Here is a bit of news involving Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that, unlike his antisemitic remarks and the unfortunate soundtrack during one of his appearances, didn’t exactly go viral. Earlier this week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in a case against a California law that was passed last year to prohibit physicians from spreading misinformation about Covid. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a key figure in the fight against this law. 

It’s not hard to see why this wasn’t exactly headline material. The pandemic officially ended in May, but Covid news fatigue set in long before that. Yet this particular case is worth paying attention to because the people who oppose California’s Covid misinformation law have expanded their areas of interest. Their efforts could lay the groundwork to give contrarian physicians broad authority to go rogue on all kinds of medical issues, from the administration of routine childhood vaccinations to reproductive health, gender-affirming care, and beyond.  

To understand why, you need some context. In early 2022, California state assembly member Evan Low introduced AB 2098, a bill that would allow the state medical board to discipline doctors who promoted false information about Covid—say, by claiming that unproven treatments could cure or prevent the disease, or that the vaccines were dangerous. The bill garnered broad support from the healthcare sector, including from the California Medical Association, the state lobbying group that represents physicians. California governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law last September.

That level of support is remarkable since physicians don’t typically love being told that there are certain things they can’t say. But the law is quite specific in what it does and does not deem to be misinformation, as California physician Nick Sawyer recently pointed out in a MedPage Today op-ed:

In his signing statement, Newsom specified that the bill is “Narrowly tailored to apply only to those egregious instances in which a licensee is acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the required standard of care while interacting directly with a patient under their care.” He further added, “This bill does not apply to any speech outside of discussions directly related to Covid-19 treatment within a direct physician-patient relationship,” and that discussing emerging ideas or treatments, including risks and benefits, “does not constitute misinformation or disinformation under this bill’s criteria.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on Tuesday that charges have been filed against 16 residents of the state for their roles in a fake elector scheme following the 2020 election. All 16 have been charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and election law forgery. 

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Nessel said. The announcement comes just hours after Donald Trump revealed that he has received a target letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

Today, @MIAttyGen @dananessel announced felony charges against 16 Michigan residents for their role in the alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Read more https://t.co/ODhkAQfXNP /1 pic.twitter.com/u5riNpTD5I

— Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (@MIAttyGen) July 18, 2023

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election in Michigan by more than 150,000 votes. Trump and his allies worked to overturn the results of the election in the state, even though they hadn’t requested a recount.

Once upon a time, Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina condemned racism. Now, not so much. What happened?

The presidential hopeful might be finding it difficult to make headlines in an increasingly crowded Republican primary field, but he’s still hauling in crucial campaign cash. The latest figures, unveiled last week, disclosed that his campaign has accumulated $6.1 million from over 53,000 donors in the second quarter of this year—ensuring his eligibility for the debate stage, alongside frontrunner Donald Trump, should the former president show up. Scott is also spending big, hoping to sway early-voting Iowans with a recent $6 million ad campaign titled “Winning.” 

“The radical left is indoctrinating our children, teaching CRT instead of ABC,” Scott says in the video, a phrase that has become something of a campaign catchphrase.

As Scott burnishes his anti-woke credentials on the campaign trail to compete with the more established culture warriors of the far right, I decided to scrutinize his views on race and how they’ve evolved over the years. In this video, I juxtapose Scott’s responses to two racially fueled tragedies: the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the 2022 Buffalo Massacre. These events elicited two completely different responses from the only Black senator in the Republican caucus, which prompted me to ask: What the hell happened in between?

My analysis begins in 2010 when Scott clinched a resounding victory in the US House of Representatives election against Paul Thurmond, whose father, Strom, was a notorious racist figure in the 20th century. Scott’s ability to win in a majority-white district set his political career on an upward trajectory, making him, in some respects, the Republicans’ primary spokesperson on race, or what I describe as the party’s “default DEI Guy”. After the Charlottesville rally, Scott was explicit in acknowledging America’s racial issues. But I quickly noticed a striking shift in Scott’s narrative following the racial tensions triggered by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020. In an email newsletter following the 2022 Buffalo Massacre, Scott stated, “America isn’t a racist country.”

Ron DeSantis is failing when it comes to grassroots fundraising. The situation has gotten so bad that it’s possible the Florida governor might actually be losing money when it comes to courting small-dollar donors.

