Is the federal government helping companies sell surveillance technology to repressive governments? Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wants to know, but a federal subagency has been cagey about the information. 

In a letter sent on Friday, Wyden asked the International Trade Administration (ITA), a subagency of the Department of Commerce, for details about its role in helping US firms sell their surveillance technology to other countries. In the letter, Wyden—a privacy-minded lawmaker who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance—noted that he had been asking for an answer on the matter since last summer.

In August of 2022, the ITA confirmed to Wyden that it “provides assistance” to companies selling surveillance technology. But when asked, the subagency, Wyden writes, “did not provide details on these activities” or the specific help ITA has offered because of “unspecified legal barriers to revealing more [information].” In theory, this work falls within ITA’s purview of promoting US exports: ITA’s website touts that it will help companies compete in foreign markets on everything from “Steel” to “Aerospace and Defense.” But that does not account for the potential buyer: repressive regimes looking to crack down on civil liberties.

Wyden has good reason for suspicion. When the ITA published posts on its website showcasing arenas that are ripe for surveillance and security technology sales, the countries mentioned include not only obvious allies like the United Kingdom, but also others with a history of abusing surveillance technologies, including Honduras, the Philippines, and India.

Amnesty International has warned of the possible harms of India’s growing appetite for surveillance technology, which is particularly concerning in light of the increased persecution of Muslims in the country. In its market intelligence post on India, the ITA did not mention this repression. Instead, in February, the ITA told US firms that the “surveillance systems market in India is growing” and “provides opportunities for U.S. exporters.” Another post on “India’s surveillance and security market” noted “huge opportunities for U.S. companies,” and that “surveillance systems are in demand across all sectors.” 

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

The scope of a landmark law to protect America’s waterways has been shrunk by the US Supreme Court, which has sided with an Idaho couple who have waged a long-running legal battle to build a house on wetlands near one of the state’s largest lakes.

In a ruling passed down on Thursday, the conservative-dominated court decided that the federal government was wrong to use the Clean Water Act, a key 50-year-old piece of legislation to prevent pollution seeping into rivers, streams and lakes, to prevent the couple building over the wetland beside Priest Lake in Idaho.

Just hours before the pandemic-era immigration rule Title 42 was set to lift on Thursday, a Florida judge blocked President Joe Biden’s plan to release some migrants on “parole,” a policy aimed at reducing overcrowding in migrant detention facilities. Late Friday, the Biden administration asked for an emergency stay of the judge’s order, saying it plans to appeal.

In Florida, US District Judge T. Kent Wetherell has been busy. Thursday’s ruling, issued in response to a lawsuit brought by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, was the second of two of his orders that have delayed and complicated Biden’s immigration plans in recent months. In March, Wetherell also blocked a Biden administration policy to release migrants with minimal supervision, an order that the Department of Justice is also planning to appeal, Politico reports. “The Solicitor General has authorized an appeal of both orders,” a DOJ filing in the Florida court reads. “The Court should immediately stay its orders to prevent those harmful consequences while the government seeks review in the court of appeals.”

The language in the filing echoes comments made by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. While speaking on MSNBC on Friday, he called the ruling “very harmful” and noted that its parole policy is a practice that already has been used by “prior administrations,” (Mayorkas didn’t cite any administrations by name, but the practice has been deployed by both the Bush and Obama administrations.) Similarly, while speaking to reporters also on Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “The way we see that is, it’s sabotage. It’s pure and simple.” (Jean-Pierre declined to specify whether she was referring to the judge’s decision or the lawsuit itself.) “The claims that [US Customs and Border Protection] is allowing or encouraging [the] mass release of migrants is just categorically false,” she added. “That’s not what’s occurring; that is not what’s happening.”

Meanwhile, at the border, officials say there was a steep increase in people crossing into the US without documentation on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, before the suspension of Title 42, but the number of migrants at the border dropped on Friday after the policy expired. The mixed reports, however, haven’t stopped GOP lawmakers from capitalizing on the situation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), for instance, called it an “absolute travesty” and an “invasion at our southern border,” while Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said the situation at the border is “as chaotic as Afghanistan was.”

