James.galbraith

Academy Award-nominated director Todd Phillips and his new sequel Joker: Folie à Deux bravely ask the daring question: What if the most annoying man you know got an equally annoying girlfriend? And what if they sang show tunes to each other? And what if you had to watch?

The man in question is one Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the social outcast turned serial killer from 2019’s Joker, who is in jail awaiting trial following the events of the first film. The girlfriend is one Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), a woman with both a master’s in psychiatry and an obsession with Fleck, who gets herself locked up in order to stalk him better. Harley Quinn and Joker’s toxically codependent relationship has existed in the Batverse for decades — first appearing in Batman: The Animated Series in 1992 — and the former doctor and the one-time patient who drove her mad have been explored across comics, movies, and TV. In Phillips’s new film, however, their entanglement is rewritten to be even more grim and, frankly, flat (especially Quinn’s arc), but with a lot more singing.

Yes, though he is loath to tell anyone, Phillips has also managed to make a movie musical about the Joker’s murder trial. On paper, creating a supervillain movie that doesn’t involve setting a city on fire or threatening the world is about as subversive as a director can get. Potentially ignoring the strict directives that come with franchise filmmaking and the demands of Warner Brothers and then throwing in singing and dancing? There was potential here for something truly subversive. 

But as Fleck reminds us, some people don’t seek change, but simple misery. For two hours and 20 minutes of Joker: Folie à Deux, Phillips shows us how. 

Do not be fooled, Joker 2 is actually a musical 

Following a trend of movies like Mean Girls and Wonka, the marketing and creative team behind Joker: Folie à Deux, a.k.a. Joker 2, have refrained from making it clear the movie is a musical (a choice the upcoming Wicked also seems to be making). Some of that obfuscation might be a conscious effort not to alienate Joker’s original audience, but it may also be based on the notion that movie-going audiences don’t like musicals. Mean Girls and Wonka didn’t sell themselves as musicals, and they were considered box office successes — meanwhile obvious musicals like the West Side Story revival and In the Heights underwhelmed. 

That said, and despite the reluctance, Joker 2 is very much a movie musical — at times trying to be a very edgy one. 

Phillips uses music as a very obvious storytelling device, if not a very sensitive one. Throughout the film, Fleck’s sanity is in question. Everyone from judges to doctors talk about him living in a “fantasy world.” Enter: the singing and dancing. From “Get Happy” to the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” the movie’s numbers function as a glimpse into Fleck’s desires, fears, and mental illness all rolled into one. 

One can only know the surreal interior life of this man by peering into his delirious hallucinations, where we find a sparkly, razzle-dazzle version of his trauma and mental illness.

These moments also allow Lady Gaga to take off her pop star mask and show us Stefani Germanotta, theater kid. She’s good — especially when Fleck envisions himself and Harley as a kind of chaotic Sonny and Cher duo. Gaga’s committed, crackling performance is proof there is room for another Judy Garland biopic, as long as she can audition.

Phoenix, on the other hand, warbles and screeches through his numbers.

The result sounds like a big bird harassing another smaller bird. Phoenix’s vocal performance is knowingly bad, especially when you consider this man won an Oscar for playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. Perhaps Phillips believes that his audience wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend how disturbed Fleck is if he sounds smooth and delightful in his own fantasies, but Phoenix deliberately makes him sound discordant. After three or so songs, the singing just feels a little like some kind of petty punishment. I suppose that’s the point: Being in Joker’s head is supposed to be an unpleasant experience. I just wanted to be unpleased in a different way. 

Imagine if you took all the fun out of My Cousin Vinny, then you have Joker 2

The most perplexing element of Joker 2 is not that it’s a musical; it’s that it’s a courtroom procedural. While there’s a rich cinematic history of clowns and their girlfriends in courtrooms, this is not a choice that makes for an exciting film.

At the heart of this two-hour and 20-minute movie is the question of whether or not Arthur Fleck, a.k.a Joker, is insane and, by extension, if the Joker is real. His attorney (played by Catherine Keener) claims as a defense strategy that while Fleck did kill five people, he has dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder. (The police don’t know Fleck killed his own mother, which would bring the body count to six.) Joker is that other personality, and so Fleck can’t be held responsible. Prosecutor Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) — the man who will become the Batman villain known as Two-Face — argues that Fleck and Joker are one and the same: a violently depraved murderer. 

Watching Fleck in jail waiting for trial or on trial waiting to go back to jail just doesn’t make for thrilling viewing. Dissociative identity disorder as a legal argument is sort of compelling but less so when it becomes all that’s happening. (It’s also important to note that despite some media portrayals, people with DID are not more violent than the general public.) Courtroom procedurals need some kind of twist or some kind of build to enhance the drama. Starting with all the cards on the table — Arthur Fleck is culpable for Joker or he isn’t — just takes the air out of the genre.  

Maybe that’s why it’s a musical? 

As a character who has been an icon since the 1960s, the Joker was created to terrorize Gotham City. The Joker was not created to sit in a jail cell and talk legal strategy with his lawyer. There’s a reason that so many Batman comics and adaptations have a jailbreak scene. Batman’s villains are more interesting when they’re doing crime!  

Phillips seems to want to make a bigger point about how the most terrifying part of the character is Joker’s influence over Gotham’s citizens. If Fleck is allowed to be Joker, then what’s stopping everyone else in the city from being Joker? If Fleck is declared legally insane, how can the laws in Gotham keep people safe? If no one can be held accountable for murder, it doesn’t matter how powerful Gotham’s police force is; it doesn’t even matter how powerful its heroes are. But other than the huge crowds outside of the courtroom, some in Joker masks, Phillips doesn’t really show us what’s happening in Gotham. We aren’t really made to understand the stakes for Joker’s verdict, even if they’re the destruction of a civilized society. 

Worst of all, Phillips has intentionally or unintentionally created a bizarro, humorless version of My Cousin Vinny. In the 1992 classic, a clown and his Italian girlfriend are the only people that stand in the way of a mixed-up town convicting a pair of dweebs of murder. In Joker 2, a clown and his Italian-ish girlfriend are the only people that stand in the way of a mixed-up town convicting a dweeb of murder. Now, imagine if Marisa Tomei wasn’t charming, the clown wasn’t funny, and there were no twists, no turns, and no 1963 Pontiac Tempest with its independent rear suspension. Your honor, that dour, miserable thing is The Joker 2.

Photo-illustrations by Vanessa Saba

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Last year, in Texas, a deteriorating marriage became the testing ground for a novel legal strategy favored by some of the country’s most prominent right-wing lawyers and politicians.

Marcus and Brittni Silva’s divorce had just been finalized when Marcus filed a lawsuit against two of Brittni’s friends. According to his complaint, Brittni had discovered that she was pregnant with their baby in July 2022, and ended the pregnancy by taking abortion medication. Marcus alleges that her friends Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter “assisted Brittni Silva in murdering Ms. Silva’s unborn child.” He is suing for wrongful death and asking for at least $1 million in damages from each defendant.

Noyola and Carpenter tell their own version of what happened in a countersuit they filed. Marcus drank often, they allege, and when he did, he was prone to verbally abusing Brittni. He got so drunk at one of her work events that he had to be escorted off the premises—but not before he called her a “slut,” a “whore,” and an “unfit mother” in front of her co-workers. Brittni had stayed in the marriage for the sake of their two daughters, but Marcus’s outburst convinced her that there was no saving it. In the spring of 2022, she filed for divorce.

That summer, soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned but before Texas’s abortion “trigger ban” went into effect, Brittni got a positive result on a pregnancy test. Certain that she did not want to have another child with Marcus, Brittni texted Noyola and Carpenter to talk about her options. Noyola and Carpenter allege that Marcus disapproved of the friendship; he would sometimes hide Brittni’s car keys to try to prevent her from seeing her friends.

Brittni kept her pregnancy test a secret from Marcus, but according to Noyola and Carpenter’s suit, he learned about it when he riffled through her purse and discovered a Post-it note with the number for an abortion hotline and, on her phone, her texts with her friends. Marcus took photographs of the texts. The next day, he looked through her purse again and found a pill that can be taken to induce abortion.

Later, Marcus confronted her, Brittni told her friends. She wrote in a text message that he had demanded that she give him her “mind body and soul” and act “like his wife who loves him.” If she didn’t agree to give him primary custody of their daughters, Brittni wrote, he would “make sure I go to jail.” Brittni was surprised by Marcus’s reaction, her friends’ suit alleges; he’d never been opposed to abortion. Now he was accusing her of killing a baby and threatening to go to the police. (Noyola and Carpenter have denied all the claims in Marcus’s lawsuit, and he has denied all the claims in their countersuit.)

In fact, Marcus had already filed a police report. Soon, he obtained legal representation. Jonathan Mitchell, a conservative activist and attorney and the former solicitor general of Texas, became his lawyer in the case. Mitchell is often cited as the brains behind Texas’s 2021 “bounty law,” which provides a reward of at least $10,000 to plaintiffs who successfully sue someone who “aids or abets” abortion. The Silva case follows a similar logic: Marcus is, in effect, seeking a reward for reporting his ex-wife’s friends to the state.

Mitchell declined to comment for this article. But his work on the Silva case and the bounty law, among other matters, reflects a tactic that conservatives have recently embraced in a range of social battles, including those over abortion, LGBTQ issues, and school curricula. Across the nation, Republican-controlled state legislatures and conservative activists have passed bills and embraced legal strategies that encourage Americans to monitor one another’s behavior and report their friends, family members, and neighbors to the authorities. Call it the Snitch State.

[Adam Serwer: The Constitution is whatever the right wing says it is]

Texas has been particularly hospitable to rules that promote such monitoring in service of advancing conservative ideological goals. Perhaps it’s a matter of necessity: Despite right-wing victories in court and at the ballot box in recent decades, public sentiment on a variety of cultural issues has drifted leftward. And so, in an effort to impose their values, Republicans have turned to invasive forms of coercion.

Most Americans, including most Texas voters, believe that abortion should be legal in some form. The architects of this new anti-privacy regime do not. Republican legislators in Texas have proposed numerous additional restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned, including bills that would punish employers who help their workers get abortions, outlaw abortion funds that help women seek the procedure in another state, and circumvent local district attorneys who refuse to criminally prosecute abortion providers. Some proposed measures would restrict access to contraception. One would criminalize speech by making it illegal to provide “information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug” and forcing internet providers in Texas to censor such information.

It’s hard not to conclude that the people pushing for bills like these want women to be scared to even contemplate having an abortion, let alone seek one out. They have said so themselves; in 2021, for example, the anti-abortion organization Texas Right to Life said it was “optimistic that,” in light of the bounty law, “the day is soon coming when abortion will not only be illegal, but unthinkable.” Even expressing support for abortion rights could be considered suspect. Indeed, the Silva lawsuit seems to foreshadow this reality: It alleges that Brittni and her friends “celebrated the murder by dressing up in Handmaid’s Tale costumes for Halloween,” as if their costumes indicate liberal views on abortion that deserve sanction by the state.

[From the October 2024 issue: What abortion bans do to doctors]

As of this writing, no one has yet been successfully sued under Texas’s bounty law, and other measures that seek to turn citizens into informants have faced challenges in court. (If reelected, former President Donald Trump is likely to appoint more federal judges who would look favorably upon such measures.) But these policies have chilling effects whether or not they are strictly enforced. The mere threat of having one’s privacy invaded and one’s life potentially destroyed is sufficient to shape people’s speech and behavior. American history shows us where this could lead.

The roots of this political style lie in the state-sponsored efforts of the first and second Red Scares. During the first, in the years following World War I, a wave of anarchist violence provided a predicate for suppressing free speech, as well as a justification for mob violence against people perceived to be disloyal to the government. But it was during the second Red Scare, in the 1940s and ’50s, that the informant emerged as a paramount figure in American politics, when the federal government’s attempts to block Soviet espionage metastasized into a national panic. Dozens of states passed laws criminalizing speech deemed subversive. Private employers, unions, and professional groups adopted loyalty oaths and administrative tests that inquired about personal beliefs and past associations.

According to the constitutional scholar Geoffrey R. Stone, from 1947 to 1953, more than 4.7 million people were scrutinized as part of the federal government’s loyalty program, leading to about 40,000 “full-field investigations” undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The bureau relied on allegations from informants, many of which were “unsubstantiated hearsay—mere gossip, rumor, and slander,” Stone writes. The accuracy of the allegations hardly mattered; federal investigators often did not take the time to verify informants’ claims. As a result, people policed their own thoughts, actions, and relationships out of fear that someone might tell on them.

