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Scandals finally forced the Conservatives to abandon their leader, as Johnson announces he will resign.

Boris Johnson always seemed to defy political odds.

He went the typical path of the political class — Eton- and Oxford-educated — but sold himself as an outsider and populist man-of-the-people, messy hair and all. He was fired from journalism for fabrication, and his reporting and political careers were marred with scandal after scandal, professional and personal, and sometimes a mix of the two. For some of his supporters, his gaffes and his disregard for the norms added to his appeal.

And he continued to rise: the Conservative mayor of London, a Labour town; a prominent face of the “Leave” campaign that prevailed in the 2016 Brexit referendum; the leader of a party that won a historic majority in 2019, making him the prime minister with the biggest Conservative majority in three decades. As prime minister, he officially took the United Kingdom out of the European Union after years of a divisive Brexit debate.

Those successes helped Johnson defy those political odds — until they couldn’t anymore.

After a dizzying few days of fresh scandals and unprecedented government resignations, the British prime minister announced his resignation Thursday, marking the close of his leadership of the Conservative Party nearly three years after he took on the job.

In the end, Johnson was taken down by someone else’s sex scandal, a minor drama that was only partly of his own making. But this erupted after months of stories about illicit, in-person parties at 10 Downing Street during the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns in England — parties that Johnson originally denied happened, until media reports and investigations proved otherwise. Johnson was fined for violating the Covid-19 restrictions he himself set — along with dozens and dozens of other officials.

Conservatives, then, had already soured on Johnson by the time this latest scandal broke involving sexual misconduct allegations against the government’s chief deputy whip. They saw a backlash in electoral results and poor polling and an escalating cost-of-living crisis, and they ultimately had to make choice.

“That calculation is Johnson — is he a blessing or is he a burden? And if the tipping point is met, he’s more of a burden than a blessing,” said Matt Beech, a professor at the University of Hull and senior fellow at the University of California Berkeley.

Conservatives chose burden, and so they revolted and dispatched with him, not unlike past Conservative prime ministers before him. “The Conservative Party, historically, has been very good at getting rid of leaders who they do not think are going to win the next general election,” said Simon Griffiths, a politics professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. “They’ve been much more ruthless about it than other political parties.”

Johnson himself acknowledged this in his resignation speech, though he declined to take any responsibility for bringing about his own political demise. “The herd instinct is powerful; when it moves, it moves,” Johnson said. “No one is remotely indispensable.”

“I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world,” Johnson added. “But them’s the breaks.”

For now, Johnson remains prime minister until a successor is chosen, a process that will likely conclude sometime in the late summer or early autumn. Some Conservatives see Johnson as too much of a political liability to stick around, even for a few weeks, and want him gone immediately. If that happens — which would be pretty unusual — an interim prime minister would take over until the next leader is selected.

As Johnson departs, there isn’t an obvious successor to replace him, which may be another reason Johnson lasted as long as he did. Plenty of people are likely to put their names forward, but it is still unclear who might emerge as the true frontrunner. Whoever does will say a lot about the future of the Conservative Party and just how much influence Johnson may have had in shaping it, even as it leaves him behind. Them’s the breaks, after all.

Conservatives made a deal that Johnson would deliver on Brexit and win elections. Those requirements no longer apply.

“The reason I have fought so hard in the last few days to continue ... was not just because I wanted to do so, but because I felt it was my job, my duty, my obligation to you to continue to do what we promised in 2019,” Johnson said in his resignation speech on Thursday, outside of No. 10 Downing Street.

In his brief remarks, Johnson cited that historic 2019 election victory; delivering on Brexit; the UK’s navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic, including its vaccine rollout; and the UK’s support for Ukraine against Russia among the achievements of his tenure.

Johnson’s resume is a bit more complicated — an inquiry is examining the UK’s Covid-19 response, Brexit is still very, very messy — but on the top-line things, Johnson succeeded at what Conservatives wanted him to do.

In 2019, he emerged as the frontrunner for Conservative leader following Theresa May’s resignation because he was seen by Conservatives as the best option to deliver Brexit, but also to win supporters back to a party badly battered by the Brexit debates.

Johnson did both. He mounted a stunning victory in 2019 that brought together more traditional Conservatives and new working-class voters who had traditionally voted for Labour (Britain’s center-left party, now in opposition). Sure, Johnson was assisted by then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s unique unpopularity, but 80-seat majorities don’t come around all that often. And while Johnson may have glossed over some of the obstacles to his Brexit approach, the bottom line is he broke the Brexit deadlock that had previously been tearing the country apart and took the United Kingdom out of the European Union.

Partygate tested that bargain. Juicy details of boozy parties aside, the scandal is fairly straightforward: The people in charge of making and enforcing Covid-19 rules were themselves breaking them. Not only that, but much of the country was on extreme lockdown and couldn’t visit family or friends in the hospital, let alone host parties. “The hypocrisy is too obvious there,” Griffiths said.

It also put the rest of the Conservative party in a bind. Members of Parliament and government officials had to twist themselves to defend the prime minister — only to have new revelations emerge that showed Johnson wasn’t being honest. Official ethics investigations and police inquiries proved the media reports were as bad as they seemed.

“I think they can tolerate that if the guy’s a winner,” said Sean Kippin, a lecturer in public policy at the University of Stirling. “But as soon as it starts following through into election results — the polls have been pretty bad for quite a long time — as far as the Conservatives are concerned, it’s a sense that this man is going to drag them down with him.”

As Kippin said, “Boris Johnson’s been known to be all the things that he’s been shown to be for a long time.” But Conservatives were willing to overlook it in Johnson as long as voters could, and as long as Johnson delivered. But the inflation crisis further dampened support for the prime minister. In May, the Conservatives lost hundreds of seats in local elections, a sign that the electorate was moving against Johnson and his party. Even after Johnson survived a no-confidence vote in June, the party lost two seats in off-cycle elections to replace Conservative MPs. One, in Tiverton and Honiton, reversed a Conservative majority of 24,000. If Conservatives needed a sign that Johnson shouldn’t lead them through the next election, this was probably it.

“The biggest driving force behind this decision is the conviction of most Conservative MPs that they cannot win the next election with Boris Johnson as leader,” said Roger Mortimore, professor of public opinion and political analysis at King’s College London. “I think up to this point many of them have been hanging on essentially because Boris does have this past record of pulling improbable things out of the hat. He has a very enviable record of winning elections that other politicians would not have been expected to win.”

Johnson probably held on a bit longer than another Conservative leader because there was a sense that if anyone could turn this around, he probably could. But there were also those who saw him as flawed and knew this was always a risk. This time, it finally caught up with him. “They’ve been proven correct because obviously, it’s ended in a kind of chaotic, disorderly [way] — allegations of wrongdoing,” said Ben Williams, a lecturer in politics and political theory at the University of Salford. “And that’s probably what many would say was inevitable.”

Johnson leaves a Conservative party different from the one he found. It’s just not entirely clear what comes next.

Johnson’s promise of getting Brexit done helped usher in his rise. That unifying factor isn’t there anymore because the UK left the EU. (The Brexit problems continue.) That also means the Conservative Party about to choose a new leader is, in lots of ways, very different from the one that bet on Johnson three years ago.

As experts told me, the Conservative Party is now largely one of Euroskeptics. Instead of Brexit, the fault line is likely to be in this new Conservative coalition that Johnson managed to bring together. Divisions are emerging between the more traditional Conservatives who want to rein in public spending and want to see tax cuts (basically, what you’d consider low-tax, fiscal conservatives in the US) and these newer Conservative voters, many from working-class or blue-collar backgrounds, that are more likely to support public spending and want to see more state intervention and investments — the “leveling up” that Johnson talked up — come to fruition. Add in an economic and inflation crisis, and those tensions are likely to be even more pronounced.

How that plays out will depend on who becomes party leader — whoever the heck that might be.

A lot of people are going to put their names forward, though a clear favorite hasn’t really emerged. Ben Wallace, the defense secretary, whose profile has risen during the Ukraine war, is among the possible frontrunners. So is Rishi Sunak, who is one of the cabinet ministers who launched the government rebellion against Johnson this week. But unlike in 2019, when it was pretty much Johnson from the get-go, this leadership contest is pretty wide open.

This is kind of by Johnson’s design. “One of the clever things about Johnson, politically, is he’s really good at undermining potential rivals. So it’s not as if there was somebody waiting in the wings to come in and swoop in,” Griffiths said.

All of that has left a huge spread of people, in a pretty factional party, all of whom have decent odds of being the next leader. Typically, Conservative MPs will vote on candidates, eliminating them in rounds of voting until two finalists emerge. About 200,000 members of the Conservative Party will decide between those finalists. Those members tend to be older, white, and more conservative than probably the party as a whole.

But as experts pointed out, what will be top of mind for all members is which person is most likely to help Conservatives win. And the party is sure of one thing: That person is no longer Boris Johnson.

This should surprise no one, but Joshua Benton, over at Nieman Lab, has a really fantastically well-reported article about how Facebook basically wants out of the news business entirely. It goes through multiple reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long demands that Facebook and Google simply fork over some cash to news organizations (for sending them traffic) has finally had some modicum of success in Australia, and is now being considered elsewhere around the globe.

As Benton highlights:

The fact that it worked in Australia has inspired other countries to try to do the same. Canada will soon pass a version of Australia’s law. The U.K. will likely do the same, promising “Australia plus plus.” And while I still doubt it will pass, there’s a weaker bill in Congress that’s seeing “new bipartisan interest.”

And, for Facebook, (whose core business has been struggling a lot of late) that’s just one more reason to just ditch news entirely.

But Facebook? Facebook has been trying to wipe the news off its platform for years. Why would it think it should be doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to publishers it is actively trying to squeeze off its feeds?

[…]

So it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s Facebook that plans to just…stop writing checks. It’s hit a little revenue bump and needs to cut costs. It has handed out hundreds of millions of dollars in order to shut up publishers, and now publishers in countries a lot bigger than Australia think they’ve figured out how to force it to hand out more — a lot more. If the checks didn’t work…why keep writing them?

Of course, as Benton notes throughout the article, there are plenty of other reasons for Facebook to abandon the news business entirely. It’s actually not what most people use Facebook for (he has citations to stats that suggest most users don’t even want to use it for news), and Facebook regularly gets blamed for all sorts of stuff, based on how news (and fake news) is shared on the site.

So, getting rid of news entirely kills two birds with one stone. It takes some heat off of Facebook… and it removes the need to pay these massive sums to shut up Murdoch and others.

Of course, that may mean that everyone who’s been hoping that free cash from Facebook would somehow “save the news business” are going to be forced to look elsewhere. Google may still be on the hook, but it’s not like the newer social media networks are likely to care much about news either. I don’t think many people rely on TikTok or Instagram (of course, also owned by Facebook) for news, as both are not even remotely built on links.

Maybe, just maybe, like we’ve been saying since Techdirt’s earliest days, news organizations need to focus on building sustainable business models, not just demanding cash from others who figured out how to give people what they actually want.

The Supreme Court’s decision to say “fuck it” to reproductive rights has resulted in plenty of firmly protected First Amendment expression. People are angry and have decided to let the Supreme Court, along with the rest of the federal government, know that they aren’t happy.

Twitter user mattie daddy did the same thing, only using Twitter for their response. Here’s what that looked like, as captured by Adam Steinbaugh after the Twitter user deleted tweets and locked down their account:

Reacting to President Biden calling for non-violence in response to the Supreme Court’s reprehensible decision, the Twitter user quote-tweeted the lukewarm call to non-action and added this statement:

Burn every fucking government building down right the fuck now. Slaughter them all. Fuck you god damn pigs.

Incitement? A terroristic threat? A violation of laws federal or local?

Actually, no. None of the above. This was anger, expressed inelegantly. No one was directly encouraged to engage in violence. No specific agency was targeted. None of the elements needed to prove a violation of the federal law cited by the federal idiot who responded to this tweet (which had 8 retweets and 31 likes when it was removed by the Twitter user): 18 U.S. Code § 115 (Influencing, impeding, or retaliating against a Federal official by threatening or injuring a family member.)

This appears to be the “relevant” part of the law cited by the US federal agent (Josh Henry of the DHS’s “Threat Management Branch”), and I am using the term “relevant” only in the sense that Henry cited this part of the US code in his threat letter to the Twitter user:

[Whoever threatens] with intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with such official, judge, or law enforcement officer while engaged in the performance of official duties, or with intent to retaliate against such official, judge, or law enforcement officer on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).

(2) Whoever assaults, kidnaps, or murders, or attempts or conspires to kidnap or murder, or threatens to assault, kidnap, or murder, any person who formerly served as a person designated in paragraph (1), or a member of the immediate family of any person who formerly served as a person designated in paragraph (1), with intent to retaliate against such person on account of the performance of official duties during the term of service of such person, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).

I can’t see how that tweet fits into this framework, unless the very special agent Joshua Henry felt a wholesale call to burn everything down was indistinguishable from distinct actions or threats directed at specific government officials.

But that’s what Josh Henry put in his threat letter, which was published by the Twitter user shortly before tweets were deleted and the account locked.

If you can’t read/see the image, I will reproduce it in full, lest I be accused of misconstruing the language or intent of Special Agent Josh Henry of the US Department of Homeland Security, who really needs to be sent back to “Know What The Fuck You’re Talking About” school.

This letter is in reference to your recent post on Twitter. Specifically, on June 4, 2022, you became upset at the Roe Vs Wade decision and stated, “Burn every fucking government building down right the fuck now. Slaughter them all. Fuck you god damn pigs.”

This letter is to advise you that any further communications containing any real or implied harassment/threats against the personal safety of agencies, employees or contractors towards government facilities are unwarranted and unwelcome. You are advised as of the date of this letter to cease and desist in any conduct deemed harassing/threatening in nature, when communicating to or about the federal government. Failure to comply with this request could result in the filing of criminal charges for violations of 18 United States Code Statue [sic] 115.

In closing, please refrain from any harassing/threatening language when contacting any government agency.

First things fucking last: the tweet was sent on June 24, not June 4. Sure, it might be a typo, but details matter, especially when threatening someone with a loss of their freedoms over expression protected by the First Amendment.

Second: the most robust First Amendment protections apply to speech “to or about the federal government.” So, this agent has a higher bar to clear than most when it comes to “real or implied harassment/threats.” Agent Joshua Henry doesn’t even make an attempt to clear this bar. And then he goes on to cite a government “statue” that definitely doesn’t apply to the speech he’s being extremely stupid about.

Third: there’s no evidence this Twitter user ever directly contacted any government agency to repeat the (protected) hyperbolic expression of disgruntlement observed in this tweet.

None of this appears to be slowing the roll of DHS Special Agent Dunning-Kruger. As far as the agent sees it, he might need to do something even stupider in the near future since his angry letter has failed to silence the Twitter user or an ever-increasing number of online critics.

Henry said Walker sharing the letter on Twitter could bring more trouble.

“She’s kind of taking it as a joke,” Henry said. “She’s not remorseful about these statements, so that’ll be presented a United States Attorney and they’ll make a decision on that.”

Hopefully, Agent Henry’s superiors will be along shortly to smack the stupid out of him. Law and Crime’s editor Colin Kalmbacher spoke to Robert Sperling, the Director of Communications for the Federal Protective Service — the agency overseeing Agent Henry’s attempts to keep the country safe by steamrolling the rights of Twitter users.

If Henry presents this case, there’s a very good change he’ll get laughed out of the US Attorney’s office:

In a phone call, Sperling described the language as quite “colorful” but, when asked about the First Amendment implications, said he doubted the incident would actually be presented to a U.S. Attorney for prosecution.

Come get your boy, DHS. This is embarrassing. Of course people are angry about the Supreme Court decision. Of course they’re going to talk a bunch of shit on social media. But almost none of it will actually escape the boundaries of the First Amendment. Actions like these just make the federal government look stupid, censorial, and ineffective. With any luck, it will be Agent Henry who needs to worry about the dumb stuff coming out of his mouth, rather than some internet rando whose “threat” managed to reach a few dozen followers before being picked up in the DHS’s social media dragnet.

An increasingly important theme around here is how various laws to regulate the internet are often in conflict with each other. Privacy law is leading to less competition, for example. And from TorrentFreak, we have another, somewhat amusing example. The incredibly aggressive Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has yet another hare-brained scheme to try to prevent copyright infringement: forcing ISPs to send threatening letters to those accused of large scale infringement.

However, the large Dutch ISP, Ziggo, (which has a long history of protecting user rights) went to court to argue that it cannot pass along the warning letters, as it would be a violation of the GDPR. And the courts have now agreed.

This time, a Ziggo subscriber was accused of offering over 200 e-books to the public through an open directory. BREIN hoped that the ISP would forward a notice to the associated account holder or share their personal details.

This week, the Utrecht court ruled that the ISP is not required to cooperate with this request. Without a license from the Dutch Data Protection Authority, linking the IP-address to the subscriber information would violate privacy law. For the same reason, it can’t share the subscriber details directly with BREIN either.

Even if Ziggo was allowed to process the data, BREIN wouldn’t have won the case. The court concluded that there’s insufficient evidence to show that the subscriber willingly made the books available for others to download. It’s possible that they were simply put online for personal use, without proper protection.

“Contrary to what BREIN states, it is not certain that the IP address holder himself has infringed copyrights,” the court writes in a press release.

There’s something quite amusing here, of course, since the legacy entertainment industry always seems to pop up in support of these kinds of laws, in the belief that it will somehow harm their mortal enemies in the internet industry…

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You’ve probably heard of the trolley problem, a thought experiment that imagines a trolley approaching a fork in the tracks. There are five people stuck on one path and one person stuck on the other. If the trolly continues on its current path, five people will die, but if you consciously switch the tracks, you could save them and only one person dies. Do you switch or let the trolley continue?

Neal Agarwal, who continues to gift the internet with fun projects, reframes the trolley problem with increasingly more absurd choices. You also get to see how others answered, so you can compare your own choices against the moral compass of the internet.

Tags: humor, Neal Agarwal, trolley

by Charles Ornstein

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, advocates for privacy and reproductive health have expressed fears that data from period-tracking apps could be used to find people who’ve had abortions.

They have a point. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA, does not apply to most apps that track menstrual cycles, just as it doesn’t apply to many health care apps and at-home test kits.

In 2015, ProPublica reported how HIPAA, passed in 1996, has not kept up with changes in technology and does not cover at-home paternity tests, fitness trackers or health apps.

The story featured a woman who purchased an at-home paternity test at a local pharmacy and went online to get the results. A part of the lab’s website address caught her attention as a cybersecurity consultant. When she tweaked the URL slightly, a long list of test results of some 6,000 other people appeared.

She complained on Twitter and the site was taken down. But when she alerted the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees HIPAA compliance, officials told her they couldn’t do anything about it. That’s because HIPAA only covers patient information kept by health providers, insurers and data clearinghouses, as well as their business partners.

Deven McGraw is the former deputy director for health information privacy at the HHS Office for Civil Rights. She said the decision overturning Roe, called Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, should spark a broader conversation about the limits of HIPAA.

“All of a sudden, people are waking up to the idea that there’s a lot of sensitive data being collected outside of HIPAA and asking, ‘What are we going to do?’” said McGraw, who is now the lead for data stewardship and data sharing at Invitae, a medical genetics company. “It’s been that way for a while, but now it’s in sharper relief.”

McGraw noted how that’s not just the case for period-tracking apps but also some apps that store COVID-19 vaccine records. Because Congress wrote HIPAA, lawmakers would have to update it to cover those cases. “Our health data protections are badly out of date,” she said. “But the agencies can’t fix this. This is on Congress.”

Consumer Reports’ digital lab evaluated eight period-tracking apps this spring and found that four allowed third-party tracking by companies other than the maker of the app. Four apps stored data remotely, not just on the user’s device. That makes the information potentially subject to a data breach or a subpoena from law enforcement agencies, though one of the companies surveyed by Consumer Reports has said it would shut down rather than turn over users’ data.

In a press release last week, HHS sought to allay worries with some advice that sounds reassuring.

“According to recent reports, many patients are concerned that period trackers and other health information apps on smartphones may threaten their right to privacy by disclosing geolocation data which may be misused by those seeking to deny care,” HHS said in the release.

The document quoted HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra about the protections provided by HIPAA: “HHS stands with patients and providers in protecting HIPAA privacy rights and reproductive health care information,” Becerra said. He urged anyone who thinks their privacy rights have been violated to file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.

The release later acknowledged that, in most cases, HIPAA rules do not protect the privacy or security of individuals’ health information when they access or store it on personal cellphones or tablets. It offered guidance on steps people can take to protect their information.

Since the court’s decision overturning Roe, some period-tracking apps have taken steps to minimize the risk of personal information being shared. One such company called Flo said it is developing an “anonymous mode” that would not require users to provide their name or email address.

“Flo does not share or sell any health data with any other company, but wanted to take this additional step to reassure users who are living in states affected by an abortion ban,” the company said in a press release. “It is important to note that once this mode is activated, users will no longer be able to recover data when the device is lost, changed, or stolen and there may be limitations to using the app’s full personalization benefits. This is why Flo is offering Anonymous Mode as an option for concerned users instead of activating it by default.”

In a statement after the Supreme Court decision, the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation said consumers should pay attention to “privacy settings on the services they use, turn off location services on apps that don’t need them, and use encrypted messaging services.

“Companies should protect users by allowing anonymous access, stopping behavioral tracking, strengthening data deletion policies, encrypting data in transit, enabling end-to-end message encryption by default, preventing location tracking, and ensuring that users get notice when their data is being sought,” the EFF statement said. “And state and federal policymakers must pass meaningful privacy legislation. All of these steps are needed to protect privacy, and all are long overdue.”

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A rabbi makes the case for reproductive rights.

For decades, the Christian religious right’s opposition to abortion has dominated the reproductive rights debate in the United States. Activists spent years pushing states and the federal government toward more restrictive policies; those efforts culminated in the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the constitutionally protected right to an abortion.

But Christians aren’t the only people of faith with deeply held religious convictions regarding reproductive rights. Judaism not only teaches that abortion is permitted, but compels Jewish faith leaders to fight for reproductive rights, says Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, an author, scholar in residence for the National Council of Jewish Women, and creator of Rabbis for Repro, a national network of Jewish clergy working to support reproductive rights in their communities and on a national level.

The argument Ruttenberg and other rabbis are making has important implications for the law. If Judaism teaches that abortions are necessary, then laws denying the right to an abortion infringe upon the religious freedoms of Jewish people to have them. In Florida, one rabbi, Barry Silver of L’Dor Va-Dor in Palm Beach County, is suing the state to block a new 15-week abortion ban from going into effect, arguing that the proposed rule restricts religious freedom and amounts to “theocratic tyranny.” (A judge announced he would temporarily block the new law, one day before it was set to take effect, in response to a separate lawsuit.) In Israel, officials announced new policies meant to ease abortion access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Vox spoke with Ruttenberg about what Judaism teaches on abortion, and the role Jewish leaders will play in the next phase of the abortion rights fight.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What does Judaism say about abortion?

Abortion is permitted in Judaism, and when the life of the pregnant person is at stake, it is required. Judaism’s approach to abortion finds its basis in the book of Exodus. There’s a case where two people are fighting, and one person knocks over a pregnant person and causes a miscarriage. It says very clearly, if it’s only a miscarriage, then the person who caused the harm is obligated to pay monetary fines as damages, and if a pregnant person dies, then it is treated as manslaughter. So we see right away that in the book of Exodus it’s very clear that the fetus and pregnant person have different statuses, and causing a miscarriage is not treated as manslaughter. The fetus does not have the same status as a born human. It’s treated as potential life, rather than actual life.

There are two statements in the Talmud, codified in roughly 500 CE, that say for the first 40 days of pregnancy the fetus is “mere water” and doesn’t have any legal status at all, which incidentally is the same in Islam. For the first 40 days, the fetus has zero status, and from then on the fetus is considered a part of the pregnant person’s body — it is “as its mother’s thigh.” The fetus is an extension of the pregnant person until birth. It’s like that old slogan “my body, my choice”: it is literally her body! That makes intuitive sense and resonates with Roe and Casey’s delineation that abortion is permitted until viability. There’s a certain logic to all of that.

I could cite millions of texts through the centuries. We see language stating that emotional pain is just as serious as physical pain in making decisions about abortion. We see that dignity and suffering are legitimate reasons for having an abortion.

Judaism has said again and again that the life, health, and safety of the pregnant person is paramount. Her rights come first.

What do these new restrictions happening in states across the country mean for Jewish people who wish to have an abortion?

This is a violation of our First Amendment rights. It’s definitely a violation of free exercise of religion because it’s not only true that my religion permits me to have an abortion any time that there is need, but also at times I am obligated to have an abortion in order to save my own life. The range of situations in which Judaism would say: “yes, this is go time, you need to take care of yourself” is broader than the state’s in places that are outlawing abortion.

There’s also an establishment clause issue, because the state is making determinations about when life begins based on one very specific Christian interpretation of what that means, but as I’ve mentioned, Judaism has a totally different way of thinking about what the fetus is and how we understand what life is, and how abortion fits into that. The state is preferring one religious philosophy and enshrining it as policy and imposing it on atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and everyone else, when we are supposed to be a country for everyone.

Are there other elements of Jewish tradition that compel you to advocate for reproductive rights?

Yes. In the story of Exodus, we’ve got the Israelites leaving Egypt and being commanded to set up a new society. They’re like, okay, we’re starting from scratch, here’s what a just society is going to look like. There are all sorts of structures set up for economic justice. What the Torah repeats again and again is to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. It’s ancient intersectionality. The Torah knows there are people who will, because of gender, marital, or parental status, be uniquely vulnerable to poverty.

We have to not only set up structures that are good for everybody, but to keep the focus on making sure that those who are most impacted are centered and cared for, and that their needs are at the heart of our work to create justice. For me, to work for abortion justice is to be aware that the people who are most impacted by bans are people who are struggling financially; are Black, Indigenous, and people of color; are young people often trying to do this around parental oversight; are trans men and some nonbinary people; are immigrants; are disabled people; are people in rural communities. We have to always keep our focus on those who are most impacted.

In the American conversation, we like to talk about rights — what rights am I entitled to? In Judaism, we talk about responsibilities and obligations. What am I obligated to? I feel obligated to do this work.

What role did Jewish religious leaders play in helping people secure abortion access in the era before Roe?

Before Roe, there was a network called the Clergy Consultation Service, that was a network of rabbis and Protestant ministers working to help people access abortion care. That work looked like a number of different things depending on where people were and what the need was. It is very natural that rabbis would be part of the activism then. Rabbis for Repro have pledged to preach and teach and speak out and agitate on behalf of abortion justice. It’s very important that we fight for abortion justice not despite our Jewishness, but because of it.

There’s a rabbi in Florida suing the state, arguing that the state’s proposed 15-week ban on abortion access is a violation of religious freedom. What do you make of that, and should we expect to see other lawsuits like this come up?

The National Council of Jewish Women is watching the case very closely, with great interest, and agrees that abortion bans are a violation of religious freedom.

Is there anything about this moment that is giving you hope?

I believe in us. What can I say? I know that power doesn’t break easily, I’m not naïve.

But I’m a student of history, and I know that when enough people come together and say “no”, powerful things can happen. The way out of here, this very narrow place, is going to be hard and long and painful, and it won’t be without a fight. We just have to be willing to show up and be patient. And keep showing up even if we aren’t seeing results today or tomorrow. It takes time and we have to keep working.

The Jewish community is here for this. We’re showing up. And I’m really proud of us.

Democrats don’t have the votes right now for major Supreme Court reform. But if they pick up seats, they could have many options.

Editor’s note, July 2: The following is an updated version of an article that originally ran in Vox in October 2020. We are republishing it with revisions to reflect the Court’s most recent term.

The Supreme Court’s just-concluded term was a bacchanalia of reactionary indulgence. Roe v. Wade is dead. Gun laws throughout the nation are now in peril. The Court is pummeling the wall separating church and state — and it isn’t afraid to tell easily disprovable falsehoods to achieve this goal. The Court’s GOP-appointed majority curtailed the EPA’s power to fight climate change, and gave themselves an open-ended veto power over any federal regulation.

It’s likely that the worst is yet to come. Three “shadow docket” decisions this past term suggest that the Court is about to slash safeguards against racial gerrymandering. Another case looming in the next term, involving North Carolina’s gerrymandered congressional maps, is likely to give Republican state legislatures the power to defy their state constitution when writing election laws. And that’s after the Court has spent the last decade dismantling the Voting Rights Act and stripping the federal courts of any authority to fight partisan gerrymanders.

The Court’s Republican majority isn’t simply handing down bold conservative policy decrees, it is undermining democracy itself.

Indeed, the GOP owes its control of the Court to an anti-democratic system that effectively gives extra votes to Republicans. Only three justices in American history were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, and confirmed by a block of senators who represent less than half of the country. All three were appointed by Donald Trump, and all three sit on the Court right now.

Neither Congress nor President Joe Biden, however, are powerless against an anti-democratic Supreme Court. The elected branches have broad powers to rein in a rogue judiciary, or to limit the scope of at least some of the Court’s decisions. The greatest of these powers is court-packing — adding additional seats to the Supreme Court to dilute the votes of Trump justices who lack democratic legitimacy.

Realistically, Democrats lack the votes to push that or other meaningful Supreme Court reform through Congress right now. Such a proposal would require changing or abolishing the filibuster, as it’s nigh impossible to imagine 10 Republican senators voting to diminish the power of an institution controlled by Republicans. And at least two members of the Senate’s narrow Democratic majority oppose filibuster reform.

But just because court reform isn’t currently politically viable doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering, especially if Democrats somehow manage to pick up larger majorities in a future Congress. There are several options to deal with an increasingly partisan Supreme Court. Here are 10 of them.

1) Court-packing

Let’s get the biggest weapon in the arsenal of democracy out of the way first. If Congress has the votes, it could simply add more seats to the Supreme Court. President Biden would then name several new justices to fill those vacant seats, who could be confirmed by a Democratic Senate.

Although the Constitution provides that there must be a Supreme Court, it does not say how many justices shall serve on that Court. Over the course of American history, the Court has had as few as five seats and as many as 10. A bill pending in Congress right now would add four seats to the Court, transforming the 6-3 Republican majority into a 7-6 Democratic majority.

That said, there are several good reasons for Democrats to be cautious of packing the court, at least as an initial tactic to rein in the Court’s current majority.

One is that getting a court-packing bill through Congress would probably require extraordinarily high levels of public anger at the Supreme Court. Shortly after President Franklin Roosevelt won his first reelection bid in an historic landslide, he proposed adding seats to the Supreme Court as a solution to reactionary justices who sabotaged many of his New Deal policies. But even at the apex of his political might, Roosevelt struggled to build support for his plan.

Indeed, some historians blame Roosevelt’s court-packing proposal for shattering his coalitions and preventing him from pushing bold policies through Congress. Perhaps because of this history, Biden has been reluctant to embrace court-packing in the past.

The other problem with adding seats to the Court is that, absent a constitutional amendment fixing the number of justices on the bench, Republicans could potentially retaliate if they regain control of Congress and the White House.

Just as a Democratic Congress can transform a nine-member Court with a Republican majority into a 13-member Court with a Democratic majority, a Republican Congress could add any number of seats to the Court if they have the votes to do so — and that new majority might be even more hostile to democracy than the current crop of justices.

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

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

2) A “balanced” Court

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

In a 2019 paper, law professors Dan Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman proposed a 15-justice Court made up of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five justices chosen by the other 10. The idea behind this proposal, which now-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg featured during his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is that the balance of power on the Supreme Court would be held by moderate judges acceptable to both political parties.

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

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

But if there was ever enough energy to make a 13-justice Court with a Democratic supermajority a real possibility, perhaps Republicans will be willing to negotiate a compromise — the kind of compromise that could be written into a constitutional amendment if both parties agree to it. And a balanced Court proposal similar to the one offered by Epps and Sitaraman could potentially be that compromise.

3) The “Supreme Court lottery”

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

The basic idea is that each of the approximately 170 active federal appeals court judges would be appointed as associate justices of the Supreme Court. Then, every two weeks, nine of these judges would be randomly selected to serve on the nation’s highest Court. After two more weeks, a different panel of nine would be selected. (In this system, the current justices could also be eligible to rotate onto a temporary panel of nine, but they would no longer sit permanently on that panel.)

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

One problem with this proposed lottery system from a Democratic (and democratic) perspective is that the rotating Supreme Court panel would, at least in the short term, more often than not be controlled by Republicans who may share the current Court’s hostility toward voting rights. There are currently 172 active appeals court judges in the United States, and 92 of them were appointed by a Republican president, although Democratic appointees could control a majority of these judgeships by the end of Biden’s current term, if Democrats retain a Senate majority that will confirm Biden’s nominees.

Another risk is that a panel of anti-democratic radicals will be randomly chosen to hear a crucial voting rights case — or that such a panel will resolve a disputed election. Suppose, for example, that a “Supreme panel” that happened to be sitting when Donald Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election included judges like Neomi Rao, Andy Oldham, Edith Jones, Kurt Engelhardt, and Clarence Thomas — all of whom are known for taking extraordinary liberties with the law to advance conservative causes. That panel may very well have handed Trump the presidency.

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

4) Term limits

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

The leading term limits proposal, which has at times enjoyed support from prominent Democrats and Republicans, would require each justice to step down after 18 years. Terms would be staggered so that a justice steps down every two years, meaning that two justices would be replaced during each presidential term, although whoever is president when this proposal is implemented might get to replace more justices depending on how Congress decided to manage the transition to the new system.

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

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

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

Ways to weaken the Supreme Court

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

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

5) Jurisdiction stripping

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

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

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

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

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

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

Similarly, jurisdiction stripping would not allow Congress to restore a constitutional right to an abortion. Indeed, if Congress passed a law stripping federal courts of the power to hear abortion cases, that would strip them of their authority to hear a case seeking to reinstate Roe v. Wade.

But jurisdiction stripping could prevent a rogue Court from creating new “rights” — think of early 20th-century decisions inventing a right to pay workers less than the minimum wage, or a right to employ a non-unionized workforce — that implement conservative policy preferences from the bench.

6) Supermajority voting requirements

In a 2021 law review article, law professors Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn propose that Congress could require a supermajority of justices to vote to strike down federal laws. This proposal could potentially be implemented in two different ways: Congress could either impose a universal rule requiring a 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court to strike down a federal law or identify particular laws, such as the Voting Rights Act, which can only be struck down by a supermajority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Departmentalism would not allow the president to completely neutralize such a Court decision. Lower federal courts would remain bound by the Supreme Court’s decision, so the president would not be able to obtain a court order against states or private insurers who violate their obligations under Obamacare.

Similarly, departmentalism probably could not be used to restore lost abortion rights, because state abortion bans are enforced by state law enforcement officers and not by anyone who answers to the president. But departmentalism would, at the very least, allow the president to mitigate the harm created by a decision that would otherwise strip health coverage from tens of millions of Americans.

8) State resistance to the Supreme Court

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

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

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

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

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

Ways to override Supreme Court decisions

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

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

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

9) Omnibus legislation overruling past Supreme Court decisions

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

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

Similarly, Congress could enact a Civil Rights Act of 2023 that overrides several Supreme Court decisions at once.

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

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

10) Expedite legislation seeking to overrule Supreme Court decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realistically, however, if Congress wants to prevent the Supreme Court from entrenching its power to veto federal laws and manipulate voting rights, it’s likely to only have a short window in which to do so. Indeed, that window could already be closing. If there is one lesson from the past two decades, it is that full Democratic control of the elected branches does not happen very often — and even when it does happen, a Democratic majority can be held hostage by its most conservative members.

Supreme Court justices, by contrast, serve for life. They can afford to bide their time, waiting until their party controls at least one house of Congress or the White House to hand down decisions that could entrench that party in power for a very long time.

The former president is out of office, but his policies have found a lifetime appointment.

The night of the 2016 election, millions stood in front of television screens fearful that Trump’s electoral victory would mean harsher treatment for groups like people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ individuals. He had, after all, promised such policies and delivered on many of them. With President Joe Biden finally in office after a seditious mob overran the Capitol, some believed they could lay down their protest signs and breathe a sigh of relief.

Now, many of the same Americans are haunted not by the preferences of one elected official, but the edicts of six unelected ones. The Supreme Court’s ruling last Friday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which wiped the right to an abortion from constitutional law, demonstrates that even out of the White House, Trump is still clinging to power. The former president, even as he battles a wide-ranging investigation from the House Jan. 6 Committee, has preserved the ability to shape the law in almost every area, from guns and religion to climate change and tribal sovereignty.

In particular, some civil rights leaders and legal scholars see the momentous ruling as proof of a political process in disrepair and the capture of democratic institutions in service of a privileged few. In this Court, they see not just a continuity only of conservative policy, but of a minoritarian philosophy.

“Until the 1960s, we were fighting on Freedom Rides about the constitutionality of our travel — that is not enumerated in the Constitution,” said Maya Wiley, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which maintained a tracker of Trump’s civil rights rollbacks while he was in office. “The logic of Justice Alito’s opinion puts so much on the table.”

For a long time, the Supreme Court had been conceived in popular imagination and civic culture as a protector of minority rights. The legal circles of the twentieth century grappled with the theory of “counter-majoritarian difficulty,” which held that the judiciary was a necessarily antidemocratic institution because in declaring a statute or executive action unconstitutional, they overruled the will of the people as expressed through their representatives, while another camp asserted that the Court could continue to advance democracy if it devoted itself to reinforcing the representation of minorities in political process.

But in 2022, such theories are growing ever more distant from reality. As one scholar put it in the California Law Review, the U.S. electorate is becoming “more racially and ethnically diverse, more geographically concentrated and homogeneous, and more divided, not only in its partisan affiliations, but in its values and its prospects for the future.”

The Court, however, has used its power neither to serve as a countermajoritarian counterweight nor to reinforce representation of a growing multiracial electorate. The result: A court that enables the entrenchment of “a shrinking white, conservative, exurban numerical minority to exert substantial control over the national government and its policies.”

Sarah Turberville, the director of the Constitution Project at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, sees the demise of abortion rights as a symptom of a larger anti-democratic illness. “This is a place where too few people hold too much power for too long, and their decision to overturn a 50-year-old precedent in a way that strips 50 percent of the population of a right they previously held is just absolutely emblematic of that fundamental problem,” she said. “It’s almost a recognition that this is a political institution now.”

In other words, with this Court of Trump’s making, the United States is moving closer to a democracy for the very few and authoritarianism for the masses.

Democracy for the very few

Aziz Rana, a professor of law at Cornell Law School, points out that when presidents have enjoyed ideological harmony with the judiciary, they have traditionally also been backed by a robust popular vote that put them in office.

Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won landslide reelections. Their nominations to the Supreme Court—which ushered in an era of judicial conservatism—were in tandem with the general conservative trends of the moment. Those political trends were reflected in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which committed to Roe’s general right to abortion but limited the applicability of the decision.

Dobbs is completely different, according to Rana. “You have a situation in which a minority party is imposing an ideological agenda that has been rejected by a clear majority of the country,” he said. Today, only one of the five justices who signed onto Dobbs was nominated by a president who won the popular vote, and one of them only made it to the court because of Republicans’ unwillingness to give former president Barack Obama’s nominee, now-Attorney General Merrick Garland, a hearing.

Dobbs noted that the ruling nevertheless did not “prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.” But court-watchers point out that the legislative path is replete with hurdles that the Court itself has installed, such as its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidating a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed the government to supervise changes in election laws in counties with a history of voter discrimination.

“It’s so disingenuous to say that we’re just going to allow political majorities in the state to determine the legality of abortion when not everybody in the state is going to be able to vote because of what Republicans are doing and because of what the Court is allowing them to do,” said Khiara M. Bridges, a professor of law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. “Our democracy is undeserving of that label.”

How Trump became “a kind of permanent lawmaker”

Trump’s policies are alive and well at the Supreme Court in other areas of law, too. Last term, the Court allowed Arizona to impose burdens on voting by mail and provisional ballot, even though these obstacles had a discriminatory impact on Black and brown Arizonans.

This year, the Court also invalidated a regulation that permitted large workplaces to establish vaccine-or-test requirements. It also struck down a Maine ban on using taxpayer money to fund private religious schools. One day before Dobbs, it threw out a 100-year-old New York law that required gun owners to show “proper cause” to obtain conceal-carry permits, making it easier to carry a concealed gun in public. On Monday, it also sided with a Christian high school football coach, allowing him to pray at the 50-yard line, even though the Court had held in 1962 that school-sponsored prayer violated the separation of church and state.

“The Court is now stacked in such a way that it will not protect marginalized people when it comes to abortion rights. It won’t protect LGBTQ communities. It won’t protect poor people,” Bridges said. “But it will protect Christians.”

The decisions that came after were no less significant. While the Court did clear the way for Biden to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, it also expanded the power of states to prosecute crimes on Indigenous reservations based on a state’s interest in public safety within “its territory,” and it curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce greenhouse emissions.

On the last day of its term, the Court also agreed to hear a case that could give state legislatures exclusive and near-absolute power to regulate federal elections in their states.

Taken together, these decisions exemplify the perils of presidentialism, Rana said. When a lack of coalition-building and compromise paralyzes a political system, a powerful executive can use the courts as an end-run around the legislative process to “become a kind of permanent lawmaker.” He noted that the Supreme Court is made more powerful, when compared to other democracies, by its lack of term limits, small size, and the absence of legislative or ethics oversight.

“It’s not a surprise that the incentives are set up for Trump, while in office, largely to avoid any kind of legislative agenda beyond tax cuts for party donors — to often operate using the security apparatus of the state, like in immigration policy — and then to impose long-term policy changes, not by building majorities in support of his views, but rather by focusing on lifetime judicial appointments,” Rana said.

Still, others say, there will be a role for Biden to play in the post-Roe era. One view is based on a pre-emption theory: that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution empowers federal law to trump state law when the two conflict. This is the main thrust of a recent article in the Columbia Law Review cited approvingly by the three dissenters in Dobbs.

Greer Donley, a professor of law at the University at Pittsburgh School of Law and one of the article’s authors, said that this theory gave the Biden administration a wide array of constitutional options to combat this decision.

“Given that the [Food and Drug Administration] has both approved medication for abortion and strictly regulated it for the past two decades, that might suggest that states are not actually able to regulate it more harshly than the FDA,” she told me. “And so to the extent that a state is banning an FDA-approved and strictly regulated drug, that is in conflict with the federal government’s policy and is preempted.”

In a statement immediately following the ruling, the Justice Department appeared to adopt this view. “States may not ban Mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy,” the attorney general said.

But for Wiley, the role of lawyers will be to take their advocacy local.

“The fact that it’s the Supreme Court and not the legislative branch, not the executive branch … means we are in a very long fight, state by state, locality by locality, and federally, about how to get people protected.”

After deplaning on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews on his last day in office, Donald Trump made a pledge to the crowd of supporters gathered there: “We will be back in some form.”

A year and a half after that day, the Trump’s policies are back, in the form of a supermajority at the Supreme Court.

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Jesús Rodríguez is a writer and lawyer in Washington, D.C., and the publisher of Alienhood, a newsletter on law and illegality.

As you’ll recall, a year and a half ago, much of the world who didn’t live on the WallStreetBets forum were introduced to the concept of meme stocks. As we discussed at the time, much of the embrace of such stocks by retail investors was really about people who were fed up with feeling like the entire financial system was rigged against them, and in favor of those already rich and powerful. The underlying concept that drove much of the meme stock effort was about every day investors trying to assert some pushback on the underlying system.

That’s not to say that the meme stocks worked out well for everyone. Plenty of people did lose money, because that’s part of the nature of investing. There’s an underlying myth that the entirety of meme stock investing was about ignorant investors doing silly things, but doing so en masse to effectively counter for their own ignorance. And, surely, there were some retail investors who just went along for the ride, for the lolz, or whatever. But especially with the original meme stock, GameStop, the core of that deal was a retail investor who had done a ton of research, had a real game plan, and a real argument for why the stock was undervalued.

Ever since then, however, there’s been scrambling by “the system” to deal with “the problem” of meme stocks. And, yes, there are a lot of questionable underlying assumptions that meme stocks are, indeed, a problem. A few weeks ago, the SEC launched its very, very weird response to the whole meme stock thing by trying to create a meme of its own, with a very, very cringeworthy video called Investomania.

So… a few comments on this. First off, encouraging anyone who is looking to invest to do some research is a reasonable enough message on its own, but this is the exact wrong way to deliver this message. The people who are into meme stocks quite reasonably mocked the SEC mercilessly for this nonsense.

And, yes, I’m sure you can piece together the sad logic by SEC folks that resulted in them taking this approach: these are meme stocks, so the people who are interested in them like memes, so let’s create a meme! That’ll do it!

But, again, that totally misunderstands what’s going on here. The general focus of the meme stock world is sticking it to the system that is rigged against them. The SEC is the system. The SEC is the Man. Having the system you’re trying to stick it to, then turn around and suggest that everyone investing in meme stocks is an idiot who doesn’t do research not only gets the message wrong, it targets the message in exactly the wrong way.

The Man can’t meme about why those trying to stick it to the man shouldn’t fall for meme stocks.

Yes, people investing in stocks should do research, and you’re very likely to lose a lot of money just chasing after dumb ideas, but this video is not actually targeting the people who just go along for the ride, but rather the people who are doing their research and are trying to make a difference against the underlying rigged system — while the SEC seems to be pretending that the system is fine, it’s just you stupid retail investors who are the problem.

And… now it’s getting worse, because Congress is getting involved.

The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services on Friday called for the SEC, along with other regulators, to do more to protect the markets from similar events.

The impetus for change came from the so-called “Reddit rally” of January 2021, in which GameStop Corp and other “meme stocks” popular on social media surged to extreme highs on buying from investors trading heavily through Robinhood and other commission-free retail brokerages.

The intense volatility led to big losses for hedge funds that had bet against the meme stocks.

Notice the language here. “Protect the markets.” Because it was “the markets” that suffered? No, as later noted, it was some hedge funds that had bet against these stocks that lost. They don’t need to be protected.

All this kind of thing does is make people even more sure the system itself is rigged against the everday retail investor.

Now, there are reasonable concerns that the SEC has about “payment for order flow” and how that creates potentially questionable incentives for firms like Robinhood, which really pioneered the zero commission trade setup after realizing that they could just sell their deal flow through Citadel, allowing that firm to pre-run the market. The main issue there is that companies like Robinhood get paid more for a larger order flow, which gives them incentive to, in turn, encourage retail investors to trade more.

But, it’s reasonable to be skeptical about whether the SEC’s and Congress’ actual concerns are about systems that may encourage retail investors to trade too much… or if it’s really about “protecting the market” in the form of protecting the hedge funds that lost a bunch of money.

The Biden v. Texas decision rejects a Trump judge’s absurd reading of federal law, then sends the case right back to that same judge.

Everything about the Supreme Court’s handling of Biden v. Texas, an important immigration decision it handed down on Thursday, emphasizes how easily the Court can sabotage President Joe Biden’s policies — even as it rules narrowly in Biden’s favor.

The case involves the so-called “Remain in Mexico” program, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, a policy implemented by President Donald Trump that required tens of thousands of immigrants seeking asylum in the United States to, well, remain in Mexico while their cases were being processed. The Biden administration announced in a June 1, 2021 memo from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that it would end this program — noting, among other things, that it forced many migrants to live in squalid conditions without “stable access to housing, income, and safety.”

But then Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump judge known for his extreme ideology — Kacsmaryk has labeled being transgender a “mental disorder,” claimed that gay people are “disordered,” and denounced what he called a “sexual revolution” — ordered the Biden administration to reinstate the program last August.

In the Biden decision handed down on Thursday, six justices — the three liberal justices plus Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — all agree that Kacsmaryk misread federal immigration law when he held that the federal government is required to maintain the Trump-era program. (Technically, Barrett dissented from the Court’s holding, stating in her opinion that she agrees “with the Court’s analysis of the merits,” but she would have sent the case back to lower courts to consider a jurisdictional issue.)

Indeed, as Roberts indicates in his opinion for the Court, Kacsmaryk misread a key provision of federal law so egregiously that, if the Trump judge’s reasoning is taken seriously, no president has ever complied with this law since it was enacted 26 years ago.

The Court’s decision in Biden goes a long way toward reaffirming that Joe Biden is the president, Alejandro Mayorkas is secretary of Homeland Security, and Matthew Kacsmaryk is neither of these things.

But, while the Court’s rejection of Kacsmaryk’s misreading of federal law is a victory for Biden, it is likely to be a hollow one. Although the Court decides the important issue of whether federal immigration law requires a Remain-in-Mexico-style policy (it doesn’t), the justices send the case back down to Kacsmaryk to resolve a few other lingering questions, including whether Mayorkas adequately explained the administration's decision to end the program in an October memorandum.

Given Kacsmaryk’s past behavior, and his commitment to an extraordinarily conservative ideology, it is very likely that he will find a new excuse to order the Biden administration to reinstate the Remain in Mexico program once the case is back in his hands. And Kacsmaryk’s new decisions will be reviewed by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, an extremely conservative court that has thus far been complicit in Kacsmaryk’s efforts to seize control of much of US border policy.

Indeed, the Supreme Court has also been complicit in these efforts. Last August, not long after Kacsmaryk handed down his initial decision appointing himself border czar, the Supreme Court rejected the Biden administration’s request to block that decision — claiming that Mayorkas made a paperwork error in his initial June memo suspending Remain in Mexico.

Kacsmaryk’s decision, in other words, has now been in effect for nearly a year. While the Biden administration most likely will take steps quickly to end Remain in Mexico, Kacsmaryk could once again put a stop to that. And it could be a year or more before the Supreme Court gets around to reversing whatever order Kacsmaryk hands down after the case is sent back to him.

By slow-walking this case, in other words, the Court has ensured that Judge Kacsmaryk, and not Secretary Mayorkas, will exercise many of the secretary of Homeland Security’s most important policymaking powers. And, at this rate, President Biden could be near the end of his term by the time this case is fully resolved and he finally regains the power to end Remain in Mexico for good.

Kacsmaryk’s reading of federal immigration law is embarrassingly wrong

The crux of Kacsmaryk’s decision is that federal immigration law only gives “the government two options vis-à-vis aliens seeking asylum: 1) mandatory detention; or 2) return to a contiguous territory.” That is, when a person arrives at the Mexican border seeking asylum, the government must either lock that person up, or require them to stay in Mexico until their asylum case is resolved.

Under this incorrect reading of immigration law, even the Trump administration was insufficiently cruel to asylum seekers. Trump’s version of the Remain in Mexico policy exempted non-Spanish speakers. But Kacsmaryk’s reading of federal law would not permit such exceptions.

Kacsmaryk arrived at his wrongful conclusion by looking at just two provisions of federal law. One provides that the government “may” return an immigrant who arrives on land at the Mexican or Canadian border to Mexico or Canada while that person’s immigration case remains pending in the United States. The other provision states that most such immigrants “shall be detained.”

Thus, Kacsmaryk concluded that the government has only two options, detention or return to Mexico.

But, as Roberts explains in his opinion, there are many problems with this interpretation of federal law. For starters, the law explicitly gives the government several options — not just two — when confronted with an asylum seeker at the Mexican border. Among other things, the government may “parole into the United States” an immigrant seeking admission to this country “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Kacsmaryk’s framework ignores this option.

The United States, moreover, has only a tiny fraction of the detention capacity it would need to detain every asylum seeker who arrives at the Mexican border. And the US cannot unilaterally decide to send tens of thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico — the Mexican government has to agree to such an arrangement.

That means that, under Kacsmaryk’s reading of federal immigration law, it may be impossible for the federal government to follow the law, because the Mexican government may refuse to take in immigrants that the United States lacks the capacity to detain.

As Roberts explains in his opinion, courts are supposed to “avoid ‘the danger of unwarranted judicial interference in the conduct of foreign policy.’” Kacsmaryk, by contrast, effectively forced the United States to enter into a diplomatic negotiation with Mexico — in order to reinstate a program that neither government supports.

Kacsmaryk is likely to sabotage Biden again

Even though the Supreme Court rejects Kacsmaryk’s egregious misreading of federal law, it leaves him with significant power to sabotage Biden — and to order Remain in Mexico reinstated one more time.

First of all, the Supreme Court concluded last August that Mayorkas’s original June memo ending the Remain in Mexico program did not adequately explain why he did so. (It’s well established that the federal agencies must explain themselves when they change existing policies, although it’s more debatable whether the June memo failed to do so.) This is why Mayorkas issued a longer memo in October providing a more full-throated explanation for the Biden administration’s policy.

Rather than determining whether this new memo is sufficient, however, the Supreme Court sends the case back down to Kacsmaryk to consider this question. So Kacsmaryk can easily seize control of border policy again by finding some fault with this new memo.

The Supreme Court’s decision also allows Kacsmaryk to determine whether the Biden administration is properly exercising its authority to grant parole to some immigrants “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” That gives Kacsmaryk another possible rationale to sabotage Biden’s policies.

Perhaps Kacsmaryk will get his hands on this case again, and suddenly decide to act like a fair and impartial judge who is loyal only to the law. Given his past behavior, however, this outcome seems unlikely.

All of which is a long way of saying that this case is likely to go on for a very long time. And for as long as it does, thousands of immigrants are at the mercy of one of the most ideological judges in the country.

Data shows why taking abortion rights away is structural violence against women.

For Colleen McNicholas, a physician in Missouri, the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision can already be keenly felt.

The Planned Parenthood in St. Louis where she works — the last operating abortion clinic in the state — has halted all abortion appointments since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping Americans of their constitutional right to an abortion. For now, McNicholas is advising patients on alternative options in other states, including Illinois, where there’s another clinic just 15 miles away. That location, she notes, is increasingly serving people from as far away as Texas and Mississippi.

“We are doing what we can to help patients understand their own reality,” McNicholas told Vox. “We’re figuring out how they can pay for a procedure, figuring out what’s going to happen to their family when they are trying to access that care, how to get them resources to pay for child care.”

These are difficult questions. Already, many people have had to seek abortions out of state, or put them on hold. At least some will likely have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. And given disparities in health care access, Black women, young women, and low-income women are among those disproportionately expected to bear the burdens of these new restrictions, which could mean greater poverty, and even a greater likelihood of death down the line.

“This decision is structural violence,” says Boston University health law professor Julia Raifman. “The US already has higher maternal mortality than many countries. This will exacerbate that. The US already has higher child poverty than many countries. This will exacerbate that.”

The data, ultimately, backs up Raifman’s assertion.

Tens of millions of women are directly affected by this decision

Missouri is one of nine states where a ban or near ban on abortion was set to go into effect since Roe was overturned, and as many as 17 other states could soon follow suit. (Notably, several bans have been put on hold because of legal challenges that have been filed.) About 33.7 million women, or about half of reproductive-age women (defined as those between 15 and 44, in this analysis) in the US, live in states where there are poised to be new restrictions.

About 13.9 million have already lost their rights to legal abortion where they live, or are about to lose them, in most cases in less than a month. Another 6.8 million face early-term restrictions. And 13.1 million women live in states where anti-abortion legislation has been proposed, or where a Republican-led state legislature may pursue future restrictions.

The number of people who will have to carry their pregnancies to term is tougher to estimate, though numbers from previous years may offer some clues. According to data from the CDC, about 255,000 legal abortions took place in 2019 in the states where abortions are now banned or likely to be banned. While some women may still be able to stop a pregnancy at an abortion facility in a neighboring state, some won’t be able to do that.

Middlebury College economics professor Caitlin Myers looked into the data on access to abortion facilities around the country, and predicted in May that about 24 percent of women who’d like an abortion would be unable to reach a provider in the affected states, under the new laws, and that three-quarters of those women would give birth in the first year after a Roe reversal. Myers’s analysis assumes one-fourth of abortion seekers who can’t get out of their state might be able to get the procedure through other means.

Assuming that the number of people seeking abortions in the affected states in the next year is the same as those who got abortions in 2019 (the most recent year for which we have data), about two in 10 women hoping to stop their pregnancy would have to give birth in the next 12 months.

The calculation is a general estimate. People in the same state can still have very different lived experiences depending on how far away the nearest facilities are.

While people in states with abortion bans are most directly affected by these laws, activists emphasize that everyone across the country will feel the repercussions, with those in blue states expected to see delays in care due to an influx of new patients. McNicholas notes that the Illinois clinic nearest to Missouri, for example, has already seen a surge of interest and will likely face staffing pressures. Currently, they’re operating for eight hours a day and seeing 50 to 60 patients, but she expects they’ll be taking on 10- to 12-hour days soon.

Low-income women, young women, and Black women will be disproportionately impacted by these bans

According to Myers’s model, the people who are most likely to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term are those who can’t afford to travel to a facility out of state.

Per her research, three factors determined whether a person could still access an abortion: travel distance, neighboring states’ policy environments, and clinic locations in those states. Essentially, the two in 10 women who would end up giving birth are the ones who didn’t have the time or financial resources to seek care elsewhere. It could cost more than $1,000 in medical expenses to obtain an abortion alone without insurance, and that’s not factoring in food, travel, lodging, and child care.

“Whether someone is forced to continue a pregnancy or forced to leave their state, if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, either of these can seem impossible,” says Kimberly Inez McGuire, the executive director of URGE, a reproductive justice organization dedicated to mobilizing young people.

Due to health care gaps — including a lack of access to contraception — Black women, Latina women, low-income women, and younger women are also among the groups that have had higher abortion rates in the past — and are among those most likely to be harmed by these bans.

Such gaps are tied to longstanding disparities. As Vox’s Fabiola Cineas explained, Black women are more likely to live in “contraception deserts,” or places where barriers to obtaining contraception are higher. They’re also less likely to receive formal sex education and less likely to use prescription contraception, which is more effective compared to other methods. Many of these dynamics are due to inequities in health insurance coverage, since it’s more difficult and expensive to obtain birth control without it.

Black women in Southern states — where abortion bans are already starting to take effect — have the lowest health insurance coverage rates of all Black women, Cineas writes. And even for people who have health insurance, there are discrepancies in coverage: Only 30 states currently require insurance providers to cover prescription contraception, including just four of the states that ban or restrict abortions.

Because of these health care gaps, Black women have been consistently the most likely to get abortions among all racial groups, and were almost four times as likely to get an abortion as white women in 2019, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute and the CDC.

“The disparity can be explained by inequities in rates of unintended pregnancies, as well as other factors: unequal access to quality family planning services, economic disadvantage, and distrust of the medical system,” Cineas explains. In addition to health care access issues, Black women are also more likely to face discrimination when they do receive medical care, leading some to be skeptical of such services and others to receive inadequate treatment when they do seek them out.

Latina and other minority women have also been more likely to get abortions, and have done so at twice the rate of white women, given similar health care inequities.

Low-income women were substantially overrepresented among those seeking abortions as well, according to a 2014 survey of abortion patients by the Guttmacher Institute. This dynamic is also tied to contraceptive access and unintended pregnancies, with low-income women having higher rates of unintended pregnancies compared to higher-income women.

About 49 percent of people seeking abortions had a family income below the federal poverty line, which was $19,790 for a three-person household in 2014. The higher-income group — those who made more than twice that much — was underrepresented; every four in 1,000 women in that group had abortions.

Younger, unmarried women are also more likely to have unintended pregnancies and seek abortions. The majority of women obtaining legal abortions in 2019 were in their 20s, and over 85 percent were unmarried.

Finally, people who are already parents are also more likely to pursue an abortion: 60 percent of those who have an abortion already have at least one child, while 40 percent do not.

While women of all means will be affected by the end of Roe, people who are members of one or more of these groups are the most likely to feel the impact of these restrictions, given compounding health care disparities and economic pressures they may encounter. Because of this reality, many activists and officials have decried the abortion bans and restrictions as an explicit attack on these already-vulnerable groups, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

“It’s going to fall on the women who are poor,” she said last year when the Court was hearing oral arguments in the Dobbs case. “It’s going to fall on the women who already have children and cannot leave; it’s going to fall on women who are working three jobs; it’s going to fall on young, young girls who have been molested and may not know they are pregnant until deep into the pregnancy.”

Fewer abortions mean higher poverty rates and higher maternal mortality rates

The impact doesn’t stop at abortion access, either, and is likely to be long-term, sweeping, and dire. Research has shown that losing access to legal abortion means that more women will die, that more families will live in poverty, and that society will bear larger consequences in the decades to come.

As the New England Journal of Medicine’s editors wrote just after Dobbs was handed down: “Restricting access to legal abortion care does not substantially reduce the number of procedures, but it dramatically reduces the number of safe procedures, resulting in increased morbidity and mortality.”

It’s a statement backed by data. In a recent study, a group of researchers from Boston College and McGill University analyzed maternal mortality data in 38 states and Washington, DC, between 2007 and 2015. They found that in the 18 states where Planned Parenthood clinics decreased by 20 percent, the maternal mortality rate increased by an average of 8 percent.

This impacted Black women the most, who were three times more likely to die than white or Latina women as these clinics were shuttered, an exacerbation of decades of structural disparities resulting from losing access to abortions.

Maternal mortality is already a major problem in the US. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births — a ratio more than double that of most other high-income countries. That number has been on the rise for more than three decades. Meanwhile, the rate of abortions has decreased in the past 10 years. Now, the scientific community worries that maternal deaths will become even more common.

The lasting effects

For those forced to give birth, that experience will also have lifelong impacts.

A landmark study known as the Turnaway Study, led by professor Diana Greene Foster at University of California San Francisco, followed 1,000 women seeking abortions over 10 years. One group was turned away when they got to abortion clinics for exceeding the gestational limits; the other group received their abortions.

Six months later, women who were denied an abortion were three times more likely to be unemployed than women who were able to access an abortion. After a year, they were less likely to have aspirational future plans. By the fifth year, they were four times more likely to live in poverty.

“Being denied access to abortion pushes people and families into poverty. We know that,” says Inez McGuire. “If we’re looking at large-scale denials of abortion access, we are seeing more and more people being forced into economically precarious circumstances.”

The impact affects not just parents but their children as well. Taking the data from the study, researchers from University of California assessed how children of parents who were denied an abortion fared compared to those who were able to obtain one. They found that children of women unable to receive an abortion experienced poorer maternal bonding at an early age than did children of those who received an abortion — the mothers were more likely to say that the babies stressed them out. Poor maternal bonding at early infancy could lead to lower social competence later, when children reach school age. These children were also more likely to live in poorer households.

Since low-income women, young women, and existing parents are overrepresented among those seeking an abortion, cutting access to such care likely means that there will be a greater number of younger and larger families living in poverty.

What’s more, as Vox’s Dylan Scott has reported, the states that have banned or restricted abortion access post-Roe often lack social services that support children and families, particularly those who are poor.

Several places with some of the most aggressive bans — including Texas and Alabama — have not expanded Medicaid and do not offer paid family leave. According to a CNN analysis, most states expected to impose stricter abortion restrictions rank poorly when it comes to factors related to the well-being of children and parents, including access to prenatal care and enrollment in early childhood education.

The decision to roll back abortion care only adds to existing policy gaps and will have wide-ranging consequences, experts say.

“The Supreme Court ruling will spare no one,” says Morgan Hopkins, the interim executive director of All Above All, an abortion rights advocacy group. “This is now a nationwide crisis where even if you’re in a state that has not banned or restricted abortion access, the ripple effect will impact you and be felt far and wide.”

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In Wake Of Supreme Court Gun Ruling, D.C. Gun Owners Sue To Be Able To Carry Concealed Handguns On Metro

The Women’s March will hold a DC protest on Saturday, July 9 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last Friday. There’s not a lot of info from the organizers so far, but according to a permit filed with the National Park Service, the event is expected last from 11 AM to 5 […]

The post The Women’s March is Planning a Massive Abortion Rights Protest in DC Next Weekend first appeared on Washingtonian.

Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and its audiobook division, Audible:

Amazon owned Audible ceased selling individual audiobooks through their Android app from Google Play a couple of weeks ago. This will prevent anyone from buying audio titles individually. However, Audible still sells subscriptions through the app (…)

Karpeles points out that this is yet another straw in the wind indicating that the ownership of digital goods is being replaced with a rental model. He wrote a post last year exploring the broader implications, using Netflix as an example:

What content landlords like Netflix are trying to do now is eliminate our “purchase” option entirely. Without it, renting become the only option and they are thus free to arbitrarily hike up rental fees , which we have to pay over and over again without us getting any of these aforementioned rights and freedoms. It’s a classic example of getting less for more.

He goes on to underline four extremely serious consequences of this shift. One is the end of “forever access”. If the company adopting the rental model goes out of business, customers lose access to everything they were paying for. With the ownership of goods, even if the supplier goes bankrupt, you still have the product they sold to you.

Secondly, the rental model effectively means the end of the public domain for material offered in that way. In theory, books, music, films and the rest that are under copyright should enter the public domain after a certain time – typically around a century after they first appeared. But when these digital goods are offered using the rental model, they usually come wrapped up in digital locks – digital rights management (DRM) – to prevent people exiting from the rental model by making a personal copy. That means that even if the company offering the digital goods is still around when the copyright expires, this content will remain locked-away even when it enters the public domain because it is illegal under copyright laws like the US DMCA and EU Information Society Directive to circumvent those locks.

Thirdly, Karpeles notes, the rental model means the end of personal digital freedom in this sphere. Since you access everything through the service provider, the latter knows what you are doing with the rented material and when. How much it chooses to spy on you will depend on the company, but you probably won’t know unless you live somewhere like the EU where you can make a request to the company for the personal data that it holds about you.

Finally, and perhaps least obviously, it means the end of the library model that has served us so well for hundreds of years. Increasingly, libraries are unable to buy copies of ebooks outright, but must rent them. This means that they must follow the strict licensing conditions imposed by publishers on how those ebooks are lent out by the library. For example, some publishers license ebooks for a set period of time – typically a year or two – with no guarantee that renewal will be possible at the end of that time. Others have adopted a metered approach that counts how many times an ebook is lent out, and blocks access after a preset number. Karpeles writes:

Looking to the future, as more books become only available for lease as eBooks, I see no clear option which allows libraries to sustainably serve their important roles as reliable, long-term public access repositories of cultural heritage and human knowledge. It used to be the case that a library would purchase a book once and it would serve the public for decades. Instead, now at the end of each year, a library’s eBooks simply vanish unless libraries are able to find enough quarters to re-feed the meter.

The option to own new digital goods or to access the digital holdings of public libraries may not be available much longer – enjoy them while you can.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

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Mark Meadows warned Cassidy Hutchinson that “things might get real, real bad” on January 6. That was just the beginning of her bombshell testimony.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows warned one of his top aides on January 2, 2021, that “things might get real, real bad” on January 6, that aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, said in the opening moments of her bombshell testimony before the House January 6 committee on Tuesday.

The testimony she provided over the next two hours included a litany of details about Meadows’s, Trump’s, and other White House officials’ knowledge of the danger the January 6, 2021, rally participants posed, their activities as the Capitol riot happened, and what they did in the days after it.

Although clips of the nearly 20 hours of depositions that Hutchinson gave the committee had previously played in public hearings, this was the first time that a White House staffer has appeared in person during the hearings, and it surpassed the hype stoked by the committee’s last-minute announcement of a hearing.

Hutchinson was a key conduit between the White House and dozens of members of Congress, and the committee previously aired part of her deposition where she named members of Congress who had sought pardons from Trump after January 6. She also was in countless meetings with figures who played key roles in the plot to overturn the election, including Meadows and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and has played a vital role in the committee’s effort to piece together the events leading up to January 6.

Here are the seven most shocking revelations Hutchinson disclosed on Tuesday.

1) Trump attacked a Secret Service agent

Hutchinson revealed that Trump was so intent on going to the Capitol following his speech during the Stop the Steal rally at the Ellipse on January 6 that, according to a colleague who talked to her shortly after he saw the incident, he grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine and then got physical with the Secret Service agent who tried to restrain him.

She said that Trump had believed he was going to the Capitol after his speech that day, and only discovered that those plans had been blocked once he returned to the motorcade afterward. According to Hutchinson’s second-hand account, Trump was so enraged that he shouted “I’m the f-ing president, take me up to the Capitol now” before trying to drive himself there. When a Secret Service officer restrained him, Trump then “lunged at his clavicle.”

2) Trump was repeatedly warned about going to the Capitol

Hutchinson said White House counsel Pat Cipollone repeatedly warned Trump and other top officials that going to the Capitol as protesters were marching there to disrupt the counting of electoral votes would create criminal liability.

“We are going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Hutchinson said he told her of the plans for Trump to show up there on January 6. The top White House lawyer specifically cited obstruction of justice and obstructing the electoral count as crimes that Trump might commit by appearing at the joint session of Congress.

3) Trump was blasé about the armed mob

Trump was unhappy that the crowd at his Ellipse rally before his speech was too small, and displeased that many rallygoers were watching from beyond the security perimeter, Hutchinson recounted.

