On Skidaway Island, off the coast of Georgia, “not one blade of grass feels out of place.” Giant oak trees provide shade from the heat. Nature surrounds you, but as Center for Public Integrity reporter Alexia Fernández Campbell describes, it “seems to have been tamed to become amenities” for The Landings, a gated community that takes up half of the island.

The average price of a home in The Landings was more than $800,000 in 2022. The community boasts a spa, four clubhouses, five swimming pools, and six golf courses. Although Black people are the majority in nearby Savannah, on Skidaway Island 93 percent of the population is white.

It’s hard to tell now, but this wealthy white enclave used to be home to a Black utopia. In 1865, a promise was made to newly freed people, the promise of “40 acres and a mule.” For thousands, that was made real. The Center for Public Integrity found that at least 99 men and women were issued federal documents entitling them to land on the island. But as the latest episode of Reveal details, it was later all taken back from them as white Southerners sought pardons from President Andrew Johnson, who granted many of them and returned plantations back to the enslavers.

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This weekend marks the official start of summer, and it’s shaping up to be a scorcher. The extreme heat that’s afflicted much of the eastern United States this week is set to continue, with temperatures hitting the mid to upper 90s in the Midwest and the Mid Atlantic regions. The National Weather Service reports that temperatures in the Midwest are “anomalous and dangerous for early Summer.” In the Southeast, temperatures could exceed 110 degrees. Making matters worse, overnight temps are expected to stay high, allowing little relief to those without access to air conditioning.

According to climate scientists at World Weather Attribution, we’ve largely done this to ourselves. Their recent report found that in the year 2000, this level of heat was only expected to occur once in a lifetime for those living in North and Central America. Now, “on average a person will experience it 5 or 6 times in their lifetime.” That uptick is driven by “fossil fuel driven warming,” which has made the heatwaves we’re experiencing in this region 35 times more likely to occur.

Black people in the US are 40 percent more likely than other racial groups to live in areas “with the highest projected increases in extreme temperature related deaths.”

“As long as humans fill the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the heat will only get worse,” stated one of the report’s authors, Izidine Pinto, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, adding that “vulnerable people will continue to die.”

In 2022, in a decision penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court announced a new approach to regulating firearms. Henceforth, the court declared in Bruen, gun laws would only pass Second Amendment muster if they are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Within a year, the Supreme Court was asked to confront the effect of their backward-looking decision: Could someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order have firearms? The question pitted the right of abusers to possess guns against the right of their victims not to be murdered. Would the justices double-down on their history-only approach, or would it find a way to keep guns away from violent abusers?

This decision hinges on ancient laws most people have never heard of.

On Friday, all the justices—except Thomas—decided that the government could take guns away from people whom a court deems a credible threat. The decision in United States v. Rahimi attempted to make Bruen workable in our modern world: one with far deadlier weapons than in 1791, and far more respect for women. But as the decision in Rahimi, its concurrences, and its lone dissent demonstrate, a clear and sensible approach to evaluating gun laws is a long way off.

On Thursday, committees at Stanford University published two reports on the campus climate following October 7. The publication comes just days after hundreds of pro-Palestinian students walked out in protest of the official graduation ceremony. The new reports, created by separate committees, are complex. Broadly, they delve into antisemitism and bias against Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians at the California university amid mass protests. But their lessons go far beyond the college campus.

Activists at Stanford were some of the first in the nation to set up a tent encampment protest, calling for an immediate ceasefire on October 20. Students and community members seeking to create a platform for pro-Israel student voices set up a corresponding encampment—called a “blue and white tent”—on November 13. The encampment calling for a ceasefire was among the longest-established student encampments, lasting more than 120 days. In early June, pro-Palestinian students occupied the president’s office on Stanford’s campus. Thirteen people were arrested.

The two dueling encampments are an example of yet another reckoning on a college campus—albeit an elite, private one with one of the largest endowments in the country—over student protests after Hamas’ attack and Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

In mid-November, Stanford University convened a select number of students, alumni, and professors to create a Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, as well as a Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian (MAP) Communities Committee. 

There was a time when Republicans said they were very supportive of in vitro fertilization. That time was late February.