Soviet espionage and expansionism were both very real threats. Many Red hunters, however, were not merely trying to prevent the establishment of Soviet-style communism in the U.S., or to protect U.S. atomic secrets. At a moment when liberalism appeared to be ascendant, conservative beliefs about economics, labor, race, gender, and sexuality could all be imposed in the name of “fighting communism.” As historians such as Ellen Schrecker and Landon R. Y. Storrs have argued, the second Red Scare was, in this way, successful at constraining the radical possibilities of New Deal social democracy. The power of organized labor was curtailed, and the potential for a more generous welfare state was limited. Even in books, films, and television shows, Americans sought to avoid topics and storylines that might be interpreted as left-wing.

Black workers—who were asked questions like “Have you ever danced with a white girl?” and “Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?”—were among those who “suffered disproportionately” from loyalty investigations, Schrecker has written. Homosexuality, or perceived homosexuality, was also punished. As the historian David K. Johnson writes in The Lavender Scare, at one point during the Truman administration, “in the State Department alone, security officials boasted that on average they were firing one homosexual per day, more than double the rate for those suspected of political disloyalty.” Ruining someone’s life with an anonymous accusation was, for a time, a relatively simple matter.

During the second Red Scare, communism was frequently described as a plague that infected and transformed unwilling victims. Modern conservatives use similar rhetoric to justify fighting “wokeness” or “the woke mind virus,” presenting liberalism as a civilizational threat that justifies extreme measures to suppress it—particularly, these days, in the name of protecting children. But whereas conservatives in the ’40s and ’50s depicted the Soviet Union as a dystopian cautionary tale, their counterparts today openly venerate the oppressive tactics of illiberal societies abroad. In March, for example, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tenure as “a model for conservative governance.” In September, Trump praised Orbán from the presidential-debate stage.

The contemporary crackdown is different in another crucial respect: Although many of the people targeted during the second Red Scare chose to withdraw from public service or public life in the face of invasive surveillance and constant suspicion, that is much harder to do in the 21st century. Today, many of us share intimate details of our personal lives online with friends, loved ones, and, often, total strangers. Whether we intend to or not, thanks to the data economy, we are all our own informants, sharing our location, reading habits, search terms, menstrual-cycle dates, online orders, and more. In exchange for using online services and social-media platforms, we make ourselves more visible to those who would become the eyes and ears of the state.

If you live in a part of the country where your very person could attract unwanted attention from the state and its informants, abstaining from social media or even withdrawing from public life may not guarantee safe harbor. Sometimes, you just need to leave.

Karen Krajcer grew up in a conservative religious family in Houston before moving to Austin, where she and her husband raised their kids. When their eldest child, who is trans, was in first grade, she came up to Krajcer in the kitchen and said, “Mom, I’m a girl.” Krajcer replied, “You don’t have to be a girl to like girl things.” “I know,” her daughter said. “But I’m a girl who likes girl things.”

“She just held my stare,” Krajcer told me. “And I realized that I didn’t understand what she meant, but that I’m her parent, and it’s my job to find out.”

Then, one day when she was in fourth grade, Krajcer’s daughter asked if she was going to die. “She’s not prone to questions like that,” Krajcer told me. “She wasn’t talking about self-harm or suicide. She was afraid.”

It was February 2022, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott had ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of minors who were receiving gender-affirming medical care. “The Texas Family Code is clear,” Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a legal opinion that Abbott used to justify his order. “Causing or permitting substantial harm to the child or the child’s growth and development is child abuse.” Abbott called upon “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to tell the government about families who were known to have trans children, so that they could be investigated for abuse. These families were now surrounded by potential informants: teachers, friends, neighbors—even extended family.

Professional medical groups, including the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, objected to the order, noting in one legal brief that “the medical treatments characterized as ‘child abuse’ in the Abbott Letter are part of the widely-accepted treatment guidelines for adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria, and are supported by the best available scientific evidence.”

The portrayal of gender-affirming care as child abuse nevertheless led to a rash of reports. People called DFPS to report students “even if they’re just simply going by a nickname, or different pronouns,” Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, told me.

DFPS representatives appeared at Texas schools to pull students out of class for questioning, and showed up at children’s homes to speak with their parents. “As an investigator, when you go in to speak to a child, as easy as you try to be and as kind, it’s traumatizing; it just is. It’s invasive,” Morgan Davis, a former Texas child-welfare investigator, told me. Davis, who is trans, eventually resigned in protest of the order. A DFPS employee testified in court that, unlike with other kinds of investigations, she and her colleagues did not have discretion to set aside cases involving trans kids despite finding no evidence of abuse.

One DFPS employee who herself has a trans daughter asked her supervisor for clarification on the new policy. Would she now be considered an abuser for obtaining health care for her daughter? And if so, would her child be taken from her? According to a lawsuit that the ACLU filed on behalf of the employee and her family, she was put on leave hours later, and told the next day that she was under investigation. A state investigator came to her family’s home, seeking access to her daughter’s medical records.

The order threatened to separate trans children from their parents, which could lead to expensive legal battles for families who wanted to keep custody. Tracy Harting, a lawyer in Travis County who has been involved in child welfare for more than two decades, immediately grasped the cruel irony: If trans kids were taken from their parents, she told me, they would be entering a foster-care system “that’s already overrun with kids who were actually being physically and emotionally abused by their families.”

In response to the ACLU’s lawsuit, a judge blocked enforcement of Abbott’s order in March 2022, and two years later, a state appeals court upheld the injunction. But an exodus of families with trans children was already under way, particularly after Texas outlawed gender-affirming medical care for children in 2023. “I don’t want to live in this state of terror anymore,” one mother who left for Colorado told Texas Monthly.

[Listen: Radio Atlantic on when the state has a problem with your identity]

Krajcer and her family, who live in Oregon now, felt the same way. Although her daughter was not undergoing any medical interventions, Krajcer still feared that she could be reported to the authorities by someone who disapproved of her gender identity. The implications of staying in Texas, Krajcer said, were too terrifying to contemplate. “What happens if I’m out in a rural area and our trans daughter breaks her arm? Am I going to be able to take her to the ER for basic medical care? Or is there a chance that a nurse or a receptionist or just a person sitting in the waiting room could turn us in?”

“I imagined being led into some small windowless room for my monitored child visitation,” Krajcer said, “and looking at our children and knowing that we could have gone, that we could have left, but we didn’t.”

In August 2023, Michael Troncale, then an English teacher in Houston, was upset about what he saw as the “anti-trans propaganda coming from the right wing in Texas.” Wanting to show support for his transgender students, he put up a poster in his classroom that said trans people belong.

No one seemed to mind at first. But two months later, a school administrator told him that a parent had complained that the sign was “divisive.” Troncale didn’t know who the parent was, or if their child was in his class.

“ ‘Look, I’m sorry, but our legal team says you can’t have this up, because it’s a political message,’ ” Troncale says he was told. “I didn’t consider it political.”

Perhaps he should have. In the past few years, Texas conservatives have undertaken a campaign of censorship in schools that longtime educators told me is unprecedented in its breadth and ferocity—part of a nationwide backlash against what conservatives perceive as left-leaning books and ideas, many of them involving LGBTQ and racial issues. A major means of enforcement for this campaign is tattling: Parents and students alike are encouraged to report the teaching of forbidden ideas, so that those who teach them may be punished.

The recent spate of regulations against so-called critical race theory in K–12 schools exemplifies this logic. (Actual critical race theory is an academic framework conceived of by the Black legal scholar Derrick Bell; it is not generally taught outside higher education.) In 2021, Texas passed House Bill 3979, which included the provision that educators cannot “require or make part of a course” the idea that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Using language designed to sound egalitarian, the law purportedly safeguarded all students’ psychological well-being: Educators, it stipulated, cannot teach students that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.”

When Representative Steve Toth introduced the bill, he said it was “about teaching racial harmony by telling the truth that we are all equal, both in God’s eyes and our founding documents.” The alternative, he suggested, was communist indoctrination, “a souped-up version of Marxism” from which children needed to be protected.

In practice, though, H.B. 3979 and the similar Senate Bill 3—which went into effect three months later, replacing the House bill—constitute a de facto government ban on material that conservatives oppose, and essentially mean that the feelings of a certain category of student are the only ones that matter. In 2023, a school-district trustee in Montgomery County asked for “personal ideologies” to be “left at the door.” One parent, she said, had told her that their first grader had been so distressed by a poster celebrating racial inclusivity that he moved classrooms. Another trustee suggested that displaying LGBTQ flags in schools might be illegal.

Texas’s recent cascade of book bans has also been framed as an attempt to protect children from distress. “Parents have the right to shield their children from obscene content used in schools their children attend,” Governor Abbott has written. But parents already have the right to tell their kids which books they can and can’t read; what Abbott is calling for is the right to control which books other people’s children read.

[Read: Book bans are targeting the history of oppression]

Matt Krause, a former attorney for the Christian conservative law firm Liberty Counsel, was a Texas state legislator in the fall of 2021 when he sent a letter to superintendents inquiring about “books or content” in schools that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” He attached a list of roughly 850 books, requesting that the school districts tell him how many copies of each they had. Krause—who later acknowledged to The Dallas Morning News that he did not believe he had read the books in question—had no power to order any books banned, but his list, and his invocation of the language in H.B. 3979, helped spur an avalanche of challenges across the state.

According to a lawsuit filed by library patrons in Llano County, one woman, who would later be appointed to the county’s library board, sent an email to a county official with the subject line “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.” Attached was a spreadsheet of books from Krause’s list that were in the libraries. Another concerned citizen, who herself would also later be appointed to the library board, was more direct about what she found objectionable: In an email to allies, she referred to Krause’s list as the “16-page list of CRT and LGBTQ book[s].” Indeed, the titles on Krause’s list, many of which deal with topics such as racism, LGBTQ rights, and abortion, highlight the political nature of his effort.

Soon, the Llano County libraries began removing some of these books from their shelves. One librarian alleges that she was fired after she refused to remove targeted books. She is now working as a cashier to make ends meet while she sues the county over her dismissal. (The county has denied any wrongdoing.)

After a court ordered the books returned to the shelves, county officials appealed the order and considered shutting down the libraries altogether rather than allow community members to access the material. (County officials said the removal of books had nothing to do with their content. They ultimately decided to keep the library open, and an appeals court later ruled that some of the books must be returned. That court is now reconsidering its order.) The officials are represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the same attorney who is representing Marcus Silva. According to Axios, Mitchell has also reportedly drafted hypothetical bounty laws that would provide financial remuneration to those who snitch on librarians for keeping banned books on their shelves—or even just for expressing pro-LGBTQ sentiments.

In 2024, the purpose of banning books is not to keep children from accessing disturbing material—the internet exists—but to use the power of the state to stigmatize certain ideas and identities. Nelva Williamson, an Advanced Placement history teacher from Houston, told me that she sees efforts like Krause’s as part of a right-wing response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the earnest desire of many young white people to learn more about the country’s history of injustice. At the core of the backlash, Williamson thinks, is a fear that children will leave their parents’ politics behind. “They just put CRT as an umbrella over everything,” she said.

“What is included in the obscenity standard is actually very vague,” Jeremy Young, a historian who runs PEN America’s anti-censorship program for education, told me. “And this is something that you’ll see across these bill types. The vagueness is the point; the vagueness is the way that the bills are enforced. Which is to say, when a bill has very vague definitions, it can be either overenforced or underenforced, depending on the person doing the enforcing.”

Texas legislators cannot embed themselves in every classroom to monitor whether forbidden concepts and books are being discussed and assigned. But they can rely on informants. According to NBC News, a chief deputy constable in Hood County, recently spent two years attempting to bring criminal charges against a group of school librarians after activists filed a complaint alleging that their libraries were carrying obscene books (the county district attorney ultimately said there was not enough conclusive evidence to charge the librarians). In October 2021, Rickie Farah, a fourth-grade teacher in the Dallas area who had previously been named Teacher of the Year, was reprimanded by the school board after a parent complained about a book that her child brought home from Farah’s classroom—This Book Is Anti-racist, by Tiffany Jewell. Farah contested the reprimand and kept her job. But her colleagues got the message: Even allowing a student to encounter a book that a parent disapproved of might lead to consequences.

Higher education has also been a target for Republicans, who see universities as sources of “woke ideology.” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has argued that “tenured professors must not be able to hide behind the phrase ‘academic freedom,’ and then proceed to poison the minds of our next generation.” A 2023 bill to end tenure at state universities was rejected, but the legislature instead passed a law that gives politically appointed university overseers broad leeway to terminate tenured faculty for reasons of “professional incompetence” or “conduct involving moral turpitude.” Thus, in Texas, academic freedom may now be contingent on the political approval of state officials.

