2025-05-10 05:24:29
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Welcome to The Logoff. Patrick Reis is off today: Rümeysa Öztürk was detained by the Trump administration, seemingly just for writing an op-ed. Now, in a scorching new ruling, a federal judge ordered her freed.
What’s the background? Öztürk — a Tufts University PhD student and a Turkish national — was whisked off the streets of Massachusetts by ICE agents in late March. Her arrest was part of the Trump administration effort to revoke visas from students who protested Israel’s war in Gaza.
Her detention stood out as particularly shocking because there was no indication she had ever engaged in any disruptive or lawbreaking protests. She had merely co-authored an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper last year that criticized the war and urged school administrators to acknowledge students’ concerns about it.
A Trump administration spokesperson anonymously claimed in March that “DHS and ICE investigations found Öztürk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” But to this day they have conspicuously failed to produce any evidence of that — including, when Öztürk filed suit, before a judge.
What did the judge say? Judge William Sessions III ordered Öztürk released “immediately.” Ruling from the bench, he sounded appalled by the Trump administration’s conduct, which he said “chills the speech of the millions and millions of people who are not citizens.”
He said Öztürk had made “very substantial claims of First Amendment and due process violations,” and that, furthermore, the government had offered “no evidence” about their motivation for detaining her other than the op-ed.
Is this case over, then? No. Öztürk was ordered released from detention. But the question of whether the US government can legally revoke her visa remains unresolved. While Sessions sounds very likely to rule in her favor, it’s unclear if conservatives on the Supreme Court will do the same, should the case reach them. Still, this case has been an embarrassment to the Trump administration, and perhaps there’s a faint glimmer of hope they’ll decide to just drop it. Too optimistic? Probably.
If you want some good art film recommendations, Jia Zhangke — one of the best directors working today, in my view — visited the Criterion Closet this week and picked some of his favorites. His own films are also streaming on the Criterion Channel — if you’re interested in contemplative movies about the modernization of China that suddenly drop a Village People dance track, check them out!
2025-05-09 23:55:00
The next salvo in the crusade to ban abortion is now clear. Anti-abortion activists have launched what they’re privately calling “Rolling Thunder” — a coordinated campaign to pressure the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restore restrictions on mifepristone, a popular drug used in the US to end pregnancies. Under Rolling Thunder, the existence of which was first reported by POLITICO, activists also plan to bring new lawsuits against doctors who prescribe abortion medication, and continue lobbying to strip the drug from the market entirely.
Their vision relies heavily on a new report claiming mifepristone causes high rates of health complications — contradicting decades of rigorous drug safety testing. Citing the report, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill on Tuesday to reimpose mifepristone restrictions, and to allow patients to sue telehealth abortion providers who prescribe it. This comes amid another legal attack on a New York abortion provider, who faces a first-of-its-kind criminal charge for prescribing abortion pills to the mother of a pregnant minor in Louisiana.
The FDA approved mifepristone 25 years ago, and it’s used today in two-thirds of abortions in America. Abortion pills have become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the US, partly due to their safety record and lower cost, combined with diminished access to in-person care. While states have ramped up abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, access to abortion pills has actually significantly expanded since, helping to explain why there were more US abortions in 2023 than in any year since 2011. Reinstating federal restrictions on mifepristone could effectively end telemedicine abortion access, in which patients consult with abortion providers remotely, and which thousands of people in states with bans rely on each month for care.
While activists’ current focus is on telehealth bans, physician intimidation, and shortening the legal window to use mifepristone, anti-abortion leaders were explicit on a private Zoom call that this all just represents a “first step” ahead of pushing to ban the drug entirely.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to send mixed signals. In April, Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, said that while he has “no plans” to restrict mifepristone, he “can’t promise” his agency won’t act on incoming safety data that “suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal.” In his January Health and Human Services confirmation hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also said he would study the safety of mifepristone and follow whatever the president wanted to do.
And earlier this week the Trump administration’s Department of Justice asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit from three Republican states seeking to restrict access to the medication. Yet the DOJ was not explicitly defending the safety of mifepristone; instead, it was rejecting states’ ability to challenge the FDA’s authority.
Abortion rights experts see the Trump administration’s latest move as an effort to protect its ability to restrict mifepristone by making it harder for blue states to bring any court challenges. But pulling the drug or passing new limitations wouldn’t be so simple, and would require a significant amount of resources and data for the FDA to justify reversing its own earlier findings.
“None of these things are happening in a vacuum,” Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Vox. “This junk science ‘report,’ the Rolling Thunder campaign…it’s all part of the same coordinated effort to end abortion access by any means necessary.”
In late April, a conservative think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), published a report claiming that serious complications from abortion pills are dramatically higher than previously known. The report was not peer-reviewed and was based on an analysis of insurance claims data from medication abortions between 2017 and 2023. It alleged that nearly 11 percent of women who took mifepristone experienced “infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious or life-threatening adverse event” — which would be 22 times higher than the rate listed on the FDA-approved drug label.
Reproductive health experts dismissed the findings and pointed to the large body of research affirming mifepristone’s safety. (My former colleague Keren Landman covered this literature for Vox two years ago.)
“The evidence that we have for the safety of medication abortion is so robust,” Brittni Frederiksen, the associate director for women’s health policy at KFF, told me. “Additional studies are always welcome, and researchers are always looking into safety and the use of medication abortion. But it’s not going to be one [report] that’s going to change an entire body of evidence.”