The Alabama Supreme Court had just ruled that frozen embryos are considered children under state law—and that their destruction could bring murder charges. The decision prompted several IVF providers in the state to pause services and left Republican politicians scrambling.

It took a few days, but Donald Trump proclaimed his support for IVF in a Truth Social post. Republicans working to elect GOP senators publicly urged those candidates to support IVF. A poll conducted after the Alabama decision showed why: 86 percent of Americans support the fertility procedure. Even Alabama backtracked, enacting legislation that protected IVF clinics.

Evangelical leaders took Alabama’s anti-IVF ruling as an opening to push forward.

Every 16 hours in the US, a woman is gunned down in an act of domestic violence. Nearly 1 million American women have been shot or shot at by a current or former intimate partner; some 4.5 million have been threatened with a gun. Those appalling numbers would be even higher if Congress hadn’t enacted laws over the past 50 years prohibiting certain categories of abusers from possessing firearms, the leading cause of death in domestic violence homicides.

Now, in an 8 to 1 decision that is likely to have sweeping ramifications for other gun rights cases going forward, the Supreme Court has rejected an argument that could have gutted one of those protections for abused women and children, ruling that people who have domestic-violence restraining orders filed against them are banned from having guns. Read the opinion here.

The decision in US v. Rahimi, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a 1994 federal law aimed at safeguarding victims of intimate partner violence for whom obtaining a protection order is both a vital step in breaking free from an abuser—and an act of empowerment that can increase an abuser’s rage. The court found that the prohibition on gun possession for people subject to restraining orders is consistent with the Second Amendment as interpreted by conservative justices in a landmark 2022 ruling.

“When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment,” Roberts wrote.

Once upon a time there was a person with the unnoticeable name of Mary Harris, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1837, who lived a private life of suffering and failure. Her parents, fleeing Ireland’s Great Hunger, brought her as a teenager to Canada, where she briefly attended a Toronto teachers’ school, before she went to Monroe, Michigan, where she briefly taught school in a convent. A skilled seamstress from a girl, she left Monroe for Chicago, where she opened a dress shop. But she moved on yet again, to Memphis, where in 1861 she married George Jones, an organizer of his fellow iron foundry workers, to whom she quickly bore four children. Then her worst tragedy hit, the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1867, which wiped out all five members of her family. Back in Chicago, she reopened her dress shop, to have it destroyed by the Chicago Fire of 1871. Disaster had crowded on disaster throughout her entire blighted life, leaving no record of having done a single thing memorable.

Then, mysteriously, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, an entirely new person appeared. The previous one had been private and passive. The new one would be public and expansive. This woman would have a remarkable (but made-up) age and name and garb and task. She would be exactly (and by plan) the opposite of what went before—the most amazing work of self-reinvention on record. Mary Harris was erased, replaced by Mother Jones. Just consider the thoroughness of the changes this involved: 

Made-Up Age

Women, according to a stereotype, especially actresses or public figures, try to pretend they are younger than their real age. The made-up Mother Jones claimed to be older. Safely in her middle-aged (for that time) 40s, she claimed to be in her 50s. And she kept on adding 10 or more years to her age all the way up to her 80s, which she made out to be her 90s. Despite what should have been a cumulating decrepitude, she displayed a prodigious energy in the union organizing of her late husband. This allowed her to have beers with “my boys“ (as she called the workers), and curse the “goddamned” strike breakers, without being confused with the prostitutes around the coal mines and oil fields where she labored. Other women lied about their age to stay young enough to remain sexually interesting. She lied to escape that. It freed her to mix with all kinds of people without sexual tension or questioning.

Made-Up Name

The new person adopted a name that is not personal. It is a title. And a female title at that. If it had been male, the community in and around the mines would have had a touch of the military. Since it is a maternal title, the community was a family, made up of her children and grandchildren. Her appeal was to the women as well as the male workers.

On Monday, the US Department of Justice sent a letter to Alaska’s director of elections, outlining the state’s litany of violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act that impacted disabled voters. Under the ADA, disabled voters should have the same opportunity and access to vote as non-disabled people. The DOJ says in Alaska that was not happening.

