2026-05-15 18:30:00
Last year, nearly 130 million pigs were raised for meat in the US, but they didn’t come out of nowhere; they had parents. Or as pork producers call them, “breeder pigs.”
Since the 1970s, producers have been keeping most of the breeding females — known as sows — in tiny enclosures called gestation crates. It’s a way for producers to more closely monitor the pigs’ pregnancies and control their feeding, but in doing so, they’ve created one of the worst forms of widespread animal abuse.
The crates are so small that the pigs — who are highly social and intelligent — cannot walk or even turn around, and it causes many to bite the bars of their crate and engage in other repetitive behaviors that are signs of chronic stress. They’re confined in the crates for virtually their entire life, until they themselves are shipped off for slaughter when their reproductivity wanes at around five years old.
The animal welfare scientist Temple Grandin has likened gestation crates to forcing a human to live in an airline seat.
If the use of these crates disturbs you, you’re not alone. In 2002, Floridians — via a ballot measure — voted to require pregnant pigs to have at least enough room to turn around and extend their limbs, effectively banning the use of gestation crates in the state. Four years later, Arizona voters did the same. Later, seven other states followed suit.
As important as these laws are, they weren’t that effective in actually getting many pregnant pigs out of gestation crates because most of those states host little of the country’s pork production. But everything changed in 2016, when Massachusetts put a measure on the ballot to not only prohibit the use of gestation crates in the state, but to also prohibit the sale of pork from farms that use such confining crates, whether the farm is in Massachusetts or not. (Disclosure: I worked on this campaign during my time at the nonprofit Humane World for Animals.)
It passed overwhelmingly, with 78 percent of voters in support. And two years later, 63 percent of California voters supported a nearly identical law. All of a sudden, pork producers around the country had to stop using gestation crates if they wanted to sell meat into these two states that, combined, contained almost 15 percent of the US population.
But now, these overwhelmingly popular laws have a chance of being upended — and gestation crates being used to confine more pigs in the future — if a provision in the new Farm Bill, now being hashed out in Congress, becomes law.
Not everyone has embraced freeing the sows from their intense confinements.
Several meat trade groups, along with Triumph Foods — one of America’s largest pork companies — have sued California and Massachusetts numerous times to try to overturn their gestation crate laws. The industry’s legal argument centers around the claim that the animal welfare laws violate a legal doctrine called the dormant commerce clause, which puts some limits on states enacting laws that affect other states.
But all of the lawsuits have failed, including one from the National Pork Producers Council that made it to the US Supreme Court, which in 2023 ruled to uphold California’s law as constitutional.
Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year.
This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill, a package of legislation that is supposed to be reauthorized every five years and is the main vehicle for federal agriculture and nutrition policy.
In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act.
It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”
Hershey had used gestation crates for much of his decades-long career raising pigs in Pennsylvania, but a few years ago, he had a change of heart thanks to his daughter, who was upset about the crates.
“One day, my daughter just looked at me and she said, ‘Dad, we are not going to accept that,’” Hershey told me last year. “‘We are going to demand that you do it a better way.’” Hershey converted his hog-rearing practice to group housing, in which several pregnant sows are kept together in a larger pen — a common way producers convert their facilities to accommodate these laws.
Many other hog farmers, like Hershey, don’t want Congress to overturn California and Massachusetts’ laws on moral grounds, but also on economic grounds: They have converted their barns to comply so they can sell their pork in those states. Overturning them means that the time and money they spent on doing so would have been for naught.
According to an April 2025 USDA estimate, 27 percent of US hog producers had made or were in the process of making investments to comply with the laws, a figure that has likely grown over the last year.
Clemens Foods, one of the largest pork companies in the country, has vocally opposed the Save Our Bacon legislation.“Many in the industry, including Clemens, have invested significant capital (and human capital) to meet the regulations set by the people of California and Massachusetts,” a Clemens spokesperson told Vox in an email last year. “Accordingly, Clemens remains vehemently opposed to any legislative or regulatory action that would overrule” the laws.
But not all of the industry feels the same way. Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer, has publicly supported federal legislation to nullify California and Massachusetts’ laws. Seaboard Foods, another major pork producer, declined to comment for this story and referred me to the National Pork Producers Council, which declined an interview request and declined to answer detailed questions over email.
In a statement, an NPPC spokesperson said that if left to stand, California’s law “will prompt a patchwork of similar state laws that will only continue to drive up the cost of farming.”
The organization pointed me to a recently published white paper, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed, from economists at North Dakota State University and the US Department of Agriculture. The researchers found that from January 2024 (when the California law went into effect) to January 2026, the price of pork in California increased by 73 cents per pound (a 15 percent increase) and 63 cents in Massachusetts (its law had gone into effect in August 2023). However, the researchers note, more than half of the price increase can be attributed to “retail amplification,” or supermarkets adding a premium for this kind of meat — beyond any increase in actual production cost.