Legal health experts criticized the analysis, noting that insurance claims often overcount procedures for billing purposes, and can be misleading proxies when trying to figure out the true cause of a health outcome. The conservative think tank also suggested mifepristone led to dangerous events like ectopic pregnancies, which the medication cannot cause. The EEPC received so many objections that on Wednesday the co-authors released an FAQ in defense.
Matthew Loftus, a physician who opposes abortion but also had concerns about the study’s methodology, said while insurance claims are imperfect proxies, that does not make them inherently invalid ones. Loftus believes the report should prompt further review, and argues that the ectopic pregnancy data could suggest potential safety concerns with telehealth, as patients don’t receive ultrasounds that could identify ectopic pregnancies.
However, the FDA considered such concerns before approving mifepristone via telehealth. Ushma Upadhyay, a professor with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California San Francisco, points to research showing telehealth may actually lead to earlier diagnosis and treatment for patients with ectopic pregnancies, because it’s more accessible and allows people to take their pills sooner than if they had to wait weeks for an in-person appointment.
Research published since the FDA’s telehealth approval in 2021 has continued to affirm medication abortion’s safety profile, and Kirsten Moore, director of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access Project, disputes the necessity of ultrasounds for ectopic pregnancy screening. “Even if every patient were to get an ultrasound before being given mifepristone, the chance that an ectopic pregnancy is discovered so early in pregnancy is limited because there is little to nothing to see — especially at six, seven, eight weeks,” she told me.
Moore notes that telehealth protocols also have screening measures, including disclosure of ectopic pregnancies, “something that can obviously be done over Zoom, phone, or even just paperwork.”
The FDA, for its part, has responded cautiously. A spokesperson told Vox the agency is “committed to safeguarding public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and quality of the products it regulates.” They emphasized that the FDA “rigorously evaluates the latest scientific data, leveraging gold standard science to make informed decisions” and applies “a balanced, science-based approach while incorporating practical, common-sense considerations to its regulatory processes.”
Last fall, when attorneys general from Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri filed their lawsuit against the FDA demanding rollbacks on mifepristone access, most observers expected Trump’s DOJ to drop the Biden administration’s defense of the drugs or even side with the states, since Trump had emphasized repeatedly on the campaign trail that abortion was now a states’ issue.
Instead, the DOJ this week asked to drop the case or transfer it to another court, arguing that the Republican-led states had relied on “an incorrect legal argument” to challenge the federal rules allowing the pills to be prescribed online and sent by mail.
Reproductive rights advocates stress the administration’s hostility to abortion rights has not changed. “The most cynical read you could have on that situation is they’re making that move so they are free to enact whatever restrictions administratively,” said Vasquez-Giroux of Planned Parenthood. “They were making a strictly procedural argument and not saying anything about the merits” of mifepristone’s safety.
It’s not yet clear what Trump will decide to do. While on the campaign trail, Trump claimed he would “not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances,” but he did vote in Florida to maintain the state’s extreme six-week ban. In December Trump told Time magazine it was “highly unlikely” he would limit access to medication abortion as president, but he also declined to rule out the possibility. He added that “somebody could come up with something that, you know, this horrible thing,” implying new information brought to his attention could change his position.
Since winning, Trump and his team have aimed to keep abortion out of the news, in a way they have not for other planks of the Project 2025 agenda. While Trump did appoint Dr. Mehmet Oz , who is anti-abortion, to oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Trump’s HHS secretary pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was on record supporting abortion rights. Trump’s team also rejected naming Roger Severino to a top HHS post, primarily because the administration thought his anti-abortion views would be too controversial. (Anti-abortion leaders lobbied heavily for Severino.) Vox has previously reported that anti-abortion advocates were preparing to be lenient with the president, meaning they would accept compromises with him to stay in his good graces.
If the anti-abortion coalition succeeds in pressuring the FDA to restrict access, several levels of regulation could be reimposed.
The most likely scenario would be reinstating requirements that were relaxed during the Biden administration, like rules requiring in-person dispensing of the medication. Other potential restrictions include reducing the approved use of mifepristone from 10 weeks to seven weeks of pregnancy, banning pharmacy dispensing (reversing the 2023 change that allowed retail pharmacies to provide the medication), or even enforcing the Comstock Act to ban mailing abortion medication entirely.
Another option for restricting the drug could be for an HHS official to write a memo on behalf of Kennedy claiming mifepristone represents an “imminent harm.” Under federal law, that could empower the HHS secretary to pull the drug from the market.
The impact of such changes would extend far beyond states with abortion bans. Even in states where abortion remains legal, telehealth abortion services have significantly expanded access, particularly for those in rural areas, those with limited transportation options, or those who can’t take time off work for multiple clinic visits.
For now, it’s not clear how the FDA will respond. While many anti-abortion activists are feeling optimistic that the EEPC report will give the FDA reason to revisit restrictions, a push to do so would still require Trump’s approval. And while the president continues to receive intense pressure from his base to curb access to mifepristone, some advocates are skeptical that Trump will dedicate his political capital for it.
“I remain skeptical that this will be the path,” Moore, of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access Project, said. “And yes, manufacturers can and will sue” the FDA, too, if it tries to roll back access to approved drugs.
2025-05-09 23:25:00
The most likely outcome is that the latest deadly flare-up between India and Pakistan will end relatively soon: In the little over 25 years that the two countries have possessed nuclear weapons, both have become very good at engaging in tense and violent confrontations without them escalating to threaten the entire planet.