In 2022, Lauren Miller, who lived in Dallas, was pregnant with twins and suffering from such severe nausea that she found it difficult to eat and had to go to the emergency room twice. When one twin was diagnosed with a genetic disorder that is almost always fatal, she and her husband struggled to get clear guidance from medical professionals. No one would even say the word abortion out loud. “We would have genetic counselors—so, people who don’t even give abortions; they just counsel on options—get midway through a sentence and then just stop, just scared to say more,” Miller told me.

Then one genetic counselor, who had lived and worked in New York, let slip that in cases like these, doctors would usually perform a procedure called a “single fetal reduction.” Miller asked what that meant.

“She immediately clammed up and she started apologizing; you could tell she was scared,” Miller said. “It was truly like we had Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and, you know, other politicians, Texas Supreme Court justices, just sitting in that room taking notes, chewing on a pen cap right there with us.”

Miller decided to have the single fetal reduction—aborting one fetus—to protect her health and that of the other twin. Afraid to leave a paper trail, she told friends in a group text of the diagnosis, but not about her plans. She had a quick, careful phone conversation with a friend who was a gynecologic oncologist, who recommended a doctor in Colorado. As she spoke over the phone with the Colorado doctor, Miller noticed that he made sure to say explicitly that he was not in the state of Texas.

At a party with friends that fall, Miller and her husband were careful not to mention that they were going to Colorado. “Who was there who would overhear and report us because they want that $10,000?” Miller said. “We didn’t know everybody who was at the house that evening.”

They also worried about the logistics of their trip. “The first question,” Miller said, was “what kind of digital footprint are we leaving? Do we leave our phones behind? Do we drive? Do we do everything in cash?” Because of her severe nausea, she didn’t think she would make it 12 hours in a car from Dallas to Colorado, and she was concerned about driving through rural Texas on her way to get an abortion at 14 weeks pregnant, especially if she ended up in an emergency room. She decided to fly.

Miller was perhaps more fearful than she needed to be about her trip to Colorado. The Texas bounty law has not been used against people who travel out of state, and women themselves cannot be punished for having an abortion—only people who help them can. Still, given the political climate in Texas, her cautious behavior doesn’t seem irrational. What would the ultrasound tech back in Dallas say or do when they noticed there was only one heartbeat instead of two?

The procedure went well. Miller’s severe nausea subsided, and the remainder of her pregnancy was smooth. She delivered a healthy baby in March 2023. As it turned out, Miller’s doctor in Dallas, Austin Dennard, had also recently fled Texas for an abortion because of a pregnancy complication of her own. Miller recalled that at her first appointment with the doctor after her abortion, Dennard simply said, in a formal tone, “There is only one heart rate. I will note in your file that there is an intrauterine fetal demise of one twin.” The two women later joined a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sought to set clear standards for exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. This past May, the Texas Supreme Court issued a ruling leaving the vague exceptions language intact.

Such lack of clarity can have a chilling effect. “There’s a lot of confusion,” Damla Karsan, a Houston ob-gyn, told me. “People aren’t sure what they can and can’t legally say.” In December 2023, Karsan was personally warned by Paxton against performing an abortion for Kate Cox, a Texas mother who was ultimately forced to leave the state to get an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with the same genetic condition as Miller’s. (Karsan was also a plaintiff with Miller and Dennard in the Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit.)

Still, rules that provoke this kind of fear and uncertainty around private choices have flourished primarily in conservative enclaves; when I spoke with teachers in more liberal and diverse areas of Texas, they seemed less afraid of being reported to authorities. Areas like Llano County, where support for Trump is strong, have so far been most successful in their efforts to root out subversives and promote self-policing. For the time being, abortion laws like Texas’s, as restrictive as they are ambiguous, don’t stand a chance outside Republican-dominated states; women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox can still travel elsewhere—if they can afford it—to legally receive the care they need. Similarly, families with trans children can move out of state, and library patrons can go to court when books are removed from the shelves.

But for how long? In September, Texas sued to overturn federal privacy regulations that prevent investigators from seizing the medical records of women who leave the state to get an abortion. And just as the influence of the federal government supercharged the first and second Red Scares, it could very well, under a Republican president, expand the reach of the Snitch State nationwide. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, suggests adopting a measure that would allow for a political purge of anyone in the federal government who is not obsequiously loyal to Trump. The former president, and conservative legal elites, have called for the traditional independence of the Justice Department to be disregarded, which would allow Trump, if reelected, to use the immense power of federal law enforcement to target abortion providers, political dissidents, and even local prosecutors who do not use their discretion as the administration demands.

In his foreword to Project 2025’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership, Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes that “pornography”—which he describes as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children”—“should be outlawed,” and that “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” He adds that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” Roberts also describes gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and echoes the legal language used to ban “critical race theory” in places like Texas. The policy blueprint outlines a plan for forcing states to report abortion and miscarriage data to the federal government, referring to the harrowing experiences of women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox with the dismissive euphemism of “abortion tourism.” Presumably, executing these plans would depend on a steady supply of willing informants.

Conservatives have long railed against the chilling effect of “cancel culture.” But by encouraging people to tell on their neighbors, Republicans have, in effect, constructed a legal framework for socializing the means of cancellation. Having routinely mocked left-wing college students as “snowflakes” for their use of content warnings and their desire for “safe spaces,” Republicans have now institutionalized their own opposition to points of view they dislike with laws that punish those who disagree with them. They have attempted to subject teachers, librarians, and educational administrators to harsh punishments should they express—or even make available—ideas that conservatives deem offensive. They have attempted to criminalize the parents of trans children, and have forced pregnant women to flee their home in order to receive lifesaving care. All of this has been done in the name of “liberty,” to combat what Roberts has called the “totalitarian cult” that is the “Great Awokening.”

The first and second Red Scares created oppressive societies in the name of preventing America from becoming one. The version of “liberty” being promoted by right-wing legislators and activists today rings just as hollow, a stifling political and social conformity enforced by the fear that someone, somewhere, might report you.

---

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Right-Wing Plan to Make Everyone an Informant.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In an otherwise confident debate performance on Tuesday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, conspicuously dodged questions from the CBS moderators about his views on health care. For weeks, Vance has made clear his desire to dismantle one of the central pillars of the Affordable Care Act: the law’s provisions that require the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick. On Tuesday, though, Vance refused to elaborate on his plans to reconfigure the ACA, instead pressing the implausible argument that Donald Trump—who sought to repeal the law, and presided over a decline in enrollment during his four years in office—should be viewed as the program’s savior.

Vance’s evasive response to the questions about health care, on a night when he took the offensive on most other subjects, exposed how fraught most Republicans still consider the issue, seven years after Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. But Vance’s equivocations should not obscure the magnitude of the changes in the program that he has signaled could be coming in a second Trump presidency, particularly in how the law treats people with significant health problems.

The ACA provisions that mandate risk-sharing between the healthy and sick underpin what polls show has become its most popular feature: the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage, at comparable prices, to people with preexisting conditions. In numerous appearances, Vance has indicated that he wants to change the law to restore to insurance companies the ability to segregate healthy people from those with greater health needs. This was a point that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accurately stressed during the debate.

The political paradox of Vance’s policy is that the trade-off he envisions would primarily benefit younger and healthier people, at a time when most young people vote Democratic. Conversely, the biggest losers would be older adults in their last working years before they become eligible for Medicare. That would hit older working-class adults, who typically have the biggest health needs, especially hard. Those older working people are a predominantly white age cohort that reliably favors the Republican Party; in 2020, Trump won about three-fifths of white voters ages 45 to 64, exit polls found. The threat that the GOP’s ACA alternatives present to these core Republican voting groups represents what I called in 2017 “the Trumpcare conundrum.”

“Going back to the pre-ACA days of segregated risk pools would lower premiums for young and healthy people, but result in increased cost and potentially no coverage at all for those with preexisting conditions,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), told me.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign hopes to exploit that tension by launching a major advertising campaign across swing states this week to raise an alarm about the plans from Trump and Republicans to erode the ACA’s coverage. Support for the ACA—in particular, its provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions—may be one of Harris’s best assets to hold support from older and blue-collar white women, who may otherwise be drawn to Trump’s argument that only he can keep them safe from the threats of crime and undocumented immigration.

[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]

The efforts of Republicans like Vance to roll back the ACA this long after President Barack Obama signed it into law, in 2010, are without historical precedent: No other major social-insurance program has ever faced such a lengthy campaign to undo it. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, Alf Landon, the GOP presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing it. But when he won only two states, no other Republican presidential candidate ever again ran on repeal. And no GOP presidential candidate ever ran on repealing Medicare, the giant health-care program for the elderly, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1966.

By contrast, this is the fourth consecutive election in which the GOP ticket has proposed repealing or restructuring the ACA—despite polling that shows the act’s broad popularity. During Trump’s first year in office, House Republicans passed a bill to rescind the law without support from a single Democrat. The repeal drive failed in the Senate, when three Republican senators opposed it; the final gasp came when the late Senator John McCain voted no, giving a dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.

Most health-care analysts say that, compared with 2017, the ACA is working much better today. At that point, the ACA exchanges had begun selling insurance only three years earlier, following a disastrously glitchy rollout of the federal website that consumers could use to purchase coverage. When congressional Republicans voted on their repeal plans, about 12 million people were receiving coverage through the ACA, and the stability of the system was uncertain because insurers feared that too many of those buying insurance on the exchanges were sicker people with more expensive health needs.

“In 2017, not only did we have rising premiums because insurance companies were worried the market was getting smaller and sicker, but we also had insurance companies exiting markets and raising the risk that parts of the country would have nobody to provide coverage,” Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told me.

Today, however, “we are in a very, very different place,” she said. “I would argue that the ACA marketplaces are thriving and in a very stable” condition. The number of people purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges has soared past 21 million, according to the latest federal figures. Premiums for plans sold on the ACA exchanges, Corlette said, are rising, but generally not faster than the increase faced by employer-provided insurance plans. And enough insurers are participating in the markets that more than 95 percent of consumers have access to plans from three or more firms, according to federal figures.

Despite Vance’s portrayal of Trump as the program’s savior, the number of people receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges actually declined during Trump’s term, to 11.4 million, after he shortened the enrollment period and cut the advertising promoting it. The big leap forward in ACA participation came when the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 passed a major increase in the subsidies available to people for purchasing insurance on the exchanges. That made a mid-range (“silver”) insurance plan available for people earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level at no cost, and ensured that people earning even four times that level would not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.

“The biggest criticism of the ACA from the start, which in many ways was legitimate, was that the coverage was not truly affordable,” Levitt said. “The enhanced premium subsidies have made the coverage much more affordable to people, which has led to the record enrollment.”

Neera Tanden, the chief domestic-policy adviser for President Joe Biden, told me that the steady growth in the number of people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges was the best indication that the program is functioning as intended. “A way to determine whether a program works is whether people are using it,” Tanden said. “No one is mandated to be in the exchanges, and they have grown 75 percent in the past four years. This is a program where people are voting with their feet.”

Conservative critics of the law nonetheless see continuing problems with the system. Michael Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that many insurers participating in the ACA exchanges limit their patients to very narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, a trend acknowledged even by supporters of the law. And Cannon argues that the continued rise in premiums for plans sold on the ACA shows that it has failed in its initial ambition to “bend the curve” of health-care spending, as Obama often said at the time.

The ACA “has covered marginally more people but at an incredible expense,” Cannon told me. “Don’t tell me it’s a success when it is exacerbating what everyone acknowledges to be the main problem with the U.S. health sector”—the growth in total national health-care spending.

Other analysts see a more positive story in the ACA’s effect on coverage and costs. The insurance exchanges established by the ACA were one of the law’s two principal means of expanding coverage for the uninsured. The second prong was its provision providing states with generous grants to extend Medicaid eligibility to more working, low-income adults. Although 10 Republican-controlled states have still refused to extend eligibility, nearly 24 million people now receive health coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

Combined with the roughly 21 million receiving coverage through the exchanges, that has reduced the share of Americans without insurance to about 8 percent of the population, the lowest ever recorded and roughly half the level it was before the ACA was passed.

Despite that huge increase in the number of people with insurance, health-care spending now is almost exactly equal to its level in 2009 when measured as a share of the total economy, at slightly more than 17 percent, according to KFF figures. (Economists usually consider that metric more revealing than the absolute increase in spending.) That share is still higher than the equivalent figure for other industrialized countries, but Levitt argues that it counts as an overlooked success that “we added tens of millions of people to the health-insurance rolls and did not measurably increase health-care spending as a result.”

[David Frum: The Vance warning]

The ACA’s record of success underscores the extent to which the continuing Republican opposition to the law is based on ideological, rather than operational, considerations. The GOP objections are clustered around two poles.