Just how much it costs hog producers to comply with California and Massachusetts’ laws, whether by retrofitting their barns or building new ones, has been in dispute. The National Pork Producers Council has argued it costs producers at least $3,400 per sow. Hershey has said it cost him around $600 per sow. While there was the upfront cost to converting to a crate-free system, he told me it’s paying off; the percentage of sows who die prematurely has declined, and they are also producing more piglets.
Just as the pork industry is divided over gestation crates, so too is Congress. For years, congressional division over gestation crates mostly fell across partisan divides, with Republicans largely backing the pork industry’s effort, and Democrats largely opposing it. But this year has been different. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida, introduced an amendment with bipartisan support to strip the Save Our Bacon Act out of the Farm Bill. The House Rules committee allowed votes on dozens of amendments to the Farm Bill, but not Luna’s.
“We shouldn’t be doing anything at the federal level that would remove the autonomy of a state to decide what’s best for their farmers and what their citizens choose to put on the ballot and then pass by law in that state,” Luna said on Fox News earlier this month.
Now, the Senate is drafting its own version of the Farm Bill, and if it passes, the two chambers will need to reconcile any differences between the two.
I reached out to every Senate Democrat’s office to ask whether this attempt to overturn the will of California and Massachusetts voters would be a red-line issue for them in the Farm Bill, and a few — Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Alex Padilla (D-CA) — replied with strong opposition to the Save Our Bacon Act. Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have also been outspoken on the issue.
“It makes no sense for Republicans in Congress to bigfoot individual states’ efforts to set higher food safety and animal welfare standards — especially those implemented through a mandate from large majorities of those states’ voters,” Van Hollen wrote in a statement to Vox, adding that it doesn’t belong in the Farm Bill.
“This is a highly controversial and poisonous policy that ignores the will of the people,” Markey and Warren wrote to Vox in a statement. “These state laws were overwhelmingly supported by a popular vote — they shouldn’t be overridden because of big-dollar lobbying.”
Perhaps most importantly though was who didn’t respond, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). Klobuchar is the ranking chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, making her the lead Democrat on the Senate Farm Bill. In previous Congresses, former Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) held that position and managed to prevent past iterations of the Save Our Bacon Act from advancing in the Senate. But Klobuchar is currently running for governor of Minnesota, the second largest pork producing state after Iowa, and the agribusiness sector has been a top donor to her 2026 campaign committee.
The attempts to overturn California and Massachusetts’ laws by congressional action is perhaps the inevitable outcome of an industry that is intent on maintaining practices it can’t defend in the courts — or in the court of public opinion.
We’ve been here before. In the early 2000s, animal protection groups increasingly went undercover to film inside farms and slaughterhouses and documented terrible practices — like pig gestation crates and employees horrifically abusing animals. The videos often made national news, shocking millions of Americans. But instead of meaningfully improving animal welfare, industry groups instead successfully lobbied state lawmakers in around two dozen states to introduce legislation to make it illegal to videotape inside farms. Several passed, though some have been struck down in the courts as unconstitutional.
The meat industry has also managed to contort regulations in order to receive other special treatment under the law. Animal farms, for example, are exempt from several pollution and labor laws and exempt from most state animal cruelty laws.
There are also less blatant forms of subversion, in which the industry has withheld information and misled consumers and policymakers:
Much of the industry’s success at hiding cruelty and thwarting regulation stems from its penchant for storytelling — portraying itself not as a large, powerful, highly concentrated group of a few dozen companies but rather a loose network of millions of salt-of-the-earth farmers just trying to scrape by.
“The industry has always tried to use its ‘homestead narrative’ as a way of pushing pretty extreme measures,” Will Potter, author of a recent book on deception in the agricultural industry — Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable — told me. “Coming out of journalism, I just always had this faith…that if people are exposed to the truth and to facts, the truth will win out.”
At least in the case of gestation crates and other intensive farming practices, this has held true. When voters are presented with the facts on how they affect animals, they vote to ban them. But as the Farm Bill has revealed, those votes may not be safe.
In the coming months, if the Senate manages to put together its own Farm Bill, we’ll find out where its members land: on the side of one industry group, or the will of millions of voters who’ve made it clear that locking pregnant animals in tiny crates has no place in the country.
2026-05-15 18:00:00
Left activists who love Sen. Bernie Sanders have this year flocked to a surprising new champion: hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.
In his campaign for California governor, Steyer has racked up the endorsements of Our Revolution (a group founded by Sanders 2016 campaign notables) and the California Nurses Association (the state’s leading champions of single-payer healthcare).
And earlier this month, even the Democratic Socialists of America’s California chapter praised Steyer as “most progressive of the current viable candidates for governor” — and advised against making a further-left protest vote.
Though all tout Steyer’s positions on the issues, the optics of the anti-billionaire left backing a candidate who has spent $132 million of his own money to saturate the state’s airwaves with his ads may seem strange.
Yet Steyer isn’t the only example of a very wealthy pol who’s won at least some left enthusiasm:
Wealthy politicians who can plow millions into their political runs are hardly new, of course, with plenty of current examples in each party, as well as independents like the late Ross Perot. Today’s progressives frequently trace their roots to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was himself a scion of one of the most well-connected families of its era.