When he announced the cross-border missile strikes that began what India is calling “Operation Sindoor,” Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri described his country’s actions as “measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible.” Neither side has yet sent ground troops into the other’s territory, which would be the clearest sign yet of a wider war.
On Wednesday, India launched missile attacks into Pakistan in response to a brutal massacre of tourists in April by militants that the Indian government alleges have links to the Pakistani state. Since then, the two countries have been trading artillery and drone strikes across the border, with around four dozen deaths reported so far.
All the same, in its scale and intensity, and without an obvious off-ramp for the combatants, some analysts are describing the current conflict as the most dangerous episode of violence between India and Pakistan since the Kargil War of 1999, in which hundreds of troops were killed on both sides.
Just because the two sides don’t want the crisis to escalate doesn’t mean it won’t anyway.
Since majority-Hindu India and majority-Muslim Pakistan were partitioned in 1947, they have fought four major wars and a number of smaller skirmishes. The primary source of tension between the two has been the disputed region of Kashmir, which since 1972 has been divided by an unofficial border known as the Line of Control.
Even in peaceful times, alleged violations of the line and cross-border firing have been relatively common. India also accuses Pakistan of sponsoring a long-running Islamist insurgency in the parts of Kashmir it controls — which Pakistan denies, although it does openly support autonomy for the region.
The stakes of the conflict were raised by the introduction of nuclear weapons, which India first tested in 1974 and Pakistan acquired in 1998. The year after Pakistan got its nukes, the Kargil War began when Pakistani fighters covertly crossed the Line of Control and took up positions in Indian-administered Kashmir.
The war, which lasted around two months, is often held up as the primary counterexample to the idea of “nuclear peace” — the concept that nuclear weapons make war less likely because of the risk of escalation.
Pakistan and India demonstrated that two nuclear powers can fight a war, albeit a short and relatively limited one, using only conventional weapons. Some political scientists have used India and Pakistan’s case to demonstrate what’s known as the “stability-instability paradox”: The introduction of nuclear weapons makes large-scale war less likely, but small-scale violence more likely, because each side assumes the other will not want to escalate.
There have been a number of additional flare-ups in the years that followed, and they’ve been getting gradually more intense and dangerous with each new episode.
“You can see the quantitative, qualitative, sort of growth in the Indian response to Pakistan in the last 24 years,” said Happymon Jacob, an Indian security analyst and the editor of India’s World magazine.
In 2001, after terrorists attacked the Indian parliament, the Indian government accused Pakistan’s intelligence services of being involved in the attacks, and both countries amassed nearly 1 million troops on the border, but ultimately did not go to war. Similarly, in 2008, after terrorist attacks in Mumbai killed nearly 200 people, India again refrained from direct strikes against Pakistan.
In 2016, after 19 Indian troops were killed by militants in an attack on a base in Kashmir, India responded with “surgical strikes” at militant camps across the Line of Control.
Then in 2019, after 40 Indian police were killed in a suicide bombing, India carried out airstrikes against militant targets on Pakistani territory. Pakistan responded with strikes of its own on the Indian side of the line, which led to an air battle and downing of an Indian fighter jet.
Since then, the conflict has been relatively quiet, even as clashes between India and its other nuclear-armed neighbor, China, have been more intense. That all changed last month.
The current crisis began on April 22, when gunmen killed 26 people in Pahalgam, a popular tourist resort in Indian-administered Kashmir, appearing to specifically target Hindu men.
A militant group called the Resistance Front has claimed responsibility, but India says the group is an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that carried out the Mumbai attacks and which has alleged links to Pakistani security services.
The Pakistani government denies any links to the attacks and the Indian government has not presented any direct evidence of their involvement, but Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to “raze whatever is left of the terror haven,” referring to terrorist camps in Pakistan.
After weeks of rising tensions, including cross-border fire, the expulsion of diplomats, and India’s withdrawal from a key water-sharing treaty, the military conflict began in earnest on Wednesday when India fired missiles into Pakistan, targeting nine sites “where terrorist attacks against India have been planned,” according to the Indian defense ministry.
At least 31 people, including women and children, were killed, and two mosques were hit, according to Pakistani authorities. Pakistan has responded with drone and missile strikes of its own against Indian military targets. The attacks and counterattacks have been ongoing. Pakistan also appears to have downed a number of Indian aircraft, though the exact number is unclear and both sides are accusing the other of spreading misinformation.
For the moment, there isn’t an obvious “off-ramp,” which would allow the two sides to defuse tensions.
For instance, in 2019, Pakistan’s release of a captured Indian pilot helped deescalate the crisis. Srujan Palkar of the Atlantic Council has written that a renegotiation of the water treaty that India has suspended could provide an opportunity for dialogue. (Pakistan relies on the Indus River system, which passes through India, for much of its agriculture and economic activity. Amid the growing crisis, Indian officials have threatened to withhold that water.)
“The United States has always been the default crisis broker between India and Pakistan, but it is becoming more awkward for Washington to play that role.”
Joshua White, former director of South Asian affairs on the Obama administration’s National Security Council
The brutality of the Pahalgam massacre touted with the fact that Modi’s government had been touting Kashmir as a safe and pacified tourist destination made a strong Indian military response almost inevitable, and one need only look at the examples of September 11 or October 7 to see how the anger provoked by a deadly terrorist attack can lead a country into a long-term war. Nationalist fervor is running high in both countries, but ironically, Foreign Policy magazine editor Ravi Agrawal suggests that the sheer amount of misinformation circling around the conflict could help defuse it by making it easier for both sides to claim victory.
