2025-06-25 19:30:00
While public attention has largely been focused on the Middle East and on President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, Republicans in Congress are on the verge of passing massive Medicaid cuts as part of a budget bill that could lead to millions of Americans losing their health insurance benefits and, according to one recent estimate, thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.
While the GOP’s so-called “big, beautiful” bill is a smorgasbord of policy — potentially including everything from blocking AI regulation to restricting the power of the federal courts — perhaps the most consequential changes would be to Medicaid. The program, which covers low-income Americans of all ages, is now the country’s single largest insurer, covering more than 70 million people. The legislation approved by House Republicans, which is now being debated and amended by the Senate, would cut Medicaid spending by $793 billion over 10 years. The upshot is that 10.3 million fewer people would be enrolled in the program by 2034.
Those coverage losses would more than undo the progress the US has made in reducing the ranks of the uninsured over the past few years. On Tuesday, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the number of US adults without insurance in 2024 had fallen to 27.2 million, down from 31.6 million in 2020. The GOP bill would reverse those gains and then some within a decade.
The consequences would be much more severe than the mere loss of a government health insurance card. According to one analysis of the House bill published last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine by a trio of Harvard-affiliated researchers, those losses of Medicaid coverage would lead to fewer Americans reporting good health, fewer patients getting preventive health screenings, and, at the end of the day, between 8,200 and 24,600 additional annual deaths.
Senate Republicans are not going to adopt the House bill exactly as it is, which means any estimates of its effects are preliminary. But it appears likely GOP senators will keep at least two impactful provisions: new work requirements for many of the people on Medicaid and limits on the financing tools that the states can use to access more federal Medicaid funding. The Harvard study broke out the estimated effects by provision and the results are still foreboding: between 3,000 and 9,000 annual deaths attributable to Medicaid work requirements, and between 4,200 and 12,600 deaths if state provider taxes were completely eliminated.
Even short of the worst-case scenario, Americans’ health would be worse off under the Republican bill, according to researchers Adam Gaffney, David Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler. The number of Americans who have a personal doctor would drop by 700,000 under Medicaid work requirements; 285,000 fewer people would ever get their blood cholesterol checked, and 235,000 fewer patients would ever have their blood sugar tested. The number of women getting a recommended mammogram within the past 12 months would drop by nearly 139,000. And an additional 385,000 people would have to borrow money or skip paying other bills to afford their medical care. The people affected are low-income and disproportionately Black and Hispanic.
There is plenty of uncertainty in these projections. It is also hard to be sure how these policies would interact with each other: The Harvard researchers noted in their cumulative estimate of the House bill’s effects that there would likely be some overlap in the policies’ projected effects when combined together. Some of the people who lose their Medicaid coverage would be able to get insurance by other means, offsetting the losses to a degree that can be difficult to predict.
But the takeaway from the analysis is clear: A lot of people are going to suffer if these proposals become law.
The debate in the Senate has not yet concluded, and the bill could still change. Hospitals are busy on Capitol Hill, lobbying Republicans to reduce the spending cuts and warning lawmakers of the devastating consequences that the legislation would have. Some GOP senators are reportedly open to providing additional funding for rural hospitals, to relieve the impact on the facilities that would be hardest hit by the proposed Medicaid cuts.
But after Republicans narrowly failed to roll back Medicaid during Trump’s first term, they seem likely to succeed this time — a step backward from building a true universal health care system.
America’s lack of universal health care is the main reason we spend more money than any other country in the world while seeing worse outcomes. One recent JAMA analysis found that deaths that could be prevented by accessible health care increased in the United States from 2009 to 2019, while declining in most other comparable countries.
You can achieve universal health care via a variety of strategies, including the expansion of private health insurance, but the Republican bill could instead lead to more unnecessary deaths by taking existing benefits away from people, according to the Annals of Internal Medicine study.
Medicaid has actually been a rare bright spot in America’s often dysfunctional health care system. The program has its own problems — not enough doctors participate because of its low reimbursement rates, for one — but since its expansion through the Affordable Care Act in 2010, research has shown that Medicaid allowed more people to access health care, reduced their financial burden from medical services, and improved their physical and mental well-being.
Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials justify the Medicaid cuts by saying that people who can work should be required to work in order to receive government benefits. They claim nobody who deserves to be on Medicaid will lose their coverage. As one White House official put it to Politico earlier this month: “Medicaid does not belong to people who are here illegally, and it does not belong to capable and able-bodied men who refuse to work. So no one is getting cut.” (Undocumented migrants are already ineligible for federal Medicaid funding. Six states cover undocumented adults through Medicaid using the state’s own funds, and 14 cover undocumented children.)
But independent analysts say that most of the people on Medicaid are either children, elderly, disabled — or adults who are already working or caring for another person — meaning they are limited in their ability to work. Most of the projected coverage losses result from people having paperwork problems in documenting their work or proving they should be exempt from the requirements, not because people are actually ineligible under the new rules.
That aligns with the experience of Arkansas during Trump’s first term. That state tested work requirements in the real world for the first time and 18,000 people lost their health insurance in a matter of months, with no meaningful effect on their employment.
The US has made halting progress in its pursuit of a better health system. In 2010, the uninsured rate was 16 percent. Today, it’s half of that. But in the GOP’s proposed future, the problems that have left Americans so frustrated with their health care system are going to get worse.
2025-06-25 18:04:00
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.
Anna can’t exactly pinpoint when her relationship with her sister-in-law started to sour. Rather, it was a slow unraveling.
When the two met over 20 years ago through their now-husbands, who are brothers, Anna actually preferred spending time with her future sister-in-law. “We would hang out all the time,” says Anna, who is being referred to by her middle name so she can speak freely about her family. “I would get through being with him just to hang out with her.”
Anna and her sister-in-law also had a common enemy: their husbands’ parents. At family gatherings, they’d steal away with a glass of wine and whisper, “Can you believe they said that?” The women could compare notes about their mother-in-law’s latest insult or how their father-in-law constantly belittled his wife.
Unlike Anna, 47, who largely kept her concerns to herself, her sister-in-law was vocal about her dislike for their in-laws. This rubbed Anna’s husband the wrong way and ultimately drove a wedge between the two families.
Now, they live an hour away and only see each other a handful of times a year. And when they do, it’s awkward, Anna says. Her kids are no longer close with their cousins. Whenever Anna’s sister-in-law invites her family on trips to amusement parks, they decline but end up going anyway — without them — and then lying about why they couldn’t coordinate plans.
“I just hate the dishonesty,” Anna says. “The worst part for me is pretending everything is fine when clearly everybody in the room knows it’s not fine.”
The relationship one has with their in-laws can be fraught and perplexing, friendly and intimate, polite and distant.
The relationship one has with their in-laws can be fraught and perplexing, friendly and intimate, polite and distant. They’re not the people you’ve chosen to bind yourself to, but you’re still inextricably linked as long as you’re with your partner. In-laws enjoy all the trappings and status of family, but aren’t quite. Spending time with them can feel obligatory and not totally enjoyable. At the same time, there are no clearly defined expectations for what in-law relationships should look like, beyond the stereotypes.
So what do you owe your partner’s families of origin? They may not be your family, but they’re probably going to be in your life in some form or fashion. They might never be a proxy for your own mother or sibling, but that doesn’t mean they can’t come close.
As long as people have married, they have inherited their spouse’s family. For centuries, parents aimed to pair their children based on the reputation, power, and wealth of a neighboring family, to create alliances through marriage. In many cultures worldwide, newlyweds typically moved in or near the husband’s family. “The aim of marriage was to acquire useful in-laws or gain political or economic advantage,” writes Stephanie Coontz in the 2005 book Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. By the 1920s, Coontz writes, “marital privacy was more important than adults’ ties with their parents” and, as a result, the number of couples who lived with their parents dropped precipitously over the first half of the 20th century.
As couples established themselves as independent entities, in-laws — especially mothers-in-law — came to be seen as prying interlopers, as evidenced in the 1954 book In Laws, Pro & Con. “Many a mother-in-law sounds baffled, bewildered, and bitter in her role,” wrote the book’s author Evelyn Millis Duvall. “She reports that anything she does is misconstrued by her sons- and daughters-in-law. If she leaves them alone, she is being neglectful; if she is nice to them, she is being twofaced; if she appears interested in what they are doing, she is meddling; if she keeps out of their affairs, she is not interested in them — she just can’t win!”