In this week’s New Yorker, JR Moehringer breaks all the rules of ghostwriting by ceasing to be invisible and asserting his hiding-in-plain-sight presence as the writer for Britain’s exiled Prince Harry’s blockbuster memoir Spare. Moehringer offers plenty to satisfy Royal obsessives, providing glimpses into their process, their relationship, and the genuine affection and respect that seems to have grown between him and his subject. Here are two guys, from unfathomably different worlds, connected by nearly obsessive love for their deceased mothers, and calling each other “dude.”

We are given the opportunity to witness Harry’s stubbornness as an example of the inevitable tensions that arise between the writer and the author. In the opening scene, Moehringer describes Harry’s repeated insistence on including his retort to soldiers who tortured him during his military training, and Moehringer’s repeated refusal to do so. (Moehringer won that one.) We see Meghan providing treats while Moehringer labors in his word factory on their California estate. And we have an intimate view of the outsized controversies that appeared after the memoir was published. Moehringer sets the record straight about an egregious passage in the book that mentions a TK Maxx sale the prince claimed to wait for every year.  As Moehringer writes:

Not so fast, said the monarchists at TK Maxx corporate, who rushed out a statement declaring that TK Maxx never has sales, just great savings all the time! Oh, snap! Gotcha, Prince George Santos! Except that people around the world immediately posted screenshots of TK Maxx touting sales on its official Twitter account. (Surely TK Maxx’s effort to discredit Harry’s memoir was unrelated to the company’s long-standing partnership with Prince Charles and his charitable trust.)

Quite a relief to have that sorted out.

But for those of us, who have ever been ghostwriters, and I have ghosted seven books, (please don’t ask for whom) the real revelations were in Moehringer’s descriptions of his own experiences in the ever-mysterious process between writer and author: the back and forth, the disagreements, the negotiations, the sometimes confused pride of authorship. I’ve always said that what appeals to me about this role is the opportunity to do two professions that always interested me but ones I would never have managed: actor and psychoanalyst. But I am a mere mortal.

On Thursday, the Louisiana House passed a bill to make some juvenile criminal records public in three majority-Black parishes. Sponsors argue that providing the public with these records would offer transparency in crime-afflicted areas. If signed into law, the measure would serve as a two-year pilot program.

Critics of the measure, House Bill 321, say the measure is racist, noting that the three parishes to which it would apply—Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans—are 50 percent, 47 percent, and 60 percent Black, respectively, with Black residents making up the majority of their populations, according to US Census Bureau data. The bill would not be rolled out in Jefferson Parish, however, which is larger than both Cado and Orleans parishes and is majority white.

“Let’s be real. We know what this is about. The optics are obvious. Let’s stop playing around with this,” Rep. Edmond Jordan (D-Baton Rouge) told the Times-Picayune. “If you’re from Baton Rouge, if you’re from Shreveport, if you’re from New Orleans, you should be offended by this.”

Advocates in favor of the bill have said its aim is to increase accountability. “This bill is about public safety,” Republican Rep. Debbie Villio, who represents Jefferson Parish and sponsored the bill, said on the House floor, according to the Times-Picayune. “The public has a right to know.”

But criminal justice advocates question why juvenile court records—which would include not just convictions but also accused crimes—need to be made public in the first place. “I think, in this instance, it is becoming very clear because of the locations [for this legislation] that there are certain children—particularly Black children—who we are unwilling to provide a second chance to, and we quickly look at them and decide, ‘Oh, they are just not going to be better,’” Kristen Rome, the co-executive director of Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, told the Associated Press. “Those records are going to always be available for everyone to see…and that creates a stigma, which creates an environment where they can’t thrive.”

This piece was published originally by Capital & Main.

Business groups are vigorously opposing Julie Su, President Joe Biden’s nominee for labor secretary, and they are counting on a handful of votes from swing senators to defeat her confirmation.

