House Votes for Third Time to End Iran War Thanks to 7 Republicans
For the third time, the House of Representatives said “no” to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Seven Republicans voted with Democrats to end the conflict.
The Tuesday night vote, which will probably be the last anti-war resolution before the midterm elections in November, passed 220-204, with eight Republicans and one Democrat not voting.
Three Republicans voted against the war for the first time: Representatives Nancy Mace, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and Zach Nunn. They joined Tom Barrett, Brian Fitzpatrick, Warren Davidson, and Thomas Massie, who voted for the previous resolutions opposing the war.
“I will not support another open-ended war. We can defend Americans, pressure Iran, and pursue peace while ensuring Congress fulfills its constitutional responsibility,” Nunn said in a post on X.
Later this week, Democrats will attempt to pass the resolution in the Senate. The last time they tried in June, Trump showed up on Capitol Hill and yelled at Republican Senator Bill Cassidy for breaking ranks and voting to end the war. Cassidy ended up flip-flopping, changing his vote, and sinking the resolution.
This time, with the midterms less than two months away, will Senate Republicans try to take a stand? Trump and the GOP are historically unpopular, with the expensive war sending gas prices skyrocketing and continuing to damage the global economy. Congress has the constitutional authority to end the war and bring relief to the American people. Do Republicans have the courage?
Wednesday morning traffic: Lane closures on Highways 9, 1, 236, 129
Here’s what’s happening on Santa Cruz County roads this morning…
▼︎ new incidents
Road incidents as of 6 a.m. on September 16- Highway 9 at Pool Drive in the San Lorenzo Valley has alternating lane closures because of bridge work. The closures are expected to end on April 30, 2027.
- South Highway 1 at Park Avenue in Capitola is facing closures for paving work. The closure is expected to end on Nov. 19.
- There is one-way traffic on north Highway 236 at Boulder Brook Drive in the San Lorenzo Valley because of pavement repair. This closure is expected to last until Sept. 21.
- There is one-way traffic on Highway 129 at Salsipuedes Creek Bridge in Watsonville because of pavement work. This is expected to end at 2:59 p.m. today.
- One-way traffic is being controlled on Highway 236 at Azalea Avenue in the San Lorenzo Valley because of tree work. This is expected to end by 2:01 a.m. today.
Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.
The post Wednesday morning traffic: Lane closures on Highways 9, 1, 236, 129 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Former Infosys chief’s AI startup nabs another $53M
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Daily Kos Opinions is a forum for sharp commentary and shrewd conversations. These pieces reflect guest contributor views and don’t represent an official endorsement by Daily Kos. Back in July, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani held a press conference in the Bronx to roll out a package of help for small businesses, and spent part of it complaining about ice cream. No, no…
SpaceX aims Starship for orbit on September 22
The big picture
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | Trump takes destruction of US history to a whole new level…
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With EPA’s Latest Move, Trump Topples the Last Pillar of Biden’s Climate Legacy
Coal is by far the dirtiest of the world’s major energy sources. It accounts for almost half of the cumulative global carbon emissions since the industrial era began—as much as oil and natural gas combined. And it generates much more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than either oil or gas. Most climate experts agree that phasing out coal power is the single biggest change the world could make to slow down global warming.
For almost 20 years, the United States has whipsawed on the question of whether the federal government should try to speed up that phaseout. After Barack Obama failed to push a carbon tax through Congress, his administration drafted the “Clean Power Plan,” which would have forced electric utilities to cut their emissions by shifting away from coal. President Donald Trump repealed that rule during his first term, and the Supreme Court later said that the president could not unilaterally force utilities to give up the fuel.
“The Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” said EPA chief Lee Zeldin.
Instead of forcing utilities to abandon coal, the Biden administration tried to work around the Supreme Court ruling in its 2024 rule by giving utilities a choice. They could either retire their coal plants sometime in the 2030s, or they could equip them with new machines that would capture almost all the carbon dioxide that would come out of their smokestacks. The result either way would be a significant drop in carbon emissions from the power sector.
The Trump administration is now repealing that rule. The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that it plans to wipe away all federal regulations for carbon emissions from the electricity sector, essentially allowing utilities to warm the Earth as much as they want. The agency used the same justification as it did in its repeal of climate regulations on motor vehicles earlier this year, arguing that the science of climate change was uncertain and that the repeal would save consumers money on power bills.
“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” said Trump’s EPA chief Lee Zeldin at an international energy summit in Texas. “We are working to go even further so that American energy can be fully unleashed. Realizing the full potential of American energy means more jobs, lower prices, and a more prosperous America.”
This repeal deals a significant blow to the federal government’s efforts to force the power sector away from coal. The whiplash between Democratic and Republican administrations has been so frequent and so severe that neither the Obama nor the Biden rules have done much to speed the decarbonization of the power sector, especially when compared to other federal efforts like the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for solar and wind.
“The reason to have a target is that it sends a clear signal to decision-makers in companies,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental economics at Yale University and an economic adviser to the Obama administration, where he helped draft the Clean Power Plan. “If you’re on the fence between choosing two things, you might as well choose the one that’s in line with the target. That’s been undermined. There has to be some teeth behind it.”
Even though the Obama and Biden rules never took effect, coal power has still been plummeting in the United States over the past 20 years. That’s thanks to the shale fracking boom, which lowered the cost of natural gas and made it cheap for utilities to replace their coal plants with gas plants. When burned, natural gas does warm the Earth, but slower than coal, and the shift has caused overall power sector emissions to fall in the US by almost half.
The repeal of the Biden rule will likely delay that phaseout and will have significant effects for the nation’s public health. Coal plants also release harmful toxins like mercury and particulate matter, leading to thousands of premature deaths around the world. Inasmuch as the Biden rule would have sped up coal closures, it would also have prevented around $370 billion in health damages from climate change and air pollution. The Biden administration predicted that in 2035, the rule would have prevented hundreds of thousands of asthma flare-ups, hundreds of emergency room visits, and more than 1,200 premature deaths.
The rapid growth in power demand from data centers has led to a resurgence in demand for coal plants.
The artificial intelligence boom is also slowing the phaseout of coal. The Biden administration drafted its 2024 rule at a time when coal was expected to keep shrinking on its own; the rule projected a “continued decline in projected coal-fired steam generating unit capacity as well as a steady decline in annual operation of those [plants] that remain online,” driven largely by “eroding economic opportunities for coal-fired steam generating units to operate.”
Now the rapid growth in power demand from data centers has led to a resurgence in demand for coal plants, and has led many utilities to push out the retirement date for their legacy coal assets. For coal power plants that sell into wholesale markets like the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic, high prices have made it worthwhile to stay online. (The Trump administration has also ordered some coal plants to stay online past their planned retirements, a move that a federal court found to be unlawful earlier this month.)
A case in point is Southern Company, the massive utility that produces energy for states including Georgia and Mississippi. Under the Biden administration, the utility had planned to retire its major Mississippi coal plant by 2028, but Southern announced last year that data centers would necessitate keeping it online well into the 2030s. The company’s previous efforts to install carbon capture at its coal units, meanwhile, have ended in failure. Environmental groups have criticized these decisions and argued that AI demand is inflated, but the Trump administration is happy to give utilities leeway to keep coal online.
The next president who seeks to take action on climate change will face much the same coal challenge that Obama did: how to speed up the phaseout of a fuel that is declining, but not dying? Gillingham argues that the short-term boost provided by Trump and the data center boom may not help rescue the coal fleet. The nation’s coal plants are only getting older, and many utilities will choose to replace them with gas or other fuels rather than repair them. The next president may still need the regulatory “stick,” but by that time the sector may be on its last legs.
“We have more electricity demand than we did before, which is, on the margins, going to make it easier for a coal plant to stay on,” said Gillingham. “But the trend is pretty clear, and you can only fight markets so much.”