Here are just some of the issues found by the DOJ:

Not all early voting and Election Day sites had accessible voting machines, and some machines did not work. At one site, the DOJ found, the machine was still in its shipping box.The state of Alaska does not provide accessible voting machines at absentee in-person voting sites. There are audio issues with some accessible voting machines. One Blind user could not understand the audio and had to get a poll worker to assist them in voting on a paper ballot, stripping them of the right to vote independently. There were accessibility problems to get into some voting locations. Issues include the lack of ADA-accessible parking and issues with ramps, including one where there was a step before the ramp started. Some voting machines were also placed at too high of a level, making it difficult for wheelchair users to reach.Alaska’s election website is inaccessible for some disabled users, with some videos not containing captions.

The DOJ warned that if Alaska does not address these findings, the US attorney general may file a lawsuit against the state.

“The Justice Department is fully committed to enforcing the ADA to make sure that individuals with disabilities have an equal opportunity to vote, including by voting privately and independently like everyone else,” DOJ Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement.

Last week, Senate Republicans introduced a bill that would designate federal funds for “Restorative Reproductive Medicine,” a loose group of therapies meant to help treat infertility without the use of in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination. The seven lawmakers who introduced the Reproductive Empowerment and Support through Optimal Restoration (RESTORE) Act, say it isn’t meant as an attack on IVF, which recently has come under fire by conservatives. “I strongly support treatments such as IVF, which have helped so many families experience the miracle of life,” Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a statement last week. “Healing the actual causes of infertility will only help increase the success rate for couples trying to conceive.”

Yet Restorative Reproductive Medicine isn’t the politically neutral medical field that the measure’s champions claim. Rather, it’s the latest rebranding of an IVF “alternative” by religious groups who consider the process of IVF, which can include the destruction of unused embryos, to be a form of abortion.  

“Healing the actual causes of infertility will only help increase the success rate for couples trying to conceive.”

The authors assert that Restorative Reproductive Medicine “means any scientific approach to reproductive medicine that seeks to cooperate with, or restore the normal physiology and anatomy of, the human reproductive system, without the use of methods that are inherently suppressive, circumventive, or destructive to natural human functions.” If that sounds vague, it’s because it is: Restorative reproductive medicine, according to these lawmakers, basically can include anything that’s not IVF, artificial insemination, and certain kinds of birth control. The bill says that “most male and female infertility” can be treated with medication, surgery, or simply by figuring out the optimal time for intercourse in a woman’s cycle.

On Tuesday, the US House voted to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) in response to the court’s prosecutor seeking an arrest warrant for Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and another Israeli official. The prosecutor is also calling for arrest warrants for three senior Hamas leaders. But the main concern for politicians was the crackdown on Israel, a close ally. Nearly all of the Republican legislators, and 42 Democrats, supported the ICC sanction measure, which passed by a vote of 247–155.

The bill, which would prohibit any member of the ICC from using US banking networks or entering the country and places restrictions on those who follow the ICC’s ruling, is not likely to make it through the Democart-controlled Senate. But it marks another clash between the United States and international governing bodies since the beginning of Israel’s incursion into Gaza.

The relationship between the ICC and the US has long been complicated. The US was one of seven countries that participated in negotiations leading to the creation of the court. But it also has opted out of the ICC’s judgments. The rulings, which are meant to determine when countries have committed war crimes such as genocide, don’t apply to the US.

This policy, standard for the US over the years—of creating systems to impose laws on others that often do not apply to its own actions—was summed up well in a quote from the recent battle in the House. “The ICC has to be punished,” said House speaker Mike Johnson in a press conference Tuesday morning after the court called for arrest warrants for Israel’s president. “We cannot allow this to stand. If the ICC was allowed to do this and go after the leaders of countries whose actions they disagree with, why would they not come after America?”

The United States, as a rule, is not very good about pricing in negative costs, in part because the people responsible for those costs get very upset when you try. The federal gas tax—which is supposed to pay for infrastructure repairs necessitated by gas consumption—has not been raised in 31 years, so everyone else has to cover the balance. Gun violence costs in excess of $229 billion a year and the only people who aren’t on the hook for that are the people who make guns. The enormous societal costs of asthma and respiratory ailments are largely shouldered not by the people and corporations who poison the air, but invariably by kids who breathe it in. Inhalers, hospital bills, rent—a lot of things are more expensive here, because of all the other things that are cheap.