Leading the charge are trade groups representing companies like McDonald’s and Uber that currently are not the employers of record for workers in fast-food franchises or drivers who are treated as independent contractors. Because of that arm’s length relationship, those corporations are often shielded from responsibility for labor law violations. They fear Su would more aggressively enforce labor laws that could expose them to penalties for infractions.

Those fears stem from Su’s record. She rose to prominence in the 1990s for representing Thai seamstresses who were enslaved in a sweatshop in El Monte, California. She brought a suit on their behalf that held retailers and manufacturers liable for using slave labor that resulted in $4 million in restitution for the garment workers.

She served as the state’s top labor-law enforcer under Gov. Jerry Brown, launching a “Wage Theft Is a Crime” campaign and aggressively pursuing claims on behalf of restaurant, car wash, and garment workers. As California’s labor secretary under Gov. Gavin Newsom, she steered the department’s expanded unemployment system for those thrown out of work by the pandemic. Her opponents are also attacking her for the fraud that emerged in that program, although such fraud was common nationwide. Now serving as acting secretary of labor, she has the support of organized labor, some business leaders and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. 

“Live through Jim Crow, so you can live off of Harlan Crow.”

That’s how MoJo’s Garrison Hayes archly summarizes the hypocrisies of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in light of recent blockbuster revelations that he accepted elite private school tuition money from the real estate mogul for his grandnephew, alongside other lavish, all-expense-paid holidays and gifts from the Texas billionaire.

“If these things are true,” Garrison observes, ironically, in his new video about the many contradictions of Thomas, “your favorite Black conservative appears to be the most exaggerated version of a welfare queen, feeding off the generosity of a wealthy white benefactor who showers him and his family with unlimited trips.”

Since discovering that Thomas once identified as a Black nationalist, Garrison has been fascinated with better understanding the events that led him to become one of the most prominent figures in right-wing politics. Garrison has spent the last few weeks diving deeply into Thomas’ on-the-record speeches, biographies, interviews, and judicial opinions. In this video, he highlights instances where Thomas has opposed programs designed to help Black communities, despite personally benefiting from similar programs. Thomas attended Yale’s law school in 1971 through an affirmative action program but later opposed a similar program in a judicial opinion. When he couldn’t find a legal job after graduation, he saw affirmative action as the reason for his difficulties, writing in his 2007 memoir, “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference. I was humiliated—and desperate.”

Despite receiving extraordinary opportunities and assistance throughout his life, Justice Thomas, Garrison concludes, seems committed to subjecting other groups—particularly Black people—to a rigid “bootstrap” individualism. In other words: opportunity for me, but not for thee.

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

Utilities across the country use money collected from customers’ monthly bills to fund political campaigns and lobbying efforts, often with the goal of blocking climate progress. But in Colorado, that’s about to change. This week, the state passed the country’s most comprehensive legislation to prevent utilities from using customer funds to support political activities. 

Colorado’s new Utility Regulation Act was passed on Monday by the state Senate after clearing the state House two days prior, and is expected to be signed by Governor Jared Polis soon. It prohibits investor-owned utilities from charging their customers—known as ratepayers—for any membership dues in trade associations, lobbying expenses, or any other activities influencing legislation, ballot measures, and other regulatory actions. It also bars utilities from spending ratepayer money on political advertising or any messaging intended to boost the utility’s brand.

“This is the first comprehensive effort by a state to protect utility customers from being forced to fund gas and electric utilities’ political machines,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog group. 

The first time I spoke with Olga Shpak, I made the mistake of beginning as I often do when interviewing researchers: by asking for some basic biographical information. “I used to be a scientist,” she said, not sounding bitter, only a bit nostalgic. Now, she clarified, she’s a war volunteer.

Shpak built a storied career studying Arctic and sub-Arctic marine mammals as a researcher at Moscow’s prestigious A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her work inspired some of Russia’s most significant whale conservation measures over the last decade, including protections for bowheads in the Sea of Okhotsk, an Alaska-sized body of water on the country’s Pacific coast. But in February last year, just as Vladimir Putin prepared to invade her home country of Ukraine, Shpak abruptly left, ultimately saying goodbye to her life in Russia—and the whales.

