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.

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.”  

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. 

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.

Former President Donald Trump wrote on his social media site Thursday that he had been indicted for a second time, this time for taking classified documents with him to Florida when he left office in January 2021. The New York Times confirmed the indictment, reporting that he had been “charged with a total of seven counts, including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and an obstruction of justice conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter.” Trump is the first former president in US history to be charged with federal crimes.

“I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”

Trump left the White House in 2021 with hundreds of documents that the National Archives and Records Administration considers federal records that do not belong to the former president. The charges against him, which the DOJ has not yet detailed to the public, would likely have resulted from his efforts to keep much of the material, some of it classified, despite repeated demands that he return it, including a May 2022 Justice Department subpoena. Trump lawyers claimed that he had complied with that subpoena, but a dramatic FBI search last year at Mar-a-Lago showed their claims were false. Trump was ultimately found to have taken to his club more than 300 documents with classified markings.

The charges, apparently related to illegal retention of documents, may strike many people relatively minor compared to some of conduct for which Trump has been investigated. Special counsel Robert Mueller found in 2019 that Trump’s campaign had hoped benefit from Russian hacking efforts designed to damage his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The House impeached Trump in 2020 over his effort to delay US military support from Ukraine in a bid to pressure that country to launch investigations Trump hoped would embarrass Joe Biden. Trump’s efforts to retain power after his 2020 election defeat—including his incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, which led to his second impeachment—seems like a bigger deal than the documents case.

But lawyers and former prosecutors have argued that regardless of how bad Trump’s conduct in the documents matter may seem, the case is simpler than other matters for which Trump has been investigated. In other words, Trump appears to have clearly broken the law. Served with a federal subpoena after refusing to turn over records that belonged to the US government, he allegedly took steps to hide the material, some of it highly classified, from prosecutors.

This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail. John Vaillant’s latest book is Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.

We weren’t a week into May before 30,000 people had been evacuated because of dozens of fast-moving wildfires in Alberta. Structure losses were mounting, and politicians were trotting out words like “unprecedented.”

Unprecedented? Where were they in 2017, when British Columbia had its worst fire season on record and generated four simultaneous pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms? Where were they in 2016, when Fort McMurray burned—for days—along with 6,000 square kilometers of forest? What about 2011, when Slave Lake lost its town hall, library, radio station, and 500 houses in a few hours?

No, the current fire situation is not unprecedented, and calling it the “new normal” is offensive. There’s nothing “normal” about it. Do I sound angry? I have a right to be, and so do you. In the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted that the effects of increased industrial CO2 would penetrate the “noise” of random climate fluctuations and become measurable in the form of rising global temperatures, especially at higher latitudes like ours.

I started working on my latest book, Fire Weather, in 2016, just days after Fort McMurray disappeared beneath a fire-borne pyrocumulus cloud 14 kilometers tall. I did so not because this was a once-in-a-lifetime fire (the intervening years have proven otherwise). I did it because I understood, way back in 2016, that if a fire could do that much damage to such a wealthy, well-equipped subarctic city when the lakes were still frozen and car-sized blocks of ice still lined the Athabasca River, imagine what it could do to more southerly towns filled with old, densely packed wooden houses? Places such as Vancouver, Moose Jaw, or St. John’s? Imagine what such a fire could do in cottage country, or in the thousands of rural communities located in the wildland-urban interface, where half of Canadians, and a third of Americans, now live.

Like many households over the past year, Jose and his family were being squeezed by rising costs. “Everything is going up,” he said. “The food. The cost of day care.” To free up space in their budget, they turned to a company promoted by their apartment complex: Flex. A booming tech startup based in New York City, Flex says it helps consumers “improve cash flow” by splitting their monthly rent into two manageable installments instead of a single, larger payment.

The process was supposed to be simple. Flex offers to pay its customers’ rent—in full—directly to the landlord. For their part, customers pay their rent to Flex in two installments, one due at the beginning of the month and one later in the month. In essence, Flex promises to front a big chunk of the rent, allowing families to spread out one of their largest expenses.

To Jose, this sounded like a good deal. “It was pretty much beyond convenient to split our rent,” he said. “That’s the reason why we used Flex—to make sure we can cover day care and have food in our house.”

