James.galbraith

Christina Animashaun/Vox

The Affordable Care Act made birth control more accessible than ever. Then came Trump.

As an OB-GYN in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jenn Conti prescribes birth control to many patients every day, for many different reasons.

Some want to prevent pregnancy. Others need a way to regulate painful or irregular periods. One patient has premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a very severe form of PMS.

“Every single month, in the days leading up to her period, she gets this debilitating depression and anxiety, such that she’s been suicidal on several occasions,” Conti, a fellow with the group Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Vox. The patient sees a psychiatrist and takes antidepressants, but hormonal contraception is also a key part of her treatment. “With that, over the course of several months, we’ve been able to take her to a place where she’s no longer suicidal,” Conti said. “She’s able to enjoy her life.”

While her patients’ stories vary, one thing is constant: Under the Affordable Care Act, patients with employer-sponsored insurance get their birth control without a copay. Conti, who practiced before and after the law went into effect in 2011, has seen that make a huge difference. She thinks of another patient, for whom she recently prescribed a hormonal IUD to help treat painful cramps. The IUD can cost more than $1,000 without insurance, but because of the ACA, her patient was able to get it at no out-of-pocket cost. If they had been responsible for the full $1,000, Conti said, “I know for sure that person would not have been able to afford it.”

This is how the ACA was supposed to work: ensuring widespread access to a variety of contraceptive methods, including the most reliable, like IUDs and contraceptive implants. And for a while, it looked like it was working. Thanks in part to the mandate that employers offer insurance covering contraception, the use of these methods rose around the US, more than quadrupling between 2002 and 2017. Meanwhile, the median out-of-pocket cost for birth control among insured patients fell to $0 after the ACA was passed, with 91.5 percent of IUD recipients getting the device at no charge.

Then came the Trump administration.

In Trump’s first year in office, federal agencies weakened the ACA’s contraceptive mandate, allowing employers to deny birth control coverage if they had a religious or moral objection. Though the rollback was quickly tied up in the courts, dozens of employers signed separate settlements with the administration allowing them to refuse to cover birth control.

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Meanwhile, the Trump administration took aim at other federal programs designed to promote reproductive health and access to birth control, including Title X, which funds services like contraceptive counseling and cervical cancer screenings for low-income Americans. The result was that when Covid-19 hit, the country’s safety net was already weakened, with shuttered clinics and reduced hours making it harder to provide the low-cost care that Americans — many of them facing layoffs and loss of health insurance — needed more than ever.

Then, in the midst of the pandemic, the Supreme Court dealt another blow to birth control access: The justices upheld the administration’s rollback of the ACA contraceptive mandate in July, a ruling that could mean the loss of contraceptive coverage for 126,000 American workers.

Conti thinks of her patient with PMDD. She wonders what would happen if that patient’s employer chose not to cover birth control. “What if she couldn’t afford that monthly cost because she was also raising her family at home and all the costs that that incurs? No one’s thinking about that when they make these rulings, and if they are, they’re just cruel.”

The Trump administration, through a systematic dismantling of federal programs and requirements intended to ensure contraceptive access, has turned back the clock on years of successful public health policy and jeopardized countless Americans’ ability to control their reproductive lives.

“The best word to describe it is catastrophic,” Conti said.

The Affordable Care Act helped millions of Americans access the most effective birth control

Long-acting reversible contraceptives, also known as LARCs, are among the biggest public health success stories of the past 20 years. These methods, like IUDs and contraceptive implants inserted under the skin, work for years without the need for the user to remember a daily pill. That ease has been a boon to women, many of whom have shouldered the burden of preventing pregnancy in their relationships.

But unlike more permanent methods of birth control like tubal ligation, LARCs can be quickly removed if a patient wants to get pregnant. And they are highly effective, with failure rates of less than 1 percent, compared with about 7 percent for typical use of birth control pills.

IUDs had something of a bad name for decades because an early version, the Dalkon Shield, led to serious side effects, including infertility and even death. Even after safer versions became available, doctors were reluctant for many years to prescribe them for younger patients. The “more traditional view” among doctors was that IUDs were for “after you’ve had your children,” Alina Salganicoff, senior vice president and director of women’s health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Vox. Starting in 2007, however, LARCs began to become more popular, perhaps due to the advent of new products like the Mirena, an IUD with an added, non-pregnancy-related bonus — it can reduce menstrual bleeding.

Even then, however, there was a problem: cost. While birth control pills cost between $20 and $50 per month without insurance, an IUD insertion can cost more than $1,000 — an unmanageable amount for many patients, especially if they are low-income.

But the Affordable Care Act changed the calculation for many patients. The legislation, passed in 2010, requires that employer-sponsored insurance plans cover certain preventive care services without a copay or other cost-sharing. And in 2011, the Obama administration designated contraception as one of the services that had to be covered, in what is often called the contraceptive mandate. That meant that the millions of Americans who got health insurance through their jobs could get birth control at no extra charge beyond their monthly premiums.

The law had a significant impact. The share of insured women who got birth control without a copay rose from 15 percent in the fall of 2012 to 67 percent by the spring of 2014. For all forms of contraception, but especially for the costlier LARCs, “the guarantee of that coverage made a tremendous difference,” Salganicoff said.

Indeed, one 2016 study found that the reduction in contraceptive cost due to the ACA was associated with a 2.3 percent increase in the use of any prescription birth control, with the biggest effect seen on LARCs. Another study found that privately insured patients’ odds of getting a LARC inserted increased 3 percent after the contraceptive mandate took effect. And while these percentages may seem small, researchers point out that, given the millions of patients of reproductive age in the US, they have a big impact on public health.

The rate of unintended pregnancy in the US had fallen to historic lows by the time the ACA was passed, likely due to the rise of LARCs, but it remained far higher than rates in many other wealthy countries. Experts hoped that greater access to the most effective methods of contraception would further drive down unintended pregnancy rates, and although there is little nationwide data on how rates have changed since 2012, there have been encouraging signs. The rate of teen pregnancy, for example, falling for some time, dropped to a record low of 22.3 births per 1,000 in 2015.

Going into the fall of 2016, a lot of reproductive health experts were praising the benefits of the ACA mandate and trying to figure out how to extend the benefits of LARCs to even more patients.

Then Trump was elected.

The Trump administration set about dismantling the ACA — and federal family planning infrastructure

Donald Trump had campaigned on getting rid of the ACA, one of President Barack Obama’s signature achievements. He also brought into his administration many social conservatives who opposed both abortion and some methods of contraception. Katy Talento, for example, one of his top health care advisers, has falsely claimed that birth control pills cause miscarriage and can “ruin your uterus.”

And in his first year in office, Trump took on both the health care law and birth control access, issuing new rules that created broad exemptions to the contraceptive mandate. Under the rules, announced in October 2017, employers could refuse to provide copay-free birth control coverage if they had a religious or moral objection to doing so.

Religious employers and their advocates praised the decision. In requiring religious employers to cover birth control, the Obama administration “was giving them a really tough choice,” Maria Montserrat Alvarado, executive director of Becket, a law firm that represented the Catholic order Little Sisters of the Poor in suits challenging the mandate, told Vox. For the Little Sisters, “being complicit in what they consider to be a moral wrong actually makes a big difference to them, because it’s about consistency in their religious witness.”

But reproductive health and women’s rights groups decried the move to broaden exemptions to the mandate. “This will leave countless women without the critical birth control coverage they need to protect their health and economic security,” Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement at the time.

The rules soon faced lawsuits, including one by the state of Pennsylvania, which said it would end up having to pay for contraception for many of the patients who lost coverage under the new exemptions, according to the New York Times. The suits would keep the rules tied up in court for years.

But more than 70 religious employers signed a separate settlement agreement with the Trump administration allowing them to stop offering birth control coverage even before those suits were resolved. The University of Notre Dame, for example, ceased covering copper IUDs and emergency contraception for some 17,000 students, employees, and their families beginning in July 2018 and began charging copays for other forms of contraception.

In the years that followed, the Trump administration would take several other actions that limited Americans’ contraceptive access.

For example, in March 2019, the administration issued a rule barring Planned Parenthood and any other health care providers that perform abortions from receiving funding under Title X, a federal program established under President Richard Nixon to provide family planning services to low-income and other underserved Americans. The program was already barred by federal law from paying for most abortions; instead, Title X dollars went to services like contraceptive counseling and screening for cancer and sexually transmitted infections.

Many Title X providers also provide routine medical services like blood pressure checks, and for some low-income patients, a Title X clinic is the only medical facility they visit all year. Under the Trump administration rule, however, any provider that offered abortions — or even just referred patients elsewhere for the procedure — had to either stop doing so or exit the Title X program.

Planned Parenthood and many other providers — a total of 981 clinics, according to a Guttmacher Institute analysis — chose the latter option.

“Planned Parenthood’s withdrawal from Title X shows it will always choose abortion over health care for vulnerable women,” Vice President Mike Pence tweeted in August 2019. “Taxpayer dollars should never go to an org that recklessly disregards the sanctity of life.”

But many reproductive health advocates say the rule has had effects far beyond abortion, making contraceptive services harder to get. The rule “would not allow us to provide the kind of care that we wanted to provide,” Lisa David, CEO and president of Public Health Solutions, a New York City nonprofit that exited the Title X program, told Vox last year. The group’s clinics didn’t provide abortions but did refer patients elsewhere for them, and a rule limiting the information its doctors could give “was unacceptable to us,” David said.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In some cases, clinics had to shut down when they stopped getting Title X funds. Others had to reduce their hours or change their schedules. “Let’s say you have a day a week or two days a week where they were doing LARC insertion. Now maybe it’s every other week,” Salganicoff said. That can make it harder for patients to get the birth control of their choice, especially if they’re juggling jobs, school, child care, or all of the above.

Overall, the Title X rule — called the “domestic gag rule” by reproductive rights advocates — led to a 46 percent reduction in the program’s ability to provide contraception, or about 1.6 million patients who could no longer get free or low-cost birth control through the program, according to Guttmacher. And patients who already face obstacles to getting contraception, including young people and people of color, have been disproportionately affected, many say.

“It’s definitely having a devastating impact on communities of color,” Margie Del Castillo, director of field and advocacy at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, told Vox. Prior to the Trump administration rule, about half of patients receiving services under Title X were people of color, and about one-third were Latinx. Now, many of those patients have fewer places to go for care. “What it looks like is people, real people in our community, not getting birth control,” Del Castillo said.

And the Title X rule was only one of many actions by the Trump administration that affected Americans’ contraceptive access. In May 2019, for example, the administration finalized a “refusal of care” rule, allowing health care providers such as doctors or pharmacists to refuse to provide contraception to patients if they have a religious or moral objection. Such rules, also in place in some states, can mean patients have to travel to more than one pharmacy to find someone willing to fill a birth control prescription, making it less likely they will actually be able to obtain the medication.

In some cases, pharmacists will decline to fill prescriptions if they find out a patient got them at an abortion clinic, even if the prescription is for birth control. “What that looks like for us is pharmacies refusing to fill patient prescriptions because they have our location’s name on there or our physician’s name on there,” Katie Caldwell, a staff patient advocate at the Shreveport, Louisiana, clinic Hope Medical Group for Women, told Vox earlier this year.

While the Trump administration denied federal family planning funds to the clinics many patients rely on for contraception, it also directed some of that money to clinics that don’t provide birth control, a crucial part of family planning. In 2019, the administration granted Title X funds to Obria, a network of facilities run by an anti-abortion activist that do not provide hormonal contraception but do spread misinformation about such contraceptives, cancer risk, and abortion. The Trump administration also promoted teen pregnancy prevention programs that use an abstinence-only approach, even though such programs have been shown to be less effective than comprehensive sex education that includes lessons about birth control.

Overall, “instead of giving women the choices” when it comes to birth control, “the administration has made the decision on who gets it,” and prioritized the rights of employers and other groups to deny access if they choose, Salganicoff said.

The administration has weakened reproductive health providers’ ability to respond to Covid-19

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic has limited patients’ birth control choices even further.

In a Guttmacher survey conducted in April and May, 33 percent of women reported that they had trouble getting birth control due to the pandemic, or that they had to delay or cancel an appointment for reproductive health care. Difficulties were more common among women of color, with 38 percent of Black women and 45 percent of Latinx women reporting problems getting birth control, compared with 29 percent of white women. They were also more common among queer women, 46 percent of whom reported problems with contraceptive care, compared with 31 percent of straight women.

There are likely many reasons for these difficulties. Many reproductive health clinics have had to reduce the number of patients they see in a day due to social distancing restrictions, making it more difficult to get an appointment. Public transit schedules have also been cut back during the pandemic, making travel to an appointment more difficult.

Moreover, “people are afraid to come see the doctor right now, because they’re afraid of exposure, or they may live in a place where the normal access they had to care is shut down or severely limited because the people who staff and run those clinics aren’t able to come into work,” said Conti, the California OB-GYN.

Black, Latinx, and Indigenous patients, whose communities have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, may be especially likely to face these barriers.

In addition to all these factors, the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic has made it harder to pay for birth control. Low-wage workers already faced many barriers to birth control access, from lack of paid time off to the difficulty of getting to a pharmacy to supervisors unwilling to give them time to go to the doctor, Leng Leng Chancey, executive director of the working women’s advocacy group 9to5, told Vox. “All those are just the barriers on top of, now, bigger barriers.”

Millions of Americans — a disproportionate share of them women and people of color — have lost jobs since March, and the employer-sponsored health insurance that comes with them. “People are forgoing reproductive health care to be able to make ends meet and to support their families,” Del Castillo said.

Indeed, lower-income women were more likely than higher-income women to report pandemic-related difficulties getting birth control in the Guttmacher survey. And 27 percent of women said that because of the pandemic, they worry more than they used to about paying for or obtaining contraception, with Latinx and queer women more likely to report this concern than white and straight respondents.

Overall, it’s a time when more people than ever need low-cost contraceptive services, but family planning clinics around the country — many of them now missing a major source of funding — are less able to provide them.

“You just have to think about what these clinics have gone through over the past three or four years,” Salganicoff said. “It has been a consistent challenge and erosion of protections.”

Indeed, the Trump administration’s actions and the pressures of Covid-19 are combining to put these facilities — and patient access to contraception — at greater risk than ever. Clinics still adapting to the loss of Title X funds are now, like many medical providers around the country, facing a loss of revenue as patients stop coming for appointments due to the pandemic. They’re also facing staffing shortages that make it harder to see patients, even if those patients are willing to come in. “It really has been very, very difficult for many clinics to continue to operate,” Salganicoff said.

Some have already closed or cut staff, with Planned Parenthood of Greater New York temporarily closing 11 of its 28 branches in April and laying off or furloughing more than 240 employees. The concern, for many, is that such closures could proliferate and become permanent as the pandemic drags on, leaving patients with even fewer options for affordable care.

A Supreme Court victory could magnify the coverage losses

Amid all this, the Trump administration scored a major victory. In the case Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court upheld the administration’s exemptions to the contraceptive mandate. The Affordable Care Act grants the federal government “virtually unbridled discretion to decide what counts as preventive care and screenings,” and to “identify and create exemptions from its own Guidelines,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his opinion in the case.

The exemptions don’t take effect just yet. Though the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration had the right to issue the exemptions under the ACA, it referred the relevant cases back to lower courts to resolve any other issues. But if the exemptions make it through those courts, experts say, they will have big implications for American workers, whose employers will have broad freedom to curtail birth control coverage or eliminate it altogether.

And low-wage workers, who can ill afford to pay out of pocket for contraception, will face the biggest impact, many say. “People have this conception that just because you have employer insurance, you are in a job that pays you what you’re worth,” Mara Gandal-Powers, director of birth control access and senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, told Vox. But in fact, many employees at Little Sisters of the Poor, the religious order that was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case and that offers care to low-income older patients, are low-paid workers like medical assistants, cooks, and custodians, she said.

