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According to a report from Wisconsin's Division of Executive Budget and Finance, Foxconn has not built the enormous Gen 10.5 LCD factory in Wisconsin that it specified in its contract with the state. "It also says that the building the company claims is a smaller Gen 6 LCD factory shows no signs of manufacturing LCDs in the foreseeable future and 'may be better suited for demonstration purposes,'" reports The Verge. From the report: The report notes that Foxconn received a permit to use its so-called "Fab" for storage, which The Verge first reported this week. Furthermore, according to an industry expert consulted by the state, Foxconn has not ordered the equipment that would be needed to make LCDs. If the building were to be used as an LCD manufacturing facility, the expert notes it would be the smallest Gen 6 in the world and "would appear to be more of a showcase than a business viable for the long term." If any LCD-related manufacturing were to take place in the building, the analysis says, it would likely only be the final assembly of components produced elsewhere and imported to Wisconsin. Such a project would have a vastly smaller impact on local supply chains and employ nowhere near the 13,000 workers anticipated in Foxconn's contract with the state. Wisconsin Secretary of the Department of Administration Joel Brennan said in an interview with The Verge today that "clearly the Gen 6 that's been discussed and built in Mount Pleasant is not similar to other Gen 6 fabs around the world." Brennan said the memo was an effort to consult industry experts to better understand the scope of Foxconn's current project and its potential impact on the state. "There was justified criticism of the [former Governor Scott] Walker administration for entering into this contract, and not really getting any outside experts for an industry that was new to Wisconsin," Brennan said. "This is about making sure that we can use the best expertise that we have inside and outside state government so that we can make the best decisions possible." The report provides the fullest articulation of the state's reason for rejecting Foxconn's subsidy payments so far. Last week, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), which oversees the deal, denied the company its first installment of the nearly $3 billion refundable tax credits because it hasn't built the "Gen 10.5 Fab" specified in its contract. The project Foxconn has pursued instead, the new analysis says, would not have warranted the record-breaking subsidy package passed by then-Gov. Scott Walker, nor required the infrastructure state and local governments have built to support it. "Taxpayers fully performed their side of the agreement to date, while the Recipients have not," the report says. In fact, "state taxpayers have spent as much if not more than" Foxconn has on improvements to the company's supposed manufacturing campus. The Verge previously reported that state and local governments spent at least $400 million on the project, mostly on land and infrastructure the company will likely never need. Foxconn listed approximately $300 million in capital expenses at the end of 2019.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Given that the Trump administration has failed to give reasonable, consistent guidance and recommendations for life amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, it’s hardly surprising that instances of the virus spreading have been traced back to various social events. Sometimes clusters have been tied to weddings, family vacations, or, in multiple instances, religious gatherings. Most recently, a cluster of more than 50 COVID-19 cases, involving both people who attended the event and close contacts to those people, have been tied to a week-long church event in Charlotte, North Carolina.

As reported by local outlet WSOC, as of Wednesday, 51 confirmed cases of the virus have been linked to church activities at the United House of Prayer for All People. An additional 75 people who have been in close contact with those who have the virus have also been asked to quarantine. Among people with confirmed COVID-19, one miniature cluster includes five people who live in an assisted living facility. 

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According to a statement from the Health Department, the event included hundreds of people. The activities were reportedly held both inside and outside. As the statement puts it, event planners “made significant efforts to ensure mask-wearing and social distancing” but not all who attended were in compliance.

An anonymous person chatted with Channel 9 about his decision to not attend the church event in early October. “I decided because of health reasons in my family, I wasn’t going there," he told the station, adding that it “should have never been held. It was just too many people."

The big picture, of course, is that this pandemic is still ongoing, still potentially deadly, and still disproportionately killing Black and brown people. And as schools reopen, students, teachers, and staff alike are worried about outbreaks. And even still, people are legitimately terrified about finances and avoiding evictions, as federal pandemic relief continues to come up short. After months of inconsistent (or practically nonexistent) stay-at-home guidelines, many people are understandably itching for life to return to normal. But sadly, our lack of national guidance seems to only push that possibility further and further away. 

The reason that recruitment of law-enforcement officers into far-right extremist organizations has always been a source of concern is the likelihood that the officers—whose understanding of the law is wildly distorted by the belief systems underlying these groups—will not just enforce the law badly and selectively, but actively enable fellow (and often violent) right-wing extremists from the positions of power they hold.

That appears to be precisely the scenario unfolding in Michigan, where a number of sheriffs and other police authorities are telling reporters that they will not enforce the state’s ban on open carry of firearms at public polling places, announced last Friday. To counter their defiance, the state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, has ordered state police to patrol polling places in the areas most likely to see a local refusal to enforce the law.

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"The most important thing is this, we don't want people to harass voters when they are in the process of exercising what is a fundamental right, which is their right to vote," Nessel said last week when the policy was announced. "And I feel like it's my job to do everything I can to ensure there is a safe and secure vote, and I'm hopeful law enforcement will agree."

As Tess Owen at Vice reports, however, a number of sheriffs have already gone on the record saying they will not enforce the policy. One of them, Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy, posted a Facebook video indicating he would not enforce the directive.

“I’m a law-enforcement officer, not a directive enforcement officer,” he said, and then explained that he would not arrest people for carrying guns to the polling places, but he would arrest people engaged in active “voter intimidation.”

The head of the state’s police-chiefs association made similar assertions this week, claiming that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson lacks the authority to issue such a directive. Robert Stevenson, director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police told the Detroit News that “the feedback I’ve been getting from our police agencies is that they’re uncomfortable trying to enforce something they clearly don’t have the authority to enforce. Our hope is that this will get resolved and there’ll be some clear guidance.

"... But as it stands now, there’s nothing in the law that gives police the authority to enforce the Secretary of State’s edict."

A spokesperson for the secretary of state's office said Benson consulted with Nessel before issuing the order in an email response: "The directive was the result of the attorney general, the state’s top law enforcement official, reviewing relevant laws and legal precedent and ruling, in her capacity as that law enforcement official, that the secretary has the authority. It is within the scope of authority for executives to interpret relevant and applicable law and apply it appropriately, and is indeed based in law."

The ban comes amid an increasing flood of threatening far-right rhetoric agitating against state officials that culminated in the October 7 arrests of 14 men—all members of militia groups which claim an allegiance to “constitutionalist” beliefs about gun rights—on charges they plotted to kidnap and murder Whitmer and other state officials.

Benson has explained that, while every election season brings rumors that menacing people will show up at the polls which rarely amount to anything, “this year is different” because the calls to observe people at polling places “have been much more specific and much more targeted than in years past.”

The leading figure encouraging such behavior has been Donald Trump, who at a Michigan rally on Saturday attacked Whitmer as a “partisan” who is “like a judge of the ballot stuff.”

“So you got to watch it, watch those ballots, watch what’s going on,” he told the crowd.

The president’s comments, Benson said, increased state officials’ concerns about potential disturbances on election day from gun-toting “patriots.”

“As a result we are preparing accordingly,” Benson said. “But at the same time, my priorities on making sure that voters know they will be completely safe if they choose to vote in person, because we’ve got protections in place, and that even if they still feel unsafe they have the option to vote early, or vote from home.”

As Owens notes, several of the sheriffs who have indicated defiance are members of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an extremist organization which claims, among other things, that county sheriffs, not the Supreme Court, are the arbiters of what’s constitutional, and which has been associated with armed standoffs and defiance of legal authorities, usually under the guise of the “Patriot”/militia movement.

Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, another member of the CSPOA, had multiple associations with at least two of the kidnap plotters, including an appearance and speech at an anti-Whitmer rally in May. He has not indicated whether he will enforce the directive.

Several CSPOA-affiliated sheriffs in Michigan last week told Bridge Michigan that they would work to ensure voter safety during the election. If individuals showed up outside polling places with guns, they would permit it—unless they began brandishing them in a menacing way.

“We would follow the law. As long as they are peaceful and not violent and trying to intimidate people, we would make sure they respect that limit,”said Benzie County Sheriff Ted Schendel. “Everyone has the right to peaceable assembly.”

“I don’t like hypotheticals,” Leelanau County Sheriff Mike Borkovich said. “But if a guy with a Trump sign showed up with a butcher knife and started swinging it at people, would we enforce that? Yes.”

Nessel said she intended to use Michigan State Police officers to ensure that the directive is followed. "If you have a county sheriff that seems to be sympathetic to any of these organizations and we think they're not going to enforce the laws, then we'll get somebody else who will, the Michigan State Police," Nessel said. "Every place in the state of Michigan, there will be law enforcement that believe that voters need to be protected."

The spread of the CSPOA’s influence among law-enforcement officers, particularly county sheriffs, has become an increasing source of concern in recent years. The organization—primarily overseen by a former Arizona sheriff named Richard Mack, who made a similar name for himself in the 1990s by defying federal gun control laws—has a long history of promoting the theory that county sheriffs, not federal law enforcement, represent the supreme law of the land.

This radically decentralized vision of government was first promoted by the old far-right Posse Comitatus movement, which proffered governance in which federal authorities had little to no role (and which also was profoundly racist and anti-Semitic). Indeed, the sovereign citizens movement that preaches the same beliefs vis-a-vis the role of government has, over the past 20 years, also posed the most lethal threat to law enforcement officers in the country. The FBI in 2010 designated the movement a significant source of domestic terrorism.

“It’s terrifying to me,” Justin Nix, a University of Louisville criminology professor who specializes in police fairness and legitimacy, told The Washington Post. “It’s not up to the police to decide what the law is going to be. They’re sworn to uphold the law. It’s not up to them to pick and choose.”

A 2016 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the CSPOA’s reach was fairly widespread nationally, though hard numbers are difficult to come by. The CSPOA claims to have “about 5,000 members,” and in 2014 issued a letter condemning the Obama administration’s gun rights policies cosigned by 485 sheriffs. It also claims to have “trained” about 400 sheriffs.

The report noted the damage caused by the CSPOA is both direct and indirect: The spread of this ideology has consequences. The number of threats and assaults against the [Bureau of Land Management] rose from 15 incidents in 2014 to 28 in 2015, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The number of incidents targeting the U.S. Forest Service rose from 97 in 2014 to 155 last year.

The CSPOA and its law enforcement philosophy have played major roles in the two armed confrontations over public land led by the Bundy family—in 2014 at Bunkerville, Nevada, where Cliven Bundy and an army of “Patriots” forced federal agents to back away from enforcing environmental laws on his ranch, and in 2016 at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Bundy and his son Ammon tout a version of “constitutionalist” ideas identical to Mack’s.

An Oregon CSPOA sheriff who played a role in the Malheur standoff, Grant County’s Glenn Palmer, essentially turned his jurisdiction into a personal fiefdom. While being investigated by the Department of Justice for his role in the standoff, it emerged that Palmer had been using the power of deputization to create a private armed force comprised of his political supporters—and he gave them tremendous powers, including the ability to harass his enemies.

Trump's own director of national intelligence accidentally gives away the president's game.

Senate Democrats boycotted Thursday morning's Judiciary Committee vote on Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination, but chairman Lindsey Graham plowed ahead anyway, putting a point on what a total sham the whole process has been. The Committee's rules expressly state that there have to be at least nine members, "including at least two Members of the minority," to "constitute a quorum for the purpose of transacting business." Further, "No bill, matter, or nomination shall be ordered reported from the Committee, however, unless a majority of the Committee is actually present at the time such action is taken and a majority of those present support the action taken."

Rules are for everyone else, however, so the Committee moved ahead with all 12 Republicans passing her nomination. "Judge Barrett deserves a vote and she will receive a vote," Graham said Wednesday, adding, "As to my Democratic colleagues' refusal to attend the markup, that is a choice they are making. I believe it does a disservice to Judge Barrett who deserves a vote, up or down." Because she is a Republican and a whack job. Merrick Garland, of course, did not deserve a vote, up or down, because he was nominated by a Democratic president who won both the popular and Electoral College vote, twice. But Democrats not being there for the hearing was "surreal," Sen. John Cornyn said, calling their choice to have pictures of people whose lives would be endangered by the loss of the Affordable Care Act mere theater.

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"Democrats are boycotting the illegitimate markup of Judge Barrett’s nomination in Judiciary," Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted. "We are not going to have business as usual while the Republicans try to use an illegitimate process to jam through a nominee to rip away health care from millions." That's awful, but everything else about this nominee is pretty much worse. For instance, she refused to answer Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's written questions about abortion, including whether states should execute women for obtaining an illegal abortion. She said she could not express an opinion on whether states should kill women for getting abortions. Which pretty much tells you where her head is at.

She refused to answer most of the follow up questions from Democrats. On voting rights, on health care, on abortion rights, on unfettered executive power claims by Trump, she answered with some variation of the theme: "As a sitting judge and as a judicial nominee, it would not be appropriate for me to offer an opinion on abstract legal issues or hypotheticals."

As if there was anything she could say in answer to their questions that would keep Republicans from putting her on the court. They're going to have the cloture vote for her on Sunday—Sunday—and this extremely devout Catholic who refused to say it's bad to rip children from their families and put them in cages and who apparently has no opinion on the death penalty has no objection to the Senate working on the Sabbath for her advancement.

Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins have said that they oppose having this vote before the election. We'll see if they'll stick with that "principled" stand. On Sunday.

After multiple reported incidents nationwide of people calling the cops on persons of color going about their everyday lives, San Francisco is the latest city that decided to do something about it. San Francisco supervisors unanimously voted to pass the Caution Against Racially and Exploitative Non-Emergencies (CAREN) Act on Tuesday. The legislation will now go to Mayor London Breed to sign, The New York Times reported. The act deems racially motivated phone calls to 911 a hate crime and enables victims to sue for at least $1,000 in damages plus attorney fees. It is meant to expand on a California measure that labels filing a false police report a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine.  

"When law enforcement responds to non-emergency calls as a result of the caller's prejudice, discriminatory views, and racial bias, it diverts resources away from actual emergencies to the unnecessary policing of people of color," a press release on the legislation said. "This is another form of racial violence instigated against people of color that causes further mistrust between communities of color and law enforcement.”

The legislation was first introduced in July following incidents during which police were called on individuals outside of their own homes or in their neighborhood. In one San Francisco incident, a couple called the police on a man writing “Black Lives Matter” in chalk on a wall outside of his own home, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. According to the press release, the act will address discrimination not only on the basis of race but also due to one’s age, sex, religion, place of birth, gender identity, disability, weight, or height.

While the legislation is being applauded by activists for addressing concerns that many of these incidents could result in police violence, some have criticized the act’s name for being a play on the name “Karen.” Across social media, the name “Karen” has grown popular to signify a racist and entitled white woman, and memes depicting “Karens” have flooded the internet as a result. While the name is common and most individuals with that name do not fit this description, “Karen” became the go-to term online to describe individuals who fit this connotation. People have called the usage of and memes associated with the name both sexist and ageist while also working as a tool to silence women. “Calling a woman a Karen is simply another way of controlling women and their behavior, telling us to be quiet and stop complaining,” Karyn Stricker, an environmental activist, wrote in The Hill. “It legitimizes misogyny.”

But despite there being criticism about the name of the act, all 11 supervisors signed off on the legislation, noting that the intent was not to evoke the name “Karen.” “We wanted to put something in place that’s going to stop these racist, prejudiced calls that weaponize police against Black people and people of color,” Shamann Walton, the Democratic supervisor who introduced the legislation, said. Walton added that it was only a coincidence that the acronym of the law they created to address this issue spelled out “CAREN.”

“We don’t want what happened to Emmett Till in 1955, or the long history of false accusations of Black men and boys in this country, due to weaponizing law enforcement, to threaten, terrorize, and sometimes even kill them, to ever happen again,” Walton said. “I really want to emphasize that 911 is not a customer service line for someone’s racist behavior.” The incident involving Till is one of many tragic injustices Black folks have faced throughout America’s racist history. In 1955, Till, a Black teenager, was beaten to death after accusations by a white woman, who later admitted they were false.

 Since before the tragic death of George Floyd, which resulted in protests against police brutality and racial injustice across the country, videos of people calling 911 to threaten people of color have consistently been shared online. This legislation does not mock these people with the term “Karen” but instead works to discourage individuals from perpetuating their clear bias against people of color.

“We must not allow people to use our 911 and law enforcement systems as weapons for hate,” California Assemblyman Rob Bonta said. “If you are afraid of a black family barbecuing in the community park, a man dancing and doing his normal exercise routine in the bike lane or someone who asks you to comply with dog leash laws in a park, and your immediate response is to call the police, the real problem is with your own personal prejudice.”

Is Thursday morning too late to keep hoping Donald Trump will pull out of Thursday night’s debate? Because … yikes. Yes, Thursday night is what was supposed to be the third debate but will instead be the second after Trump pulled out of the remote town meeting debate. Trump and his campaign have been making angry noises about this one after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that candidates’ microphones would be muted for parts (though not enough) of the debate, and after moderator Kristen Welker announced her planned topics. According to Team Trump, this debate was supposed to center on foreign policy, except that was never the announced plan.

Welker’s planned topics are fighting COVID-19, American families, race in America, climate change, national security, and leadership. Trump’s hope was to use foreign policy discussion to attack Joe Biden via his son Hunter, but fear not, Trump will get that attack in no matter what. That’s the stated plan from the White House.

