appear to not fully separate and line up like beads on a string. Despite the variety, all these cells are genetically identical. These videos and others like them allowed the researchers to observe how their genetic manipulations affected the cell growth and division. If removing a gene disrupted the normal process, they'd put it back and try another. Of the seven genes added to this organism for normal cell division, scientists know what only two of them do. The findings have been published in the journal Cell.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation Wednesday morning to legalize adult-use, recreational cannabis in New York and create the country’s second-largest recreational marijuana market.

With the governor’s endorsement of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, NY S854 (21R) / NY A1248 (21R), which cleared the Legislature late Tuesday, New York officially joins 16 other states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, that have embraced full legalization. More than two-thirds of the northeast’s 56 million residents will live in states that have legalized recreational cannabis, ramping up pressure on Washington, D.C., to ease federal restrictions on the drug.

"This is a historic day in New York — one that rights the wrongs of the past by putting an end to harsh prison sentences, embraces an industry that will grow the Empire State's economy, and prioritizes marginalized communities so those that have suffered the most will be the first to reap the benefits,” Cuomo said in a statement issued after he quietly signed the bill.

New Yorkers aged 21 and older can now legally possess and consume cannabis. Dispensaries are not expected to open in New York until at least 2022 under the new regulatory and licensing structure.

State Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) and Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, the sponsors of the legislation in their respective chambers, also touted the bill’s historic significance as it moved through the Legislature hours earlier.

“The last time New York State did anything like this is when we were removing the prohibition from alcohol: that was in 1933. Here we are in 2021 — almost 100 years of prohibition on marijuana — and we’re removing it,” Peoples-Stokes said during remarks delivered on the Assembly floor late Tuesday.

Krueger said she was “very proud to have played a role” in what she called “a nation-leading model for what marijuana legalization can look like.”

The bill’s passage and enactment marked a major political victory for Krueger and Peoples-Stokes, who had unsuccessfully pushed for legalization in New York for several years. It’s also an important win for Cuomo, who has faced questions in recent weeks over his ability to pass major legislation amid allegations of sexual harassment, inappropriate workplace behavior and a cover-up of nursing home deaths.

Cuomo, a Democrat, abandoned his push for legal cannabis after Covid-19 first hit New York last March, but pledged in January to make recreational cannabis a top priority for his Fiscal Year 2022 budget, which is due Wednesday. Although the governor had loomed large over previous failed cannabis negotiations, lawmakers and advocates sought to take advantage of his newly weakened state as the FY 2022 budget deadline approached.

Several backers of legalized marijuana ramped up calls to pass the legislation put forth by Krueger and Peoples-Stokes, describing it as “the gold standard for legalization.” They argued Cuomo’s budget proposal fell short, even with February amendments to how social equity funding would be allocated and what criminal charges would be enforced or imposed for improper sales. The Senate and Assembly, meanwhile, stripped marijuana legalization language from their budget proposals released earlier this month.

The Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, which was amended Saturday after the sponsors and Cuomo’s office struck a three-way deal on marijuana legalization, calls for the creation of an Office of Cannabis Management to oversee New York’s recreational, medical and agricultural cannabis markets.

It also sets a 9-percent sales tax on cannabis, an additional 4 percent tax split between counties and municipalities, plus another tax based on THC content — 0.5 cents per milligram for flower, 0.8 cents per milligram for concentrated cannabis and 3 cents per milligram for edibles. Forty percent of excess revenue from sales would be dedicated to reinvestment in communities disproportionately affected by the state’s drug laws, with 40 percent to public education and 20 percent to drug treatment, prevention and education.

The adult-use program is projected to bring in $350 million annually in tax collections when fully implemented, and could create an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 new jobs across New York.

Cities, towns and villages would have the ability to opt-out of having adult-use dispensaries and consumption sites in their communities.

The legislation further allows for limited home grow of three mature and three immature plants; includes equity programs to ensure broad opportunities for participation in the new legal industry; ends penalties for possession of less than three ounces of cannabis; and calls for automatic expungement of records for people with previous convictions for activities that are no longer criminalized. And it sets a new range of criminal penalties for unlawful possession and sale of cannabis, as well as incorporates impairment by cannabis into the infraction of driving while ability impaired.

Opponents have cautioned the legalization measure will increase rates of substance abuse and impaired driving. They’ve further raised concerns that New Yorkers below age 21 could more easily access the drug.

Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and a vocal critic of the MRTA, pledged to “help towns and communities exert local control over the marijuana industry and enact opt-out provisions,” as well as “hold lawmakers who supported this accountable."