For the moment, the two sides don’t appear to have much interest in talking. America’s role in the crisis is also something of a question mark.
US diplomacy has played a critical role in resolving India-Pakistan crises in the past, including in 1999 and 2019, but Joshua White, former director of South Asian affairs on the Obama administration’s National Security Council, said America’s leverage is not what it once was.
While the Indian government has been growing ever closer to Washington, thanks to their mutual distrust of China, the US-Pakistan relationship has deteriorated since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio has been in touch with the governments of both countries. President Donald Trump has declared the fighting a “shame” and said, “They’ve gone tit for tat, so hopefully they can stop now,” and added, “If I can do anything to help, I will be there.” Vice President JD Vance was more equivocal, saying that while the US would encourage both sides to deescalate, “we’re not going to get involved in the middle of war that’s fundamentally none of our business.” In contrast to other recent crises, such as 2016 and 2019, the US has not criticized India’s strikes on Pakistan.
“The United States has always been the default crisis broker between India and Pakistan, but it is becoming more awkward for Washington to play that role because of the thinner, more tenuous, and more conflictual relationship that it has developed with Pakistan in recent years,” White said.
India’s defense ministry claims it demonstrated restraint by striking against alleged militant targets rather than Pakistan’s military in its initial strikes, but the situation has already escalated.
Pakistan’s retaliation did target the Indian military (there aren’t non-state “militants” to attack on the Indian side, so this was basically inevitable) and India has not targeted Pakistan’s air defense systems.
It’s not hard to imagine scenarios that could cause this conflict to escalate. A missile strike could — intentionally or inadvertently — cause a large number of military or civilian casualties, prompting an even larger retaliation.
Indian authorities have claimed that the purpose of their strikes is to deter terrorist attacks, not to seize territory, but if they sent troops over the Line of Control into Pakistani-administered Kashmir, leaders in Pakistan might still interpret it as an invasion.
Given the potentially global consequences of a worst-case scenario, these are risks people everywhere are forced to take seriously.
India and Pakistan have around 180 and 170 nuclear warheads, respectively. Pakistan, crucially, does not have a “no first use” policy around these weapons, meaning it does not rule out using nuclear force to deter a conventional attack. It has also introduced low-yield “tactical” weapons into its arsenal specifically for battlefield use to counter India’s conventional military superiority. India does have a declared no-first-use policy, though some officials’ recent statements have cast doubt on it.
In the current crisis, Pakistan’s defense minister has said they would only consider using their nukes if “there is a direct threat to our existence.” That sort of threat is in the eye of the beholder, but we’re still likely a long way from it, particularly given the alleged losses India’s air force has already sustained.
But, said White, the former National Security Council staffer, “so long as we continue to see back and forth missile strikes, the nuclear question is not off the table.”
Beyond this immediate crisis, India’s increasing willingness to use conventional military force against Pakistan — with greater and greater intensity — to respond to terrorist attacks on its territory, suggests that the fear of nuclear escalation may not be as powerful a deterrent as it once was.
So far, these two long-time belligerents have demonstrated an ability to keep these conflicts limited. The main victims, as always, will be the people of Kashmir, subject to both war and increasingly dire human rights conditions. But with each new crisis, they also seem increasingly willing to push the envelope.
2025-05-09 23:00:00
Many liberals would like the Democratic Party to put climate change at the center of its messaging and policy agenda. They would also like Democrats to win more elections. In a recent column in the Washington Post, former Washington governor and presidential candidate Jay Inslee argued that there is no tension between these two objectives: The best way for Democrats to defeat Republicans is to focus more on bold climate action.
Inslee’s case can be broken down into three claims:
Inslee is right that young voters swung hard against the Democratic Party in 2024. AP VoteCast, a high-quality exit poll, showed Kamala Harris winning voters under 30 by just 4 points. By contrast, Joe Biden won young voters by more than 20 points in 2020. And it’s also true that young voters are more worried about climate change than older ones.
Nevertheless, the evidence for Inslee’s fundamental thesis — that the best way for Democrats to win back power is to focus more on climate — is weak.
The problem with his argument is simple: Voters — both old and young — do not consider climate change a top priority. And focusing on an issue that voters care relatively little about isn’t a great way to win their support.
Sign up here for more stories on the lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz.
When Gallup asked Americans last year which issues were most important to their vote, climate change ranked 21st out of the 22 issues tested — above transgender rights but below “relations with Russia.” A separate Gallup survey right before the election asked Americans to name their country’s most important problem, and only 2 percent mentioned climate change or the environment. Similarly, in Pew’s polling published in February on the biggest problems facing America today, climate change came in at 17th.
In his op-ed, Inslee’s prime concern is with winning over young voters, on the grounds that declining youth support for Democrats was “the dynamic that caused” Trump’s election. But this is an overstatement. Democrats also lost ground with voters over 30 in 2024. And since older voters far outnumber younger ones, Democrats can’t afford to give exclusive consideration to the latter’s concerns.
This said, young voters’ priorities aren’t actually that distinct from the broader electorate’s. According to AP VoteCast data — which Inslee himself cites — only 8 percent of young voters listed climate change as their No. 1 issue in 2024, while 40 percent named the economy and jobs.