No, really:

He’ll answer the questions he wants to answer and the one thing we can be sure of is no matter what, he’ll go after his opponent’s son who has struggled with addiction. Trump is not trying to make a policy or political point. Rather, The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer explains, Trump “possesses a bully’s eye for an individual’s point of greatest emotional vulnerability,” and in that vein, “He’s cruelly lashing Biden, not to explain the relevance of an esoteric scandal that doesn’t directly indict the ethics of his opponent, but because he seems to hope that his raising the subject will induce an unbecoming outburst of emotion onstage.”

Of course, as Foer notes, one of Biden’s strongest moments in the first debate was when Trump interrupted his attempt to talk about his late son Beau by attacking Hunter, and Biden broke through to address his love for his surviving son and pride in Hunter’s efforts to overcome his addiction.

So we know that, no matter that it’s irrelevant to the presidency, Trump will work in attacks on Biden’s son. Key questions about the debate include how Trump will respond to having his mic muted even for the two minutes of Biden’s opening response on each topic. Beyond that, Trump is free to interrupt, though, The Washington Post reports, “Advisers are asking Trump to interrupt less and let Biden talk more.”

Does Trump have the self-discipline to reduce his interruptions? Or maybe he just thinks he knows better than the advisers asking him to do that. We’ll see, but be prepared for another ugly night of interruptions. The other question, then, is how prepared Biden is to do the things that worked best for him in the first debate and continue to hold himself together under the attacks on his beloved son.

The other big question mark is moderator Kristen Welker, of NBC News. Trump has already attacked her, as well, so we know he goes in with a hostile approach to her. Will Welker be able to control his interruptions any better than Chris Wallace, moderator of the first debate? Will he attack her in the debate itself, or wait until afterward?

The debate begins at 9 PM ET and runs for 90 uninterrupted minutes. It’s being held at Belmont University in Nashville. It will air on most broadcast and cable news networks, and you can watch it streaming in many places, including C-SPAN. Daily Kos will have live coverage.

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making this endorsement freely available to all readers until November 5.

In 1973, a United States Air Force officer, Major Harold Hering, asked a question that the Air Force did not want asked. Hering, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, was then in training to become a Minuteman-missile crewman. The question he asked one of his instructors was this: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?”

The writer Ron Rosenbaum would later call this the “forbidden question.” Missile officers are allowed to ask certain sorts of questions—about the various fail-safe systems built to prevent the accidental launching of nuclear weapons, for instance. But the Air Force would not answer Hering’s question, and it moved to discharge him after determining that officers responsible for launching nuclear weapons did not “need to know” the answer. “I have to say I feel I do have a need to know because I am a human being,” Hering said in response.

Hering’s question was taboo because the national defense strategy of the United States is built on the unstated assumption that the American people will not allow a lunatic to become president. If that assumption is wrong, then no procedural, legal, or technological mechanisms exist that are able to fully protect the human race from such a lunatic. Hering discovered a catastrophic flaw in U.S. nuclear doctrine, and for this he was driven from the Air Force.

In most matters related to the governance and defense of the United States, the president is constrained by competing branches of government and by an intricate web of laws and customs. Only in one crucial area does the president resemble, in the words of the former missile officer and scholar Bruce Blair, an absolute monarch—his control of nuclear weapons. Richard Nixon, who was president when Major Hering asked his question, was reported to have told members of Congress at a White House dinner party, “I could leave this room and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead.” This was an alarming but accurate statement.

When contemplating their ballots, Americans should ask which candidate in a presidential contest is better equipped to guide the United States through a national-security crisis without triggering a nuclear exchange, and which candidate is better equipped to interpret—within five or seven minutes—the ambiguous, complicated, and contradictory signals that could suggest an imminent nuclear attack. These are certainly not questions that large numbers of voters asked themselves in 2016, when a transparently unqualified candidate for president won the support of 63 million Americans.

At the time, Donald Trump had not yet served in public office, so concerns about his ability to protect the United States from harm were hypothetical, though grounded in his long and terrible record as a human being. As The Atlantic stated in its October 2016 endorsement of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, Trump “traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself … He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”

What we have learned since we published that editorial is that we understated our case. Donald Trump is the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever. Trump has brought our country low; he has divided our people; he has pitted race against race; he has corrupted our democracy; he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate; he has abandoned America’s allies; he has aligned himself with dictators; he has encouraged terrorism and mob violence; he has undermined the agencies and departments of government; he has despoiled the environment; he has opposed free speech; he has lied frenetically and evangelized for conspiracism; he has stolen children from their parents; he has made himself an advocate of a hostile foreign power; and he has failed to protect America from a ravaging virus. Trump is not responsible for all of the 220,000 COVID-19-related deaths in America. But through his avarice and ignorance and negligence and titanic incompetence, he has allowed tens of thousands of Americans to suffer and die, many alone, all needlessly. With each passing day, his presidency reaps more death.

But let us lay all of this aside for the moment. Let us even lay aside the extraordinary fact that Donald Trump has been credibly accused of rape. Compelling evidence suggests that his countless sins and defects are rooted in mental instability, pathological narcissism, and profound moral and cognitive impairment. Which returns us to the subject of Major Hering.

Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, is in many ways a typically imperfect candidate, but if we judge these men on two questions alone—Who is a more trustworthy steward of America’s nuclear arsenal? Which man poses less of a threat to our collective existence?—the answer is spectacularly obvious.

The Atlantic has endorsed only three candidates in its 163-year history: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hillary Clinton. The latter two endorsements had more to do with the qualities of Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump than with those of Johnson and Clinton. The same holds true in the case of Joe Biden. Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference. Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule. Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man.

— Jeffrey Goldberg, on behalf of the editors of The Atlantic

Debates can often produce some of the most memorable moments of a campaign. But just two weeks before the Nov. 3 election, four states are unlikely even to hold debates on whom to send to the U.S. Senate.

The debate about the debates is playing out in three red-leaning states — Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, where GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy and Cindy Hyde-Smith plus Republican Senate candidate Tommy Tuberville are not planning to debate their opponents.

A closer race in Michigan between Democrat Sen. Gary Peters and Republican businessman John James also likely won’t produce a debate, though it’s because of disagreements over the forum.

Candidates typically don't agree to debates when they’re so confident they’ll win that they don't think it's necessary. Debating with an opponent also opens up the possibility of a fatal gaffe — just ask Richard Mourdock, a Republican Senate candidate from Indiana who appeared on his way to becoming a U.S. senator in 2012 until he said during a debate that a rape that resulted in pregnancy is "something that God intended to happen."

But not debating an opponent has its drawbacks, namely that the underdog can paint the favorite as scared. Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), the most endangered Senate incumbent, argued in an interview that Tuberville’s not debating him would only help his campaign.

“He's proven that he’s a quitter at his job, and now he’s proven he’s just kind of a coward because he really doesn’t have anything to say,” Jones said. “He doesn’t have a plan, he doesn’t do anything to put forth a plan or any platform and there’s just only so many times you can say ‘Donald Trump.’”

A spokesperson for Tuberville did not respond to a request for comment.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said in an interview that he wasn’t closing the door on a debate, but that television stations in Louisiana that could host the event didn’t provide invitations with sufficient criteria for who would participate. Cassidy said that even if he doesn’t participate, the issues will “be pretty aired out.’” Cassidy also skipped a debate in 2014.

“My opponent has basically signed up for the Democratic platform, the ‘Green New Deal,’ ‘Medicare for All,’ doing away with the filibuster,” the Louisiana Republican said. “I think people will know what that means in my state.”

Ben Riggs, press secretary for Adrian Perkins, Cassidy’s main Democratic opponent, accused the senator of “dodging debates because he can’t stand on stage with Mayor Perkins and defend his record on pandemic relief or his many attempts to rob millions of Americans of health care.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Cindy Hyde Smith (R-Miss.) will also skip debating, prompting her Democratic opponent, Mike Espy, to accuse her of “disrespecting her voters.” When asked about the incumbent Republican’s decision, a spokesperson for her campaign said in a statement that “Mississippians care about what Sen. Hyde-Smith is getting done in the job they elected her to do.”

Senate debates do not typically make or break a candidate’s campaign. But with many Senate candidates holding fewer events amid the coronavirus, they provide a key platform for undecided voters. (The states where control of the Senate will likely be decided — Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Iowa and Maine — have all had debates.)

Some Democratic challengers have been more selective about which forums they want to participate in and incumbent Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Martha McSally of Arizona and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have called on their Democratic opponents to take part in more debates. Collins, for example, asked her challenger Sara Gideon to participate in 16 debates. A spokesperson for Sara Gideon said the campaign agreed to participate in five debates, similar to previous election cycles.

In Michigan, Peters and James insist they want a debate but disagree over the terms.

“I’ve agreed to two debates that we have done in Michigan since the 1990s,” Peters said in an interview. “The debates that he did two years ago when he lost to Debbie Stabenow ... it’s in his hands, he’s just trying to avoid it.”

Abby Walls, a spokesperson for James, argued that the campaign is pushing for four debates, two in local media markets and two national and accused Peters of being unwilling to talk about his record.

“The James campaign has turned down nothing,” Walls said. “We’ve left the door open on those options, but our conversations have been stunted, because Gary Peters’ team has turned down any other options besides the two he’s suggested on the spot.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday denied touching himself inappropriately in the upcoming “Borat” movie, insisting that a reported clip from the film was taken out of context.

“The Borat video is a complete fabrication,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter. “I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment. At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.”

The tweets come after a Guardian report that the upcoming movie includes a scene in which Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and a former mayor of New York, appears to touch his genitals while alone with an actor playing Borat’s daughter. The Guardian reported that the scene was part of a set-up for the movie, which loops unknowing people into gags involving the caricatured titular character.

The actor playing Borat’s daughter pretended to be a conservative journalist interviewing Giuliani, the Guardian reported. After the two finished their interview, they went to a bedroom where she helped remove his microphone. In the clip, Giuliani then allegedly lay down and reached into his pants until Baron Cohen, who plays Borat, intervened in character. NBC News and The Daily Beast reported similar descriptions of the scene.

Giuliani called the New York City police on Cohen once he realized it was all a gag, Page Six reported at the time. Giuliani acknowledged calling police in his Wednesday tweets.

The movie is set to be released on Friday.

Getty Images

Without specific guidance around whether — and how — to travel, some find themselves playing a game of risk roulette.

Part of The Home Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

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Mariusz Wiecheć last visited his home country of Poland in September 2019, and in hindsight, he regrets staying for only a week. It was barely enough time to adjust his sleep schedule and catch up with family and old friends, but Wiecheć was resigned, he said, to the fact that “America doesn’t have enough vacation days.” Like many others, he hadn’t accounted for a dangerous virus that would send the world into lockdown and keep him from his family for nearly a year.

Six months into the pandemic, Wiecheć, who lives in Philadelphia and holds an American green card, leaped at the first chance to return to Poland. Airlines began to offer limited direct flights from New York in August, and Poland was no longer requiring citizens and their families to undergo a strict quarantine for 14 days upon arrival.

“I’ve realized the importance of family and being home,” Wiecheć said in a phone interview in early September. “I miss the culture in Europe, and while I’m used to some aspects of American culture, I will always be Polish at heart.” An eight-hour international flight, then, was a risk he was willing to take: Later that month, he and his wife geared up in medical-grade masks, landed in Warsaw, got tested, and quarantined from family members until their results came through.

The isolating nature of the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated many people’s desires for comfort and human connection — impulses that are strongly affiliated with home and family and are likely to grow as the holidays approach. “People are getting frustrated and tired of having this basic human need — of social interaction and contact with others — suppressed and hindered,” said Michael Brein, a psychologist who specializes in travel. “In some cases, they’re becoming less vigilant and a little more careless because Covid has been going on for so long.”

And in other cases, such as Wiecheć’s, travelers simply want to head home safely. Many people live and work hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from immediate family members, and in the absence of clear directives from the government and health experts, some find themselves playing a fraught game of risk roulette. For Wiecheć and others who spoke to Vox, it has resulted in an elaborate process of quarantining and testing and hoping and worrying, all of which still seems worth it when compared to the alternative.

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As we approach the colder months, public health experts are raising alarms over the likelihood of another surge of infections as people cozy up indoors instead of gathering in parks or other outdoor spaces. But there’s another reason experts and the general public are worrying about the wintertime: holiday travel. An uptick in both car and plane trips during the weekends of Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day serves as a hint of what’s to come in November and December, months in which millions of Americans traditionally congregate with their loved ones. In 2019, the top leisure activity for domestic US travelers was visiting relatives, according to the US Travel Association, and that urge to visit friends and family will likely persist through 2020.

The coronavirus has derailed events, from adolescent milestones to weddings to funerals, but will Americans give up treasured end-of-year traditions like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s Eve? Across the country, large family gatherings — even those attended by relatives in the same town or county — have unwittingly turned into superspreader events, with one North Carolina party infecting 41 people from nine different families, the Charlotte Observer reported. Infectious disease experts have warned that intra-household spread is a key component in Covid-19’s transmission, despite any social distancing measures in place.

This added layer of risk among loved ones is something homebound travelers are trying to assess. Some are avoiding enclosed spaces with strangers entirely, even as airlines slash holiday airfare prices to make them cheaper than in years past. Road trips are now considered an attractive alternative: Drivers can plan for pit stops ahead of time and, if it’s a short drive, can completely avoid human contact on the road.

Christian Grand and his wife Alex, both of whom are in their early 30s, used to fly to California about 12 times a year because they have a large network of family and friends in the state. In June, they took a 1,000-mile car ride from Portland, Oregon, to Orange County, California, routing through a national park to briefly sightsee and avoid traffic.

“It’s not sustainable to stay indoors and isolate with your immediate family for months,” Grand said. “My wife Alex and I realized we needed to see our family, while taking precautions to not expose ourselves to unnecessary risk.”

They aren’t sure whether they’ll be taking any more California-bound trips this year, although the couple does feel the urge to be with family. “I have a really special place in my heart for California, although we’ve lived in Portland for seven years and have a home here,” Grand said. “As far as which one we identify as our real home, well, I couldn’t tell you.”

The Grands’ June gathering, which occurred before California’s summer spike in cases, was relatively small and consisted only of two couples and two kids, all of whom had been seriously self-isolating. “My wife doesn’t even like being around strangers at a national park, whether they are 6 feet away or not,” Grand said. “She’s just not comfortable being around people at all, and that’s our biggest challenge to navigate.”

The two set certain social boundaries ahead of time, including not going out to eat or closely interacting with others beyond their six-person cluster. While that meant they weren’t able to see extended family, the visit was much needed and satisfied a social itch, according to Grand.

“We are in much better spirits, which is why we chose to go,” he said. “But even before Covid, we’ve always prioritized going places and seeing our loved ones whenever we have the opportunity. So we accepted early on that this year was going to be different.”

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For some, it’s not the lure of a getaway but necessity that has them accepting the risk and hitting the road. Anjella Jensen did not expect to head to Oregon for her first pandemic road trip. Nor did she expect 10 other extended family members to similarly make the trek. In late August, the South Dakota resident and her longtime boyfriend took a trip after receiving news that a relative had a terminal medical diagnosis. “We had family come from all over the country: Nashville, Florida, Oregon, South Dakota,” she told Vox. “Most of them flew or were close enough to drive, but we drove and stayed a week.”

Some attendees were elderly or immunocompromised. Jensen had been isolating with her partner before the drive, packing coolers and food to limit their exposure on the road. As a seasoned traveler, Jensen prefers driving, but her brother is planning to fly to South Dakota from Alabama later this year, and both of her older parents have flown during the pandemic as well.

“Confined space in an airplane personally makes me very nervous, although my family seems to be much more comfortable with it than I am,” Jensen said. “However, I’m much less concerned or cautious when it comes to family gatherings or individuals. There isn’t a logical reason for it, but that’s where I find myself.”

This natural familial comfort — a feeling that encourages people to let their guard down — could be a contributing factor to local outbreaks from family gatherings. But Jensen’s situation reveals how certain events, like a terminal diagnosis, could lead individuals to reassess their own risk tolerance when it comes to traveling vast distances to physically be near their loved ones.

Getty Images

For Jensen and her family, it has been impossible to plan travel months ahead of time anyway, given the uncertain nature of Covid-19 in the US. While they aren’t exactly packing their bags and leaving at a moment’s notice, shortening the planning time to a week or two has provided time to self-isolate, factor in current infection rates, and iron out the logistics of potentially receiving a Covid-19 test prior to or after the trip.

Jensen has begun to plan three road trips before the end of the year: to Daytona, Florida, in October to see her 20-year-old son; to Nashville for Thanksgiving with her boyfriend’s family; and to Salt Lake City in December with her 70-year-old dad. Traveling by car gives her flexibility since Jensen can decide at the last minute to forgo a trip — but, she says, it isn’t likely she’ll miss Thanksgiving or a chance to see her dad, “who is insistent on skiing this year.”

“No, I don’t want to get Covid. Who does?” Jensen told me. But the potential to get the disease, she said, is still present whether she stays home or travels. “I am more concerned with being self-contained while I travel to minimize my risk of exposure.”