How the Supreme Court Seized Power to Rule Over the Rest of Us
In 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act by a single vote. Four years earlier, President Barack Obama had won the White House in a 9 million vote landslide, campaigning on reforming America’s broken healthcare system. His decisive victory swept Democrats into a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. In 2010, Obamacare became the law of the land. It was an example of something vanishingly rare in American politics: The people had spoken, and the federal government had delivered.
But in June 2012, the entire country waited to learn whether nine unelected judges would find some constitutional problem with the new law, nullifying all the votes of those who elected their leaders and the year of work those leaders put into revamping the health care system. Ultimately, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the decisive vote upholding the core of the law. And so it has gone down in history.
But the reality is that Roberts’ opinion was a limited win: The chief justice also joined four colleagues to decide that the law’s requirement that states expand their Medicaid programs was unconstitutional. Because of these five men, expansion became a state-by-state option, and millions of Americans have gone without health care over a decade. Today, 2.4 million Americans remain without coverage who would otherwise have it. Studies show thousands have likely died as a result.
From a human standpoint, it’s tragic. From a constitutional perspective, it’s absurd: The people elect their representatives to enact legislation, and five unelected judges veto that legislation. Is this really the democratic system our founders envisioned?
The conventional wisdom is that this is in fact the system our learned framers adopted that Philadelphia summer of 1787. Three co-equal branches of government—except that the unelected one gets to veto the others. We are currently living with the undesirable consequences of this system. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court hasn’t just taken healthcare from millions. It overruled Congress’ battle against billionaire power by vetoing campaign finance laws, most infamously in Citizens United. Though activists marched and died before Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, this court has torn it down. In 2024, the Supreme Court gifted the president the right to ignore Congress by granting him criminal immunity for official acts. Laws enacted by the people’s representatives are reduced to suggestions, not just to the justices but to the president.
As the midterm elections approach, we see the world this Supreme Court created reflected back at us: billionaires trying to buy elections, Republican-run states rushing to gerrymander away Black representation in Congress, a president who doesn’t think twice before illegally starting a war, trying to sway elections by illegally interfering in voting by mail, and literally bulldozing a third of the White House.
“We can rebuild a democratic government of the people in place of supreme rule by the Court.”
In the face of this constitutional destruction, a new book from two legal scholars argues that the country was never supposed to be run by judges sitting on high, and it doesn’t have to be. In Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People, Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan demonstrate how the court has taken more power than the framers entrusted to them. Tracing the growth of the court’s authority through the nation’s history, they describe our current system, in which the high court can veto Congress’ will, as judicial supremacy. Rather than a constitutional construct, they show, it is a social one. Over a period of some 100 years, the American people, encouraged by leaders on both sides of the political aisle, came to believe that the Supreme Court had the final say over what the country would become. Rather than the people, through their representatives, running the country—nine unelected judges took control. Now, the authors argue, it’s time to take it back.
“Public opinion is the source of its current power,” they write of the Supreme Court. “If public opinion inadvertently protects the Court’s supremacy, it can also take it away.” Rather than throw up their hands at the court’s stranglehold on the country’s ability to provide health care, protect voting rights, and keep up the guardrails of democracy, they argue that the solution is remarkably simple. “We can rebuild a democratic government of the people in place of supreme rule by the Court” if Americans build a movement to demand it.
Today’s Congress is supine. The court invalidates its laws and lawmakers do nothing about it. But, Bowie and Renan argue, Congress can take power back from the court. Their book seeks to explain how the court seized power it was never intended to have, and why a people’s movement, culminating in Congressional action, could set the country back on a democratic track.
There is perhaps no Supreme Court case worse than Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 decision that propelled the country toward civil war. Infamously, the court ruled both that Black people could not be citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in US territories. The decision was expressly overturned by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, establishing citizenship to all people born on American soil. But Dred Scott is also deserves a place in history as the birth of judicial supremacy—of the Supreme Court overruling an act of Congress.
The court overrules Congress so frequently today, that it’s hard to imagine that such an assertion of authority could be a scandal. But of all the shocking and intemperate parts of Dred Scott, the fact that the court invalidated an act of Congress—the Missouri Compromise that banned slavery in certain territories—was among the most audacious.
As the justices weighed their decision in early 1857, president-elect James Buchanan anxiously awaited the results. Pro-slavery, Buchanan hoped that the court’s ruling might quell the anti-slavery forces gaining political influence outside the south. So he wrote to one of the justices, a staunch ally named John Catron, trying to deduce how the court might rule, and what he might say about it in his inaugural address.
It’s unthinkable by modern norms, where leaks of the court’s deliberations are treated as scandals by the court and the press, but Catron replied promptly. A long-serving justice from Tennessee, Catron doubted that his colleagues were preparing to declare the Missouri Compromise invalid. “To hold that no power existed to govern Territories after a practice of 68 years would shock all,” he told Buchanan.
Judicial supremacy is an elite, anti-majoritarian check on the nation.
But a week later, Catron sent a follow-up with new information. The court actually would do the unthinkable and rule that Congress had no authority to restrict slavery in the territories. Catron also offered some political advice to Buchanan on how to assuage predictable outrage in the north: He advised Buchanan to “say in your Inaugural, ‘That the question involving the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise line is presented to the appropriate tribunal to decide; to wit, to the Supreme Court.’” As Bowie and Renan recount, Catron then suggested the ruling might go down more smoothly with the public if Buchanan emphasized the “‘high and independent character’ of the justices to explain why it was up to them to ‘settle a controversy which has so long and seriously agitated the country, and which must ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.’”
Overruling Congress was a radical step, and Catron knew the public might reject it. So he closed his letter by asking Buchanan for a little help: Would he reach out to his fellow Pennsylvanian on the court, Justice Robert Grier, to encourage him to join the majority opinion on the point of overruling Congress? It would look better if the decision wasn’t the work, solely, of southern Democrats. Buchanan messaged Grier, and Grier complied.
This story epitomizes what judicial supremacy would become: the tool by which the justices would entrench white supremacist and reactionary rule, dressed up as the high mindedness of the country’s smartest men.
But in the 1850s, despite its boundary breaking attack on Congress, Dred Scott did little to decide the question of the court’s authority over lawmaking. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass decried the ruling, but did not despair, because he did not consider it the final word. “If it were at all likely that the people of these free States would tamely submit to this demonical judgment, I might feel gloomy and sad over it,” Douglass said at the time. Douglass had come to believe that the Constitution, which empowers Congress to guarantee a Republican form of government in every state, contained the tools to abolish slavery. Dred Scott had not changed that; it was simply the view of a handful of men. “We can appeal this hell-black judgment of the Supreme Court, to the court of common sense and common humanity,” Douglass said. In other words, the people could reject it by electing leaders who would not submit to it.
This was the platform Abraham Lincoln sucessfully ran on in 1860. In fact, the south’s secession after his election—despite having won the right to retrieve runaway slaves and expand slavery into the territories—was an acknowledgement that the court did not have the final word on slavery, or anything else.
What, then, is the role of the court if not to interpret the constitutionality of the laws? Bowie and Renan are asking us to abandon the modern understanding of the court’s role for one they believe is more faithful to the Constitution and more aligned with how an actual democracy must function. It would look something like this: Congress, with the president’s signature, makes the nation’s laws. The president carries out those laws. And the Supreme Court simply enforces those laws. If states stray either from the Constitution or federal law, the federal courts can nullify those laws, and in so doing protect the federal law. Similarly, the court should hold the president to those same laws by halting executive decisions that break the law—a duty this court has all but abandoned in the Trump era. But as it was in the country’s first seven decades, all the way up to Dred Scott, the authors argue, the court should not have the power to second guess the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and signed by the president.