The share of younger voters who considered climate change a top three issue is more substantial. In Tufts University’s post-election survey of the youth vote, 26 percent of respondents put climate as one of their top three priorities. Yet this still constitutes a small minority of the under-35 voting population. Notably, young Americans who did not cast a ballot in 2024 were especially unlikely to prioritize climate, with only 18 percent putting the issue in their top three.
A proponent of Inslee’s strategy might blame Democrats for the public’s limited concern about climate change. After all, political parties have influence over which issues are and are not salient. If Democrats centered climate change in their messaging, perhaps voters would start prioritizing the issue.
But there are a couple problems with this reasoning. First, as Inslee himself writes, Democrats did put climate at the center of their agenda under Biden, making “historic investments in clean energy” through the Inflation Reduction Act. And Biden and Harris spoke frequently about the need to combat the climate crisis. Yet none of this was sufficient to turn climate change into a top 15 issue for the American public.
Second, and most critically, Americans are well aware that the Democratic Party deems climate change a policy priority. In January, when the New York Times and Ipsos asked voters to name the issues that are most important to Democrats, climate came in third.
In other words, the party does not need to put greater emphasis on climate in order to convey its commitment to decarbonization — that message is already coming through. And last year, Harris won voters who considered climate change one of their top three issues by 70 points, according to Navigator Research.
The problem is simply that such voters aren’t very numerous. This is a point that progressive donors and activists are liable to miss, since voters who prioritize climate change are heavily overrepresented in their social circles. According to polling from Democratic data firm Blue Rose research, wealthy and/or “very liberal” Democrats are much more likely than the broader public to name climate as a top concern.
Meanwhile, on the issues that Americans do broadly prioritize — such as the cost of living, the economy, and inflation — Republicans boasted a double-digit advantage in 2024.
Focusing more rhetorical energy on climate change is unlikely to enhance Democrats’ credibility on bread-and-butter issues. To the contrary, there’s reason to fear it would hurt that cause.
One of the party’s biggest challenges today is that voters don’t think Democrats share their priorities. In the Times’s poll mentioned above, voters were asked to name their top five issue priorities and then those of the Democratic Party. Respondents said their top issues were the economy, health care, immigration, taxes, and crime — while the Democrats’ were abortion, LGBT policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and health care.
In other words, they suggested that Democrats weren’t focused on their top concerns, with the exception of health care policy.
This sense that Democrats are more preoccupied with niche social causes than the middle-class’s core material needs surfaces in other survey data. For instance, even after Trump engineered an economic crisis in April with his unpopular tariffs, Quinnipiac still found the public evenly split on the question of which party “cares more for the needs of people like you.”
Making progress on climate requires removing the GOP from power.
Thus, were Democrats to put greater emphasis on climate change, they would risk perpetuating the idea that the party does not share ordinary Americans’ priorities.
And doing so would also risk directly undermining the party’s standing on the cost of living.
Inslee rightly notes that it is possible to reduce emissions and raise living standards simultaneously. But it’s nevertheless true that there are some tensions between cutting carbon pollution and increasing affordability in the near term. The climate movement has sought to block new fossil fuel extraction and transport projects, an objective that would limit the supply of energy in the near term, thereby potentially increasing costs.
Therefore, if Democrats signal that climate change is their overriding concern, some voters may conclude that the party isn’t committed to keeping gasoline or home heating oil cheap.
Or so some polling would suggest. During the Biden administration, Blue Rose gauged the persuasive impact of hundreds of Republican messages by polling voters, exposing them to a conservative argument, and then polling them again to see if any had switched their voting intentions. The firm found that one of the GOP’s best attack lines — one that outperformed 90 percent of all other Republican messages — was, “Since Day 1, Biden has waged war on energy independence. His failed policies, like canceling the Keystone Pipeline, have led to Americans paying higher heating costs.”
To be fair to Inslee, he acknowledges that young voters are preoccupied with the cost of living. And his vision for climate policy foregrounds direct material benefits for ordinary people: He touts the fact that Washington’s “cap-and-investment” program has subsidized working families’ electric bills and provided young people with free access to transit.
This is a fine program. And a national version might deserve a place on Democrats’ laundry list of policy proposals. But the idea that the party’s most electorally expedient message is one that centers climate change just isn’t plausible.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats should never discuss the climate crisis, or advocate for emissions-reducing policies. But the party should not overestimate the political utility of the issue. Climate change is a top priority for progressive donors and activists — but not for swing voters, old or young.
That reality does not render decarbonization any less important. But making progress on climate requires removing the GOP from power. And it will be difficult for Democrats to do that, if they refuse to align their party’s priorities with those of the electorate.
2025-05-09 19:30:00
On May 15, the Supreme Court will hear three cases — consolidated under the name Trump v. CASA — which concern his unconstitutional attempt to strip many Americans born in the United States of citizenship. The mere fact that this hearing is happening is significant, as the Court rarely gives cases a full hearing in May, and typically only does so for matters of extreme urgency.
There is no plausible argument that the Donald Trump executive order at the heart of this case, which targets birthright citizenship — the constitutional principle that nearly anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen — is lawful. As Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who was the first judge to block the order, said from the bench, “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
That said, the specific legal questions before the Court have little to do with birthright citizenship. At least three courts issued “nationwide injunctions” against Trump’s anti-citizenship order, meaning that lower court judges handed down orders that bind the entire federal government and prohibit Trump from canceling anyone’s citizenship anywhere under his executive order.