“There were relatively very few projects in Russia aimed at actually protecting marine mammals, rather than exploiting them,” Phil Clapham, a retired biologist and a leading expert on large whales, told me. “And with Olga’s loss to the war, they lost one of the absolute—probably the best one of all.”

Today, Shpak is working near the front lines of the war, helping nonprofit aid groups supply civilians and soldiers with everything from underwear and tourniquets to drones, wood-burning stoves, and pickup trucks. When we spoke, bomb sirens blared in the background, a numbingly routine occurrence for Shpak, who told me her focus had been entirely consumed by the war effort. “To do science you have to concentrate,” she said. “You have to kind of put your brain in a certain mode. And that switch is broken.”

Shpak is one of thousands of researchers whose life’s work has been set adrift by the war, as she and her peers have been forced to flee the region or stay and fight. International collaborations with Russian institutions have been put on hold, and scientists around the globe tell me they’ve abandoned or modified projects, canceled conferences, forgone necessary supplies, or lost funding. Even the world’s biggest scientific endeavors haven’t been spared: In early 2022, for instance, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which runs the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, said it would “not engage in new collaborations” with Russia “until further notice.” Similarly, after being sanctioned by the United States, European Union, and Canada, Russia said last year that it planned to leave the International Space Station when its current agreement ends in 2024, meaning the program would lose one of its principal members. (In late April, Russia backtracked, saying it would stick around through 2028.)

Yesterday, a federal jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. As soon as journalist Kaitlan Collins mentioned the verdict during this evening’s CNN town hall with the former president, the audience of Republican-leaning New Hampshire voters started to laugh.

“I never met this woman. I never saw this woman,” Trump said, before launching into a mocking retelling of Carroll’s allegations about what Trump did to her in a New York department store. “What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?”

Trump swore “on my children” that the alleged attack never happened, despite a jury of nine people unanimously finding otherwise. He also repeated an insult he has frequently lobbed at Carroll, calling her a “wack-job,” to rapturous laughter from the audience.

Trump swears on his children that he didn't assault E Jean Carroll pic.twitter.com/YyHDBSy2LZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2023

Could a blossoming kinship, forged in the fire of unceremonious dismissals on the same day, be developing between Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon? 

Maybe. That’s one of the big takeaways from Brian Stelter, who reports for Vanity Fair that the two men, in addition to retaining the same entertainment lawyer, have reportedly exchanged several texts in the last few days. The content of those messages isn’t yet known, but I have a feeling they hit the same notes as the statements the two men put out since getting canned: stunned, chaotic, and fuming.

At first blush, Carlson and Lemon don’t seem to share much in common. Carlson helmed one of the most racist, toxic, and hateful programs on cable TV, and is someone of genuine evil. Lemon, though irritating and sexist, during his career as one of CNN’s top personalities, is not. In fact, as Stelter notes in his report, Carlson and Lemon have bashed one another on air: Carlson has deliberately mispronounced Lemon’s name; Lemon once called Carlson’s claim that white supremacy is a “hoax” one of the “dumbest things” he’s ever heard.

But it’s hard to ignore the ominous nature of a potential relationship between the two scorned former anchors, who are all but certain to be plotting their paths back to prominence. That’s especially true when one of the few threads of commonality between Carlson and Lemon, in addition to their high-profile firings, is repeated accusations of misogyny.

On Friday, Montana joined an alarming number of states to ban gender-affirming health care for minors when its Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, signed a bill that had been condemned as “unconscionable” by the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker.

Gianforte, who catapulted to the national spotlight in 2017 after body-slamming a Guardian reporter, signed the legislation despite protest from his nonbinary son, David Gianforte.