“They’re not people who have a lot of resources, and many are women of color and immigrant women,” Gandal-Powers said. When it comes to affordable birth control, “that’s who I am particularly concerned about.” (Alvarado, the Becket executive director, told Vox that no employees at Little Sisters have complained about the lack of birth control coverage, and that they are able to get the medications for reasons other than contraception, such as treating endometriosis.)

And by stripping away employer coverage, the decision could drive more patients to the Title X program — which has already been decimated by the Trump administration. “There are going to be people who aren’t going to be able to get their birth control,” Gandal-Powers said. “That is going to be the bottom line.”

All told, the administration’s actions, coupled with a pandemic and an economic recession, threaten to erode many of the gains of the past 10 years when it comes to reducing unintended pregnancy and ensuring that people have access to the most effective forms of birth control.

Nationwide data on unintended pregnancies during the Trump administration is not yet available, but experts say actions at the state level provide a glimpse of what could happen to the entire country. In 2011, for example, Texas began a multi-pronged campaign to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, by cutting the state’s entire family planning budget, excluding Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, and ultimately exiting the federal Title X program.

One in four family planning clinics around the state (many of which were not even operated by Planned Parenthood) closed. And counties that lost a Planned Parenthood clinic saw a 36 percent reduction in the provision of LARCs. The cuts increased both teen birth and abortion rates, according to an analysis by economist Analisa Packham.

Now, the entire country may be moving in the direction of Texas. And by the time the effects of Trump administration policies show up in nationwide data, it may be too late to reverse them — even if a future administration wanted to.

After all, Salganicoff said, “when services go away, it’s not like you flip a switch and they start again.”

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its mfing cookie time

President Donald Trump found a new applause line at his Florida rally this week: “Normal life. O! I love normal life. We want to get back to normal life.” The next day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis moved to deliver on that promise — or the appearance of it.

The Republican governor of the president’s must-win battleground responded 24 hours later by canceling all state coronavirus restrictions Friday without warning, catching local governments and epidemiologists off-guard amid their own strategies to keep the coronavirus contained.

“The state of Florida is probably the most open big state in the country,” DeSantis bragged Friday, as he announced the reopening and said he was using his executive power to cancel all fines levied against people who didn’t wear masks. “We’re not closing anything going forward.”

DeSantis’ unilateral action capped a week of headline-grabbing announcements – from a crackdown on rioters to protections for college kids partying during a pandemic – that aligned neatly with president’s campaign messaging around putting the coronavirus behind us. The burst of activity, including the Jacksonville MAGA rally DeSantis attended with Trump on Thursday, coincided with the first batch of domestic absentee ballots being mailed out to Florida voters.

At the outdoor MAGA rally DeSantis attended with thousands of maskless Trump supporters, the president similarly cheered the state’s trajectory while musing about normalcy and pledging that “the Florida tourism and hospitality industries will reach record highs. That's what's going to happen. You see it. And next year will be one of the greatest years.”

Trump has a history of downplaying the threat of coronavirus and repeatedly predicting an economic renewal, only to see Covid-19 cases surge along with hospitalizations and deaths in different parts of the country. This spring, DeSantis similarly fumed at his critics for predicting a wave of coronavirus cases would overtake Florida under his leadership, only to see cases, hospitalizations and deaths jump after reopening the state in early June.

A DeSantis spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Epidemiologists and Democrats predicted that would happen again, especially with the president holding big rallies without people wearing masks and a governor determined to open the state quickly. But whether the cases will skyrocket the way they did in July depends largely on whether individuals take the prerogative to keep enough social distance and wear masks.

On the day DeSantis made his announcement, the state reported 2,847 new confirmed coronavirus cases and 120 related deaths. Total cases since March 1: 695,887. Total deaths: 14,038.

Even if cases rise, it’s “highly probable” that cases won’t spike in a meaningful way before Election Day, said Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist with the University of South Florida, “especially if it starts with the less-vulnerable and then extends to the more-vulnerable from the less-vulnerable.”

Florida slowly began the process of reopening earlier this month, but DeSantis’ decision Friday accelerated it at warp speed. It also blindsided Republican allies like Carlos Gimenez, a congressional candidate and mayor of Miami-Dade, the state’s most-populous county, and home to the most coronavirus cases in the state.

Miami-Dade used to have a county-wide mask-wearing ordinance and fines to give it teeth. Now, that precaution has been blocked by DeSantis.

Gimenez said the county could still impose restrictions but would have to let businesses and bars open up, and they could be subject to some regulations. Miami-Dade’s 11 p.m. curfew can also remain in effect, Gimenez said, who confessed to some worry.

“Of course, I am concerned,” Gimenez said while steering clear of criticizing DeSantis.

DeSantis was only able to block local governments from levying the fines because the governor did not repeal his state-of-emergency order, which gives him extraordinary powers. So the state is technically under an emergency due to the coronavirus — an order still standing despite the rhetoric from Trump and DeSantis so the governor can keep pull back local governments from reacting to that emergency.

The Florida Democratic Party’s chairwoman, Terri Rizzo, accused Trump and DeSantis of ignoring science, issuing bad messages during a pandemic and presiding over an “unmitigated disaster.”

“We all desperately want things to return back to normal, but that can't happen when DeSantis and Trump have no plan to get us out of this public health crisis," Rizzo said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce helped bankroll the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2014. Now, it’s preparing to expand outreach to Senate Democrats as they challenge for the majority in 2020.

Jack Howard, the Chamber’s senior vice president of congressional and public affairs, announced during a Friday morning staff video conference that the organization would be engaging in an “all-hands-on-deck … serious, sustained” effort to “normalize our relationships” with Senate Democrats, according to a clip of the meeting obtained by POLITICO.

“I don’t want anyone to be under any illusion about how challenging this will be. We’re starting frankly from a deep hole with a lot of Senate Democrats. So on the outreach side things are going to be very dicey,” Howard continued.

The remarks come with Democrats leading Republican senators in the polls in several key states — and with the pro-business, traditionally conservative Chamber facing a precarious moment.

The group has clashed with President Donald Trump on issues including trade and immigration and is now facing an internal revolt over its decision to endorse a slate of vulnerable freshmen House Democrats for reelection. The move represented a major shift for the Chamber, which has long endorsed and funded Republican candidates and backed few Democrats in recent years. In 2014, the Chamber’s political director declared that making McConnell the majority leader was the group’s “number one priority.”

The organization has aired commercials backing several Senate GOP candidates in this election. But the outfit has pared back its electoral spending this year, investing just a fraction of what it devoted to the GOP’s push for the majority six years ago.

“It’s always an all hands on deck strategy to work with members of Congress to advance the priorities of our members," a Chamber spokesperson said in a statement. "Our first priority is keeping a pro-growth Senate majority and we have exclusively put our money toward those races."

After Democrats took control of the House in the 2018 midterms, the Chamber signaled plans to take a more bipartisan approach. But senior GOP officials have lashed out at the lobbying group following its Democratic endorsements, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declaring that he no longer wanted the Chamber’s support.

Trump last week reached out to Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue to complain about the endorsements, a conversation that was first reported by Axios.

Howard — who previously worked for an array of top congressional Republicans, including ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott — cautioned that the Chamber shouldn’t assume that the “progress we made this year with House Democrats carry over this year to the Senate.”

But he said the Chamber’s network of local partners gave it “an important strategic advantage ... that a lot of groups don’t have,” adding that
“we should approach many of these offices, particularly on the Senate side, through our local Chamber partners to see if we can transfer any of that goodwill to a working relationship in Washington.”

A majority of Americans believe the winner of this year’s election should determine the successor to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Friday.

Of those surveyed, 57 percent favored delaying the process until after the election, compared with only 38 percent who said Ginsberg's seat should be filled before the election, as President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans have announced plans to do.

That comports with other polling data on the issue. A POLITICO/Morning Consult survey released earlier this week similarly found that half of those polled believed the election winner should get to nominate Ginsburg's replacement. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that more than 60 percent of Americans agreed the winner should have the right to choose the next justice, and a Rasmussen Reports survey reported that 51 percent of “likely voters” supported Trump leaving the seat vacant until the election.

However the ABC News/Washington Post poll also showed that Americans by an even wider margin — 54 to 32 — oppose increasing the size of the nation's highest court, as some liberals have suggested in response to the GOP’s push to install a conservative judge as a replacement for Ginsburg, a liberal icon. And only 11 percent said that the future of the Supreme Court is the most important issue in deciding their vote, a sentiment that was nearly identical among self-identified Democrats, Republicans and independents.

Republicans thus far are not deterred in their effort to reshape the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. Trump plans to unveil his nominee to the court on Saturday at 5 p.m. and has played up the made-for-TV moment over the past week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has locked up enough support within his caucus to proceed with the confirmation process.

Friday’s poll also comes on the same day that Ginsburg became the first woman to lie in state at the United States Capitol. Shortly before her death on Sept. 18, Ginsburg told her granddaughter that her “most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

The Washington Post/ABC News poll was conducted from Sept. 21 to 24, surveying 1,008 adults nationwide in both English and Spanish via landlines and cellphones. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Finally, the court has become more important to Democrats' votes than to Republicans'.

The Trump administration is hell-bent on filling the seat of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, against her deathbed wish that she not be replaced until a new president is elected by the American people. But when it comes to honoring the rulings made by that same Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in no rush.

Immigrant rights advocacy organization America’s Voice notes that Friday, Sept. 25 marked 100 days since the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration unlawfully ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—and for 100 days, officials have defied the Supreme Court’s ruling and refused to reopen the program to new applicants.

Fresh off the heels of a “law and order” Republican convention, the Trump administration has in fact been defying not one, but two court orders to fully reopen the DACA program to new applicants, following a Maryland judge’s ruling a month after that historic Supreme Court decision. The rulings to accept paperwork from potentially hundreds of thousands of young immigrants were unequivocal—but unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf instead said nope. 

Unlawful Chad has since been sued for his unlawful memo that made the Supreme Court defiance official by rejecting new applications and slashing current protections in half. Since he’s unlawful, so is his memo. Advocates have additionally pleaded with the Maryland court “to hold the administration in contempt of court,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month. But the scary part is how that could be enforced without any real teeth, because the Trump administration has already given the finger to the Supreme Court.

It’s an abomination that we’re in a space where a government’s defiance is just accepted as part of daily life now—I mean, how often have you heard this discussed on cable news or on the front page of The New York Times recently?—but welcome to America in 2020, I guess.

But as all this is playing (or not playing) out, lives hang in the balance. “You get your hopes up—not once but twice,” Ximena Zamora told The Appeal this month about the win at the Supreme Court, and the administration’s subsequent defiance. She had just turned 15, the minimum age to apply for DACA, when an ecstatic Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III announced the program’s termination in September 2017. She’s now among the young immigrants who sued Unlawful Chad over his memo. “To be in the same place where I was three years ago is very frustrating,” she continued.

Very, very frustrating. Trump has lost plenty of court battles over his racist and frequently sloppy edicts and actions, but it’s not hard to see why he would single out DACA in defying the highest court of the land for 100 days, and counting: DACA is a pro-immigrant program implemented by his predecessor Barack Obama. It’s eased the lives of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, but Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller just can’t have that. It would ease the lives of thousands more if it were again reopened, but Trump and Miller just can’t have that. And it’s been a successful Obama-era program. But Trump and Miller just can’t have that. They didn’t like the ruling. So they’re ignoring it. 

What I can say for sure is that DACA is on the ballot in November. Should the impeached president remain in power come January, he’ll again move to end DACA without worry about the public backlash—and with a hyper-conservative Supreme Court to greenlight it (remember, the justices ruled not on the legality of the program itself, but on how he ended it).

His opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, has pledged to protect young immigrants as we work on passing permanent relief so they and their families can no longer be left in limbo again.

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The "health care plan" unveiled Thursday at a Trump rally billed as a presidential address is actually worth even less than the paper he signed to "enact" it. Nothing Trump puts forward in the orders has the force of law. You can't hand your insurance company an executive order to make them cover your kid's asthma. The administration knows all that, and admits as much, in the order itself. This is about Trump having a lot of fanfare in saying he's doing something about preexisting conditions and drug prices, while in actuality he's making it all much worse. Given that the administration knows this, what was all the hoopla about? The bribe he announced for seniors.

Out of nowhere, Trump announced that every senior on Medicare was going to be getting a $200 card, a "Trump Card" to use to pay their part of prescription drug co-pays. This all started with an idea by chief of staff Mark Meadows during drug pricing negotiations with the industry. The talks fell apart when Meadows insisted that the drug makers fund a scheme consisting of $100 cash cards to Medicare enrollees to be mailed out before the election. With that failure, the Trump team decided to go bigger—$200 and make taxpayers fund it by stealing from Medicare, probably. The Wall Street Journal reports that the money—$6.6 billion—will come from savings from a Medicare waiver program that is definitely not intended to fund a program like this, and offset by a drug-pricing program that doesn't exist yet. So, yes, it's taxpayer funding for Trump's bribes as of now.

“This is stretching the demonstration authority much more than I’ve ever seen,” Larry Levitt, an executive vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the WSJ. The last time the waiver process was used for anything other than a limited demonstration project was when President Obama used it to incentivize performance for private insurers contracting with Medicare. His program was intended to test whether “stronger financial incentives and investments”—bonuses to insurers—would lead the companies to offer better quality coverage. That enraged Republicans, and the Republican House launched investigations into it. Now it's a brazen political bribe to voters, and not a single Republican lawmaker is making a peep.

Other Republicans, sure. “It’s completely inappropriate: The timing of it reeks of a bribe to seniors before the election,” Doug Holtz-Eakin, the president of the conservative American Action Forum told Stat News. “I see no reason to somehow pretend this is OK. It’s not OK.” One of the former officials in the Obama administration, Eliot Fishman, agreed. He said that the fact Republicans in Congress were not calling out Trump's bald electioneering is “worse than conventional partisan hypocrisy,” because it has constitutional implications. “You’re essentially turning the Medicare program and any other program where there’s executive branch demonstration authority into an open slush fund that can be used to mail checks to key constituencies right before an election,” he said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who is the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, calls it a "taxpayer-funded bribe." Which it is, because the money the administration says it will use to offset the funds it's raiding from Medicare will be replenished by a program that doesn't even exist yet. It is supposed to come from a “most favored nations” drug pricing proposal, which has not been implemented and might never be. Trump has signed an order directing it, but the regulations haven't been written and the pharmaceutical industry is threatening legal action if the administration tries to enforce it.

All of this comes as Trump has been threatening Social Security, not just for future beneficiaries (as Republicans usually do), but people getting their retirement payments now. Trump has promised that he will "terminate" the payroll tax if he's reelected—the payroll tax that all worker and employers pay in order to fund Social Security and Medicare. Without the payroll tax, the Social Security actuary projects, the Social Security Disability Income fund runs out of money next year. The Social Security retirement fund would run out in 2023.

Trump's team had been fighting him on the payroll tax holiday for months as he tried to get it into coronavirus stimulus bills, knowing that it was not at all helpful when the real economic problem is all the people not on any payroll (and also that it's dangerous to threaten Social Security in an election year). The damage is done politically, and this is what they've got: bribes to seniors with cash cards that might cover a month's worth of prescriptions.