Since then, the cultural view of in-laws in America has stayed remarkably consistent, says Sylvia Mikucki-Enyart, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa. The caricature of the overbearing mother-in-law still has strong cultural sway — TV and movie representations abound. In real life, there are entire Reddit communities dedicated to meddlesome “MILs.” Now, try to think of a single well-known father-in-law joke.
“In-law relationships are this weird between place of being family but not being the same intensity of family as family origin.”
Beyond these broad stereotypes, cultural and familial expectations and traditions influence the in-law relationship. For instance, daughters-in-law in Asian American families reported feeling anxious, angry, and confused as a result of their in-laws’ traditional cultural expectations to be subservient and deferential, according to one study. Other research found that among Black families, sons-in-law sharing interests with their fathers-in-law and making an effort to engage in family activities helped strengthen their bond.
The way you interact with your in-laws is largely shaped by your partner’s example. After all, if it weren’t for them, you probably wouldn’t have any connection to these people at all. Marrying someone who has a history of regularly spending time with their family of origin is a strong indication that you’ll likely see more of these people in the future. “I would take my guide from my wife,” says Geoffrey Greif, a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and co-author of In-Law Relationships: Mothers, Daughters, Fathers, and Sons. “How close does she want me to be with her father and mother?”
These expectations shouldn’t come as a surprise — they’re almost certain to come up while a couple is dating. As the relationship progresses and you gain insight into your partner’s familial ties, you may learn how much they value weekly hangouts with their siblings or big gatherings for holidays. A close-knit family dynamic can, for some, be a green flag.
Early on in his relationship with his now-wife Melli, Steven Schenberg, a 37-year-old in transportation logistics in Chicago, realized they’d not only be marrying each other but also each other’s families.
Within the first few months of dating, Schenberg grabbed dinner with one of Melli’s sisters, attended the family’s annual New Year’s Day brunch, and slept on the floor of the hotel room Melli shared with her sisters at a wedding. Melli’s brother is now one of Schenberg’s best friends — a friendship that likely wouldn’t have happened had they not met through Melli. Schenberg credits the closeness he maintains with his wife’s family as part luck, part shared values. “I was raised in a tight family nucleus,” he says. “Melli was the same way.”
Just because in-laws occupy a place of prominence in your partner’s life doesn’t necessarily guarantee them a similarly intimate space in yours. After all, you lack a deep shared history. There’s always a degree to which you’ll always play catch-up. “In-law relationships are this weird between place of being family but not being the same intensity of family as family origin,” says Gretchen Perry, an associate professor of social work at the University of Northern British Columbia. “When you have conflict, often, there’s less tolerance for the intensity of that conflict [than] with your own family of origin.”
And these relationships can be primed for conflict: too involved in-laws, absent in-laws, pushy in-laws, cheap in-laws, too-invested-in-their-traditions in-laws. Because there are fewer cultural norms offering a clear example of normative in-law relationships in Western societies, Mikucki-Enyart says, uncertainty abounds. “Versus other cultures where when you get married, you go live with your husband’s family and you’re deferential to your mother-in-law,” she says. “There are other cultures where it’s very clearly outlined how these in-law relationships go, and in the US, we really don’t have that.”
In her research, Mikucki-Enyart has observed two types of uncertainty arise within in-law relationships: relational uncertainty (What kind of relationship do I want with this person? How often do we interact?) and family level uncertainty (How do we balance time with each family? How will grandparents interact with children?) The latter is usually more impactful, Mikucki-Enyart says, especially when grandchildren enter the picture. If a parent-in-law is uncertain about how best to help their adult child and their spouse care for their own kids, they may sacrifice closeness with their grandkids.
“There are other cultures where it’s very clearly outlined how these in-law relationships go, and in the US, we really don’t have that.”
Mother-in-law relationships are typically the ones that are more fraught, at least in heterosexual relationships. This is because mothers have more points of contact within families. Women are still socialized and are expected to carry the bulk of child rearing and kin keeping, Mikucki-Enyart says, and a scarcity mindset pits mothers against their child’s partner. “There’s not enough for all of us,” she says. “We have to fight for a position and a spot, which leads to…it’s either her or me. Not ‘no, we can both love him and have individual relationships with this linchpin person.’” The recent “boy mom” phenomenon only further ties a mother’s identity to her male children — the trope suggests that relinquishing her son to a romantic partner means a woman losing a part of herself, too.
