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Vanderpump Rules shows the limits of making money on reality TV Reality stars have always fallen in the lower ranks of onscreen talent. Despite their huge impact on pop culture, they’re not as well-compensated and generally respected as actors and even hosting personalities. This is especially noticeable on Bravo, where the network’s biggest names mainly exist in their own ecosystem of celebrity — or more accurately, Bravolebrity — which rarely ever translates to actual stardom. However, the seismic reality TV event known as Scandoval last year, where Vanderpump Rules star Tom Sandoval was exposed for cheating on his longtime partner Ariana Madix with newer cast member Rachel Leviss, yielded a rare moment of financial prosperity and heightened visibility for the stars of the show, including a mention at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and two Emmy nominations. Naturally, Madix gained the most from the entire mess, nabbing endless sponcon deals, a slot on Dancing With the Stars, a role in the Broadway production of Chicago, and now a hosting gig on Peacock’s Love Island USA — on top of viewers’ sympathy. The scandal also served as marketing for her and her costar Katie Maloney’s sandwich shop Something About Her. Meanwhile, other cast members reaped benefits too: Lala Kent launched a successful merch line pegged to the ordeal. Scheana Shay saw a boost in her podcast streaming numbers and got to star in an Uber Eats commercial featuring her Bravo-famous song “Good as Gold.” And DJ James Kennedy became the de facto No. 1 guy in the group. Watching season 11, though, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s actually thriving. The show, which initially centered on a group of servers and bartenders working at Lisa Vanderpump’s gaudy West Hollywood restaurants, has always seen its cast struggle to make ends meet. In the afterglow of Scandoval, however, it’s particularly striking to hear several cast members mention how currently broke they are this season or how little money they had going into filming after more than a decade of being on the air. Accordingly, much of the cast’s plotting seems driven by a desperate need to keep the show — i.e., their main source of income — running. After 11 years in the public eye and a publicist’s wet dream of a scandal, the limits of gaining financial stability through the reality TV machine have never been more clear. This season was mostly about Madix and Sandoval, but also money This season of Vanderpump Rules has been burdened by one glaring (supposed) dilemma: How will Sandoval and Madix film together after his affair, to maintain a semblance of harmony amongst the cast? Despite the fact that the series’ large ensemble has always dealt with discord and separated itself into cliques, there seemed to be unsaid agreement — according to Shay, one that was enforced by producers — that Sandoval must be accepted back into the group in order for the show to go on. Thus, this season has seen some awkward attempts by cast members, specifically Shay and Kent, to force Madix to co-exist in group outings with her ex. This culminated in a memorable fourth-wall-breaking moment in the season finale when Madix refused to have an on-camera reconciliation with Sandoval. Kent ends the episode fulminating against Madix’s alleged diva behavior in refusing to comply with producers for the sake of their jobs. She also laments that Madix wasn’t being “real” in dismissing her ex, appearing to confuse what needed to occur in order to supposedly “preserve the show” with any real-life scenario where a woman was confronted with her conniving, trash-talking ex. Since the finale aired, Kent and Shay have endured backlash from fans’ for facilitating a redemption arc for Sandoval and ignoring Madix’s boundaries. Much of Kent and Shay’s gripes with Madix seem ridden with jealousy over her becoming a fan favorite. Yet, within the context of their feeble positions as reality stars, their odd maneuvers and bitter confessionals also feel like a display of economic panic. Reality stars, specifically those who join shows when they aren’t already famous, have long endured insultingly low pay. In an oversaturated reality landscape, one can imagine that negotiating a salary on one of multiple, ever-changing Bravo shows is a lot different than when popular, unscripted shows felt like monocultural events. (For example, the cast of Jersey Shore persuaded MTV to pay them $1 million for their second season.) This isn’t to say that the Vanderpump Rules cast are necessarily living in squalor. While Bravo keeps most of their salaries confidential, sources told the Hollywood Reporter in 2020 that the cast began earning $25,000 per episode during 2017, compared to the $10,000 they were paid for the entire first season. Nevertheless, these people are starting businesses and raising families in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Additionally, most of them didn’t come on the show with much. Vanderpump Rules has been an outlier in the more recent Bravospehere — aside from the Below Deck series — in centering on hourly workers from mostly middle-class backgrounds. This contrasts with Bravo’s “aspirational” programming, the Real Housewives franchise and Bravo’s other millennial