“For my own sake, I’ve chosen to focus primarily on transgender rights, as that would significantly directly affect a number of my friends,” David said in a statement that was read to his father last month. Referring to the proposal to restrict transition health care for kids and separate legislation to expressly define sex as binary in Montana code and ban drag performances from public spaces. David added, “I would like to make the argument that these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights.”

According to an email exchange seen by the Montana Free Press, the governor expressed a willingness to discuss the issue and hear his son’s concerns. But the subsequent conversations, both in email and in person, don’t appear to have swayed Gianforte from approving the bill to block transition health care for minors.

While speaking out against the anti-LGBTQ bills earlier this month, Zooey Zephyr, the state’s first and only openly trans lawmaker, said she hoped that the next time supporters of the bill prayed, they would see “blood on [their] hands.” The remarks prompted the state’s GOP to ban Zephyr from speaking or voting from the floor. 

In a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito seethed against criticisms of the high court, appeared to mock the abortion pill, and suggested he knew who leaked the draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. 

“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible,” Alito said, declining to name names, “but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody.” He then claimed, without providing any evidence, that the leak was an effort to protect abortion rights.

In January, the official investigation into the leak announced that it could not identify a person responsible. But speaking to the WSJ, Alito continued to push unfounded theories that the leak was a left-wing project aimed to “intimidate the court,” before moving on to complain that the leak endangered his life, as well as the lives of other conservative justices on the court.

As for the abortion pill mifepristone, which has been at the center of an incredibly consequential legal battle after a Trump-appointed judge suspended its FDA approval, Alito could barely contain his contempt. “Mifestiprone? However you pronounce the word,” he said. 

All in all, Alito’s comments—unusually loquacious, derisive, and conspiratorial for a Supreme Court justice to air publicly—sure make him sound like someone auditioning to replace Tucker Carlson. That or they’re simply typical of the kind of man, who, shortly after the Dobbs decision, publicly bragged about authoring the opinion to strike down the constitutional right to an abortion. As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote last year, Alito has a particular track record of intellectual condescension and a stunning lack of empathy, characteristics we’ve seen in many of his rulings. Still, even against that history, these new remarks stand out.

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

In his opening statement in the ongoing civil sexual assault and defamation trial against former president Donald Trump, his attorney Joe Tacopina was aggressive, scathing and snarling in his attacks on E. Jean Carroll, the writer who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1997.

By Carroll’s admission, her story contains inconsistencies. She can’t remember the date the assault occurred, for example, and has said she doesn’t know why she went into the dressing room with Trump that day. In his opener, Tacopina told the jury he would expose all of Carroll’s inconsistencies, show that she was indeed the liar Trump claimed her to be, and prove she made up the entire story in pursuit of public attention. 

But on Thursday, when Tacopina, a burly, muscular man with a growling deep voice and a thick Brooklyn accent, had his chance to question Carroll, a former fixture of New York media society, now 79, he hit a brick wall. Carroll parried his initial attempts to unravel inconsistencies in her story, so the lawyer proceeded to grill her on slight inconsistencies between her testimony in a deposition last fall and what she has said on the stand this week. Those efforts left even the judge, Lewis Kaplan, appearing exasperated, and snapping at Tacopina to move on. 

But when Tacopina tried to challenge Carroll about why she did not scream when Trump was allegedly raping her violently, Carroll ultimately delivered a strong rebuke.

“I’m not a screamer, I was in too much of a panic, I was fighting,” she responded to his initial query.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to go after Disney last spring for opposing his “Don’t Say Gay” law, he was making it an example. He chose a powerful, high profile target that had disagreed with his policy preferences, and he punished that company for crossing him. In doing so, he sent a clear warning to other companies: Disagree and I will come knocking. If he was willing to attack Disney, one of the state’s largest employers and a major tax source, no business was safe.

This is an authoritarian tactic. Authoritarian leaders use various means to control the private sector to suppress dissent and bring a powerful segment of society under their sway. But in order to make an example of Disney, DeSantis had to be clear that Disney was suffering as a direct result of speaking out against him.