As the nation continues to face a global pandemic, some right-wingers are still finding time to push rampant transphobia. This time, a number of Republican senators introduced the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2020. Does this bill really have anything to do with “protecting” women in sports? No, because it’s inherently exclusive to transgender women and girls. The bill seeks to essentially punish schools that receive federal education funding if they allow transgender women and girls to participate in sports that match their gender identity. So, according to this bill, if a transgender girl was allowed to play on the girls' team, that school would be at risk of violating U.S. law (in this case, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972)—and losing that federal funding.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who led the pack when introducing the bill on Tuesday, wrote a press release wherein she doubles down on supporting women—but as we know, she’s only talking about cisgender women. “’I’m proud to lead this legislation to ensure girls of all ages can enjoy those same opportunities,” the release reads. “This commonsense bill protects women and girls by safeguarding fairness and leveling the athletic field that Title IX guarantees.”

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You might be wondering how the bill defines sex. According to the bill, “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” Interestingly—and as is quickly becoming the norm in conversations about trans-inclusion in sports—the bill doesn’t mention transgender men or boys. Co-sponsors for the bill include Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Mike Lee of Utah, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and James Lankford of Oklahoma.

It’s unclear whether the bill has a real chance of passing at this point, given that it’s already September, but these moves are a quietly growing, insidious part of the Republican platform. You might remember a similar bill that came out of the state legislator in Idaho. Though a federal judge ultimately blocked it, the bill also used advocating for women’s rights in sports as a thinly veiled cover for transphobia. That particular bill even went so far as to suggest that student-athletes would have to undergo DNA or genital exams in order to compete if their gender identity was challenged, though Loeffler’s bill is quite vague in terms of how they would determine sex, aside from the mention of “biology and genetics at birth.”

Republicans are not above trying to push anti-trans legislation as the nation stumbles toward a presidential election, flounders amid a pandemic, and tries to heal and fight against police brutality.  Want to support transgender youth? We have a handy guide on how to use gender-neutral pronouns, as well as tips on how to support LGBTQ youth and be an effective ally in general. 

You can’t make this stuff up.

A Trump-supporting Minnesota family has reported that their garage and three vehicles were destroyed in a fire and explosion at their residence. “BLM,” an “A” in a circle, and “Biden 2020” were allegedly spray-painted on the garage door.

According to the local CBS affiliate, the Brooklyn Center homeowners, Denis and Deana Molla, say they had “Trump 2020” flags on their trucks. Police and ATF are investigating, but folks on social media aren’t buying it.

“Biden 2020” is now trending.

The incident has brought back memories from the past.

The family, of course, immediately set up a GoFundMe, which I am not linking to.

Here’s hoping that the perps are discovered. Whoever did it—if the family didn’t do this to themselves—is an idiot.

Remember one year ago, and the lengths Republican senators would go to to avoid answering a simple question? Then it was "Is asking foreign leaders to investigate rivals okay?" Now it's "What's the difference between 2016 and now with Supreme Court justices?" They still don't have a good answer.

A year ago, Sen. Cory Gardner tied himself up in knots trying to not answer the Ukraine question. Here he is this week, when asked by CNN why he's flipped from 2016. Back then, he said bluntly "The next election is too soon, and the stakes too high," to allow President Obama to replace a vacancy. Asked about those comments Wednesday, and what was different now, Gardner brushed it off. "If you didn't see my statement, I'll send it to you," Gardner said as he escaped into a senators-only elevator. But that statement said nothing about 2016. It just said that if a qualified nominee comes forward, "I will vote to confirm."

We'll never get out of this crisis without taking back the Senate. Donate now to help make that happen.

Huh. How about Joni Ernst? Back in March 2016, she said "In the midst of a critical election, the American people deserve to have a say in this important decision that will impact the course of our country for years to come. […] This is not about any particular nominee; rather this is about giving the American people a voice." March, by the way. More than seven months before the election. Now that we're less than six weeks away, she says "Once the president puts forward his nominee for the Supreme Court, I will carry out my duty—as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee—to evaluate the nominee for our nation’s highest court." But what about letting the people have their say, Senator? Crickets. She refused to answer when CNN asked.

Okay, then, what about Georgia Sen. David Perdue? "I got people waiting for me," he told CNN when asked. Back in 2016, he said refusing to hold hearings on Merrick Garland "is a wise course of action in the midst of a presidential election." Yeah, he's got people waiting for him now, can't talk.

They are wholly owned subsidiaries of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

[To avert Court Packing, would the Chief Justice allow a President Biden to appoint his replacement?]

On Sunday, I wrote that Court Packing is an inevitability when the Democrats win the White House, and majorities in both the House and the Senate. That post caused quite a stir, with 537 comments. (By way of comparison, the post on Reason-Volokh with the most comments has 556 comments). I appreciate that others have attempted to propose compromises and deals to forestall Court Packing. I am not sanguine. Politicians have very short time horizons. It is not feasible to strike a deal that may pay benefits years in the future. Any solution that requires collective action is, in my mind, off the table.

But there is one possible solution that does not require collective action. Of course, my proposal here is my proposal for all problems afflicting the Supreme Court. A resignation in time could save nine. Hear me out.

Imagine the Senate confirms Judge Barrett before election day and then three months later President Biden is sworn in with a Democratic-controlled Senate. At that point, the Court would have a 6-3 conservatish majority. There will be calls for Court packing.

At that point, in an act of selflessness, Chief Justice Roberts resigns. Then, President Biden follows the lead of President Reagan in 1986. Biden would elevate the de facto Chief Justice to become the de jure Chief Justice. With Chief Justice Elena Kagan in the middle seat, Biden would then be able to pick Justice Leondra Kruger, or someone else, to fill the Associate Justice seat. Biden would have two nominations in the span of a few months. Certainly those changes, in rapid succession, would quiet the waters for some time.

True, there would still be a 5-4 conservative majority. But, for the first time since Fred Vinson, there would be a Democratic-appointed Chief Justice. I think she could deftly guide the Court throughout these tumultuous times far more effectively than Roberts ever could. If she could manage Harvard Law School, she can manage the Supreme Court.

Think about it. Roberts would resign as the virtuous Cincinnatus–he resigned at the peak of his power for the sake of the republic. What better way to cement a legacy and foster bipartisanship? His place in history will be secure.

This post is written somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I think it could possibly work if things get ugly after January.

Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he needs to install a Supreme Court nominee before the election, offering a preview of the strategy he’ll take when he loses.

Said Trump: “We need 9 justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending, it’s a scam, it’s a hoax, everybody knows that. Democrats know it better than anybody else. So you’re gonna need 9 justices up there. I think it’s going to be very important. Because what they’re doing is a hoax with the ballots. They’re sending out tens of millions of ballots, unsolicited, not where they’re being asked, but unsolicited, and that’s a hoax. And you’re gonna need to have 9 justices so doing it before the election would be a very good thing because you’re gonna probably see it. Because what they’re doing is trying to sow confusion and everything else, and when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others, they will be able to do something here because paper ballots are very simple. Whether they counterfeit ’em, forge ’em, do whatever you want.”

Trump also claimed that the 200,000 U.S. deaths from coronavirus are a result of him doing things “right.”

"We need 9 justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they're sending … you're gonna need 9 justices." — Trump suggests he's counting on SCOTUS to have his back when he makes claims of election fraud following November's election pic.twitter.com/Ju8ShMe8MN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2020

The post Trump Says He Needs to Fill SCOTUS Seat Before Election Because Mail-In Voting is ‘a Scam, a Hoax:’ WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Asked Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Donald Trump instead advocated for skipping the transfer of power.

Railing against ballots—the backbone of our electoral system—as a “disaster,” Trump offered scrapping them altogether as the best option. "Get rid of the ballots,” Trump said, “and there won't be a transfer, frankly, there'll be a continuation." 

The reporter, White House correspondent Brian Karem, pressed Trump on the matter several times, seeking to get a commitment from him to tamp down the division and unrest in the country in the aftermath of the election. Trump’s answer to quelling any post-election chaos? Just make his position permanent. Karem later called Trump’s response, “The most frightening answer I have ever received to any question I have ever asked.”

Trump’s answer should be taken both literally and seriously by every media outlet in the country. Trump is overtly and indisputably using every tool in his box—in every branch of government—to undermine our nation’s free and fair election and disenfranchise American voters nationwide. 

Trump’s efforts are pervasive, and they are both rhetorical and structural. Judicially, he’s rushing to fill a Supreme Court seat in order to secure 6-3 conservative majority that he believes will side with him in any legal dispute over the election—and it might well do that. Legislatively, Trump’s got GOP lawmakers both working to confirm his SCOTUS nomination and deliver Kremlin-driven reports intended to smear Joe Biden. And the Executive Branch has become Trump’s muddy little playpen, with Attorney General Bill Barr digging up dirt on Biden; his Postmaster General taking a hatchet to the U.S. Postal Service’s efficiency and functionality; and U.S. intelligence agencies depriving the American people of accurate information about the threats posed by Russia in the upcoming election (not to mention white supremacist extremists).

But Trump’s mafia levels of corruption don’t stop there. They also extend to the states where he’s presently trying to install elected loyalists who will defy the election results if need be and vote for him in the Electoral College, regardless of who actually wins.

Finally, rhetorically, Trump is spewing disinformation (often Russian-derived) about ballots, mail-in voting, widespread voter fraud (which doesn’t actually exist), and the overall integrity of the election at every turn. Trump constantly tells his true believers that the only way for Joe Biden to win is if he cheats—no small amount of projection there. But as we all know, his cultists believe everything Trump says. 

As conservative commentator and anti-Trumper Charlie Sykes wrote last week, “Despite the polls, Trump’s backers believe with a moral certainty that he will win — and win big. His defeat will come as a considerable shock to many of them who have fallen down the rabbit hole and they will be an eager audience for the most lurid conspiracy theories and charges of fraud.”

We are in for one hell of a battle, folks, particularly if this election is close and not called on Nov. 3, which is very likely given all the mail balloting this cycle. Trump doesn’t know the meaning of the word integrity and he gives no fucks about anyone else in this entire world but himself. So, even if he loses, we can be assured that he will go to any and all lengths to rip this country to shreds or die trying before he surrenders his powers as president. 

This very real potentiality is something I addressed at length in this piece about Portland several weeks ago. If you’re looking for a way forward, perhaps there’s a nugget or two that can be helpful there. I personally am never without hope, even on the darkest days. Peace and solidarity.

Watch it (second clip).

There’s little doubt that Donald Trump is willing to do anything at all to hold onto power. He’s already proven that with the actions that ended with his impeachment, and expanded on that proof to a horrific degree when he purposely discarded a national testing plan for COVID-19 out of hopes that more people would die in Democratic states. When someone is ready to discard hundreds of thousands of people just on the chance it will bolster their odds, it’s hard to think there’s any lines that can’t be crossed in trying to keep his stubby hands on the reins.

To that end, Trump has already spent the first part of this year:

• Tearing apart the Postal Service
• Spreading lies about vote by mail
• Testing the use of force to block protests
• Fomenting violence in democratically led cities

To prepare against the day when the numbers show voters want him to leave their house.

But there’s one more step Trump is taking that’s designed to ensure he can’t lose. Like … really can’t lose. That step goes back to one of the least favorite parts of the system created by eighteenth century people unable to imagine a world in which electronic communication could tie the nation together in an instant: the Electoral College.

Like the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College is an institution that ensures a handful of people can control the fate of vast issues. Everyone recognizes that it’s undemocratic. Only those who absolutely depend on it—like Republicans who have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven elections—have anything nice to say about it. It was an overly complicated idea in 1788. It’s a ridiculous relic today.

Barton Gellman's latest article in The Atlantic is notable for the forthright discussion of how Trump is unlikely to be pried from the White House without, at the very least, a legal fight. One of the biggest reasons that the Republicans are hurrying to get a fresh Trump appointment into the Supreme Court—even if that means making the selection while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is still lying in state at the Capitol—is precisely so that there will be a heavily Trump-friendly majority on the court when the lawsuits inevitably arrive on its doorsteps. After all, Republicans don’t want to take the chance John Roberts has a twinge of conscience. 

But in addition to laying the public groundwork by disparaging mailed-in votes and planting false stories of foreign nations seeding America with fake ballots, there’s another big step that the Trump campaign is making more quietly in the effort to prepare for a loss at the polls. After all, Trump doesn’t have to win at the polls to secure his spot in the White House—he already proved that in 2016.

However, 2016 swung on a very small number of votes in a few swing states. Right now, Trump is further behind in the polls than he ever was in that cycle, and he’s well behind in several states that he won last time around. But that may not be an issue.

The meeting of the Electoral College in December, and the count of those votes in January, immediately after Congress is seated, are supposed to be formalities. Sure, the college itself is a democracy-warping relic that gives way too much power to small numbers of people in specific states while disenfranchising tens of millions. But at least the process of executing the vote is more or less ceremonial. Except when it’s not. 

In 2000, with the vote in the Electoral College looming and many people urging him to fight on, Al Gore went before the nation to say “Tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.” It is impossible to even imagine Trump making such a speech. If Trump refuses to concede, no matter what the outcome in the popular vote or the Electoral College, there is no real procedure in place for making him go. 

And there’s another threat: the electors themselves.

We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.

Republican sources report that the Trump team is already conducting a low-level campaign to test their ability to seat electors who are “loyal” not in the sense that they vote according to the outcome of the election, but in the sense that they vote for Trump, no matter what.

Six of the most critical states—Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—have both chambers of the state legislature controlled by Republicans. What happens if the voters of Florida or Pennsylvania give Biden a solid victory, but the legislatures of those states seat electors who all promise to vote for Trump? It would go to court, of course, but how would a newly appointed Trump justice rule on a case about “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct?” The Supreme Court, the with Ruth Bader Ginsburg Court, recently ruled that states could pass laws prohibiting faithless electors. But it’s unclear if those laws would stand up to deliberate meddling by Trump-favoring legislatures. Some state officials are currently denying this effort, which means about as much as a denial from Trump.

As with every other contingency, the possibility of Trump exercising these anti-democracy measures drops with every percentage point of his defeat. Trump doesn’t just need to lose, he needs to lose so badly that everyone, top to bottom, gets the message. So badly, that everyone sees that opposing the will of the voters would not mean a protest, but a revolution. So badly that everyone will be buying new ten foot poles just to keep him at a distance.

Trump will try to cheat. If there is any possible means in which he can claim victory, even it means doing to the Constitution what Mitch McConnell has done to the Senate rules, he will go there. His rejection must be visceral and decisive, because anything else he will read as weakness.

Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri and his wife have tested positive for Covid-19, the governor’s office said on Wednesday.

Parson said he would continue to carry out his duties from the governor’s mansion, and promised more details on the situation on Thursday. The governor’s staff is also undergoing testing, according to Parson’s office.

“Needless to say, it’s been quite a day here at the mansion and here at the state Capitol,” Parson said in a video message Wednesday evening.

The governor’s office said that Parson — who is running for a full term after having taken office following Eric Greitens’ resignation in 2018 amid a torrent of scandals — was indefinitely postponing all government and campaign events. That includes a debate against his Democratic challenger, Nicole Galloway, scheduled for Friday.

Parson has rejected calls to impose a statewide mask mandate, as dozens of other states have during the pandemic, and the gubernatorial campaign has centered on his administration’s response to the public health crisis.

The Parsons were first tested on Wednesday after the first lady started to display minor symptoms. The pair were then re-screened using the more accurate polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests, which subsequently confirmed Teresa Parson’s results. The governor’s PCR test is still pending.

Missouri’s top health official, Randall Williams, said at a news conference that contact tracing efforts were underway but that the number of possible contacts with the governor was “not as big a number as you might think,” despite his recent public events.

In a video posted to social media, Teresa Parson said she was “fine” but decided to seek testing after developing “cold-like symptoms.”

“My test did come back positive, but I want to reassure you I’m going to take the next few days to take care of myself, and I will see you again soon,” the first lady said.

Unless the test turns out to have yielded a false positive, Mike Parson is the second sitting governor to be diagnosed with the virus.