The question of whether a single federal trial judge may issue an order that binds the entire country is fraught and has been hotly disputed for years. During the later days of the first Trump administration, Republican Justice Neil Gorsuch published an uncharacteristically persuasive concurring opinion arguing that these nationwide orders must be reined in.
Gorsuch argued that injunctions — court orders that either require a party to take a particular action or forbid them from doing so — are “meant to redress the injuries sustained by a particular plaintiff in a particular lawsuit.” When one judge can go much further, halting an entire federal policy nationwide, that creates an asymmetry. “There are currently more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges,” Gorsuch wrote. In a world with nationwide injunctions, plaintiffs can shop around for the one judge in America who is most likely to be sympathetic to their cause, and potentially secure a court order that no other judge would hand down.
This “judge-shopping” became a huge problem during the Biden administration, as there is a cohort of judges in Texas who proved quite willing to issue injunctions against a wide range of liberal policies that are unquestionably lawful. Think of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and his infamous court order attempting to ban the abortion drug mifepristone.
The GOP-controlled Supreme Court, moreover, often treated nationwide injunctions against the Biden administration very differently than injunctions binding a Republican president. In the first Trump administration, when lower court judges blocked Trump’s immigration policies, the Court often intervened within days to halt those injunctions. But when judges like Kacsmaryk enjoined Biden’s immigration policies, the Supreme Court would sometimes sit on those cases for nearly a year before ruling that the injunction was illegal.
Indeed, nationwide injunctions so frustrated the Biden administration that, on her way out the door, Biden’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, filed a brief asking the justices to limit these broad orders. That brief was filed in December 2024, after Trump had won the election, so Prelogar knew that Trump was likely to benefit if the justices took her up on her invitation.
Ultimately, they did not — but they’ve instead decided to consider the question of nationwide injunctions in CASA. That’s an odd choice, because the case for a nationwide injunction on this particular issue is unusually strong.
If Trump’s lawyers convince the Supreme Court to limit nationwide injunctions, however, it will have enormous implications that stretch far beyond the birthright citizenship issue. As of this writing, there are more than 200 lawsuits challenging actions by the Trump administration. If lower court judges cannot issue nationwide injunctions, Trump will have far more leeway to implement policies even after a lower court deems them illegal or unconstitutional.
Still, the nationwide injunctions issue has lingered for a long time, upsetting the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations. So the Court probably could not continue ignoring it forever.
Before we dive deeper into the nationwide injunctions issue, it should be noted that the merits of the CASA case are as straightforward as any issue that has reached the Supreme Court in recent memory. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is obviously unconstitutional, and there are no good-faith arguments for his position.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order that purports to strip citizenship from many babies born in the United States. The order targets children born to undocumented mothers whose fathers were neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents at the time of the child’s birth. It also targets children of fathers with similar immigration status, and mothers who were lawfully, but temporarily, present in the United States when their child was born.
The order does not apply retroactively — by its terms, only babies born 30 days after it was issued would be ineligible for citizenship. Had it applied to adult citizens, however, it would likely denationalize many very prominent Americans, including former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The problem with this order is that the 14th Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” “All persons” means all persons, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), moreover, the 14th Amendment’s exception for children who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States is very narrow. The United States has “jurisdiction” over anyone who is bound by its laws — if the US did not have jurisdiction over undocumented immigrants, for example, then it would not be legal to deport them.
Wong Kim Ark explained that there are three classes of people, two of which are still relevant today, who are not subject to US jurisdiction. One is the children “born of alien enemies in hostile occupation.” The other is children of “diplomatic representatives of a foreign state,” who have diplomatic immunity from US law. (The third category is some “children of members of the Indian tribes,” but a 1924 law established that tribal citizens are also US citizens.)
Indeed, it’s worth noting that Trump’s lawyers didn’t even ask the Supreme Court to fully restore his birthright citizenship order — they merely asked the Court to limit the scope of the lower courts’ injunctions so that they only apply to the specific plaintiffs challenging the order. That strategic decision by Trump’s lawyers is unsurprising, because the unconstitutionality of Trump’s order was settled more than 125 years ago in Wong Kim Ark.
While there is no serious argument that Trump’s birthright citizenship order is legal, there are very serious arguments on both sides of the nationwide injunction question. Gorsuch and Prelogar are correct that, when a single trial judge can set policy for the entire nation, it can needlessly disrupt the federal government’s legitimate activities.
At the same time, a blanket rule against nationwide injunctions would render many court orders worthless. As one of the plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order points out in their brief, the appropriate remedy in a gerrymandering case is that the entire gerrymandered district must be redrawn — not that the individual plaintiffs who brought that case be moved to another district. A more limited order would be unworkable and would impose impossible burdens on election officials who would have to track which voters are plaintiffs in which lawsuits in order to determine which candidates they may vote for.
Similar problems would arise in the birthright citizenship cases if the Supreme Court attempted to limit the injunctions against Trump’s executive order. Two of the plaintiffs challenging that order, CASA, Inc. and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), say that they have “more than 800,000 members, spread across all 50 states.” When an organization secures an injunction against a federal policy, that injunction typically covers every member of that organization.
Were the injunction against the executive order limited to CASA and ASAP members, in other words, states and the federal government could have to track whether the parents of impacted children are members of either group (or perhaps if the children are — again, it’s not at all clear how this would work), and extend citizenship only to those individuals. A parent who lets their membership lapse could see their child denationalized, perhaps to become a citizen again once they rejoin. That would create an unworkable administrative nightmare for everyone involved.