Fathers-in-law, meanwhile, are seen as protectors. “Men aren’t involved in these relational roles, or their protectiveness is fulfilling their role,” Mikucki-Enyart says.
The more you buy into the cliches, the more they become self-fulfilling prophecies. “Parents, especially mothers-in-law, are really in this damned if they do, damned if they don’t position,” Mikucki-Enyart says. “They’re very aware of the negative stereotype surrounding them. So sometimes then they’ll go to the extreme and really, give the couple space. … Then children are like, ‘Well, my mother-in-law doesn’t even reach out, she doesn’t even care,’ and when she does, it’s too much.”
Whether an in-law falls under the umbrella of kin depends on how you define family. Those with a more narrow view of family — spouse and children — may be less inclined to bend over backwards to appease their mother-in-law. Still, in most cases, it’s worth maintaining at least a cordial relationship with your in-laws for the benefit of your spouse or children.
That’s assuming you’re treated with the same respect.
Rina, a 31-year-old who works in hotel customer service in Toronto, used to consider her husband’s sister someone reliable, someone worth confiding in. But over time, Rina’s sister-in-law cut off contact with her, despite maintaining daily calls with her brother. At family gatherings, Rina’s sister-in-law would ignore her and never told her kids to call her Aunt Rina. Recently, Rina’s sister-in-law introduced her new baby to everyone in the family — except Rina. She was heartbroken.
Rina, whose last name is being withheld so she can speak freely about her family, told her husband that his sister’s actions made her feel like an outcast. “He sees the problem,” Rina says in an email, “and really wanted to help out.” He offered to talk to his sister, but Rina stopped him. It would only cause more drama.
Knowing your in-laws, flaws and all, helps blunt the pain of any slights. In her research examining relationships between mothers- and daughters-in-law of East Asian descent, psychologist Angela Gwak found that though they were stressed by their mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law learned to cope with them over time. “They’ve learned to accept them, but not like [their] family of origin,” Gwak says, “but just learn to coexist together. The stress is less jarring because they know and can predict how they would respond to certain circumstances or situations.”
Proof (and perhaps solace) that you may not be able to completely live without your in-laws, but you can learn to live with them.
2025-06-25 18:00:00
Nausea and vomiting during pregnancy have been recorded at least since the Greeks scribbled about it on papyrus some 4,000 years ago. The Romans hypothesized (wrongly) that boys caused more nausea in their mothers and advised women to fast for one day and take a hot wine bath to combat symptoms.
By the 1960s, doctors were prescribing seemingly more effective drugs to combat the barfing. When one such drug, thalidomide, turned out to cause birth defects in the children born to parents who’d taken it, however, the scandal caused a chilling effect on the study of pregnancy nausea.
But the story of how we finally got a scientific answer to why some pregnant people get sicker than others starts with a woman in the 1990s.
After geneticist Marlena Fejzo experienced a debilitating form of pregnancy nausea, called hyperemesis gravidarum, she found very little in the scientific literature attempting to explain why. Then an early career post-doc, Fejzo decided she would set out to find the answer herself.
Pregnancy nausea was not Fejzo’s professional focus at the time she set out to study it, and she didn’t have funding to embark on any formal research, so she embarked on a bit of a DIY inquiry. She posted a survey online in the early days of the internet and received hundreds of replies via fax from people who’d experienced hyperemesis. Those gave her the first clues that the mechanism at play might be genetic.
On the latest episode of the Unexplainable podcast, I talk to Dr. Fejzo about her pregnancy and her path to finding a biological cause and a cure to pregnancy nausea. Listen below, or in the feed of your favorite podcast app.
2025-06-25 03:40:00
Summer has officially begun with a blast of scorching temperatures across much of the United States. The National Weather Service is warning of “extremely dangerous heat” baking 160 million people under a heat dome stretching from the Midwest to the East Coast the rest of this week. It’s already proven fatal.