enterprises, Summer House and Southern Charm, where the cast members join the show with preexisting wealth or high-paying jobs. Still, eleven seasons into one of Bravo’s most popular shows, which has granted them other money-making opportunities, it’s a bit startling to learn that the cast still isn’t financially comfortable. Early on in the season, Madix said that she only had $2,000 in her bank account before being showered with job opportunities. Even with her post-Scandoval gains, she’s argued against her costars’ claims that she’s rolling in dough. Meanwhile, Shay’s attempts to rekindle a friendship with Sandoval, despite his mistreatment of her best friend Madix, seem economically driven. (Besides the push to keep the show working, all her recollections of him being a “good friend” are monetary favors.) Ironically, Sandoval and his business partner Tom Schwartz, who have spent the past few seasons investing money for their two restaurants Tom Tom and Schwartz and Sandy’s, have complained about their low bank accounts and struggles to afford ideal housing after their breakups. During season nine, both Toms purchased $2 million farmhouses in San Fernando Valley with their then partners, Maloney and Madix. In the wake of their splits, it feels sadly poetic — their critics would say, karmic — that they’re now planning on shacking up together in their 40s, which is the exact same position they were in as broke 20-something-year-old models before the show even began. Reality stars aren’t as financially mobile as social media makes it seem All of this underscores a reality of reality TV, which is that exposure doesn’t necessarily allow participants to become economically mobile or even enjoy a comfortable life. A Bravolebrity can seemingly be the most beloved person on the internet, going viral every week on social media and spurring countless GIFs and memes — which has sparked its own debate about intellectual property — but that doesn’t always translate into dollars in their pocket. Even in the age of social media, where normal people are plucked from obscurity and launched into a world of fame and wealth from their living rooms, the combination of visibility and likeability is not an automatic portal to success. This is seemingly why most reality stars’ outside ventures seem largely limited to sponcon, live shows, podcasts and occasionally hosting, which isn’t to insult that work. It is all, however, work that hinges on their continued fame. It’s interesting how few Bravolebrities have been able to launch truly successful brands that go beyond their shows, and not for lack of trying. It’s become a trope on Real Housewives for cast members to use the platform to elevate or establish businesses no one really asked for, often overestimating their appeal as saleswomen. Across cities, you can see women hawking everything from multi-wick candles to fragrances, to custom hats to weave, all in the hopes of becoming the next Bravo girlboss. It’s a trend that kicked off with former Real Housewives of New York City star Bethenny Frankel, whose food and beverage company Skinnygirl became a multimillion-dollar success story. Summer House star Kyle Cooke also used the show to launch his hard tea company Loverboy, which made $16 million in sales in 2022. Vanderpump Rules’ Schwartz, Sandy, Madix, and Maloney have obviously all gone into brick-and-mortar, although the returns, so far, don’t appear to be that abundant. Working against this goal to make as much money as possible while on reality TV is the need to present a wealthy lifestyle. Likewise, Real Housewives, particularly the Georgians, often accuse one another of renting huge mansions or leasing luxury cars they can’t afford for the sake of “stunting.” Meanwhile, Bravo, as a company, has seemingly never been in a more secure, lucrative place. In recent years, Bravo’s annual three-day convention, BravoCon, has become a huge profit generator for the network, as it’s evolved into a brazen parade for advertisers. Additionally, season 10 of Vanderpump Rules, which unfolded during the reveal of Sandoval, has presumably handed the network even more advertising dollars, as the series became the most-watched cable show last year, including on streaming platforms. Still, the cast, aside from Madix, doesn’t appear to be reaping the benefits of Scandoval like one might have guessed watching them sell T-shirts and endorse Chili’s tequila espresso martinis on television. That frustration has simmered throughout the whole season and into the reunion. There’s an obvious argument here that the tertiary parties shouldn’t benefit at all. Plus, it’s been odd hearing Madix’s castmates claim that she’s “thriving” because she’s hawking Duracell batteries and competed on Dancing With the Stars despite the immense and traumatizing betrayal she experienced from Sandoval. For all the heavy drinking that’s occurred on this show, the cast has never exhibited so much thirst.vox.com