Unfortunately for DeSantis, that kind of retaliation against speech is a violation of the First Amendment. When Disney finally decided to fire back on Wednesday by filing a suit against DeSantis, the governor had spent over a year doing the company the favor by making myriad comments explaining he was seeking revenge against Disney, strengthening its legal hand. As Disney predicted in its complaint, “This is as clear a case of retaliation as this Court is ever likely to see.”

“It is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to punish a corporation because of the company’s expressed viewpoints on political issues,” Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA School of Law and the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights told Mother Jones a year ago when DeSantis first passed legislation targeting Disney for retribution.  

As Republican Mitt Romney famously reminded Iowans during his 2012 presidential campaign, “Corporations are people.” And for many legal purposes, he was right. Over the last century, the Supreme Court has extended civil rights to corporate entities, a trend Republicans and the conservative movement generally cheered. In 2010, the Supreme Court granted them the right to spend money to influence elections, ruling that was a form of political speech protected by the First Amendment. In 2014, the justices decided that some corporations also have religious rights.

On Wednesday evening, Tucker Carlson broke his silence on his surprise firing from Fox News.

After saying he’d taken a moment to step back, Carlson lamented that both political parties had cohered around a set ideology endorsed by cable news. But now, after his dismissal, he foretold an end. “This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue,” Carlson said in a video he posted on Twitter. “The people in charge know this. That’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive…but it won’t work when honest people say what’s true.”

That is funny to hear because I’ve spent the last few days poring over hours of Tucker Carlson videos from the archives, listening to what he has previously considered “true.” And, as you can see in five very clear chapters of footage, his truth has often involved promoting Nazi conspiracy theories; broadcasting racist and self-serving propaganda; spewing hate about trans people and children; and pushing the Big Lie. (You can read more about that last part here from our DC Bureau Chief David Corn.)

It’s unclear what will happen next for Carlson. On Monday, when Fox News announced they would be parting ways with the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight—one of cable’s most popular programs—the reasons were unclear. Rumors swirled as speculation about the split began. One theory focused on the legal trouble: Fox News had settled to pay Dominion Voting Systems over $785 million in their defamation trial against the news network following their network-wide promotion of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. One of the most popular perpetrators of promoting those pretenses was, of course, Tucker. Had he been ousted for hurting the bottom line? Or was it the content of his text messages, many redacted, that pushed Fox to act?

Tucker’s announcement implied he would continue broadcasting in some form. “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change,” Carlson said in his Wednesday night rejoinder, in what looks like the studio he built in Maine, which residents voted to approve. “When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues?”

In 2011, Robert Regan of Bourne, Massachusetts, stopped working as a forklift operator after being diagnosed with COPD. In 2015, he failed to pay about $900 in property taxes. The next year, the town took the tax title of his home. Bourne would eventually be able to sell it if Regan failed to pay back taxes and other fees—and under Massachusetts law, Regan and his relatives would get nothing from the sale. Bourne stood to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by dispossessing a dying man dependent on disability checks and supplemental oxygen.   

Local governments across the country have the right to take people’s homes when they don’t pay their taxes. In most states, extra money from tax sales go to the former owners. If a family owes $10,000 and the government sells their old home for $150,000, they can get $140,000. But in about a dozen states, the government keeps all $150,000.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could deem that unconstitutional. The question in Tyler v. Hennepin County is a simple one: Should governments be able to keep excess funds after taking and selling the homes of residents who fail to pay their property taxes? The case has brought together disparate groups from across the political spectrum, and justices on the right and left of the Court were unusually in sync during Wednesday’s arguments.

The Court appears likely to rule that those laws violate the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking private property for public use “without just compensation.” That would prevent states from keeping potentially hundreds of millions of equity in the coming years. Public-interest law groups say the benefits would disproportionately go to low-income Americans who are often elderly or in poor health.