Meanwhile, two other cases were brought by two blocs of states, led by Washington and New Jersey, respectively. And it’s not at all clear how an injunction against the executive order limited to these states alone would work: Would someone born in Washington cease to be a citizen if they crossed the border into Idaho? Or would someone born in Idaho suddenly become a citizen if they entered Washington, only to lose that status the minute they returned to a non-plaintiff state? Such a rule wouldn’t just be exceedingly difficult to administer, it would likely violate the Constitution’s equal protection principle, which prohibits arbitrary distinctions among similarly situated individuals.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court’s current precedents offer a framework that can be used to resolve this tension between giving judges too much power to set national policy and forcing them to draw arbitrary lines that needlessly burden both the plaintiffs and the government. As the Court said in Califano v. Yamaski (1979), the ordinary rule is that “injunctive relief should be no more burdensome to the defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs.”
In many cases, Califano will preclude nationwide injunctions. But, in the birthright citizenship cases, it’s hard to see how anything other than a nationwide injunction could suffice. CASA and ASAP members won’t receive complete relief if they are constantly having to prove their membership (or their parents’ membership) in one of these two organizations to obtain the benefits of citizenship, including the right to be free from deportation. And states can’t administer programs like Medicaid, where eligibility often turns on a beneficiary’s immigration status, if they can’t tell who is or is not a citizen.
It’s worth acknowledging one additional wrinkle in this case, which the Court could decide to take up at the May 15 argument. The Trump administration claims that the state plaintiffs aren’t entitled to any relief at all because they lack “standing” — the requirement that a litigant show that they were injured in some way by the defendant they are suing before bringing a federal lawsuit.
But the states have a very strong argument that they have standing to challenge the birthright citizenship order. As one bloc of states explains in their brief, many federal programs tie funding to the number of citizens within a particular state, so states will lose money if the birthright citizenship order goes into effect. Loss of funding is one of the most common ways to establish standing to bring a federal lawsuit.
Additionally, the states argue that ending birthright citizenship for many children of immigrants would require them to make “substantial changes to existing public programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Title IV-E foster care, and the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Enumeration at Birth program.”
Ultimately, because the case for a nationwide injunction in CASA is so strong, the Court probably will not use this case to unravel many of the more difficult questions posed by more questionable nationwide injunctions. But, at the very least, the case is likely to offer an early window into how these justices will determine which nationwide injunctions are allowed and which ones are forbidden.
2025-05-09 19:00:00
The Catholic Church has a new pope, and for the first time, he is an American.
Pope Leo XIV was elected on Thursday, succeeding Pope Francis, who died in April. Leo, a 69-year-old native of Chicago, has held several roles in the Church, including serving as a bishop in Peru and leading the Order of St. Augustine. Most recently, he was the head of a board tasked with choosing new bishops. And according to his brother, Leo is a longtime White Sox fan.
While these biographical details are important and offer some insight into the man behind the title, they cannot tell us much about the biggest questions raised by Leo’s ascension: Where will he lead his Church? Will he usher in reforms? And how will he approach the many challenges facing the institution?
To answer those questions, and others, I turned to Michele Dillon, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire, and a scholar on the Catholic Church.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
What do people need to know about the new pope?
What’s very impressive is the range of experiences that Pope Leo XIV brings to the role.
He has been a missionary on the ground in Peru for 20 years, and so knows firsthand the needs of the local churches in poor peripheral areas that are a key concern and of great importance to the Church.
It’s also very important that he has, most recently, been head of the Dicastery — the department at the Vatican in charge of bishops — so, he really has been very strongly involved in vetting and making new appointments of bishops, as well as recommending bishop appointments across the whole world. The network of bishops [he developed] will be important, not just formally, but also informally. Presumably, he can literally get on the phone and ask a particular bishop in a particular diocese [for advice or information].
And it’s important to know that he’s an Augustinian, and was the head of the Augustinian order, so he brings that Augustinian tradition, which is a very significant part of the church — theologically, and in terms of the world today.
Of course, the very fact that he’s American is obviously a big surprise, but there’s always the uncertainty that every cardinal who goes in there, any one of them, can emerge as the pope. We’re always surprised who the next pope is.
In part, what tipped the balance in favor of his papacy is not only is he an American, but he is so deeply rooted in South America. I imagine that the South American and Central American cardinals would have a lot of respect for him, as would the cardinals from Africa and Asia, who really do appreciate that missionary tradition and experience.
He truly is a great American from Chicago, which has a very proud history and still today a very vibrant Catholicism on the ground in all those parishes across Chicago, but he also brings his other experience outside of America to this job.
Overall, he brings really deep pastoral experience, plus executive management experience.
He understands the work of the Vatican, the internal workings of the Vatican bureaucracy, and is probably fairly adept at navigating its complexities.
What are some of the challenges — and some of the big decisions — Pope Leo will face?
It’s not as if there’s some looming decision on his desk. But certainly there are a lot of ongoing, pressing issues in the Church.
One of those are the Vatican finances, which have been a recurring issue. Francis himself made a lot of efforts to bring reform to the Vatican Bank and to its accounting practices. He had some success in making it a little bit more transparent; he brought in some outside experts, although that wasn’t necessarily very successful, because many of those ended up leaving for one reason or another, sometimes under the cloud of scandal.