One is the increase in federal spending on health care that the ACA has driven, through both the generous premium subsidies and the costs of expanding Medicaid eligibility. The repeal bill that the House passed in 2017 cut federal health-care spending on both fronts by a total of about $1 trillion over a decade. This spring, the conservative House Republican Study Committee released a budget that proposed to cut that spending over the same period by $4.5 trillion; it also advocated converting Medicaid from an entitlement program into a block grant. Every serious analysis conducted of such proposals has concluded that they would dramatically reduce the number of Americans with health insurance.

Even if Republicans win unified control of Congress and the White House in November, they may not be able to muster the votes for such a sweeping retrenchment of federal health-care spending. (Among other things, hospitals in reliably red rural areas heavily depend on Medicaid.) At a minimum, however, Trump and congressional Republicans would be highly unlikely to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of 2025, a move that could substantially reduce enrollment on the exchanges.

The other main Republican objection is the issue that Vance has highlighted: the many elements of the ACA that require risk-sharing between the healthy and the sick. The ACA advanced that goal with an array of interlocking features, including its core protection for people with preexisting conditions.

In varying ways, the GOP alternatives in 2017 unraveled all of the law’s provisions that encouraged risk-sharing—by, for instance, allowing states to override them. That triggered the principal public backlash against the repeal effort, as Americans voiced their opposition to rescinding the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. But Vance has made very clear that a second Trump administration would resume the effort to resurrect a pre-ACA world, in which insurers sorted the healthy from the sick.

“A young American doesn’t have the same health-care needs as a 65-year-old American,” Vance argued recently on Meet the Press. “A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health-care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.” Although “we want to make sure everybody is covered,” Vance claimed, “the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Supporters of this vision, such as Cato’s Cannon, argue that it would allow younger and healthier people to buy less comprehensive plans than the ACA now requires, at much lower cost. As those more affordable options become available, Cannon says, cutting Medicaid spending to the degree Republicans envision would be more feasible, because people currently covered under that program could instead purchase these skimpier but less expensive private-insurance policies. Government-subsidized high-risk pools, the argument goes, could provide affordable coverage for the people with greater health needs whom insurers would weed out from their new, slimmed-down plans.

“If you want to make health care universal, you need to give insurers and consumers the freedom to agree on the prices and terms of health-insurance contracts themselves,” Cannon told me. “You need to let market competition drive the premiums down for healthy people as low as possible so they can afford coverage.”

Supporters of the ACA generally agree with the first point: that a deregulated system would allow insurers to create less expensive plans for young, healthy people. But they believe that all the arguments that follow are mistaken. Initial premiums might be lower, but in a deregulated system, even young and healthy families might find comprehensive policies, including such coverage as maternity benefits, unaffordable or unavailable, Georgetown’s Corlette told me. And when, before the ACA, states sought to establish high-risk pools for people with greater health needs, those efforts almost uniformly failed to provide affordable or adequate coverage, she pointed out.

Even if a reelected Trump lacks the votes in Congress to repeal the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements, he could weaken them through executive-branch action. In his first term, Trump increased the availability of short-term insurance plans that were free from the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Biden has shut down such plans, but if Trump won a second term and reauthorized them, while ending the enhanced subsidies, that could encourage many healthy people to leave the exchanges for those lower-cost options. Such actions would further the goal of Vance and other ACA critics of separating the healthy and sick into separate insurance pools.

Vance’s most revealing comment about this alternative vision may have come during a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, when he said that his proposed changes to the ACA would “allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.” But—as many health-policy experts noted to me, and Walz himself observed last night—that notion rejects the central purpose of any kind of insurance, which is to spread risk among as many people as possible—which, in fact, may be the point for Vance and other conservative critics of the ACA.

“The far right,” Tanden told me, “has always believed people should pay their own way, and they don’t like the fact that Social Security, Medicare, the ACA are giant social-insurance programs, where you have a giant pooling of risk, which means every individual person pays a little bit so they don’t become the person who is bankrupted by being sick or old.”

To date in the presidential race, health care has been eclipsed by two other major issues, each foregrounded by one of the nominees: immigration for Trump, and abortion for Harris. Under the glare of the CBS studio lights on Tuesday night, Vance was tactical in saying very little about his real health-care ideas. But the arguments he has advanced aggressively against crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act have made clear that its future is still on the ballot in 2024.

Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Corey Lewandowki was being his disrespectful self on CNN with Jim Acosta on Wednesday—and Acosta ran out of patience. During the contentious interview, Lewandowski, who was recently rehired by the Trump campaign, refused to answer direct questions, offering up only inflammatory (and debunked) talking points, and repeatedly mispronounced Vice President Kamala Harris’ first name. 

It was during one of these MAGA-misinformation dumps that Acosta interrupted Lewandowski saying, "Corey you've been in this business a long time. I think you're a mature grown-up. It's Ka-ma-la Harris. Can you just say, can you say Kamala? Or you cannot say Kamala?"

Lewandowski ignored the question, and attempted to continue with a new immigration lie Trump’s campaign is promoting about non-detained immigrants under the Biden administration. That was enough for Acosta.

"Yeah. Well, Corey, I, you know, I appreciate you coming on. Maybe we'll have you back. Thanks for your time." 

And with that Acosta abruptly ended the interview.

Lewandowki was brought back this summer to bring more crass MAGA-excitement into Trump's lagging campaign. This is what you get.

Help Kamala Harris win in November!

Donald Trump will no longer be interviewed for "60 Minutes’" customary primetime election special, the network announced Tuesday, saying Trump’s team had “agreed” to a sit-down interview before they “decided not to participate.”

In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, said “there were initial discussions, but nothing was ever scheduled or locked in.” Cheung also said CBS “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.”

A representative for CBS News, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump through a spokesperson had first accepted the interview request, followed by Vice President Kamala Harris, with the agreement being that each candidate would receive two segments in the broadcast of equal time.

According to CBS News, after accepting "60 Minutes’" request for Trump to be interviewed by Scott Pelley, a campaign spokesperson notified the show on Tuesday that Trump would not sit for an interview with the broadcast. The special is set to air Monday, and Harris’ interview will still be shown, the network said in a statement.

Asked about the situation at a press conference Tuesday evening in Milwaukee, Trump said he was “waiting for an apology” from CBS News, citing reporting from the network on Hunter Biden’s laptop and crime rates.

Trump said he “wouldn’t mind” doing the interview, and said he had previously been interviewed twice by former "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace, but reiterated that he expects an “apology” from the network.

The representative for CBS News did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump demanding an apology, nor about whether a time for the interview had already been set.

“For over half a century, "60 Minutes" has invited the Democratic and Republican tickets to appear on our broadcast as Americans head to the polls,” CBS said in a statement.

CBS said Pelley “will address” the Trump campaign’s decision on the issue during the special at 8 p.m. Monday evening.

Financial Times has more details on the new fundraise closed by OpenAI. From the report: OpenAI has asked investors to avoid backing rival start-ups such as Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI, as it secures $6.6bn in new funding and seeks to shut out challengers to its early lead in generative artificial intelligence. [...] During the negotiations, the company made clear that it expected an exclusive funding arrangement, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. Seeking exclusive relationships with investors restricts rivals' access to capital and strategic partnerships. The move by the maker of ChatGPT risks inflaming existing tensions with competitors, especially Musk, who is suing OpenAI. Venture firms are party to sensitive information about the companies they invest in, and close relationships with one company can make it difficult or contentious to also back a rival. But exclusivity is rarely insisted on, according to VCs, and many leading firms have spread their bets in certain sectors. Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, for instance, have backed multiple AI start-ups, including both OpenAI and Musk's xAI.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the end of the vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz asked Sen. JD Vance a pointed question: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Vance’s response: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?”

There is a clear right answer — that the 2020 presidential election was in fact legitimate — and Vance refused to offer it. It was, as Walz immediately noted, “A damning non-answer,” one that showed viewers who JD Vance is and what he stands for. 

Ultimately, every issue discussed earlier that night comes in second to the fundamental question of whether America’s democratic institutions deserve to endure. On that question, Vance truly is radical, and his exposure as such was the only truly important moment of the night.

Many Republicans have embraced Trump’s lies about the last election. Some have done so reluctantly, but Vance has been enthusiastic. He has, among other things, fundraised for January 6 rioters and said he would have illegally thrown the 2020 election result to Congress had he been in Mike Pence’s position at the time.

But what’s most distinctive about Vance is the degree to which he has paired 2020 conspiracy theories with a coterie of other anti-democratic positions and ideologies.

In a 2021 podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the Supreme Court intervened, Vance suggested that Trump simply ignore the ruling and dare the Court to stop him. In the interview, he explicitly cited Curtis Yarvin — a Silicon Valley blogger who advocates for overthrowing democracy and replacing it with a form of monarchy — as an influence on his views in this area.

None of this should come as a surprise. Anti-democratic radicalism has been central to Vance’s political identity since he began running for Senate in Ohio, widely discussed since he was tapped to be Trump’s vice president earlier this year.

And yet, it wasn’t central to the vice presidential debate tonight. The moderators left it until the very last minutes of the event, only coming up after the debate was originally scheduled to end. Despite democracy being at the core of the difference between the two candidates onstage — in fact, the core ideological difference between the two parties today — it was treated as an afterthought. 

In doing so, the moderators created an illusion of normalcy: allowing the two candidates to civilly discuss issues like housing and the deficit in a basically standard-politician manner, when in fact they disagree on an existential question about the nature of American government itself. 

It’s also worth dwelling on Vance’s attempt at deflection — the confusing line about Harris trying to “censor Americans from speaking their mind” on the Covid-19 pandemic — because I think it’s essential to understanding the ideological scaffolding of anti-democratic politics on the right today.

There are multiple theories on the right about how the Biden administration colluded with Big Tech to censor Americans, and it wasn’t exactly clear which particular one Vance was referencing. For present purposes, the details of the issue are less important than the ideological role they play.

For Vance and others like him, it is essential to do more than just insist that Trump was right in 2020 — to go the extra mile and say that Democrats are the true threat to democracy in America today. That argument, the claim that he and Trump are democracy’s real defenders, serves as justification for taking aggressive action to seize power.

When Vance proposed to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in 2021, he didn’t sell it as a naked power grab. Rather, he positioned it as a kind of counter-offensive: a necessary response to the left’s alleged stranglehold over the “deep state” in Washington. The rallying cry of Trump’s campaign to overthrow the 2020 election wasn’t that democracy was illegitimate, but rather that Trump had been robbed of his authentic victory by Democratic cheating. Stop the steal!

The argument that “Democrats are worse” does more than just legitimize power grabs. It also is a powerful disciplining tool for wavering Republicans, the kind that aren’t on board with Trump or Vance’s rough-and-tumble politics. If they waver or blanch, the response that Democrats are more dangerous helps bring them back onside — producing the phenomenon known as anti-anti-Trumpism.

In just one moment, in short, the veneer of normalcy carefully built up over the past 90 minutes was punctured. Vance not only exposed the true center of his candidacy, but also some of the key ideological scaffolding underpinning the Republican Party’s turn into anti-democratic territory.

This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

Google is introducing a new "Quick Insert" button on Chromebooks, offering contextual AI tools across the operating system. The feature debuts on Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook Plus, replacing the traditional Caps Lock key. Older Chromebooks can access Quick Insert via a keyboard shortcut. The button opens an overlay providing access to emojis, GIFs, Google's Help Me Write AI feature, and recent web links. Future updates will include AI-generated image creation. Google is also rolling out new AI features to Chromebook Plus devices, including automatic transcription, real-time translation, and voice isolation for video calls. Standard Chromebooks will receive updates like Welcome Recap and Focus mode. Lenovo and Samsung are launching new Chromebook models to coincide with these software updates. The Lenovo Duet, a detachable 2-in-1, features an 11-inch 2K screen and starts at $349. Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook Plus boasts a 15.6-inch OLED display in a lightweight 2.58-pound package.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of more than 5,000 car dealers have made public their worries about a lack of demand for electric vehicles. Earlier this year the group lobbied the White House to water down impending federal fuel efficiency regulations that would require automakers to sell many more EVs. Now, they're sounding an alarm over impending EV mandates, particularly in the so-called Zero Emissions Vehicle states.

The ZEV states—California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia—all follow the emissions standards laid out by the California Air Resources Board, which require that by 2035, 100 percent of all new cars and light trucks be zero-emissions vehicles (which includes plug-in hybrid EVs as well as battery EVs).

That goes into effect starting with model-year 2026 (i.e. midway through next calendar year) and would require a third of all new vehicles to be a BEV, claim the car dealers. But there is not enough customer demand for electrified vehicles to buy those cars, the dealers say. Worse yet, it would make gasoline-powered cars more expensive.

Read full article

Comments

Over the weekend, Hurricane Helene pummeled the Southeast, causing sweeping devastation to areas of the country unaccustomed to such disasters. The storm destroyed homes, businesses, and roadways, left millions without power and cell service, and stranded people in western North Carolina in the midst of  several feet of floodwater. More than 130 deaths have been reported across six states, including Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina.