There are others who might have to make a trek at the holidays: college students who were lured back to campus will be returning home. Families will host get-togethers in spite of the health precautions around mass gatherings, although probably with a shorter guest list and some Zoom participants. Some worry that students coming home from college towns, which have become Covid-19 epicenters, could drive up infections.

“My school isn’t monitoring us at all. People come and go every day if they want,” said Lauryn Craine, a junior at Missouri Valley College. Craine, who is from Chicago, filed a special request in September to ask administrators if she could study remotely. Since she was worried about the college’s handling of Covid-19 outbreaks, Craine knew home would be a safer environment for her to focus and remain for the rest of the academic year.

Last month, she drove the seven hours home to stay with her mother, who is considered high-risk, and quarantined in her room. The risk felt necessary for Craine, who said her mental and physical health were in decline living in an on-campus dorm with four other housemates.

“Traveling was stressful, but I only stopped once for gas to limit my interaction,” added Craine, who will be staying at home for the rest of the school year. “I believe it’s highly likely people will spread Covid back to their hometowns. Since people are already not caring on my campus, they probably won’t care and fly or drive home and spread it.”

Individuals who have been dutifully self-isolating like Craine are mindful of the risks involved in a trip and how to minimize them: Stay at contactless hotels, eat at drive-thrus, avoid crowded pit stops. A handful of these careful travelers also plan to fly. Some say it’s more of a “now or never” moment, according to Wiecheć, the Polish citizen. For those who live thousands of miles away, a plane ride is not only efficient; it also allows one to limit the number of interactions with strangers.

When Wiecheć heard the news that Poland had lifted its quarantine restrictions, he immediately thought to book a flight, although he didn’t tell his family until the logistics were ironed out. He didn’t want to get their hopes up if the trip had to be canceled.

“I am of the mindset that we have to live in the moment, but I think we have to learn how to live with Covid for the next few months or the next couple of years,” Wiecheć said. “I might not be able to hug my mom at the airport right away, but I know I can do that after a week of getting tested.”

Terry Nguyen is a reporter covering consumer and internet trends at The Goods by Vox. She has previously reported for the Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Vice.

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Sunlight glows through the steam of a geothermal power plant in Niland, California. | Mickey Strider/Loop Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

“An engineering problem that, when solved, solves energy.”

Geothermal power is the perpetual also-ran of renewable energy, chugging along in the background for decades, never quite breaking out of its little niche, forever causing energy experts to say, “Oh, yeah, geothermal ... what’s up with that?”

Well, after approximately 15 years of reporting on energy, I finally took the time to do a deep dive into geothermal and I am here to report: This is a great time to start paying attention!

After many years of failure to launch, new companies and technologies have brought geothermal out of its doldrums, to the point that it may finally be ready to scale up and become a major player in clean energy. In fact, if its more enthusiastic backers are correct, geothermal may hold the key to making 100 percent clean electricity available to everyone in the world. And as a bonus, it’s an opportunity for the struggling oil and gas industry to put its capital and skills to work on something that won’t degrade the planet.

Vik Rao, former chief technology officer at Halliburton, the oil field service giant, recently told the geothermal blog Heat Beat, “geothermal is no longer a niche play. It’s scalable, potentially in a highly material way. Scalability gets the attention of the [oil services] industry.”

In this post, I’m going to cover technologies meant to mine heat deep from the Earth, which can then be used as direct heat for communities, to generate electricity, or to do both through “cogeneration” of heat and electricity. (Note that ground-source heat pumps, which take advantage of steady shallow-earth temperatures to heat buildings or groups of buildings, are sometimes included among geothermal technologies, but I’m going to leave them aside for a separate post.)

Before we get to the technologies, though, let’s take a quick look at geothermal energy itself.

William Campbell/Getty Images

What is geothermal energy?

Fun fact: The molten core of the Earth, about 4,000 miles down, is roughly as hot as the surface of the sun, over 6,000°C, or 10,800°F. That’s why the geothermal energy industry is fond of calling it “the sun beneath our feet.” The heat is continuously replenished by the decay of naturally occurring radioactive elements, at a flow rate of roughly 30 terawatts a year, almost double all human energy consumption. That process is expected to continue for billions of years.

The ARPA-E project AltaRock Energy estimates that “just 0.1% of the heat content of Earth could supply humanity’s total energy needs for 2 million years.” There’s enough energy in the Earth’s crust, just a few miles down, to power all of human civilization for generations to come. All we have to do is tap into it.

Tapping into it, though, turns out to be pretty tricky.

The easiest way to do so is to make direct use of the heat where it breaks the surface, in hot springs, geysers, and fumaroles (steam vents near volcanic activity). The warm water can be used for bathing or washing, and the heat for cooking. Using geothermal energy this way has been around since the earliest humans, going back at least to the Middle Paleolithic.

Slightly more sophisticated is tapping into naturally occurring reservoirs of geothermal heat close to the surface to heat buildings. In the 1890s, the city of Boise, Idaho, tapped one to create the US’s first district heating system, whereby one central source of heat feeds into multiple commercial and residential buildings. (Boise’s downtown still uses it.)

After that came digging deeper and using the heat to generate electricity. The first commercial geothermal power plant in the US was opened in 1960 in the Geysers, California; there are more than 60 operating in the US today.

The technology for accessing deep geothermal is developing at a dizzying pace these days. Let’s take a look at its basic forms, from established to experimental.

DOE

Four basic types of geothermal energy technology

Once it reaches the surface, geothermal energy is used for a wide variety of purposes, mainly because there are many different ways to use heat. Depending on how hot the resource is, it can be exploited by numerous industries. Virtually any level of heat can be used directly, to run fisheries or greenhouses, to dry cement, or (the really hot stuff) to make hydrogen.

To make electricity, higher minimum heats are required. The older generation of geothermal power plants used steam directly from the ground, or “flashed” fluids from the ground into steam, to run a turbine. (The water and air pollution that has been associated with first-generation geothermal projects was all from flash plants, which boil water from underground and end up off-gassing everything in it, including some nasty pollutants.)

Flash plants require heat of at least 200°C. The newer, “binary” plants run fluids from the ground past a heat exchanger and then use the heat to flash steam (meaning the underground water isn’t boiled directly and there’s no air or water pollution). Binary plants can generate electricity from around 100°C up.

Getting the heat to the surface is the trick. For that purpose, it’s useful to think of geothermal energy technology as falling into four broad categories.

1) Conventional hydrothermal resources

In a few select areas (think parts of Iceland, or California), water or steam heated by Earth’s core rises through relatively permeable rock, full of fissures and fractures, only to become trapped under an impermeable caprock. These giant reservoirs of pressurized hot water often reveal themselves on the surface through fumaroles or hot springs.

DOE

Once a reservoir is located, exploratory wells are drilled until a suitable location can be located for a production well. The hot water that rises through that well can range from just over ambient temperature to 370°C, depending on the field (to get into temperatures hotter than that requires going deeper; more on that later). Once heat is extracted from them, the fluids are cooled and returned to the field via an injection well, to maintain pressure.

Almost all conventional geothermal projects, most of what’s now running, make use of high-quality hydrothermal resources.

One problem with hydrothermal reservoirs is that their visible manifestations — hot springs and fumaroles — remain the only reliable way to identify them; exploration and characterization of new fields is expensive and uncertain. (This is one area of furious technological development.)

Another problem is that they are extremely geographically concentrated. In the US, geothermal electricity is mostly located in California, Nevada, Hawaii, and Alaska, where tectonic plates are grinding beneath the surface.

NREL

Where hydrothermal resources are readily available, the advantages of geothermal energy are well-understood. The global geothermal electricity fleet has an average capacity factor — time spent running relative to maximum capacity — of 74.5 percent, and newer plants often exceed 90 percent. Geothermal can provide always-on, baseload power; it is the only renewable resource to do so.

As of the end of 2019, global installed geothermal electric capacity, dispersed across 29 countries, reached 15.4 GW, with the US in the lead.

Think Geoenergy

The final problem is that most of the big, well-explored, well-characterized fields have been tapped out, at least with conventional technology. Geothermal that relies on high-quality hydrothermal resources remains a niche solution, difficult to standardize and scale. That’s why it has lagged behind other renewable resources for so long.

Which brings us to ...

2) Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS)

Conventional geothermal systems are limited to specialized areas where heat, water, and porosity come together just so. But those areas are limited.

There’s plenty of heat stored down in all that normal, solid, nonporous rock, though. What if geothermal developers could make their own reservoirs? What if they could drill down into solid rock, inject water at high pressure through one well, fracture the rock to let the water pass through, and then collect the heated water through another well?

That, in a nutshell, is EGS: geothermal that makes its own reservoir.

DOE

To be clear, the line between a conventional hydrothermal resource and a resource that requires EGS is not sharp. There are many gradations and variations between wet/porous and dry/solid.

“What you really have is a supply curve, where the variables are temperature, depth, well permeability, and reservoir permeability,” says Tim Latimer, founder and CEO of the EGS company Fervo Energy. “Everything between the two extremes exists.”

To put it simply, as the resource gets deeper and the rock becomes hotter and less porous, the engineering difficulty of accessing it rises.

The basic idea has always been that EGS would start off within existing hydrothermal reservoirs, where fields are relatively well-characterized. Then, as it learned, honed its technology, and brought down costs, it would branch out from “in field” into “near field” resources — solid rock adjacent to reservoirs, at similar depth. Eventually it would be able to venture farther out into new fields and deeper into hotter rock. In theory, EGS could eventually be located almost anywhere in the world.

That’s been the game plan for a decade now, and it’s still the game plan, as laid out in the magisterial 2019 GeoVision study on geothermal from the Department of Energy. The EGS industry has had trouble, though, getting all the ducks in a row. There was a burst of activity around 2010, based on Obama stimulus money and binary power plants. But by the time the drilling technology from the shale gas revolution had begun making its way over to geothermal, around 2015, capital had dried up and attention had turned away.

It’s only been in 2020, Latimer says, that everything has finally lined up: strong public and investor interest, real market demand (thanks to ambitious state renewable energy goals), and a flood of new technologies borrowed from the oil and gas industry. EGS startups like Fervo are growing quickly and bigger, established companies are running profitable EGS projects today.

The engineering challenges remain daunting, especially as the targets get deeper and drier. There are PR challenges as well. Injecting fluids into the ground in order to fracture rock is known as “fracking” in the oil and gas business, and ... it’s got a bit of a reputation. In fact, there are whole US states and countries where it is banned.

The industry is keen to distance itself from gas fracking. The fluids used are benign, so there’s little danger of water pollution. Worries about induced seismic activity are somewhat overblown; in oil and gas drilling, it is high-volume water disposal wells associated with seismicity, and EGS doesn’t have those. The fractures are smaller, more controlled, and under far less pressure than in oil and gas fracking. As long as drillers avoid fault lines, which they’re getting better at doing, the risk is modest, especially relative to the benefits. (Ironically, geothermal projects have to meet more seismic safety conditions than comparatively far more dangerous oil and gas projects.)

And, of course, unlike with gas fracking, there’s no combustion of fossil fuels at the end of the line. EGS is benefiting from technology advances in fracking, but it is not doing the thing environmentalists hate. Explaining that to the public and policymakers remains a thorny challenge, though, to say the least.

Still, if the engineering and marketing challenges can be overcome, the prize is almost unthinkably large. Assuming an average well depth of 4.3 miles and a minimum rock temperature of 150°C, the GeoVision study estimates a total US geothermal resource of at least 5,157 gigawatts of electric capacity — around five times the nation’s current installed capacity.

Alternatively, using EGS for direct heat could provide the US with 15 million terawatt-hours-thermal (TWhth). “Compared to a total US annual energy consumption of 1,754 TWhth for residential and commercial space heating,” DOE writes, “this EGS-based resource is theoretically sufficient to heat every US home and commercial building for at least 8,500 years.”

There’s enough heat down there to sustain civilization for generations.

Tim Latimer

And there’s even more heat deeper down, 6 miles and further.

3) Super-hot-rock geothermal

At the far horizon of EGS is “super hot rock” geothermal, which seeks to tap into extremely deep, extremely hot rock.

At extremely high heat, the performance of geothermal doesn’t just rise, it takes a leap. When water exceeds 373°C and 220 bars of pressure, it becomes “supercritical,” a new phase that is neither solid nor liquid. The science of supercritical water is funky (it’s like ... low-density water?) and I’m not going to attempt to explain it, but it is regularly used by industry, including in some advanced coal plants, so its properties are fairly well understood.

For our purposes, there are two important things about supercritical water. First, its enthalpy is much higher than water or steam, meaning it holds anywhere from 4 to 10 times more energy per unit mass. And second, it is so hot that it almost doubles the Carnot efficiency of its conversion to electricity.

“Not only do you get more energy out of your well,” says Eric Ingersoll, a clean energy analyst at the consultancy LucidCatalyst, “you get more electricity out of that energy.”

That means an individual geothermal project at 400°C would have about 50MW capacity, compared to the roughly 5MW capacity of an EGS project at 200°C — twice the temperature, 10 times the power.

You could get more power out of three wells on a 400°C project than you can out of 42 EGS wells at 200°C, using less fluid and a fraction of the physical footprint.

ARPA-E

Experience to date shows that the hotter geothermal gets, the more competitive its power price, to the point that super-hot EGS could be the cheapest baseload energy available.

The engineering challenges are hairy. (Oil and gas engineers, the current masters of drilling, did not design for high heat; they didn’t need to.) New casings and cements need to be developed; water chemistry at high heat needs to be better understood; materials that resist corrosion and high heat need to be perfected; drilling techniques need to continue improving. There are even new, “non-contact drilling” methods being developed, including AltaRock’s, which uses frickin’ lasers (“millimeter waves,” technically).

No well is currently producing electricity from supercritical water, but several past wells (in Hawaii and California’s Salton Sea, e.g.) have encountered supercritical water and there are exploratory projects in Japan, Italy, Mexico, and several other counties to learn more. (Here’s a recent review of super-hot-rock history and research.)

It wouldn’t take much help to get this technology developing more quickly. “There’s an opportunity to spend a relatively small amount of money to galvanize the industry,” says Ingersoll. The US currently lacks a robust clean energy innovation system, but there’s a super-hot-rock research program at ARPA-E (AltaRock), a spinoff group called the Hotrock Energy Research Organization (HERO), and several demonstration projects pushing things along. More is needed. The reward — cheap baseload power, available almost anywhere — is too big to pass up.

A fourth category of technologies has emerged recently, which holds out similar promise that geothermal power could someday be accessible anywhere.

4) Advanced geothermal systems (AGS)

AGS refers to a new generation of “closed loop” systems, in which no fluids are introduced to or extracted from the Earth; there’s no fracking. Instead, fluids circulate underground in sealed pipes and boreholes, picking up heat by conduction and carrying it to the surface, where it can be used for a tunable mix of heat and electricity.

Closed-loop geothermal systems have been around for decades, but a few startups have recently amped them up with technologies from the oil and gas industry. One such company, started by investors with experience in oil and gas, is the Alberta-based Eavor.

In Eavor’s planned system, called an “Eavor-Loop,” two vertical wells around 1.5 miles apart will be connected by a horizontally arrayed series of lateral wells, in a kind of radiator design, to maximize surface area and soak up as much heat as possible. (Precise lateral drilling is borrowed from the shale revolution, and from the oil sands.)

Eavor

Because the loop is closed, cool water on one side sinks while hot water on the other side rises, creating a “thermosiphon” effect that circulates the water naturally, with no need for a pump. Without the parasitic load of a pump, Eavor can make profitable use of relatively low heat, around 150°C, available almost anywhere about a mile and a half down.

So far there’s an “Eavor-Lite” demonstration project built in Alberta, meant to prove out the basic concepts and technologies. It has shown that the lateral wells can be precisely targeted, the thermosiphon effect works, and the plant’s costs and output can be reliably predicted in advance. The company has three or four commercial plants in various stages of planning; likely up next is a plant scheduled to break ground in 2021 in Geretsried, Germany. (It will take advantage of Germany’s feed-in tariffs.) In France and the Netherlands Eavor will provide heat; in Japan, electricity; in Germany, a mix.

When I spoke with Eavor president John Redfern and head of business development Paul Cairns, they told me about a recent change in their design that will reduce the physical footprint and enable even more precise drilling. Instead of the two vertical wells being located at a distance, they will be right next to each other. Lateral wells branch out from them, staying parallel until they meet at the end. Like so:

With the wells so close to one another, they can use “magnetic ranging” (with a transmitter in one well and a receiver in another) to remain at a fixed distance from one another. Meeting at the end is easier than meeting in the middle.

As for land use, after the initial drilling, the only part that technically needs to be aboveground is the air cooler that cools the water before it descends. Power lines, even the electric generator itself, could be underground. And if there’s a water cooler rather than an air cooler, that too could be underground. “Theoretically,” Cairns says, “you could have zero surface footprint.”

Since all Eavor needs to work is hot rock, which is pretty reliably located beneath almost any site in the world, it avoids the need for expensive exploration and modeling. “We’re not smarter,” Redfern says, “we just have much simpler theoretical problems.”