DeSantis’ team has tried to spin the situation as a positive. In a New York Times piece last week, his advisers argued that the campaign was making a strategic decision to avoid alienating rank-and-file supporters with the sorts of fake promises and alarmist or misleading email blasts that have become hallmarks of political fundraising. That strategy may be commendable, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

It’s hard to say exactly how many small donors DeSantis has—the definition of “small donor” is generally someone who gives less than $200, and campaigns aren’t required to say how many donors of that size they have or how much each of those donors gave. Campaigns simply have to report to the Federal Election Commission the total amount raised from all those small donors, combined. According to filings from DeSantis’ campaign on Saturday, the answer is: not much.

To be precise, it was $2,867,814.98, or about 15 percent of DeSantis’ overall fundraising haul for the second quarter of 2023. It’s hard to draw a comparison directly to Donald Trump’s second quarter numbers, because the former president utilized several complex fundraising vehicles. But Trump has previously broken records for a presidential candidate’s small-dollar fundraising—GOP small donors like him. Even Joe Biden, who has made little effort with grassroots contributors so far, raised $5.3 million from small donors.

While DeSantis’ grand total from all donations, including large ones—$19.7 million—isn’t terrible, the roughly $2.9 million he raised specifically from small donors comes with some red flags. First, it appears to be costing DeSantis a lot to raise that rather paltry sum. According to the same federal filings, his campaign spent:

Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors can go into effect—at least for the time being.

In late June, a district court had halted a ban on minors receiving care such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy on the grounds that the restrictions in the bill, which Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee signed in March, were unconstitutional because they discriminated on the basis of sex.

But on Saturday, the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily reversed the lower court’s ruling until the appeals court can complete its full review of the ban and the appeal, filed by the state’s GOP attorney general. The higher court said it hopes to finish this review by the end of September. 

In the meantime, the ban will take immediate effect. Medical providers caught providing gender affirming hormones, puberty blockers, or gender-affirming surgery to minors in the state face $25,000 fines per violation. The law also allows lawsuits to be brought against a minor’s parents “if the parent of the minor consented to the conduct that constituted the violation on behalf of the minor.” (Children who already received prescriptions before the law went into effect must stop treatment before March 2024.)

“This ruling is beyond disappointing and a heartbreaking development for thousands of transgender youth, their doctors, and their families,” said the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, one of the advocacy groups challenging the ruling on behalf of several individuals, including a family with a trans child. “As we and our clients consider our next steps, we want all the transgender youth of Tennessee to know this fight is far from over and we will continue to challenge this law until it is permanently defeated and Tennessee is made a safer place to raise every family.”

Two and a half years after January 6, lawyers who helped former president Donald Trump use lies about election fraud to try to retain power are finally starting to face sanctions for their actions.

On Friday, a legal ethics committee recommended that Rudy Giuliani, who helped Trump’s legal efforts following election day in 2020, be disbarred in Washington. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the three-member panel said in a 38-page ruling. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”

The three-member panel noted that Giuliani had a record of public service during his stints as mayor of New York and as a US Attorney. But “the misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments,” they said. “It was unparalleled in its destructive purpose and effect. He sought to disrupt a presidential election and persists in his refusal to acknowledge the wrong he has done.”

The DC case focused on Giuliani’s role in the legal effort to contest Trump’s defeat in Pennsylvania during the 2020 presidential election. “His hyperbolic claims of election fraud and the core thesis of the Pennsylvania litigation were utterly false, and recklessly so,” the panel said.

The recommendation that Giuliani lose his license must still be okayed by DC’s Board on Professional Responsibility and by Court of Appeals. One of Giuliani’s lawyers said he will file “a vigorous appeal.” Ted Goodman, a Giuliani spokesman, called the DC Bar Association’s leaders “an arm of the permanent regime in Washington,” adding: “This is also part of an effort to deny President Trump effective counsel by persecuting Rudy Giuliani—objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history. I call on rank-and-file members of the DC Bar Association to speak out against this great injustice.”

Over the last two years, Republican state politicians have done their best to wipe out access to gender-affirming medical care for trans adolescents. In a flurry of lawmaking—coordinated by conservative Christian legal groups and think tanks, and backed by fringe doctors and activists who deny that anyone is truly transgender—a whopping 20 states have passed laws forbidding medical professionals from caring for trans adolescents with treatments supported by all major US medical associations.