While the Civil War reversed the findings of Dred Scott, the court’s antebellum foray into judicial supremacy had opened a Pandora’s Box that could not be shut. Supremacy traces how judicial supremacy gathered steam despite its ignominious origins. A decade after Lincoln’s election, his Republican Party fractured, with wealthy northerners suddenly wary of a radical Congress that might turn enthusiasm for equality in the South into pro-labor legislation for the industrial North. “The Supreme Court’s insulation from democracy now looked like an asset to a genteel and propertied Republican elite,” Bowie and Renan write. Though, “the Republican Party supported Congress as the people’s representatives uniquely positioned to give meaning to the Constitution through lawmaking,” by 1869, “a small but prominent group started to imagine the Supreme Court as a bulwark against multiracial democracy and the political power of the working masses.”
That is precisely how the Supreme Court used this newfound power. Encouraged by a coalition of Democrats and elite Republicans in the 1870s, the court invoked its new supreme authority to end Reconstruction by vetoing federal laws at a rapid clip. “By the end of the century, the Supreme Court undid nearly every major law Congress passed to protect multiracial democracy in the South,” Bowie and Renan explain.
This is no way to run a democracy.
Then, as now, this is no way to run a democracy. Douglass, optimistic after Dred Scott, turned mournful after the court invalidated a major civil rights law in 1883. The court, he said, “had become ‘the autocratic point in our national government,’” with “more absolute power than any ‘monarch in Europe.’” Against Congress’ judgment, the court had “‘inflicted a heavy calamity upon seven millions of people of this country.” Further still, the Court’s actions revealed “‘the United States before the world as a Nation utterly destitute of the power to protect the rights of its own citizens.’” That assessment remains true today.
The Supreme Court didn’t reserve its judicial veto for civil rights legislation. Starting in the 1880s, it used its power to advantage the wealthy and nullify laws protecting workers. By the early 20th century, the progressive and labor movements recognized judicial supremacy as a major threat. The American Federation of Labor conducted a review of every case since Dred Scott in which the court considered the constitutionality of an act of Congress, concluding in a solemn 1919 report that judicial supremacy was “destructive of human life.” The millions without healthcare today may agree.
After the court invalidated a federal income tax and an anti-child labor law, Congress proposed constitutional amendments to undo the decisions. To progressive Senator Robert La Follette, the situation was untenable: “We cannot live under a system of government where we are forced to amend the Constitution every time we want to pass a progressive law.”
Today, his ideological heirs face a similar problem. Even if advocates convince Congress to pass laws to combat climate change or adopt Medicare-for-all, the Roberts Court will almost certainly strike them down. Just look at how Medicaid-for-a-few-more went in 2012. Under our system of judicial supremacy, five people can decide that the First Amendment’s free speech protections allow billionaires to spend infinite amounts on elections, but amending the Constitution to regulate campaign donations is a Herculean effort that can be thwarted by a tiny minority. According to political scientist Robert Dahl’s 2001 calculations, a constitutional amendment can be blocked by senators representing 8 percent of the population, or by state legislatures representing just 4 percent of the country. Similarly, because six people decided presidents are not bound by criminal laws, it will take two-thirds majorities in Congress and three quarters of the states to again constrain the president to follow the law.
Running for president in 1924, La Follette put the problem of judicial supremacy front and center: “Shall we move forward in our development as a nation, carrying out the will of the people as expressed by their ballots, or shall all progress be checked by the arbitrary dictates of five judges until the situation becomes so desperate that it can no longer be endured?”
There’s no mystery, then, why the forces of wealth and racial hierarchy latched onto judicial supremacy in the 1850s and have expounded it ever since. It is, in its essence, an elite, anti-majoritarian check on the nation. But the more recent, and puzzling, development is the left’s capitulation to it. Bowie and Renan explain this as a tragic misunderstanding. After a century of attacking the court, the left warmed to it under Chief Justice Earl Warren, when the justices ended Jim Crow and embraced civil rights. Accepting the Supreme Court as the final say on the Constitution became a way to safeguard the major progressive wins of that era during the conservative backlash of the Regan years, including the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, ending segregation in education, and 1973’s Roe v. Wade, the now-overturned case recognizing a right to abortion. These landmark decisions could be wiped away if the court itself wasn’t the ultimate arbiter of what the constitution meant.
“Brown was quickly misconstrued, even by its authors, as a decision that turned on judicial supremacy,” write Bowie and Renan. “And this misunderstanding began to convince progressives, after decades of critiquing judicial supremacy, to give the Court the final say—even over Congress—about what the Constitution meant.”
But Bowie and Renan offer a way for the left to have its cake and eat it too. The progressive decisions of the Warren era, including Brown and Roe, they argue, are actually examples of the court enforcing a federal law, even though they are cloaked in the language of judicial supremacy. Though the authors of Brown don’t mention it, the civil rights advocates who argued that case urged the court to end the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal” by using authority granted by Congress.
“Our rights are only as secure as our politics make them.”
This Congressional authority goes back to Reconstruction, when Congress was trying to enforce the 14th Amendment’s legal protections for Black people. In 1871, Congress knew it could not individually override every unconstitutional state law, so it explicitly empowered federal courts to act as enforcers of the 14th Amendment by deciding when a state law violated the new amendment’s dictates. Brown and Roe do exactly this; with Congress’ permission, the court determined that state laws mandating segregation and banning abortion ran afoul of the 14th Amendment. Understanding the landmark decisions of this era not as judicial supremacy but as enforcing a federal law requires a shift in our perception of the court’s authority, but not of the outcome of these cases.
These gains would be no less fragile if the ultimate authority on Constitutional meaning were Congress, rather than the court, Bowie and Renan argue. Yes, a mere majority of Congress could theoretically decide that segregation is Constitutional under this theory of congressional authority—they call it democratic constitutionalism. But as the justices’ 5-4 decision to overturn Roe in 2022 shows, Brown and the other civil rights cases of the era, upon which our democracy depends, are vulnerable to the whims of a changing court. (In recent years, conservative judicial nominees have refused to say that Brown was rightly decided during their confirmation hearings.) “Ultimately, our rights are only as secure as our politics make them,” they write. “But under a system of democratic constitutionalism, the final say regarding how to address things like abortion access, mass shootings, the environment, and voting rights—questions of profound moral import and political debate—would belong to the people through their elected representatives.”
Supremacy argues that the problem of judicial supremacy has a simple solution: Congress can pass a law prohibiting the court from overturning acts of Congress on Constitutional grounds, and require that they enforce their laws instead. Under the Constitution, Congress has significant power over the court, including how many members it has, and what kinds of cases they can decide. There are smaller versions of this same type of reform, commonly called jurisdiction stripping. Congress could stipulate in law which federal laws are not subject to constitutional review by the courts, and it could require a greater number of justices agree before overruling Congress, so that five justices cannot decide our collective fate but perhaps seven or nine can. For a daunting problem, it’s a simple remedy—it requires Congress to awaken from its deep sleep and defend its place in our three-branch system of government, as the voice that is most powerful because it is most accountable to the people.
Such a change, however legal, would have to be accompanied by a demand for making it from a majority of the people. And while today’s court is not popular—currently at its lowest ebb since Gallup started polling on its reputation—other surveys show that the court, though not well liked, is still buoyed by its reputation as a nonpartisan body of learned lawyers.
Today’s court bolsters its authority to decide what the Constitution means for the entire country by cultivating an aura of expertise and impartiality, like oracles who hand down Constitutional truths from on high. This mythology is powered in part by a lack of transparency or accountability—mechanisms of control reserved for political actors, which they claim vociferously they are not. (For example, the New York Times recently reported that the justices have decided to keep their papers hidden until decades after their deaths, a secrecy that speaks to the justices reputation as deliberating minds, not political actors accountable to the public.) But the idea of the court as nine smarties floating above the political fray is, like judicial supremacy, a more recent construct. In fact, the myth of an apolitical court dates back to the same period that judicial supremacy took root, reinforcing the court’s claim to the new power to decide the meaning of the Constitution for everyone.