But while this is the first real taste of extreme heat for Northeastern cities, parts of the country like Texas have been cooking since May. Alaska this month issued its first-ever heat advisory. Forecasters expect more above-average temperatures through the summer.
Summers are indeed getting hotter, a consequence of the warming planet. As the climate heats up, the frequency and intensity of heat waves is increasing and their timing is changing, arriving earlier in the season.
But the damage from extreme heat isn’t spread out evenly, and the more dangerous effects to people are not necessarily found in the hottest places. High temperatures often lead to more emergencies and hospital visits when they represent a big jump from a place’s average, which means ordinarily cooler regions tend to suffer the worst harm from heat. That includes places like Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, where temperatures rarely climb higher than 80 degrees Fahrenheit and most homes don’t have air conditioning.
Now researchers have found that rural areas may suffer more under extreme heat than previously thought. A report from Headwaters Economics and the Federation of American Scientists found that more than half of rural zip codes in the United States, which includes some 11.5 million Americans, have “high” heat vulnerability, a consequence not just of temperatures but unique risk factors that occur far outside of major cities.
The thermometers thus do not tell the whole story about who is likely to suffer from extreme heat — nor do the images, which tend to come from sweltering cities. But understanding the factors that worsen the harm of rising temperatures could help save lives.
The discussion around the geography of extreme heat tends to focus on the urban heat island effect. The concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass of dense urban areas act as a sponge for the sun’s rays. Air pollution from cars, trucks, furnaces, and factories helps trap warmer temperatures over cities, and that hotter air, in turn, accelerates the formation of pollutants like ozone. On a hot summer day, a city center can be 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding regions. And with so many people squeezed into these metropolitan ovens, it adds up to a massive health burden from extreme heat.
But far outside of downtowns, where homes and buildings get farther and farther apart, rural regions face their own long-running challenges that exacerbate the dangers of extreme heat.
A major factor: the median age of the rural population is older than in cities. That matters, because on a physiological level, older adults struggle more to cope with heat than the young. People living in rural communities also have double the rates of chronic health conditions that enhance the damage from heat like high blood pressure and emphysema compared to people living in urban zip codes.
Rural infrastructure is another vulnerability. While there may be more forests and farms in the country that can cool the air, the buildings there are often older, with less adequate insulation and cooling systems for this new era of severe heat. Manufactured and mobile homes, more common in rural areas, are particularly sensitive to heat. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, mobile homes make up 5 percent of the housing stock but account for 30 percent of indoor heat deaths.
Even if rural residents have air conditioners and fans, they tend to have lower incomes and thus devote a higher share of their spending for electricity, up to 40 percent more than city dwellers, which makes it less affordable for them to stay cool. That’s if they can get electricity at all: Rural areas are more vulnerable to outages due to older infrastructure and the long distances that power lines have to be routed, creating greater chances of problems like tree branches falling on lines. According to the US Census Bureau, 35.4 percent of households in rural areas experienced an outage over the course of a year, compared to 22.8 percent of households in urban areas.
Sparsely populated communities also have fewer public spaces, such as shopping malls and libraries, where people can pass a hot summer day. Rural economies also depend more on outdoor labor, and there are still no federal workplace heat regulations. Farmworkers, construction crews, and delivery drivers are especially vulnerable to hot weather, and an average of 40 workers die each year from extreme heat.
The health infrastructure is lacking as well. “There is a longstanding healthcare crisis in rural areas,” said Grace Wickerson, senior manager for climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists. There aren’t always nearby clinics and hospitals that can quickly treat heat emergencies. “To really take care of someone when they’re actually in full-on heat stroke, they need to be cooled down in a matter of minutes,” Wickerson said.
The Phoenix Fire Department has now started using ice immersion for heat stroke victims when transporting patients to hospitals to buy precious time. But rural emergency responders are less likely to have tools like this in their ambulances. “In Montana, which has not traditionally seen a lot of extreme heat, you would not have those tools on your truck and not have that awareness to do that cooling. When you see someone who has to also then travel miles to get care, that’s going to worsen their health related outcomes,” Wickerson said.
Emergency response times are generally much longer in rural areas, sometimes extending more than 25 minutes. People also have lower incomes and lower rates of insurance far from cities. Hospitals in rural areas are closing down as well. So when severe heat sets in, rural healthcare systems can get overwhelmed easily.