This made the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan for congestion pricing in Manhattan, which was scheduled to begin later this month—after 17 years of planning, legislating, study, and litigation—something of a miracle. For once, the priorities were in order. New York proposed that the people who contribute to a problem should subsidize the solution. Drivers would pay a $15 toll for entering a “congestion zone” south of 60th Street during peak hours (it’s only $3.75 off-peak). The fees would net the MTA about $1 billion annually, which it would use to finance a $15 billion capital plan. That money would pay for long-needed improvements and upgrades to subways, bus lines, and commuter rail.

If all went according to plan, a significant number of drivers would choose mass transit instead—pushing still more funds into the agency’s coffers, improving air quality, and reducing carbon emissions. It would also ease Manhattan’s notorious gridlock, enhancing commutes for people who really did need to drive. Hence the name.

In a speech last month, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul evoked images of cars “spewing exhaust” and noted that New York commuters spend an average of 102 hours a year stuck in traffic. “It took a long a time because people feared backlash from drivers set in their ways,” Hochul said, acknowledging the stop-and-go pace of implementation. “But, much like with housing, if we’re serious about making cities more livable, we must get over that.”

For all his efforts to evade transparency and, instead, offer a steady stream of lies, Donald Trump has always been brutally honest about one thing: his penchant for revenge.

This lust has, over the years, taken on a particular kink. When possible, Trump has often enjoyed walking up to a microphone and implying—if not outright saying—that his enemies should be investigated, prosecuted, or arrested by the government he wants to head. These enemies include a seemingly endless list of people, from James Comey to Joe Scarborough.

It’s no surprise that vengeful threats of political prosecution have escalated since Trump’s conviction; he and his allies now appear hellbent on opening investigations into all their perceived enemies. Republicans have made clear political persecution could take place as a key role of government should Trump return to the White House.

With a second term possible, here is an incomplete and running list of everyone we could find that Trump has said should be prosecuted.

Is the dream dead? And, if so, who killed it?

On June 15, 2012, President Barack Obama stood in the Rose Garden of the White House to announce a massive change in immigration policy. For years, Congress had been unable to pass legislation to protect from deportation the so-called Dreamers, undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. In 2001, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) first introduced a bill that would have granted them a path to citizenship. But, a decade later, the Dream Act had failed—again.

Obama declared that day he had taken matters into his own hands. His administration put forward an executive action to create a now-famous program: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). “These are young people who study in our schools, they play in our neighborhoods, they’re friends with our kids, they pledge allegiance to our flag,” Obama, facing pressure over his administration’s harsh immigration enforcement practices, said. (He had begun to be called a moniker that would stick: “deporter in chief.”) “They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper.” As such, they shouldn’t be expelled from the country or have to live under the “shadow of deportation.”

DACA went on to become a landmark achievement of the Obama presidency—lauded for its seamless logistical implementation led by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, then head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the economic benefits of authorizing eligible beneficiaries to work. Crucially, it gave a lifeline to more than 800,000 young immigrants raised and educated in the United States. DACA was “a temporary stopgap measure,” Obama had said. But its success, for a time, allowed the program’s original sin to be played down. The expectation, Mayorkas told the New York Times recently, “was that DACA would be a bridge to legislation.”

Politicians could assume that change, albeit delayed, would likely someday materialize. Over the past quarter of a century, the issue of Dreamers has enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress. It has been included in virtually every immigration negotiation. And the stories of promising undocumented young people have been common on front pages and magazine covers—inspiring a rare kind of solidarity that transcended political divisions. (There was even a Broadway musical.)

Remember when Trump, as the Republican frontrunner in the 2016 election, claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and he wouldn’t lose voters?

Well, that bold assertion, which has proven somewhat true among his devout base, may run into some technical issues in New York, where the police department is trying to make it impossible for Trump to even carry a firearm following his guilty conviction in his hush-money case, according to a Wednesday report from CNN.