Eavor

An Eavor-Loop can act as baseload (always-on) power, but it can also act as flexible, dispatchable power — it can ramp up and down almost instantaneously to complement variable wind and solar energy. It does this by restricting or cutting off the flow of fluid. As the fluid remains trapped underground longer, it absorbs more and more heat.

So, unlike with solar, ramping the plant down does not waste (curtail) the energy. The fluid simply charges up, like a battery, so that when it’s turned back on it produces at above nameplate capacity. This allows the plant to “shape” its output to match almost any demand curve.

Jamie Beard, who runs the Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization at the University of Texas Austin, is bullish on AGS (she worries about the PR problems facing EGS), but she warns that Eavor — like other promising geothermal startups Fervo Energy, GreenFire Energy, and Sage Geosystems — does not yet have everything figured out, despite its confident claims. “I want them to have it in the bag,” she says, “but they don’t yet have it in the bag.”

Directional drilling in high temperatures, above 150°C or so, remains difficult, with equipment prone to melting (again, oil and gas engineers did not design their technologies with high heat in mind). As rock becomes harder, equipment must also be hardened to additional vibrations. And electronics need to be better insulated.

The Eavor-lite project is only mining heat of about 70°C. (It was not intended to be commercially viable.) To make geothermal work, Eavor and other companies will need to master going deeper and hotter. “You can’t economically produce geothermal energy at 90°C,” Beard says. “150, yeah, you’re getting there. 250, oh, yeah. 300, you’re solid.”

She stresses that there are no insuperable barriers if enough technical know-how and capital are brought to bear. The problem of extracting geothermal from deep, dry, hot rock, she says, “is largely an incremental engineering problem that, when solved, solves energy.”

“Solves energy” might sound like big talk, but in this case, it is not idle.

SMU

The extraordinary promise of geothermal

The main problem facing renewable energy is that the biggest sources, wind and solar, are variable. Whereas fossil fuel power plants that run on coal and gas are “dispatchable” — they can be turned on and off on demand — wind and solar come and go with, well, the wind and sun.

Building an electricity system around wind and solar thus means filling in the gaps, finding sources, technologies, and practices that can jump in when wind and solar fall short (say, at night). And the electricity system needs to be extremely secure and robust, because decarbonizing means electrifying everything, moving transportation and heat over to electricity, which will substantially raise total electricity demand.

The big disputes in the clean energy world thus tend to be about how far wind, solar, and batteries can get on their own — 50 percent of total power demand? 80 percent? 100?) and what sources should be used to supplement them. (See this much-cited 2018 paper in the journal Joule on the need for “firm, low-carbon resources.”)

The answer currently favored by renewable energy advocates is more energy storage, but at least for now, storage remains far too expensive and limited to do the full job. The other top possibilities for “firming” electricity supply — nuclear power or fossil power with carbon capture and sequestration — have their own issues and passionate constituencies for and against.

Geothermal power, if it can be made to reliably and economically work in hotter, drier, and deeper rock, is a perfect complement to wind and solar. It is renewable and inexhaustible. It can run as baseload power around the clock, including at night, or “load follow” to complement renewables’ fluctuations. It is available almost everywhere in the world, a reliable source of domestic energy and jobs that, because it is largely underground, is resilient to most weather (and human) disasters. It can operate without pollution or greenhouse gases. The same source that makes the electricity can also be used to fuel district heating systems that decarbonize the building sector.

It checks all the boxes.

“Our challenge is not that we have any enemies,” says Latimer. “If you want to talk to Democrats, we produce carbon-free electricity 24/7 — the last piece of the puzzle for a fully decarbonized electricity sector. If you talk to Republicans, it’s American ingenuity putting our drilling fleet to work on a resource that’s fuel-secure, doesn’t rely on imports, and puts the oil and gas people back to work. It’s a beautiful bipartisan story. The problem is we just don’t get talked about.”

Oil and gas to the rescue?

One thing that might get more people talking about geothermal is the somewhat serendipitous opportunity it offers to the oil and gas industry, which is reeling from oversupply, persistently low prices, and cratering demand caused by the pandemic. Consequently, it is hemorrhaging jobs.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images

Geothermal is buzzing with startups that specifically need innovation and expertise in drilling technology, the very skills many oil and gas workers already have. They could put those skills to work making the planet safer for future generations. That skills match is what animates Beard’s geothermal entrepreneurship organization and the $4.65 million contest that DOE launched this year to pair geothermal innovations with partners in the manufacturing industry.

There’s never been a better time to start or join a geothermal startup — most of them will fail, but there’s a future billionaire in there somewhere.

Industry veterans have taken notice. It made waves when, a few months ago, the “Frack King” — Mukul Sharma, an O&G engineer at UT Austin who has been key in the development of hydraulic fracturing — launched a new EGS venture called Geothermix.

“When we started in the unconventional [oil and gas] space, there were a lot of issues that needed to be resolved, but over time we have increased well productivity by a factor of 4 to 10 in many shale basins,” he told Heat Beat. “We are very early on the learning curve in the EGS context, but I have no doubt that we will be able to translate oil and gas learnings from the past decade and successfully deploy these methods in EGS.”

Latimer was an O&G engineer before he shifted to geothermal. Sage Geosystems was founded by Lev Ring and Lance Cook, two longtime O&G veterans. Eavor employs several O&G veterans.

The industry is taking notice as well. “We got a nice little head start, and we’re running like hell to stay ahead of it,” says Redfern, “but yeah, [oil and gas majors] are definitely turning their attention to this.”

What’s likely is that oil and gas majors will eventually start buying up geothermal startups. Investments in geothermal would give them a way to shelter part of their portfolio from the brutal oil market.

And geothermal is a more natural match than wind and solar for many of these companies. “The fact that it leverages industry core competencies for the purpose of producing clean energy,” Rao said, “will give it staying power in the industry, regardless of energy market conditions.”

Geothermal remains a relatively small industry, with a market cap in the single-digit billions, while oil and gas is a trillion-dollar industry. There’s no realistic way geothermal can promise to absorb all the jobs currently being lost in oil and gas.

Nonetheless, geothermal offers O&G something it badly needs: a port in a storm. It’s a growing clean energy industry that needs a smart workforce trained in exploration and drilling. Oil and gas has one of those.

Recent oil and gas technology innovations are going to turbocharge geothermal, especially if policymakers can get their act together and offer some support. There’s a steep learning curve ahead and they’re just now accelerating into it, but the next decade is likely to be more active for geothermal than the past four.

With an inexhaustible, dispatchable, flexible renewable energy source so close to breaking through, the vision of a fully renewably powered world seems less and less utopian, more and more tantalizingly within reach.

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Incumbent Democrat Chellie Pingree of Maine is facing Republican challenger Jay Allen, for her 1st District seat in a couple of weeks. On Tuesday night, the two faced off in a debate. Many issues were covered in the debate: public health, where Allen blamed nursing homes for not following the “rules” of public health, while also trying to say that mandating mask wearing was not a good public health policy. Rep. Pingree mentioned that wearing a mask was, at the very least, “a benevolent act for everyone else,” and wondered aloud why anyone would refuse to wear one anyway. She also explained that the concept of “low risk,” during these times is relative and therefore mask wearing is very important for everyone to participate in.

This was the tenor of the First Congressional District Debate. Oh, Jay Allen also wore a tie with an American flag pattern all over it, talked about creating a social security sliding scale that would get rid of some people’s social security benefits, and was not able to give an actual replacement solution to getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. Super classy stuff. But this was all overshadowed when race and law enforcement’s relationship to race came up.

Allen began by bringing up some tangled sentence about law enforcement personnel having Black friends and other white people have Black friends. Seriously. The point was that we already have laws that say you cannot discriminate against Black people and so there isn’t systemic racism. “People in general are not racist.” He then blamed issues in the Black community on homes “without fathers.” An old, factually incorrect, and racist trope. Then moderators asked about “qualified immunity” laws that give law enforcement blank checks to brutalize citizens with impunity.

Rep. Pingree explained that there are inequities in our society that fall along racial lines and to deny that is a non-starter in trying to fix it. She spoke about the need for programs that helped disadvantaged groups of citizens and her support for a task force that would look into modifying “immunity laws” for police as they frequently become great obstacles in investigations of police malfeasance and accountability. 

Allen wanted to jump in to give his two-racist cents and talk about how police are awesome and … that, I guess? He then explained that there are programs for disadvantaged groups already. He must be talking about the ones that Republican politicians in Maine have been attacking and cutting funding from for about a decade. He then went on to give what is arguably the most concise racist logic about law enforcement’s use of violence against Black people you will ever read. When asked if what he was basically saying was that Black people are more likely to be shot by police because Allen thinks the Black family unit has eroded, Allen went full-blown bananas cuckoo clock.

JAY ALLEN: No. They [police] are less likely. Because they know that if they shoot a Black person then they will face an inquisition if they shoot that Black person. So they have to be pretty sure that that Black person needs to be shot.

[Gulp]

Everyone took a slight pause there, trying to compute the confusing racist man with the American flag tie. Later on Allen called into question the science behind climate change. Just more of the Grand Old Party’s stale greatest hits.

Last month, the Environmental Working Group, a critic of agribusiness subsidies, reported that its analysis showed that in 2018 and 2019, more than half of the $23.2 billion in the Market Facilitation Program went to the richest 10% of farms. The program is meant to offset harm caused by the U.S.-China trade war initiated by Donald Trump.

This week, The Washington Post looked at another aspect of the relief funding and discovered 91% of those billions went to counties that supported Donald Trump in 2016, with just 9% going to counties that voted for Hillary Clinton. If there’s a surprise to be found in those figures, it’s that Clinton-favoring counties got even a nickel.

Sign up with 2020 Victory to make phone calls to voters in battleground states to elect Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the whole Democratic ticket. All you need is a home computer, a quiet place at home to make calls and a burning desire to kick Donald Trump out of office.

Reporter Philip Bump writes:

What’s more, counties that flipped from blue to red in 2016 received an average of nearly $3 million more than ones that backed the Republican presidential candidate in both 2012 and 2016. Counties won by Clinton received an average of $5.7 million. Counties that voted Republican in 2012 and 2016 received an average of $8.4 million. Counties that flipped got an average of $11.1 million. [...]

It’s important to note that it is not necessarily the case that the money received in a county was then used solely within that county. The data is organized based on the location of the entity receiving the check, meaning that a large agricultural company located in a red county might actually be doling out its receipts to a broader range of places. But, again, Trump won rural areas by 27 points, and rural areas are, for obvious reasons, more likely to have farms.

To see the future, watch where the incentives and interests — particularly Mitch McConnell's — lie.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Young protestors in Belgium call for action on climate change | Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images

75 million American citizens can’t vote in this election. What if we changed that?

Around the world, almost every country bars people under 18 from voting. The reasons vary — they won’t be informed enough, they don’t pay taxes yet, they can’t serve in the military yet, they tend too liberal, they tend too rebellious. Yet the rule persists, even though many 16- and 17-year-olds do pay taxes, even in the face of a generation of passionate, smart, and informed teenage activists, and even as it becomes obvious that our current political system is failing our children.

In the last year, there’ve been encouraging signs that we might rethink this. Democratic candidate Andrew Yang argued for a voting age of 16, and a bill proposing a voting age of 16 died in the US House in March 2019 with a majority of Democratic representatives supporting it.

In my state of California on November 3rd, voters will consider whether to let 17-year-olds vote in the primary if they will be old enough to vote in the general election, which 18 other states and Washington, DC, already allow.

Well, let’s do them one better: The United States should consider eradicating the voting age entirely and letting every American citizen who can successfully fill out a ballot be counted in our local, state, and national elections (and yes, this goes for felons too).

My colleague Matt Yglesias made the case for this five years ago. Since then, it’s only become more apparent that our current system is failing kids — and that they’re competent to fight for a better one.

Enfranchising 75 million American citizens is the right thing to do, and there’s some evidence suggesting it’ll lead to a more engaged, more informed electorate that can at last do right by some of its most vulnerable constituents.

The expanding voting-rights circle

American democracy got off to a rough start. At first, the vote was only extended to white land-owning men. Gradually, property requirements to vote were abolished, and then, with the Civil War, racial restrictions were struck from the books (though still enforced in practice). It was not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, and not until the Civil Rights Movement that many Black Americans could meaningfully exercise their voting rights.

Many of these expansions of voting rights were bitterly opposed at the time. In hindsight, they are all clearly moral and necessary.

Decreasing the voting age to let more of our citizens have a vote isn’t a new idea. We’ve actually lowered the voting age before without any problems. The voting age in the United States was 21 for most of our history. By 1968, several states had lowered it to 18, 19, or 20, and in 1971 the 26th Amendment prohibited any state from setting the voting age higher than 18.

States may still set the voting age lower than 18 for state or local elections, and a few cities have taken steps in that direction: Takoma Park, Hyattsville, and Greenbelt in Maryland have lowered their voting age to 16, and Berkeley, California lets 16-year-olds vote in school board elections. Eighteen is the most common voting age elsewhere in the world, too, but a few countries — including Brazil and Austria — permit 16-year-olds to vote, and until 2007 the voting age in Iran was 15.

Each of these decreases in the voting age may have been controversial at the time, but they’re uncontroversial in hindsight. Virtually no one wants to go back to denying 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds the vote. And granting them the vote was simultaneously a reflection of their full citizenship and full personhood under U.S. law, and an instrument by which the law came to take their interests more seriously. When people become able to vote, politicians work harder to cater to them. Politicians working harder to cater to young people would be a good thing, given the devastating recent rise in child poverty.

4 reasons why we need to get rid of the voting age

There are a host of good reasons to give children the vote. Here are four I want to highlight:

1) The whole concept of a voting age is kinda unprincipled

The US Constitution holds that the right to vote cannot be abridged on the basis of race, color, previous condition of servitude, sex, or age ... if you’re older than 18. It’s an awkward exception we’ve carved out to the admirable general principle that just government requires fair and free elections in which everyone can participate.

We are signatories to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which demands that elections be held “by universal and equal suffrage.” We (and pretty much every other country) fall short of that in a lot of ways, but the 75 million Americans denied the right to vote because they are younger than 18 are definitely the largest group of people systematically excluded from the franchise.

The arguments against universal suffrage have taken a few forms. When women wanted the vote, for example, people argued that they weren’t as educated as men, weren’t as smart, and wouldn’t vote as well. They also argued that they’d just vote however their husbands told them, so there was no need for them to vote.

All of these arguments turned out to be false, but they’d be objectionable even if they were true. We’re founded on the principle that people, as people, deserve a voice in their government. What universal suffrage aspires to is a society where you get a voice not because you’re a member of the right group or rich enough or worthy enough, but just because you’re a person and a member of this society with a stake in its future.

So while I’d be happy about the voting age being lowered to 16 as some have proposed — and such a plan is far more realistic than mine — it still falls short of our obligations to our fellow citizens. The most principled democratic stance is that suffrage should be universal.

2) The case for democracy can’t rest on voters being rational informed agents. Indeed, there’s a strong case for democracy that doesn’t.

Research suggests that voters are not very informed. They don’t know the differences between candidate policy positions. They don’t even know what the executive can and can’t do. They don’t reliably vote for the candidate who they agree with more on the issues.

Does that mean that democracy is a failed experiment? Not at all. Democratic societies work surprisingly well, considering that voters don’t seem very informed. They are more peaceful than non-democratic societies, have better human rights records and stronger economies, and they are more likely to protect the environment. So somehow, this system — for all its frequent and costly flaws — does, actually, do better than any other system of government. The secret sauce of democracy must be something other than “informed voters rationally selecting the candidates most aligned with their nuanced policy views.”

In fact, much of what democracy does is secure buy-in from the population. There’s a strong relationship between satisfaction with democracy and political institutions and generalized social trust — and social trust is very important to functioning societies. Right now, young people express breathtaking cynicism about the U.S. democracy and whether our society cares about them. It’s worth some work to build democratic institutions they have more confidence in.

So, will adding some less-informed voters make democracy fall apart? Not likely. First, there are a lot more adults than kids — you can’t get elected just by carrying the kid demographic.

Second, a lot of people underestimate how informed kids can be. Like, I’m fairly embarrassed by the formulaic writing and lack of nuance in this 11-page essay on the New Deal and how it transformed the role of government that I wrote for the History Day competition when I was 12. But I think the person who wrote it would’ve been a pretty responsible voter, or at least no less capable than the average citizen. (And I don’t think I was unique, either, except in the educational opportunities I had access to.)

Third, if you want more informed voters, giving kids the opportunity to vote will also likely give them more motivation to learn about politics and engage seriously with it. In the long run, I’d expect that an electorate that nourishes its youngest participants ends up more informed.

3) Voting as kids will turn young people into better citizens and likely increase participation their whole lives

Young adults don’t vote much. Some researchers have looked into why not and found a mundane explanation: They lead unstable lives that our voting system accounts for poorly. Many young adults are in short-term housing situations, off at college or trade school, or in a first job or apartment. They are disproportionately more likely to move, and to not know where their polling place is, and to not be sure if they’re registered to vote. Navigating that bureaucracy for the first time, when you’re also navigating your degree or first job, lease, student loan repayments, etc., is daunting. Lots of people don’t succeed.