Three more states may still pass similar bans this year: In North Carolina, and Louisiana, Republican-controlled legislatures are preparing to call special sessions to override their Democratic governors’ vetoes of several anti-LGBTQ bills, including trans healthcare restrictions. And Ohio still has a ban on the table. 

Yet even as more states consider banning affirming medical care for trans youth, federal courts are blocking or overturning these restrictive laws in a cascade of wins for transgender rights. In Arkansas, on June 20, a federal judge struck down a law banning gender-affirming care for youth, concluding after a trial that “the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients” and that despite its claims to the contrary, the state hadn’t been protecting children when it passed the law. Meanwhile, judges in Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee all granted temporary injunctions last month that will keep puberty blockers and hormone therapy accessible to trans adolescents while legal challenges to their state bans play out in court. (Update: Tennessee’s injunction was overturned on July 8 and the ban was allowed to go into effect.)

The decisions, all issued during Pride month, follow a similar ruling in Alabama in May 2022 that temporarily blocked a law banning gender-affirming medication for trans people under the age of 19. All in all, in almost every court case so far in which a decision has been issued on gender-affirming care bans for youth, judges have sided with the trans adolescents and their families suing for access to treatment.

The rulings are a victory—though temporary, in some cases—for the parents who have sued their states to protect their children’s healthcare. The plaintiffs include the mom of a 9-year-old in Florida who had told her parents she was a girl even before she started kindergarten. According to court filings, she had stopped expressing the desire to self-harm after socially transitioning, and was waiting to start puberty blockers before the new law was passed. In Kentucky, a dad sued the state to protect his 14-year-old transgender son’s access menstruation suppressants and testosterone patches—medication which had helped reduce his gender dysphoria and suicidality. And in Arkansas, the parents of a 10-year-old transgender girl joined a lawsuit knowing that if the ban there took effect, they would have to move to make sure their daughter could get appropriate medical care when she enters puberty.  

In May, Starbucks abruptly shuttered a unionized store in Ithaca, New York. This week, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Starbucks had violated federal labor law, and ordered the company to reopen the store.

The College Avenue store, near Cornell University, was one of three Ithaca stores that closed after workers unionized, a move that the union characterized as retaliation. In a Thursday ruling, Judge Arthur Amchan wrote that the College Avenue store’s closure “was done in large part to discourage unionization efforts in Ithaca and elsewhere” and that Starbucks hadn’t proved that it wouldn’t have closed the store “absent its animus towards the pro-union employees who worked there,” Bloomberg reports.

As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had billed himself as a benevolent CEO, but, in coming out of retirement to attempt to quell the growing movement to unionize Starbucks cafes, has shown a different side of his American dream. The company has increased wages and allowed baristas to receive tips by credit cards—but only at non-union stores.

The Ithaca store closures aren’t the first examples of outright retaliation. As Noah reports:

According to an NLRB court filing, illegal firings of pro-union workers became routine. In one case, seven workers leading a drive at a Memphis store were simultaneously fired; a federal judge later found that to be illegal retaliation and ordered their jobs be offered back.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A constitutional legal strategy is gaining traction as a way to potentially help bring about climate justice, boosted by a recent high-profile trial in which 16 young plaintiffs spoke movingly about how the climate crisis has affected their lives.

That case, the first US constitutional climate trial, came to an end in Helena, Montana, earlier this month, with a verdict expected to be delivered by a judge in the coming weeks.

Climate and legal advocates say the Montana case—which made national and international headlines—could inspire more legal action, while also pushing forward similar lawsuits pending against four other states and the federal government.

Some climate advocates are, meanwhile, working to enshrine similarly robust environmental rights in other state constitutions, which they say could become the basis of future climate litigation.

Last Friday morning, at the beginning of a hot June day in Philadelphia, I walked through a phalanx of about a hundred protesters in order to make my way to the Joyful Warriors Summit, the annual convention of the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. It was early in the day, but the bass from the speakers was already thrumming, and the protesters—most were young, many were not white—danced behind the barricades that separated them from the Marriott where the convention was taking place. Bedecked in rainbow gear, the jubilant crowd waved signs: “STAND UP TO BULLIES,” “DANCE THE HATE AWAY,” “GO HOME, KAREN.”