Looking at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Census Bureau, Wickerson and her collaborators mapped out how all these underlying factors are converging with extreme heat. They found that 59 percent of urban zip codes and 54 percent of rural zip codes are highly vulnerable to extreme heat as defined by the CDC’s Heat and Health Index, meaning they are much more likely to see health problems from extreme heat. So while rural areas may be cooler, the people living there face heat dangers comparable to those in much hotter cities, and geographically, they cover a much wider expanse of the country.
So while temperatures out in the sticks may not climb to the same peaks they do in downtowns, urban heat islands are surrounded by an ocean of rural heat vulnerabilities.
There are ways to reduce the dangers of scorching weather across vast swaths of the country, but they aren’t fast or cheap. They require big upgrades to infrastructure — more robust energy delivery, more shade and green spaces, better insulation, cool roofs, and more energy-efficient cooling.
Countering extreme heat also requires bigger structural investments to reverse the ongoing rural healthcare crisis where a doctor shortage, hospital closures, and longer emergency response times are converging. But the Republican budget proposal will do the opposite, cutting healthcare access for millions of Americans that would, in turn, lead to dozens of hospitals closing down, mainly in rural areas.
Protecting people from dangerous heat also demands policy changes. Most states don’t have any worker protections on the books for extreme heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is in the process of creating the first federal heat safety standard for employers, requiring them to give employees breaks, water, and shade when it gets hot. But it’s not clear how strong the final regulation will be given that the Trump administration has been working to weaken rules across the board.
Cities and local governments could also impose rules that prevent utilities from shutting off power to customers during heat waves, similar to regulations that limit heat shutoffs during the winter.
But there are limits to how much people can adapt to hotter temperatures. Even places with a long history of managing heat are seeing more deaths and hospitalizations as relentless temperatures continue to mount. That means curbing the ongoing warming trend has to be part of the solution as well, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change.
2025-06-25 00:00:00
Last week, federal agents arrested Brad Lander, a Democrat running for mayor of New York City and the city’s incumbent comptroller, after Lander linked arms with an immigrant the agents sought to detain and asked to see a warrant. Last month, federal officials also arrested Newark’s Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka while Baraka was protesting at a detention facility for immigrants.
A federal law permits sitting members of Congress to enter federal immigration facilities as part of their oversight responsibilities. That didn’t stop the Trump administration from indicting Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), who was at the same protest as Baraka. Federal officers also detained and handcuffed Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) after he tried to ask Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem questions at a press conference.
These arrests are part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to step up deportations, and to intimidate protesters who object. Most of these incidents are recent enough that the courts have not had time to sort through what happened and determine whether anyone’s constitutional rights were violated. But one thing is all but certain: even if it turns out that federal law enforcement officers flagrantly and deliberately targeted protesters or elected officials, violating the Constitution’s First or Fourth Amendment, nothing will happen to those officers.
The reason why is a pair of fairly recent Supreme Court decisions, which make it nearly impossible to sue a federal officer if they violate your constitutional rights — even if the allegations against that officer are truly shocking. In Hernández v. Mesa (2020), the Court’s Republican majority gave lawsuit immunity to a US Border Patrol officer who fatally shot a Mexican teenager in the face. And in Egbert v. Boule (2022), the majority reaffirmed this immunity — albeit in a case involving a less sympathetic plaintiff.
Both of these cases are part of the Republican justices’ crusade against an older Supreme Court decision known as Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971). Bivens held that federal law enforcement officers who violate the Fourth Amendment — which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” among other things — may be sued for that violation.
Significantly, Bivens ruled that a victorious plaintiff in such a case “is entitled to recover money damages for any injuries he has suffered as a result of the agents’ violation of the Amendment.” So officers faced very real consequences if they violated the Fourth Amendment.
The Court’s current majority, however, appears determined to destroy Bivens. Hernández and Egbert didn’t explicitly overrule Bivens, but they ground down that decision to the point that it has little, if any, remaining force. And the Court appears to be laying the groundwork for a decision eliminating Bivens suits altogether. Significantly, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Hernández warned that “it is doubtful that we would have reached the same result” if Bivens were decided today.