Supplies are being airlifted into impacted areas of North Carolina and the National Guard has been deployed to assist in rescue efforts. As relief continues, many across the country are looking to offer their support.

Here are some ways you can help the burgeoning relief effort and what to avoid in order to not hinder emergency and rescue crews on the ground in these pivotal early days.

What you can do right now

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, do not send donations or supplies that have not been specifically requested by state and local organizations, according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. In a statement on X, TEMA said it is not accepting volunteers or donations “until the life safety mission is complete.” 

While local communities appreciate the volunteer spirit during disasters, please DO NOT send donations that have not been requested by state or local authorities.

TEMA is not accepting volunteers or donations until the life safety mission is complete. Tennesseans, do not… pic.twitter.com/EhrIcewCLX

— Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) (@TennesseeEMA) September 29, 2024

While well-meaning, donating supplies can “further burden a community that is already in crisis,” according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If you are local to the areas impacted by Helene, connect with established local or national charitable organizations to ensure you’re donating exactly what is needed and in the necessary quantities (usually in bulk). Used clothing is never necessary, per FEMA.

North Carolina Emergency Management advised against traveling to western North Carolina in order to keep roads cleared for rescue and utility crews. If you have a trip planned to an affected community in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, consider delaying or canceling your trip: tourists may complicate search and rescue efforts. The state also asks that people do not send physical donations and volunteers.

⚠️ DO NOT travel to western NC. Rescue crews are continuing to work in impacted areas. Utility crews are also at work to restore power, cell service and other vital infrastructure. Keep the roads clear for them.

— NC Emergency Management (@NCEmergency) September 29, 2024

The best way to offer your support after a disaster is to donate money, according to FEMA. “Organizations on the ground know what items and quantities are needed, often buy in bulk with discounts and, if possible, purchase through businesses local to the disaster, which supports economic recovery,” the agency’s website says.

Here are some organizations where you can donate funds:

• A fund with the East Tennessee Foundation supports local nonprofits and agencies dedicated to rescue and recovery. 
• Local chapters of the national coalition Voluntary Organizations Active In Disaster are asking for only cash donations for recovery efforts in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
• The North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund helps with the “unmet needs of hurricane victims.”
• The Florida Disaster Fund supports response and recovery activities in the state.
• Donations to the Salvation Army will go to the distribution of emergency aid, food, and critical supplies to survivors and rescue workers in impacted states. 
• Donate to the United Way, where funds will be distributed to local chapters for recovery efforts.
• Feeding America is collecting funds to provide meals and supplies to impacted areas.
• Donations are being accepted at Americares to deliver medicines and supplies to victims of the storm.
• GoFundMe is organizing its own fundraiser for disaster relief efforts.

To avoid charity scams, research organizations you plan to give to and avoid donating to ones that have obvious red flags such as rushing you into making a donation or asking you to donate via gift card or by wiring money. Give.org and Charity Navigator provide trustworthiness ratings for many charitable groups. 

What you can do in the weeks and months ahead

Do not go to a disaster area to volunteer. Until a disaster area has been declared safe to enter and volunteer needs are identified, stay home and donate instead. Volunteers should only come once they have been given an assignment with an established organization that has asked for assistance.

Volunteers will be needed in the months following a disaster, according to Voluntary Organizations Active In Disaster, so be patient. You can check for opportunities at the National Voluntary Organizations Active In Disaster, which coordinates disaster response across a number of organizations nationwide.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Donald Trump is making it harder for news outlets to “sane-wash” his increasingly incoherent ramblings. But too many in the media continue to downplay his deteriorating mental state—and things got especially ugly on Sunday at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Let’s lead with something we already knew—that Trump treats his workers like crap and allegedly refuses to pay them—but he usually had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about it. Not anymore.  

Notice how people are clapping, then he says he hates paying people overtime and no one is clapping? 

He complained about the size of his crowds, which he blamed on President Joe Biden.

He blamed his past losses on cities with sizable Black populations. 

Then he said Harris “was born” mentally impaired.

He also said Harris was “a stupid person”—his go-to attack when he can’t manage a substantive argument against someone. His deplorable crowd reacted as you might expect. But if she’s so impaired and stupid, why is he afraid to debate her again? 

He said he wants to eliminate shoplifting through “one really violent day.” 

Look at the bored crowd as the old man rambles.

Trump also acted out his own sleepy, nostalgia-heavy version of the classic Grandpa Simpson “I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time” bit.

He also relished in mocking his own supporters, such as a man who wears a border-wall-themed suit.

In fact, he really loves dumping on his own supporters, telling them he’d rather be anywhere else but at a campaign event with them.

And despite all this, he keeps saying over and over again, “I don’t care.”

Trump’s call for a violent purge and his admission he stiffed workers on overtime pay should be all over the news today. 

Instead, we’ll probably see more of this nonsense: 

We need your help if we’re going to defeat Trump, Vance, Project 2025, and Republicans up and down the ballot. Click here to volunteer to write letters so we can increase voter turnout.

It’s hard not to feel a sense of dread as the Supreme Court justices return to Washington for their new term, which, by law, begins on the first Monday in October. Most of the men and women on the Court so recently showed such astoundingly poor judgment, in a case that could lead the United States down the grim road to dictatorship, that it’s far from clear why anyone would trust them to judge a beauty contest — much less to sit on the nation’s highest Court.

That case, Trump v. United States, was an infidelity. Six justices, despite swearing an oath to “administer justice without respect to persons,” ruled that Donald Trump, the leader of their political party, was allowed to use his official powers to commit crimes while in office. 

They did so, moreover, just days after President Joe Biden’s disastrous June debate performance seemed to ensure that Trump would return to the White House in a walk. And those justices did not simply immunize Trump from prosecution for many of his past crimes, they provided a roadmap for how he can abuse and consolidate power if he does again become president.

Among other things, Trump held that a former president may not be prosecuted for any order they give the Justice Department, including orders that are given “for an improper purpose.” The Supreme Court, in other words, said that nothing could happen to Trump if he won in November, then promptly ordered the FBI to round up all of his political opponents and have them arrested.

Despite this partisan decision, these uniquely unsuited men and women remain the most powerful people in the country. The United States has no mechanism to remove a justice for recklessness, or for sheer incompetence.

For the moment, at least, this upcoming term appears less busy than the previous one, which featured not only the Trump immunity decisions, but also one of the most consequential power grabs by the Supreme Court in many years. Bear in mind, however, that the character of a term can change quickly. At this time last year, the Court had not yet gotten its hands on the Trump immunity case. And, in a potentially nightmarish scenario for American democracy, these justices could be called upon to settle a presidential election this November.

Still, while the current term may be less eventful than the previous one, it’s unlikely to be sleepy. The Court will weigh into the fraught issue of transgender rights in United States v. Skrmetti, the first such case to reach the justices since GOP-led states enacted a wave of anti-trans legislation after Trump left office.

Vice, specifically guns and porn, also stands out on the Court’s upcoming docket. In Garland v. VanDerStok, the same Republican justices who recently voted to legalize a device that effectively converts an ordinary semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun, will decide whether to allow virtually untraceable guns to be sold without a background check.

Then, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court will reconsider several key First Amendment cases that established that the government may not prevent adults from accessing sexual material online, even if the government does so to try to prevent children from seeing this material.

Glossip v. Oklahoma, meanwhile, presents the odd question of whether the state of Oklahoma must execute a man that it very much does not want to kill. 

Finally, there’s FDA v. Wages and White Lion Investments, a meritless case brought by tobacco companies that are upset that the FDA didn’t approve their flavored nicotine vapes. The case is interesting largely because the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided to cast its lot with these companies.

For now, the Fifth Circuit is a reminder that there are some things even this Supreme Court is unwilling to do. Last term, the justices reversed a Fifth Circuit decision that could have triggered a second Great Depression, as well as some unusually partisan free speech cases handed down by the Fifth. And these cases are part of a long series of Supreme Court rulings reining in the Fifth Circuit’s worst excesses. White Lion will give us a window into whether the justices will continue to do so.

Given recent events, we probably can’t expect the justices to show much moderation or judgment in their upcoming decisions. But we can, at least, hope that they do not descend even further into partisanship.

Trans rights return to the docket, in United States v. Skrmetti

In May of 2021, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for transgender patients under the age of 18. Since then, such laws have become ubiquitous in states controlled by the Republican Party — according to the Human Rights Campaign, 26 states now have laws imposing some restrictions on health care for trans youth, although some of these laws are stricter than others.

The Tennessee law at issue in United States v. Skrmetti, which the justices will likely hear this winter, is among the strictest in the country. It does not simply ban treatments that alter a transgender youth’s body to align it with the patient’s gender identity, it also bans treatments such as puberty blockers, which seek to delay permanent changes to that patient’s body until the patient is older.

These laws raise difficult constitutional questions. On the one hand, the government typically has the power to regulate the practice of medicine, and to ban drugs and procedures it deems harmful. This is why, for example, states can ban heroin even if it is prescribed by a doctor.

At the same time, the political context of these laws — the fact that they are all of recent vintage, are supported almost exclusively by Republican lawmakers, and are part of a broad attack on transgender rights by Republican politicians — suggests that these laws may not be motivated by a sincere desire to protect anyone from a harmful medical procedure, and are actually rooted in unconstitutional animus against transgender people.

Skrmetti asks whether Tennessee’s strict ban on transgender health care violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, a provision that protects against laws motivated by such animus against a vulnerable minority group. Under this provision, the Court has long held that any law that targets a group that has experienced a “history of purposeful unequal treatment” which “frequently bears no relation to ability to perform or contribute to society,” should be viewed with extraordinary skepticism by courts.

Realistically, however, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans is unlikely to rule that all anti-trans laws are constitutionally suspect, and it’s notable that neither the United States nor the ACLU, which represents parties challenging the Tennessee law, devote much of their brief to this argument.

Instead, they focus primarily on an argument that two of the Court’s Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, embraced in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020).

Bostock asked whether a federal ban on “sex” discrimination in employment prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. A majority of the Court concluded that it does, even if you assume that the word “sex” refers exclusively to a person’s sex assigned at birth, and not to their gender identity. 

The Court reasoned that, if a male employee is allowed to date women, to dress in traditionally masculine clothing, or to otherwise present as a man, then a female employee must be allowed to do these same things. Otherwise, the employer is treating men differently than women, and that’s illegal sex discrimination.

Similarly, both the Justice Department and the ACLU argue that Tennessee’s strict trans health ban violates Bostock because it treats patients of one sex differently than patients of the other sex. A patient assigned male at birth, for example, is allowed to be treated with testosterone if their doctor prescribes it, but a patient assigned female at birth is not.

This argument, however, has not won many fans among Republican lower court judges. And the Supreme Court recently signaled that it may be moving away from Bostock. So the parties challenging this Tennessee law probably face an uphill climb in this very conservative Court.

Garland v. VanDerStok, the “ghost guns” case

Federal law requires gun buyers to submit to a criminal background check before they can purchase a new firearm. It also requires guns to have a serial number that allows law enforcement to track them. In Garland v. VanDerStok, however, the Court could potentially create a loophole that would make it trivially easy to evade these two laws.

These federal laws apply to “any weapon … which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” It also applies to “the frame or receiver of any such weapon,” the skeletal part of a firearm that houses other components, such as the barrel or trigger mechanism. Thus, if someone purchases a series of gun parts to assemble at home, they should still face a background check when they buy the gun’s frame or receiver.

VanDerStok involves “ghost guns,” guns that are sold dismantled, in ready-to-assemble kits. To evade the background check and serial number laws, the kit’s frame or receiver is often sold in a partially incomplete state. Some kits allow a gun buyer to build a working firearm after drilling a single hole in the kit’s frame. Others merely require the user to sand off a small plastic rail. According to the Justice Department, it is often a trifling task to complete these guns. 

The right-wing Fifth Circuit held that these ghost guns were immune from the background check and serial number laws. Frames that are missing a small hole, a panel of three Trump judges concluded, are “not yet frames or receivers.” The Fifth Circuit also claimed that ghost guns do not count as a weapon that “may readily be converted” into a working gun because this phrase “cannot be read to include any objects that could, if manufacture is completed, become functional at some ill-defined point in the future” — even if only a trivial amount of work would be necessary to make the gun function.

It’s likely that a majority of the justices will disagree with the Fifth Circuit, although the vote in VanDerStok is likely to be quite tight. The Court has already heard this case twice on its “shadow docket” — a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices handle on an expedited basis — and a majority of the justices voted twice to apply the background check and serial number laws to ghost guns, albeit only on a temporary basis. 