Researchers have found that voter turnout is a habitual behavior: The best predictor of whether you’ll do it in the future is whether you have a pattern of doing it. People who vote in the first three elections when they’re eligible will likely vote for the rest of their life. And the chaotic years from 18 to 21 are a terrible stage to acquire a new habitual behavior, because they’re full of so many life changes. If everyone registered to vote as kids and voted as kids, they’d have a decade or more of practice at their civic responsibility by age 18.

Realizing these benefits might require schools to actively work to help students register and, on the day of the election, helping them to vote. Schools are well-equipped to do that (many do it for fake mock elections in class anyway). But between schools and parents, children would have more supports in making it to the polls than young adults living alone in college or their first full-time jobs.

Lowering the voting age does seem to help (at least a little bit) to create a population of high-participation, civically engaged voters — or, at least, it did so when Austria tried it. In 2007 they became the first country in the EU to lower their voting age from 18 to 16. The 16- and 17-year-olds were more likely to turn out to vote than 18-21 year olds, and researchers found that they were no less informed and were as likely as older voters to make choices that reflected their values.

Takoma Park, Maryland, saw promising results too. Turnout among 16-17 year olds in the first city election after they were extended the franchise was nearly double turnout for voters 18 and up.

And research from Denmark suggests that parents whose children have a vote are themselves more likely to vote. The researchers studied this by comparing children who turned 18 just in time for the election to children who turned 18 a day too late. The parents of the newly minted voters were more likely to show up at the polls — likely because they wanted to take their child to the polls or model civic engagement.

Of course, this raises an important question: Did the last big change in voting age make our society more democratic? Someone who wanted to argue that the 26th Amendment strengthened our society might point out that there hasn’t been a wartime draft since, and that the socially liberal values younger people are more likely to hold have won some definitive cultural victories since then. But a critic could easily argue that our democracy doesn’t really seem to be stronger than ever and voter participation is no higher. On the whole, the evidence from the change in voting age from 21 to 18 is a mixed bag.

4) Kids have the same — or even a greater — stake in political issues that adults do

A frequent justification for denying kids the franchise is that voting should be attached to the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship. Kids mostly can’t open a bank account under their own name, work a job, or pay taxes. They can’t serve in the military. Therefore, they shouldn’t get to vote.

There’s a problem with this line of logic. First, it’s kind of perverse that the fact that kids are excluded from participation in many corners of society gets used as an excuse to exclude them from the civic sphere as well. Yes, kids typically can’t open bank accounts without their guardian’s approval. They can’t apply for benefits — even if they need them — and they don’t have the right to make many medical decisions for themselves.

That’s not a reason to give them even less of a voice in shaping the society that makes those decisions for them. Voting should not be a final responsibility you earn only once you’ve taken on all of the other responsibilities of society; it should be one of the first core rights you exercise as a member of society.

Second, kids shoulder the consequences of the decisions our politicians make. They’re the population most affected by food insecurity and by air pollution. In failing to address climate change, we’re damaging the world they will live in. We have made financial commitments that they’ll be on the hook to pay back, and we’ve started wars that they are only a few short years from being sent off to fight in. If you earn the right to vote alongside the burden of responsibility, we’ve burdened kids with responsibilities without extending the rights.

We typically don’t think about the fact that kids have very few rights as a moral issue. Why not? Perhaps because the people who are currently experiencing it get fewer platforms to talk about it, have less practice articulating their perspectives, and are stereotyped as bratty, entitled, and ignorant — especially if they complain about their lives. Perhaps that may be because we all lived through it and it can take time to notice that an experience that was universal in your life is actually harmful.

But the restrictions on the rights of children that are commonplace around the world often aren’t justified and often leave kids vulnerable. Giving them a vote would be a first step toward addressing that.

Two reasons why we shouldn’t do this, debunked

There’s a common counterargument to giving children the vote: Won’t a lot of parents use this to effectively just get their kids to vote the way they do? If their kid is going to vote for the “wrong” presidential campaign, won’t they scold or threaten them?

I think this will absolutely happen; it happens to adults. It happened to an adult friend of mine who turned 18 shortly before the 2016 election and whose parents bullied him into voting for their preferred candidate. It happens within marriages, too.

It’s obviously a problem when it happens, and in a world where kids voted, it would happen — no arguing that. But there’s something perverse about denying someone the right to vote to stop other people from denying them the right to vote.

And as my colleague Matt Yglesias argued, even if letting kids vote results in more influence for their parents, that doesn’t really seem like a terrible outcome: “A family of five contains more human beings than a family of two, so if the result of children voting were that the political system started giving more weight to the interests of five-person families than to the interests of two-person families, that would be a sensible outcome, not some shady sleight of hand.”

There’s another objection. Some people might say, “Okay, I’m with you for all of that, but surely kids younger than, say, 8, would just be filling in bubbles at random, right? Don’t we have to draw a line somewhere?”

As a political compromise, sure; a voting age of 12 might be more achievable than universal suffrage is. It is probably more pragmatic to draw a line somewhere. But I don’t think it’s necessary as a matter of principle. If everyone is allowed to vote, then very young kids will likely spoil their ballots (that is, they won’t be able to successfully indicate one and only one candidate for each office that they prefer, so their vote won’t be counted). At some point — a point that’s determined by the capabilities of each individual child — they’ll be able to fill out a ballot successfully. Of course, they should have access to the same accommodations as adults, like accessible voting machines with audio ballots if preferred.

I think this is more desirable than a law banning them from voting until they’re presumed competent to fill out a ballot. First, it’s fairer to young children who are capable of voting successfully; it doesn’t deny them rights because of the assumption they’re too unskilled to exercise them. Second, I think voting would be an exciting and meaningful exercise even for children too young to fill out their ballot validly, and it’s a great chance to develop the habit early — just like we have young children brush their teeth even though they’ll lose those teeth in a few years anyway.

I don’t expect that enfranchising all children will solve all our problems. There are some very real drawbacks here. I expect that enfranchising everyone will make the electorate less informed on average. I don’t have any idea whether it’d be a win for my preferred policies.

But I think the moral case for enfranchising children overwhelms these concerns. In a democracy, the default ought to be that the people can vote — even if we think they’re not very smart or not very informed or not worthy of the privilege. Much of the promise of democracy is that giving people power over their government is a good thing. Taking that seriously means extending the vote as far as we can.

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Rudy Giuliani’s descent from big city mayor to two-bit fraudster has been like watching a 20-year slow-moving train wreck. It seems his long, tortured career is about to end with total humiliation. 

This week, international prankster and award-winning actor Sacha Baron Cohen is releasing a follow-up to his hugely popular and controversial 2006 film, Borat. As he did in 2006, Cohen was able to disguise himself so that he and his fellow cast members could interview highly influential people. In the latest Borat film, Cohen managed to snag an interview Rudy Giuliani, along with Mike Pence and others. 

According to The Guardian, the film contains a scene where Rudy finishes the interview with a young woman he believes is a journalist before adjourning to the hotel bedroom for a drink. In the movie, which hits the big screen on Friday, Rudy entered the bedroom of the suite (which was filled with hidden cameras) and reportedly stretched out on the bed before “fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers.” 

“Borat” then burst into the hotel bedroom to say, “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

WARNING: Here is a still from the video. It is so much worse than the description. [Edit note: the screenshot was deleted from Twitter, you’ll have to watch the Borat movie, if you dare]

After the interview, which took place in July, Rudy realized he’d been had and he called the police. He told the New York Post he was relieved not to have gotten caught up in a Sacha Baron Cohen scam, saying “I only later realized it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.” 

Welp, sounds like he did get caught after all. And what a creep to boot. Borat or not, who thinks it is acceptable to do such a thing to a young female journalist in a hotel room?

Quibi is considering shutting itself down, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter, a move that points to a possible crash landing for a once-highflying entertainment startup that raised $1.75 billion in capital. From the report: The streaming service has been plagued with problems since it launched in April, facing lower-than-expected viewership, disappointing download numbers and a lawsuit from a well-capitalized foe. The service is aimed at mobile viewers, but the coronavirus pandemic forced would-be subscribers away from the kinds of on-the-go situations Quibi executives envisioned for its users. Quibi attracted blue-chip advertisers including Pepsi, Walmart and Anheuser-Busch, securing about $150 million in ad revenue in the run-up to its launch. Those deals came under strain earlier this year amid lower-than-expected viewership for Quibi's shows, prompting advertisers to defer their payments. In recent weeks, Quibi hired a restructuring firm to evaluate its options, the people said. The firm recommended the options to the board of directors this week, laying out a list of options that included shutting the company down.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's so bad, it's almost comical at this point—almost. As Senate Republicans suddenly try to distance themselves from the monster in the White House who just might doom their majority, it's impossible to forget just how much harm these elected lawmakers have visited upon our country.

But that's not going to stop them from trying to gaslight the country two weeks before an election that could end their grip on power and, for some, even their political careers. GOP whip and South Dakota Sen. John Thune, who isn't up for reelection, is suddenly concerned about Donald Trump's attacks on the free press, as well as his tirades against infectious disease experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci trying to slow the spread of the pandemic. 

Dumping Trump would be sweet but also retaking the Senate would be oh-so-much sweeter. Make it happen with your $2 donation right now.

"Stay away from personal attacks. Quit attacking the media. Quit attacking Fauci and focus on issues," Sen. Thune told CNN. Gee, those critiques could have been useful months, if not years, earlier. But they were nowhere to be found as Senate Republicans dodged reporters and spent more time claiming they hadn't seen the news of Trump's latest abomination than they did actually legislating.

But if you want some insights into what really concerns sitting Republicans fighting for their political lives, it's Trump's horrific handling of the coronavirus. Not only did Trump downplay the lethality of the pandemic from the get-go, he has actually gone to war with the scientists in his own administration, most recently attacking Dr. Fauci as a "disaster"—on a campaign call, no less.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who recently tested positive for coronavirus and is now trailing his Democratic rival Cal Cunningham by just a few points, took Fauci's side in the debate. 

"I got a lot of confidence in Dr. Fauci," Tillis said.

GOP Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who typically keeps a low profile and is also fighting off a tough challenge from Democrat Steve Bullock, telegraphed his support for Fauci without mentioning either him or Trump. "We're seeing huge spikes in Montana right now," Daines said when asked about Trump's broadside on Fauci. "We need to stay focused now in stopping this pandemic."

Even the ever-obsequious GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sided with Fauci, offering, "I think in terms of Dr. Fauci, I trust his judgment."

Oh, and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas has suddenly found his voice, telling the editorial board of a local Texas paper that he's been voicing his opposition to many of Trump's positions but behind closed doors, where no one could see it—privately, as he says.

A lot of good that did. Anyone notice Trump making that pivot to being a competent, ethical, and law-abiding public servant? Nope. 

And that's exactly because of episodes like this one, recounted by CNN. 

After Trump's rocky performance at last month's presidential debate, Cornyn was speaking to two reporters about a range of topics. But when asked about Trump's refusal at the debate to disavow white supremacists, Cornyn abruptly ended the back-and-forth.

"I'm done. See ya later," Cornyn said as he walked through the halls of the Russell Senate Office Building.

What a profile in courage. 

Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump in London in June 2019. | Manden Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

If there’s any family that should sit out attacking others for alleged corruption, it’s the Trumps.

Donald Trump is the first president in modern history to refuse to divest from his business interests upon taking office. As a result, he reportedly took in at least $73 million from foreign sources during his first two years in office, creating an unprecedented tangle of conflicts of interest with countries like the Philippines, India, and Turkey that are home to Trump-branded buildings.

Meanwhile, Trump’s adult sons — who said before his inauguration that they’d stay out of politics to avoid conflicts of interest — serve as key political surrogates for their father while running the family business, which has benefited from Trump’s presidency both directly and indirectly.

Somehow, none of this has stopped the president or his family from making his closing reelection case about corruption. Not his, mind you, but the flimsily supported idea that Joe Biden committed crimes by letting Obama administration foreign policy be influenced by his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.

Various aspects of these allegations have been debunked before (more on that later), but Trump’s attacks have nevertheless been echoed by his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

“The Biden family has spent decades in Washington, DC enriching themselves by selling access to Joe Biden’s taxpayer funded office. Hunter Biden is corrupt. Jim Biden is corrupt. Joe Biden is corrupt,” Trump Jr. tweeted last week, with Eric Trump making a similar attack on Tuesday.

Of course, the first rule of Trumpism seems to be to never let shame or hypocrisy get in the way of attacking your enemies, so it’s not necessarily surprising that Trump is trying to weaponize one of his weaknesses in a last-ditch effort to turn his flailing reelection campaign around. But it’s still worth devoting some attention to the projection involved in Trump posturing as some sort of anti-corruption crusader.

The thin Hunter Biden “scandal,” briefly explained

Hunter Biden is back in the news following the New York Post’s October 14 piece about unverified emails found on a hard drive of dubious provenance. The story suggests emails found on the drive indicate that while Biden was vice president, his son used his connections to get the vice president to meet with an executive from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company Hunter served on the board of for $50,000 a month.

It’s not clear whether the meeting ever happened (the Biden campaign says no one-on-one time ever did). But the implication, conservatives say, is that the purported meeting led to Joe Biden abusing his office by pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who had been investigating a company that was paying his son.

While it’s unclear what qualifications Hunter had for that gig beyond having Biden as a last name, the accusation that his role on Burisma’s board somehow compromised the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has been long debunked.

For one, the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, was widely regarded as corrupt, and his ouster in March 2016 had broad international support. As Parker Molloy recently wrote for Media Matters, “Biden’s role in carrying out that internationally supported action actually made it more likely that Burisma would face increased legal scrutiny, not less.” Secondly, while Shokin had investigated Burisma, his probe was reportedly dormant at the time Biden advocated for his ouster.

In short, there’s no there there. So it tracks that, according to reporting from the New York Times, Post staffers were unwilling to put their names on the October 14 piece. The article was ultimately co-bylined by Emma-Jo Morris, a former staffer for Sean Hannity’s Fox News show who had never bylined a piece for the Post before, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, who reportedly “learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published.”

“Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings,” the Times wrote. “Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.”

As a result, Trump acolytes who have been pushing the Burisma story — including Rudy Giuliani — have already moved the goalposts from “Biden is guilty of wrongdoing” to “even if the premise of the Post story is false, the American people deserve to see the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

Trump and his acolytes have also accused Hunter Biden of selling his name and connections in China.

“He’s like a vacuum cleaner — he follows his father around collecting,” Trump said on October 16. “What a disgrace. It’s a crime family.”

But as the New York Times detailed in a story on Tuesday that, ironically, is about a previously undisclosed bank account Trump has in China, there’s no evidence Hunter did anything wrong here either:

In a misleading claim amplified by surrogates like his son Donald Trump Jr. and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president has said the younger Mr. Biden “walked out of China” with $1.5 billion after accompanying his father on an official trip in 2013. Numerous news articles and fact-checking sites have explained that the huge figure was actually a fund-raising goal set by an investment firm in which Hunter Biden obtained a 10 percent stake after his father left office. The firm did receive financial backing from a large state-controlled bank, but it is not clear the fund-raising target was ever met, and there is no evidence Hunter Biden received a large personal payout.

Even if Hunter Biden were as shady as the president’s circle is alleging, the Trump family should still probably sit this one out.

From “drain the swamp” to being the swamp

Very few people would argue that there isn’t something unseemly about Hunter Biden seemingly cashing in on his family name while his father was still serving as vice president. But if there’s anybody who should refrain from making that case, it’s the Trump children.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Don Jr. and Eric have been responsible for the Trump Organization, which sprawls across more than 30 countries and about 500 business entities, and, according to Trump, generated about $9.5 billion in revenue annually before he took office. And while Trump and his family insist that they’ve honored the promise Trump made before his inauguration not to do any new foreign deals while he’s in office, the business has still provided the family multiple chances to cash in since January 2017:

• In January 2019, Eric Trump took a business trip to Uruguay to visit a Trump property, and taxpayers ended up spending more than $80,000 on Eric’s Secret Service protection.
• In September 2019, Donald Trump Jr. met in New York City with about 100 purchasers of Trump-branded condos in India, and told an Indian newspaper that “India is a market that we would be very interested post politics.”
• In October 2019, Eric Trump claimed that “when my father became commander in chief of this country, we got out of all international business” — but days later, the Trump Organization refuted Eric’s claim by publicly touting a new deal to expand the Trump Doonbeg project in Ireland.

As I wrote last February, shortly after the Washington Post broke news about the Secret Service spending more than $500,000 at Trump properties since he took office, the Trump family has become the swamp that Donald Trump once promised to drain:

The irony is that the Trump children have made a fortune from foreign dealings, and not just before their dad took office. In October, Forbes reported that Eric and Donald Jr. have sold more than $100 million of the family’s real estate since the January 2017 inauguration — including a $3.2 million deal in the Dominican Republic in 2018 that is “the clearest violation of their father’s pledge to do no new foreign deals while in office.” Foreign money has also poured into the Trump International Hotel, located just blocks from the White House, which the president’s most recent financial disclosure indicated made him $41 million in 2018 alone.