But the rise of this specific class of left-leaning ultra-wealthy candidates is noteworthy, because it comes after years of Democratic alarm over the influence of megadonors on elections in the Citizens United era — and over how billionaires have increasingly imposed their will on the government and society more broadly. (Hence the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies from Sanders and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez around the country last year.)
In conversations about this broader topic with left activists, I heard some mixed feelings about backing wealthy candidates, especially prolific self-funders like Steyer — but also a general sentiment that, if they’re saying the right things on the issues and making the right enemies, they could be worth supporting.
“Every billionaire is a policy failure,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution. “That being said, we have to operate in the world that we’re in. And in this world we happen to have a billionaire candidate who is ideologically aligned with our organization and our policy priorities.”
Others on the left have gone even further, and questioned whether the left’s anti-billionaire rhetoric itself has been flawed.
“The fact that the DSA and many progressives in California are coalescing around Steyer underscores the problem with casting billionaires, per se, as the enemy,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, wrote on X. “This frame doesn’t fare well in the real world, where some billionaires are very much part of the problem, while others are part of the solution.”
The candidates in question don’t hide from their wealth, nor do the progressives and socialists backing them pretend these tensions aren’t there. But each one has found their own individual way to address concerns — and an audience willing to hear them out. Here’s what the modern playbook looks like for a progressive tycoon seeking elected office.
A hedge fund billionaire who started his career at Goldman Sachs, Steyer isn’t exactly new to left causes — he’s been a major funder of climate change activism going back to the Obama-era fight to block the Keystone XL pipeline. Then, during Donald Trump’s first term, he spent millions on a push to get the president impeached, and then more than a quarter-billion dollars on his own quixotic presidential bid (his best showing was 11 percent in South Carolina).
But the open-seat California governor’s race provided a new opportunity. Steyer’s outreach to the left began with his choice of campaign consultants, as he signed on Fight Agency, the buzzy firm launched in January 2025 that’s behind left insurgent candidates such as Graham Platner in Maine and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Any consulting firm would typically love to land a big-spending self-funder, but Steyer was off-brand for Fight. Initially, its co-founder Rebecca Katz said she told Steyer’s team all the reasons she’d never work for a billionaire — but they said Steyer still wanted to meet with her, and she agreed. After talking to her for an hour, he won her over.
“Being a billionaire, he’s not the messenger I would’ve expected, but there was no one else saying what he was saying.”
Rebecca Katz, Fight Agency co-founder
“I said, ‘My first question for you is: Should billionaires exist?’ He said: ‘Yes, but we should tax the hell out of them,’” Katz told me. “He wanted to change the way things are done and wanted to disrupt the system. He talked a lot about costs, the systems that were rigged from the inside, and the urgency of the moment. Being a billionaire, he’s not the messenger I would’ve expected, but there was no one else saying what he was saying.”
Steyer then set about wooing other left groups, and two of his positions mattered most of all.
One was a controversial wealth tax proposal going up for a statewide vote this year, a onetime tax of 5 percent of the wealth of residents with over $1 billion in assets. Gov. Gavin Newsom strongly opposes the proposal due to fears it would drive investment out of California. Most Democrats in the race have declined to support it, worrying it is badly designed despite sympathy for its aims. But even though Steyer has expressed some reservations about the wealth tax proposal, he’s also said he’d vote for it — and posed for pictures wearing a hat with the label “class traitor.”
“I understand it’s not the perfect measure, and that Steyer has said that,” Geevarghese, Our Revolution’s executive director, said. “But he’s willing to endorse it, he’s willing to support it, he agrees with the principle that extreme wealth should be significantly taxed.”
The second key issue is Steyer’s support for single-payer healthcare in California, which was crucial in winning him the nurses union endorsement. This is a promise that has frequently been made by California politicians, including Newsom — but it keeps not getting done. Leftists blame this failure on the Democratic establishment being captive to the insurance industry. Of course, there are other obstacles as well — politicians may fear disrupting voters’ current care, and no one seems to know how the cash-strapped state will pay for it (or get the Trump administration’s permission, which they’d need).
Steyer hasn’t put forth a serious proposal on paying for it — “God is going to be in the details,” he recently told KFF Health News — but he has promised to get single-payer done more consistently and unambiguously than his rivals in the race.
Both the wealth tax proposal and statewide single-payer tend to get the sideeye from wonks, who suspect they’re pandering promises that will work out very poorly in practice. But many on the left view such commitments as a promising sign that Steyer will break with the party’s establishment and the conventional wisdom about how things are typically done.
And, indeed, the evident reluctance of state party bigwigs to back Steyer — many initially were leaning toward Eric Swalwell, who dropped out over sexual misconduct allegations, and now seem to have switched to back former Health Secretary Xavier Becerra — is a draw in and of itself, as is the financial independence that lets Steyer avoid fundraising from moneyed interests.