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The misleading, wasteful way we measure gas mileage, explained Time for a pop quiz. Which of these trades saves more gas: A) Swapping a car that gets 25 miles per gallon (MPG) for one that gets 50 MPG, or B) Replacing a car that gets 10 MPG with one that gets 15 MPG. If you said that A conserves more gas, you’re mistaken. And it’s not even close. Here’s why: In the first scenario, the old vehicle getting 25 MPG uses four gallons of gas to travel 100 miles, while the new one at 50 MPG uses two. In the second scenario, the vehicle getting 10 MPG needs 10 gallons to traverse those 100 miles, while the one at 15 MPG uses 6.7, saving 3.3 gallons — fully 65 percent more than in scenario A. If you answered wrong, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve succumbed to the MPG Illusion, a widespread fallacy that can easily distort perceptions of a car’s efficiency and muddle debates about transportation and climate policy. Providing the basis for federal fuel economy rules, MPG is a foundational automotive metric in the US. “Americans are very familiar with MPG,” Richard Larrick, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, told me. “But I think that familiarity means that we don’t recognize what it’s not answering, which is the question of how much gas we’re using.” Larrick co-authored a 2008 paper in Science that illuminated Americans’ “systematic misperception” of fuel efficiency when viewed through MPG. The researchers asked 77 college students questions similar to the pop quiz above. Most undervalued the benefits of rising from 18 to 28 MPG relative to going from 34 to 50 MPG. “We think of gas savings as a kind of linear relationship with MPG,” Larrick told me. But “there are diminishing returns from MPG [improvements].” Because of the MPG Illusion, many people underestimate the benefit of addressing bona fide gas guzzlers. They give disproportionate attention to squeezing a few more MPG from models that are already comparatively efficient. In a subsequent 2015 paper, Larrick and two co-authors offered a solution: Flip MPG and turn it into “GPHM,” or gallons of gas per 100 miles of travel. Such a metric would help consumers see how much more (or less) gas they would buy if they opt for a particular model. It could also nudge public officials striving to reduce oil consumption and tailpipe emissions to focus on the low-hanging fruit: improving the most abysmally inefficient vehicles. The MPG Illusion sheds light on a host of policy issues The European Union already does this, measuring fuel economy in liters per 100 kilometers driven. “They do it that way because fuel consumed per mile is directly related to energy use and directly related to emissions, whereas our MPG is not,” said Kate Whitefoot, an associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. The US remains wedded to MPG, although the 2008 Science paper drew a flurry of attention (in part because it was published at a time when the price of gas was surging to $4.05/gallon, equivalent to around $5.80 today). A few years later, the MPG Illusion seemed to catch the eye of federal regulators revising the fuel efficiency stickers affixed to new cars at dealerships. Since 2013, those stickers have included measures of gallons per 100 miles as well as an estimated annual gasoline cost (albeit in a much smaller font than the familiar MPG figure towering above). But Larrick said that climate and consumer groups have paid scant attention to his proposed “GPHM” metric, and it does not seem to have penetrated public awareness. Worse, the MPG Illusion can lead climate advocates to misallocate political capital, downplaying the most effective opportunities to reduce emissions from transportation, the US’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, the federal policy that sets automobile fuel efficiency rules, have always been based on MPG, a big reason why the metric is so ingrained in popular consciousness. CAFE establishes one fuel economy standard for “passenger cars” (sedans and station wagons) and a second, more lenient one for “light trucks” (primarily SUVs and pickups). The MPG Illusion helps conceal the distortions of that bifurcated structure, known as the “light truck loophole”: It reduces pressure on carmakers to improve their most inefficient SUVs, like the 2023 Chevrolet Suburban that gets a puny 16 MPG. A similar problem exists for the federal Gas Guzzler Tax, a levy that can add thousands of dollars to the cost of vehicles getting less than 22.5 MPG. Yet nonsensically, the Gas Guzzler Tax applies only to passenger cars, omitting the SUVs and trucks that now comprise more than 80 percent of the US auto market. Another lesson of the MPG Illusion: It’s better to build hybrid versions of the most gas-thirsty cars, rather than of those that are already relatively efficient. A gas-powered 2023 Hyundai Elantra, for instance, gets 37 MPG while a hybrid model gets 50 MPG. Impressive though that sounds, an equivalent 13 MPG improvement for a hybrid version of the three-ton, all-gas Cadillac Escalade which gets a measly 16 MPG, would allow the hybrid Escalade to save four times more gasoline than the Elantra, compared to their all-gas versions. (No hybrid Escalade has been available since 2013.) Purely electric car models are still more climate-friendly than hybrids, but US consumers have shown queasiness about going all-electric, and there is a solid argument that a given number of lithium-ion cells can more efficiently reduce emissions if they are deployed across numerous hybrid vehicles than in a single all-electric one. That being the case, publicly dragging a company like Toyota for prioritizing