All of this comes on top of President Trump having visited properties he still owns and profits from more than 500 times while in office, according to a count kept by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which found last month that Trump has racked up 3,403 conflicts of interest while in office.

Not only that, but on numerous occasions Trump has used White House events to promote his businesses, such as the following free ad for Trump National Doral Miami he cut last year during his failed push to hold the G7 there.

In addition to Ukraine, the Trumps have accused Hunter Biden of cashing in in China. But as the New York Times detailed last year, a $1.7 billion Trump Organization project in Indonesia received a $500 billion infusion from a state-owned Chinese construction company. And it’s not just Eric and Don Jr.; Ivanka Trump, despite working in the White House, continues to do business in China as well.

Donald Jr. and Eric may be two of their father’s key campaign surrogates and regularly appear on Fox News to discuss politics (making a mockery of their pre-inauguration promise to stay out of their father’s administration while running the family business), but Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner actually work in the White House. Their most recent financial disclosure indicates that politics has been lucrative for them, as they reported at least $36.2 million in income in 2019. And in 2018, Kushner received a massive cash infusion from Qatar.

As Robert Maguire, research director for CREW, told Vox, “one way to think about this is: Imagine if Hunter Biden passed his time during the Obama administration working to sustain and promote a business that not only he profited from, but Joe Biden did also. Then, on top of that, imagine that Joe Biden himself spent day after day in office openly and single-mindedly promoting that same business, in his official capacity, through glowing statements and hundreds of visits to the business, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money being spent there — along with special-interest and foreign money.”

“If all of that were true, it still wouldn’t be as corrupt as what we’ve seen over four years of the Trump administration,” Maguire added.

Desperate times call for desperate measures

With Trump trailing Biden by a robust margin in the polls and few of his attacks on his challenger landing, it seems his campaign is basically trying to recreate some of the conditions that helped propel him to an unlikely victory in October 2016 — ginning up an email scandal in hopes of tarnishing Biden as corrupt in the eyes of voters.

But one problem with this approach is that there’s even less to the Biden/Burisma “scandal” than there was to Hillary Clinton’s emails. Trump on some level seems to recognize this, as in recent days he’s started berating the media for not covering the Hunter Biden scandal, such as it is, instead of trying to highlight the scandal itself.

Secondly, as Republican Frank Luntz told Fox News this week, in a country being ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic in both human and economic terms, voters just don’t seem to care that much about Hunter Biden.

Nonetheless, during a Fox & Friends interview on Tuesday, Trump pleaded with Attorney General Bill Barr to appoint a special prosecutor before the election to investigate Biden. That echoed comments Trump made almost exactly a year ago when he publicly pleaded with the Ukrainian and Chinese governments to investigate the Bidens.

And in another sign of how desperate Trumpworld has become, Trump acolyte Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) went on Fox News last weekend and made baseless insinuations that child pornography was found on Hunter Biden’s computer.

Whether there’s merit to serious accusations of this sort is beside the point for Trump and his Republican enablers — what matters is creating the appearance that Biden and/or those close to him are guilty of wrongdoing. After all, if Trump really cared about corruption, he would have done what every other modern president did before taking office and divested from his business before taking office.

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The American flag flies at half-mast in April in New Jersey, behind a sign that reads, “Maintain social distance.” | Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images

Covid-19 cases are surging. This was predictable — and preventable.

America is in the middle of its third nationwide surge in Covid-19 cases — what some are calling a “third wave” — with reported cases hitting a record high of more than 100,000 in one day.

With that, the much-feared fall and winter surge of coronavirus cases that experts warned of for months is here. Despite the US already suffering at least 235,000 Covid-19 deaths — the highest death toll in the world — it looks like things are getting worse.

As of November 8, the seven-day average of daily new coronavirus cases was more than 111,000, a record high. That’s up from a recent low in the seven-day average of fewer than 35,000 cases on September 12. The increase doesn’t appear to be driven by a single state or region — although the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin appear to be in particularly bad shape — but rather spikes across much of the country at once, with more cases reported in the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West.

The spike is partly due to more testing exposing more cases. But that can’t be the full explanation, because hospitalizations and the overall rate of positive tests are trending up. Over the most recent week of data, the seven-day average for daily tests increased by only 9 percent while daily new coronavirus cases increased by 34 percent.

Unlike the summer’s surge of coronavirus, the US isn’t alone in its latest wave — cases have risen in much of Europe, too. Still, that doesn’t mean this was inevitable: With aggressive measures, developed nations like Canada, Germany, and especially Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea have kept their Covid-19 caseloads much lower than America’s or Europe’s as a whole. And many European countries, unlike the US, have started to tame their outbreaks with new measures, from lockdowns to mask mandates.

Experts have long warned that a surge was coming in the US in the colder seasons. Even though the country never fully suppressed its summer surge in Covid-19 cases, most states have moved to reopen more businesses, including risky indoor spaces like restaurants and bars, as well as schools, with colleges and universities proving particularly problematic so far.

President Donald Trump, for his part, has encouraged the rapid reopenings — even after his own illness. As he left the hospital, Trump tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” He’s kept pushing a false sense of normalcy in the weeks since, even going as far as mocking masks and claiming, falsely, that they’re ineffective. (In reality, the evidence for masks keeps getting stronger.)

President-elect Joe Biden takes the virus more seriously, but he won’t take office until January 20, 2021.

The fall and winter are right now making things worse. Schools are continuing to reopen. The cold in northern parts of America is pushing people back inside, where the virus has a much easier time spreading than the outdoors. Families and friends will come together for the holidays. A flu season could strain the health care system further.

States will likely move to reopen more widely, especially as officials face pressure from businesses to allow indoor spaces while colder temperatures make outdoor activities less feasible. Experts worry that Americans as a whole will get even more fatigued with social distancing and masking, now that the US is more than eight months into its battle against Covid-19.

“It’s less excusable this time,” Crystal Watson, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, previously told me. “We have an example of what happens when we reopen these types of businesses for indoor activities.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Cities, counties, states, and the federal government — or, short of all that, the public — could take social distancing seriously again. Governments could mandate masks, and the public could opt to wear them without a mandate. Bars and restaurants could close, voluntarily or not. Places that do open, such as schools, could try to adopt aggressive testing-and-tracing regimes to try to keep the coronavirus under some control.

Without that, America’s coronavirus epidemic will keep getting worse. That would not just lead to more Covid-19 cases and deaths, but deal yet another blow to the prospects of the US returning to normal anytime soon.

“If you do things the right way, you can do them,” Cedric Dark, an emergency medicine physician at the Baylor College of Medicine, previously told me. “If you do them the wrong way, then you’re going to get cases.”

America keeps making the same mistakes

After the spring outbreaks hit the northeastern US, much of the country, led by Republican leaders in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas, moved forward with aggressive reopenings. The problem, experts said, is many of these places never suppressed their Covid-19 outbreaks. As epidemiologist Pia MacDonald at RTI International told me at the time, many states “never got to flat.” Case counts continued to climb, and states continued to reopen anyway.

This created an environment that made it much easier for the coronavirus to spread. If there’s already some community transmission going on, then it’s simply going to be more likely that one person will infect another. Add more spaces in which infections are very likely — particularly close indoor spaces like bars and restaurants — and that risk can be increased dramatically. So cases started to increase in the summer.

The current surge seems to be a repeat of the summer spike. Cases started to fall in late July, eventually reaching a recent low point in mid-September. But that low point was still much higher than the peak of Covid-19 cases in the spring (partly, but likely not entirely, due to more testing). Yet states seemingly declared victory and started to reopen anyway — and now cases are rapidly climbing again.

So MacDonald has repeated the same thing she told me in the summer: “We never got to low enough levels [of Covid-19] to start with in most places.”

Of particular interest is indoor dining at restaurants and bars, which are reopening at varying levels across the country. Experts characterize these settings as perhaps the worst imaginable spaces for Covid-19 spread: People are close together for long periods; they can’t wear masks as they eat or drink; the air can’t dilute the virus like it can outdoors; and alcohol could lead people to drop their guards further. It was a recognition of all these risks that led many states to scale back and close indoor dining and bars during their summer outbreaks.

This time, though, schools are also reopening.

There have been reports of outbreaks in K-12 settings, where students and teachers can potentially transmit the coronavirus to each other in the classroom. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about how younger kids, particularly in elementary schools, spread the virus. And it doesn’t seem, at least so far, as though the K-12 outbreaks are driving the national increase.

Instead, some experts have pointed to colleges and universities as bigger drivers of the recent Covid-19 wave. Students in these institutions aren’t just potentially spreading the coronavirus in their classrooms, although that’s likely happening to some degree. They’re also showing up at bars, clubs, and indoor restaurants, partying at dorms, and drinking a lot more than they should.

“College kids are college kids,” Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory University School of Medicine, previously told me. “That’s what I always tell every university president I talk to: You can make all the plans you want, but at the end of the day, it’s what happens outside your plans that matters.”

The good news, for now, is that infections in colleges and universities skew younger, and younger people are less likely to suffer major complications, including deaths, from Covid-19. That helps explain, along with general improvements in treatment, why daily Covid-19 deaths are still lower than they were in August (though they’re still at more than 900 a day in the US).

But young people can still get seriously ill and die from the coronavirus. Even if their death toll remains low overall, young people will also likely interact with their teachers, parents, and grandparents at some point, potentially infecting them. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested many of the summer outbreaks started among young people but eventually spread to older populations, who were more susceptible to illness and death. That already may be happening again, as deaths start to tick up again.

After the summer surges, Brown University School of Public Health dean Ashish Jha previously told me, “I was like, ‘Okay, now we’ve all been through this — every part of the country: the South, the West, the Midwest, the Northeast. There’s no denialism anymore that will work, because there’s been this long denial while it’s been there but not here.’” Yet, he said, “We’re starting to see this again.”

He added, “I, at this point, feel like I clearly no longer understand why our country can’t learn its lessons and why we keep repeating the same mistakes.”

Winter is coming

Things are still getting worse.

People are getting more fatigued with social distancing, and more ready to move on from thinking about the pandemic more broadly, as time drags on. When the summer surge of Covid-19 abated, it became easier for people to convince themselves it’s safe out there. With this fatigue, complacency, and false sense of safety, more people are perhaps putting themselves in dangerous settings, infecting each other along the way.

At the same time, colder temperatures, particularly in the northern parts of the US, are pushing more people indoors, where the coronavirus is much more likely to spread due to poor ventilation. (One upside: This could have the opposite effect in southern parts of the country, where temperatures will get less unbearably hot, so the outdoors may actually get more tolerable.)

As Thanksgiving rolls around, followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s, families and friends will likely come together from around the country. That includes college and university students, who could come home from Covid-19 hot spots back in their dorms or classrooms.

With this, Covid-19 outbreaks are bound to get worse. And as people carry the coronavirus across state borders, they may cause a much more dispersed — and larger — epidemic than the US has seen so far.

“People will bring this back during Thanksgiving, during Christmas, during winter break,” Dark said. “This is a disease that has an incubation period of up to two weeks. So it’s not really safe to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to come home and come back.’ … By the time you develop symptoms, you’ve already exposed your parents.”

On top of all that, another flu season this fall and winter could strain health care systems, hindering hospitals’ abilities to treat Covid-19 patients and potentially contributing to more deaths.

So the numbers are already heading in the wrong direction, as experts predicted. “The next number in the fall is likely going to shoot way up,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, previously told me. “Likely well beyond 65,000, 70,000,” the summer’s previous peak. “I think this fall is going to be the biggest spike of all.”

The US can still act — but Trump seems unlikely to change

The ideas to stop further outbreaks aren’t shocking or new. They’re all things people have heard before: More testing and contact tracing to isolate people who are infected, get their close contacts to quarantine, and deploy broader restrictions as necessary. More masking, including mandates in the 16 states that don’t have one. More careful, phased reopenings. More social distancing.

This is what’s worked in other countries, from Germany to South Korea to New Zealand, to contain outbreaks. It’s what studies support: As a review of the research published in The Lancet found, “evidence shows that physical distancing of more than 1 m is highly effective and that face masks are associated with protection, even in non-health-care settings.” Other studies have backed these policies.

It’s also what’s worked in the US. After suffering huge outbreaks in the spring, states like New York managed to suppress the coronavirus with such policies. Cities, such as San Francisco, have avoided big outbreaks entirely with similar efforts. Even some universities have seen promising early results with very aggressive testing and tracing. (The federal government would ideally be in charge of all of this, but Trump has by and large punted the pandemic down to the states to resolve.)

“There’s no mystery about what causes new cases,” Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious diseases physician and medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston University School of Medicine, previously told me. “We have to make trade-off choices.”

Everything that reopens will add to the infection rate. Some places may have tiny, even negligible effects, such as parks. Some are bigger threats, like bars and indoor dining. And some may carry potentially high risk but still seem worth it to the community for their social benefits, like schools.

The goal, then, is to balance out a reopening — doing it slowly, making it possible to see the effects of each extra step — to make sure outbreaks don’t get out of control. Ultimately, it may require not opening bars or indoor dining, perhaps ever, so schools and other more socially crucial places can open. At the same time, the government could offer shuttered businesses a bailout or other financial support.

“For us, as a society, to be able to send children to school, we have to make tough decisions and sacrifices in other areas,” Jorge Salinas, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, previously told me. “We can’t have it all.”

More testing, tracing, and masking likely reduce the infection rate in a community further, letting more places reopen than otherwise could.

By striking this balance, the US can not only avoid more infections and deaths but also potentially avoid an outbreak from getting so bad that it necessitates another lockdown. While experts all agreed that there’s zero political appetite for a lockdown right now, a massive surge in the fall and winter could leave the US with no other option. Israel and several European countries were forced to shut down again following massive outbreaks.

The reality is that the US will likely not go back to normal until it vanquishes the virus through a vaccine or similar treatment — a process that could take months or years, even after a vaccine is proven safe and effective, as the country and world scale up distribution to actually reach sufficient levels of immunity within the population. Experts say the nation should be careful until then.

But maybe the US will continue muddling along, or worse. The country has already shown a much higher tolerance for Covid-19 cases and deaths than the rest of the developed world. Trump, for his part, seems content with that — previously stating the coronavirus “affects virtually nobody” and, even after his own illness, showing no interest in changing his hands-off, minimizing approach. And Biden won’t have the power to change what the US is doing until late January.

So over the next several months, America’s already worst-in-the-world Covid-19 death toll of more than 235,000 will likely continue to rise.

[The government deported the parents without making any provision for reuniting them with their children.]

 

More than two years after a federal court ruled that the Trump administration's migrant family separation policy was illegal and ordered reunification of the children with their families, over 500 of the victims still have not been reunited with their parents. The reason is that the parents in question were deported, and the government officials operating the program didn't bother to make any provision for keeping track of them for purposes of eventual reunification, even though they knew that many young children were unlikely to ever be able to find their parents again on their own:

Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children and that about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Trump administration instituted a "zero tolerance" policy in 2018 that separated migrant children and parents at the southern U.S. border. The administration later confirmed that it had actually begun separating families in 2017 along some parts of the border under a pilot program. The ACLU and other pro-bono law firms were tasked with finding the members of families separated during the pilot program.

Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found….

To my mind, the family separation policy could well be the greatest evil perpetrated by the Trump administration, which is saying no little, given some of the other things they have done. I discussed the reasons why it was so deeply unjust in this 2018 post, which includes responses to claims that Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions can't be blamed because they were "just enforcing the law." As the court decision striking down the policy makes clear, far from being a proper law enforcement measure, it was actually illegal itself. And even if it were not illegal, it would still be a horrific injustice.

I believe the Ukraine scandal was a serious enough abuse of power to justify impeachment.  But if it were up to me, I would rather have impeached Trump over the family separation policy, which was both more obviously illegal, and caused vastly greater harm to innocent people. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions' central role in the family separation policy is one of the reasons why I cannot agree with those (including some on both the left and the right) who lamented his forced departure from office in 2018, and praised him for supposedly standing up for the rule of law. He and Trump deliberately adopted family separation for the purpose of punishing and deterring migrants. And they applied it even to many migrant families who had not violated any law, but instead legally crossed the border to petition for asylum in the United States.

I suppose I should also briefly address the canard that Trump and Sessions were just continuing policies previously initiated by the Obama administration. This oft-heard excuse just simply is not true. If Trump and Sessions were just continuing Obama's policies, they would not have had to issue a new "zero tolerance" order to get what they wanted. Likewise, there would have been no need for the 2017 "pilot program" for family separation, which—as discussed above—resulted in hundreds of family separations that still haven't been rectified. There would have been no point to the pilot program if the policy it sought to test was already in place.

To say that Obama was not to blame in this case, is not to deny that his administration also had some awful immigration policies. They did, and I condemned them at the time. Trump's, however, have been substantially worse. In any event, previous administrations' abuses of power do not justify those of the current one—and vice versa.

Deputy US Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen announces a federal settlement with Purdue Pharma over the OxyContin maker’s role in the opioid epidemic. | Yuri Gripas/AFP via Getty Images

The Justice Department announced an $8 billion settlement with Purdue on Wednesday.