New York is just the fourth state to pass recreational legalization through the Legislature, joining Illinois, Virginia and Vermont. Several other states, including New Mexico, Connecticut and Rhode Island, are also looking to pass adult-use legalization bills this year.

New Jersey voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in November to legalize recreational cannabis.

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Arkansas just became to the first state to pass a bill that would cut off trans kids from medical care. More are set to follow.

It’s become a transgender cliché at this point, but Amanda Dennis, a 41-year-old mom from Northwest Arkansas, always knew her middle child, B, was different.

So when B, now age 8, gravitated toward femininity, Dennis didn’t discourage it. “We have never raised our children in a manner of, ‘You’re a boy, you must do this. You must play with this. You’re a girl, you must do this, play with this,’” she told Vox. “I’ve allowed my children to self-direct and experience the world and life through however they choose to do that.”

That presented some challenges for B in kindergarten and first grade, where she was teased for her femininity by the boys in her class. But then the pandemic hit, and suddenly B was going to remote school, which gave her a chance to breathe and the family an opportunity to help her experiment with her gender in a safe space.

Dennis recalls a moment early in the pandemic when a friend was taking socially distant family pictures in their front yard. “She kept referring to B as ‘she,’ ‘her,’ ‘sweetheart,’ this and that,” said Dennis. “After that was done, I sat down with B and said, ‘How did that make you feel?’ And she said, ‘It doesn’t bother me. I actually prefer that.’”

Over the course of last summer, B started easing into identifying as a girl. Many discussions were held with B about how she’d like to dress, what pronouns she preferred, and trying out a new name. “It was the pandemic and being at home and being together as a family and feeling like we had this moment of safety around us,” said Dennis. It “allowed her to get to that point where she felt like, ‘Oh, I can do this.’”

Though B is much too young to start any kind of medical transition, which wouldn’t begin until after puberty starts around age 11 or 12, her social transition has already paid dividends to her mental health. “It was like a weight lifted off that child’s shoulders,” Dennis said. “It was such a beautiful moment to see her be able to fully embrace who she is as a person.”

Now back in a physical classroom, B seems to be thriving. She’s more relaxed and no longer comes home crying every day. But there’s a threat to B and her family’s newfound peace of mind — in the form of Arkansas’s Republican-led state legislature.

On Monday, state lawmakers passed HB 1570, which bans transition-related health care, like puberty blockers, for trans minors. HB 1570 also encourages, though not requires, health insurance companies to refuse to cover transition-related care for all trans people, even adults. This means if Gov. Asa Hutchinson signs the bill, which he is expected to do, B will not be able to access the care she may eventually need at the only adolescent gender clinic in the state, Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.

“The bill in Arkansas is among the most sweeping and egregious anti-trans bills this [legislative] session,” Chase Strangio, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Vox.

How the bill works, per Strangio: It would create civil and regulatory penalties for any health care provider who directly provides or even refers a patient for transition-related care to minors. It also bans state funds from being used toward transition-related care for minors, so even if someone goes out of state for care, but is on the state insurance plan or Medicaid, they would not be able to get coverage for that care.

The Arkansas bill is part of a larger, carefully coordinated campaign by the far right and religious conservatives to attack trans people in the wake of their failures to stop marriage equality and pass anti-trans bathroom bills over the past decade. So far, at least 18 states have proposed similar bans on transition-care for trans youth, though Arkansas is the first to pass it. Just last week, Hutchinson signed a sweeping religious exemption law allowing health care providers to refuse to treat LGBTQ people on the basis of religion or moral conscience; he also signed a bill banning trans girls from girls’ sports. Twenty-nine other states have introduced similar trans athlete ban bills this year.

Trans advocates have pointed out that these bills fit comfortably within the larger GOP plan to seize minority power in an effort to force their preferred gender dynamics. “The voting restrictions being passed in these statehouses are the fuel, and the limits on women and trans people are the fire,” Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the National Women’s Law Center, told Vox. “They know their retrograde views on gender are deeply unpopular, and they need to rig the game in order to be able to do it without facing consequences.”

Strangio promised that each and every anti-trans bill passed will be challenged in federal court. “We’re going to challenge the bills and build the public narrative,” he said. “I believe in the harm reduction potential of federal court and state court litigation.”

Branstetter, meanwhile, is looking toward the Biden administration, the president being an early and often vocal supporter of trans rights, to speak out against bills such as the one passed in Arkansas. She noted what a monumental moment it was in 2016 when then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke out against North Carolina’s bathroom bill, which was eventually partially repealed.