In July, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt was diagnosed with Covid-19; he has since returned to work. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine also tested positive ahead of a scheduled meeting with President Donald Trump, though that proved to be a false positive.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky grand jury brought no charges against Louisville police for the killing of Breonna Taylor during a drug raid gone wrong, with prosecutors saying Wednesday that two officers who fired their weapons at the Black woman were justified in using force to protect themselves.

The only charges brought by the grand jury were three counts of wanton endangerment against fired Officer Brett Hankison for shooting into Taylor’s neighbors’ homes during the raid on the night of March 13. The FBI is still investigating potential violations of federal law in the case.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for Taylor’s family, denounced the decision as “outrageous and offensive,” and protesters shouting, “No justice, no peace!” began marching through the streets. Some sat quietly and wept. Later, scuffles broke out between police and protesters, and some were arrested.

Taylor, an emergency medical worker, was shot multiple times by officers who entered her home on a no-knock warrant during a narcotics investigation. The warrant used to search her home was connected to a suspect who did not live there, and no drugs were found inside. The use of no-knock warrants has since been banned by Louisville’s Metro Council.

Along with the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, Taylor’s case became a major touchstone for the nationwide protests that have gripped the nation since May — drawing attention to entrenched racism and demanding police reform. Taylor’s image has been painted on streets, emblazoned on protest signs and silk-screened on T-shirts worn by celebrities.

The announcement of the charges drew immediate sadness, frustration and anger that the grand jury did not go further. The wanton endangerment charges each carry a sentence of up to five years.

“Justice has NOT been served,” tweeted Linda Sarsour of Until Freedom, a group that has pushed for charges in the case.

Morgan Julianna Lee, a high school student in Charlotte, North Carolina, watched the announcement at home.

“It’s almost like a slap in the face,” the 15-year-old said by phone. “If I, as a Black woman, ever need justice, I will never get it.”

Right after the decision, protesters brought cases of water to “Injustice Square,” the Louisville park where people have gathered to demand justice for Taylor. Some began preparing food.

Later, police in the city cordoned off a street with yellow tape, and officers in protective gear could be seen handcuffing some people. Some scuffles broke out, and police ordered a group that broke off from the protests to disperse, warning that chemical agents might be used if they didn’t.

Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, urged state Attorney General Daniel Cameron to post online all the evidence and facts that can be released without affecting the charges filed.

“Those that are currently feeling frustration, feeling hurt, they deserve to know more,” he said. “They deserve to see the facts for themselves. And I believe that the ability to process those facts helps everybody.”

The case exposed the wide gulf between public opinion on justice for those who kill Black Americans, and the laws under which those officers are charged, which regularly favor working police and do not often result in steep criminal accusations.

At a news conference, Cameron, the state attorney general, spoke to that disconnect.

“Criminal law is not meant to respond to every sorrow and grief,” he told reporters after the charges were announced.

“But my heart breaks for the loss of Miss Taylor. And I’ve said that repeatedly. My mother, if something was to happen to me, would find it very hard,” he added, choking up.

But Cameron, who is the state’s first Black attorney general, said the officers acted in self-defense after Taylor’s boyfriend fired at them. He contended that Hankison and the two other officers who entered Taylor’s apartment announced themselves before entering — and so did not execute the warrant as “no-knock,” according to the investigation.

“According to Kentucky law, the use of force by (Officers Jonathan) Mattingly and (Myles) Cosgrove was justified to protect themselves,” he said. “This justification bars us from pursuing criminal charges in Miss Breonna Taylor’s death.”

Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, opened fire when police burst in, hitting Mattingly. Walker was charged with attempted murder of a police officer, but prosecutors later dropped the charge.

Walker told police he heard knocking but didn’t know who was coming into the home and fired in self-defense.

Cameron, who is a Republican, is a protégé of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who has been tagged by some as his heir apparent. His was also one of 20 names on President Donald Trump’s list to fill a future Supreme Court vacancy.

Asked about the decision at a White House event, Trump said he hadn’t had time to consider it yet but would comment when he had. He added: “My message is that I love the Black community, and that I’ve done more for the Black community than any other president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.”

Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, told reporters in Washington that she also hadn’t fully read the decision.

“But there’s no question that Breonna Taylor and her family deserved justice yesterday, today and tomorrow so I’ll review it,” she said.

Before charges were brought, Hankison was fired from the city’s police department on June 23. A termination letter sent to him by interim Louisville Police Chief Robert Schroeder said the white officer had violated procedures by showing “extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he “wantonly and blindly” shot 10 rounds of gunfire into Taylor’s apartment in March.

Hankison had previously been placed on administrative reassignment, as were Sgt. Johnathan Mattingly, Officer Myles Cosgrove and the detective who sought the warrant, Joshua Jaynes.

On Sept. 15, the city settled a lawsuit against the three officers brought by Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, agreeing to pay her $12 million and enact police reforms.

Protesters in Louisville and across the country have demanded justice for Taylor and other Black people killed by police in recent months. Several prominent African American celebrities including Oprah and Beyoncé have joined those urging that the officers be charged.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling for California to ban new gasoline-fueled vehicles within 15 years in a bid to combat climate change and make the state the first in the nation to stop sales of cars with internal combustion engines.

The Democratic governor on Wednesday signed an executive order that directs the California Air Resources Board to establish regulations requiring that all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California in 2035 be zero-emission vehicles.

California has long been a leader on fuel economy, forcing automakers to build more efficient vehicles than required by federal standards. The Golden State is the world's fifth-largest economy, with more than half of its emissions stemming from the transportation sector, so the move is expected to significantly help reduce tailpipe pollution from vehicles with internal combustion engines.

The move comes as California experiences historic wildfires that have consumed more than 3.6 million acres this year already. Newsom has repeatedly emphasized the role of climate change in driving the fires, while Republicans have focused on a need to better manage forests in the state.

"We are marking a new course," Newsom said in a press conference in front of electric vehicles at the state fairgrounds in Sacramento. "We are setting a new marker. We're advancing the cause, with the support of the California Air Resources Board, to once again lead not only this nation but in many respects lead the world."

The ban on gas-powered vehicles is likely to face opposition from automakers and Republican leaders in Washington, who have already battled the state over its stricter fuel economy rules. The Trump administration is fighting the state in court over whether it can set stricter emissions standards than the nation as a whole.

California Business Roundtable President Rob Lapsley said in an interview that the "radical step" to ban internal combustion engines "makes no sense" and is a rushed decision, with no guarantee of affordability for many who live in an already-expensive state.

Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro said that his electric utility wants more to be done on economy-wide electrification, saying that the state's recent approval of Edison's proposed 38,000 charge ports is just a "drop in the bucket" for what's needed to reduce emissions.

While environmentalists embraced his call to ban gas-powered vehicles, some questioned Tuesday why he wasn't doing more to stop fracking.

Newsom announced he was asking state lawmakers to implement a fracking ban by 2024, but stopped well short of directing his own oil and gas regulators to stop approving fracking permits. Environmentalists have increased their criticism of Newsom on fracking in recent days, especially as the governor has emphasized California's role in fighting climate change.

Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, called it "rhetoric rather than real action."

“Newsom can’t claim climate leadership while handing out permits to oil companies to drill and frack," she said in a statement. "He has the power to protect Californians from oil industry pollution, and he needs to use it, not pass the buck.”

Newsom responded Wednesday that he doesn't have that authority, but did not elaborate.

The California Air Resources Board will be tasked with writing the vehicle rules, which the Newsom administration estimates would slash greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80 percent. Other agencies will be directed to support the development of zero-emission vehicle charging stations, and medium- and heavy-duty trucks will be mandated to be zero-emission by 2045 where feasible.

That goal will be 2035 for trucks conveying ship containers at ports, an important checkpoint because the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports are the busiest in the country.

Residents would still be able to own gas-fueled vehicles and sell them on the used market, but the governor's executive order is sure to give rise to questions surrounding the logistics and equity of the transition from internal combustion engines in car-dependent California. The state would join 15 other countries that are already phasing out gas-fueled vehicles.

CARB Chair Mary Nichols said Wednesday that California wants to phase out hybrid vehicles over the next 15 years and have Californians purchase fully electric cars.

"We're not taking anything away," Newsom said, emphasizing that used gas vehicles can still be sold in California after 2035. "We're providing an abundance of new choices and new technology."

California last year reached a vehicle emissions agreement with five automakers, a response to the Trump administration's rollback of tailpipe standards, splitting manufacturers between those aligned with the Golden State and the White House. Newsom's move Wednesday could shake up the auto market once again, but some companies have already signaled a desire to transition more toward zero-emission.

Newsom directed agencies to develop a zero-emission vehicle market development strategy by the end of January and update it every three years. He also asked them to accelerate existing efforts on charge ports.

The governor's order also called for agencies to craft "an integrated, statewide rail and transit network," a pronouncement that came over a year after Newsom shrunk the scope of the state's high speed rail project. He also outlined plans to support more bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, especially in low-income and disadvantaged communities.

While Newsom did not order an end to fracking permits, he asked agencies to accelerate their existing work on repurposing extraction facilities during the climate transition, with a report on necessary changes due in July 2021. That month will also see another report on what it will take to "manage and expedite" the closure and cleanup of old wells.

He directed the California Geologic Energy Management Division to "strictly enforce" operators' insurance requirements known as bonding tied to their facilities, in addition to proposing by the end of 2020 a rule that "protects communities and workers from the impacts of oil extraction activities."

And CARB will strategize on how to reduce the intensity of fossil fuels beyond 2020, which Newsom emphasized will include "consideration of the full life cycle of carbon" — suggesting that carbon capture and sequestration will see greater deployment throughout the state.

One of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s colleagues on the Supreme Court remembered the late justice Wednesday as a “star'' jurist and a fierce warrior whose personal experiences with discrimination fueled her fight for equality and improved life for all in her nearly three decades on the bench.

In an emotional eulogy at the high court on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts likened Ginsburg, who died on Friday of complications from cancer, to family, and called her a force on the court despite her small stature.

“Her voice in court and in our conference room was soft but when she spoke, people listened,” Roberts told a small group of her family, friends and fellow Supreme Court justices. “She was not an opera star, but she found her stage right behind me in our courtroom. There she won famous victories that helped move our nation closer to equal justice under law.”

“Her 483 majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions will steer the court for decades,” Roberts added.

He emphasized her friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia despite their “totally divergent views” and joked that while Ginsburg was “passionate” about the opera, she was “clueless” about sports.

She was also, Roberts said, “tough, brave, a fighter, a winner. But also thoughtful, careful, compassionate, honest.”

“I mentioned at the outset that Ruth's passing weighed most heavily on her family and that is true. But the court was her family too. This building was her home too,” Roberts contended. “Of course she will live on in what she did to improve the law and the lives of all of us. And yet still, Ruth is gone and we grieve.”

Prior to Roberts’ eulogy, Rabbi Laruen Holzblatt, whose husband clerked for Ginsburg, said of the late justice: “To be able to see beyond the world you are in, to imagine that something can be different, that is the job of a prophet.”

“As Justice Ginsburg said, and I quote, think back to 1787. Who were ‘We the people?’ They certainly weren't women. They surely weren't people held in human bondage. The genius of our constitution is that now over more than 200 sometimes turbulent years. That ‘we’ has expanded and expanded,” Holzblatt said. “This was Justice Ginsburg's life's work, to insist that the Constitution deliver on its promise.”

An iconic member of the court for liberals and women alike, Ginsburg will lie in repose outside the court for two days so that the public can pay their respects. Another ceremony will take place Friday at the Capitol across the street, and Ginsburg will become the first woman to lie in state there.

President Donald Trump will visit the court to honor Ginsburg on Thursday, the White House said.

Trump’s visit to pay his respects to Ginsburg will come just days before he announces his choice to fill her seat on the court, in defiance of her dying wish that she be replaced by whichever candidate wins November’s presidential election.

The president and Senate Republicans have vowed to confirm Ginsburg’s replacement ahead of the election, over the objections of Democrats and their nominee, Joe Biden.

“She led an amazing life. What else can you say?” Trump told reporters Friday night when asked about Ginsburg’s death. “She was an amazing woman, whether you agreed or not. She was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I’m actually sad to hear that.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a news conference to announce the Trump administration’s restoration of sanctions on Iran, on September 21, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Patrick Semansky/AFP via Getty Images

Some experts believe the speeches violate federal law.

Two of President Donald Trump’s top national security officials delivered blatantly political speeches in battleground states seemingly to boost their boss’s chance of reelection — potentially in violation of federal law.

The Hatch Act of 1939 imposes strict limits on most federal civilian workers who want to engage in political activity. Some Cabinet departments, including the State Department, augment these statutory limits with additional policies intended to maintain a clear wall of separation between partisan politics and nonpartisan government functions.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien may have busted through that wall on Wednesday.

In Wisconsin, a state Trump won in 2016 and is at risk of losing in 2020, Pompeo addressed state lawmakers on the administration’s policies to confront China. But he used the speech to touch on themes that could easily be construed as a broader campaign pitch.

“The Trump administration is fighting to protect our wallets, hearts, minds, and our freedoms,” he said. “Democrat or Republican, you have a friend in the Trump administration to help you push back against the [Chinese Communist Party’s] exploitation of our open society.”

Norm Eisen, a government ethics expert at the Brookings Institution who represented House Democrats in the Trump impeachment hearings and now advises the Biden campaign, told me Pompeo’s appearance was definitely a problem.

“By giving a speech in battleground state Wisconsin a few short weeks before the presidential election, Secretary Pompeo has not only departed from State Department tradition to stay out of domestic politics, but appears to be engaged in an aggressive pattern of conduct to misuse his official position and taxpayer-funded resources to serve the president’s political interests,” he said, noting the address “raises serious questions under the rules.”

Hours after Pompeo’s speech, O’Brien spoke at Drake University in Iowa — an important state for the president to win — about Trump’s general foreign policy. His comments, though, veered into the political. “The world is more peaceful and prosperous, we believe, because of the president’s policies,” he stated, adding “there’s more to come in a second Trump term.”

Those remarks, some experts say, went too far. “Certainly I think O’Brien’s comments are a kind of advocacy that runs afoul of the Hatch Act,” said Donald Sherman, deputy director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group.

The issue here isn’t that Trump administration officials openly boasted about the work of, well, the Trump administration. That’s par for the course. The issue is they’re purposely giving pro-Trump speeches in states critical to the president’s reelection efforts — on taxpayers’ dime — just weeks before Election Day.

Pompeo and O’Brien, then, may have openly flouted the law. For the secretary, at least, that’s just another day at the office.

Pompeo, as secretary of state, is acting like a Trump campaign surrogate

Pompeo’s address in Wisconsin shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He’s used many appearances in recent weeks to speak in support of Trump the president, and not the Trump administration.

During the Republican National Convention in August, Pompeo filmed a short video while on official travel in Jerusalem, Israel, to back Trump. His decision shattered years of precedent in which sitting Cabinet members, and especially high-profile ones like secretaries of state, don’t engage in openly political and partisan activities. It was a norm Pompeo’s predecessors — in both Republican and Democratic administrations — believed was important to uphold.

And three days ago, the secretary spoke at a Baptist church in Plano, Texas, about the role of faith while serving in government. However, he waded into the domestic battles that animate the presidential discussion today.

“We need to return to the founders’ central understandings about faith and how this Judeo-Christian nation is central to the world, and we must stand with it and we can’t let anybody try and rewrite history to suggest otherwise,” he told the audience. “It is an absolute imperative that we stand on these traditions and continue to build them up. It’s for our kids and for our grandkids. It’s absolutely imperative.”

These aren’t normal comments for a secretary of state — the nation’s top diplomat — to make, or normal forums for him to make them in. That’s why experts like Eisen are concerned.