But by August, what had started as a lifeline turned into a source of significant financial stress, after Flex issued confusing instructions. At the time, Jose said, his wife was set to receive a direct deposit on the fifth day of the month. The rent was due to their landlord company two days earlier, on the third of the month. But Jose said he was under the impression that Flex would pay the rent so long as funds were available in the family’s account by the fifth.

Jose’s belief was reinforced by a text message from Flex that said, “Please make sure you have funds available for your first payment of $585.25 by the 5th* in order for Flex to help you cover this month’s rent payment.” That message was accompanied by a perplexing caveat: “*disclaimer: if Flex has sent you a specific email stating a different deadline for payment, that email takes precedence.”

As Donald Trump prepares to fight his second indictment in two months—the latest stemming from Department of Justice allegations that he mishandled classified documents after leaving office—he seems to be facing a major, self-inflicted problem. Multiple news outlets are now reporting that they have obtained the transcript of an audio recording that appears to capture Trump bragging about retaining secret documents.

“Secret. This is secret information,” Trump says in the conversation, according to the transcript CNN received. “Look, look at this. This was done by the military and given to me.”

Perhaps more critically, the transcript also reportedly shows that Trump admitted to not declassifying the documents he is heard bragging about in the recording. This would significantly undermine Trump’s previous assertion that as president, he could declassify anything he wanted by merely “thinking about it“—and that the documents he retained were, therefore, no longer classified. Trump’s own lawyers notably declined to support that shaky defense after the FBI’s search at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, which, of course, uncovered among many items, dozens of empty folders marked “classified.”

“As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t,” Trump reportedly says in the bombshell transcript.

The New York Times reports that the remark prompted a woman in the room to reply, “Now we have a problem.”

The Supreme Court’s surprise ruling upholding the use of the Voting Rights Act in cases challenging political maps is likely to affect the 2024 elections and beyond—though how big the impact will be depends on how quickly courts across the country move in multiple cases challenging racial gerrymandering schemes.

Thursday’s opinion in Allen v. Milligan came out of Alabama, where civil rights groups alleged that the Voting Rights Act required the state two draw two districts where Black voters are likely to elect their preferred candidate instead of just one. And it is there where the case will have its most obvious effect. “Black voters in Alabama are entitled to an additional opportunity district in the upcoming election,” says Yurij Rudensky, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

In Louisiana and Georgia, similar cases brought by civil rights groups and voters targeting maps enacted by Republican legislatures were awaiting Milligan‘s outcome. Now that the Alabama case has been decided in favor of the maps’ challengers, it is likely that both Louisiana and even Georgia could see new maps in 2024. If they do, each state could end up with an additional congressional seat with a large African-American population that would favor Democrats.

In 2013, the Supreme Court put an end to the Voting Right’s Act’s preclearance process—a system where states with a history of discrimination had to get approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing election procedure, including issuing new political maps. When, ahead of the 2022 midterms, new census data was released and redistricting took place, it was the first time lines were redrawn nationwide without such oversight. That led to a large number of maps that likely discriminated against voters of color. In Alabama, the district court that first heard the Milligan case found that the Republican-controlled legislature had likely diluted Black votes in violation of Section 2 of the VRA and ordered a new map put in place for 2022. But in February 2022, the Supreme Court blocked that decision, allowing that year’s election to be conducted under the discriminatory map. It was too close to voting to put a new one in place, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained.

Similarly, the Supreme Court stepped in to stop a Louisiana-based court that found the state’s 2022 map likely violated the VRA from putting a new map in place for 2022 until the high court decided the Alabama case. The delay effectively preserved two GOP seats and cost Black voters a chance to elect their preferred candidates. In Georgia, a district court found that state lawmakers’ proposals for their own districts, as well as the congressional lines they drew, may have violated the law, but, taking a cue from the Supreme Court, ruled it was too close to the 2022 elections to make new maps. Redistricting schemes now being challenged for violating the VRA and the Constitution in Texas and Florida likewise were in effect in 2022.