In The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History, out next month, Pennsylvania State University legal historian Rachel Shelden demonstrates that through most of the 19th century, justices were chosen not for their legal acumen but for their political experience. Each justice hailed from a different region, their assigned circuit, in order to represent those states’ interests on the court. And justices rode circuit, which required them to travel extensively during the year to hear trials throughout the geographic region each oversaw. Whereas today, the court cultivates authority by raising an opaque screen like the wizard of Oz, disconnected from the people, the early court drew its authority from its connection to them. Through “judicial representation,” people were induced to accept the court’s rulings because the court was tied to the people—not above them. Today’s court, made up of four graduates from Yale Law School, four from Harvard Law School, and one from Notre Dame, is certainly not one that represents the people.
The justices “rewrote the past to claim that the Court had always held final constitutional authority.”
For the court’s first 100 years, justices participated in the political fray. As Shelden reveals with jaw-dropping details, justices were often vying for elected office—including the presidency—from the bench, and generally involved in Washington politics. “Members of the Court advised on or created legislation for members of Congress and state legislators,” Shelden writes. “They ghost-wrote presidential addresses, served as political liaisons, and participated in diplomatic affairs.” And “nearly every justice on the Court participated in presidential or congressional campaigns by endorsing friends, working behind the scenes to promote favorite candidates, or even hosting the equivalent of early fundraisers.”
Justice Catron, who corresponded with Buchanan about the Dred Scott decision, was an artful political manipulator. As Shelden’s book recounts, he placed a fabricated story in his local Tennessee paper to bolster Buchanan’s chances in the 1856 elections, in which he claimed that the long-deceased but adored former president, Andrew Jackson, had told him he supported Buchanan for the presidency 12 years prior.
Today’s proponents of the justices hiding their papers for generations might be surprised to learn that when Buchanan wrote to Justice Grier about how he should rule in Dred Scott, Grier responded with an account of the internal deliberations and how each justice was voting. When Buchanan gave his inaugural address days later, he urged the public to accept the court’s determination of slavery in the territories as final, whatever it may be, but knowing full well exactly what it would do.
As the justices began to cultivate a reputation as nonpartisan experts, their efforts were bolstered when Congress effectively eliminated circuit-riding in 1891. Now, justices would gain their authority as powerful brains disconnected from the real world, rather than as people who participated in it. To firm up this new source of authority, the justices and their backers “rewrote the past to claim that the Court had always held final constitutional authority, even from its earliest years,” Shelden writes.
Even non-law students are aware of the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall famously asserted the court’s authority to find acts of Congress unconstitutional. But according to Shelden, as well as Bowie and Renan, the canonization of Marbury is revisionist history from the late 19th century used to sell judicial supremacy to the public. “Among the most effective and lasting stories of this moment was that of John Marshall as an apolitical guardian of judicial supremacy,” Shelden writes. “This well-worn heroic tale is published in textbooks, consumed by generations of new law students, and promoted in popular histories of the courts and the nation.” But the decision, in its time, was never assumed to assert judicial supremacy; it was plucked from the history books and mythologized in the decades after Reconstruction as evidence that overruling Congress was the court’s duty nearly from the beginning.
Though the court shed the trappings of political actors, it’s hard to argue that the modern court is not enacting its political preferences. In the past year alone, the court’s Republican-appointed majority finished dismantling the 1965 Voting Rights Act, setting off a rush to redraw Black Democratic districts as white Republican ones ahead of the midterms; it overturned two lower-court findings of racist gerrymandering to put into effect congressional districts in Texas and Alabama that favor Republicans, it let Louisiana halt its primary elections after they had begun in order replace a Black-majority district with a white Republican one; and it invalidated a New York state trial court order in a case in which it had no jurisdiction in order to maintain a Republican-leaning district on Staten Island—an emergency order that even some of the court’s conservative supporters argued was beyond the pale. It struck down a campaign finance law to allow the wealthy to give more to candidates by routing it through the party apparatus, then used its emergency docket to give those new donations a discounted TV ad buying rate, all at the behest of the Republican Party. Shelden calls her book a forgotten history, detailing the political activities and social lives of the justices through the 19th century. Would an accounting of the modern justices’ social and political lives, which include secret vacations with billionaires and financial ties to political activists, show more of the same?
Each June, as the court wraps up its annual term, many Americans tune in to learn what rights and benefits will remain intact. In recent years, the court has taken away rights to vote equally, bodily autonomy, medical care, health insurance, religious freedom for prisoners, protections against unlawful detainment and deportation, and very nearly the right to be a citizen if born on US soil, among other major changes to people’s rights and our system of government. The situation was described aptly by La Follette in 1922. “By a process of gradual encroachments, uncertain and timid at first, but now confident and aggressive, sovereignty has been wrested from the people and usurped by the courts,” he said. “Today the actual rule of the American people is the Supreme Court of the United States.”
As Bowie, Renan, and Shelden show, this is not how its always been, or how it’s supposed to be. To take back their power, the people must simply demand it.
Transcript: Trump Rages Openly at Midterm Woes as Worst Poll Yet Drops
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 16 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The New York Times poll is the absolute gold standard, so when it drops, we pay attention. And boy, did it just drop. It finds that the Democratic lead in the House generic ballot matchup is growing, and it also found a lot of other things that are deeply problematic for the GOP and for Donald Trump. It’s not a coincidence that Trump just erupted in crazed fury over the Supreme Court, which just blocked his plot to steal the election via corrupting vote by mail. Meanwhile, other polling shows Trump absolutely cratering with Latinos, which means the Texas Senate race could be gettable.
We’re talking about it all with Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki, who’s worked on a lot of midterms and knows this stuff in and out. Caitlin, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Caitlin Legacki: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So the Supreme Court just blocked Trump’s effort to use the Postal Service to rig the midterms. He exploded in a frenzy on Truth Social, calling the ruling horrible. He said:
“It is a big loss for Republicans and America itself, and makes cheating by the radical left ‘Dumocrats’ on mail-in ballots a much easier thing to do. The Supreme Court has really let our country down!”
Trump added that Democrats are “crazed and depraved.”
Caitlin, this was maybe his longest tirade ever. It was really, really lengthy. He really lost it. He was counting on using the mail to steal the election, I think. Your thoughts on all that?
Legacki: Yeah, I mean, this is an issue that I’ve been working on for a couple of years, but it’s part of a larger agenda where Trump has been trying to either use the FBI or the Department of Justice or his ability to control and change regulations at the U.S. Postal Service to really turn the federal government against his perceived political opponents. And so it isn’t surprising that it got to this place.
I think the most surprising thing is that the Supreme Court stood fast against him. But you know, he definitely is the kind of guy that, like, if you can’t win the game, he’s going to change the rules. And that’s clearly what he’s trying to do here.
And, oddly enough though, a lot of his voters vote by mail, whether it’s rural voters, older voters. Plenty of Republicans have tried to push back on his war on vote by mail, but he clearly views this as a huge loss for him and his interests.
Sargent: And I think that that’s probably a good thing. Look, we’re going to have a real election, it looks like now. They’re still trying to corrupt the elections and steal them, but the big story right at this moment is that with around eight weeks to go, we now know we’re going into an actual election without any kind of shenanigans, any theft like that—presuming that the Republican efforts don’t work, which I don’t think they will. That’s what Trump is angry about. He has been hoping to avoid a real election, and now he’s facing one, right?
Legacki: That’s exactly right. And I think what’s funny is that the more he talks about all of this other stuff, the more it’s going to drive the American voter away from him. Because what we’re seeing, whether it’s in this New York Times poll or elsewhere, is there is a massive affordability crisis in America right now. And, you know, I think the American people are smart enough to know that there’s not always a lot you can do on that.