This all “appears to be part of a coordinated effort to showcase senior administration personnel in battleground states in close proximity to the election to benefit President Trump’s political interests rather than to serve the public interest,” Eisen told me.

There’s a further problem. “Pompeo’s politicking, especially in his official capacity, undermines his ability to represent the United States across the world,” CREW’s Sherman said. “He’s either America’s chief diplomat or he’s a political crony for one political party.”

In effect, giving speeches like the one Pompeo gave in Wisconsin might cause foreign leaders to believe he represents Trump more than he represents Americans. Based on his recent actions and comments, that may just be right.

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Covid-19 exposed fractures in our economy yet also offers an opportunity. From defunding police to fixing housing, this is how we can prepare for future crises.

Six months have passed since the nation’s businesses, schools, and government offices shut down as part of a global effort to stymie Covid-19, a virus that would spread despite the lockdowns. Almost instantly, tens of millions of Americans found themselves unemployed; millions of working parents were forced to take on the duties of full-time teachers; shuttering businesses have left city landscapes culturally and spiritually barren; and millions of 20- and 30-somethings are now realizing that the second financial crisis to strike their burgeoning careers could affect their economic security all the way into retirement.

The pandemic has exposed the fundamental fractures in the economy: the underfunded unemployment insurance systems, the tenuous state of child care, the underemployment that has only become more entrenched in the years since the Great Recession. But in doing so, the pandemic has also provided the nation an opportunity. Policymakers now have every reason to intervene to stabilize the economy while making the future better for people it has historically left behind.

A mobilization this massive has been accomplished before. We only have to look to the past.

In 1945, as Britain reached the conclusion of years of war and prepared for the inevitable contraction of its wartime economy, the economist John Maynard Keynes proposed not financial austerity, but its polar opposite: He sought to invest in people on an almost ostentatious scale, designing the new National Health Service and a pension and social support system, even investing in the arts on a grand scale. To Keynes, the economy was less a series of numbers and indicators than a slew of social and cultural issues that must be addressed for the good of the nation.

Today, as Covid-19 continues to change the landscape for American workers and the economy at large, could these lessons of Keynes be applied, here and now?

Could we federalize unemployment insurance, offering effective aid to the unemployed during times of crisis rather than shorting them because of the myth of personal responsibility? Could we find purpose for underemployed graduates sidelined by the pandemic, save child care as a means of guaranteeing that millions of others might work, fix our broken policing, and solve for housing shortages while addressing the racist barriers in our housing system? We can.

This month’s issue of The Highlight surfaces the pervasive issues that have left vast swaths of our economy vulnerable, and looks to economists, policymakers, advocates, historians, even former presidential candidates to answer the difficult question of how we might correct the missteps of the past.

The great rebuilding of the economy won’t be easy. But we have the blueprint. We only have to let it guide us.

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How to build a better American economy

A blueprint exists for a more inclusive, successful nation that invests in the well-being of its citizens. We only have to look to the past.

by Zachary D. Carter

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We can end America’s unemployment nightmare

The problem with our social safety net is clear. The solution is, too.

by Emily Stewart

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Young people are the new corps of engineers the US has been waiting for

We have more than enough work to go around for the next generation if we address one of our nation’s biggest problems: infrastructure.

by Andrew Yang

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The financial case for defunding the police

It’s time to ask why we continue to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on police misconduct lawsuits and billions more on policing that yields poor outcomes.

by Sean Collins

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Building housing — lots of it — will lay the foundation for a new future

A massive boom in new construction would create countless jobs and help finally end the legacy of racist housing policies.

by Matthew Yglesias

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The future of the economy hinges on child care

We must bail out the industry that allows millions of parents to work.

by Anna North

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Party of One is a collaborative creative studio founded by Melissa Deckert and Nicole Licht, based in Brooklyn, New York. Through combined experience in fine arts and traditional design, Party of One creates compelling visuals with an emphasis on unique and often handcrafted prop design, styling, and sets.

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These stories are part of The Great Rebuild, a project made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. All Great Rebuild coverage is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work, and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. Contribute today from as little as $3.

Party of One Studio for Vox

A massive boom in new construction would create countless jobs and help finally end the legacy of racist housing policies.

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

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As America’s generals were plotting the final moves of World War II, its economists had another concern: the potentially dire economic consequences of victory.

The war, of course, had been preceded by a severe and prolonged depression. And many thought its end would bring back mass unemployment; after all, the demobilization of soldiers in the wake of World War I created a severe recession. In 1939, Alvin Hansen, a leading American Keynesian economist, published a famous analysis suggesting that with the frontier closed, the United States was now due to become a country with slow population growth and structurally deficient demand for investment. In other words: It was destined to be a country mired in frequent recessions.

The war had solved the problem, providing employment for millions both as soldiers and as workers in war production industries. But after the war, what would they all do?

America found its answer in what historian Kenneth Jackson memorably dubbed “the crabgrass frontier” — suburbs opened by the automobile and the construction of the Interstate Highway System — which became the engine for a new era of growth. The ability to construct vast tracts of new, larger homes — homes that ex-soldiers could purchase thanks to subsidized loans via the GI Bill of Rights — became the source of investment demand that Hansen feared America would lack.

The new homes would have to be filled with durable goods, including appliances, furniture, and cars, that factories no longer busy serving as the arsenal of democracy could churn out. Along the way, the debt-financed purchase of homes became an engine of wealth accumulation that America’s growing families could pass on to their children.

This story has become well known lately for its role in widening the racial wealth gap. Black neighborhoods and mortgage applicants were largely excluded from federal largesse even as the civil rights movement was winning victories in the courts and, eventually, in Congress.

An equivalent policy approach today must be racially inclusive and more mindful of environmental sustainability, but house-building as the cornerstone of rebuilding the economy remains a solid idea. The United States is currently both underhoused and underemployed but possessed of plenty of capacity to build more. A combination of rental assistance for consumers, capital funding for affordable housing, and regulatory relief for builders of all kinds could unleash a massive boom in new construction, creating countless blue-collar jobs and laying the foundation for a new era of inclusive prosperity.

It only needs to direct money to those in need and provide regulatory relief to those inclined to build.

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Before there was Covid-19, there was the Great Recession. And before that, the great housing price bubble of the mid-aughts.

Despite the enormous price increases in some metro areas during the bubble, the number of houses built then was modest — extremely modest compared to the scale of the housing slump that followed. The perception of a George W. Bush-era house-building boom is largely an illusion, wrote Mercatus Center researchers Kevin Erdmann and Scott Sumner, “based on the fact that construction of new single-family homes did reach record levels in 2005–2006.” But it did not result in a sky-high quantity of total housing. Instead, they wrote, the single-family boom was a “shift of market share out of manufactured and multi-unit homes.”

So after more than a decade of post-boom slump, the United States is significantly short of houses. Even before the pandemic — i.e., during a time of economic growth — the number of young adults living with their parents was rising, according to the Pew Research Center, while the Urban Institute found an increase in the share of Americans with crowded housing arrangements. This overcrowding was a policy failure on its own terms, but also proved to be tinder for the spread of the virus.

Unlike in the 1940s, we don’t really need to do much now to get people subsidized loans. Mortgage interest rates are at record lows, so families with the means to make a down payment can easily buy. But then there’s everyone else.

“We certainly need a renters’ policy in America right now,” says Darrick Hamilton, the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State, who’ll soon be rejoining the economics faculty at the New School in New York. Policies that focus on cheap credit, such as what the Federal Reserve has delivered, or the Trump administration’s emphasis on tax cuts, can help boost a severely depressed economy. But Hamilton cautions that they also exacerbate gaps between people who already have the money necessary to take advantage and “the existing residents who aren’t positioned to benefit from those incentives.”

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has already proposed fully funding the Section 8 housing voucher program. The program helps millions of low-income families by putting housing assistance directly in their hands — and creates a huge new market opportunity in building homes for them to rent. But pre-pandemic, Section 8 excluded about 75 percent of eligible households, and it will only exclude more as joblessness grows. Mary Cunningham, the vice president for metropolitan housing and communities policy at Urban Institute, says making it universal “will go a long way in making sure every American has a home.”

While Biden has endorsed the idea, he has not really foregrounded it in his campaign rhetoric, nor has he indicated that he sees it as part of an economic recovery program. But it’s extremely well targeted as economic stimulus to give money to families who are sure to spend it. If paired with smart regulatory ideas, it could unleash a real boom in house-building that creates jobs and lays the foundation for future prosperity.

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A big difference between the housing problems of today and those of two generations ago is where the demand is. Sprawling construction of new homes continues to take place on the crabgrass frontier, but in most cities of any size, that frontier is now located far from the most convenient commuting routes. And in the geographically constrained cities of the Pacific Coast and the Northeast Corridor, and in cities like Denver and Miami, the frontier is essentially closed. A healthy dose of the future of construction has to be “infill” — new development in already developed neighborhoods. That happens today to an extent in low-income or formerly industrial neighborhoods, but it’s often blocked by local homeowners in the priciest areas where new building would be most desirable.

“Those that are better positioned politically, economically, and even racially are able to use state apparatus, including zoning laws, to enrich themselves at the expense of others,” Hamilton says.

Until relatively recently, the Trump administration agreed with this diagnosis, arguing that exclusionary zoning laws were hurting the economy and contributing to the rising homelessness problem of pre-Covid-19 America. Housing Secretary Ben Carson even tweeted in 2018 that “we must look at increasing the supply of affordable housing by reducing onerous zoning regulations.”

But more recently, Trump has been trying to counteract poor polling results among upscale whites by promising to uphold the “suburban lifestyle dream” by excluding apartments from upscale neighborhoods. The St. Louis couple made famous for waving guns at protesters, the McCloskeys, warned at the Republican National Convention that progressives have an agenda for “ending single-family home zoning,” which would “bring crime, lawlessness, and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighborhoods.”

There is nothing wrong with single-family homes. But a regulatory requirement that only single-family homes be built across vast swaths of land is a recipe for housing scarcity, and it explains why decent housing has slid out of reach for so many middle-class families in some American cities. Equipping the lowest-income residents with financial assistance will be a big boost to them, but no amount of cheap credit and vouchers can compensate for an objective shortfall of dwellings.

Most Democrats aren’t actually seeking to abolish single-family zoning. A visionary effort in California to force high-income and transit-proximate communities to accept apartment buildings died in the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature last year on a vote that scrambled party allegiances and saw many Southern California liberals take the McCloskey family view.

But the city of Portland offers an alternate vision of reform.

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Last summer, the Oregon state legislature took action to allow two-unit structures across almost the entire state and three-unit ones in its larger towns. This doesn’t “abolish the suburbs,” but it does ensure that a wider variety of house types are available in a wider range of communities.

And this summer, the city of Portland went even further, enacting what the Sightline Institute’s Michael Andersen calls “the best low-density zoning reform in the US.”

The details are a bit complicated, resulting from a coalition-building process that doesn’t lend itself to easy single-sentence description. But the urbanist and illustrator Alfred Twu produced a graphic for Sightline that shows the breadth and scope of changes, including an easier path to build accessory dwelling units, relaxed parking rules, legalization of four-unit “cottage clusters,” and a structure for building small, six-unit apartment buildings if half the units are provided at deeply subsidized rates to poor families.

This should allow nonprofit builders to create mixed-income buildings that generate enough rent from market-rate tenants to cover operating costs.

Madeline Kovacs, who helped organize the coalition that secured the historic reform, says it took a combination of determination and open-mindedness to build an alliance between skeptics of overweening regulation and advocates for low-income communities. The bill’s contents are hard to summarize cleanly because it was a question of “getting those people around the table and hashing it out, over and over and over again.” But ultimately it worked, and it mobilized enough citizen enthusiasm to match the notorious status quo bias of the community meeting process.

“We matched anti-housing testimony and even outstripped it by a couple of people,” she said.

But just because you can build new types of housing doesn’t mean you will. That’s where money comes in.

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The genius of policy that allows more market-rate construction — whether that’s zoning for duplexes in the suburbs or taller apartments in central cities — is that the Federal Reserve has already acted to make the financing easy. If there’s a project that pencils out as profitable, and the regulatory climate allows it to be completed in a reasonable time frame, loans are cheap these days. But more jurisdictions should pay attention to that time frame issue. With state and local tax bases hard-hit by the pandemic and study after study after study after study confirming that more market-rate house-building improves affordability, every jurisdiction should look at how it can ease off on anti-housing rules.

But there is more to life than the profit motive.

“There’s practically nothing in the American political or economic system that doesn’t run straight into housing,” says Felicia Wong, the president and CEO of the progressive Roosevelt Institute. Whether you’re talking about education, policing, transportation, climate, or access to jobs, the nature of the building environment is critical. Subsidizing low-income renters on the demand side can be extremely helpful. But constructing non-market housing to deliberately promote integration or expand access, as envisioned in Portland, should also be on the table.

“We would also argue at Roosevelt that the federal government has a role in providing more affordable housing,” Wong says.

As Portland’s example shows, funding non-market housing is not in tension with regulatory reform. Instead, if we want affordable housing to exist in any quantity outside of the most depressed areas, we need regulatory reforms to allow its construction.

Matthew Yglesias is a senior correspondent focused on politics and economic policy. He is one of the co-founders of Vox. He’s a host of The Weeds podcast, and the author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.

This story is part of The Great Rebuild, a project made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. All Great Rebuild coverage is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

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Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work, and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. Contribute today from as little as $3.

If you sold these dumbbells, you would be very rich. | Al Bello/Getty Images

Dumbbells are impossibly expensive right now, thanks in large part to resellers taking advantage of a shortage.

Humans’ fragile understanding of worth and employment has long been tested by comically effective get-rich-quick schemes — think rare Beanie Babies or the volatile world of cryptocurrency. Now there’s a “why didn’t I think of that?” business idea for the pandemic era: reselling dumbbells.

Literal, not figurative, dumbbells.

Dumbbells — cast iron molded to a specific shape, set to a specific weight, and created for the simple act of being picked up and put down — have become some of the most coveted items of 2020. Like cookware or cars or electronics, there’s a range of quality when it comes to dumbbells that might not be apparent at first glance. Some dumbbells are worth every penny. But on the resale market, on sites like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist, dumbbells are being sold for twice to sometimes six or seven times the amount they went for before the coronavirus pandemic struck.

The markup and profits are the result of a dumbbell shortage combined with meteoric demand. But there’s something else happening: This new supply of ravenous consumers is largely uninformed about the market, and resellers are eager to take advantage of that perfect storm.

“And you know, of course, the million-dollar question is: Is this thing going to correct itself? And what happens when it does?” American Barbell CEO Phil Patti told me. “The bottom line is we don’t see that happening anytime soon.”

America has a dumbbell shortage and an excess of resellers

Johnny Louis/Getty Images

Understanding the lucrative dumbbell resale market means understanding the shortage. The pandemic resulted in gym shutdowns across the country in March. With their fitness plans in limbo, people started ordering weights from retailers, which burned through their inventory and placed orders that most likely went through China (according to my sources, the country accounts for 95 percent of cast-iron weights). At the same time, China’s winter and spring lockdowns gummed up the supply chain. Retailers’ stock remains sporadic, sometimes taking months to ship.

This shortage put resellers at an advantage.

“I never once considered selling everything that I own. I had everything that I wanted,” Brian Doyle, a former NCAA coach and home-gym enthusiast, told me. “Once I put it on paper, and I saw exactly how much money that the market was telling me that I could make off of my gym, that told me, ‘Go ahead, you’re gonna make a 3x return on your investment on this.’”

Doyle said he had been working on his home gym for five or six years before selling everything during the pandemic. He then used that money to repurchase a more expansive home gym. Putting Doyle’s flip into plain English, the weights and dumbbells he was looking at two years ago were going for less than $1 per pound, sometimes as low as 50 cents per pound. Those same weights now go for $2.50 to $3 (or even more) per pound on the resale market.