The federal indictment of Donald Trump and his valet Waltine Nauta on 38 counts of retaining and withholding national security information, conspiring to obstruct justice, and lying to the FBI that was unsealed today is historic…and wild. It shows Trump at his Trumpiest, scheming to cheat, evading responsibility and accountability, lying, and apparently breaking the law. Of course, just allegedly. Since nothing has been proven, and he’s presumed innocent until there is a verdict. But overall, the indictment depicts Trump as a conniver who acts like a mob boss—perhaps a sloppy mob boss. He orders an underling to move boxes containing classified records so his lawyer won’t find the secret documents when he reviews Trump’s stash. He parks his booty in a shower stall in a bathroom. When an initial review uncovers several dozen classified documents, Trump signals to his lawyer—with a “plucking motion”—that this attorney should remove some of these documents from the folder they are in and make them disappear. 

It’s all a bit comical but certainly damn serious. You have to wonder what Roy Cohn, the sleazy lawyer for Mafia bosses and other crooks who was something of a mentor for Trump, would say, were he still alive. Surely, there must have been a smarter way to steal and conceal government secrets. Would Cohn be disappointed with Trump’s carelessness in pulling off this caper?

The case against Trump looks strong. But it’s special counsel Jack Smith’s job to present a good first impression with the indictment. No doubt, there will be much shouting and many complications ahead in this case. Yet what has been revealed today is pure Trump. Here are some highlights—or lowlights—that caught my eye as I read the document.

Yeah, this is just fine, right? pic.twitter.com/hVtgKOJmlc

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

As the ramifications of Donald Trump’s historic federal indictment over his mishandling of classified documents rapidly unfold—and stunning details continue to emerge—I feel compelled to pause and turn your attention to page 12 of the 37-count criminal indictment against the former president to note: This is repulsive.

Here you will set your eyes on a hideous Mar-a-Lago bathroom that, according to federal investigators, was used to store boxes of classified information, one of several locations where sensitive information was uncovered throughout Trump’s property after the FBI descended onto his Palm Beach residence last summer. (The other rooms: his bedroom, a ballroom, an office.)

A Mar-a-Lago bathroom outfitted with two chandeliers, over 30 boxes of documents, and a box of Kleenex deserves specific recognition, for it singularly captures the stunning idiocy of our former president.

Let the image’s unique Trumpian mix of gaudiness, stupidity, and corruption haunt each Republican defending Trump against charges he reportedly admits to committing on tape. May it guide federal prosecutors into wearing hazmat suits to protect themselves from filth. Let the garishness overwhelm you with reminders that American voters actually elected Donald J. Trump—a corrupt businessman with a history of sexual assault allegations, who partied with Jeffrey Epstein, and is the patriarch of a tasteless, exceedingly annoying family—to the White House, and that it might happen all over again.

Check out the American dream. It’s next to the shitter.

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.”

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.  

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 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.

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.” 

On Thursday, a Texas house panel voted to recommend impeachment proceedings for Republican attorney general Ken Paxton. Investigators for the committee concluded that the state’s top law enforcement official broke a number of laws—including felony statutes—by using his office to help a friend and political donor named Nate Paul. (You can read more about the scandal, and the committee’s investigation, here.)

Paxton, you may be surprised to learn, is not taking this well. In a statement after the committee’s announcement, Paxton, who was reelected last fall, accused his fellow Republicans of carrying water for liberal Democrats and claimed that the committee was trying “to use their unsubstantiated report to overturn the results of a free and fair election.” It was an “illegitimate attempt to overthrow the will of the people and disenfranchise the voters of our state.”

As the Texas Observer’s Justin Miller noted, Paxton and his team are floating a legal argument that holds that a public official can’t be impeached after an election for actions that were widely established before that election. This idea that all the facts were known, though, would seem to be undercut rather severely by Paxton’s continued insistence that the facts we think we know are wrong, as well as the fact that he was literally trying to get the state legislature to pay the whistleblowers he fired $3.3 million to settle their claims, rather than face a public trial—which is what prompted the legislature’s investigation. It wasn’t as if his reelection slogan was “Yes, I did it.”

But more importantly, this is Ken Paxton we’re talking about. You know, the guy who famously tried to overturn an election.

After the 2020 presidential election, as Donald Trump and his team were scrambling to come up with a way to reverse his loss, Paxton stepped forward. As I recounted in a profile of Paxton last year, his office asked the Supreme Court to throw out the election results in four states that Joe Biden won, claiming, among other things, that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” The brief was a disaster, recycling claims that had already been rejected. Even fellow Republican-run AG offices wanted to keep their distance. In internal emails obtained through a records request by the group American Oversight, staffers in the Florida attorney general’s office called Paxton’s brief “batshit” and wondered if “this is Paxton’s request for a pardon.”