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma has reached an $8 billion settlement with the federal government in which it pleads guilty in a criminal investigation over its role in the opioid epidemic, the US Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

As part of the settlement, Purdue will plead guilty to three counts related to its misleading marketing of opioid painkillers and faces a $3.5 billion criminal fine, $2 billion in criminal forfeitures, and a $2.8 billion civil settlement.

Purdue admits it illegally and misleadingly marketed its opioids, including “to more than 100 health care providers whom the company had good reason to believe were diverting opioids” for misuse; illegally paid doctors to prescribe more opioids; and took part in other fraudulent and illegal practices. Purdue says it did all of this between 2007 and at least 2017 — after a separate guilty plea in 2007 forced the company to pay more than $600 million in fines.

But no one — neither the company’s executives nor members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue — will go to jail or prison as a result of the settlement.

Despite the settlement, it’s unclear how much Purdue will actually pay. The company is in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings, with claims from other people to whom it effectively owes money. The federal government is only one of many entities that Purdue’s holdings will likely be divvied up among.

The Justice Department also threw its support behind a deal that would turn Purdue into a public benefit company overseen by new leadership, with proceeds from OxyContin and other drugs purportedly going to help victims of the opioid crisis. Purdue previously proposed the deal to settle thousands of lawsuits against it, including from local and state governments, over its role in the opioid crisis.

Dozens of states have rejected that deal. They argue that it lets the Sacklers off the hook, since they’d remain very wealthy and out of prison, and that using revenue from OxyContin sales to fund efforts to stop the opioid crisis presents a conflict of interest.

Some critics also claim that the Justice Department’s settlement is a political ploy before Election Day — to shore up President Donald Trump’s weak record on the opioid epidemic.

“DOJ failed,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said. “Justice in this case requires exposing the truth and holding the perpetrators accountable, not rushing a settlement to beat an election. I am not done with Purdue and the Sacklers, and I will never sell out the families who have been calling for justice for so long.”

The Justice Department said the settlement with Purdue doesn’t release anyone, including the Sackler family, from criminal liability — meaning they could be prosecuted and incarcerated in the future. A criminal investigation into the Sacklers is ongoing, according to the Associated Press.

It does, however, free Purdue and the Sacklers from the federal government’s civil claims. But states and others can continue pursuing civil litigation.

Besides Purdue, other opioid makers and distributors currently face criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. Earlier this year, the founder and former CEO of opioid maker Insys, John Kapoor, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison. Other opioid businesses, including Rochester Drug Cooperative, also face criminal charges.

Opioid companies have fueled the drug overdose crisis

Since 1999, nearly 500,000 people have died from opioid overdoses — either on painkillers themselves, or in many cases heroin or illicit fentanyl through a drug addiction that began with painkillers. Pharmaceutical companies were at the forefront of causing the crisis with aggressive marketing that pushed doctors to prescribe more painkillers. That put the drugs not just in the hands of patients but also of friends and family of patients, teens who took the drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and people who bought excess pills from the black market.

Studies have linked marketing for opioids to more prescriptions and overdose deaths.

With OxyContin, Purdue — and the Sacklers — led the charge on this kind of marketing. They claimed that their opioid painkiller, which first hit the market in 1996, was safe and effective, both claims which are now contradicted by the real-world and scientific evidence.

Among Purdue’s alleged crimes, according to the Justice Department:

• “Purdue learned that one doctor was known by patients as ‘the Candyman’ and was prescribing ‘crazy dosing of OxyContin,’ yet Purdue had sales representatives meet with the doctor more than 300 times.”
• “The Named Sacklers then approved a new marketing program beginning in 2013 called ‘Evolve to Excellence,’ through which Purdue sales representatives intensified their marketing of OxyContin to extreme, high-volume prescribers who were already writing ‘25 times as many OxyContin scripts’ as their peers, causing health care providers to prescribe opioids for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary, and that often led to abuse and diversion.”
• “Between June 2009 and March 2017, Purdue made payments to two doctors through Purdue’s doctor speaker program to induce those doctors to write more prescriptions of Purdue’s opioid products. Similarly, from approximately April 2016 through December 2016, Purdue made payments to Practice Fusion Inc., an electronic health records company, in exchange for referring, recommending, and arranging for the ordering of Purdue’s extended release opioid products — OxyContin, Butrans, and Hysingla.”

The Sacklers, for their part, continue to deny culpability for the opioid epidemic. The family claimed in a statement, “Members of the Sackler family who served on Purdue’s board of directors acted ethically and lawfully, and the upcoming release of company documents will prove that fact in detail. This history of Purdue will also demonstrate that all financial distributions were proper.”

Of course, many people simply don’t believe this. They point to the evidence — not just in the federal government’s case but in the lawsuits filed by dozens of states — that indicates the Sacklers were heavily involved in Purdue’s marketing for OxyContin.

Now, some critics are calling not just for Purdue to face criminal culpability, but for the company’s executives and the Sacklers, too. They argue that prison time is necessary, because fines that add up to a fraction of a company or family’s wealth aren’t enough to send a message.

“If [the Sacklers] have the perception — and it’s the correct perception — that ‘people like us just don’t go to jail, we just don’t, so the worst that’s going to happen is you take some reputational stings and you’ll have to write a check,’ that seems like a recipe for nurturing criminality,” Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys previously told me.

For now, though, the Sacklers and other Purdue executives continue to escape that level of punishment.

For more on the case for prosecuting opioid executives, read Vox’s full story.

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If it loses in November, the party of President Trump will only double down on divisiveness.

Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett taps on her microphone during technical difficulties while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. | Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images

The Supreme Court threatens American democracy. Here’s how to stop it.

Republicans are poised to gain a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, something that will enable any five of the Republican-appointed justices to strike down policies supported by Democrats.

If Democrats take back the White House and Congress, however, they have several potent tools that they can use to defend against a 6-3 Court. The most potent is court-packing: add enough seats to the Supreme Court to overwhelm the Court’s current majority, and then fill those seats with judges who support voting rights and are not inclined to strike down progressive legislation.

Although the Constitution provides that there must be a Supreme Court, it does not say how many justices shall serve on that Court. Over the course of American history, the Court has had as few as five seats and as many as 10. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of seats to 15 back in 1937 — although that proposal proved unpopular, and it died in Congress in no small part because the Supreme Court backed away from several previous decisions that undermined the New Deal.

Even if Democrats crush the 2020 election, however, it’s far from clear that they will have the votes to pack the Court. Though Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden hasn’t ruled out adding seats to the Court, he’s said that he’s “not a fan of court-packing.” And packing the Court brings considerable risks — the biggest is that Republicans could retaliate by adding even more justices if they regain control of the elected branches.

If Democrats refuse to pack the Court, they still have other, less potent options. They run the gamut, from rebalancing the Court with Republicans, Democrats, and moderates to passing legislation to override Court decisions to the more drastic step of states simply refusing to obey certain rulings.

Many of the ideas laid out below are radical. So it’s worth taking stock of why such radical ideas need to be considered at all. Simply put, the American system of government is not producing democratic results. And it’s likely to get much worse if the Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican majority.

Republicans owe their majority on the Supreme Court to our failing democracy. In 2012, President Obama won reelection by a comfortable margin. However, his fellow Democrats lost control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, a testament to Senate malapportionment. Republicans in the Senate that blocked Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland’s confirmation in 2016 represented about 20 million fewer people than their Democratic counterparts.

Since then, Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and Republicans have hung on to the Senate. The first Supreme Court justice in American history to be nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country is Trump’s first appointee, Neil Gorsuch. The second is Trump’s second appointee, Brett Kavanaugh. And the third is likely to be Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

The conservative Supreme Court majority is likely to further entrench Republican rule. The Court weakened much of the Voting Rights Act, the principal law forbidding racist voter suppression, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and in Abbott v. Perez (2018). This term, it plans to hear a new voting rights case that could potentially render the Voting Rights Act little more than an empty husk.

And the anti-democratic threat goes beyond voting decisions. The Court is the one unelected branch of government, but it has the power to decide who receives potentially lifesaving health care and who is denied such care. It can veto our efforts to protect the environment, give its blessing to discrimination, and even decide who we are allowed to marry.

Many of the following proposals seek to weaken the Supreme Court — and that might be the most important pro-democracy reform that America could enact. A party that wins a presidential race should get to govern for four years, not for 40. But, in our current system, a president who is lucky enough to fill enough Supreme Court seats can continue to shape our nation’s policy long after they are gone.

Ways to change the makeup of the Supreme Court without giving a clear advantage to one party

Assuming that the next Congress does not have the votes to simply add new seats to the Supreme Court and let a Democratic president fill them, Congress still has several options that could change the makeup of the Court in ways that are less overtly partisan.

1) A “balanced” court

One of the leading alternatives to simply adding and filling new seats on the Court with Democratic judges is still a form of court-packing. But the aim is to create a politically balanced Court where neither party dominates.

In a 2019 paper, law professors Dan Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman proposed a 15-justice Court made up of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five justices chosen by the other 10. The idea behind this proposal, which Pete Buttigieg featured during his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, is that the balance of power on the Supreme Court would be held by moderate judges acceptable to both political parties.

There are a number of concerns about this proposal. One is that it is likely to be declared unconstitutional. The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint new justices; it does not give that power to a panel of 10 other justices.

A more fundamental problem is that any attempt at court-packing, even an attempt that installs a centrist Supreme Court, is likely to enrage Republicans and invite retaliation if Republicans regain control of the government. And there’s no guarantee that a centrist Court will overrule the Roberts Court’s previous decisions undercutting voting rights. Democrats could wind up triggering all the downsides of packing the Court, without gaining the benefits of a more democratic system.

That said, if the alternative to a balanced court controlled by moderates is a 15-justice Court with a Democratic supermajority, perhaps Republicans will be willing to negotiate a compromise. And a balanced Court proposal similar to the one offered by Epps and Sitaraman could potentially be that compromise.

2) The “Supreme Court lottery”

A separate proposal from Epps and Sitaraman would transform the Supreme Court from a permanent panel of nine justices to an ever-changing panel of judges. These judges would briefly rotate onto the Supreme Court before returning to their regular job on a federal appeals court.

The basic idea is that each of the approximately 180 active federal appeals court judges would be appointed as associate justices of the Supreme Court. Then, every two weeks, nine of these judges would be randomly selected to serve on the nation’s highest Court. After two more weeks, a different panel of nine would be selected. (In this system, the current justices could also be eligible to rotate onto a temporary panel of nine, but they would no longer sit permanently on that panel.)

It may seem random, but this is more or less how federal appeals courts already operate. Most appeals court cases are heard by randomly selected panels of three judges, although a larger panel consisting of all the active judges on the court will occasionally hear exceptional cases.

One problem with this proposed lottery system from a Democratic (and democratic) perspective is that the rotating Supreme Court panel would, at least in the short term, more often than not be controlled by Republicans who may share the current Court’s hostility toward voting rights. There are currently 179 active appeals court judges in the United States, and 99 of them were appointed by a Republican president.

And there’s no guarantee that a panel of anti-democratic radicals won’t be randomly chosen to hear a crucial voting rights case — or that such a panel won’t sit during a disputed election.

In the long term, however, a rotating Supreme Court could, in Epps and Sitaraman’s words, “depoliticize the appointments process by making confirmations more numerous and less consequential.” And it would mean that individual justices “would no longer have the ability to shape constitutional law for a generation by strategically timing their retirement” so that their seat is filled by a president of their same party.

3) Term limits

Another way to prevent justices from “strategically timing their retirement” is term limits.

The leading term limits proposal, which has at times enjoyed support from prominent Democrats and Republicans, would require each justice to step down after 18 years. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA), Don Beyer (D-VA), and Joe Kennedy III (D-MA) recently introduced legislation that would implement 18-year term limits. Terms would be staggered so that a justice steps down every two years, meaning that two justices would be replaced during each presidential term — although whoever is president when this proposal is implemented might get to replace more justices depending on how Congress decided to manage the transition to the new system.

If such a proposal were implemented on the first day of a Biden presidency, Biden might immediately get to replace Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer, both of whom have served more than 18 years. The next justice in line to leave the Court would be Chief Justice John Roberts.

It is far from clear, however, that term limits may be imposed on a sitting justice. The Constitution provides that federal judges “shall hold their offices during good behaviour,” and the particular “office” held by each of the current justices is a seat on the Supreme Court for life. (Future justices could probably be term-limited, on the theory that they are being confirmed to a different “office” that only allows them to sit on the nation’s highest Court for 18 years before they are rotated onto a lower court.)

Moreover, even if there is a constitutional way to impose term limits on sitting justices — Yale Law School’s Jack Balkin has a clever proposal to achieve this goal — the question of whether sitting members of the Supreme Court can be subjected to term limits would be decided by, well, the Supreme Court. And it’s unlikely that a majority of sitting justices would willingly agree to term limits.

Ways to weaken the Supreme Court

As an alternative to changing the personnel on the Supreme Court — or, perhaps, in addition to changing the personnel of the Court — Congress might also enact several reforms that seek to diminish the Supreme Court’s nearly unchecked power to hand down binding interpretations of the Constitution.

The president may also be able to diminish the Court’s authority by refusing to enforce particularly egregious Supreme Court decisions.

4) Jurisdiction stripping

The Constitution gives the Supreme Court power to hear most federal cases on appeal from a lower court, but it may only assert jurisdiction over cases “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.” Accordingly, Congress has at least some power to tell the Supreme Court that it is not allowed to hear certain cases.

But it’s not entirely clear how much power Congress has to limit the Court’s power to hear particular cases. Congress has unlimited power to restrict the jurisdiction of lower federal courts — a power that a Democratic Congress could use to prevent Trump-appointed trial judges from blocking new progressive laws as soon as those laws are enacted. But the Supreme Court’s decisions concerning Congress’s power to limit the high Court’s jurisdiction are not a model of clarity.

In Ex parte McCardle (1868), the Supreme Court held that it did not have jurisdiction over a case, brought by a newspaper publisher who claimed that he was wrongly jailed for publishing attacks on Reconstruction, because Congress enacted a law stripping the Court of jurisdiction to hear this case.

McCardle, however, is an old case. And the opinion in that case does not explain the Court’s reasoning in much detail. In the many years since McCardle, many scholars and at least some justices have argued that Congress’s power to limit the Court’s jurisdiction is not unlimited. Concurring in Felker v. Turpin (1996), for example, Justice David Souter suggested that Congress may only be able to prevent the Court from hearing a particular case if there is some other way that the issue presented by that case could reach the justices.

In any event, there are two closely related problems with this tactic — known as “jurisdiction stripping” — as a solution to a partisan Supreme Court. The first is that the question of whether Congress has the power to enact a particular jurisdiction-stripping law will be decided by the Court itself — so the justices may simply strike down an act of Congress that seeks to limit the Court’s jurisdiction.

The other problem is that most federal statutes do not enforce themselves — they need to be applied to individual parties through court orders. Congress might be able to prevent the Supreme Court from striking down the Voting Rights Act, for example, by stripping the Court of jurisdiction to hear voting rights cases. But if voting rights plaintiffs cannot obtain a court order enforcing the Voting Rights Act, then that law ceases to function.

5) Supermajority voting requirements

In a forthcoming law review article, law professors Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn propose that Congress could require a supermajority of justices to vote to strike down federal laws. This proposal could potentially be implemented in two different ways: Congress could either impose a universal rule requiring a 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court to strike down a federal law, or identify particular laws, such as the Affordable Care Act, which can only be struck down by a supermajority.

Such a law would need to be coupled with provisions stripping the lower courts of the power to strike down such laws, or else judges on the lower courts could potentially block laws that the Supreme Court would be unable to strike down with a bare majority vote.

A supermajority requirement, Doerfler and Moyn argue, “would functionally reallocate decision-making authority to the democratically legitimate branches of government in cases in which a countermajoritarian faction on the Court enjoys only a simple majority.” In effect, the Court’s conservatives would have to convince at least one Democratic appointee to strike down a federal law if Congress imposed a 7-2 supermajority requirement.

This proposal, however, is vulnerable to one of the same problems facing jurisdiction stripping. What happens if a 5-4 Supreme Court strikes down the law imposing a 7-2 supermajority requirement? The result could be a constitutional crisis, as Congress and the Supreme Court would be fundamentally at odds regarding whether particular laws are constitutional, and there would be no clear way to resolve this dispute under the Constitution.

Another problem is that the Supreme Court does not need to declare a federal law unconstitutional in order to sabotage it. If Congress requires a supermajority to strike down the Voting Rights Act, for example, the Court could still interpret the individual provisions of this law so narrowly that they would do very little to protect voting rights.

6) Presidential (or congressional) resistance to the Supreme Court

Abraham Lincoln began his presidency with a broadside against the Supreme Court. Reacting to the Supreme Court’s pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), Lincoln attacked the very idea that the justices should have the final say on constitutional matters in his first inaugural address.

[I]f the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Though Lincoln conceded that Dred Scott was binding upon the particular parties to that litigation, he rejected the idea that the president or Congress is bound by the Court’s understanding of the Constitution. The Lincoln administration issued a passport to a Black man, defying Dred Scott’s holding that Black people cannot be citizens. And Lincoln signed legislation banning slavery in the territories, defying Dred Scott’s conclusion that slaves remained slaves even after entering a free territory.