hybrids over all-electric models, as environmental groups like the Sierra Club have done, risks making the perfect the enemy of the good. One of the most powerful insights of the MPG illusion is the power of simply removing gas-guzzling cars already on the road, rather than solely focusing on making new cars ever more efficient. Many vehicles manufactured in the 1980s and 1990s got significantly worse gas mileage than current versions. A 1995 GMC Yukon, for instance, gets an estimated 12 MPG, while a 2024 Yukon reaches 17 — not much to brag about, but still a 42 percent improvement. Millions of decades-old models are still in use; last year, the average age of an American car hit 12.5 years, an all-time high. Such disparities provide a compelling argument for “cash for clunkers” initiatives like the 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), a program that offered Americans up to $4,500 off a new vehicle if they traded in an older, still drivable one that got 18 MPG or less. (Even better: A 2020 Lithuanian program offered those surrendering an old car up to €1,000 toward far more sustainable transportation modes like e-bikes, bikes, or public transit.) The US ended its federal program in 2009, but states including California and Colorado maintain their own. Due to the resources required to produce a new vehicle, it makes sense to limit cash-for-clunkers eligibility to the most inefficient models — a feature that the old CARS program did but Colorado’s current one does not. Eventually, the MPG Illusion will lose its relevance as the American vehicle fleet becomes fully electric. But transitioning to a zero-emissions fleet will take decades, even under the most optimistic projections. Only around 1 percent of cars currently on US roads are fully electric, and more than four out of five new cars sold in the US in 2023 were fully gas-powered. Like it or not, millions of gas cars will be plying American streets for a long time to come. Policymakers should aim to minimize the total amount of fuel those vehicles consume at the same time that they encourage electrification. They’ll have a much easier time doing so if they incorporate the MPG Illusion into their plans.vox.com
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Bridgerton’s third season is more diverse — and even shallower — than ever With the recent Netflix drop, Bridgerton’s color-conscious casting enters its third season, and we still have many of the same questions for the series that we had at the beginning. What impact does this casting have on our storyline, if any? Does the injection of so many characters of color add complexity to our understanding of the Bridgerton universe, or is this casting ultimately little more than window dressing for the same old crusty patriarchal tropes? Bridgerton is almost — but not quite — an alternate historical universe, one where a colorblind view of society prevails. This slight historical rewrite posits that Queen Charlotte, who was the real wife of Britain’s King George III, is a Black aristocrat who marries into the British royal family and presides over society in all her glory. That thin historical tie, along with the show’s season-one acknowledgment that slavery exists in this universe, has always complicated how we understand the diversity of the ton (Bridgerton-speak for society). Season one, indeed, drew criticism for “having Black people strolling around in the background” without giving most of the show’s Black characters meaningful identities or storylines. Season two expanded the number of minority characters and gave two of them the show’s focal storyline, but did little to address the concerns held over from season one about the lack of complexity in this universe. Granted, romance as a genre is all about escapism; but how can the show simultaneously tell us that class and racial inequalities exist while usually pretending they don’t? Season three, rather than attempting to reconcile this paradox, has simply flung more characters into it. And while it’s a lot more fun to have even more characters of color strolling around in the background, the show still largely configures them all as shallow and undeveloped. Bridgerton’s Black men are all isolated within their society Bridgerton frankly enjoys its surface pleasures, and season three has chosen to go wide, not deep. We’re introduced to a truly dizzying number of new characters and relationships — everyone from lead character Penelope’s (Nicola Coughlan) dueling love interests to Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis), cane-tapping Lady Danbury’s (Adjoa Andoh) surprise brother. He appears and immediately develops a flirtation with Danbury’s bestie, widower Lady Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), who’s one of four Bridgertons looking for love this season. (Anthony, who married his love Kate last season, also makes an appearance.) Among them, another unexpected sibling, Francesca (Hannah Dodd), who was previously played by a different actress in a much smaller version of the role, returns from Bath just in time to make an amiable connection with the quiet, quirky but charming John Stirling (Victor Alli), a little-known earl who seems destined to easily win her hand. Francesca and her mother seem to represent opposite ends of the marriage spectrum: Lady Violet wants all of her children to make a love match like she did with her late husband, but Francesca seems perfectly content to make a convenient marriage based on her friendship with the earl. What’s less clear is what either man hopes to gain from wooing a Bridgerton. Lady Danbury seems to be wary of Marcus, with the vague implication that he might be a rake, but he gets so little screen time that we barely get any sense of his character beyond his shallow banter with Violet. John, by contrast, gets one of the more interesting arcs of the season — if you can call socially awkward courtship an arc. Both get sidelined by a script that has too many characters to cycle through and not enough time to devote to giving them all three dimensions. Additionally, as Black gentlemen of the ton, both men appear to be disconnected from the society they’re moving within. Marcus has arrived from out of town and no one seems to know him apart from Lady Danbury. John likewise seems to have come to town specifically to tour the marriage mart — no one among the Bridgerton families seems to know him at all. His apparent neurodivergence further sets him apart from their sphere, at least initially. It’s unclear whether the writers intended both characters to feel this isolated, or whether it’s a byproduct of the show’s divided attention, but the result leaves us questioning what role Black men actually play in this society, and how integrated they actually are within it. Recall that our season one hero, Simon (Regé-Jean Page), was also a solitary figure within his set whose best friend, Will Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe), was a working-class boxer who bonded with him through the military. Throughout season one, Will’s primary role was that of sidekick and exposition tool for Simon. Over the course of season two and season three, Bridgerton has tried to redeem its mechanical use of him in season one by gradually elevating him through the social ranks. Season two sees him breaking away from the shady world of boxing and trying to establish himself as a respectable barkeep. Season three cavalierly upends that storyline by handing Will’s young son a surprise title and elevating Will’s entire family to the peerage. This “unexpected fortune” trope forms the basis for many a romance, but Will is happily married to Alice (Emma Naomi). She’s not too pleased, though, when Will fights to keep his club and continue running it himself. His resistance to luxury horrifies the gentlemen who formerly patronized his establishment, and they drop him, threatening both his business and his family’s new position in society. Given that Will is one of only a few significant characters in Bridgerton with an actual job — dressmaker Madame Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale) has likewise hovered around the edges of polite society for all three seasons — it’s hardly surprising that so much of his character revolves around work. It also makes sense that a show so fixated on wealth would explicitly create an upwardly mobile character to both center all the show’s class concerns and represent the show’s modern middle-class viewer. Yet it’s striking that the conflicts that arise from this new season three storyline have everything to do with class but nothing to do with race. The Mondriches have no trouble being accepted by the ton until Will determines to keep the club; it’s only his choice to buck the trendy disdain for work that makes him unfashionable. Will and Alice each afford the show a rich opportunity to explore the combination of class and race, one that so far the show has declined. Bridgerton’s prequel series, Queen Charlotte, addresses these intersections more explicitly — and arguably more improbably — than the main series yet has. There seems to be little thematic connection between the social isolation of Marcus, John, and Simon and the ease with which Will is initially accepted into society. Yet their disconnection, combined with the fact that Will’s patrons turn on him so rapidly once he chooses to keep working, implies that for all of these men, race may be the primary factor keeping them set apart from the other characters. Again, this could be all down to the writing, to the show’s expanding storylines and self-conscious frippery. Still, intentional or not, race provides subtle friction for these characters. That brings us to Bridgerton’s most isolated character of all. Queen Charlotte may be the reason Bridgerton’s London has so many diverse marriages Bridgerton is a story that’s ultimately all about competition — competition for a better position in society, for a wealthy spouse, for more money, and for more power. At the center of all that competition sits the regent herself — Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), who simultaneously reigns over London society and fiercely fights to maintain her position. The show configures its arch gossipmonger, the anonymous scandal-sheet writer Lady Whistledown, as the foil to the queen herself. Both women exert huge influence over the fates of their fellow members of the ton. But where Whistledown’s influence is usually strategic, due to her writer’s need to protect herself and her loved ones, the queen’s influence often feels random and quixotic — characterized by bored vanity and