This was my second encounter with the joyful warriors, having attended their convention last year, in Tampa, Florida. At that event, there were a few lackluster official protesters, but most of the action outside came from kids attending the anime gathering at the convention center next door. Back then, inside the Marriott, I watched Moms for Liberty heads Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Marie Rogerson present Gov. Ron DeSantis with a commemorative sword. The golden boy in Tampa, who would be speaking at breakfast in Philadelphia, had a far less prominent role this year; it was clear that the headliner would be Friday’s evening speaker, former President Donald Trump.

Demonstrators react as James Calkins, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, walks outside the Moms for Liberty meeting in Philadelphia, Friday, June 30, 2023.

Nathan Howard/AP

Founded in 2021, Moms for Liberty began in Florida as a protest against school closures and then mask mandates. But as the pandemic wore on, the group’s mission coalesced into what is now known as the parents’ rights movement, focusing on what its supporters see as the dire consequences of schools’ over-involvement in shaping the moral lives of their offspring. The Moms do not think children should be learning about institutional racism in the United States. The Moms consider schools’ social-emotional learning programs—which focus on soft skills like friendship, anger management, and being part of a community—to be Trojan horses for a Marxist agenda. The Moms want to purge school libraries of books that present gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. The Moms want the federal government out of the schools, and, while they’re at it, abolishing the Department of Education would be a good idea as well.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

More than 1,500 lobbyists in the US are working on behalf of fossil-fuel companies while at the same time representing hundreds of liberal-run cities, universities, technology companies and environmental groups that say they are tackling the climate crisis, the Guardian can reveal.

Lobbyists for oil, gas and coal interests are also employed by a vast sweep of institutions, ranging from the city governments of Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia; tech giants such as Apple and Google; more than 150 universities; some of the country’s leading environmental groups—and even ski resorts seeing their snow melted by global heating.

The breadth of fossil fuel lobbyists’ work for other clients is captured in a new database of their lobbying interests which was published online on Wednesday.

It shows the reach of state-level fossil fuel lobbyists into almost every aspect of American life, spanning local governments, large corporations, cultural institutions such as museums and film festivals, and advocacy groups, grouping together clients with starkly contradictory aims.

Why the hell did President Joe Biden nominate a one-time protector of war criminals to a top administration post?

On the Monday before July 4—a black hole day for news—the White House let drop the word that it was appointing Elliott Abrams to the bipartisan US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The commission’s job is to oversee US government information programs designed to convey American diplomacy to the world. It keeps an eye on the US Agency for Global Media, which manages the Voice of America and similar programs. The commission essentially helps the United States present its idea of itself to the rest of the planet.

This is a task for which Abrams is distinctly unsuited.

Long a stalwart in neoconservative circles, Abrams was one of the many cheerleaders in the early 2000s for the disastrous Iraq War. A decade earlier, in 1991, as a player in the Iran–Contra affair, he pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about the Reagan White House’s secret operation to arm the Nicaraguan Contras. In short: As a top State Department official, he engaged in a cover-up to hide the arguably illegal operation overseen by Oliver North. 

But Abrams most odious (known) action occurred several years previously. As a top Reagan official, he dismissed reports that the US-trained-and-equipped military had massacred 1,000 civilians—including many women and children—in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981. This was the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. But Abrams wanted to protect the Salvadoran army, which the Reagan administration was showering with guns and money, despite its well-established record of human rights abuses. Abrams trash-talked American journalists who reported on the massacre and claimed the horrific reports were “implausible.” He praised the military unit that conducted this awful action. He suppressed the truth to assist killers.

For GOP presidential hopefuls, the weekend that marked the anniversary of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade presented an opportunity to demonstrate just how opposed to abortion they were. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference on Friday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez all made their respective cases to an audience of approximately 500 religious conservatives in Washington, DC. Then on Saturday, it was former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s turn to defend her self-described “unapologetically pro-life” record, with the weekend culminating in the appearance of former president Donald Trump.  

“We’re certainly going to do everything that we can, as an organization and as a pro-life and pro-family movement, to give our candidates a little bit of a testosterone booster shot and explain to them that they should not be on the defensive,” Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition said before the conference. “Those who are afraid of it need to, candidly, grow a backbone.” 

As historically one of the most ardent anti-abortion candidates who calls himself an “advocate for the unborn,” Mike Pence urged all Republican candidates to support a federal 15-week abortion ban. “We must not rest and we must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in this country,” he said on Friday.