A similar drama nearly played out in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. During Roosevelt’s first term, many contracts contained “gold clauses” requiring debtors to pay back creditors in gold dollars valued at the time when the contract was made. Because of rampant deflation due to the Great Depression, these contracts effectively increased the amount of debt owed under these contracts by as much as 69 percent.

Among other things, these gold clauses drove up the returns railroads owed on their bonds so high that they could have bankrupted most of the railroad industry, potentially shutting down much of the nation’s shipping in the process. And the clauses threatened to ruin homeowners who suddenly owed the equivalent of $1.69 for every dollar they borrowed to buy their house.

Congress declared these gold clauses null and void. But Roosevelt, fearing that the Supreme Court would reinstate the clauses, prepared a speech announcing that he would not obey such a decision. “To stand idly by and to permit the decision of the Supreme Court to be carried through to its logical, inescapable conclusion,” Roosevelt would have said in a speech the Court never forced him to deliver, “would so imperil the economic and political security of this nation that the legislative and executive officers of the Government must look beyond the narrow letter of contractual obligations.”

The theory that each branch of government may decide on its own how to interpret the Constitution, even in defiance of the Supreme Court, is known as “departmentalism.” Under this theory, a president potentially has significant (although not entirely unlimited) power to undermine the judiciary’s determination that a particular law is unconstitutional.

Suppose, for example, that the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act. A Democratic president could order the US Marshalls not to enforce this decision. They could order the Treasury to continue to provide subsidies to states and individuals entitled to receive them under Obamacare. And the president could routinely pardon executive branch officials who continue to make these payments, neutralizing a federal law that plausibly could subject these officials to prosecution in a future administration.

Departmentalism would not allow the president to completely neutralize such a Court decision. Lower federal courts would remain bound by the Supreme Court’s decision, so the president would not be able to obtain a court order against states or private insurers who violate their obligations under Obamacare. But departmentalism would, at the very least, allow the president to mitigate the harm created by a decision that would otherwise strip health coverage from tens of millions of Americans.

7) State resistance to the Supreme Court

Just as the executive or legislative branch might resist a Supreme Court decision through departmentalism, states might invoke a theory known as “interposition” to defy a court order.

The history of interposition, which posits that a state may “interpose” its authority between the Supreme Court and its citizens, is not a happy one. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Southern segregationists relied on interposition to justify defying Brown. Martin Luther King Jr. called out segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, for “having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification.’”

Yet, there are constitutional systems where something similar to interposition exists without this same tainted history. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, contains a provision known as the “Notwithstanding Clause,” which allows either the national parliament or a provincial legislature to declare that at least some laws shall operate “notwithstanding” a court decision declaring that the law violates Canada’s Charter — although these overrides automatically expire after five years if they are not renewed.

In the US system, if a state defies a Supreme Court order, the executive branch may use force to enforce that order — think of President Dwight Eisenhower ordering the Army to enforce a desegregation order in Little Rock, Arkansas.

But, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse” and “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” If the Supreme Court hands down a decision that a state government deems abhorrent, the Court cannot enforce that order if the president decides that it should not be enforced.

Ways to override Supreme Court decisions

As Congress has grown more and more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court has gained a nearly unchecked power to determine the meaning of federal laws. Though Congress lacks the power to overrule a Supreme Court decision interpreting the Constitution, Congress may amend a federal statute if it disagrees with the Court’s reading of that statute.

Yet Congress uses this power far less than it used to, according to a 2012 study by University of California Irvine law professor Rick Hasen. Hasen found that, between 1975 and 1990, Congress enacted “an average of twelve overrides of Supreme Court cases in each two-year Congressional term.” Between 2001 and 2012, by contrast, the number of overrides dwindled to a mere 2.8 per two-year term. (Hasen defines the term “override” to include acts of Congress that “overturned, reversed, or modified a Supreme Court statutory interpretation holding.”)

But there’s no reason why Congress — especially a filibuster-free Congress controlled by a single party — must continue to defer to the Supreme Court.

8) Omnibus legislation overruling past Supreme Court decisions

One model that Congress could follow is the Civil Rights Act of 1991, a bill signed by President George H.W. Bush back when it was still possible to achieve a bipartisan consensus against discrimination.

In its 1988 term, the Supreme Court handed down five decisions that, in the words of one scholar, “substantially eroded Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which prohibits many forms of employment discrimination. Congress enacted the 1991 civil rights bill to overrule, or, in some cases, modify those five decisions.

Similarly, Congress could enact a Civil Rights Act of 2021 that overrides several Supreme Court decisions at once.

This bill could include, for example, provisions tossing out the Supreme Court’s entire forced arbitration jurisprudence, which allows companies to force their workers and customers into a privatized justice system that favors corporate parties. It could overrule decisions weakening the Voting Rights Act. And it could also override less famous decisions such as Vance v. Ball State University (2013), which made it much harder for workers who are sexually harassed by their boss to sue their employer; or Gross v. FBL Financial Services (2009), which weakened protections against age discrimination.

Such an omnibus bill would serve two purposes. It would get rid of Court decisions that weakened laws intended to protect our democracy and halt practices such as discrimination, and it would send a clear message to the justices that there’s a new sheriff in town who is keeping a close eye on them.

9) Expedite legislation seeking to overrule Supreme Court decisions

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) lays out an expedited process that Congress can use to swiftly overrule regulatory decisions by the executive branch. A bill overruling a federal regulation through the CRA still must pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president, but the CRA’s streamlined process makes it relatively easy for lawmakers who oppose a particular regulation to override it quickly.

In an essay published in the Atlantic, Sitaraman suggests enacting similar legislation allowing Congress to swiftly overrule Supreme Court decisions:

If the Court issued a decision interpreting a statute or regulation, Congress would have 30 days to vote on whether to open a reconsideration process. If Congress voted yes, the speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader, and the minority leaders would appoint a special committee in each chamber (with proportional party membership) to design a legislative fix for the full body to vote on within the next 30 calendar days. The bill would then go to the other house, where it would be voted on within 10 days through a privileged, fast-track process, which would avoid common legislative snags like the filibuster and committee hearings. The president would then sign the law or veto it, as with any ordinary piece of legislation.

Such legislation could create a normalized process whereby Congress routinely reviews the Supreme Court’s decisions and corrects decisions that read federal laws in damaging or implausible ways. It would also act as a complement to an omnibus bill in the vein of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The omnibus would take care of past decisions that misread federal law, while the review act would prevent new decisions from having much effect.

Democrats will not have much time to decide how to deal with the Supreme Court

Setting aside the more detailed proposals described above, it’s worth noting that Congress has a great deal of power to restrict a Supreme Court that seems determined to undermine democracy.

In its 2020 budget request, for example, the Supreme Court requested $106.8 million in funding from Congress. Congress could if it wanted drastically reduce these funds (with the proviso that the Constitution does not permit Congress to reduce a sitting justice’s salary and benefits).

Similarly, Congress could also impose onerous new duties on the justices. For most of the nation’s history until 1911, Supreme Court justices had to spend at least some of their time “riding circuit” — traveling to various parts of the country to hear ordinary federal cases. Congress could revive this practice. Or it could expand the Court’s (currently very limited) mandatory jurisdiction, forcing it to hear thousands of routine cases involving uncontroversial legal issues.

The point isn’t that Congress should strip the Court of its staff, order the justices to spend half their year flying around to random federal courthouses, or drown them in an ocean of routine appeals. Rather, Congress has tremendous power to fight back against an anti-democratic Supreme Court.

Realistically, however, if Congress wants to prevent the Supreme Court from entrenching its power to veto federal laws and manipulate voting rights, it’s likely to only have a short window in which to do so. Right now, polls show Democrats are favored to win the White House and both houses of Congress, but even if that prediction bears out, Democrats won’t control the elected branches forever.

The biggest risk from a 6-3 Republican Supreme Court is that the conservative justices will bide their time, maybe handing down a few decisions shifting the law marginally rightward, but avoiding anything like a new major attack on the Voting Rights Act until after Republicans gain control of at least one house of Congress.

And once Republicans control at least one veto point, they can halt any effort to rein in Supreme Court decisions that place a thumb on the scales of democracy.

If Democrats do regain control of Congress and the White House, in other words, they may need to make a difficult decision quickly. Even if they dominate the 2020 election, Democrats may have only a two-year window before Republicans regain the House or the Senate.

And once that happens, American democracy will be at the mercy of a 6-3 conservative Court.

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A baby and a girl sit among Central American migrants — mostly Hondurans heading in a caravan to the US — as they rest on their way from Ciudad Hidalgo to Tapachula, Chiapas State, Mexico, on January 23, 2020. | Alfredo Estrella/AFP via Getty Images

The tragedy of family separations isn’t over.

Three years after the Trump administration started separating immigrant families arriving on the southern border, lawyers say they still haven’t been able to reach the parents of 545 affected children, according to court documents filed Tuesday night.

Some of the children involved may never see their parents again. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said that they still cannot find the parents of 283 children despite thorough on-the-ground searches, and don’t expect to be able to reach them by telephone, meaning that the families may never be reunited.

Many of the families involved were separated in 2017, before the Trump administration began separating immigrant families routinely, hoping to deter immigrants from crossing the border without authorization.

The children have been released to sponsors, who are typically family members or friends, but also include foster families. Their parents, two-thirds of whom were deported before a federal judge ordered that they be identified and reunited with their children in 2018, either have not been located or have not been successfully contacted.

The group Justice in Motion is continuing to work to locate the parents in Mexico and Central America, though that has become more difficult amid the pandemic.

“While we have already located many deported parents, there are hundreds more who we are still trying to reach,” the group said in a statement. “It’s an arduous and time-consuming process on a good day.”

The news underscores the devastating long-term effects of the Trump administration’s policy. But even in cases in which lawyers expect to be able to find the parents eventually, families may never fully recover from the long-term psychological harm.

The US government had a policy of separating families — despite officials’ denials

Beginning in mid-2017, the federal government ran a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, under which it began filing criminal charges against anyone who crossed the border without authorization, including parents with minor children — even though many of them intended to seek asylum in the US, which is legal.

Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities operated by Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or to foster homes. (Previous administrations, in most cases, would have simply released the families from detention.)

The Trump administration formalized the policy in May 2018, which it dubbed the “zero tolerance policy.” At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunify the families affected and end the policy.

The federal government, however, neglected to link the children to their parents in its databases, making the reunification process difficult, especially in the hundreds of cases of children who were under the age of 5, including one who was just 4 months old.

Unlike the Trump administration, the Obama administration did not have a policy of separating families, but it did try to detain families together on a wide scale and deport them as quickly as possible during the 2014 migrant crisis. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, told the New York Times in 2018 that the administration had briefly considered pursuing family separations but quickly dropped the idea.

“We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea,” she told the Times. “The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

Senior Trump administration officials, including former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of family separation. Nielsen told Congress in December 2018 that the administration “never had a policy for family separation.” It was later revealed that she had, in fact, signed a memo greenlighting the practice, which clearly stated that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the administration has tried to carry out what immigrant advocates call a new kind of family separation. It pressured parents already detained within the US to voluntarily separate from their children by presenting them with what the administration has called a “binary choice”: Either allow their children to be placed with relatives or a foster family in the US while the parents remain detained, or stay together as a family in indefinite detention and risk contracting the coronavirus.

Family separations carry a long-term cost

The US government has long known the psychological harms associated with separating family members. These harms would only add to the anxiety created by the pandemic as immigrants and their children fight for their release from detention.

Commander Jonathan White, who previously oversaw the government’s program providing care to unaccompanied immigrant children, told Congress that, beginning in February 2017, he had repeatedly warned the officials who concocted the policy that it would likely cause “significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”

A September 2019 government watchdog report confirmed those effects, finding that immigrant children who entered government custody in 2018 frequently experienced “intense trauma” and those who were “unexpectedly separated from a parent” even more so.

Each child reacts to family separation differently. But psychologists have observed three main kinds of effects: disruptions to their social attachments, increases in their emotional vulnerability, and, in some cases, post-traumatic stress disorder, Lauren Fasig Caldwell, director of the American Psychological Association’s children, youth, and families office, said.

Those symptoms could be short-term or they could persist; they could also not even manifest until a child enters their teen years or adulthood. Any of them could significantly hinder a child’s later success in academics and in the workplace.

Parents who were separated from their children have experienced their own trauma — which may manifest in symptoms similar to those that researchers observe in children — and may not have the mental and emotional capacity to be able to provide what their children need.

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Facebook is becoming like that crappy plumber you hired who keeps coming over to fix the clog in your sewage drain, assures you it’s done each time, a few days after which you once again find your basement flooded with shit. The social-media giant keeps promising it’s going to fix that nasty, violent-right-wing-extremists-organizing-on-their-platform problem. Then—after 14 Michigan militiamen who organized on Facebook are arrested for plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—a review of its progress shows that militias, “Boogaloo” fanatics, and QAnon cultists continue to thrive and organize there.

A new report from the Tech Transparency Project shows that Facebook allowed militia groups not only to flourish on their platform—in apparent violation of its action, announced two months ago, to prohibit “militarized social movements”—but that the company continued to run the recruitment ads from which it had already profited for years.

Back in August, Facebook announced it intended to ban far-right militant, anarchist, and QAnon groups from its platform. Two months later, TTP was able to find 45 pages and eight groups associated with right-wing extremist groups. “At least 53 Facebook militia pages and groups are still active on the platform. Some of them even have the word ‘militia’ in their name,” the report says.

The ads recruiting participants into various “Patriot” militias have run for at least the past couple of years, some of them reaching tens of thousands of users. They have continued running even after the so-called ban: “As recently as October, Facebook hosted an ad encouraging militias to attend a ‘freedom march’ in cities across the country just days before the election,” the report says.

The ad, which cost less than $100 and had the potential to reach between 500,000 and 1 million people, read: “We The People gather across America in a show of solidarity and demand emancipation from the bondage of tyranny. (Lawful carry & Militia strongly encouraged.)”

The ads in particular have been noteworthy:

As recently as mid-August, a Facebook ad for a group called New Mexico Light Foot issued a call for new members, expressing its allegiance to the 2nd Amendment with an image of an semi-automatic rifle. (“Light foot” refers to privately organized local militia battalions.) Another ad for America’s United Militia touted the group’s mission to “uphold and support the constitution,” adding, “Fight with us to take back America.” That ad had up to 45,000 “impressions,” indicating how many times it appeared on a screen.

The Facebook page for “Virginia Militia” ran a total of 61 ads. One of its last ads from February 2020 promoted a “Muster Call,” with the message, “Are you going to give up your rights or fight?” TTP also found an ad campaign for a Facebook page called “My Militia – American Patriot Community.” The page ran political ads in fall 2018 ahead of the midterm elections, with the message “The red wave is rising” and “It’s not revenge we are after, but a reckoning.” After the midterms, the group took out recruitment ads calling American militia men “the last hope of freedom” and urging users to “join your local militia today.”

These pages are far more than just basic organizing centers; they double as disinformation/propaganda outlets, as well as forums for extremist rhetoric, which often blatantly violates Facebook’s terms of service, but are rarely if ever removed. Numerous members of “Patriot” and pro-Trump Facebook pages have posted explicit threats to kill public officials and racial justice protesters, including Whitmer.

As Buzzfeed reported, Facebook—which was the organizing platform of choice for the Michigan militiamen who plotted to kidnap and kill Whitmer—responded quickly by telling journalists it had reached out to the FBI early in the investigation. Company spokespersons said it takes down content when it's reported to law enforcement, so long as there is a “credible threat of imminent harm to people or public safety.”

Yet even though Facebook officials told reporters that it had removed such Michigan militia groups as the Michigan Liberty Militia—two of whose members were arrested in the Whitmer plot—and the Michigan Militia Corps, TTP nonetheless found that same week a number of Michigan militia pages still active on Facebook, including another page for the Michigan Liberty Militia, operating under the barely altered moniker “MLM Michigan Liberty minutemen.”

Facebook’s seeming inability to contain the spread of far-right extremism is becoming a global issue. Its own internal investigation into the growth among its users of the far-right QAnon meta-conspiracy theories was not only immense—there are now thousands of QAnon groups on Facebook, with millions of members—but it was spreading beyond the United States to Europe and Australia.

Similarly, an earlier TTP report found that white supremacists were able to worm their way under its rules to maintain a toxic presence, including 113 of the 221 groups designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The platform’s algorithms, it said, worsened the problem by referring users to other white supremacist pages, amplifying the ideology along the way.

Facebook has responded with halting and inconsistently applied enforcement of its terms of service, which explicitly forbids threatening, violent, or hateful speech. Its initial response to the deluge of QAnon conspiracism on its platform was to ban a handful of pages and users who indulged in spreading the cult’s bizarre claims—not for spreading false smears, but for “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” i.e., because the people operating them broke Facebook’s rules about false or double identities.

The spread of white nationalist and other far-right ideologies has been a challenge for virtually every Internet-based company, including Google, YouTube, and Twitter. The greatest hurdle has involved getting the companies to recognize that reporting systems alone cannot slow this spread, and that moreover the algorithms that have helped make them profitable also play a powerful role in creating the closed feedback loops that heighten the cycles of radicalization that enhance far-right ideologues’ ability to spread propaganda.