Still, the first of those two decisions was decided on a 5-4 vote, with Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing over to vote with the Court’s three Democrats. So there appears to be significant support on the Court for the idea that criminals should be allowed to buy guns without submitting to a background check.

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: Do adults have a right to look at porn?

In the mid-to-late 1990s, as the internet was starting to become widely available to American consumers, Congress passed a pair of laws intended to prevent minors from accessing pornography online. Both laws were eventually blocked by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004).

Reno and Ascroft established, in Reno’s words, that a law seeking to “deny minors access to potentially harmful speech” must not suppress “a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another.” That is, the First Amendment does not permit the government to cut off adults’ access to sexual material in order to prevent young people from seeing it.

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton involves a Texas law that is very similar to the ones blocked in Reno and Ashcroft. Under this law, websites that devote “more than one-third” of their content to “sexual material harmful to minors” must require their users to prove they are over 18 before they can access any of that material — such as by transmitting a copy of their photo ID to the website owner.

Texas is one of eight states with similar laws — these sorts of age-gated restrictions are also in place in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.

Needless to say, most people who view pornography online do not want to send a record of their identity, which might be leaked or stolen, to the pornographic website. And many of the major online porn sites have simply blocked access to their content in the states with Texas-style laws. Someone who tries to access the website Pornhub in these states, for example, will be greeted by a video of a fully clothed woman criticizing their state’s law and urging them to contact their state legislator.

The Fifth Circuit, being the Fifth Circuit, nonetheless upheld the Texas law. The two Fifth Circuit judges who ruled in Texas’s favor claimed that they were not bound by Ashcroft because the Supreme Court’s decision “contains startling omissions,” meaning that the Court did not discuss a legal argument that these two lower court judges find persuasive.

This is not how constitutional litigation is supposed to work. Once the Supreme Court announces a legal rule, lower court judges are not free to ignore it just because they think of a new critique of the Court’s decision.

Nevertheless, both these two Fifth Circuit judges and the eight state legislatures that enacted similar bans appear to be betting that a newly constituted Supreme Court, dominated by very conservative Republicans, will overrule Reno and Ashcroft and allow states to restrict adults from seeing entirely legal sexual content.

Does Oklahoma have to execute a man against its will? The tragic case of Glossip v. Oklahoma.

Richard Glossip, a motel manager, was convicted of murdering the owner of that motel in 2004 and received a death sentence; he’s awaiting execution. Glossip did not actually commit the murder himself, but the prosecution’s theory was that Glossip hired Justin Sneed, a maintenance man at the motel, to kill the victim.

Since then, the murder case against Glossip has fallen apart. In 2022, a committee of Oklahoma state lawmakers commissioned a law firm to investigate whether the conviction was reliable. The firm’s 343-page report is scathing, concluding that a combination of lost and destroyed evidence, a “deficient police investigation,” distortion of evidence by the prosecution, and “a cascade of errors and missed opportunities by defense attorneys” all “fundamentally call into question the fairness of the proceedings and the ultimate reliability of the guilty verdict against Glossip for murder.”

A separate investigation, conducted by a former district attorney at the request of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, concluded that “Glossip was deprived of a fair trial in which the State can have confidence in the process and result.” Drummond, a Republican, is now asking the Supreme Court to toss out Glossip’s conviction and order a new trial.

The reason why this unusual move is necessary is that Oklahoma’s own courts have refused to grant similar relief to Glossip, despite the weight of evidence against his conviction. 

One explanation for this refusal is that Oklahoma requires someone who has already been convicted of a crime to bring most challenges to that conviction within 60 days of discovering any new evidence that undercuts the conviction. So, as new evidence has trickled out that benefits Glossip, his lawyers have been forced to submit that evidence to the courts on a piecemeal basis, and those courts have looked at new pieces of evidence in isolation, rather than seeing the cumulative picture detailed in the legislature’s and the attorney general’s investigations.

The newest piece of evidence, which is now before the Supreme Court, is that prosecutors hid the fact that Sneed, a key witness against Glossip at his trial, was treated by a psychiatrist for a serious mental illness that made Sneed prone to violent outbursts and paranoia.

It remains to be seen whether Glossip’s lawyers, even with Drummond as their unlikely ally, can persuade this chaotic Supreme Court to order a new trial.

FDA v. Wages and White Lion Investments: the flavored vape epidemic

Flavored nicotine vapes are supposed to be illegal in the United States. A federal law requires the FDA to approve any “new tobacco product” sold in the US. And, while the FDA has approved some tobacco-flavored vapes, it has not approved fruit-flavored, bubblegum-flavored, or any of the other many arrays of flavored nicotine vapes that tend to appeal to young people.

In practice, however, the ban on flavored vapes has not been particularly effective. Much like the proliferation of illegal weed shops in cities where marijuana is legal but is also supposed to be highly regulated, shops selling illegal flavored vapes are common in the US.

Nevertheless, courts are supposed to apply the law as written, and the law governing FDA approval of nicotine vapes is pretty clear. The FDA is required to deny any application to approve a new tobacco product unless the manufacturer of that product can show “that permitting such tobacco product to be marketed would be appropriate for the protection of the public health.” FDA makes this determination by weighing the likelihood that approving a new product will lead existing smokers to quit against the likelihood that approving the new product will cause new users to become addicted to nicotine.

Accordingly, the FDA has approved some tobacco-flavored vapes, on the theory that vaping is safer than smoking so it is better if existing smokers switch to vaping. But it has not approved any flavored vapes, on the theory that these products are so appealing to young users that they will cause many new people to become addicted to nicotine.

Then the Fifth Circuit decided to get involved.

In Wages & White Lion Investments v. FDA, the right-wing court essentially ordered the FDA to rerun its approval process for flavored vapes, claiming that the FDA illegally changed the process it used to evaluate these products midstream. It didn’t. While Judge Andy Oldham’s majority opinion in White Lion is very long, he rests his case primarily on blockquotes from FDA documents that do not say what Oldham claims that they say.

Oldham, a Trump appointee and former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, has a history of reading the law in implausible ways to benefit right-wing causes, and he’s often reversed by the Supreme Court. So it’s likely that even this panel of justices will cast a skeptical eye on his White Lion opinion.

But, if nothing else, White Lion is a reminder that, no matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse. If Trump wins in November, he could potentially replace several sitting justices with judges like Oldham, who make many of the justices responsible for the Trump immunity decision seem like sensible moderates eager to preserve the stability of US democracy.

by Shauneen Miranda, West Virginia Watch  

A U.S. Department of Agriculture initiative to feed hungry kids during the long summer months is mostly winding down, with advocates calling it a success despite some hiccups — and the federal government and many states are already working to bring the permanent program back in 2025.

The Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer Program — or Summer EBT — has popped up in 37 states, the District of Columbia and multiple territories and tribal nations this year. Advocates say that despite the program’s fair share of challenges, especially given its first year of implementation, the program emerged as an important resource in the fight against kids’ summer hunger.

Summer EBT, also known as SUN Bucks, provides low-income families with school-aged children a grocery-buying benefit of $120 per child. Children are automatically enrolled in Summer EBT if already enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, known as TANF; or the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, per the USDA.

Students might also be automatically enrolled if their school offers the National School Lunch Program or School Breakfast Program and their family qualifies for free or reduced-price school meals, according to the USDA. Most states’ deadlines to apply for the benefit this summer have already passed, and many have already issued the benefit for the summer months.

Allan Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the USDA, said it’s too early to say just how many children have been served through the program so far this summer, but based on the participating states, territories and tribes, an estimated 21 million children are eligible to receive the benefits.

‘Critical support to families’  

Kelsey Boone, senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research & Action Center, told States Newsroom that “like any new program, there are challenges with Summer EBT.”

The national nonprofit works to reduce poverty-related hunger through research, advocacy and policy solutions.

“That has included tight implementation timelines, logistical complexities and the need to raise awareness among eligible families,” Boone said.

Despite those challenges, Boone said the program is “definitely worth it” and “provides critical support to families by ensuring children have access to nutritious foods during the summer months, bridging the gap when school meals are unavailable.”

Boone said “we are still in the midst of implementation, so there aren’t hard statistics on how the programs are really rolling out at this point.”

She added that “some states have had to return to USDA and ask for … higher amounts of benefits, and that is due to the fact that they are streamline certifying, or automatically giving benefits to more students than they expected, and that is a very big positive for the streamlined certification process.”

Boone noted that some states have been delayed in issuing the benefits, “which means some families will not be receiving benefits until September or even October or November.”

Still, Boone said that despite the importance of receiving the benefits during crucial summer months when school meal programs are not an option, “it is also going to be helpful no matter what.”    

Over a dozen states opted out    

But 13 states — all with Republican governors — chose not to partake in the program this year, including Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. Multiple tribal nations in Oklahoma are participating despite the state opting out.

Rodriguez said the department expects that even more states and tribes will provide SUN Bucks next year.

States have until Jan. 1 to submit a notice of intent if they plan to participate in Summer EBT for 2025, according to the USDA. Alabama has already allocated millions of dollars in funding for the program next summer.

“We recognize that standing up a new program in a very short time period is no easy task,” Rodriguez said, adding that “potential challenges may include making systems changes, identifying sufficient staff, and securing financial resources to cover program administration, particularly [states’] responsibility for covering 50% of the administrative costs associated with operating the program.”

The USDA “is committed to working closely with all states, U.S. territories, and eligible tribes to support our shared goal of ensuring children have access to critical nutrition in the summer months through SUN Bucks,” Rodriguez added.

Justin King, policy director at Propel — a financial technology company helping low-income Americans track Electronic Benefit Transfer balances, like Summer EBT, through an app — said “there’s a lot of frustration and disappointment among folks who feel left out because their state has chosen not to participate this year.”

The company, which has partnered with the Biden administration, serves more than 5 million households each month.

King said “the big takeaway from looking at Summer EBT is that while there might be inevitable hiccups and challenges, Summer EBT can work, and it does make a difference for the households that it serves.”

“The comments that we’ve gotten from households who’ve received the benefit this year are overwhelmingly positive about it making a real difference in their ability to keep their kids healthy and fed in summertime.”    

       

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on Facebook and X.

Campaign Action

While it has been a treat to see the value of shares in Trump Media drop off a cliff, what is much less fun is thinking about how much the whole enterprise distorts democracy. 

Before Trump, it would have been impossible to imagine a former president helming a publicly traded company while running for office again. However, the Trump presidency shattered every norm as Trump used his office to line his pockets. 

A second Trump presidency will be worse, without a doubt, particularly because the federal courts, now stuffed with Trump appointees, are happily weakening the meager guardrails that remain.

While the name “Trump Media” connotes some sort of multi-faceted media empire, it’s really just Truth Social, Trump’s hard-right social media network. Truth Social is, to put it bluntly, not terribly popular. Its audience keeps plummeting, and even Trump has returned to posting on X, a rival platform with an audience nearly 100 times that of Truth Social. The stock was comically overvalued, pegged at $7 billion despite Truth Social posting millions of dollars of losses and having nearly no revenue. 

None of that seems to matter to die-hard Trump fans, who poured money into the stock with what one stock analyst called a “quasi-religious fervor.” They’re happy to excuse the losses, making statements like “I did it more as a statement to President Trump and to show support at the time,” said Teri Lynn Roberson to ABC News. “I wasn't really looking to make a lot of money,” said Roberson, who bought five shares of the company after it went public in March. 

That’s probably the best attitude, given that top executives at Trump Media started selling off their shares as soon as possible, eating huge losses in their quest to get out from under the failing stock. Trump still owns his shares, representing roughly 57% of the company. Until Sept. 19, Trump could not sell shares, as he and other company insiders were in a six-month lock-up period. Toward the end of the lock-up period, Trump said he wouldn’t be selling his shares, a statement that goosed the stock price a bit at the time. 

In a typical company, this might be seen as a vote of confidence from the founder, a willingness to risk their own fortunes. But Trump has far darker reasons to hold on to his stock. If Trump wins the election, the chances that investors will pony up and buy Trump Media stock increases. People could buy access to the president by throwing money at his company, which he would be running from the White House.

As Abdallah Fayyad explained at Vox, it is easy to imagine someone who has maxed out their campaign contributions deciding to show support for Trump by investing in Trump Media instead. This is, of course, not speculation. 

During Trump’s first term, millions of dollars poured into his hotel in Washington, D.C., with Republicans pretending that they were just staying there because it was the most convenient location. However, they’ve barely stayed in that hotel since it changed hands and became a Waldorf Astoria in 2022.

And why would they? It’s no longer a way to show Trump their support by helping him profit financially. Trump has shifted his focus as well, instead selling access to Mar-a-Lago to the tune of $1 million per membership.  