That means that individuals who are unconstitutionally arrested by federal officers, or who face similar violations of their rights, will generally have no recourse against those officers. And that’s likely to embolden the worst officers to violate the Constitution.
The Constitution places several restrictions on law enforcement, including the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable arrests and excessive force. But it is silent on what can be done when an officer violates these restrictions.
Bivens, however, held that a right to sue federal officers is implicit in the Constitution itself. An officer who acts unlawfully “in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And so it follows, Bivens explained, that there must be a meaningful remedy to ensure that officers do not abuse this power.
In fairness, the Supreme Court started limiting Bivens suits not long after that case was handed down. Shortly after Bivens was decided, President Richard Nixon replaced two justices, creating a new majority on the Court that was more favorable to law enforcement. But the Court only recently signaled that it intends to destroy Bivens altogether. In Egbert, the Court’s Republican majority declared that courts must reject Bivens suits if there is “any rational reason (even one)” to do so. Even a minor factual discrepancy between a new case and Bivens, such as the fact that the officers who violated the Constitution belong to a different agency than the officers in Bivens, is frequently enough to defeat a Bivens suit.
President Donald Trump took office on twin promises to crack down on both undocumented immigrants and his perceived enemies — “I am your retribution,” he told supporters in 2023 — and it’s not hard to see how decisions like Egbert and Hernández enable him to do so.
The Republican justices argue that nullifying Bivens is necessary to restore a more traditional vision of “the Constitution’s separation of legislative and judicial power.” The Supreme Court, under this vision of the separation of powers, may not determine that a right to sue federal officers is implicit in the Constitution. This right, according to Alito, must come from an explicit act of Congress.
Alito’s historical claim, that Bivens departed from a traditional understanding of the role of Congress and the courts, is somewhat dubious; the courts permitted at least some suits against federal officials who break the law for most of American history. In Little v. Barreme (1804), for example, the Supreme Court held that a Navy officer who unlawfully seized a neutral ship “must pay such damages as are legally awarded against him.” More recently, in Larson v. Domestic & Foreign Commerce Corp. (1949), the Court declared that “the principle that an agent is liable for his own torts ‘is an ancient one, and applies even to certain acts of public officers or public instrumentalities.’”
Hernández’s call for granting immunity to federal officials would also have more credibility if the Republican justices hadn’t recently ruled that Trump has broad immunity from prosecution if he uses the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. This concept of presidential immunity appears nowhere in the Constitution, and it certainly has no place in American legal tradition — among other things, why would President Gerald Ford have pardoned former President Richard Nixon for crimes Nixon committed in office, if Nixon were immune from prosecution?
The Court, in other words, appears determined to remove legal obstacles that might have deterred federal officials from behaving illegally in the past — regardless of what the law or legal traditions might dictate. And it removed important obstacles right before the United States took a dangerously authoritarian turn.
2025-06-24 19:30:00
Summer camp. It’s where kids go every year to make friends, find their long-lost twin, or even evade a slasher wreaking havoc on the campers and counselors. At least, that’s what pop culture would lead you to believe: For the outsized space they take up in our consciousness, going to camp for the summer isn’t actually all that common.
“It has never been the case that the majority of American children went to summer camps,” says Leslie Paris, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the book Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp.
“The first camps were founded by urban middle-class men,” she told Vox. “They were concerned about white boys who they saw as not getting enough outdoor adventure and the kind of manly experiences they would need to be — in the minds of these adults — the nation’s leaders for the next generation. They were worried about the effects of urbanization, and they were nostalgic for an earlier day when more boys had grown up in rural places.”
How did camp begin to be available for more kids? And if so few people actually attend, then why does summer camp have such lasting cultural influence? Those are just a few of the questions we posed to Paris on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Paris, edited for length and clarity.
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How did camp expand beyond the audience it was originally created for?
The YMCA movement became involved, and by the turn of the century the movement started really ramping up. Not only because more YMCA camps were founded, but because different organizations got involved and more groups of American adults thought this camp idea would be great.
By the turn of the century, you’ve got small numbers of women leading groups of girls out into the wilderness. Many of the women who started camps were college-educated and saw leading girls and giving them adventures as a kind of passion.