This is central to Steyer’s pitch. “I’m the only person running for governor who’s taking them on,” he told my colleague Zack Beauchamp in a recent interview. “I’m the only person they’re worried about. I’m the only person they’re spending a nickel against and they’re spending tens of millions of dollars to stop because they think they run the state.”
It is quite possible that all Steyer’s millions in spending and his left activist support will be for naught. Recent polls have mostly shown Steyer behind Becerra and one or two Republican candidates (California’s primary advances the top two finishers, regardless of party, to the general election). But the race remains close, and perhaps, if a billionaire spends enough money and wins enough hearts, he’ll be able to achieve his dream.
Four years before Steyer’s governor bid, it was another billionaire winning strange new respect from the left: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Pritzker was surely not the left’s candidate when he first ran for governor in 2018; progressive support in the Democratic primary went to second-place finisher Daniel Biss, who ran on a “middle-class governor” platform that called out his opponent’s wealth.
But in his first term, Pritzker passed a series of progressive bills — a minimum wage hike, marijuana legalization, and pro-choice and pro-union laws, among many others — that summed to an impressive record of achievement. “Pritzker has been signing bill after bill, and many of them are exactly what progressives want,” Nathan J. Robinson, a prominent socialist commentator, wrote in Current Affairs in 2022.
So during a period of frustration with President Joe Biden’s struggles to pass his agenda, Pritzker started to look pretty good to some. Online, a memeified version of Pritzker as a badass progressive hero was embraced — with some amount of irony — by accounts such as “Socialists for Pritzker.”
Writing in Jacobin magazine, Ben Burgis pointed out that this was all a bit strange because Pritzker was a “thoroughly mainstream Democrat” — but argued that he contrasted with the party’s national leaders because he “actually followed through.” (Though perhaps the difference is more that Pritzker, unlike Biden, had supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature.)
The physicality and personal charisma of Pritzker — who is overweight and happy to call attention to that by, for instance, making “Think Big” his campaign slogan — was also part of the appeal for some. “JB Pritzker is a unicorn for the Democratic Party in 3 ways: he is enormous, doesn’t come off as particularly intellectual, and has good instincts. you really never get all 3 in a Dem,” Felix Biederman, co-host of the Chapo Trap House podcast, tweeted in 2022.
But the interest is also mutual. Pritzker has said he takes pride in winning over Sanders supporters in his state— and he’s well aware he’ll have to find ways to address their skepticism in the future. In an interview with The Atlantic, he called his personal fortune an “obstacle” to overcome should he run for president 2028.
The enthusiasm for Pritzker may have been situational; it’s not clear it would carry over to a potential 2028 campaign, where the left could have other champions. Ocasio-Cortez is the first name on everyone’s lips there, but there’s also been chatter around another longtime Sanders backer — Rep. Ro Khanna.
Khanna busted into Congress by challenging an aging Democrat, Mike Honda — unsuccessfully in 2014, and successfully in 2016 — for a Silicon Valley House seat. But he earned his anti-establishment cred early by endorsing Sanders over Hillary Clinton, and then by co-chairing Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2020.
Khanna is also, it turns out, quite rich — through his wife, whose immigrant father started an auto transmission business in Ohio. However, Khanna has publicly stressed that the wealth that shows up on his financial disclosure forms is “my wife’s money from prior to marriage over which I literally have no say or claim,” and that it is largely held in an independent trust. (Khanna also differs from the other politicians mentioned in this article in that he does not self-fund his campaigns.)
Initially, Khanna didn’t shy away from his connection to his wealthy district’s elites. And for a time, he seemed to be pulling off the delicate balancing act of cultivating support from both Bernieworld and the tech industry, including a longtime relationship with Musk, by emphasizing a more pro-growth and futurist approach to progressivism.
But the California wealth tax initiative this cycle finally forced him to pick a side — and he backed the tax, stoking fury among wealthy tech donors and earning him a Democratic challenger, Ethan Agarwal.
In office, Khanna has shown a knack for putting himself at the forefront of major national topics, such as by co-authoring the bill to release the Epstein files. Khanna is weighing a 2028 presidential run, and according to NBC News’s Natasha Korecki, he has lined up support from some key Sanders campaign figures and may run even if AOC runs too.
Not far away from Khanna’s district, another quite wealthy candidate is hoping support from the left can carry him into Congress. Saikat Chakrabarti, a software engineer whose early work at the payment startup Stripe helped make him a centimillionaire, is running for Pelosi’s open House seat in San Francisco.
“I experienced that lottery economy, that the startup economy really is,” Chakrabati said on a podcast last year. “It’s this system where you can just hit it big if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.”
Like Khanna, Chakrabarti has longtime ties to Bernieworld — he worked on Sanders’s 2016 campaign, and in 2017 co-founded Justice Democrats to back further left candidates in Democratic primaries. Four of the candidates he backed, once elected, would become the initial members of “The Squad” — including AOC, who Chakrabarti worked for as chief of staff. (He left after a few months, reportedly because his public criticism of moderate Democrats caused controversy.)