If you were to buy a 10-pound dumbbell at the 50-cents-per-pound steal Doyle found, it would cost $5. On the current resale market, that 10-pound weight could be $30 (if not more). That’s a 600 percent difference. Obtain and sell enough weights, or really anything at a 600 percent markup, and you’ve got an extremely profitable business model. Or one that could, if enforced, qualify as price gouging.

“I’m defending the secondhand market because price gouging is typically only enforceable in retail, not in secondhand sale,” Doyle said. “You know, the secondhand market is free game. It’s the wild, wild west.”

As Doyle points out, there isn’t a federal law against resellers marking up their prices. He saw it happen to the very dumbbells he sold.

“When I sold everything here, I sold my dumbbells at $1.20 a pound,” he told me. Later, “I saw four pairs of my dumbbells marked up for $2 a pound. They were listed online two days after I sold them. And so I see it happening immediately with the stuff that I sold. I sold it at what I thought was a very reasonable price.”

Reseller Lupe Barajas told me he makes roughly a 30 percent profit from the weights he’s been buying at retail. His strategy is to go directly to retail stores, ask when shipments come in, and then flip the weights that he buys.

“Big 5 [Sporting Goods] gets loads once a week, and Walmart is pretty much every day but varies,” Barajas said. “Usually workers will let me know when that is and I make sure I get there in the morning, when everything is stocked up.”

While Barajas started out selling on eBay, he learned that selling locally was a better option, since he could avoid shipping fees and eBay’s cut. I asked him what he would say to a buyer who says he and other resellers are price gouging.

“I think that should be motivation to producers of items that there is a shortage on,” he said. “It’s not just gym equipment — there’s tons of items people increase the price on. But some people like the convenience of knowing someone like myself has the item available and are fine paying a little more, versus going to stores and the store not having what they want and they’re just wasting their time.”

While writing this story, I received tips about more complex sourcing and selling techniques, from bots that crawl Amazon to sellers who have found that moving equipment was more lucrative than their current career. Those sellers declined to speak to me on the record, though I spoke with a few one-off resellers who had stories about selling adjustable dumbbells and even equipment like Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure video game for around double the price.

Earlier this year in March, a man from Tennessee hoarded 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer in an attempt to make a monster profit. His plan went awry when lawmakers like Gov. Andrew Cuomo took action against price gouging, and websites like Amazon followed suit and blocked bad actors.

That said, dumbbells and weights aren’t considered “essential” items during the pandemic the way sanitizer and other items were. There’s also no law or even Amazon directive that bars you from hypothetically purchasing dumbbells from a seller looking to make an exponential profit. The reverse is also true: There isn’t anything stopping sellers on Amazon or Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. And it’s worth noting that these extreme markups, while rare, are actually commonplace with items such as sneakers and watches.

The transactions, as simple as a click on Venmo, are often unregulated.

It’s not hard to find the resellers on sites such as eBay or Facebook Marketplace, the latter of which features multiple sellers offering dumbbells at $2 to $2.50 per pound. On the r/flipping subreddit, sellers share stories about how buyers’ offers for dumbbells have skyrocketed during the pandemic and strategize about whether gym reopenings will drive prices down.

Dumbbell have become a luxury.

No one needs them right now, but there’s a premium on having them because for the most part, how we work out still hasn’t returned to “normal.” Even in places where gyms are open, some people might not be comfortable working out with others amid the pandemic.

Retailers sell weights for a fair price with delays, but with dumbbells that allow you to work out right away, you run the risk of getting hosed. Doyle summed up the price dilemma as such: “How much is my time worth? How much is it worth to not wait two months to get what I want right now?”

The answer, it seems, is as much as a 600 percent markup.

How uninformed customers have driven up dumbbell prices

Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images

For 42 years, American Barbell was a behind-the-scenes player and commercial manufacturer of, you guessed it, American barbells. It supplied everyone from Orange Theory to Planet Fitness, but when the pandemic struck, most of its business — $28.5 million of the $30 million it did in 2019 — shut down overnight.

As American Barbell’s Patti tells it, it was a crisis — for about a week.

As the CEO was plotting his next move, one of his partners came to him. “He said, ‘We have $4 million in internet orders,’” Patti told me. “In 2019 we did about $1 million to $1.5 million in total [online]. Now we had $4 million all at once.”

In the before times, gyms such as Gold’s or Equinox or Planet Fitness edited and picked out weights for their customers. According to Patti, these customers were now ready to spend money without having a clue what to buy. And as a result, resellers and new retailers looking to cash in on booming demand are getting away with selling or reselling poor-quality products at astronomical prices.

Take hexagonal-shaped dumbbells, for example.

“Hex bells are very, very popular for the home market. They’ve been around forever,” Patti explained. “But you know, you can buy one that’s recycled rubber that smells like old car tires, and it’ll smell up a room and you know, gag people. That’s the majority of what people sell.” (Rubber and urethane-coated dumbbells are popular because they protect both the equipment and surfaces like your floor.)

Patti is very clear that his products aren’t cheap — he said they signify premium, top-shelf strength-training products. His rubber hex bells are going for the high end of retail value ($1.75 to $2.25 per pound), but he argues that you’re paying for quality and natural, non-stinky rubber that won’t induce your gag reflex.

The thought being that if you’re already paying a premium, above-market price for a product, you might as well go with a premium product. Further, Patti said the influx of new and resold product could result in serious safety issues, such as equipment falling apart or something disastrous, like an Olympic bar snapping.

“We realize that boy, the public needs a little bit of education, because to us it’s a tremendous disservice to watch all these people that are making big money,” Patti told me. “They don’t deserve it. They haven’t put in any dues. They’re just capitalizing on, you know, the unknowing customer, and to me, I take that extremely personal.”

Doyle, the home-gym expert, echoed what Patti said about education. He said he was at an advantage because he’d been building and researching his home gym for years, as well as coaching college athletes. He knew what to look for and the price points to seek out.

“Without market knowledge, it’s kind of like shooting a dart with your eyes closed trying to find the right price,” Doyle said.

Patti said he doesn’t see the market shifting back to gyms anytime soon or in the capacity it once was, at least not until a vaccine is created. He doesn’t blame people for not wanting to be in a tight space working out with others. He also doesn’t blame consumers for wanting to bring those workouts home — he just wants them to be more educated.

“Don’t be afraid to ask the seller tons of questions,” Patti told me. “If you’re buying something very inferior and you’re paying a Ferrari price, that’s a problem.”

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FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver explains how the Senate’s rural skew makes it hard for Democrats to win a majority.

For more insights into the race for the Senate, check out our 2020 Senate forecast.

[The idea has a lot of merit. But it will be hard to enact, and probably won't do much to end partisan conflict over Supreme Court appointments.]

 

Recent and ongoing battles over Supreme Court nominations have increased interest in the possibility of limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices. This idea has long enjoyed  widespread (though not universal) support from legal scholars on different sides of the political spectrum, such as Sanford Levinson on the left, and Steve Calabresi on the right. While there are different variations of the proposal, in most versions Supreme Court justices would be limited to non-renewable 18 year terms, as opposed to the life tenure they enjoy now. I am happy to support the idea, as well. It has a number of important advantages, including some that have been overlooked by advocates. But it is unlikely to to put an end to bitter confirmation battles and partisan conflict over the courts more generally.

Steve Calabresi enumerates the potential benefits of term limits in an excellent recent New York Times op ed:

Supreme Court justices often try to retire during the presidency of someone sympathetic to their jurisprudence. Of course, that doesn't always work: Justice Scalia died after almost 30 years on the high court trying to wait out President Barack Obama, and Justice Ginsburg died after nearly 27 years trying to outlast President Trump.

Over all, though, strategic retirements give the justices too much power in picking their own successors, which can lead to a self-perpetuating oligarchy….

The unpredictable American system of life tenure has led to four presidents picking six or more justices and four presidents selecting none, as happened with Jimmy Carter. This gives some presidents too much influence on the Supreme Court and others too little.

It also leads to justices remaining on the Supreme Court when they are unable either physically or mentally to do the job…

The solution is for Republicans and Democrats to unite in supporting a constitutional amendment that fixes the size of the Supreme Court at its current nine justices, each of whom would serve an 18-year nonrenewable term, staggered so that one seat opens up during the first and third years of a president's four-year term…..

Given the length of this term, longer than for judges on the high courts of any other constitutional democracy, the justices would be amply independent.

Presidents would no longer have the incentive to pick comparatively young nominees — say, someone 45 to 50 years of age — to project their influence decades into the future. Justices would lose their power to help pick successors who share their views by retiring strategically.

To this list, I would add another point: As life expectancy continues to increase (at least once the awful coronavirus pandemic ends), life-tenured justices could potentially serve for even longer than they do now. Imagine a world where people routinely live to the age of 100 or more, and retain their ability to work up until that age, or close to it. A justice appointed at the age of 45 or 50 (as is increasingly commonplace) could serve for fifty or sixty years or even longer. At some point, giving people largely unaccountable power for that long will rightly be seen as intolerable. Longer life expectancy is a great thing! But it interacts poorly with life tenure for positions of great power.

At the same time, unlike Calabresi, I doubt that term limits would "end what has become a poisonous process of picking a Supreme Court justice" or "depoliticize the court and judicial selection." Even if justices serve for "only" 18 years, they will still have great power. And presidents will still have a strong incentive to appoint justices whose judicial philosophies align with his and his party's priorities. For their part, senators will continue have strong incentives to oppose nominees whom they (and their party) see as ideologically inimical. We live in an era of intense partisan polarization, including divisions over many legal issues that are likely to come before the Supreme Court, including such matters as abortion, affirmative action, law enforcement powers, gun rights, and (at least in recent years) immigration. The gap between the way a conservative Republican justice and a liberal Democratic one will vote on these and other issues is predictably large (even if there will be a good many outlier cases).

So long as that polarization persists, I highly doubt it will be possible to return to the era of relatively noncontentious Supreme Court nominations. Conflict is likely to continue, particularly in situations where the Senate and the presidency are controlled by different parties.

Calabresi's proposal includes a provision designed to force the president and the Senate to cooperate on nominations:

Failure to confirm a justice by July 1 of a president's first or third year should lead to a salary and benefits freeze for the president and all 100 senators, and they should be confined together until a nominee has been approved. The vice president would act as president during this time and the Senate would be forbidden from taking action whatsoever on any of its calendars.

Like Jonathan Adler, I am skeptical that this "confinement" can be enforced. I also highly doubt that Congress would be willing to enact a constitutional amendment that included this punitive aspect.

Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute (who should not be confused with the present writer, but often is) offers some additional reasons why term limits are unlikely to end the partisan war over judicial appointments here.

Perhaps the biggest problem with term limits for SCOTUS justices is that they would be extremely hard to enact. In my view, that would require a constitutional amendment. That necessitates securing a massive supermajority: 2/3 of both houses of Congress, and 3/4 of state legislatures. While SCOTUS term limits have become more popular in recent years, I am doubtful that the idea has the level of support needed to pass. However, support might grow over time, especially if I am right about increased life expectancy creating a situation where justices routinely serve for fifty years or even longer.

In addition, there will be inevitable wrangling over how to deal with incumbent justices. If they get "grandfathered" in and allowed to serve for life, that means term limits will not have much effect for many years to come. If they are forced to accept limits themselves, the amendment is likely to be opposed by whichever party currently enjoys a majority on the Court.

Some scholars argue that term limits can be imposed by statute, without a constitutional amendment. They contend that life tenure in the Constitution simply requires that federal judges have some judicial position for life, not necessarily that of SCOTUS justice. Thus, Congress could enact a law under which, for example, justices are demoted to the lower courts after serving for 18 years (or for however long Congress dictates).

I  think this argument is both wrong on the law, and would create dangerous incentives for Congress if it became widely accepted. It would have the same sorts of problems as the "rotation" proposal endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries this year. I criticized that idea here:

Instead of adding new justices to the Court, [under the rotation plan] Congress  could pass a law removing some of the current justices and transferring them to lower courts…. Then, the president can appoint new Supreme Court justices who will be more to his or her party's liking….

It isn't hard to see how this plan could easily lead to the same sort of spiraling dynamic as court packing. Imagine Sanders [or, now, Joe Biden] gets elected president in 2020 and—with the help of a Democratic Congress—sends Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to judicial purgatory. Perhaps they end up being consigned to a specially created federal court that considers weighty matters such as appeals of tickets issued to vehicles illegally parked on federal government property. Meanwhile, their Supreme Court seats get taken by newly appointed liberal justices….

How would the next GOP president and Congress respond? Most likely they would do the same thing to two (or more) liberal justices. Perhaps Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor end up joining Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as parking ticket court judges. Meanwhile, two new conservative justices take their seats. Of course, the next Democratic president backed by a congressional majority would retaliate in kind, and so on….

These concerns apply with equal force to statutory term limits. If Congress can impose an 18 year term, they can also impose one that is 3 years or 6 years, and use that power to get rid of Supreme Court justices whose decisions they dislike. When the opposing party comes to power, they can make the terms still shorter, and thereby get rid of justices they dislike.

If Congress has broad authority to set judicial terms as they wish, they could even have asymmetric term lengths, so as to target justices they dislike for removal, while leaving others in place. For example, a Democratic Congress could enact a very short term limit that applies to justices confirmed in a year ending in 8, so as to eliminate Brett Kavanaugh (confirmed in 2018). Republicans could respond by targeting Democratic-appointed justices. And so on. Judicial review would thereby be neutered over time, as would also happen through repeated court-packing.

In sum, there is a great deal of merit to the idea of Supreme Court term limits. But it is far from a panacea for our problems, and would be very difficult to enact.

This is very likely the Supreme Court nominee that Mitch McConnell will be trying to ram through the Senate in the next five weeks. Here’s Amy Coney Barrett playing pundit and defending McConnell’s decision to block President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, after Justice Scalia’s death. Bad enough, but note the big tell: An Obama nominee would “dramatically flip the balance of power."

So much for those “balls and strikes” of Chief Justice John Roberts, huh? She lays it all out there; it’s a “balance of power.” So much for even respecting the pretense of not prejudging cases. It’s all “us vs. them.” Even Justice Neil Gorsuch, who got that stolen seat, hasn’t played that game. I guess that’s why it’s likely to be Barrett. She’s willing to go there, on the record.

Whether you believe that top U.S. immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci is doing a solid job or whether you believe he is a grand mastermind in the global deep state conspiracy to destroy the world and get rid of Donald Trump so that Hillary Clinton can start human trafficking your children, you have to admit, he always seems rather unflappable. Dr. Fauci’s general calm and methodical way of explaining our public health crisis is not always perfect, but it is reassuring to many because, in a world where the president of the United States says horrendous things every single day, having a public official who seems competent is something of a revelation.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is what happens when you take Donald Trump and dress him more conservatively, but somehow make him more annoying. He has spent the current pandemic playing the part of science skeptic. Rand would have followed his father Ron into calling COVID-19 a hoax, but then he ended up testing positive for the virus. Like everything between Ron and Rand, Rand is just the shittier version of his racist, useless dad. So when Sen. Paul attempted to once again promote misleading scientific information in an attempt to “gotcha” Dr. Fauci during Wednesday’s hearing with the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, watching Dr. Fauci get angry and school little Rand was something to see.

Sen. Rand Paul first attempted to blame the United States’ failure to simply do nothing at all, like Sweden, as the reason for death rates. It’s idiotic for sure, but Paul is trying to argue that Dr. Fauci and others who pushed for mask-wearing and social distancing and other safety measures early on were wrong and alarmist. Paul is wrong. He is not a little wrong. He is 100% wrong, and Dr. Fauci was tired of such sophistry on Paul’s part. 