Trump has avoided taking a definitive position on a national abortion ban, largely dodging the issue on the campaign trail. He has also expressed concerns that abortion might be a losing issue for Republicans, blaming his party’s lackluster performance in the midterm elections on the defeat of Roe. But at the Faith & Freedom Coalition annual event, the 2024 GOP candidates refrained from taking shots at Trump, who, Politico wrote in describing his appearance at the conference, “is still king of the evangelical cattle call.”

Nonetheless, there was one notable exception to the avoidance of discussing the former president: Chris Christie.

Update, June 24, 2:30 p.m. ET: Wagner Group Chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin said his forces were turning around. The announcement came after President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus reportedly made a deal with Prigozhin to halt the march towards Moscow. 

Months of growing tensions between Vladimir Putin, Russia’s military, and the private mercenary Wagner Group fighting for Russia in Ukraine have escalated into a full-fledged crisis. Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Wagner chief who has become known as “Putin’s chef” over his lucrative catering business deals with the Kremlin, claimed on Friday night that the Russian military had attacked and killed “a huge amount” of his fighters. He vowed retribution and called it a “march of justice.” In response, the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s intelligence agency, accused Prigozhin of calling for an “armed rebellion” and called for his hired soldiers to arrest him. The mercenary group and Russia’s Ministry of Defense increasingly have clashed over tactics in the war in Ukraine and the supply of ammunition.

The situation quickly escalated as the Wagner Group claimed to have taken control of Russia’s key military facilities in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. A Ministry of Defense intelligence update from the United Kingdom described the apparent rebellion as “the most significant challenge to the Russian state in recent times.” Wagner convoys are reportedly heading toward Moscow—which is under increased security—and have been sighted in Voronezh, about 300 miles south of the capital. Russia has established a “counter-terrorist” operation in the Moscow and Voronezh regions. Earlier this year it was estimated that up to 50,000 fighters from the Wagner Group were in Ukraine, having played an important role in supporting Russian forces in the fight for control of the city of Bakhmut. The Wagner Group has been accused of perpetrating war crimes in Ukraine, Africa, and the Middle East.

In a televised address on Saturday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Prigozhin’s actions were “a stab in the back against our nation and our country.” He added: “Anyone who consciously went on the path of betrayal, who prepared the armed mutiny, went on the path of blackmail and terrorist actions, will be punished inevitably. They will answer before the law and our people.” Prigozhin fired back in an audio message on Telegram, saying Putin “makes a deep mistake when he talks about treason. We are patriots of our motherland, we fought and are fighting for it.” On Twitter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy weighed in, saying, “Russia’s weakness is obvious.”

“Putin’s never looked weaker than right now, in the Ukraine war and at home,” Ian Bremner, a political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group, tweeted, “which is welcome. and extremely dangerous.” US officials are monitoring the power struggle closely. 

On Friday, the US Supreme Court delivered a ruling that allows the Biden administration to reinstate a policy that sets priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regarding arrests and deportations. In an 8-1 decision on the United States v. Texas case, the justices concluded that the states challenging the government’s policy didn’t have standing to sue. The decision comes not only as a significant victory for the Biden administration but also sanctions the broader authority of the executive branch to set immigration policy.

The case concerned a 2021 enforcement priorities memorandum by the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas instructing ICE to focus its limited resources “in a more targeted way” against immigrants who represent a threat to national security or public safety and more recent border arrivals. “We do not lessen our commitment to enforce immigration law to the best of our ability,” the guidelines state. “This is how we use the resources we have in a way that accomplishes our enforcement mission most effectively and justly.”

Texas and Louisiana then sued the Biden administration claiming the enforcement priorities memo violated federal statutes requiring DHS to arrest more immigrants pending their deportation and that not doing so would incur costs for the states. In June 2022, Trump-appointed US District Judge Drew Tipton blocked the federal policy as unlawful. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case while leaving the lower court ruling halting the policy nationwide in place.  

“The States essentially want the Federal Judiciary to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policy so as to make more arrests,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, calling the case brought by Texas and Louisiana “an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit.” If the court was to green-light the lawsuit, Kavanaugh writes, it could lead to an “uncharted path” whereby states interfere with federal law enforcement in other areas, not just immigration.

The opinion states that because the federal government doesn’t have the ability to enforce the law against all undocumented immigrants—more than 11 million—in the country, five presidential administrations going back 27 years “have determined that resource constraints necessitated prioritization in making immigration arrests.” In his lone dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the ruling left states “already laboring under the effects of massive illegal immigration even more helpless.”  