Now, Chakrabarti is campaigning with streamer and leftist influencer Hasan Piker, heaping criticism on the Democratic establishment, promising a “political revolution,” and saying he’ll spend whatever it takes to win. Recent polls have shown him behind the frontrunner, state Sen. Scott Wiener, but if he wins second place in next month’s primary he and Wiener will face off in November’s general election.
Each of the above politicians are different in their own way, with different paths to relevance on the left. Steyer’s a longtime donor to progressive causes, Pritzker’s a larger-than-life personality who emphasizes his competence, Khanna’s a policy wonk with a knack for media, and Chakrabarti was an early organizer for “The Squad” before it existed. There’s no one quality that unites them — except that each has an enormous net worth.
But one thing that struck me in talking to their supporters was how some of their arguments for the virtues of a candidate like Steyer — that his wealth in this case helps make him independent of the establishment and big donors, and more willing to take on the system — resemble those arguments made for a certain other billionaire: Donald Trump.
So long as our campaign finance system remains broken, the fantasy of a billionaire savior will remain a tempting one.
Nobody would mistake Trump for a Sanders-style critic of money in politics. But in his 2016 primary campaign, the only one that he (mostly) self-financed, he and his supporters frequently argued his money gave him the unique ability to take on both the party establishment and special interest groups. Trump himself argued his opponents were all bought off by the top party donors (many of whom he later embraced) and that his wealth gave him a unique perspective on how elites held down the working class.
There’s a perverse logic that in our current legal environment, where individual donors and industries are allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence races, turning a megadonor into a candidate makes a certain kind of sense. If he can spend his own money, at least he’s not pandering to get money from everyone else!
Yet progressives don’t want a billionaire in office who’s truly empowered and independent from special interests — they want one very dependent on the right kind of special interest groups, that is to say, on themselves.
“You do have to think about who that candidate will be beholden to if they enter office,” American Prospect editor David Dayen said on a recent podcast. “Certainly if Steyer wins, he would have to thank the teachers union, progressive groups, and the kinds of organizations that have traditionally been the most progressive in California. I think that means something — that he would come in on the backs of those interests, and be more likely and willing to take on special interests who attacked him the entire campaign.”
Here, too, there’s a similarity to 2016 Trump, whose biography and lack of credibility with movement conservatives spurred him to make extravagant promises — like that he’d choose his Supreme Court nominees from a prereleased list — to win them over.
Similarly, the bet from some progressives is that these wealthy candidates will feel that, to make amends for their wealth, they’ll have to work even harder to prove their left bona fides. After all, there are worse things than having a billionaire owe you a favor.
Whether Democratic voters will actually be won over by this logic is of course a different question, which will depend on the dynamics of each particular election. But so long as our campaign finance system remains broken, the fantasy of a billionaire savior will remain a tempting one.
2026-05-15 06:30:00
A common abortion drug survived a second brush with the Supreme Court, leaving it accessible while justices decide its fate in a future ruling. The Court issued a brief order Thursday evening, which indefinitely blocks a lower court order targeting the drug mifepristone.
The Court’s order in Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana is not permanent, but it will remain in effect until this case is fully litigated, and until the justices have time to fully consider the case. As a practical matter, that likely means that mifepristone will remain available until at least June 2027, assuming that neither Congress nor the Food and Drug Administration attempt to restrict it.
As is often the case when the Supreme Court decides a matter on its “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the Court handles on an expedited basis, the Court did not disclose how each justice voted. But Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both published dissenting opinions. At least five justices must have voted to block the lower court’s decision.
Danco is the second time the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has attempted to bar access to mifepristone. After their first attempt, in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (2024), a unanimous Supreme Court concluded that federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear that case.
As I explain in this piece, very similar jurisdictional problems are present in Danco. So it is not particularly surprising that most of the justices voted to block the Fifth Circuit’s latest order. Still, the current Court did overrule Roe v. Wade, and is typically very hostile to abortion rights. So it is a harrowing event for abortion providers and their patients every time the Supreme Court gets its hands on an abortion-related case.
Technically, the Fifth Circuit’s order in Danco would not have banned mifepristone outright — it merely purported to ban distribution of the drug by mail. But that order struck down the FDA’s rules governing how doctors may prescribe the drug, without replacing them with something else, so it is unclear whether the drug would have remained available if the Supreme Court had not acted as it did.
Both Thomas’s and Alito’s dissents claimed that the pharmaceutical companies that produce mifepristone are something akin to an organized crime ring. Thomas outright called them a “criminal enterprise,” pointing to the Comstock Act, a defunct-but-never-repealed 1873 law that bans a wide range of products related to sex.
Alito, meanwhile, suggested that one of the two drug companies that make mifepristone is engaged in an “unlawful conspiracy” because their product is banned in Louisiana, even though it is legal in many states and was approved for medical use by the FDA.
In any event, neither of these justices’ views carried the day in Danco. At least for the next several months, mifepristone remains legal at the federal level.