The named petitioner in the case is Geraldine Tyler, a now 94-year-old Minnesota woman whose home was sold in 2016 for $25,000 more than she owed in taxes. Her case was argued by Christina Martin of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which was founded in 1973 by staffers of then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan. PLF has received support from allies on the right, but progressive organizations have gotten behind the case, as well. One of the many amicus briefs supporting Tyler was filed jointly by an unusual coalition that included the libertarian Cato Institute, the National Association of Home Builders, and the ACLU.

In late March, I watched as some 300 lawyers, doctors, and activists assembled in the aggressively beige conference wing of the Midtown Atlanta Hilton for the inaugural Covid Litigation Conference. A promotional flier promised that the event would “provide attendees with the resources they need to begin taking on Covid cases for the first time or to expand the range of Covid claims that they currently handle.” An unsuspecting lawyer could have been forgiven for expecting tips on how to help clients who had been disabled by Covid that they caught at their factory jobs, for instance, or those whose medical bills their insurance refused to pay.

But those kinds of cases were entirely absent from the agenda. Rather, the topic was a very particular kind of litigation: How best to advance the movement that organizers called “medical freedom.” In other words, how to sue the people who created and enforced public health measures like vaccine and mask requirements, policies against Covid misinformation, and treatment protocols for hospitalized Covid patients.

The conference organizers wore t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Misinformation Superspreader.” Steve Kirsch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a main organizer of the event, told me that the slogan was a cheeky reference to what he saw as the unfair labeling of anti-vaccine activists as peddlers of misinformation. “We said, ‘Okay if that’s what they’re calling us,” he explained, “let’s kind of make fun of it.” Indeed, many of the attendees seemed to see themselves as underdogs, scrapping against government and pharmaceutical behemoths.

What those underdogs didn’t mention during the sessions, though, is their friends in high places: specifically, federal judges who seem to be sympathetic to their aversion to pandemic policies. Pointing to some of the victories that medical freedom lawyers have enjoyed in US District courts, Dorit Reiss, a public health lawyer and law professor at the University of California College of the Law, noted, “They’re having some success in the federal system in front of Trump-appointed judges, and they’re very much forum shopping right now.” Adam Winkler, a constitutional law scholar at the University of California-Los Angeles, agreed. “The courts have issued a lot of what were once thought to be outlandish kinds of rulings with regard to any number of issues like abortion and affirmative action,” he said. “I’d expect that encourages people to bind hope to the prospects of lawsuits that they would otherwise seem certain to lose.”

When I arrived, I didn’t think I’d get past the Misinformation Superspreaders and make it into the ballroom where the event was taking place. The media liaison for the conference, Trevor FitzGibbon, asked me if I was there to write about disinformation, and he seemed to balk at my affirmative answer. When I said I worked for Mother Jones, he noticeably brightened. He had come up in the PR business working for prominent progressive candidates and groups, he explained, including Barack Obama, MoveOn, and Planned Parenthood, which I took to mean that he considered us to be politically kindred spirits. And then he let me into the ballroom.

Are House Republicans, if you’ll pardon the expression, peeing in their own Jacuzzi?

I raise this question because some of the spending cuts the House GOP and its quasi-leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, are demanding in exchange for raising the debt ceiling—a deal the Democrats have vowed to reject—are destined to hit Republican-led states hardest.

That’s likely true of the social programs such as food stamps that GOP members aim to further restrict. But it’s definitely the case for the host of clean-energy incentives (see page 2) of the Inflation Reduction Act Republicans just put on the chopping block. These federal perks have been flowing in spades to red states, notably Georgia, as Oliver Milman, a reporter for our Climate Desk partner the Guardian, pointed out in February. 

“Once known for its peaches and peanuts,” Milman wrote, Georgia “is rapidly becoming a crucible of US clean energy technology,” drawing billions in new solar, electric vehicle, and battery manufacturing subsidies, putting it at “the forefront of a swathe of southern states that are becoming a so-called ‘battery belt’ in the economic transition away from fossil fuels.”

Jack Conness, a transportation analyst at the University of Washington, helpfully put together a wonderful database depicting the jackpot that the IRA and the Chips and Science Act (CHIPS) represent for Republican-led local economies.