But the fact that he’s actively making the problem worse by going to war with Iran and closing the Strait of Hormuz—you know, diesel just hit its highest price, I think, on record, going into the fall and winter. And people are just so sick and tired of all of this other stuff that he’s spending his time on, all of these other fights that he’s waging, when he’s really just ignoring the challenges that they have every single day, whether it’s, like, buying a dozen eggs or filling up their car.
Sargent: Yep. Trump is really, really making this election as bad as possible for Republicans. The Times poll is probably the best survey out there. It’s worth taking extremely seriously. And it just found that Democrats lead by over eight points in the generic House ballot matchup, 51 percent to 43 percent.
The Times’s Nate Cohn says that’s getting into blue wave territory. Trump’s approval is just 38 percent. That’s lower than any president going into a midterm since George W. Bush, just before the 2006 Dem wave.
Caitlin, up until today, it was looking as if the Dem lead in the generic ballot was expanding, but I don’t think we could really say that with any certainty. I think this Times poll brings us a little closer to confirmation that that lead is expanding. What do you think?
Legacki: I think it’s absolutely expanding. I think as energy prices continue to get worse, I think as the situation in Iran continues to devolve—and then also, I think there is a real moment happening around concerns about technology and AI right now. And without going too deep on that, I think that Trump’s reaction to some of that dialogue has been relatively unserious.
He’s not taking those concerns seriously. And I think that that’s just one more brick in the wall, where people are going to look at him when they’re in the voting booth and say, like, this guy just doesn’t care about the things that I care about.
And I think that as we continue to see more polls, there’s a real shot that we do get into blue wave territory. But you know, like, I’m personally kind of like Chicken Little when it comes to polling. I never take a good poll at face value, but I always take a bad poll at face value.
Sargent: Good policy.
Legacki: Exactly. But you know, I think when you look at some of the comments from voters related to this poll, it goes to show that our position is improving every day, but we shouldn’t necessarily take that for granted. I think there’s a clear call from a lot of these voters, and some of the comments that they gave, that they just want normalcy, they want centrism. They’re tired of swinging back and forth from the far right to the far left.
And so I think for Democrats who are looking at a message that resonates with those voters, it’s really not that hard. It’s, we want to bring your costs down, and we want you to feel secure in your neighborhood. And that’s really it.
Sargent: I do want to home in on what you said about AI for a sec, just to clarify for listeners. You were talking about Trump essentially raging wildly about the very idea of regulating AI, saying that all we need is a smart president like him and we don’t need any regulations.
Now, I want to point out that this Times polling came before the comments about AI that Trump made. And I do think those comments from Trump are going to make things worse.
Legacki: The problem with Trump’s answer and his response to this whole dialogue is that he’s telling people, you don’t understand, I don’t care what you worry about, just leave it to me and it’ll all be fine. And, like, for a lot of people lately, that hasn’t worked out well for them. And I think that’s part of why his numbers are crashing.
It’s when you look at all of the gains he made with Hispanics in 2024—those are being wiped out because the economy is bad. And he ran on an agenda of reducing costs, of improving the economy. It’s gotten better for some very, very wealthy people, but for your average American, it hasn’t gotten better. In fact, it’s probably gotten a little bit worse.
Sargent: We’re going to talk about the Latino collapse in a bit, but first let’s talk about this other Times finding, which is really surprising. Democrats are leading the GOP on just about every major issue—the economy by six points, 51 to 45. And get this: Democrats are leading Republicans on immigration, on which party is trusted to handle immigration, by seven points, 52 to 45. Those are both big turnarounds on issues that were absolutely central to Trump’s 2024 victory.
On top of that, 52 percent overall strongly disapprove of Trump, including 60 percent of independents who strongly disapprove. That’s astounding. It’s such a dramatic repudiation of the president. I’m going to say this again: this midterm is about Trump, Trump, and Trump. What do you think?
Legacki: I agree completely. I think when you look at this battery of issues—health care, immigration—Democrats are plus 10 on the deficit, which I don’t know the last time we saw something like that. It’s just a clear repudiation of not just his policies, but his posture and his tone and the things that he is focused on.
And so, I’m going to be the skunk at the garden party a little bit, which is to say these numbers are fantastic for Democrats, but I think they’re still pretty fresh. They’re not fully baked, and they’re not the same thing as an endorsement of all of our policies.
Like, when you look at the immigration number, D plus seven—that’s not a D plus seven embrace of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, but it is a D plus seven rejection of the way that Trump and his administration have conducted themselves. And I think that’s just an important distinction to keep in mind.
Sargent: I agree. What it signals is that there’s a big opening for Democrats to grab hold of the debate. And as I’ve argued a million times on here, and at The New Republic, there is an opening to do that and Democrats should do that. They’re still not there yet. I get why—it’s a midterm, like, you want it to be about the president.
The truth of the matter, and this is something that a lot of people don’t like to say out loud, is that the challenging party doesn’t actually have to stand for too much in a midterm, because they really are about the president and his record, and about the party in power. That’s just how these things work. You’ve been down this road a lot of times, Caitlin, right? Can you talk about that?
Legacki: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny, because we always joke that it’s a lot easier to be in the minority, because you don’t actually have any real responsibility. Your job is to just respond to what the party in power is doing.
But when Democrats do get in power—whether it’s we win the House, we win the Senate, we win both, some combination of the two—that changes the dynamic. And there is responsibility that comes with governing that I think is different than when we’re in a situation where Republicans control all three branches and they’re the ones fully holding the bag.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about the Trump-GOP collapse with Latinos, which you referenced earlier, in the Times poll. Dems are leading among Hispanics in the generic matchup by 68 percent to 25 percent. And 70 percent of Hispanics disapprove of Trump—63 percent strongly. Sixty-three percent of Hispanics disapprove of Donald Trump strongly.
That’s just crazy stuff. I mean, the 68 to 25 in the generic matchup—those are the types of numbers where you look at Texas and you say, well, this is still going to be very hard. The Texas Senate race sure looks like it’s doable, but it’s Texas, and Democratic hearts have been broken before. But then you look at these numbers and you say, if this is going to happen, these are the numbers you need to see that will make it happen.
Legacki: That’s exactly right. And I think it’s important that you point out Texas has broken our hearts before. I think when you look at Beto O’Rourke, he came within two of Ted Cruz. I think the key difference we’re seeing here, with people like Talarico and Gina Hinojosa and Mary Peltola and Rob Sand and Josh Turek—all these guys and women that are running in pretty solidly red states—they’re clearly playing to win. They are taking positions that are the right positions for their states, whether it’s Mary Peltola on oil and gas, or Talarico and Turek, who both have made news about their positions on trans kids in sports.
That I think maybe is a little bit outside the mainstream for a lot of Democratic voters, but it reflects the mainstream of their states. And that tells me that they’re going to do everything they can to win these races and make this possible. And I think that’s what matters.
Sargent: Well, it certainly looks like James Talarico is really running to win that race. CNN’s Harry Enten added another data point from CNN’s polling. He looked at working-class Latinos and found that Trump is 47 points underwater among them on immigration. Enten called these “terrible, terrible numbers.”
Caitlin, remember that working-class Latinos actually approved of Trump on immigration in 2024, as hard as that is to believe. Now they’ve really seen the light, though. What do you make of all that? I mean, I just want to remind people here that the working-class Latino shift to Trump in 2024 was heralded as a sign of a seismic, durable realignment in U.S. politics. All gone now. All gone.
Legacki: Yeah, there’s a couple things. One is that, first of all, when you’re talking about Latino voters, that means that they are either people who were born here or people who have gone through the legal immigration process to become citizens so they can vote here.
So they typically tend to be a little bit more conservative-leaning on issues like immigration, because they’ve gone through the process, their families have gone through the process. And so, I think Democrats for a long time made a mistake that all Hispanics just wanted open immigration. And that was not the signal they were sending us.
The signal they were sending us, though, is that they want an economy that works for them and their families. They want everyone to play by the same set of rules. And what Trump has done is he’s made the economy terrible for working people. Like, stuff is just too expensive for working families.