Then there were urban organizations that began to say, “This would be great for impoverished working-class kids who never get out of the city at all,” and began sending groups of kids out into the country, often for shorter stays than at private camps.
In the early 20th century, you’ve got a bunch of new movements: the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls. And then there are different ethnic and religious groups: Jewish Americans, Catholic Americans, who think, Let’s start camps for our own kids, and they do that as well.
By the early 20th century there’s a bevy of different kinds of camps organized for a wider variety of kids to give them an experience of the outdoors.
You write in your book that “this triple nostalgia — for the American past, for camp community, and for individual childhood experience — is critical to understanding why camps have figured so influentially in American culture and in former campers’ lives.” I’d love for you to talk about that a little bit more.
One of the things I talk about in my book is that camps were a place where children learned nostalgia, that camps taught them a version of the American past. I think many of us are familiar with a use of Indigenous cultural practices that was often quite superficial, but that was meant to introduce non-Indigenous children to one aspect of the American past. Camps were often a place where children were exposed to ideas about what the American past had been, and then as more generations of children attended camps, they themselves brought those kinds of nostalgic memories with them, throughout their lives.
When they had a chance, many of those former children sent their own kids to camp. So this became a kind of a nostalgic cultural practice that for many adults reminded them of the first time that they had an adventure away from their parents, away from their families.
It’s so interesting you talk about Indigenous culture and how that’s been used at camp. It makes me think of that scene in [Addams Family Values] where Wednesday’s at camp. Why does camp feature so prominently in pop culture if so few of us went?
You could ask, Why are so many children’s novels premised around an orphan? I think the fact that the kid is an orphan in these novels allows them to go off and have adventures and do things that many kids raised in families would not necessarily be at liberty to do.
And I think camps have often represented that space, a space that’s at least ostensibly protected, where kids have more free play and can have exciting adventures and develop peer relationships that are outside of the norm. And that piece lends itself really well to popular culture.
Camp is so specific. How did you choose this as an academic subject?
I knew that I wanted to work on American childhood, which was still a pretty small field in the 1990s, when I started this project. There wasn’t a major scholarly book about the history of summer camps at the time and it seemed like a wonderful way to write about something that would be fun to work on. One of the things that I look at in my book is how camps illuminate the ways in which childhood was being transformed in the late 19th and early 20th century.
That’s so interesting. I imagine that changes at summer camp also reflect changes in American childhood overall. I’d love to hear in broad strokes about some of those changes. How have we seen camp and therefore childhood change over time?
One of the main changes that I look at is the rise of the idea of protected childhood. That childhood should be a time apart and children should be protected from the adult world. The late 19th, early 20th century is the same time when you see laws restricting children’s labor. There’s an emphasis on child protection that’s emerging during this period, and camps are one of the early sites of this new idea that children are deserving of spaces apart, time apart, and also that they’re deserving of vacations.
Although many of the elite kids who attended more expensive private camps were certainly going to have vacations whether or not they went to summer camp, some of the working-class kids at the turn of the 20th century who attended summer camps had never been on a vacation outside of the city.
Summer camp has become this huge business these days in the United States, $3.5 billion annually. How did that happen?
The camp industry has had to be nimble and change over time, especially since the 1970s, which was a time when many camps struggled and a number failed.
The camping industry underwent some structural changes. One of these was the rise of specialty camps: Basketball camp, computer camp, gymnastics camp, dance camp, theater camp — camps that were focused on a really specific interest emerged in the late 20th century.
Another issue was that many families who could afford private camps were starting to juggle more different opportunities. The cost of travel by plane was going down, so more families were thinking, Maybe at some point this summer we’d like to take the kids on a trip. There was also a rise in [divorce] and families had to negotiate custody. So even camps that used to have a nine-week schedule increasingly considered moving to a two-session schedule.
Modern summer camps have retained many of the same elements as some of the earliest camps, but they’ve also adjusted to the increasing complexity of some of their clients’ lives, and in that way the camp industry has continued to be able to thrive.
And there’s another issue, which is that camps have also always provided child care, and this has been important for parents since the very beginning. It’s been a boon for parents who could relax knowing that their kids were away, especially families trying to juggle complicated child care arrangements in the summer when there was no school.