Trump Media is an ethical nightmare, but at least it’s a publicly traded company, which comes with transparency and oversight. Trump’s push into the crypto market, on the other hand, is opaque and unregulated—the perfect vehicle for a corrupt former president to get spectacularly more corrupt if he’s elected again. 

The crypto project, with the uninspired name of World Liberty Financial, serves as a way for Trump to give all his failsons—now including Barron, who is the “visionary” behind the project—a fake job that still comes with real money. The fact that all of Trump’s adult sons—none of whom have worked in the financial sector—are heading the project is one way to tell that this crypto effort will just be another unserious grift. 

Additionally, no one seems to actually know what this crypto company will do, even after a two-hour livestream launching the effort. Even Trump doesn’t seem quite sure. When trying to explain it, here’s what he came up with: “Crypto is one of those things we have to do… Whether we like it or not, I have to do it… It's crypto, it's AI, it's some of the other things,” he said in an interview on X. Got it. 

Where some of Trump’s other ventures, like Trump steaks, Trump bottled water, and Trump vodka, might have appealed to the masses if they were any good, Trump’s relatively newfound affinity for crypto is wholly tied to that financial sector’s affinity for right-wing politics. It’s also a way for him to court the crypto vote and contrast himself with the Biden-Harris administration, which has cracked down on crypto scams and prosecuted people like Sam Bankman-Fried for defrauding investors out of billions of dollars. 

The crypto sector has spent over $100 million during the 2024 election cycle thus far, hoping to usher in an era of less oversight and fewer consumer protections. Trump is the superior political choice if you want less regulation of the financial markets. 

The conservatives on the Supreme Court have already seriously dented the Securities and Exchange Commission's ability to address violations by ruling that they must conduct full-fledged jury trials rather than use an in-house administrative process. Those same conservatives also just struck down the Chevron doctrine, which required courts to defer to agency interpretations of statutes. 

Under Biden, the current head of the SEC, Gary Gensler, has called the crypto sector “rife with fraud and hucksters and grifters.” If Trump wins in 2024, he could weaken the SEC without legislation or court action simply by installing people who won’t impose fines or pursue scammy crypto companies. That’s not just a giveaway to the crypto bros Trump is courting, though. It would also be a move that lines Trump’s pockets with unregulated crypto cash while in the White House. 

Ordinary people can see the obvious problems here. Trump shouldn’t have private business interests while in the White House, period, but all of that went out the window in his first administration. Trump certainly shouldn’t have a private business in a regulated industry like securities when he would have the power to weaken regulations over his own business. 

But Trump fans love giving Trump’s businesses money and increasing his personal bottom line. They understand very well that Trump looks favorably at their efforts to funnel him cash. If he wins in November and his nonsense crypto project stays afloat until he takes office in 2025, conservatives—and hucksters and grifters—will have a very easy way to buy off the president with no fear of oversight. 

The only way to stop this is to ensure Trump doesn’t win. Of course, he’ll still continue to hawk whatever products will help him fleece his supporters, but at least he won’t be able to do it from the Oval Office. 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Jack Ryan from San Diego was recently being interviewed for a job. On a video call, the interviewer, a woman with red hair, said, "I find it helps when candidates tell me a story in answering the questions." "I'm looking for examples from your work experience," the woman added. During the conversation, Ryan had a smirk on his face. That's because the woman is not real. She is an AI avatar from a company called Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies. On its website, Fairgo says its AI agent "talks to candidates any time, any where." The company claims that it can "Ensure every candidate is evaluated on a level playing field with consistent and unbiased interview practices." Julian Bright, founder and CEO of Fairgo, told 404 Media in an email that after an introductory video voiced by the AI avatar, candidate interviews are done by an audio-only AI. "At no point is any of the video or audio captured used to evaluate the candidate," he wrote. Instead, that is done with a transcript afterwards. Bright said that Fairgo does not make decisions on who to shortlist for a role; that instead falls to the hirers. Fairgo also says on its site that the interview process is low stress, and that "candidates consistently love the interview experience." "This HR AI avatar is a perfect demonstration of late stage capitalism," Ryan told 404 Media in an online chat. "While Fairgo's intent is to provide a fair and equitable interview process, I can't imagine AI, LLMs, and other tools are able to interpret the human emotion and facial reactions to provide an actual, well rounded interview." "As someone who has interviewed upwards of 50 candidates for prior roles, human connection and interaction is the single most important indicator of how a team will mesh and jive together. If an AI is running the early stage process, it eliminates potential candidates because of its algorithmic design," he added. "It shows how executives and corporations are further trying to cut costs on the human side of business. As someone who has seen these layoffs at numerous top tech companies that then go on to rehire 6-12-18 months later for the same roles because they realized their strategy failed and they actually need good people to do the work, it's laughable at best and terrifying at worst."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23andMe is not doing well. Its stock is on the verge of being delisted. It shut down its in-house drug-development unit last month, only the latest in several rounds of layoffs. Last week, the entire board of directors quit, save for Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder and the company's CEO. Amid this downward spiral, Wojcicki has said she'll consider selling 23andMe -- which means the DNA of 23andMe's 15 million customers would be up for sale, too. The Atlantic: 23andMe's trove of genetic data might be its most valuable asset. For about two decades now, since human-genome analysis became quick and common, the A's, C's, G's, and T's of DNA have allowed long-lost relatives to connect, revealed family secrets, and helped police catch serial killers. Some people's genomes contain clues to what's making them sick, or even, occasionally, how their disease should be treated. For most of us, though, consumer tests don't have much to offer beyond a snapshot of our ancestors' roots and confirmation of the traits we already know about. 23andMe is floundering in part because it hasn't managed to prove the value of collecting all that sensitive, personal information. And potential buyers may have very different ideas about how to use the company's DNA data to raise the company's bottom line. This should concern anyone who has used the service.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports: Last week, NIST released its second public draft of SP 800-63-4, the latest version of its Digital Identity Guidelines. At roughly 35,000 words and filled with jargon and bureaucratic terms, the document is nearly impossible to read all the way through and just as hard to understand fully. It sets both the technical requirements and recommended best practices for determining the validity of methods used to authenticate digital identities online. Organizations that interact with the federal government online are required to be in compliance. A section devoted to passwords injects a large helping of badly needed common sense practices that challenge common policies. An example: The new rules bar the requirement that end users periodically change their passwords. This requirement came into being decades ago when password security was poorly understood, and it was common for people to choose common names, dictionary words, and other secrets that were easily guessed. Since then, most services require the use of stronger passwords made up of randomly generated characters or phrases. When passwords are chosen properly, the requirement to periodically change them, typically every one to three months, can actually diminish security because the added burden incentivizes weaker passwords that are easier for people to set and remember. Another requirement that often does more harm than good is the required use of certain characters, such as at least one number, one special character, and one upper- and lowercase letter. When passwords are sufficiently long and random, there's no benefit from requiring or restricting the use of certain characters. And again, rules governing composition can actually lead to people choosing weaker passcodes. The latest NIST guidelines now state that: - Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords and - Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically. However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator. ("Verifiers" is bureaucrat speak for the entity that verifies an account holder's identity by corroborating the holder's authentication credentials. Short for credential service provider, "CSPs" are a trusted entity that assigns or registers authenticators to the account holder.) In previous versions of the guidelines, some of the rules used the words "should not," which means the practice is not recommended as a best practice. "Shall not," by contrast, means the practice must be barred for an organization to be in compliance. Several other common sense practices mentioned in the document include: 1. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length. 2. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD permit a maximum password length of at least 64 characters. 3. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept all printing ASCII [RFC20] characters and the space character in passwords. 4. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters in passwords. Each Unicode code point SHALL be counted as a single character when evaluating password length. 5. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords. 6. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically. However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator. 7. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT permit the subscriber to store a hint that is accessible to an unauthenticated claimant. 8. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT prompt subscribers to use knowledge-based authentication (KBA) (e.g., "What was the name of your first pet?") or security questions when choosing passwords. 9. Verifiers SHALL verify the entire submitted password (i.e., not truncate it).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

Campaign Action

On Thursday, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon introduced a bill to overhaul the Supreme Court, including adding six justices to the court. It would do this over 12 years by having future presidents appoint one in their first and third years of their term until a total of 15 justices is reached.

The bill, titled the “Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act,’’ would also require a two-thirds supermajority—instead of a simple majority—to overturn laws passed by Congress. Additionally, it proposes a prevention measure to keep senators from blocking a president’s nominee by refusing to hold a vote. That happened in 2016, when then-President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the high court and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked it.

The bill also aims to build trust between the court and the American public by requiring justices to consider recusing themselves and make their written opinions public. 

“I think we can all agree it's time to reform the Supreme Court. As of today, I have the bill to do it,” Wyden said on X.

Wyden’s bill arrives as public opinion of the Supreme Court has fallen sharply. That’s due in large part to the court overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating the constitutional right to abortion. That decision has led to an increase in women dying during pregnancy, and it’s also dealt a severe socioeconomic blow to women, who, in many states, are now unable to make choices about their education, relationship, careers, and, perhaps most importantly, their health.

Further tarnishing the court are numerous reports of conflicts of interest among the justices. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly accepted political gifts, including paid international vacations and trips on yachts, from a billionaire Republican donor without disclosing it to the court. And his wife, Ginni Thomas, reportedly praised the anti-court-reform efforts of a far-right political organization.

An upside-down American flag—a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss—was flown outside conservative Justice Samuel Alito’s residence in Alexandria, Virginia. The flag was up when the court was considering an election-related case. The New York Times’ story about the flag prompted unsuccessful calls for Alito to recuse himself from relevant cases. 

In response to some of these controversies, the court’s adopted an ethics code last year. But it’s totally toothless, lacking an enforcement mechanism.

Eventually, the Supreme Court granted Trump broad immunity from criminal proceedings. This decision, too, prompted public outrage—and even the sitting president, who, in an editorial, called for Supreme Court reform. 

“We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power,” wrote Biden. “We can and must restore the public’s faith in the Supreme Court. We can and must strengthen the guardrails of democracy.”

Research shows that the American public isn’t happy with the current state of the court. While Americans may be split over the idea of expanding the court, they overwhelmingly support age limits, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey that Daily Kos has previously reported on. The poll also found that a majority of younger adults were more likely than their older counterparts to support adding justices to the court. 

But with Republicans in control of the House, and a 60-vote filibuster alive in the Senate, court reforms have little chance of passing. 

We need your help if we’re going to defeat Trump, Vance, Project 2025, and Republicans up and down the ballot. Click here to volunteer to write letters so we can increase voter turnout.

Mike Johnson won 341 votes for his final stopgap spending plan Wednesday evening, but his strategy ultimately had an audience of just one person: Donald Trump.

After nearly a year of leading the House GOP, the speaker’s fate is inextricably tied to the former president. If the GOP nominee wins the presidency and Republicans hold onto the House majority, Johnson stands a much stronger chance at keeping the gavel if he has Trump’s blessing.

That made Johnson's circuitous, halting route toward passing legislation to avoid a government shutdown over the past two weeks — a journey that included several false starts and public failures — a painstaking exercise in Trump management, some House Republicans say.

The Louisiana conservative worked to assuage Trump throughout the spending battle, initially embracing a plan with a conservative voting bill attached to it, despite it having no chance at clearing Congress.

Johnson met with Trump in person multiple times over the past month, including once just hours after a second assassination attempt against Trump in Florida. And leadership allies continuously checked in with the former president — a sustained outreach effort that started well before the speaker ultimately shifted gears and put forward a bipartisan proposal to avert a shutdown.

While some in the party privately knocked Johnson’s initial doomed bill as an embarrassing charade, other Republicans viewed it as a necessary political dance to keep Trump satisfied. If he hadn’t gone that route, some GOP lawmakers worried, a frustrated Trump would have undermined Johnson at a critical moment with the House GOP’s right flank and increased the odds of a shutdown. Johnson subsequently jettisoned the immigrant voting language, which would have required proof of citizenship to vote.

Trump last week reiterated on Truth Social that Republicans should reject a spending bill without the voting legislation. But one Trump ally in the House, granted anonymity to talk about private discussions, said that Johnson personally urged the former president not to publicly speak out against the final bipartisan bill.

That legislation, which cleared Congress Wednesday night, funds the government until Dec. 20 and doesn’t include the Trump-pushed voting proposal. The former president ended up staying quiet through the vote, at least publicly.

There are early signs that Johnson’s efforts to keep Trump happy are paying off, for now. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), for example, was adamant just months ago when he co-lead a May ouster attempt that Johnson couldn’t win the gavel again.

Now, he says it “depends on what Trump does.”

“Maybe Trump can drag him across the finish line, but that’s probably what it would take,” he added.

Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), a Freedom Caucus member who also helped advance the ouster push against Johnson earlier this year, emphasized that Trump’s endorsement of a speaker — assuming he wins the presidential race — will majorly influence Crane’s leadership vote. If Trump does back Johnson, he remarked that he would “consider” backing the current speaker.