2026-05-15 01:30:00
If you talk to folks in the anti-abortion movement, they’re pretty disappointed about the state of things in the US.
Despite the headline victories they’ve achieved in recent years — like, say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) — they thought they’d be accomplishing a lot more.
Granted, they have a few things going for them: Republican allies in Congress. A Supreme Court has been sympathetic to their cause. And the man that they helped return to the White House, Donald Trump, who has embraced the title of most “pro-life” president ever.
And yet, leaders in the anti-abortion movement are ringing alarm bells and describing this as an existential moment for their movement.
“If the Republican Party fully follows this administration’s states-only strategy and abandons its commitments to pro-life action at the national level, then the movement as we know it is finished,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told members at SBA’s April gala. “There are more abortions in the United States now than there were on the day that Roe Wade was overturned.”
One of the movement’s major frustrations is that the Trump administration has embraced a patchwork framework for regulation of mail-order abortion pills, largely deferring to the states rather than calling for a national abortion ban.
Philip Wegmann, a White House reporter at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of the recent piece “The anti-abortion movement is turning on Trump.” He joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to discuss why the anti-abortion movement felt triumphant just a few years ago, but now are very much on the back foot.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
These lobbying groups thought that the decision from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade would mean fewer abortions in the United States. Was that kind of their bad for thinking that?
There certainly was an expectation that once Roe was reversed, there were going to be all sorts of other fights — that they were going to fight this out in all 50 states.
At the same time, though, these anti-abortion groups are of the opinion that the Dobbs decision leaves room for federal action. And what they’re frustrated by right now is that Trump, in their mind, has really held them at arm’s length. Not only does he not want a federal abortion ban, but his administration has moved forward with the approval of a generic version of mifepristone. They have kept on the books Biden-era regulations that allow a woman to order these drugs through a telehealth service and not actually have to go see a doctor in person.
They believe that Republicans are standing still at a moment when Democrats, and frankly, this is backed up by the reporting, say that they want to codify Roe. So for these “pro-lifers,” it’s existential.
These groups you’re talking about, can we get more specific? Who are we talking about here?
There’s a lot of different groups here. When it comes to the “pro-life” lobby, there’s Americans United for Life, the March for Life, the Family Research Council, but the most politically connected is the Susan B. Anthony List. If a member of Congress gets a call from the March for Life, they’re picking up the phone eager to talk. If they get a call from Susan B. Anthony List, they might be sweating.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony List, is very much a political operator. That entire group, they are knife fighters through and through and they put the Republican Party on notice earlier this month when they announced that they were going to be spending $160 million, not just in the coming midterms, but in the 2028 Republican presidential primary.
The “pro-lifers” at SBA, they have not hid their frustration. They were angry at FDA administrator Marty Makary because he approved a generic [mifepristone pill]. So last December, they called for Makary to be fired. They’ve been sort of rattling the saber. But in our interview with her, she told the Wall Street Journal, “The president is the problem.” That’s a direct quote.
She believes that Trump, who was as pro-life of an advocate as you could have in 2016 and again in 2020, has set aside the issue.
The president met with people from the Susan B. Anthony List, including their leader Marjorie [Dannenfelser], last week. Do we know how much Marjorie and the president see the midterms and the 2028 elections differently?
The pro-life lobby thinks that there is a way for Republicans to run on abortion and not run away from it. They are going to spend a lot of money in these coming midterms, but they’re also going to spend a ton of money in the coming presidential primary. And the expectation here is that any candidate that they’re going to support has to agree to federal action on the abortion issue.
Marjorie told the Wall Street Journal in our reporting that the president, who had been staunchly and openly pro-life…remember, in 2016, there’s that moment on the debate stage where he says that Hillary Clinton is okay with “partial birth abortion” and describes that in vivid terms.
That got all of the social conservatives to stop thinking twice about this billionaire playboy from New York and see him instead as a social conservative champion. Well, in the 2024 election, Trump says, “Hey, I delivered you three pro-life Supreme Court justices. My work here is done. I’m going to focus on other things.” And when Marjorie went to Trump and said, “Hey, we need federal action, I need you to get on board,” the answer that she got was, “No. This issue is killing us.”
There’s a belief inside of the current administration that if they didn’t have to deal with abortion, then maybe Republicans would be picking up dozens of additional seats. So the fact that this meeting was put on the schedule is incredibly significant because it shows that the White House knows, look, we have to service this part of our coalition. We have to get on board with them. Maybe it reflects that the administration believed that they let a core constituency outside of the fold.
It seems pretty clear if you look at his decades of history of weighing in on every last issue that abortion didn’t weigh heavily on the president’s mind until it became politically expedient to do so.
Do you really think if, say, JD Vance come 2027 or so starts advocating for a federal abortion ban, a 20-week abortion ban, whatever it might be, that it’s going to upset President Trump?