But then the other thing is that all of these Latino Americans who are U.S. citizens, have gone through the citizenship process—they’re also getting hassled by ICE agents on the street. They also know people who have been wrongfully detained, and that’s not what they signed up for. And so I think that you’re seeing a real rejection of how Trump specifically has conducted himself with Latino voters. And he really overplayed his hand there.
Sargent: And I think we should talk about this in the context of Texas again, because those South Texas counties, the ones that are heavy on Latinos—those are places where Trump really shifted the vote, because a lot of them are border counties. And for them, what they thought they were voting for was border security, right? Like, that’s what Texas Latinos thought Trump was promising them, I think. Does that make sense?
And of course, that set of promises was just completely thrown to the wind. And what they’re getting instead is, you know, ICE kicking the shit out of people on the streets and shooting people and profiling them. I think that’s the essence of the miscalculation. And again, if Texas is going to happen, that’s how it happens, because that Texas Latino vote really moves to Talarico in a big way, right?
Legacki: Totally. And I think you’re exactly right. They were voting for border security. And I think when you even talk to border Democrats in places like Arizona and Texas, there were real problems in those communities with too many people coming over the border, overwhelming their communities, overwhelming their social services. They were just looking for a little bit more, I think, control in terms of the volume of people coming over.
And especially in those border communities, those people are used to interacting with Border Patrol, because there are many land borders, ID checks, checkpoints within 50 miles of the border. And so it’s not like there hasn’t been a presence of Border Patrol in these places before.
The difference is that now, whether it’s ICE, Border Patrol, whoever else, they’ve been completely outrageous in terms of how they hassle people, how they stop people on the street. There’s no effective targeting about who they’re trying to find. And, you know, we were told that they were going to crack down on the worst of the worst. And what they’re doing instead is just breaking up families and terrorizing kids.
Sargent: So two weeks ago, GOP officials leaked their fears about the midterms to Politico’s Jonathan Martin. It’s worth revisiting now. They said they worried that the cost of living, Trump’s deep unpopularity with the middle of the electorate, and the huge enthusiasm gap Democrats are enjoying were becoming locked in and becoming close to irreversible. Jonathan Martin called this the nightmare for Republicans.
Caitlin, you look at this polling from the Times and the stuff that Harry Enten’s citing, every one of those fears is turning out to be right. Those things are getting locked in. Trump is cratering on the economy and with independents, and the Democratic lead is growing in the likely voter polling, which is what this Times poll is, which shows the enthusiasm is with Dems. What do you make of all that?
Legacki: Yeah, I mean, I think historically what happens, especially in the midterm, is the out party, the challenger party, comes into this summer with a wave of enthusiasm. They’re the new guy, everything looks possible. And then as you get closer to November, voters start going home. And you typically see those polls closing and getting tighter.
So for example, in a place like Iowa, where you’ve got Josh Turek running against Ashley Hinson, normally we would see that poll get a lot tighter as we got closer.
What should be concerning for Republicans about this New York Times poll is we’re seeing the generic ballot gap expand. And so what that means is that, you know, every race is going to be different. But the overall mood and the overall sentiment towards Republicans is getting worse by the day, which is not how you want to be going into November. You want it to be getting better, or people to be coming home, getting more comfortable with Republicans.
And here we’re seeing not only are they not coming home, but they’re actively leaving Republicans. And with two months to go, and Donald Trump not seeming to recognize, I think, the gravity of this situation, there’s no indication that that situation’s going to get better.
Sargent: I want to close on a warning note that’s based on what you just said, which is that, folks, these polls may tighten. And it isn’t just that voters will start going home to their respective parties, although that’s a big factor. It’s also because the Republican money is really starting to flow big time. MAGA Inc. opened up its spigot—that’s the Trump super PAC.
We’re going to see an enormous amount of negative advertising hitting these Democratic candidates in these big Senate races, and some of the most contested House races as well. So don’t get alarmed if these polls tighten. It’s what usually happens in this situation. And hey, as Caitlin says, if it doesn’t happen, all the better, right? But that is a real worry, isn’t it, Caitlin?
Legacki: It is. I mean, the Republican outside groups, including MAGA Inc. and all of the Republican Senate groups—they have a significant cash advantage over the Democrats. The Supreme Court recently made it a lot easier for the Republican committees to get the same ad rates that candidates get.
It’s very technical, but there used to be a benefit for candidates like, for example, Roy Cooper, who is just totally outraising his opponent Michael Whatley. That playing field is getting a little bit leveled.
But you know, the good news is that we continue to see Democratic candidates either maintaining their leads, holding steady, or in some cases expanding their leads. And if you are a Democrat, you’re looking at this polling and it’s going in absolutely the right direction.
Sargent: Caitlin Legacki, that was all really illuminating stuff. Folks, she really closed on an important note there. We shouldn’t freak out if some of these polls tighten. It’s what’s supposed to happen. Caitlin, thanks so much for coming on. It was great to talk to you, as always.
Legacki: Thanks for having me.
Logitech releases the MX Keypad to keep idle fingers busy
Women Built MAHA. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over.
Editor’s Note: When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House. But there are signs that the MAHA–MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense standoff over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections.
This past February, as Super Bowl viewers chowed down on Buffalo wings and loaded nachos, they found themselves unexpectedly admonished. On their TV screens, in a black-and-white close-up, was former heavyweight champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, ripping his teeth through a carrot as though it were Evander Holyfield’s ear. “We’re the most powerful country in the world,” Tyson said. “And we have the most obese, fudgy people.” As he tore into an apple, white block script was superimposed over his face: “Processed Food Kills. Eat Real Food.”
The ad directed viewers to RealFood.gov, a website laying out the new food pyramid, a pet project of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that literally flipped the previous model on its head: Now, whole grains are at the pointy bottom and protein, dairy, and fats get top billing. The ad was sponsored by the nonprofit MAHA Center, whose leader, publisher Tony Lyons, also co-founded MAHA pac. And it signaled a telling shift. This wasn’t your mother’s Make America Healthy Again (or Gwyneth Paltrow’s, for that matter). This was manly MAHA.
Much attention has been paid to the MAHA moms, and rightly so. Women have powered the movement, evangelizing for whole foods and raw milk on Instagram, urging President Donald Trump to appoint Kennedy to lead HHS, and protesting against food additives and agricultural chemicals, in particular glyphosate, found in the weed killer Roundup.
But it’s the movement’s men who have ascended to the highest levels of power. RFK Jr. is the most prominent, but the list also includes Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is running the National Institutes of Health; and Dr. Marty Makary, who was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration until he resigned earlier this year. And it’s not just in government. Health entrepreneur turned MAHA stalwart Calley Means is the man who suggested that Kennedy forge an alliance with Trump and remains an influential adviser to Kennedy at HHS. His sister, Casey, meanwhile, was a vaccine-skeptical doctor nominated for surgeon general—only to watch her prospects die in the Senate.
With the midterm elections approaching and MAHA voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump, it’s worth asking: How exactly did a cause powered by women turn into one run by men? And will the women who built the MAHA movement ever revolt?
Calley Means spoke to a MAHA-friendly crowd at a news conference at the Health and Human Services Department last year.Andrew Harnik/Getty
MAHA is often characterized by its most scientifically questionable positions—opposition to vaccines and fluoride, a fondness for raw milk and beef tallow—but the truth is that it is a complex coalition. Surveys conducted by Politico suggest that the movement’s core priorities are what you might hear from any athleisure-clad shopper circling the outer perimeter of Whole Foods: fewer ultraprocessed foods, food dyes, forever chemicals, microplastics, and pesticides, and more physical movement.
“I believe if these women are ignored, we’re going to lose the midterms, and I believe we will lose 2028.”