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You know, senator, I would be happy at a different time to sit down and go over detail. You have said a lot of different things. You have compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences. You said, well, you know, there are a lot of differences between Sweden, but compare Sweden's death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. It's worse. So I don't think it's appropriate to compare Sweden with us. I think in the beginning, we have done things based on the knowledge we had at the time. And hopefully, and I am—and my colleagues are—humble enough and modest enough to realize that as new data comes, you make different recommendations. But I don't regret saying that the only way we could have really stopped the explosion of infection was by essentially—I want to say shutting down—I mean essentially having the physical separation, and the kinds of recommendations that we have made.

Sen. Paul then attempted to promote the Republican narrative that the high concentrations of COVID-19 deaths in places like New York, under a Democratic governor, is proof of some Democratic Party problem in public health, while the Republican Party’s complete negligence is somehow better.

DR. FAUCI: No, you have misconstrued that. They got hit very badly. They made some mistakes. Right now, if you look at what's going on right now, the things that are going on in New York to get their test positivity 1% or less is because they are looking at the guidelines that we have put together from the task force of the four or five things: of masks, social distancing, outdoors more than indoors, avoiding crowds, and washing hands.

As time has just about run out, Sen. Paul attempts to throw in one last fake scientific fact.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Or they have developed enough community immunity that they are no longer having the pandemic because they have enough immunity in New York City to actually stop it.

That’s bullshit, and Dr. Fauci very quickly and stridently says: “I challenge that, senator.”

Time is up, but Dr. Fauci is not going to use his easygoing demeanor to allow this crap bag of a senator to get away with pushing fake science.

DR. FAUCI: Please, sir. I would like to be able do this because this happens with Senator Rand all the time. You are not listening to what the director of the CDC said, that in New York, it's about 22%. if you believe 22% is herd immunity, I believe you're alone in that.

Rand Paul is alone most of the time since his own neighbors hate him and most Americans dislike him as well.

A little after midnight on March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor was asleep in her bed when a gang of Louisville, Kentucky, police officers rammed her door and began shooting into her home, striking her eight times and killing her. The 25-year-old EMT died on the floor of the hallway in her home. 

Last week, the city of Louisville reached a $12 million settlement with Taylor’s family for her wrongful death. On Wednesday, Sept. 23, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Annie O'Connell read a grand jury indictment of only one officer, on three counts of 1st degree wanton endangerment with "extreme indifference." The charges carry a one- to five-year maximum sentence but could also result in probation. To be clear, this charge is not related to the killing of Breonna Taylor: It is about the adjacent apartments that were also sprayed with bullets as these four hoodlum officers shot haphazardly into an innocent person’s home.

Former Officer Brett Hankinson was the only officer charged even though Sgt. Jon Mattingly and officer Myles Cosgrove also reportedly shot into Taylor’s home the night she was killed. After Taylor was shot and lay dying, she received very little help from the officers, and what help she did receive from police was far too late. 

The Louisville police and attorney general’s offices have been dragging their heels on responding to the death of Breonna Taylor for some time. Her story, and pressure on law enforcement to do anything about this tragic injustice, came entirely from outside the city and state’s apparatus.

A month ago it was revealed that prosecutors were trying to cut a plea deal with Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend that would have implicated Taylor as some kind of a criminal, though there is no evidence to support that. So it is not a shock that racism and systemic injustice has seemingly won out again. Investigators said there was no body camera footage of the raid, only camera footage from law enforcement who arrived at the scene after the shooting.

Once again, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly was not indicted, nor was Detective Myles Cosgrove. Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove were determined to have been “justified in their use of force.” The indictment against Brett Hankinson seems to be related to how he sprayed his gun not simply into Breonna Taylor’s apartment, but into other apartments.

The judge set the cash bond for Hankinson at $15,000, less than the cost of a moderate-priced new car. 

The announcement begins around the 24-minute mark.

As unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf’s official nomination goes in front of a Senate committee today (he should be resigning, not getting rewarded), NBC News reports that the consulting firm where his wife works as an executive was awarded DHS contracts worth millions the year after he joined one of the department’s agencies. Drain the swa—HAHAHAHAJAJAJAJA.

“Although the company has a long history of federal contracts, it did not do work for DHS until after Wolf became the TSA's chief of staff in 2017,” Julia Ainsley reports. “A DHS spokesperson said Wolf was not aware of the contracts until he was contacted by the media.” Oh, so just like when he claimed he wasn’t aware that the naturalization stunt he helped carry out was going to be broadcast as part of the Republican National Convention? Sure, Chad.

Ainsley reports that Hope Wolf’s consulting firm, Berkeley Research Group, was awarded the contracts in question beginning in September 2018, when Chad Wolf was still working as former Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen’s chief of staff. Wolf would replace Nielsen the following year. “Kyle Herrig, founder and president of Accountable.US, a left-leaning watchdog group, said the $6 million in contracts may be a conflict of interest,” Ainsley reports.

We’ll say. "After Mr. Wolf joined DHS, it began pumping millions of dollars into his wife's firm, which also happens to be his largest financial asset," Herrig told NBC News. "The arrangement is highly problematic and warrants congressional scrutiny." But there’s little that Unlawful Chad has helped carry out for the Trump administration that doesn’t warrant scrutiny from Congress. 

In a statement released prior to Unlawful Chad’s Wednesday appearance before senators, immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice notes that from defying the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to authorizing the federal thugs who carried out the state-sanctioned kidnappings of Americans in Portland, he should be resigning, not getting rewarded.

“Wolf was a behind-the-scenes player during the systematic separation of thousands of children from their parents earlier in the Trump era—one of the darkest chapters of this or any other presidency,” the organization said. “More recently, under Wolf’s acting leadership, DHS and ICE have sought to reinstitute family separation by forcing moms and dads into an impossible choice: either staying together as a family in facilities that endanger their lives or allowing their children to be ripped away and released on their own with uncertain prospects of ever being reunited.”

The administration has continued to refuse to release these kids and their parents together from dangerous immigration prisons in the middle of a pandemic.

“The horrifying allegations of forced hysterectomies at an ICE detention facility in Georgia represents the type of demonization and abuse that must be exposed, repudiated and punished and that has flourished during Wolf’s time at DHS,” America’s Voice continued. “From ICE facilities lacking rudimentary health care to allegations of sexual abuse to a disturbing pattern of deaths in custody, the entire detention system and their leaders deserve investigation—not promotion or Senate confirmation.”

But the Trump administration seeks to promote Unlawful Chad not just because it’s scrambling to try to protect the policies he’s unlawfully signed into place while unlawfully leading the department, but because his priority has been to secure Donald Trump’s presidency, not the “homeland.” Another example: During his “State of the Homeland Address” at DHS headquarters this month, Unlawful Chad ignored actual white supremacist terror threats facing the nation to instead spew anti-immigrant garbage for his boss. Unlawful Chad’s nomination must be blocked, and he must go.

The 2020 presidential election is around the corner, and we know the importance of this election cycle cannot be overstated. We also know that Donald Trump’s attacks on the United States Postal Service (USPS) are already affecting mail now as people report major delays. We know, too, that along with Trump’s rallies against mail-in voting, obsessively describing it as “corrupt” (in spite of doing so himself to vote in Florida) that sabotaging the mail may also affect mail-in ballots. While some people vote by mail every year, it’s fair to believe that many more people will try to do so in this election cycle as we continue to face the novel coronavirus pandemic. 

At this point, you might be wondering not only how to vote in your own state, but how to make sure your friend, family member, distant classmate, and so on can vote in theirs. As much as outreach and encouragement are important—and they are—many people may reply by saying it’s too complicated or confusing to figure out how to vote. And to be frank, it is confusing, inconsistent, and downright stressful to vote in many places in the United States. That’s what this guide is here for! Big caveat: Please confirm that your local offices or polling places are open and operating at their usual hours during the coronavirus pandemic, and keep an eye on your state’s voting-related changes up until the election. Some states require notarization for some registrations or votes by mail—you can often get this done for free online, but double-check specific requirements due to the virus on that front as well.

Let’s break down each state (including Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) below in alphabetical order.

Alabama

Alabama does not make it easy to vote by any means. You must register to vote by Oct. 19. At the polls, you must present a government-issued photo ID. The only exception here is if two election officials confirm your identity. You can vote by mail and cite fear of COVID-19 as the reason why under the “physical illness” excuse. (You must list a reason.) There is no early in-person voting option. You must register by mail, online, or at the registrar. The mail ballot deadline is that it must be received by Nov. 3 at 12 PM. 

You can check your registration status online here. 

Alaska

Alaska is also pretty difficult. You must register to vote by Oct. 4. There is early in-person voting from Oct. 19 to Nov. 2, which is something. You can vote by mail without an excuse. If you vote by absentee ballot, you do need to get a witness to sign it. If you vote at the polls, you must show a government-issued photo ID or a government document with your name and address on it, like a utility bill or paycheck. If an election official attests to your identity, this is waived. There is no same-day voter registration. You can register online, by mail, at the public library, or clerk’s office. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3. 

You can check your registration status online here. 

Arizona

Arizona is not too bad. You must register to vote by Oct. 5. There is no same-day voter registration. You can vote by mail without an excuse. You can vote early in person beginning on Oct. 7. At the polls, you need to show a government-issued ID or a document like a utility bill or bank statement. This year, Arizona is mailing absentee ballot applications to all active voters. You can register to vote online, by mail, or at the county recorder’s office. Notably, disabled voters may elect to have a caregiver (such as a family member or someone in their household) hand in or mail their ballot on their behalf. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 7 PM.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Arkansas

You must register to vote by Oct. 5. If you vote at the polls, you must show a government-issued photo ID. (You may also use a photo ID issued by a college or university in Arkansas.) You can cite fear of contracting COVID-19 as an excuse (one is needed) to vote by mail. You cannot register online, but you can register by mail or in person at the county clerk’s office. Voting early in person is also an option, and this starts on Oct. 19. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 7:30 PM.

You can check your registration status online here. 

California

Compared to Arkansas, voting in California is a breath of fresh air. You must register to vote by Oct. 19. You can register online, by mail, at the DMV, or at the county elections office. Early voting is from Oct. 5 to Nov. 2. If you don’t make the Oct. 19 registration deadline, you can still register in person at the polls. The only catch here is that if you register after Oct. 19, you must vote in person. In terms of voting by mail, ballots will be mailed to all active voters. You also don’t need an excuse to vote by mail. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Colorado

Colorado is also pretty reasonable. First off, you can register to vote by Oct. 26. If you vote at the polls, you must show a government-issued ID; if you don’t have one and you bring an ID document, like a utility bill or bank statement, election officials must try to use existing records to confirm your identity. You can register to vote online, at the DMV, polling place, by mail, or at a county elections office. You can even register at an armed forces recruitment office. Voting by mail is particularly easy this year as ballots are mailed to active voters automatically. Mail-in ballots must be received by Nov. 3 at 7 PM.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Connecticut

Connecticut is also not too bad. You must register to vote by Oct. 27. If you miss that deadline, you may register at the polls on Election Day, but you have to vote in person. If you vote at the polls, you must either sign an affidavit confirming your identity or show a printed form with your name and address on it (or your name and photo) or your social security card. You do need an excuse to vote by mail, but you can cite fears of COVID-19. Connecticut is also mailing absentee ballot applications to all active voters. There is no in-person early voting. You may register to vote online, by mail, or at the registrar’s office. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Delaware

Delaware is not bad. First, you must register to vote by Oct. 10. If you vote at the polls, similarly to Connecticut, you may need to fill out a form before you can vote or show an identifying document, like a photo ID or credit card with both your name and photo. There is no option for in-person early voting, but you can vote by mail. You do need to cite an excuse, but you may cite fear of COVID-19. Delaware is also sending all registered voters absentee ballot applications. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Washington, D.C.

Washington is pretty reasonable, but you don’t have the option of registering to vote online. You must register to vote by Oct. 13. If you miss that deadline, you may still register to vote through Election Day if you go to the polls; the only con here is that you must then vote at the polls. You may vote early in person from Oct. 27 to Nov. 3. Washington is sending absentee ballots to all active and registered voters. You may register by mail, at an early voting site, or at a government agency. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Florida

You must register to vote by Oct. 5. If you vote at the polls, you must show a photo ID with a signature on it; if your photo ID does not have a signature on it, you need another form of ID that does include your signature. You can vote by mail without needing an excuse. Early in-person voting is offered in some counties starting on Oct. 19. You can register to vote online, by mail, or at the DMV or other government agencies. Some counties are mailing absentee ballot applications to all voters. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov 3. at 7 PM.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Georgia

Now, Georgia. Georgia is far from easy because of its very strict photo ID law, though you are allowed to vote by mail without giving an excuse. The registration deadline is Oct. 5. There is no same-day registration in Georgia. You may register online, by mail, or at your local registrar’s office. Notably, DeKalb County is mailing absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. If you vote at the polls, you must show a government-issued photo ID. Early voting starts on Oct. 12. Mail-in ballots must be received by Nov. 3. 

You can check your registration status online here. 

Hawaii

Compared to Georgia, Hawaii is a breeze. How much easier is it? If you want to vote at the polls, you must show a government-issued photo ID, identifying document (like a utility bill or bank statement), or say your name, address, and date of birth. You must register to vote by Oct. 5, which you can do online, by mail, or at the County Election Division. If you don’t register by the deadline, you can still register at the polls, but you must then vote in person. There is early, in-person voting from Oct. 20 to Nov. 2. Ballots are also mailed to all registered voters. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Idaho

You must register to vote by Oct. 9, and you can do so online, by mail, or at your local elections office. If you miss the Oct. 9 deadline, you may still register at the polls through Election Day; the only downside is that you must vote in person. Early in-person voting goes from Oct. 19 to Oct. 30. If you vote at the polls, you may show either a government-issued photo ID (or an ID from an in-state school) or sign an affidavit attesting to your identity. You may vote by mail without an excuse. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM.

You may check your registration status online here. 

Illinois

Most notable about Illinois is that the state does not require a photo ID to vote and that, because of the pandemic, it is mailing absentee ballot applications to the majority of voters. Still, the dates are a bit confusing, so let’s start at the beginning: If you register to vote by mail, you must do so by Oct. 6. If you register to vote online, you have until Oct. 18. Beyond Oct. 18, you may still register to vote, but you must do so at either an election office or at the polls. Similarly to other states, if you choose the latter options, you must then vote in person. You may vote by mail without an excuse. Mail-in ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 3. 

You can check your registration status online here. 

Indiana

Like Georgia, it is nowhere near easy to vote in Indiana. But first, the basics: You must register to vote by Oct. 5 and you can do so online, by mail, or at your county clerk’s office. You can vote by mail, but you need an excuse, and it must be one of the 11 given criteria. Unlike a number of states, you cannot cite fear of COVID-19 as an excuse to vote by mail in Indiana. Early in-person voting begins on Oct. 6.  Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 12 PM.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Iowa

Like some other states, Iowa is mailing absentee ballot applications to all active registered voters this fall. This step is part of what makes it not too bad to vote in Iowa, though the state’s voter ID law is strict. You must register to vote by Oct. 24. You do not need an excuse to vote by mail. You may register online, by mail, or at your county’s auditor office. You may register at the polls on Election Day, but then you must vote in person. Now, about the photo ID law: Basically, you must show a government-issued photo ID at the polls. The only exception is if a registered voter from the precinct will attest to your identity. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at the close of polls.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Kansas

While not the absolute worst, Kansas certainly does not make it easy to vote. Some counties have mailed advance mail ballot applications to active voters. You may register to vote online, by mail, or at your county clerk’s office by Oct. 13. Early in-person voting begins statewide Oct. 27, though it begins Oct. 14 in some places. You can vote by mail without needing an excuse. Now, at the polls, you must present either a government-issued photo ID or an ID from a college or university in Kansas. The only other option is that you may use a concealed carry permit. (This can be from any state, doesn’t have to be Kansas.) Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

You can check your registration status online here.  