You know, [with] Donald Trump, I think that everything is transactional. And so where you have these pro-lifers who are motivated by a single principle, and then you have a politician who is motivated just by getting the best deal that he can, do they get it back on the same page? Or is this a break?
And look, the anti-abortion lobby has been one of the most loyal constituencies for Republicans for decades. This is the story of the Trump era. He shows up and he tears the curtain on what Republican orthodoxy is, remaking the party in his own image. There are some things he absolutely cares about. Trade, immigration, foreign policy. In all of the other areas though, now there’s no gatekeeper to say what is and isn’t conservative. And all have sort of freely entered in to have this argument.
Some folks, like the pro-lifers, are saying this has been a party platform issue for decades. It cannot change. It shouldn’t change. They are looking not just to change the direction of the current administration. They’re looking to the future of the party and saying, “What will Republicans believe in 2028?” And their argument is that any definition of conservatism has to include robust limitations on abortion.
Previously, a lot of Republicans were very successful in saying, “Hey, we want to overturn Roe v. Wade.” That was the consensus. And so this is going to be a fascinating, fascinating fight that is going to tell us a lot about the identity of the new American right.
2026-05-14 22:35:00
This weekend, an array of Christian religious leaders and government officials are scheduled to gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC. They’ll convene to pray, yes, but this rally — organized as part of the White House-backed Freedom 250 celebrations tied to this coming July 4 — will also serve as a “rededication of our country as One Nation under God.”
If you’ve been following the cultural resurgence of religiosity in the United States, this ceremony shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state.
Inside the White House, the secretary of defense has framed the war in Iran and American military action abroad as sanctioned and guided by God. Outside the government, this alliance between church and state often skirts near the edge of outright idolatry. Conservative pastors are erecting golden statues of Trump (but insisting it does not mirror the infamous golden calf of the Old Testament). They’re extending their hands over the president in prayer after comparing him to Jesus and standing by him, with some mild criticism, after he cast himself as an AI-slop Messiah.
Through it all, these conservative and evangelical religious leaders seem confident that their vision of Christianity, or a more religious America, is on the rise.
Yet, a new report from the Pew Research Center suggests that these activists — who tend to agree with a range of beliefs that can be described as “Christian nationalist” — are not in line with the reality of what the American public wants.
Instead, Americans broadly reject many of the precepts of this more conservative ideological vision of America. They agree that religion is a force for good, but large majorities stand by the principles of Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between the sacred and the secular.
In other words, instead of being persuaded or converted by a bolder and louder religious right, many Americans don’t like what they’re seeing.
The Pew report shows a historic high in the share of Americans who say that religion is gaining influence in public life, rising 19 points in two years. And the reaction to this trend isn’t necessarily negative. Overall, views of the role of organized religion remain positive at about 55 percent.
Still, none of this suggests that the particular worldview of the religious right is catching fire. Though awareness of the term “Christian nationalism” has increased in the past four years, the additional attention hasn’t boosted its net popularity. Both positive and negative associations with the term have risen, and its precepts still remain unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans.
Here, it’s useful to define “Christian nationalism.” Though it’s a newer term often used by religious liberals or atheists to deride fundamentalist, evangelical, or conservative Christian interpretations of the Bible that link faith and patriotism, there are a handful of more specific ideas that fall under this umbrella.
The Public Religion Research Institute, for example, laid out five metrics they use in their polling to define Christian nationalism: the beliefs that American law should be based in Biblical principles; that the federal government should formally declare America a Christian nation; that Christianity is central to American identity; and that God has a unique mission for America and its Christians.
Yet, even with these fairly expansive definitions, these views don’t carry much public support. The Pew survey found that support for Christian nationalist ideas has remained steady for the last few years; there’s been no Trump bump for the most conservative Christian views.
The Pew researchers also noted that a steady majority of Americans want churches and houses of worship to “stay out of day-to-day politics and not endorse candidates.” And there has been basically no change in the share of Americans who want the federal government to abandon the separation of church and state — an explicit goal of the most conservative Christian nationalists like the chair of the White House’s infamous Religious Liberty Commission, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Similarly, there has been statistically no change in the share of Americans who believe American laws should be primarily grounded in the Bible. Those who oppose any Biblical involvement or weigh the will of voters first still outnumber Biblical fundamentalists by the same margins over the last six years.
Another tenet of Christian nationalist ideology has seen little movement: the sense that a Christian God uniquely favors or blesses the US over other countries. There, the percent who agree is unchanged over the last five years.
There has been a slight change in the share of Americans who would be comfortable with Christianity being declared an official religion — 17 percent, up from 13 percent in 2024 — though it’s still a small minority.
These results align with survey findings from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found little public support among most Americans for Christian nationalist beliefs or change over the last four years, its president and founder Robert P. Jones told me.
Trump’s welcoming of the most conservative and evangelical Christian believers is him fulfilling a campaign promise, Jones, who is writing a book about this topic, said.
“He’s speaking to a group that knows they’re in decline, knows their grip on power demographically speaking has been slipping for decades, and he has made the big promise that he’s going to bring them back into power,” he said.