“I think an important next step would be for the Biden administration to stand up in support of trans people. I know I’m not alone,” she said.

And trans people really seem to need the support at the moment. The Arkansas bill that passed is so domineering that some families with trans kids are now looking to flee the state, which is not easy to just pick up and do. Dennis, who grew up in Arkansas, doesn’t want to leave her extended family behind.

“None of it is about protecting kids. It’s about removing the ability for parents to make decisions with their medical team and their children, which is private,” Dennis said.

She said she has a window of about two to three years before B’s puberty starts. “I have to make a really difficult decision: Do I stay here in this state or do I try to leave?” she said. “Eventually, if this is not overturned, we will have to leave the state of Arkansas.”

Why are Republicans trying to legislate trans kids’ care?

In late 2019, the anti-trans legislative movement was seemingly on its last legs. It had found early success by passing North Carolina’s bathroom bill, HB 2, which dictated that trans people use government-owned bathrooms according to the sex designated on their original birth certificate, in 2016. But HB 2 ended up a disaster for Republicans. After a massive outcry and resulting boycott (from the NCAA, major corporations, and others) that lost the state an estimated $3.7 billion in state revenue, the bathroom bill was partially repealed, and the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, the bill’s chief cheerleader, was run out of office.

After the North Carolina disaster, bathroom bills in other states failed to pass, effectively ending the bathroom ban effort in state legislatures.

Searching for a new effective line of attack, right-wing media latched onto the case of 8-year-old Luna Younger in Dallas, Texas. Younger was at the center of a bitter custody dispute between a mother who supported her gender identity and social transition and a father who refused to affirm the child.

Even though Luna, like B, is still years away from any potential medical intervention, conservatives took the opportunity to accuse Luna’s mom of wanting to “castrate” an 8-year-old, a completely false claim. After weeks of nonstop coverage and outrage by conservative news outlets like Breitbart and Fox News, several major and local Republican lawmakers rallied around the father, promising to bring the weight of the state against young Luna’s future medical transition.

In addition to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who called Luna’s transition “child abuse,” state legislators in several states promised to propose banning transition-related care for minors in their next legislative session in 2020. Ultraconservative, anti-LGBTQ organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation were quick to capitalize, organizing public events to spread panic over trans kids, fundraise, and write model state legislation for the bans.

While many of these bills were proposed during an election-year legislative session in 2020, none passed — until Arkansas’s this week.

These bills, along with a coordinated distraction of other bills seeking to ban trans girls and women from girls’ and women’s interscholastic and collegiate sports, have taken a serious toll on a trans community that is simply trying to live their lives without conservative lawmakers issuing diktats from their capitols.

“You shouldn’t have to worry that your kid is going to abruptly be cut off from their care because lawmakers want to destroy them,” said Strangio. “There are so many conversations about whether people can leave their jobs, whether people have enough savings, and we’re creating a massive amount displacement within our own country,” he said about the Arkansas bill.

Lawmaker after conservative lawmaker has used the debates over these bills to not-so-coyly push their opinion that trans kids should not legally exist. Earlier this month, Minnesota state Rep. Eric Lucero, who proposed a trans athlete ban in his state, said, “The last several years have been witness to a rise in the number of confused boys and men mistakenly believing themselves to be girls and women when the science says otherwise.” And bills like Lucero’s and the ones banning trans health care would effectively accomplish that — making trans kids’ lives impossible to live.

What is transition-related care for minors?

While many cis people say they’re fine with an adult transitioning their gender, a large number of people feel more squeamish about trans adolescents doing the same. A 2019 PRRI poll reported that 63 percent of Americans would be very or somewhat comfortable if a friend told them they were transgender; however, just 48 percent said the same if their child told them they were.

Trans kids have always existed, and they’ve been studied for at least the past 50 years. Over time, treatment has evolved significantly. Until 2013, being trans as a child was considered a psychological disorder, called gender identity disorder, and early scientists initially recommended “conversion therapy” for gender dysphoric children.

As time went on, however, conversion therapy became less socially accepted (it’s now banned in 20 states and the District of Columbia), and scientists in the early 2010s sometimes sought softer forms of manipulation to dissuade kids from expressing an alternative gender identity — such as isolating kids from opposite-sex friends and banning gender-nonconforming toys or clothes from a household. Overall, none of these “treatments” worked.