Editor’s note: The below article is a preview of the lead item in the next edition of  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. Please check it out.

Imagine I come home and find a crazy man in my house. He is holding a full gas can and a lit match. “If you don’t sign over the deed to your house,” he screams, “I will burn this place down.” I refuse, and we enter a standoff for days. Neighbors gather around my home. The police arrive. It is a major scene. The media show up. The newspaper and TV reporters see this as a big story and slap it on the front page and lead the evening news with it: “Two local residents caught in fierce negotiations. If their talks don’t succeed, a house will go up in flames.”

That seems to be the general media framing of the debt ceiling debate in Washington, DC. In horse-race style, much of the press has covered this episode as a political battle of two opposing forces: President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And there’s been much breathless and up-to-the-minute reporting of the ins-and-outs of the deliberations between the White House and the House Republicans, with each side treated as equal partners in this tale of high-stakes politics.

Earlier this week, the New York Times front-paged a report on how McCarthy was “attempting a difficult balancing act” in the negotiations, trying to cobble together a budget deal that would win enough Republicans without alienating the most extremist members of his caucus, who—thanks to the agreement that landed McCarthy in the top House post—could easily boot him out of the speakership. Meanwhile, Politico focused on Biden’s negotiating stance, noting he has “prioritized deal-making through much of the debt ceiling talks, laboring to work across the aisle even at the risk of alienating the liberal wing of his own party.”

There was nothing wrong with these stories in and of themselves, but this coverage underplayed the core element of the story: GOP radicals, by refusing to sign off on raising the debt ceiling so the US government could pay bills already accrued (many of which were the results of what Congress voted for), were threatening to trigger a financial crisis and blow up the US economy.

Nearly two months ago, a pandemic-era policy that prevented states from dropping ineligible people from Medicaid ended. Now, we’re starting to see the fallout. According to a recent New York Times report, hundreds of thousands of low-income people have already lost their health insurance, including those who may still qualify for coverage but appear to have been booted for “procedural reasons,” like failing to turn in paperwork. 

At the start of the pandemic, the policy was initially created under the First Coronavirus Response Act, allowing families to preserve their insurance under Medicaid even if they hadn’t filed the necessary forms to re-enroll. As I’ve previously reported, the program saw 20.2 million new recipients over the course of two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Since the program’s expiration at the end of March, states have begun checking Medicaid eligibility once again, requiring households to file paperwork in order to verify their eligibility. 

While a definite total of those who’ve lost coverage is currently unknown, nineteen states have already begun the process of purging people from the health insurance program. Arkansas, one of the first states to start ending coverage, has already stripped at least 73,000 people of their insurance, including 27,000 children, reports the Times. Unlike other states, Arkansas has aimed to do this at a quicker rate—planning to get it done in only six months, instead of the year president Biden has allotted. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders framed the process as necessary in order to “preserve resources for those who need them and follow the law.” 

A South Carolina judge temporarily blocked the state’s new six-week abortion ban on Friday, one day after it was signed by Republican Gov. Henry McMaster.

“The status quo should be maintained until the [state] Supreme Court reviews its decision,” said circuit court Judge Clifton Newman. “It’s going to end up there.”

The state Supreme Court blocked a similar ban on abortion at the roughly six-week mark, which the GOP-controlled legislature passed in 2021, and which took effect after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning Roe v. Wade last June. In January 2023, South Carolina’s Supreme Court called that law “an unreasonable restriction upon a woman’s right to privacy.” That kept abortion legal in the state until around 20 weeks of pregnancy.

In response, Republicans passed a new abortion ban, which Planned Parenthood South Atlantic immediately challenged in court, alleging that it “violates the South Carolina Constitution’s right to privacy and its guarantees of equal protection and due process.”

The composition of the South Carolina Supreme Court has changed since its ruling blocking the first abortion ban. Judge Kaye Hearn, who wrote the 3-2 decision, retired earlier this year and was replaced by Appeals Judge Gary Hill, who was selected by the legislature. That made South Carolina the only state in the country to have an all-male state supreme court.