Citing an anonymous senior police official, CNN reports that the NYPD is trying to revoke Trump’s license to carry a concealed weapon, a move stemming from a federal law barring people with felony convictions from possessing firearms. (New York and Florida also have laws outlawing people with felonies from possessing a gun.)

Trump reportedly has three pistols, two of which were reportedly handed over to the NYPD in March 2023 when he was indicted on criminal charges in the hush-money case. Though his third gun was reportedly legally transferred to Florida at the time, possession of it in the Sunshine State would still be illegal now that Trump is a convicted felon. All of which is to say that if Trump does still have that a gun somewhere within the gilded walls of Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort, or any of his other homes… he could be in violation of multiple laws and committing a federal crime, CNN reports.

Earlier this week, the Biden administration officially announced a long-anticipated border crackdown. The executive action—which relies on the same presidential authority former President Donald Trump invoked to enact an entry ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries—circumvents a key provision of US law: The legal right to seek asylum, regardless of where or how a person enters the country.

Under Biden’s order, with narrow exceptions, only migrants coming to official ports of entry will qualify for asylum after encounters at the border reach a certain threshold. This may sound wonky. But it is in line with what Biden vowed to try to do as the November election approaches: shut down the border “right now.”

And, still, not even a Democratic president gutting asylum has placated the anti-immigrant fearmongers on the right.

Even before Biden gave his speech about the new border proclamation, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri was live on Fox News calling the measures “mass amnesty” for “illegals.” He was echoed by Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump and president of the “lawfare” America First Legal group, who wasted no time cherry-picking sections of the executive order and sharing them without context to baselessly claim the new rule gives “fast-pass entry to unlimited numbers of fighting-age” migrants. “This border EO makes mass migration permanent,” Miller wrote on X.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones started the process of liquidating his assets on Friday, taking the initial steps toward paying the $1.5 billion he owes families of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones runs the popular Infowars media platform, where he repeatedly described the shooting, which killed 20 first-grade students and six teachers, as a “hoax.” Families of victims filed defamation suits against Jones and Infowars, and while Jones eventually conceded in court that the shooting was real, it was too late to save him from legal action. Courts in Texas and Connecticut awarded the families massive damages.

In an effort to avoid payment, Jones and several of his companies declared bankruptcy, and Jones insisted he could never pay the damages.

“I don’t have any money,” Jones said after the billion-dollar judgment. “So, it’s all a big joke.”

But Jones changed his tune on Friday, when his attorneys signaled in court that he is starting the process of liquidating his assets. All told, Jones’ assets could yield as much as $15 million, a relative drop in the bucket toward the full total he owes victims’ families. After splitting the sum and paying administrative and legal fees, the families may not walk away with much money, but they could end up in control of Jones’ broadcast network, website, and social media accounts. That would not only be a financial blow to the conspiracy theorist, but a serious disruption to his operations.

Steve Bannon is going to jail.

US District Judge Carl Nichols—a Trump appointee in Washington, DC—ordered Bannon to start serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress by July 1. The ruling comes after the onetime Trump aide’s attempt to appeal his 2022 conviction was rejected by a federal circuit court. Nichols had previously allowed Bannon to remain free pending appeal.

Bannon refused in 2021 to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on Congress. Bannon, who attempted blow off the panel by asserting “executive privilege,” despite having last served in the White House in 2017, probably would have avoided imprisonment by showing up on the date the panel set his interview and specifying which questions he would refuse to answer.

Prior to the 2020 election, Bannon had touted his knowledge of Trump’s plan to contest the election results, even if he lost. As I reported in 2022, Bannon said in an October 31, 2020, meeting—accurately, it turned out—that Trump would simply declare victory on election night, using the likely appearance of an early lead to assert that his subsequent defeat was due to electoral fraud.

In 2017, the exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui began to remake himself in America as a dissident celebrity. In media appearances, tweets, and lengthy YouTube videos, Guo launched tirades against Chinese Communist Party corruption. They made him famous among extremely online Chinese emigres and won him prominence as an ally of Steve Bannon and other Trumpworld luminaries.