“In the past, doctors thought that gender diversity was a pathology, something that needed to be fixed,” said Jack Turban, a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches the mental health of transgender youth, in an email to Vox last year. “They would try to push kids to be cisgender. A recent study from our group found that transgender people exposed to attempts to make them cisgender had greater odds of attempting suicide.”

Nowadays, doctors recommend taking a humane and affirming approach when a child expresses that their gender may not match their assigned sex at birth. This affirmation includes allowing trans kids to socially transition (i.e., use whichever name, pronouns, and clothing make them comfortable). Medical interventions — like puberty suppression or gender-affirming hormones like estrogen or testosterone — are only recommended for adolescents who have been insistent, persistent, and consistent in their gender identity over long periods.

The affirming model has been recommended by nearly every major American medical association, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and many others.

While the affirming model is often willfully misconstrued as instructing parents to accept a child’s gender identity and rush them off into medical interventions, it’s really more about creating a space for trans kids to explore their own gender expression and more thoroughly understand their dysphoria before deciding on whether to transition or not. Allowing a trans adolescent to go on puberty blockers is a decision most parents don’t take lightly. Transitioning is a slow, deliberative process for minors.

Puberty blockers merely act as a pause on an adolescent’s natal puberty, so that adolescents ages 9 to 14 can be more mentally mature before deciding on the course of their permanent treatment when the time comes, according to Safer. Cross-sex hormones, which would be used later in the teen years, would mean testosterone injections for trans boys and a combination of a testosterone blocker in addition to estrogen for trans girls. Safer says it’s a careful and cautious system that also respects the autonomy young trans people should have over their lives and bodies.

However, conservative legislators with their bills to ban transition care have other ideas for trans children’s futures. They appeal to the fallacy that natal puberty is natural and therefore necessary for all kids.

But this approach would force trans girls into male puberty and trans boys into female puberty without their consent, and brings along its own permanent changes, which could only partially be reversed through painful and expensive medical treatments in adulthood. Trans women forced through male puberty would then have to undergo painful and expensive electrolysis to remove facial hair and may be left with a body frame (shoulder and hip width) that would be unchangeable by any surgeries. Trans men would have to have surgery to remove their breasts and, like their trans female counterparts, be forced to live in an unwanted body frame for their entire lives.

B is already experiencing anxiety over her impending puberty as she watches her 13-year-old brother go through it himself. “She came to me the other day and she said, ‘Mom, I’m really worried. Am I going to get an Adam’s apple? Because I don’t want that,’” said Dennis. “I said, ‘Sweetheart, I will do everything in my power. I will go to the ends of this earth to protect you.”

Arkansas trans people are terrified

If any message is clear from the Arkansas state legislature this past week, it’s that trans people are not welcome in the state.

“They’re just not listening to us,” said Rumba Yambu, director of Intransitive, a local trans-led organization that helps provide community and safety for trans people in Arkansas. “We’ve had parents, grandparents, trans people, medical professionals come and testify against these bills.”

Unless Gov. Hutchinson vetoes the bill, it will become law, and what happens after that remains somewhat to be seen. There will be litigation, as Strangio promised, but whether large corporations or the NCAA jump in with an HB 2-style mass boycott is an as-yet-unanswered question. And that may ultimately be what conservative legislatures are hoping for. The NCAA can’t pull events from the entirety of the lucrative Southeastern Conference footprint, which spans from Texas to South Carolina. And large corporations are unlikely to pull business from the whole of the South if each of these states passes discriminatory laws.

So ultimately, it may be up to the Biden administration to take action. The Justice Department could step in and file lawsuits or take regulatory action against these bills, as Lynch did in 2016. Biden could also use his White House platform to speak out against these bills, a move he stopped just short of doing in an International Transgender Day of Visibility statement released Wednesday.

Congress could also end all of this gender madness by simply passing the Equality Act, which passed the House several weeks ago and is awaiting further action in the Senate. (Though given Democrats’ narrow majority and the fact that the bill would need 60 votes to pass, its odds look slim.)

For now, Dennis said the trans families she knows who can afford it are looking to move away from the state. “I see a lot of expressions of fear,” said Dennis.

Even if she were to pack up her own family, which she doesn’t necessarily want to do, there aren’t a lot of potentially safe places nearby for her to move her child. Each state surrounding Arkansas has also proposed similar bills, from Texas to Missouri.

Dennis hopes that progressives from more liberal states won’t write this fight off. Arkansas is “beautiful. It’s full of beauty and we’re the natural state,” she said. “I love it here. I love where I live. I love my community. I love my people. And to think that there are groups of lawmakers in this state that want to rip that away is just very, very disheartening.”