Kennedy speaks all of these languages. His anti-vaccine activism gets the most press, but he has rallied against polluters and frequently inveighs against ultraprocessed Frankenfoods pushed on the public by corporations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, food journalist Mark Bittman asked in The New York Times why Americans were hearing more about food from Trump than they were from Kamala Harris. The intersection of food, chemicals, chronic illness, and corporate power may not have been central for most voters. But it was a topic with significant social media reach, especially to the young, female, and politically disengaged—and that pulled many who might otherwise share a Democrat’s politics into Trump’s orbit.
Kelly Ryerson, a prominent MAHA leader who writes under the name “Glyphosate Girl,” came to the movement the way many women do: because of personal health problems that traditional medicine couldn’t solve. Attending a gluten sensitivity conference, she heard it suggested that the issue might not be the gluten itself, but rather the chemicals sprayed on American wheat. That started her down a glyphosate research rabbit hole and eventually, in 2018, to the San Francisco courtroom where Monsanto, the manufacturer of glyphosate, was being sued by a man claiming the herbicide caused his cancer. One of the lawyers on the case was RFK Jr.
“I’m politically independent,” Ryerson told me. “I feel that I really represent this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity.” Ryerson, like other MAHA devotees, stuck with Kennedy even as he switched parties.
That came in the summer of 2024, as Kennedy’s own presidential campaign was lagging. When Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Calley Means reportedly called Kennedy and “suggested that it might be a moment for unity—Mr. Trump had just narrowly escaped the same fate that had befallen Mr. Kennedy’s father and uncle,” according to The New York Times. By the end of August, Kennedy was out of the race and in Trump’s camp, and MAHA was an emergent force in American politics.
Ryerson, “Food Babe” Vani Hari, and other MAHA influencers supported the McDonald’s-eating Trump in large part because of his association with Kennedy. And, Ryerson says, while much of the MAHA movement’s true devotion was and is with Kennedy, its followers were smart enough to see that Trump’s idiosyncratic and unpredictable politics were a potential asset. “The thought behind Trump,” Ryerson said, “was that it was the only way forward with getting Kennedy into a role.” And she also believed that “the chemical industry has its grips so tightly on both parties that it’s like, well, we need someone that we might have a chance of him saying, ‘No, we’re done with that.’ And Trump is so volatile in many different ways, you don’t know which way he’s going to go.” Maybe, she thought, he would go hers.
Vani Hari, a blogger who goes by “Food Babe,” made a video during a rally outside the US Supreme Court, as justices heard oral arguments in Monsanto Company v. Durnell in April.Francis Chung/Politico/AP
Agriculture and public health advocate Kelly Ryerson, also known as Glyphosate Girl, pictured at an anti-glyphosate rally outside the Supreme Court in April, feels she represents “this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity.”Francis Chung/Politico/AP
Spoiler alert: He hasn’t. Rather than forcing food and chemical companies to clean up their acts, the Trump administration’s senior health officials seem to be more preoccupied with the priorities of the manosphere. MAHA, says Monika McDermott, a professor of political science at Fordham University, “fits with the MAGA movement’s vision of the role that men play and the roles that women play. And so, yeah, women are figureheads and can do things about the family, but the experts are still the masculine figures.”
For expertise, they’ve turned to a smattering of “functional medicine” doctors (healthcare providers who focus on “root causes” of disease, like diet, exercise, and sleep), researchers, and activists, most of whom have podcasts or large social media followings, such as Dr. Mark Hyman and Calley Means. Before becoming an adviser to RFK Jr., Means co-founded a company called Truemed that helps consumers use tax-advantaged medical savings accounts, like HSAs and FSAs, to buy things like red-light therapy boxes, Meta glasses, and supplements. (Hyman is an investor in the company, which also sells his recommended supplements.)
The administration’s MAHA-adjacent decisions also have prioritized the interests of men. Take protein. Like anxieties about testosterone and “soy boys”—weak men supposedly feminized by eating too much tofu instead of red meat—the protein craze is as much about a robust male identity as it is nutrition.
The protein craze is as much about a robust male identity as it is nutrition.
“There’s been a steady drumroll of protein boosterism by characters in the manosphere who trade in ideas that masculinity is in decline and under attack,” says Samantha King, a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Canada and co-author of Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar. Joe Rogan, the megapopular podcaster whose endorsement of Trump was widely seen as boosting his support among young men, has complained that masculinity is unfairly vilified, while hawking protein supplements and talking about his own penchant for eating wild game. He went on a fully carnivore diet for a 30-day challenge, which resulted in “hellacious projectile doo-doo.” Popular manosphere figure Andrew Tate, who with his brother was fighting extradition to the United Kingdom for alleged rape and sex trafficking as of this writing, told Tucker Carlson in 2023 that “80 percent of my calories come from meat. I have 10 cups of coffee a day and three or four large cigars.” “Smoking is fantastic for your testosterone level,” he added. (The Tates have denied all charges filed against them.)
No one seems more dedicated to protein than RFK Jr. When he announced the inverted food pyramid earlier this year, he framed it as a triumphal end to the war on protein—a dog whistle, King said, for the war on men, and especially on the male manual worker. RFK Jr. claims to subsist almost exclusively on meat and fermented foods, a diet that has, according to The Wall Street Journal, been embraced by Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to no doubt pungent results. And let’s not forget the weird video that RFK Jr. made with Kid Rock, in which they both exercised shirtless in a sauna (Kennedy in jeans), before pounding milk in a hot tub.
Meanwhile, in the first year of Kennedy’s tenure, HHS announced the appointment of “five new agency leaders to advance MAHA goals.” Four of the five were men. The most prominent was Admiral Brian Christine, an “internationally recognized leader in men’s health” and the new assistant secretary for health at HHS.
As part of his mandate, Christine, a staunch anti-abortion Catholic, was responsible for overseeing the agency administering Title X, the federal family planning program that has traditionally funded contraception access for poor women across America. Earlier this year, HHS released radically revamped guidance for organizations applying for Title X grants. “Chronic disease” gets 14 mentions in the document; contraception gets one. Relatively little attention is given to helping women prevent unwanted pregnancy, the reason the Title X program was created in the first place. Much more is spent on male fertility concerns: testosterone levels, sperm counts and motility, avoiding pornography, and so on. In recent months, testosterone therapy has also become a new general HHS priority. In early September, The Washington Sun reported that the department had canceled more than half of the Office of Minority Health’s existing grants, focused on things like infant mortality and postpartum wellness, to instead prioritize programs devoted to exercise and the “root causes” of infertility, including erectile disfunction.
In recent months, testosterone therapy has become a new general HHS priority.
At the same time, the administration has been mostly unwilling to regulate Big Food and Big Ag—the MAHA moms’ main priority. After Trump appointed industry-friendly Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Zeldin immediately went on a deregulation spree, staffed the agency with former Big Ag and industry lobbyists, and appointed former industry representatives to oversee pesticide regulation. The EPA office once charged with research on toxic chemicals has been dismantled.
And then there is the administration’s actions related to glyphosate, long one of MAHA’s top targets. Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order calling glyphosate critical for national security and urging production increases. In June, the Supreme Court sided with chemical giant Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, in a case related to its weed killer Roundup. Trump’s DOJ had advocated for the court to take on the case. On Forked, a food politics podcast, Ryerson called the administration’s role in the case “deeply, deeply devastating.”
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ate ice cream at the end of a news conference last year alongside former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary, who resigned in May. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty
So where does all this leave the MAHA moms? Ryerson says that while MAHA men are largely the ones in the most powerful roles in government, women “are still dictating it from the grassroots,” and “if what we want isn’t happening, then they won’t win reelection.”
She, podcaster Alex Clark, and others have been warning Republicans that if they don’t show up for the women of MAHA, the women of MAHA may stop showing up for them. At the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit over the summer, Clark told a conservative interviewer, “I believe that we won 2024 because of these women; I believe if these women are ignored, we’re going to lose the midterms, and I believe we will lose 2028.”