And of course, during Francis’s term, we had embezzlement charges against Cardinal Becciu, who couldn’t vote in this most recent conclave. Those embezzlement charges are reminiscent ones that we’ve had every decade, certainly in my life, going back to the Banco Ambrosiano corruption scandal that made its way into The Godfather Part III.
It’s a major problem because — obviously, you don’t want mismanagement — but also, though the Vatican has a lot of assets; it has a lot of expenses. And the growth area of Catholicism today is in the poorest regions of the world, in Africa and parts of Asia. It relies on money from America to a large extent, which gives disproportionately to its share of the Catholic population globally.
[Another issue will likely be] continuing the Vatican’s diplomacy. In the Israel and Palestine situation and the Russia-Ukraine situation, the Vatican has been actively involved in making diplomatic interventions and trying to work behind the scenes, as it always does in these situations. Pope Leo XIV mentioned peace several times in his opening comments. And clearly, that’s something that he’s going to be weighing — something that probably has long been weighing on his mind, and as pope, I would imagine that would be a pressing priority for him.
Then, you have to deal with all the various debates within the Catholic Church. Many of these are very Euro- and American-centric debates that have to do with sexual morality and the role of women. These are things that are more salient here in the Northern Hemisphere and to some extent, in South America, but less so in Africa and Asia. That’s sort of a tension within the global church, and it’s certainly something that he will need to be paying attention to.
Finally, all people who have gone up the hierarchy of the Church have, in one way or another, have become implicated in various clerical sex abuse scandals — not that they themselves committed sex abuse, but often [had some] regard as to how the issues were dealt with, whether that’s within an order, such as the Augustinian order that current Pope Leo headed, or whether it’s in their role as a bishop. These are things that are a pressing issue across the world.
Do we have any sense of how Pope Leo might approach some of these issues?
The Church has made really significant advances in terms of safeguarding children from sex abuse, and so it’s a matter of making sure that [these safeguards are] enforced and are [meeting] the goals that they’re intended to serve. That’s something he would need to pay attention to.
The commission [on sexual assault] that was set up in the Vatican by Pope Francis — he will need to revitalize that commission. Many of the members have spoken out over the years that they feel that they were not being fully supported by other church officials within the Vatican, or that, in various ways, their work was being hindered. That’s one thing that he could make a decision on fairly early to really empower that group and give them the resources that they need.
I think the issue of women in the church will be on the back burner. I don’t think he’s going to say too much about that in the early days, [to avoid] being seen as nodding in a particular way to anyone’s so-called faction within the church.
I might be wrong, and I may be well surprised. There have been several commissions looking at women deacons, for example; he could make a decision in that regard, but those commissions themselves have been so controversial, and during Francis’s tenure, he didn’t even release the names of people on the commission, so I’d be surprised if this new pope were to suddenly make that a top priority.
You mentioned that different factions exist. Are there factions that are maybe more heartened by the elevation of this pope than others?
I would say that all the people who were very supportive of Francis’s papacy will certainly be very happy with this choice. I also think that those who had certain reservations about Francis will be open to giving this new pope a chance, recognizing that he seems to be a man of great character and of experience.
Catholicism has always been a pluralistic tradition, with lots of geographical diversity, doctrinal diversity, and social diversity. And Pope Leo XIV emphasized unity in his early remarks, recognizing that in Catholicism, you can have diversity and still have community. You don’t have to agree about everything, but you can still be a unified community in a positive dynamic way.
I would think people would want to give him whatever support they can to see how he moves the church forward in this moment of where there is factionalism. Oftentimes, that factionism is exaggerated because it makes news.
I don’t like using the terms “liberal” and “conservative” and “progressive” because they don’t fully align with how we think of liberal, conservative, progressive politically. But most American Catholics are moderate Catholics, and that they’ve long been moderate Catholics. They appreciate and want to be participants in the full sacramental life of the Church, and they’re very proud of their Catholic identity, but they’ve disagreed for years. A lot of American Catholics do go their own way on some of these issues of sexual morality, but they’re nonetheless proud Catholics and committed to the tradition.
What does the fact that the cardinals chose Pope Leo tell us about where the Church might be going?
The fact that he chose the name Pope Leo [is telling].
Leo XIII was really the beginning pope for the Catholic social justice tradition, as we call it today. He was the pope in the latter years of the 19th century, into the very first years of the 20th century — a time of tremendous social and economic change, expansion of industrialization, expansion of factory life, urbanization.
He was very sensitive to the impacts of all those structural changes on the ordinary lives of people, particularly factory workers and other employees. And he wrote what became maybe the first social encyclical, Rerum novarum, where he really emphasized the importance of concern for employees, for just wages, and full inclusion of everyone in society — even as the race for for profit might often mean that people get marginalized and pushed aside.
That really has been, in various guises, the consistent message of Catholic social teaching in the decades since. The choice of Leo, to me, was extremely significant, because that really is one thing that would signal Pope Leo XIV’s commitment to further amplifying the church’s social justice tradition.
That’s something which Pope Francis did, and other popes did before him, but certainly Pope Francis amplified it and elevated it more.
Now, he didn’t call himself Francis II, which I think is a good thing. It’s good to have a new name. But that he chose Leo shows that he wants to bring the church — in [a way] that’s fully in tune with the earliest gospel — into all these big issues today, whether it’s climate change, economic inequality, refugees and asylum seekers, all those complex issues, [in a manner that] comes from some of the core principles articulated by Leo XIII.
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