That view is widely shared among conservatives, who have frequently and vocally criticized Johnson but are still highly deferential to Trump.

One member of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus put the Trump effect bluntly: Johnson has a “constituency of one.”

Another conservative, asked about Johnson’s chances of keeping the gavel, specifically pointed to the speaker’s relationship with the former president as one reason he could hold on, noting that the Louisianan “understands and works well with President Trump.”

Perhaps illustrating that relationship, Trump’s repeated public calls to shut down the government without a bill that prevents noncitizens from voting have quieted since Johnson officially unveiled his bipartisan plan on Sunday. Johnson has openly broken with Trump on that point, while also emphasizing that they are in constant contact, saying earlier this week that shutting down the government just weeks before the election would be “political malpractice.”

Still, Johnson’s deference to Trump hasn’t kept the former president totally quiet. Behind the scenes, Trump called some of the 14 Republicans who opposed Johnson’s initial plan of the six-month stopgap attached to the GOP’s voting bill, known as the SAVE Act. As Johnson plowed forward with the three-month clean bill, Trump used those calls to suggest that the GOP holdouts attach voting language to the bill, according to three people familiar with the outreach.

Trump was ultimately dissuaded from mounting a more aggressive push by GOP leadership, who argued that attaching the voting legislation would cause more opposition than support, these people said. And Johnson, asked about Trump’s calls to his holdouts, touted his own ongoing conversations with the former president.

“I've been talking with President Trump all day long and he understands exactly what's going on here,” Johnson said Wednesday, shortly before the government funding vote.

Ultimately, the short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution or a CR, passed the House without any add-ons, with 132 Republicans supporting it and 82 GOP members voting against it. That margin is a win for Johnson, as his right flank watched closely to see if he would be able to get a majority of their conference.

When asked about the conservative reaction, Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Johnson had to navigate a difficult tightrope.

“I think the speaker really made a tough call to say, we’re going to let everybody have their say on that CR and on the next CR. If this one doesn’t pass — and it didn't pass — everybody knew there would be a next step. … So I don’t think anybody was surprised,” Scalise said.

Yet there are other signs of Trump’s influence in the spending debate: Some House Republicans privately said they wouldn’t support the bipartisan stopgap bill because it didn’t have Trump’s public blessing, according to a Republican with knowledge of these discussions. And conservatives have openly said one reason they oppose the three-month stopgap is because they don’t want to jam a potential President Trump with a higher spending deal.

Johnson hasn’t faced more ouster threats since one was defeated earlier this year, but several members of his right flank are refusing to discuss if they would vote for him again in January.

Texas Rep. Chip Roy, one of 11 Republicans who helped advance the ouster effort, sidestepped when asked if he would back Johnson in January, saying he’s “not going to address any of those issues now.” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), another of the 11, said Republicans were stuck in a “suboptimal pattern” on spending, but that he wasn’t focused on the speaker’s race.

Other Republicans, including those who opposed the effort to boot Johnson, said they are waiting to see the outcome of the election before they make up their minds. Republicans have little incentive to come out publicly against Johnson now, knowing it only puts a target on their backs if he ultimately runs and wins another speaker race.

But even if they’re not directly criticizing Johnson, the frustration among some was palpable.

“What I’m thinking about is how do we curb our spending? How do we not get to the point where we now join 28 other empires who fail because they can’t service their debts any longer?” first-term Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) said in an interview with POLITICO. “This is why I don’t want to stay in Congress, because nothing is changing. It is a broken institution. I’ve never seen such dysfunction.”

He says he’s seriously weighing leaving Congress, but he’s waiting to see if an administration change fixes this frustration.

“I want to at least be given the opportunity to say, ‘You know what, it wasn’t Congress, it was just the administration.’ But if it is the other administration and nothing is changing in Congress and I know it’s just Congress alone at that point, yeah, I can’t. I think that way I’ve given it a fair assessment.”

Taking a victory lap after the vote, Johnson reiterated that he plans to be wielding the gavel come January.

“I intend to be the speaker in the new Congress,” Johnson said, adding that Republicans are preparing a “very aggressive agenda” for the start of 2025 and “I intend to lead this group.”

But some members still think the speaker has fierce critics who will oppose him in a speakership vote no matter what. Those include Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.) and Massie — three Republicans who signed onto the so-called motion to vacate resolution earlier this year.

And it’s not limited to those three. One House Republican, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said their position wouldn’t change even if Trump backed Johnson.

As this member put it: “I feel completely justified going back home and saying, ‘Why would I sign up for this again?’

New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted Thursday on charges that he took illegal campaign contributions and bribes from foreign nationals in exchange for favors that included helping Turkish officials get fire safety approvals for a new diplomatic building in the city.

Adams, a former police officer, faces conspiracy, wire fraud, and bribery charges in a five-count indictment that describes a decade-long trail of crimes.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan alleges in the indictment that Adams “compounded his gains” from the illegal contributions by gaming the city’s matching funds program, which provides a generous match for small-dollar donations. His campaign received more than $10,000 in matching funds as a result of the false certifications, according to the indictment.

Adams allegedly “solicited and demanded” bribes, including free and heavily discounted luxury travel benefits from a Turkish official, the indictment alleges, noting that the official was seeking Adams’ help pertaining to regulations of the Turkish consulate in Manhattan.

FBI agents entered the mayor’s official residence and seized his phone early Thursday, hours before the indictment was made public.

“Federal agents appeared this morning at Gracie Mansion in an effort to create a spectacle (again) and take Mayor Adams phone (again),” Adams’ lawyer, Alex Spiro, said in a statement hours before the indictment was made public. “They send a dozen agents to pick up a phone when we would have happily turned it in.”

In a video speech released Wednesday night, Adams vowed to fights any charges against him, claiming he had been made a “target” in a case “based on lies.”

“I will fight these injustices with every ounce of my strength and my spirit,” he said.

The indictment caps off an extraordinary few weeks in New York City, as federal investigators have honed in on members of Adams’ inner circle, producing a drum-beat of raids, subpoenas and high-level resignations that have thrust City Hall into crisis.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has declined to comment on the investigation, though it said it would announce “significant public corruption charges” at an 11:30 a.m. news conference. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment. A spokesperson for the mayor did not immediately respond to questions Thursday morning.

In a video speech released Wednesday night, Adams vowed to fight any charges against him, claiming he had been made a “target” in a case “based on lies.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul has the power to remove Adams from office. Her spokesperson, Avi Small, issued a statement late Wednesday that said “Governor Hochul is aware of these concerning news reports and is monitoring the situation. It would be premature to comment further until the matter is confirmed by law enforcement.”

The indictment caps off an extraordinary few weeks in New York City, as federal investigators have homed in on members of Adams' inner circle, producing a drum-beat of raids, subpoenas, and high-level resignations.

Federal prosecutors are believed to be leading multiple, separate inquiries involving Adams and his senior aides, relatives of those aides, campaign fundraising, and possible influence peddling of the police and fire departments.

In the last two weeks alone, the city’s police commissioner and head of the school system have announced their resignations.

FBI agents had seized Adams’ electronic devices nearly a year ago as part of an investigation focused, at least partly, on campaign contributions and Adams’ interactions with the Turkish government. Because the charges were sealed, it was unknown whether they dealt with those same matters.

In early September, federal investigators seized devices from his police commissioner, schools chancellor, two deputy mayors, and other trusted confidants both in and out of City Hall.

All have denied wrongdoing.

Campaign Action

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a grand jury on federal criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The indictment detailing the charges against Adams, a Democrat, was still sealed late Wednesday, according to the people, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment. The indictment was first reported by The New York Times.

“I always knew that If I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target — and a target I became,” Adams said in a statement that implied he hadn't been informed of the indictment. “If I am charged, I am innocent and I will fight this with every ounce of my strength and spirit.”

In a speech recorded at his official residence, Adams acknowledged that some New Yorkers would question his ability to manage the city while he fights the charges, but he vowed to stay in office.

“I have been facing these lies for months ... yet the city has continued to improve," Adams said. "Make no mistake. You elected me to lead this city and lead it I will.”

It was not immediately clear when the charges would be made public or when Adams might have to appear in court.

The indictment marks a stunning turn for Adams, a former police captain who won election nearly three years ago to become the second Black mayor of the nation’s largest city on a platform that promised a law-and-order approach to reducing crime.

For much of the last year, Adams has faced growing legal peril, with multiple federal investigations into top advisers producing a drumbeat of subpoenas, searches and high-level departures that has thrust City Hall into crisis.

He had repeatedly said he wasn’t aware of any wrongdoing and vowed as recently as Wednesday afternoon to stay in office.

Adams is the first mayor in New York City history to be indicted while in office. If he were to resign, he would be replaced by the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, who would then schedule a special election.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has the power to remove Adams from office. Hochul’s office did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday night.

Hours before the charges were announced, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on Adams to resign, the first nationally prominent Democrat to do so. She cited the federal criminal investigations into the mayor’s administration and a string of unexpected departures of top city officials.

“I do not see how Mayor Adams can continue governing New York City,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on the social platform X.

Adams reacted with scorn, dismissing Ocasio-Cortez as self-righteous.

The federal investigations into Adams administration first emerged publicly on Nov. 2, 2023, when FBI agents conducted an early morning raid on the Brooklyn home of Adams’ chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs.

At the time, Adams insisted he followed the law and said he would be “shocked” if anyone on his campaign had acted illegally. “I cannot tell you how much I start the day with telling my team we’ve got to follow the law,” he told reporters at the time.

Days later, FBI agents seized the mayor’s phones and iPad as he was leaving an event in Manhattan. The interaction was disclosed several days later by the mayor’s attorney.

Then on Sept. 4, federal investigators seized electronic devices from the city’s police commissioner, schools chancellor, deputy mayor of public safety, first deputy mayor and other trusted confidantes of Adams both in and out of City Hall.

Federal prosecutors declined to discuss the investigations but people familiar with elements of the cases described multiple, separate inquiries involving senior Adams aides, relatives of those aides, campaign fundraising and possible influence peddling of the police and fire departments.

A week after the searches, Police Commissioner Edward Caban announced his resignation, telling officers that he didn’t want the investigations “to create a distraction.” About two weeks later, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced that he would retire at the end of the year.

Adams himself insisted he would keep doing the city’s business and allow the investigations to run their course.

Over the summer, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Adams, his campaign arm and City Hall, requesting information about the mayor’s schedule, his overseas travel and potential connections to the Turkish government.

Adams spent 22 years in New York City’s police department before going into politics, first as a state senator and then as Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial position.

He was elected mayor in 2021, defeating a diverse field of Democrats in the primary and then easily beating Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, a Republican, in the general election.

After more than two years in office, Adams’ popularity has declined. While the city has seen an increase in jobs and a drop in certain categories of crime, the administration has been preoccupied with efforts to find housing for tens of thousands of international migrants who overwhelmed the city’s homeless shelters.

There has also been a steady drip of accusations and a swirl of suspicion around people close to the mayor.

The Manhattan District Attorney brought charges against six people – including a former police captain long close with Adams – over an alleged scheme to funnel tens of thousands of dollars to the mayor’s campaign by manipulating the public matching funds programs in the hopes of receiving preferential treatment from the city. Adams was not accused of wrongdoing in that case.

Adams’ former top building-safety official, Eric Ulrich, was charged last year with accepting $150,000 in bribes and improper gifts in exchange for political favors, including providing access to the mayor. Ulrich pleaded not guilty and is fighting the charges.

In February, federal investigators searched two properties owned by one of Adams’ close aides, Winnie Greco, who had raised thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the city’s Chinese American communities and later became his director of Asian affairs. Greco hasn’t commented publicly on the FBI searches of her properties and continues to work for the city.

When agents seized electronic devices from Caban, the former police commissioner, in early September, they also visited his twin brother, James Caban, a former police officer who runs a nightlife consulting business.

Agents also took devices from the schools chancellor; his brother Philip Banks, formerly a top NYPD chief who is now deputy mayor for public safety; their brother Terence Banks, who ran a consulting firm that promised to connect businesses to government stakeholders; and from First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who is David Banks’ domestic partner.

All denied any wrongdoing.

While those investigations swirled, federal authorities also searched the homes of newly named interim police commissioner, Thomas Donlan, and seized materials unrelated to his police work. Donlon confirmed the search and said it involved materials that had been in his possession for 20 years. He did not address what the investigation was about, but a person familiar with the investigation said it had to do with classified documents dating from the years when Donlon worked for the FBI. The person spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about that investigation.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated by the Associated Press with additional details and a response from Eric Adams.

DEI gone wrong; Please share #laloalaraz cartoons!

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments