Bob Daemmrich/Zuma

As the moral panic about trans youth spreads, a dozen states have passed laws, mostly driven by Republican legislators, which prevent trans students from participating on girls’ sports teams. But in some states, these bills are facing unexpected opponents: Republican governors.

Thus far, only one Republican governor has successfully thwarted his state’s efforts to bring state law into high school sports. But three Republicans have joined Democrats in Kentucky, Kansas, and Louisiana in taking a stand against laws that target nonexistent problems. Here are their reasons.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb

Last month, Holcomb took a pragmatic approach in vetoing a bill that would have banned trans girls from participating in girls’ sports, arguing that the vague language of the legislation would open schools up to lawsuits. He further added that at no point in the past 10 years had a trans girl sought to compete on a girls’ team in Indiana.

“The presumption of the policy laid out in HEA 1041 is that there is an existing problem in K-12 sports in Indiana that requires further state government intervention,” he wrote. “It implies that the goals of consistency and fairness in competitive female sports are not currently being met. After thorough review, I find no evidence to support either claim even if I support the overall goal.”

Because a veto override in Indiana requires only a simple majority in the state House and Senate, HEA 1041 might still become law. 

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox

The most compelling and compassionate rebuke of anti-trans athletics legislation came from Cox, who issued a five-page statement last month outlining the logistical and moral downsides of the state’s proposed anti-trans sports bill.

“I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism,” Cox wrote. “I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion.”

He went on to state that among the 75,000 kids participating in high school sports in Utah, four are trans, and only one plays girls’ sports. He also noted the high rates of suicidality and attempted suicide among trans youth in general:

Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly. For that reason, as much as any other, I have taken this action in the hope that we can continue to work together and find a better way.

But the state legislature did not share Cox’s concern about those four kids. Three days after Cox vetoed the bill, the state legislature voted to override it.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum

In 2021, Burgum vetoed a bill that would ban trans participation in school sports, on the grounds that it was legislating a nonexistent problem.

“To date there has not been a single recorded incident of a transgender girl attempting to play on a North Dakota girls’ team,” Burgum wrote in a statement, adding that the state’s High School Activities Association already had regulations regarding when and how trans kids could compete in sex-separated sports. He concluded, “This bill would unnecessarily inject the state into a local issue by creating a ban with myriad unforeseen consequences.”

The state Senate then failed to garner the two-thirds majority needed to override the governor’s veto, and the bill was laid to rest.

Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto/Zuma

Earlier this month, in one of the biggest labor wins in recent memory, workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse voted to unionize. Organizers celebrated; Sen. Bernie Sanders congratulated; and President Joe Biden warned, “Amazon, here we come.”

But the retail behemoth is pushing back. The company is seeking an election do-over, according to a legal filing obtained by the Associated Press.

Amazon outlined 25 objections against the union. They say that organizers intimidated workers to vote for the union, inappropriately distributed cannabis to workers, and failed to control media presence at the polls, among other objections. An attorney for the Amazon Labor Union called the claims “patently absurd.”

The move is part of a general push by Amazon to delegitimize the union victory. The company also has said the National Labor Relations Board had “inappropriate and undue influence” on the result for bringing a lawsuit against the company in March for an illegal labor practice.

Amazon’s own behavior during the union drive wasn’t exactly beyond reproach. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote earlier this month, the company required workers to attend anti-union propaganda sessions and shelled out $3,200 per day for professional union-busters. Early on in the pandemic, Amazon fired worker Christian Smalls for helping lead a walk-out over Covid safety precautions. Smalls went on the lead the union fight—and win.

The results of an Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, has also been disputed, but this time by the NLRB. The union drive in Alabama initially failed, but the NLRB argued last year that the location of a voting box inside an Amazon-branded tent tainted the election. Workers voted again earlier this year, but the results are still too close to call.

A second Staten Island warehouse is set to vote on unionization on April 25.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

At his State of the Union address on March 1, as the coronavirus’ Omicron variant was cresting, President Joe Biden laid out his strategy for managing the pandemic. “Covid-19 need no longer control our lives,” he declared. “If you’re immunocompromised or have some other vulnerability, we have treatments and free high-quality masks,” he said. Overall, though, “it’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again. People working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office.”

Since then, a new Omicron subvariant, called BA.2, has emerged, and infection rates are showing signs of rebounding, especially in the Northeast. On cue, Washington, DC, has just endured one of its biggest superspreader events since then-President Donald Trump’s infamous mask-free party celebrating the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, back in September 2020, months before the emergence of vaccines. Here’s the New York Times:

At least 53 people have tested positive for the coronavirus since attending The Gridiron Club and Foundation’s annual dinner last Saturday in Washington, the group’s president confirmed on Friday.

The Gridiron Club dinner, an annual white-tie roast between journalists and presidential administrations, was held at the Renaissance Hotel. But a night of good-natured ribbing has devolved into an outbreak of cases among Washington’s elite, including members of Congress, members of the president’s cabinet and journalists.

Biden didn’t attend the event, but several people in his circle did, including some who have since tested positive: Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister. Another Cabinet member who was present, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, announced on Twitter on April 9 that come down with Covid, adding that “thankfully my symptoms are mild.”

Whether or not anyone falls seriously ill from a Covid case picked up at the soiree, the incident is a reminder that the coronavirus is still very much with us. As Times opinion writer Sarah Wildman noted in a Saturday column, “estimates suggest about 3 percent to 4 percent of Americans are immunosuppressed,” and thus remain vulnerable to serious illness from an exposure to the virus.  Their number includes Wildman’s teenage daughter, a cancer survivor. 

Maybe Biden was right that Covid should no longer dominate our lives. But that shouldn’t mean reestablishing the pre-pandemic status quo. “Returning to what once was is not possible for all; we need, instead, a new normal, one that recognizes that everyone deserves the chance to participate in daily life,” Wildman wrote. “In practical terms that could mean, say, that the family of a child undergoing chemotherapy might ask her classmates and teachers to don masks to protect her against Covid (and other diseases like flu), without having to sue the school to comply.” 

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

On Friday, police in South Texas’ Starr County charged a 26-year-old woman with murder and are holding her on a $500,000 bond, reports the McAllen-based Monitor. The crime, according to her accusers: She “knowingly cause[d] the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.”

It’s unclear whether the woman, identified as Lizelle Herrera, is being charged under Texas Senate Bill 8, which went into effect on September 1, 2021. The law banned abortion after cardiac activity can be detected, at around six weeks’ gestation, and added a new enforcement mechanism: It encouraged private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, and allows them to collect cash judgments of $10,000 from those they sue if successful. Many observers, including University of Chicago Law School professor Aziz Huq, have compared this aspect of SB 8 to Fugitive Slave Acts passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850, which empowered plantation owners to use freelance bounty hunters to capture escapees and terrorize free Black people. 

Since Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 8 into law last May, it has repeatedly fended off legal challenge from pro-choice advocates. In December 2021, the US Supreme Court upheld the law, but allowed other federal lawsuits against it to proceed, providing a narrow path for rescinding it in the future. In March, a ruling by the Texas Supreme Court effectively shut down that route, meaning that it will likely remain in place. 

The law immediately began “causing very real harm to pregnant Texans,” as my colleague Becca Andrews documented last November:

I have spent the past couple months reporting out of reproductive health clinics for a book project I’m working on, and I’ve seen Texans seeking care in Alabama, Kansas, and Tennessee. The one that sticks with me was a young woman who came to Huntsville, Alabama, after traveling to Jackson, Mississippi, where she was told she was barely over that clinic’s gestational limit. She had been traveling for almost a week and was exhausted. She told me it was only the second time in her life that she had ever left Texas.

Zaena Zamora, executive director of the Frontera Fund, a nonprofit that works to help pregnant people in deep southern Texas to get abortion care, was unsurprised by this anecdote. “The day after SB 8 went into effect, we had a caller who had to travel 15 hours overnight [by car] to Wichita, Kansas—she was seven weeks pregnant,” Zamora says. She is seeing unprecedented demand for help with travel and logistics. She told me that the group spent more on travel support just in the month of October than it did in the entire year of 2020.  

Zamora said that the barriers facing Texans who live in the Rio Grande Valley, a region of the state that is close to the border, are especially great. “We’re the furthest away from any state border,” she says. “Typically, the people that we help have to travel the furthest than any other person would typically have to travel in Texas…we’re looking at 12-plus hours to get to your appointment.” Many of the people the fund seeks to help don’t have paid time off, and that’s just the beginning—there’s childcare to consider, along with money for food, lodging, transportation. Sometimes the support of the fund isn’t enough. 

The Texas bill is novel because was purposely structured not to challenge Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion without excessive government restriction. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is currently mulling a case involving a Mississippi abortion law that could lead to the overturning of Roe. Its ruling is expected in June. According to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, if the conservative-dominated Supreme Court does move in that direction, “21 states have laws or constitutional amendments already in place that would make them certain to attempt to ban abortion as quickly as possible.”  

Lizelle Herrera, confined on a murder charge for exercising control over her own body, is now making headlines and trending on social media. Her case may soon be the rule, not the exception. 

Jim West/ZUMA

The right-wing grift, long a staple of the US political scene, reached a kind of apotheosis under Donald Trump, the reality TV mogul who built an empire licensing his name to various dodgy enterprises. Fittingly, the trope he rode to the presidency—that the United States needed to build a wall along our 2,000-mile southern border to keep out undesirables—also anchored a money-making scheme for some of Trump’s political allies, according to a 2020 federal indictment. Last week, one of the principles in the case, Brian Kolfage, agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and three tax charges after raising $25 million in a GoFundMe campaign called We Build the Wall.  

The most high-profile figure associated with the scheme, one-time Trump Svengali and “stop the steal” stalwart Steve Bannon, won’t deal with legal consequences for the alleged crime. That’s because on his last day in office—two weeks after the January 6, 2020, Capital riot—Trump pardoned Bannon. 

Even by the standards of right-wing griftery, We Build the Wall was bold stuff. According to the Justice Department’s 2020 press release, “to induce donors to donate to the campaign, Kolfage repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would ‘not take a penny in salary or compensation’ and that ‘100% of the funds raised…will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose’ because, as Bannon publicly stated, ‘we’re a volunteer organization.'” 

In reality, however, Kolfage “covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000,” while Bannon grabbed enough to “cover hundreds of thousands of dollars” in personal expenses. At a 2019 telethon to raise funds for the project, Bannon infamously joked that “we’re on the million-dollar yacht of Brian Kolfage. Brian Kolfage—who took all that money from Build the Wall.”

According to the indictment, the defendants actually did funnel We Build the Wall Funds into purchasing a yacht—a big 40-foot beauty they deemed “WarFighter.” It even appeared at one of those infamous “boat parades” to support Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020. 

And in case you were wondering, yes, Donald Trump Jr. praised Kolfage and We Build the Wall as “private enterprise at its finest” in 2018.

Donald Trump Jr. praised We Build The Wall and Brian Kolfage at a 2018 event: "This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.” pic.twitter.com/hOL25JoZPI

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) August 20, 2020

Kolfage is expected to enter his plea on April 21. He could face a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks after her confirmation as associate justice of the US Supreme Court on the South Lawn of the White House on April 8, 2022.Chris Kleponis/CNP/Zuma

On Friday, soon-to-be-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke to the historic moment of her ascension as the first Black woman to the United States Supreme Court on the White House lawn. 

In a tearful speech, Jackson paid tribute to her heritage as a Black woman descended from slaves, quoting Dr. Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise and noting that she rises to the nation’s highest court with the help of those who came before her. “The path was cleared for me so that I might rise to this occasion,” she said. “I do so now while bringing the gifts my ancestors gave. I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”

"In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States" — that was an amazing speech from Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson pic.twitter.com/gElMUgzPqN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 8, 2022

After a painful confirmation process in which Republicans sought to tarnish her image with unfounded accusations of being soft on pedophiles, the ceremony on Friday was a celebration of Jackson and the historic nature of her nomination and confirmation. Despite the ugliness of the past few weeks, Jackson spoke with optimism about the progress that her nomination represents.

“I strongly believe that this is a moment in which all Americans can take great pride,” she said. “We have come a long way toward perfecting our union. In my family it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Brian Cahn/ZUMA

More than a year after his supporters attacked the US Capitol, Donald Trump is finally voicing regret. No, not for pushing to overturn the 2020 presidential election or inciting violence. Instead, the former president is sad that he did not join his throng of supporters as they marched to the Capitol.

“Secret Service said I couldn’t go,” Trump claimed in a new interview with the Washington Post. “I would have gone there in a minute.”

He then deflected blame for the violence that eventually overtook the Capitol building, claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser should have done more to stop his supporters. That assertion, of course, is wildly untrue; Republican leaders, along with his own daughter, had reportedly begged Trump to intervene—and he declined to do so for hours, instead “gleefully” watching his supporters unleash violence on his White House television.

Trump’s admission that he wished he had marched to the Capitol—which contradicts Mark Meadows’ book that Trump never intended to march and that the entire thing had been planned “metaphorically”—is the latest evidence that the former president doesn’t have much contrition for the events of January 6. In fact, as the Justice Department has remained mum on whether it’s investigating Trump over the attempted coup, he’s appeared increasingly defiant. That emboldened stance was once again on display in the Post interview, where he also bragged about how many people participated in the Stop the Steal rally.

If Trump’s account here is true, then we have the Secret Service to thank for keeping Trump inside the White House. One can only imagine the significant escalation his presence would have sparked if his supporters saw the big man.

Matt MowersRobert F. Bukaty/AP

For years, Republicans have cried voter fraud, with few substantive examples. But, of late, there have been a few—from Republican politicians themselves. This week brings yet another one: Matt Mowers, a Republican candidate for Congress in New Hampshire, who voted twice in the 2016 presidential primaries, according to an Associated Press report yesterday. Mowers reportedly first voted in New Hampshire for Chris Christie, when he was a staffer for the former New Jersey governor. After Christie dropped out, he voted in New Jersey for Donald Trump.

This has two issues to it.

The main one is that you can’t do that. Mowers, like everyone else, is allowed to vote only once in elections. That’s based on federal law and the logic of democracy. The other is that Mowers—as a former State Department official under President Trump and a candidate in the 2022 midterm elections—has himself made calls to crack down on voter fraud and to implement new voting rules that amount to what my colleague Ari Berman has called “the coming coup.”

In this way, Mowers joins, most notably, Mark Meadows in an odd hypocrisy: members of the party calling the 2020 election stolen who might have done some voter fraud themselves.

Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, reportedly registered to vote somewhere he does not live. North Carolina is now investigating. Of course, he wrote in his memoir about the dangers of voter fraud. And, to add a bit more dissonance, Meadows is still being looked into for potentially helping plan January 6; we know he was texting Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about the riot. He also pushed the Department of Justice to challenge the 2020 election’s integrity. And, before he was chief of staff, Meadows was elected to Congress as a result of “extreme gerrymandering.”

As writer Alex Pareene recently pointed out, there’s a certain amount of self-actualization here. Quite a few Republicans are committing voter fraud and thus proving there is voter fraud. The Washington Post has reported plenty more examples—which means we probably are not “prepared for mass voter fraud basically being summoned into existence by the conservatives who think it is already widespread,” Pareene writes. Don’t forget: Trump literally asked his supporters to vote twice.

As we watch not-admitting-Trump-lost-in-2020 become a campaign necessity for Republicans, it is maddening to see anti-democracy shoehorned into law as a way of cracking down on…anti-democracy. The myth of a stolen election has become the impetus for the GOP to set up a mechanism to potentially steal elections. Each day, it seems more clear that the next time someone like Trump lies about winning, there’s much more of a chance they could pull it off.

January 6 was violent, visceral, and televised. However, even before that, I wondered if this, the stuff we’re seeing now, would be the stuff of a genuine overthrow: state-level changes to voting procedures, lawsuits, affidavits, legalese, bureaucratic changes to processes. Autocracy by paper cut.

Since the AP report came out, Mowers has faced his share of attacks. But, for now, he isn’t even dropping out of the race. He just told the local paper that Hillary Clinton, who tweeted that his actions were bad, is a menace. Meadows is still around.

What if many voters just don’t like democracy? Unfortunately, all the blog posts in the world calling out the hypocrisy won’t help.

Indigenous leaders and water protectors at a 2021 "Treaty People's Gathering" in Clearwater County, Minnesota, protesting the construction of Line 3Alex Kormann/AP

Earlier this year, I wrote about a unique lawsuit aiming to stop the further construction of Line 3, a tar-sands oil pipeline built in 2021 that stretches for 330 miles across northern Minnesota and has been fought fiercely for nearly a decade by an Indigenous-led movement. The suit had an unlikely plaintiff: Manoomin, a grain known in English as wild rice that grows throughout the wetlands of northern Minnesota and holds immeasurable significance for Anishinaabe people. A 2018 White Earth law gave rights to the plant, part of an international rights of nature movement that seeks to flip dominant legal frameworks on their head. According to the complaint filed in August, the construction of the pipeline threatened Manoomin’s “inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.”

Through a novel legal maneuver that used the rights of nature, treaty law, and the independent jurisdiction of tribal courts, it seemed possible that Line 3 could be halted, at least for a bit.

But the tactic didn’t pan out. On March 10, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals dismissed the August lawsuit against Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources filed by tribal leaders on behalf of Manoomin, citing a lack of legal precedent.

The lawsuit targeted a permit by the Department of Natural Resources that allowed pipeline owner, Canadian corporation Enbridge, to pump 5 billion gallons of water from the ground to clear the route for the pipeline construction. Not only was this permit given, “abruptly, unilaterally and without formal notice to tribal leaders (quasi-secretly), and without Chippewa consent,” but it would also negatively affect the level and quality of the surrounding waterways where Manoomin grows, the complaint alleged.  

The crux of the case was whether White Earth would be allowed to raise a legal claim in tribal court about something that happened off-reservation. When the Anishinaabe ceded their land to the United States, they retained what are called “usufructurary rights” to hunt, fish, and gather foods including wild rice as part of a series of treaties. The argument put forth by the mastermind of the case, White Earth tribal attorney Frank Bibeau, was that these treaty-protected rights extend into the ceded territories and could be enforced there by the White Earth Tribal Court. 

The court disagreed. “Such exercises of sovereignty must take into account the longstanding legal and judicial framework,” wrote Judges George W. Soule, Lenor Scheffler Blaeser, and David Harrington in their conclusion. “A tribal court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to hear claims based on a nonmember’s allegedly unlawful activities that occur off reservation,” and treaty law does not “confer tribal court jurisdiction” off-reservation.

The precedent they relied on is whats called the Montana doctrine, named for a 1981 ruling that allowed tribes to address “what is necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control international relations,” but the court maintained those powers do not extend to nonmembers off-reservation, such as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 

The judges weren’t outright dismissive of the historic lawsuit, though, commending the “efforts to expand jurisdiction by Band legislation and the use of Tribal Court to address matters such as raised in this case,” and encouraging similar efforts “as an exercise of inherent tribal sovereignty.”

In response to the dismissal, White Earth attorneys Bibeau and Joe Plummer filed a brief on April 7 requesting the court to reverse its order.

This lack of legal precedent presents a persistent problem for the rights-of-nature legal movement—a potentially transformative paradigm shift in environmental conservation that in the United States legal context remains almost entirely symbolic in its real world effects. It was thought that in the case of the Manoomin lawsuit, the addition of treaty rights and tribal court could combine to become one of the first successful rights-of-nature effort in the movement’s still-young history. With the release of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change this week that warned of the requirement for “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors,” the need for legal systems to adapt becomes all the more pressing. It would be even better if combating climate change and recognizing Indigenous sovereignty didn’t require unique legal strategies. And could be found in political will.

This article has been updated to reflect a brief filed to oppose the order from the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals.

Chris Kleponis/Pool/CNP/Zuma

More than a year into his presidency, Joe Biden trotted out his former boss, Barack Obama, to announce an improvement on the Affordable Care Act—and gin up some much-needed enthusiasm ahead of the midterms.

The change is minor, but consequential. Today, the administration announced a proposed fix to the “family glitch”: a problem in which some family members of ACA enrollees are ineligible for the premium tax credit they need to keep their coverage affordable. When individuals purchase health insurance through their employer, the ACA subsidizes costs exceeding 9.83 percent of household income, which is the ACA’s barometer for affordability. But affordability is determined by how much it costs to insure an individual, not including the individual’s family members. Consequently, some low-income workers who spend more than 9.83 percent of their household income on employer-provided health insurance for themselves and their families do not receive the subsidy.

Biden’s proposed rule would change that. There will still be a comment period, and it will take time to implement. But it’s something that Biden can do through executive order—avoiding the Sisyphean task of trying to convince gridlock experts like Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—that will help 1.2 million people get cheaper health care.

Today’s event marked an executive accomplishment—albeit one affecting a slim minority of the population—but it was primarily a bit of political theater by which Biden could reap the benefits of Obama’s charm. It was Obama’s first return to the White House in five years. The former president jokingly addressed “Vice President Joe Biden.” He reminisced on the difficulties of passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 despite strong Republican opposition. The two men laughed in front of cameras.

More than a year into his presidency, Joe Biden trotted out his former boss, Barack Obama, to announce an improvement on the Affordable Care Act—and had a little fun doing so. https://t.co/EOJLdNjkwW pic.twitter.com/J0sxb7Y0Vk

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 5, 2022

You can’t blame Biden’s attempt here: People like Obama. Sure, his approval rating dipped after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law—he joked today that the website crashing didn’t help—and Republicans regained the House in the 2010 midterms, stifling Obama’s ability to get much else done. But by the time Obama left office, 58 percent of Americans approved of his job performance, not far behind President Clinton’s approval rating (61 percent), according to the Pew Research Center.

And, after a decade of Republican promises to repeal and replace Obamacare—and three Supreme Court challenges that failed to undo the law—people are starting to get used to Obama’s signature legislative achievement. In 2017, more people viewed the ACA favorably than unfavorably, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and that trend has continued to the present day. In March 2022, 55 percent of Americans approved of the ACA, while 42 percent didn’t.

Why? Because, even if the law isn’t perfect, people like having health insurance. Protections for people with preexisting conditions are hugely popular, as is the rule that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until they’re 26. Unlike the infrastructure bill, whose benefits it will take years to reap, Obamacare has immediately and measurably improved people’s lives.

But, whether because of flawed messaging, the material benefits of culture wars, or the insufficiency of technocratic fixes, it’s been hard for voters to feel that Democrats have actually helped them. The midterms might be a foregone conclusion. But if Democrats want to win the next presidential election, or any, they need to keep finding ways to make people’s lives better—and brag about it.

ZUMA

One of Twitter’s most irresponsible users is now its largest shareholder.

Yep, Elon Musk—the Tesla executive with a storied history of inciting harassment, spreading misinformation, and trolling lawmakers with extremely immature digs on the social media platform—recently snatched up 9.2 percent of the company. 

The news, which sent stock prices surging over 27 percent on Monday, has already produced a string of absurd developments: Donald Trump supporters are now petitioning Musk to allow their fearless leader back on the platform. Musk, who has previously suggested that Twitter doesn’t adhere to free speech, appears to be teasing some big changes, in addition to crowdsourcing an “edit” button. As for the billionaire’s detractors, they’ve been flooding Twitter with reminders that Musk—again, one of the most powerful men in the world—falsely attacked a random dude as a pedophile after he dared to poke fun at Musk’s mini-submarine.

I’m not one to pay much attention to our tech billionaire overlords (though I am obsessed with Amanda Seyfried’s brilliant performance of Elizabeth Holmes and the disgraced Theranos CEO’s horrendous dance moves). But the Musk news happens to fit neatly into a Venn diagram of some of the worst parts of our current news cycle. That includes Trump’s flailing efforts at Truth Social—hence his supporters rallying for a Twitter return—and the complete mainstreaming of false and malicious accusations of pedophilia within the Republican Party.

Here’s to hoping that Twitter, which apparently didn’t care to read Mother Jones in 2019, can convince Musk to start behaving like a normal human being. Until then, refresh your memory with a greatest hits of Musk’s trouble-making tweets here.

Former former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally for Georgia GOP candidates at Banks County Dragway in Georgia.Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Constitution Journal/AP

Three days into his first term as a Republican congressman, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, then just 33, pulled on a smoke hood and fled the Capitol as rioters invaded the House chamber on January 6. He later voted to certify the election results and ended up being one of nine Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. Since then, Meijer has suffered death threats, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge, and now the indignity of having Trump make fun of his last name at a political rally in his home state.

Last night, Trump appeared at a sports hall outside Detroit to promote the candidacy of a couple of low-level Republican candidates for state attorney general and secretary of state. As is often the case when he shows up to help another candidate, Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and insulting one of his enemies, in this case fellow Republican Meijer. 

“A guy who spells his name ‘M-E-I-J-E-R’ but they pronounce it ‘MY-er,’” Trump said. “The hell kind of a spelling is that? ‘MY-er.’ I said, ‘How the hell do you pronounce this guy’s name?’”

“Nobody knows him,” Trump said of Meijer. “He’s done nothing in Washington. I said, ‘How do you pronounce his name? Is it ‘MAY-jer’? ‘MY-jer’? They said it’s ‘MY-er.’ How the hell do you get ‘MY-er’ out of it?”

Trump attacking Peter Meijer for the spelling of his last name pic.twitter.com/klNHboIKF8

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 3, 2022

While Trump may have thought he was making a great joke, people in Michigan may not have been so amused. The congressman’s last name is Dutch, and there’s a decent-sized Dutch American community in Western Michigan that tends to vote conservative Republican—a constituency Trump’s advisors apparently didn’t bother to brief him on. Meijer is also a household name in Michigan that adorns a beloved local chain of supermarkets that have, among other things, given away millions of dollars worth of free prescription drugs to treat diabetes and heart disease, as well as antibiotics and prenatal vitamins, the sort of meaningful philanthropy the Trump family has never even contemplated.

ZUMA

As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote in her curtain-raiser, Republicans were well aware going into the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson that they had very little to criticize in Jackson’s record, and were therefore likely to resort to hypocritical, dark-money attacks to oppose President Joe Biden’s nominee.

But dark-money attacks would end up taking a backseat to false, malicious smears that inevitably devolved the Jackson hearings into a Republican conspiracy circus. Notably, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and others tried, falsely and deceptively, to portray Jackson as soft on child pornography defendants, perhaps in an attempt to signal their allegiance to the party’s bizarre QAnon fringe. (Read more here on the right’s history of turning child abuse into a political weapon.) 

A Quinnipiac poll released late last week shows that their bad faith strategy may have backfired. More than half (52 percent) of respondents disapproved of how Republican senators handled the process, and only 27 percent approved. Democratic senators got a much more favorable review: 42 percent approval vs 32 percent disapproval. (These ratings were the reverse, more or less, of how people viewed senators’ handling of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, notes the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake.) 

But don’t expect Cruz and Hawley to care much about the broader public reception. The intended audience for their malicious performances absolutely ate it up—and that’s likely all that matters to these senators.

ZUMA

In his first term, North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn has been an embarrassment. We’ve seen his awful political chattering, like calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug”, and then the more personally damning, like getting arrested for driving with a revoked license. 

But none of that seems to have pissed off GOP leadership the way Cawthorn’s most recent controversy has after the 26-year-old Republican alleged in an interview to have received invitations from lawmakers to participate in orgies while also witnessing these lawmakers do cocaine. (Specifically, Cawthorn said he saw someone doing a “key bump.”) House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy swiftly summoned Cawthorn into his office for a talk. Local Republicans got even more unhappy. And some in the North Carolina GOP, including US Senator Thom Tillis, are beginning to put more public weight behind a primary challenge.

This could be, the GOP has indicated, the end for Cawthorn. “I just told him he’s lost my trust,” McCarthy said in a rare public rebuke Wednesday, adding that there wasn’t any evidence to back Cawthorn’s claims. “I mean, he’s got a lot of members very upset.” 

“I told him you can’t make statements like that, as a member of Congress, that affect everybody else and the country as a whole.”

But do Americans really share McCarthy’s frustration? As someone who has never attended a drug-fueled sex party—though truly no judgment if you have—I can say with full confidence Cawthorn’s allegations do not affect my life. But the clear panic Cawthorn’s claims have triggered within a party that has otherwise extended gratuitous tolerance to members hobnobbing with white supremacists is noteworthy here. It’s all to wonder what’s behind the urgent concern rankling Washington after Cawthorn opened his mouth.

Well, it looks like the answer might be the anxiety of spouses wondering if their dearly beloveds could be one of those who may or may not have invited Cawthorn to an orgy. That’s according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona, who asked Republicans why this controversy has finally forced them to draw the line with Cawthorn:

I asked a bunch of Republicans why *this* was the thing that broke the camel’s back with Cawthorn.

Their response: the orgy & cocaine allegations implicated fellow Republicans. And some members were getting questions from concerned constituents — and spouses — about the claims. https://t.co/S2qPzk8fqD

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) March 31, 2022

We may never know if Cawthorn’s claims were ever real. (For the record, McCarthy said that Cawthorn either exaggerated or was not telling the truth.) But let this whole episode show you that for Republicans, hell hath no fury like a spouse suddenly wondering if you’ve attended a cocaine-fueled orgy.

Pennsylvania SPCA

Earlier this week, two twisted individuals in Philadelphia sicced their dogs on a black cat named Buddy. They encouraged the dogs, repeatedly shouting, “Good boy!” as the cat yowled. The incident was captured on surveillance footage which I won’t share here because I don’t recommend watching it. But, hey, you know how to use Google.

I am pleased to announce that Buddy is “hanging in there,” in the words of the Pennsylvania SPCA, which has been providing the little guy with round-the-clock care. I might be biased, since I’m the proud owner of a little black cat who bears a strong resemblance to Buddy, but tell me this photo of the kitty hooked up to all sorts of machines doesn’t bring a tear to your eye:

BUDDY UPDATE: Last night, Buddy was sent to an ER vet to be closely monitored. He made it through the night. He continues to be in extremely critical condition.

We are (very) cautiously optimistic.

To donate toward his medical care: https://t.co/KD0Gk6YsjS or venmo @pspca pic.twitter.com/bdvcL5bZsq

— Pennsylvania SPCA (@PSPCA) March 23, 2022

Today, the PSPCA shared a video of a heavily sedated Buddy contentedly kneading a blanket—and melting my heart.

No $5 Friday today. Just love for Buddy.
⁰
Donate if you can. Send good thoughts if you want. And take solace in how many people across the country and globe are pulling for this sweet boy.
⁰
He's making muffins this morning.
 https://t.co/4oNPWEXhYX pic.twitter.com/wlX68q2MSz

— Pennsylvania SPCA (@PSPCA) March 25, 2022

Buddy was a stray, HuffPost reports, but received food and water from a local family. PSPCA is accepting donations for Buddy’s medical care. Meanwhile, local authorities are on the lookout for the two men responsible for the attack. If found, they could face felony animal cruelty charges.

Buddy is not out of the woods yet, but PSPCA is “cautiously optimistic” he’ll pull through. Please send this beautiful boy some good vibes.

5:15 p.m. ET: Two juvenile suspects have surrendered to authorities, the PSCPCA said in a statement. They have been taken into custody pending a custodial determination hearing.

Russia's Vladimir Putin.Kremlin Pool/Russian Look via ZUMA Press

The New York Times ran a piece Wednesday about US right-wingers parroting Kremlin talking points and swapping pro-Russian conspiracy theories with Moscow—most notably the unproven claim that the US government has been funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

As the Times reported, war-related mentions of “bioweapons labs” in Russian- and English-language media and social media have more than doubled since early March, when Moscow gave the theory a fine boost. On March 6, its Defense Ministry released a televised statement in which Russian officials claimed to have uncovered “traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.”

Just a few days later, on March 9, Fox News host Tucker Carlson—whose clips, as my colleague David Corn first reported, are being incorporated into the state media’s official propaganda strategy—dutifully aired the Defense Ministry’s statement. “Nuland just confirmed that the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie and a conspiracy theory and crazy and immoral to believe, is in fact, totally and completely true,” Carlson said. “Whoa!” (He was referring to Senate testimony by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who responded to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) by saying that Ukraine does have “biological research facilities,” which US officials are worried could fall into Russian hands.) 

On the day after Carlson’s broadcast, as Corn reported, Putin’s minions issued a memo with “recommendation for coverage” that ordered state media outlets to use Carlson clips on their programs. The same memo also dealt with the biolab conspiracy, Corn writes:

[It] highlights this bioweapons allegation as a top talking point for Russian media, noting the message should be that the “activities of military biological laboratories with American participation on the territory of Ukraine carried global threats to Russia and Europe.” The document goes further, encouraging its recipients to allege that the “the United States is working on a ‘biogenocide of the Eastern Slavs.’”

That’s a nutty claim. Yet it’s not unreasonable to distrust US government officials, too, on the topic of military conflicts. You may recall the Pentagon Papers, or the military’s coverup of civilian casualties in Syria, or the Air Force’s lies about nuclear mishaps. And who can forget how the Bush administration used bogus claims that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade and occupy. The resulting lack of trust makes it easy for our adversaries, foreign and domestic, to cast doubt upon government claims.

So I reached out by email to a person who knows a thing or two about the subject: an American bioweapons expert with security clearances who has worked closely with government officials but is not connected to the administration. This expert agreed to be quoted anonymously, and the upshot was that America’s primary post-Cold War mission in Eastern Europe has been the safeguarding and containment of some very scary stuff.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unsuccessful 1991 coup against Gorbachev, the USSR dissolved and Ukraine gained independence and recognition by the West, my source noted, and “that left a big problem, because Ukraine still housed all manner of nuclear and chemical weapons from the Soviet era, left behind—thousands of warheads, in fact.”

The Nunn-Lugar Act of 1991 created a pool of money to pay the Ukrainians to get rid of their WMDs. And—”to their ever-lasting regret!” the source said—Ukraine agreed to denuclearize. For a number of years, “the US has quietly been helping Ukraine to dismantle its Soviet-era chem/bio stuff. It seems possible that some US expertise (and possibly a small number of US personnel?) remains in Ukraine, established to retire safely the Soviet-era WMD. I have no specific idea what chem/bio matériel was left behind. So, at the core of those right-wingnut conspiracy theories may be a small kernel of truth, but one that’s being distorted beyond any (responsible) recognition.” 

“Prior to Putin’s war,” the expert summarized, “the US had certainly paid the Ukrainians to dismantle WMD, and also sent experts to help with it. But given the little of that story that is public knowledge, so much of that collaborative de-armament work was done secretly/covertly—for obvious and understandable reasons.”

I was curious whether my source agreed with former Pentagon official Andrew Weber—and Nuland, for that matter—about Moscow’s possible motivation for spreading false claims about bioweapons in Ukraine. Indeed, the person said, “Putin might try to use the existence of any existing Ukrainian labs that deal with chem/bio, and whatever US connections these may—or may not—have, as a pretext under some kind of false-flag operation. Putin often accuses his adversaries of precisely the same thing that he’s doing.”

Jay Godwin/Planet Pix/Zuma

Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as secretary of state, died today of cancer, her family said in a statement. She was 84.

Born in Prague to a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution during World War II, Albright immigrated to the United States in 1948. As ambassador to the United Nations during Bill Clinton’s first term, she sparred with Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, blocking his bid for a second term. Around this time, the United States failed to take decisive action against the genocide in Rwanda, which Albright later called “my deepest regret from my years in public service.”

As secretary of state during Clinton’s second term, she worked to resolve conflicts in the Balkans, promoted NATO expansion, and was an early proponent of US military action in Iraq—although she opposed the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion.

In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “During her tenure,” the announcement of her prize states, “she worked to enlarge NATO and helped lead the Alliance’s campaign against terror and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, pursued peace in the Middle East and Africa, sought to reduce the dangerous spread of nuclear weapons, and was a champion of democracy, human rights, and good governance across the globe.”

White House/Zuma

Last week, President Biden approved a budget that included no additional Covid spending. None.

The consequences will be drastic. A federal program that reimburses health care providers for vaccinating, testing, and treating uninsured patients is set to end by April 5. The government will scale back its allocations of monoclonal antibodies. And the White House just announced that it won’t have enough funding to purchase fourth vaccine doses for all Americans.

How can this happen after all we’ve learned? Both political parties are responsible: President Joe Biden had proposed $22.5 billion in additional Covid funding, while many Republicans opposed any further Covid spending at all. A coalition of Democrats then refused the alternative option of repurposing individual states’ unspent pandemic relief funds. Add in concerns about the budget deficit, and, in the end, Covid efforts ended up with no funding at all.

But a still-mutating virus isn’t bound by the government’s whims. As Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic last week, “Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary.” Public health experts warn that the coronavirus is not yet endemic, and that it’s too early for the government to get complacent.

The government’s failure to include Covid relief funding in its budget could have serious repercussions down the line. It could discourage the roughly 27 million uninsured Americans from seeking treatment if they become sick with Covid. It will thwart the United States’ attempt to export vaccines to countries that still need them, potentially allowing new variants to emerge as the virus continues to circulate. And it could leave the United States unprepared for the Omicron subvariant that is already increasing case counts in Europe.

We’ve been here before. Covid case counts are plummeting. Masks are coming off. Many yearn to put the pandemic behind us. That doesn’t mean we have the luxury of not preparing for what we know is potentially coming.

It seems that tests, vaccines, and hospital beds are always available when you don’t need them, and never when you do. Thanks to our collective failure to plan ahead, we’re screwing ourselves over in the event of another Covid surge. Now, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t come to that.

Andrew Spear/Getty

The Republican Party is expected to win the 2022 midterms. Mostly, this has been pegged to discontent with the Democratic Party and the fact that the president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. And that has left it unclear what the Republicans’ policy agenda actually constitutes. While House Republicans have said they want to implement a redux of the 1994 “Contract with America” (they’re getting help from original architect, and bad person, Newt Gingrich), it’s unclear if that’s the policy of the party. Mitch McConnell told a reporter that he’d “let [them] know” when he had figured out the Senate Republican agenda. And Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s plan—while ticking traditional Republican boxes of xenophobia and hatred of the poor—has not been accepted by McConnell.

But, last night, we got a step closer to figuring out the core of the Republican message in 2022. Here’s a video that explains the basics of the policies:

Last night’s Ohio GOP Senate debate: “Do you think … for the betterment of the Republican Party it’s time for Donald Trump to stop talking about the 2020 election and move on?”

Just one candidate, Matt Dolan, raised his hand. Timken, Mandel, Gibbons and Vance stared ahead. pic.twitter.com/h4UGOhOMVv

— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) March 22, 2022

I found that helpful.

It outlines the fundamentals of the GOP’s platform: Four of five members of the party don’t believe in democracy enough to admit that Donald Trump lost in 2020. The imagery is well placed here. It leaves one Republican waving his hand in a room of people staring ahead, silent. That’s just enough space to pretend the party has good folks there, fighting back. Usually, news highlights the loud, even bombastic, defenses of Trump by budding authoritarians. But this clip is a more solid explainer. It’s the silent complicity of adults trying to stand very still.

It’s particularly interesting because this video is from a GOP Senate debate in Ohio. As happened often in 2020, the race has been haunted by the question: Who will Trump endorse? This groveling has been, it seems, fun for the former president. And, as the Associated Press noted, the race is the most indicative in the country—with all the candidates gleefully sucking up—of how much the GOP has changed.

The current frontrunner is Mike Gibbons, former co-chair of Trump’s campaign in Ohio and a businessman who dabbled in racism against Asians in a podcast in 2013. But he has gotten less attention on the national level than the two can-you-believe-they-went-kind-of-fascist? candidates: J.D. Vance and Josh Mandel.

Vance, backed by the Silicon Valley money of Peter Thiel, had a Washington Post profile wondering how he kind of stopped believing in democracy. (It used his beard to explain it?) And Mandel got the Politico treatment, in which 75 people told the publication he had “been nothing if not an eager reader and rider of political currents.” (I have to mention here that Mandel and Gibbons squared up at another debate in a near fight, by the way.) 

In any case, the gist of both Vance and Mandel is that, at the end of the day, people running for the US Senate will do anything to get power. Each right-wing radicalization can come down to the simple fact that a lot of Americans like what they’re doing. Vance and Mandel thought it would help them get elected. So, they went for it. Anti-democracy can be a career move, too, after all.

While both Vance and Mandel trail Gibbons, they are outpolling the one person who raised their hand: Matt Dolan.

To be clear about a small point here, it’s not even that these Republicans are saying it would run contrary to the “betterment” of the country for Trump to drop his continuing coup chatter. It is that they are afraid to even say the party should “move on” from the last election for political gain.

No one asked them to concede Trump lost. No one asked them to say he broke democracy. All they’d have to say is something like: “Real people care about real issues—kitchen table! meat and potatoes! honest folks!—and I want to talk about that to win in 2022.” Even this dirge of candidate-speak is just too much for them though.

A girl on a train from Kyiv that arrived in Przemysl, Poland in March.Picture Alliance/Getty

More than 10 million people in Ukraine have been forced to flee their homes, the United Nation’s High Commissioner on Refugees said on Sunday. This staggering number, and other new estimates from the UN, quantify the scale of the exodus of Ukrainians from what was a thriving and tranquil country up until the Russian army invaded, unprovoked, less than a month ago. 

About 3.3 million of this 10 million have left the country and become refugees in neighboring nations. More than 1.5 million of those refugees are children, the UN’s children’s fund, UNICEF, said earlier this week—amounting to almost one child per second leaving Ukraine. “Every day in Ukraine from the start of the war, more than 75,000 children have become refugees,” a UNICEF spokesman said at a press briefing. “Every single minute, 55 children have fled their country. That is, a Ukrainian child has become a refugee almost every single second since the start of the war.”

Ukrainian refugees have scattered through nearby countries in Eastern Europe. The majority, about 2 million, have gone to Poland, while half a million have fled to Romania. Smaller numbers have fled to Hungary, Moldova, and Slovakia. About 184,000 have gone to Russia.

Millions of other Ukrainians have been displaced within their own country, the chief of UNHCR Filippo Grandi said on Sunday on Twitter.

Among the responsibilities of those who wage war, everywhere in the world, is the suffering inflicted on civilians who are forced to flee their homes.

The war in Ukraine is so devastating that 10 million have fled — either displaced inside the country, or as refugees abroad.

— Filippo Grandi (@FilippoGrandi) March 20, 2022

The European Union has already enacted friendly legislation to ease the transition of Ukrainian refugees: One week into the Russian invasion, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that Ukrainians would be given rights to live and work in the EU for three years. (The US has also offered some Ukrainians temporary protected status.) 

The EU’s response to Ukrainian refugees has earned accolades around the globe, but it has also surfaced reminders of the less friendly treatment that Syrian refugees received in some European countries when they attempted to flee war within their own borders. This included pledges of hundreds of millions in EU funds to crack down on refugees arriving in Greece, and instances of officials in Hungary using tear gas and water canons on refugees.