Ryerson, for her part, said she’s still stunned that most Democrats in Congress haven’t jumped on these issues. One exception is Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, who told The 19th: “I really don’t think that these are necessarily left or right. The questions around toxins in our food and food is medicine, and the opposition to Big Ag and big chemical companies is very universal.”
This dynamic—of women as foot soldiers while men take up command posts—is not unique to MAHA. The “wine moms” who powered Democratic victories in the suburbs for the last several election cycles, and the Black women who took on the lion’s share of the legwork of “souls to the polls” turnout machines, did most of the labor—and were often mocked instead of being credited. But they eventually translated that preparation into power: 43 percent of congressional Democrats are now female (for Republicans, it’s 15 percent); women account for nearly half of state Democratic legislators. Will MAHA’s largely female organizers and leaders take a similar path within the GOP—or will the Democratic Party convince them to defect?
Ryerson says that she continues to support Kennedy and that anecdotally, many MAHA women in her orbit believe he’s often hamstrung by the White House but still a force for good. And many Democrats are understandably hesitant to court followers of a movement they see as rife with dangerous quackery. But most of MAHA’s core issues—additives in food, microplastics, pesticides—used to be clearly Democratic issues. If Democrats were to back away from them now, Ryerson says, they’re leaving votes on the table.
MAHA voters, she says, are “up for grabs, and [politicians] should be battling it out to see who can propose the best exit out of this toxic world that we’re living in.”
This story was produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
This week in Santa Cruz County business: New executive director of Volunteer Center sets out his goals; Joby embarks on national tour
Each week, we’re taking a closer look at the movers and shakers, the growth of industries and what’s really driving the Santa Cruz County economy. I’ll be spotlighting some of the biggest areas for opportunity, updates on local development and all things underpinning the regional business scene each Wednesday.
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Ministry of Justice apologizes after court staff accessed Southport victims' files
Amazon launches Alexa+ in India with Hindi support
Salesforce suffers global outage amid Dreamforce shindig
Russia Targeted Past US Elections. Will It Meddle in the Midterms?
The 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House the first time was defined in many ways by the role of America’s longtime adversary Russia. Over the years, multiple investigations have concluded that Russia meddled in the election to boost Trump over Hillary Clinton and create political discord among voters. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly called the Russia investigations a “hoax.”
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As the 2026 midterms approach, experts warn that Russia could interfere in US elections once again. Because as Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn lays out in his new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, Russia has been waging a continuous campaign against the US.
“You have to wonder if Russia will be meddling yet again,” Corn tells host Al Letson, referring to the upcoming midterms. “And this time around, it’s different, because what Trump has done since he got back into the White House is to decimate all the government offices and agencies that would be looking for Russian interference and trying to counter it.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Corn talks about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “twilight war” against the US and Western democracies, argues that the infamous Steele dossier ultimately helped Trump, and examines how the Trump White House has dismantled government agencies tasked with finding and fending off Russian disinformation campaigns.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
How the Midterms Could Shrink Red State America—and Why It Matters
The Democrats are poised to gain control of the House and potentially the Senate this November, which would substantially weaken President Trump and MAGA at the national level. But many of the worst Republican ideas are implemented at the state level, and as long as Trump is in the White House blocking progress of any sort at the federal level, the only path to sane, just policies is through the states. So that’s why it’s great and super-important news that Democrats could also flip a number of state legislatures and governorships this November, ending the GOP’s total grip on many states and giving Democrats complete power in several others.
If things go right this fall, a majority of Americans will live in Democratic “trifecta” states, and only a quarter in Republican trifecta states. Such a shift would greatly improve the lives of millions of Americans, as well as strengthen our democracy.
Currently, Republicans control the state legislature and the governor’s office in 23 states, including virtually the entire South and Mountain West. About 42 percent of Americans (141 million) live in those states, according to Ballotpedia. In contrast, 39 percent of Americans (133 million) live in the 16 states (mostly on the coasts) where Democrats have control. In the other 11 states, a party controls one of the houses of the legislature or the governor’s office but not all three. You might say that seems about right. America is about equally divided between the two parties, and about half of Americans live in totally red states and about half in totally blue ones.
But what happens in red states isn’t something Democrats or small-d democrats should consider acceptable. States under total Republican control are constantly passing restrictions on abortion and transgender rights, rolling back academic freedom at colleges, making it harder for Black people, college students, and other-left leaning constituencies to vote, and implementing a plutocratic economic agenda of low taxes for the wealthy and corporations and low wages and meager public benefits for everyone else. These states are “Laboratories Against Democracy,” the title of a book by University of California, Berkeley political scientist Jake Grumbach that describes how radical GOP policymakers at the state level have become.
But if the blue wave is as strong as polls suggest, many fewer Americans will live under unified GOP rule than do today. Democratic candidate Rob Sands is favored to win the gubernatorial election in Iowa. Democratic candidates in Ohio and Georgia have about even odds, and Texas’s Gina Hinojosa is an underdog but has a path to victory there. The party could also gain control of the state House in New Hampshire, another state where Republicans currently have a trifecta. If Democrats won in those five states, only about 25 percent of Americans would live in GOP-controlled states, a huge decrease from the current 42 percent. That’s because these are some of the biggest states in the country: Texas (second biggest, 31 million people); Ohio (seventh, 12 million); Georgia (eighth, 11 million.)
Democratic governors could veto the racist, anti-democratic, plutocratic policies that emerge from their state legislatures. They could oppose hyper-aggressive gerrymandering schemes being pushed by GOP legislators that make it easier for Republicans to control state legislatures and the U.S. House without winning that many voters. And as Georgia incumbent Governor Brian Kemp showed in 2020, governors and state legislatures often play a major role in certifying presidential election results. Having Democratic governors in these states will make it harder for Republicans to again attempt to cheat and overturn the results of an election that they don’t win.
But this November isn’t just an opportunity for Democrats to have a better defense in states that lean red. Democrats already hold the governor’s mansion and can gain total control of the government through legislative elections this fall in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Multistate, which tracks state elections, says Democrats have a decent chance of winning the state House and Senate in all five states. Democrats also need to win the gubernatorial contests in those states again. Wisconsin is considered a toss-up but Democrats are favored in the other five. They could also win the governorship and therefore achieve a trifecta in Nevada, where Democrats already control both houses of the state legislature.
If Democrats won in those six states, an outright majority of Americans (52 percent) would live in a blue state trifecta. Blue states aren’t panaceas, and writers at The New York Times and other centrist publications rightly harp on high housing prices and other ills of Democratic states. But those writers rarely live in red states and don’t seem like they are itching to move to them. Why not? Because blue states are at least trying to achieve the deeper, more equitable democracy of our dreams. They have expanded Medicaid through Obamacare, raised their minimum wages, and are constantly trying to make it easier, not harder to vote.
Looking to 2028, it will be harder for Republicans to try to overturn the election results if Democrats are in total control of key swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
None of this is guaranteed for Democrats. Republicans of course have a good chance to win in any state where they currently have the state legislature or the governorship—-they had to win to gain such control in the first place. And Democrats are likely to lose two governorships that they now hold, in Kansas this fall and Kentucky next year, turning those into red trifecta states.
But Trump remains deeply unpopular, it’s hard to see Republicans avoiding a blowout. And if that happens, the ramifications won’t just be in Washington. We’ll see good gridlock in the South and Southwest, as Republican state legislators can no longer pass whatever hateful, plutocratic policies they want. And there will be less gridlock in the Midwest and Southwest, as Democratic officials are finally able to pass policies to make their residents’ lives better.
We’ve been split into Two Americas for a long time and that’s likely to continue. So the best we can hope for is what’s likely to happen in November—-the pluralistic social democracy America being practiced in the blue states keeps expanding while the anti-democratic, plutocratic red state America shrinks.