As a Black teenager growing up in Wilson, North Carolina, in the 1950s, Milton “Toby” Fitch Jr. wanted to swim in the Olympic-sized pool on the prosperous East side of town—a pool that only white people could use. Like so many places in the Jim Crow South, Wilson, a tobacco town of roughly 50,000 people one hour east of Raleigh, was heavily segregated; one study described it as two cities divided by a railroad track. One day, Fitch—whose father was the first Black mail carrier in Wilson and the North Carolina coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference—snuck in through the men’s showers and jumped in the pool. The police escorted him out and the city drained the water. “All the young kids were mad as hell at me,” he recalls.

In 1965, the monumental Voting Rights Act passed, striking down the suppressive devices that prevented African-Americans from voting in the South for so many years. At the time, one in four North Carolinians were Black but there wasn’t a single Black member in the state legislature. When Fitch tried to register to vote after the law’s approval, an election official threatened to make him recite the Declaration of Independence, an example of one of the many ways Southern white officials kept Blacks from voting. Fitch protested and succeeded in registering. “I realized and understood early on in life what people were able to achieve when they participated in the process,” Fitch tells me.

After becoming a civil rights lawyer in 1975, Fitch filed a range of lawsuits to desegregate schools, workplaces, and all levels of government in North Carolina. The latter effort finally bore fruit in the early 1980s when the courts ordered the state to create new legislative districts that would give Black voters the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Fitch joined the state house in 1985 and rose through the ranks, becoming the state’s first Black House Majority Leader and chair of the redistricting committee. He drew the map that led to the election of North Carolina’s first Black member of Congress since Reconstruction. After 16 years in the state house, he served as a state judge for 17 years, then rejoined the legislature as a member of the state senate in 2018. 

Like so many prominent Black lawmakers, Fitch owed his political career to the Voting Rights Act. But last year, he became one of the victims of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the law. North Carolina Republicans passed a redistricting map in 2021 that took away two counties in his district carried by Joe Biden and added two counties carried by Donald Trump, reducing the number of Black voters from 48 percent to 35 percent. This meant that a once-secure Democratic seat shifted eleven points to the right, and Fitch lost handily to a white Republican. In total, seven Black members—a fifth of the state legislature’s Black caucus—lost their seats in 2022, leading to a stunning decline in minority representation in a state that had been regarded as one of the most integrated in the South.

The main reason that Republicans were able to target Black representation so ruthlessly was because of Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 Supreme Court ruling holding that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve voting changes and electoral maps with the federal government—a process known as “preclearance.” June 25th marks the 10th anniversary of the decision, which has had a devastating impact on voting rights in the South. Shelby County laid the groundwork for a wave of new voter suppression laws and racially gerrymandered maps. Decades of advances for minority voters have been wiped out in the past ten years.

Some of you have powerful memories of Daniel Ellsberg. You remember the incredible impact he had on the way Americans thought about the war in Vietnam when he leaked the Pentagon Papers back in 1971. My memory is different. It’s from just four weeks ago, when—in hospice care, knowing he had only weeks to live—he comforted a young whistleblower who’d come to conclude her act was pointless. You could have heard a pin drop, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that moment since I learned of Ellsberg’s death last Friday.

Ellsberg was a speaker at a conference, the Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting, at the University of California, Berkeley. (You can watch the whole thing here.) He towered over the room on a giant Zoom screen, calling in from his home just a couple of miles away. On another screen was Reality Winner, who, as a twenty-something National Security Agency translator, leaked classified documents about Russian interference in the US election, and was sentenced to prison time for it. Now out and barred from traveling without the government’s permission, she sat in her living room in Corpus Christi, Texas, wearing a T-shirt that read “Grow Food, Love Hard,” and a weary expression.

It was clear from the outset that this was not the kind of panel where journalists congratulate each other for the great work they do. Ellsberg started it off noting, with a smile, that “I have yet to meet a whistleblower who has a good feeling about the newspaper they dealt with, or the reporter they dealt with.” Boom.

In Ellsberg’s case, the reporter he dealt with was Neil Sheehan, the New York Times reporter also famous for his history of the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie. Sheehan and the Times won a Pulitzer for their coverage and for standing up to the Nixon administration, which went to court to stop them from publishing the documents. (My colleague David Corn remembers the episode, and how it changed his life, here.)