When he was told it was because many of the people at the National Mall were armed and didn’t want to go through security to get closer to the stage, Trump was enraged.

“I don’t care that they have weapons, they are not here to hurt me, take the f’in mags away, and they can march to the Capitol,” he said, according to Hutchinson.

4) The White House knew it would get bad

Hutchinson testified at length about her former boss, Meadows, and the warnings he and White House officials got in the days leading up to January 6, including that January 2 comment.

The conversation in which Meadows warned things could get “real bad” occurred minutes after Rudy Giuliani told Hutchinson, “We are going to the Capitol, it’s going to be great, the president is going to be there, he’s going to look powerful.”

5. “Mike deserves it”

Hutchinson testified that she heard Meadows tell Cipollone that Trump agreed with the mob shouting “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol. “You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it, he doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong,” Meadows said, according to Hutchinson.

She went on to describe Trump’s mindset on January 7 — that the rioters didn’t do anything wrong. Instead, Trump believed, “The people who did something wrong that day was Mike Pence not standing with him.”

6. Pardons were on the table — and Mark Meadows wanted one

We knew from prior testimony that a half-dozen members of Congress inquired about pardons after January 6. Hutchinson on Tuesday testified that both Meadows and Giuliani reached out to Trump about potential pardons after the attack on the Capitol.

In addition, she testified that Trump wanted to promise a pardon to everyone who stormed the Capitol in his January 7 speech and was encouraged to do so by Meadows. However, White House counsel made clear that “they didn’t think it was a good idea.”

7. A witness-tampering chaser

Hutchinson’s revelations were so numerous, it often seemed there was a new bombshell every few minutes. And when she wrapped up her testimony, Rep. Liz Cheney, in her closing statement, offered a bombshell of her own: There had been efforts to intimidate witnesses called to testify before the committee.

Without naming the witnesses or who was doing the intimidation, she showed statements received in advance of their depositions or testimony by witnesses appearing before the committee. One read: “I’m protecting who I need to protect ... I’ll continue to stay in good graces in Trump World. And they have reminded me a couple of times Trump does read transcripts and just to keep that in mind.”

As we see more and more western countries looking to regulate the internet in order to stifle speech they dislike, we’ve noted how much these efforts seem to be almost directly modeled on how China censors the internet. You might think that would be a reason to run in the other direction, but too many policymakers seem to now view China’s Great Firewall as a success story to be followed. And, now they may get some new ideas, as China has pushed out a draft of revisions to its regulations regarding online commenting. And, while some of it is unclear, it appears to include a provision saying that services that enable comments need to have tools in place to review every comment before it can be viewed on the site.

Specifically, the draft regulations include this section:

Establish and complete information security systems for the review and management, real-time inspection, emergency response, and the acceptance of reports for post comments, to review the content of post comments before publication, and promptly discover and address unlawful and negative information, and report it to the internet information departments.

For somewhat obvious reasons, that’s raising some concerns. As the Tech Review article linked above notes, online comments and other more real-time communications have always been a sort of loophole regarding the Great Firewall, as discussions on sensitive topics often breakthrough there, even if only to be deleted later. However, this new rule seems to be setting up a system to block even that.

There’s a need for a stand-alone regulation on comments because the vast number makes them difficult to censor as rigorously as other content, like articles or videos, says Eric Liu, a former censor for Weibo who’s now researching Chinese censorship at China Digital Times. 

“One thing everyone in the censorship industry knows is that nobody pays attention to the replies and bullet chats. They are moderated carelessly, with minimum effort,” Liu says. 

But recently, there have been several awkward cases where comments under government Weibo accounts went rogue, pointing out government lies or rejecting the official narrative. That could be what has prompted the regulator’s proposed update.

Tech Review quotes people saying that it’s unlikely (for now) that Beijing will require everyone to pre-review every comment (recognizing that’s likely to be impossible), but that it will put pressure on sites to be much more proactive, and that it could force this “feature” to be used on highly controversial topics.

It does seem that a straightforward reading of the law is that it requires sites to at least build out the functionality to pre-approve all comments if need be, even if it does not need to be on all the time.

There are some other features in the new regulations, including granting more power to who can block comments, suggesting that content creators themselves will have more power to censor comments in response to their content (rather than relying on the service’s in-house censors to do so).

Also, I note that part of these requirements would make Elon Musk and others who insist that every user should be “verified” even if their identities are not disclosed publicly. As the rules require:

Follow the principle of ‘real names on file, but whatever you want up front’ , to conduct verification of identification information for registered users, and must not provide post comment services to users whose identification information has not been verified.

So, for all of the folks out there insisting that all internet users who are commenting should have identifying information on tap, in case it’s needed, just know that you’re following in the footsteps of Chinese censors.

And, of course, the new regulations also seek to tie that verified identity to China’s infamous social credit scoring system, though amusingly this is framed as part of privacy protections.

Establish and complete systems for the protection of users’ personal information: the handling of users’ personal information shall comply with the principles of legality, propriety, necessity, and creditworthiness; disclose rules for handling personal information: giving notice of the goals and methods of handling personal information, the types of personal information to be handled, the period for retention, and other such matters; and obtain the consent of the individuals in accordance with law, except as otherwise provided by laws and administrative regulations.

The people pushing for similar ideas in Europe and the US insist that it won’t be abused, but we can look to China — and the fact that many of the proposed regulations we’re seeing today originated as part of China’s Great Firewall for censorship to see where they likely lead.

The January 6 hearings have been damning. Hutchinson’s testimony took them to a new level.

In one fell swoop, former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson transformed the story of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Hutchinson, who was a top deputy to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, revealed a series of stunning details about the events of the Capitol riot during her testimony to the January 6 committee. Hutchinson’s testimony suggests that the president knew in advance that violence was a possibility that day, and may very well have approved of it. He instructed his supporters to go to the Capitol, knowing that they were armed, and planned to join them personally once they arrived. After he was prevented from going personally, he told top aides that his vice president deserved the “hang Mike Pence” chants and that the rioters weren’t doing anything wrong.

Just a few days ago, Donald Trump attempted to downplay the day’s events, describing them as “a simple protest that got out of hand.” This was never credible, but Hutchinson’s testimony has simply demolished it. What once may have plausibly been described as an inchoate violent mob egged on by the president now looks much more like an attempted coup d’état.

How Hutchinson’s testimony changed what we knew about January 6

To understand how Hutchinson changed what we knew about the Capitol attack, it’s helpful to focus on four key moments in her testimony.

1) In a January 2, 2021, conversation, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani told Hutchinson that “we are going to the Capitol, it’s going to be great, the president is going to be there.” When she asked Meadows about what Giuliani said, her boss warned that “things might get real, real bad on January 6.” In the following days, the White House received repeated warnings from intelligence agencies that the rally might turn violent; neither Trump nor Meadows did anything.

This not only indicates that the White House had warning of a very serious risk of violence at the rally, but raises the question of whether the violence was actually planned — that is, what specifically “real, real bad” referred to.

2) On the morning of the attack, when Trump was informed that people in the crowd for his speech had weapons, Hutchinson heard the president say, “I don’t care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.”

This is the strongest evidence we’ve had that the president had direct and advance warning on the day of the attack that his crowd was prepared for violence, and that he then proceeded to instruct these people to march on the Capitol, indifferent at best that those weapons might be used there. “They’re not here to hurt me” could be read a couple of ways: It could simply be downplaying any threat to Trump’s person, but it could also suggest he believed that they were there to hurt someone else.

3) After his speech, Trump had planned to personally travel to the Capitol with the rioters. Hutchinson was informed by another White House aide that Secret Service agents attempted to take the car back to the White House instead, citing ongoing violence. In response, Trump reportedly tried to physically seize control of the wheel from a Secret Service agent in a failed attempt to drive to the Capitol.

This is the one key detail that Hutchinson herself did not witness, so we can’t be as confident that it happened as described. Nevertheless, the story — together with other evidence, including National Security Council chat logs released by the committee — provides new and strong reasons to believe that the president was set on leading the Capitol mob, even after it turned violent.

4) When the president returned to the White House, he met with Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone and discussed the rioters chanting “hang Mike Pence” in the halls of the Capitol. Hutchinson heard Meadows say, “You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

Hutchinson is not the first committee source to describe Trump as approving the idea of Pence’s execution. But hearing more confirmation, together with testimony that he believed that the crowd assaulting police officers and ransacking the Capitol was doing nothing wrong, paints an even clearer picture of a president who not only condoned the violence, but actively approved of it.

Put together, and assuming the details are true, we now have good reason to believe that the violence of the day was not accidental but intentional: that Trump wanted a violent mob to attack the Capitol on his behalf, to use force to disrupt Congress’s certification of the election results and thus give him a chance at illegally holding onto the presidency.

It appears, in short, to be a kind of attempted regime change: a coup that we would have no problem describing as such in any other country but our own.

Legal commentators are already suggesting that the evidence presented by Hutchinson could fuel criminal charges against Trump, such as seditious conspiracy — with one calling it “the smoking gun” necessary to go after the former president. Whether Attorney General Merrick Garland chooses to act on this evidence is an open question; so far, he has appeared very reticent to pursue former Trump officials on issues relating to January 6.

I don’t have much faith that the gravity of this charge will change the way Republicans think and act about Donald Trump. Perhaps this time will be different, and it will prove too much for rank-and-file Republicans — and even for craven power-seekers like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. When it comes to Trump’s offenses, “this time will be different” has a poor track record.

Yet those of us in the press should not judge the import of Hutchinson’s testimony purely by its likely legal and political consequences. One of the most important roles of the press is to tell the truth: to inform the public about what is happening in their country, describing it accurately and honestly to the best of our ability.

And to that end, it is important to be as clear as possible about what Cassidy Hutchinson has done. She told us, in no uncertain terms, that the sitting president at the very least condoned a violent attack that he knew ahead of time was likely — behavior that is, itself, an assault on the foundations of American government. What we do with that, as a democracy, is up to us.