Yet, the Pew findings, as well as PRRI’s own work, suggest that this deal between the religious right and the White House to prioritize “one sector of Christianity,” as Jones put it, might not be reaping the rewards that may have been expected.
“It hasn’t resulted in major shifts in the landscape,” he said. “In other words, they’re not pulling people into that worldview. They’re basically just appealing to a small subset of Americans who already hold those views and who just happen to be their political base.”
2026-05-14 18:30:00
Americans’ doom and despair about the economy is mounting.
In fact, by one measure, the public is more depressed than they’ve ever been in the postwar era. The University of Michigan has been surveying American consumers’ sentiment since all the way back in 1952 — and their result from last month was the lowest level they’ve ever found.
A CNN survey this week found deepening doubts about the core of the American dream. Asked whether most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard, 47 percent of respondents agreed. A decade ago, in 2016, 67 percent agreed. And the swing toward pessimism was relatively similar regardless of age, race, or gender.
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings on the economy also hit new all-time lows in recent weeks, in polls from both CNBC (which showed him at 39 percent) and CNN (which showed him all the way down at 30 percent).
All this is occurring while several key topline economic stats — such as GDP growth and jobs numbers — continue to look decent or outright good, and while the stock market remains near all-time highs.
Yet the American people are furious, for the same basic reason they’ve been furious most of this decade: high prices and the cost of living. In an open-ended question in CNN’s survey, 76 percent of respondents offered some variation on affordability as the biggest economic problem facing their family.
For that particular problem, there’s no end in sight — indeed, recent economic news suggests it’s getting worse:
Yet as painful as the 2020s inflation has been, there’s still a bit of a puzzle about why exactly it appears to be overwhelming all other economic indicators in Americans’ minds this time around — making people feel worse than they did even in inflationary periods that were far more prolonged and severe.
A new article from two economists proposes one explanation for what they term the “vibe gap”: that the past few decades fundamentally changed Americans’ expectations for the economy in ways that have left them more outraged than ever before. If they’re right, it could be quite a while before consumers start feeling like happy days are here again.
In explaining Americans’ bad economic vibes, some point to decades-long economic trends like the rise of inequality or the failure of the country to adequately recover from the Great Recession. Others are inclined toward big society-wide explanations that don’t have much to do with the economy at all — for instance, negativity on social media, or deepening political partisanship.
These explanations simply don’t fit the data based on the timing. That’s because, in the mid-to-late 2010s, Americans thought the economy was doing just great. And, as you may recall if you’re old enough, social media negativity and intense political partisanship existed plenty back then.
The University of Michigan’s monthly survey is widely held to be the gold standard on measuring US consumers’ sentiment about the economy. The number they report is an index based on how positively survey respondents answer various questions. (Its peak was 110, in early 2000, at the height of the dot com bubble.)
During President Barack Obama’s second term and Trump’s first term, the index was regularly in the nineties, and even the high nineties for Trump. But the pandemic — and then, even more so, the post-pandemic inflation of the Biden years — sent it plummeting, to a nadir of 53 in the summer of 2022.
Things slowly began looking better as President Joe Biden’s term stretched on, albeit well short of the highs of the 2010s. Then Trump’s second term sent it crashing downward again — with the decline spurred first by his tariffs, and more recently by the Iran war and surging gas prices.
It’s not exactly news that Americans are irate about high prices — it’s been the central political story of the 2020s.
Still, the sheer depth of rage and despair has been somewhat of a puzzle to economists, who tend to believe that the current economy really isn’t anywhere near as bad as the public appears to think.
They point to healthier current indicators like GDP and job growth, and argue that things have certainly been far worse at many points in the past. Inflation in the 1970s, for instance, was far more severe and lasted far longer than that of the 2020s — yet it’s now that the consumer sentiment index hit an all-time low. And the consumer sentiment index typically matched “hard” economic data measures of well-being — until, in the 2020s, it stopped doing that.
What accounts for the difference? One new and compelling theory, put forth by economists Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus this month, is that there’s a gap between the economy that Americans expected to have and the one they’re getting that’s proving especially hard to reconcile.
Inflation was a major problem between the mid-1960s and early 1980s. But once the Federal Reserve finally got it under control, it stayed relatively low regardless of what else was going on in the economy.
As a result, Americans are now comparing how much things “should” cost based on not just the last few years, but a sustained four-decade period of predictably smooth price increases. And for most workers, it was the only economy they’d ever known: “Nobody under the age of 43 in 2022 would have been alive during the last time inflation breached 7.5 percent, much less actively participating in the economy,” the authors noted.
To test their theory, Bernstein and Posthumus added a new variable that accounted for consumers’ expectations for price levels over time, and found that their model predicts recent dismal consumer sentiment far better.
In that context, the 2020s inflation no longer seems like a typical economic headwind — it comes off as an outright betrayal, a sign that something had been fundamentally broken in the economy.
And if the recent ominous inflation data is any indication, it still hasn’t been put back together again.