Ellsberg was not a beneficiary of the Times’ legal gumption. He faced charges under the Espionage Act by himself, though he eventually beat them. And it was eventually revealed that Sheehan had seriously betrayed Ellsberg’s confidence: Ellsberg told him he could read but not copy the documents, but let him have a key to his apartment. Sheehan used that to secretly copy the papers. As publication approached, Ellsberg pleaded with Sheehan to give him a bit of advance notice so he could take precautions. Sheehan never returned his calls.

Reality Winner, the first person to be prosecuted in violation of the Espionage Act under the Trump administration, said she was “blown away” by the voluminous detail found in the 49-page indictment against the former president in the sprawling Mar-a-Lago documents scandal. The former intelligence contractor and Air Force linguist made the comments in a new interview with NBC broadcast Friday.

In 2018, under the Trump administration, Winner pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years and three months in prison after leaking a top-secret report on Russian hacking to the media—the longest sentence imposed for this crime at the time, according to prosecutors. Now, five years later, Trump himself has been accused of retaining and withholding national security information in violation of the Espionage Act, as well as conspiring to obstruct justice, and lying to the FBI. Winner has previously described the case against Trump “incredibly ironic.”

“It wasn’t hard to believe,” Winner told NBC on Friday. “This is a man that really likes trophies.”

In August 2022, the FBI seized top secret and classified documents from the former president’s Florida estate. On Thursday, Trump was indicted on 37 charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and including willfully retaining national defense secrets. Since the indictment’s announcement, Trump has vehemently denied any wrongdoing. His personal valet, Walt Nauta, was also listed in the suite of charges.

Winner went on: “This is probably one of the most transparent and straightforward indictments that defines national defense information and gives the public a sense of the itemized description of every document, which is not how this particular law has been used against ordinary citizens.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Carolyn McGrath thought she was ready for her testimony in front of the New Jersey Department of Education. An art teacher, she had dressed in a jaunty polka-dot blouse and chunky green necklace, and had a written statement prepared in favor of teaching climate change in every school subject.

She hadn’t expected any controversy. But by the time it was her turn to walk to the podium last month, she was so nervous she visibly shook.  “It was such an uncomfortable situation,” she said later. “I don’t like confrontation.”

McGrath is passionate about teaching climate change; she’s given her students assignments like creating portraits of climate activists. So she was delighted this past fall, when the state of New Jersey joined the global vanguard in climate education. New Jersey is the first state in America to adopt standards for learning about climate change in each grade, from K through 12, and across several different subjects, even physical education. 

Initially these additions didn’t draw much political heat, possibly because sex education standards were being updated at the same time. But this year, the standards in the core subjects of math and English language arts came up for revision. Proposed draft revisions also include climate change. This is important, advocates say, because these are the core subjects that students are tested on, and for which schools and districts are held accountable.  

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a landmark 7-2 ruling affecting millions of aging and disabled people: Providers of federally funded health services like Medicaid or Medicare, the court ruled—such as public and private nursing homes—can be sued by individuals for failures and lapses in care.

Following the death of 85-year-old Gorgi “Jorgo” Talevski in October 2021, his surviving family members sued the state-run Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana, alleging that Talevski’s nursing home gave him psychotropic drugs as restraints and attempted to involuntarily discharge him to a facility for people with dementia. Talevski’s family claimed that his treatment violated restrictions on chemical restraints and patient discharge set by the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act, 1987 legislation that “establishes the minimum standards of care” for Medicaid-backed nursing homes, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Oral arguments were heard in November. 

This week, the court found in favor of the Talevski estate, upholding a decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting. A lower court had found that private citizens had no standing to sue. Given the conservative makeup of the court, a ruling in Talevski’s favor wasn’t certain: instead of guaranteeing key protections, the justices could have gutted the civil rights of disabled and aging people.

But the legislation “unambiguously” grants individual rights, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in the majority opinion, including the “right to be free from unnecessary chemical restraints”—those “imposed for purposes of discipline or convenience” and not medically required—and “to be discharged or transferred only when certain preconditions are met.” Patients and their families, Health and Hospital Corp had argued, weren’t entitled to enforce those rights.

“We have no doubt,” Jackson wrote, “that HHC wishes [Section] 1983 said something else.”