Kentucky

You may register to vote in Kentucky online, by mail, or at your county election office. This must be done by Oct. 5. If you choose to vote by mail, you must give an excuse. Luckily, you can cite fear of contracting or spreading COVID-19 as your reason. Early-in person voting begins on Oct. 13. At the polls, you must show a government-issued photo ID. If you do not have one, you may use a photo ID issued by a school. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 6 PM.

You can check your registration status here.

Louisiana

It is not remotely easy to vote in the state of Louisiana, though the state’s voter ID law is not as bad as some others. First, you must register to vote by Oct. 5 if you are registering by mail or in person. If you register to vote online, you have until Oct. 13. If you vote by mail, you need an excuse, and despite a literal global pandemic, you cannot cite fear of COVID-19. However, if you are at a higher risk of COVID-19 because of a medical condition, are in quarantine, or are caring for someone in quarantine, those count as reasons. Experiencing COVID-19 symptoms also counts. Notably, absentee ballots must be signed by a witness. If you vote at the polls, you have to show a photo ID with both your name and signature. The other option is to sign a sworn statement attesting to your identity. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 2 at 4:30 PM.

You may check your registration status online here. 

Maine

Maine is not too bad given that they don’t have a strict photo ID law, but you can’t register to vote online. You must register to vote by Oct. 19 and you can do so by mail, at a state or federal social services agency, voter drive, or at the motor vehicles bureau. If you miss that deadline, you can register to vote at a city hall or your municipal clerk’s office until Election Day; at that point, you can still register at the polls. Like other states, you must then vote in person. You can vote by mail without citing a reason. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3. at 8 PM.

You can check your voter registration status here.  Maryland

Similarly to Maine, Maryland makes it decently easy to vote in terms of the ID you can use, though if you’re voting in Maryland for the first time and registered to do so by mail, you must bring either a valid photo ID or a document that has both your name and address (like a utility bill or bank statement) from within 3 months of the election. This year, the state is also mailing absentee ballot applications to every active registered voter. You don’t need an excuse to vote by mail. You must register to vote by Oct. 13, and you can do so online, by mail, or at your local board of elections. If you miss the deadline, you may register at the polls through Election Day. As usual, the caveat with doing so means that you have to vote in person. Early in-person voting begins on Oct. 26. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Massachusetts

You may register to vote online, by mail, or at your local clerk’s office by Oct. 24. You may vote by mail without an excuse this year, and the state is sending mail-in ballot applications to all registered voters. Early in-person voting goes from Oct. 17 to Oct. 30. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3. 

You can check your voter registration status online here. 

Michigan

Michigan is pretty simple as they mailed absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. In Michigan, you can register to vote by Oct. 19 by mail or online. If you register at your local county clerk’s office, you can cast your ballot there through Election Day, meaning that the state offers same-day registration. At the polls, you must either show a photo ID or sign an affidavit saying you do not have a photo ID. You do not need an excuse to vote by mail. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Minnesota

In Minnesota, you must register to vote online or by mail by Oct. 13. If you miss that deadline, you may register to vote at the polls on Election Day, or up until Nov. 3 at your local county election office. As usual, if you register on Election Day, you must then vote in person. Otherwise, you may vote by mail without needing to cite an excuse; in fact, the state is mailing absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Mississippi

Voting in Mississippi is among the most difficult of all of the states, and especially so this cycle. First, the basics: You must register to vote by Oct. 5 and you can do so by mail or at your county circuit clerk’s office—you cannot do so online. At the polls, you must show either a government-issued photo ID, tribal ID with a photo, or an ID from a college in Mississippi. If you vote by mail, you need an excuse, and despite an ongoing global pandemic, you cannot use fear of COVID-19 as said excuse in Mississippi. However, if a doctor has advised you to quarantine, or you are the caretaker for someone in quarantine, those do count as excuses. You also need to get both your ballot request and your ballot notarized. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Missouri

Missouri is also very tough as it similarly is strict on voter ID and requires you to have your mail-in ballots notarized. First, you must register to vote by Oct. 7, which you can do online, by mail, or at your local county clerk’s office or DMV. If you vote at the polls, you have to show either a government-issued photo ID or a government document that has both your name and address. You may also cast a provisional ballot if you do not have an ID. Now, Missouri is unusual because the state has different rules for mail-in ballots and absentee ballots. If you use an absentee ballot, you used to need an excuse, but because of the virus, Missouri has waived that requirement. Adding to the confusion, if you use an absentee ballot, you may drop it off in person, but if you vote by mail, you must literally mail it. Mail-in ballots also require notarization. If you vote by mail, you do not need an excuse. Important note: If you have COVID-19, are confined because of the illness, or fall into a high-risk category for the virus, you are eligible for an absentee ballot (meaning it does not need to be notarized). Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at the close of polls.

You can check your voter registration status here.

Montana

Compared to Missouri, Montana is a breath of fresh air, especially as it’s mailing ballots to almost all voters this fall. You must register to vote by Oct. 24 and can do so by mail or at your county clerk elections office—you cannot register to vote online. There are some late registration centers open until the close of polls on Election Day as well. All voters in Montana are eligible to vote by mail as an absentee, without needing an excuse. At the polls, you must present either a government-issued photo ID or a government document that has both your name and address on it, or utility bill or bank statement. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Nebraska

Nebraska makes it even easier to vote. Nebraska is mailing absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. You must register to vote by Oct. 16, and you can do so online, by mail, at the DMV, or select other state offices. Early, in-person voting goes from Oct. 5 to Nov. 2. You can vote by mail without an excuse. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM. You can check your voter registration status here. 

Nevada 

To register to vote in Nevada, you must do so by Oct. 6 if you choose to do so by mail or in person. If you register to vote online, you have until Oct. 29. The state offers early, in-person voting from Oct. 17 to Oct. 30. You do not need an excuse to vote by mail, and in fact this year, Nevada is mailing absentee ballots to all active voters. You may also register to vote at the polls through Election Day, though you must then vote in person. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

New Hampshire

Registering to vote in New Hampshire is astoundingly confusing, largely because it’s inconsistent throughout the state. First, here are the basics, but this definitely requires checking your own jurisdiction's guidelines: You can request to register to vote by mail, and then register in person at your local clerk’s office. You cannot register to vote online. You have to register to vote between six and 13 days before the election, depending on which town or city that you live in. You may also register to vote at polling locations on Election Day. Generally speaking, no-excuse voting by mail is not available to New Hampshire residents, but because of the virus, all voters may request an absentee ballot due to fear of contracting the coronavirus. There is not an explicit deadline for requesting an absentee ballot. Also, if you vote at the polls, you must show a photo ID. If you do not have a photo ID, a voting official at your polling location can verify your identity. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 5 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

New Jersey

All registered voters are supposed to get ballots mailed to them this fall because of the virus. These ballots should be mailed by Oct. 5. There is no excuse required to vote by mail. You must register to vote by Oct. 13 either by mail or with an election official—there is no online option, which is the main frustration with New Jersey’s system. Notably, if you choose to vote in person on Election Day, you will be using a provisional ballot. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

New Mexico

Voting in New Mexico is pretty simple as some counties are mailing absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. The only big negative is that you cannot yet register to vote the same day as the election. If you choose to register to vote online in New Mexico, you must do so by Oct. 6. Otherwise, you can register to vote at your county clerk’s office or early voting location or by mail until Oct. 31. You can vote by mail without an excuse. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 7 PM.

You can check your voter registration status here.

New York

In New York, you must register to vote by Oct. 9, and you can do so online, by mail, or through your local county board of elections or voter registration center. Early voting occurs from Oct. 24 to Nov. 1. You do need an excuse to vote by mail, but everyone can cite fear of contracting COVID-19. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

North Carolina

North Carolina is far from easy. If you register to vote at the polls, you have until Oct. 31 to do so, though, as in other states, you must vote in person. But if you register to vote online, by mail, or at your county board of elections, you have until Oct. 9. You do not need an excuse to vote by mail. Absentee ballots must be signed by a witness. (It used to be two witnesses, but because of the pandemic, they changed it to one.) Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3 at 5 PM.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

North Dakota

You do not have to register to vote in North Dakota! What do you do instead? Theoretically, you simply show up to the polls with proof of your identity and residency. Mind you, if your ID does not state your address or birth date, you must show a second document, like a utility bill, as well. While you don’t have to register to vote in North Dakota, the state has a long history of disenfranchising Native voters with its ID requirements. You can vote by mail without an excuse, and in fact, the state is mailing absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. Your mail-in ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 2.

Ohio

You must register to vote by Oct. 5, and you can do so online, by mail, at the DMV, library, county board of elections, or county treasurer’s office. You can vote by mail without an excuse. If you vote at the polls, you’ll need to have a government-issued photo ID, or a document that has your name and address, like a government check, utility bill, paycheck, or bank statement. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 2.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Oklahoma

Oklahoma is another state that’s a little tricky when it comes to the fine details. You must register to vote by Oct. 9 and you can do so online, by mail, or at your post office, library, or county election board. Because of the pandemic, if you vote by absentee ballot, you may submit a copy of your ID or have it notarized. At the polls, you need to show either a government-issued photo ID or voter ID card. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 7 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Oregon

This year, Oregon is mailing ballots to all active registered voters. Otherwise, you can register to vote by Oct. 13 online, by mail, or at your county elections office. You do not need to give an excuse to vote by mail … In fact, Oregon has all mail-in ballots! Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Pennsylvania

You must register to vote by Oct. 19, and you can do so online, by mail, or at your local county elections office. You do not need an excuse to vote by mail. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Puerto Rico

Unfortunately, in Puerto Rico, the deadline was Sept. 15. You must register in-person.

Rhode Island 

Registering to vote in Rhode Island is a little tricky in that if you wait until Election Day, you can only vote for the president and vice president. But first, the basics: You must register to vote by Oct. 4 and you can do so online, by mail, or at your local board of canvassers. If you miss the Oct. 4 deadline, you can still register at the polls through Election Day, but you can vote for just the president and vice president, as mentioned before. Voters can also go to their city or town hall within 20 days prior to the election and vote. You must bring a photo ID from the government or a school in the U.S. You do not need an excuse to vote by mail, and the state is mailing absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

South Carolina

South Carolina does not make voting easy. You must register to vote by Oct. 5. You can register in person, online, or by sending a form to the county board of voter registration. If you vote by mail, you generally do need an excuse, but they have amended that because of the virus. If you vote at the polls, you need to either show a government-issued photo ID. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov 3. at 7 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

South Dakota

You must register to vote by Oct. 19, and you can do so by mail or in-person at a number of state agencies or the DMV. You cannot register to vote online. This year, South Dakota sent absentee ballots to all active voters. At the polls, you must present either a government-issued photo ID, tribal ID, ID from a school in South Dakota, or sign an affidavit attesting to your identity. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at the close of polls.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Tennessee

Tennessee is among one of the hardest states to vote in. You must register to vote by Oct. 5. If you vote at the polls, you must present a government-issued photo ID. Student IDs do not count. If you want to vote by mail, you must either be the caretaker of someone who is at high risk for COVID-19 or be at high risk yourself. Otherwise, you need an excuse to even request an absentee ballot. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at the close of polls.

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Texas

Texas is another state that makes it really hard to vote. You must register to vote by Oct. 5 and you can do so by mail or at your local elections office—you cannot register online. You cannot vote by absentee without an excuse, and despite the pandemic, you cannot use fear of COVID-19 as your excuse. In most cases, you have to be over the age of 65, out of the country, or disabled. If you vote at the polls, Texas still makes it hard. You need to show a government-issued photo ID. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3 at 7 PM. 

You can check your voter registration status here. 

Utah

Compared to Texas and Tennessee, Utah is pretty easy. If you register online, by mail, or at your county clerk’s office, you must do so by Oct. 23. If you miss that deadline, you may still register to vote at the polls, but as is the norm, you must then vote in person on Election Day. You can vote by mail without an excuse. If you vote at the polls, be prepared to show either your government-issued photo ID or two documents that have both your name and residence on them. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3.  

You can check your registration status here. 

Vermont

Vermont is another state that makes voting pretty easy. You do not need an excuse to vote by mail. In fact, Vermont is mailing absentee ballot applications to all active registered voters this time. Otherwise, there is no deadline to register to vote, and you can do it up to Election Day, though if you register on Election Day, you must vote in person. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 7 PM. 

You can check your registration status here. 

Virginia

Virginia also makes it pretty simple. You must register to vote by Oct. 13 and can do so at a number of places, including online, by mail, at the DMV, public library, local registrar, or select other state offices. There is no excuse needed to vote by mail; typically you need to have a witness sign your absentee ballot, but because of the pandemic, this is waived. At the polls, you need to show either a photo ID or document that affirms your identity, like a utility bill or bank statement. You can also sign a statement attesting to your identity instead. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3 at 7 PM.

You can check your registration status here. 

Washington

Given that Washington State is mailing ballots to all active registered voters, the state makes it pretty easy. Otherwise, you must register to vote by Oct. 26 online or by mail. You can also register in person at your local county election office until Election Day, which means you would have to vote in person. At the polls, you have a few options to confirm your identity: You may show an ID card from the state, your employer, or a student ID card. You may also show a signature that matches the one on your voter registration form. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

You can check your registration status here. 

West Virginia

In West Virginia, you must register to vote by Oct. 13, and you may do so online or by mail. You do need an excuse to vote by mail, but you are allowed to cite fear of COVID-19 as an “illness or injury” excuse. Voting in person is a little strange here in terms of ID requirements: You must show some form of an ID, or a voter with an ID must sign an affidavit vouching for your identity. Your mail-in ballot must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

You can check your registration status here. 

Wisconsin

Voting in Wisconsin is pretty tough, but the bright side is that this fall, Wisconsin is mailing absentee ballot applications to all active registered voters. If you want to register to vote online or by mail, the deadline is Oct. 14. If you miss that deadline, you can also register to vote at the municipal clerk’s office by Oct. 30. If you miss that deadline, you may register at the polls on Election Day. If you register on Election Day, you must also vote in person. At the polls, you need to bring either a government- or Wisconsin school-issued photo ID. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 8 PM.

You can check your registration status here. 

Wyoming

Wyoming is also quite tough, though they are mailing absentee ballot applications to all active registered voters. If you register to vote by mail, your application has to be notarized—the main thing that makes Wyoming difficult—and the deadline is Oct. 19. You can also register at your county clerk’s office up until the election. You can also register at the polls, and as is usual, you must then vote in person. You cannot register online. Your mail-in ballot must be received by Nov. 3 at 7 PM.

You can check your registration status online here. 

Another reminder is that while voting—and helping to register people to vote—is extremely important, not everyone has the right to vote. Undocumented folks are disenfranchised, as are people who are incarcerated. Many formerly incarcerated people also lack the right to vote. Registering certain populations, including the homeless community, can also be tremendously difficult. There is also the reality that not everyone wants to share their citizenship status, so if you ask someone if they’ve registered to vote or plan to, and they say no or don't engage much, make sure you bear in mind that not everyone wants to share their “why.” The point here is that while encouraging people to vote is important activism, it is also important to advocate for systemic changes that ensure more people can actually exercise that right. 

Similarly, it’s important to keep in mind that many people simply feel that their vote doesn’t count. While that’s not easy to hear from the perspective of a person who’s trying to turn out the vote for obvious reasons, people’s lived experiences are real and valid. Many people do not fundamentally believe that their voice or vote matters and the way to handle that is not by berating them or talking down to them. If you can’t get someone excited at the federal or even state level, it can be useful to talk about local elections.