Guo sold a brand: A mega-rich, Brioni-clad, rule-breaking Bannon buddy leading a “whistleblower movement” with an audacious goal to “take down the CCP” and install his own supposed government-in-waiting in Beijing.

But the truth of Guo’s story is now at issue in the federal courthouse in Manhattan, where he stands trial for fraud and money laundering. In an opening statement Friday, Assistant US Attorney Micah Fergenson previewed evidence he said shows that Guo—who has also used the names Ho Wan Kwok and Miles Guo—stole more than $1 billion from his own ardent fans who invested in scam financial ventures Gou launched in 2020 and 2021.

“Miles Guo ran a simple con on a grand scale,” Fergenson said. “He lived a billionaire’s lifestyle using money he stole from people he tricked and cheated.”

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.

Sometimes I’d rather not be right. In January, reacting to Donald Trump affectionately referring to the trio of tyrants Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un as “very fine people,” I wrote that two constants in the Trump Era are his affection for murderous authoritarians and Russian efforts to screw with American politics. The former is well-known, the latter, less recognized. Moscow mounted information warfare operations to boost Trump during both the 2016 election—most notably, the hack-and-leak attack in which Russian cyber-operatives swiped Democratic emails and documents and WikiLeaks released them—and the 2020 election, when Russian intelligence operatives spread disinformation about Joe and Hunter Biden and Ukraine. The first op helped the Putin-friendly Trump reach the White House; the second failed to keep him in office, but it had the side-benefit of fueling the House Republicans’ baseless (and now fizzling) impeachment crusade against President Biden. Putin went one for two.

I noted in that Our Land issue: “[I]t’s a good bet that Putin this year will try once again to mess in an American election…[As Putin] continues to commit horrendous war crimes in Ukraine, he has even more reason to clandestinely boost Trump and win the rubber match.” At long last, official warnings have arrived.

Two weeks ago, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia remains “the most active foreign threat to our elections.” She noted that the Kremlin’s “goals in such influence operations tend to include eroding trust in US democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and degrading Western support to Ukraine.” All of this, obviously, would be to Trump’s benefit. She pointed out that artificial intelligence and deepfakes will presumably be deployed in this effort, and she cited China and Iran as other threats.

Just a few years ago, maternal mortality was the rare reproductive justice issue that seemed to transcend partisan politics. In late 2018, Republicans and Democrats in Congress even came together to approve $60 million for state maternal mortality review committees (MMRCs) to study why so many American women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Donald Trump—not exactly famous for his respect toward pregnant women and new mothers in his personal life—signed the bill.

But some Republicans’ enthusiasm for these committees began to wane at around the same time abortion rights advocates began warning that draconian restrictions on reproductive care would only push the shamefully high US maternal mortality rate—the worst among affluent countries—even higher. Nor did conservatives, like Idaho lawmakers, appreciate the policy recommendations that came out of many MMRCs.

Texas, whose record on maternal mortality (and maternal health more broadly) has been an embarrassment since long before Dobbs, has a history of controversial attempts to play down potentially unwelcome findings from its MMRC. After the Dobbs decision, when the state committee was working on its report examining maternal deaths in 2019, Texas officials decided to slow-roll its release until mid-2023—too late for lawmakers to act on its recommendations. “When we bury data, we are dishonorably burying each and every woman that we lost,” one furious committee member told the Texas Tribune. Ultimately, officials released the report three months late, in December 2022. Soon afterward, the Legislature reconfigured the MMRC, increasing its size—but also ejected one of its most outspoken members. 

Now Texas officials have stirred up the biggest furor yet, appointing a leading anti-abortion activist to the panel. Dr. Ingrid Skop, an OB-GYN who practiced in San Antonio for 25 years, will join the MMRC as a community member representing rural areas (even though she is from the seventh-largest city in the US). But she also represents a largely overlooked segment of the anti-abortion movement: researchers who seek to discredit the idea that abortion restrictions are putting women’s lives in danger. To the contrary, Skop and her allies argue that abortions are the real, hidden cause of many maternal deaths—and that abortion restrictions actually save mothers’ lives.