occasional whimsy. Queen Charlotte, much like the real-life prince regent who’s missing from this version of history, functions as a sort of chaotic neutral in the world she dominates, using her power and social influence to move chess pieces around according to her whims. Typically, only Whistledown, who operates more like a true neutral among the society she observes, can disturb her sense of studied nonchalance. As we learn in the issue-laden prequel series, Charlotte secured her position in the world of Bridgerton through a sociopolitical “experiment” spearheaded by her husband to integrate the races among all social classes. So what seems like arbitrary meddling in the affairs of the ton on Charlotte’s part may be her way of ensuring that the “experiment” continues for the benefit of all British society. Yet increasingly, for all Charlotte’s queendom ensures the elevation of her and all Black characters in this universe, we see that it’s left her almost entirely alone. Her position of power alienates her from almost everyone in the ton; the sole exception, Lady Danbury, serves her more as an advisor than a friend. We might question, then, whether anything in Bridgerton, for all its lavish luxury, leads to true community or connection, especially for its characters of color. Throughout the third season, the proliferation of minor characters of color becomes more than just window dressing; it becomes a metaphor for the show’s inability to do more than merely maneuver its characters, like Charlotte herself, without providing a cohesive narrative purpose for any of them. The show offers marriage and family as the best path to meaning, and matchmaking duly occupies most of Charlotte’s attention; yet outside of the Bridgertons, all of the marriages we’re privy to are either arranged (the Featheringtons) or currently experiencing friction (the Mondriches). And even among the Bridgertons, marriage feels so burdensome that several members of the family have done all they can to avoid it. Meanwhile, queerness exists so far outside the main scope of the show so far that it mainly occurs only accidentally; the writers so far have seemed committed to a fully heteronormative, traditional take on the concepts of marriage and family. All of this means that Bridgerton season three, for all its infusion of new characters, ultimately feels like more of the same. The ultimate test might be simply the depth test, and the show’s failure to dole out so little of it to anyone. Still, if Bridgerton has firmly embraced superficiality, then this season at least gives multiple races an equal slice of its thinly layered pie. This threadbare representation makes for the gauzy fabric Bridgerton prefers, never mind that it’s not enough for a decent muslin gown at Vauxhall. With the string quartet playing Pitbull, no one will notice.vox.com
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The Republican Party’s man inside the Supreme Court WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 23: U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito speaks during the Georgetown University Law Center's third annual Dean's Lecture to the Graduating Class in the Hart Auditorium in McDonough Hall February 23, 2016 in Washington, DC. Moderated by Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor, Alito began the conversation talking about his father. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Joe Biden was about to become president, and the Alito household was in distress. On Thursday evening, the New York Times reported that, during the tense period between the January 6 insurrection and Biden’s inauguration, Justice Samuel Alito’s family displayed an upside-down American flag outside their home. An upside-down flag is a distress signal — a way that soldiers or ships at sea show that they are in extraordinary danger. Taken in isolation, it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions from this flag. The Times reports that many supporters of the “Stop the Steal” campaign — former President Donald Trump’s failed effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election — embraced an inverted American flag to signal their belief that the United States was in grave danger. Alito claims that the flag was raised by his wife “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” But this flag is hardly an isolated incident. On the bench, Alito is the Supreme Court’s most unrelenting Republican partisan — a reliable vote for whatever outcome is preferred by the GOP’s right wing, regardless of whether there is any legal support for that position. Alito isn’t simply a bad judge; he is the negation of law, frequently embracing claims that even intellectual leaders within the conservative movement find risible. The morning before the Times published its flag scoop, for example, Alito published a dissenting opinion claiming that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was unconstitutional. The opinion was so poorly reasoned that Justice Clarence Thomas, ordinarily an ally of far-right causes, mocked Alito’s opinion for “winding its way through English, Colonial, and early American history” without ever connecting that history to anything that’s actually in the Constitution. Off the bench, meanwhile, Alito has a long history of making partisan statements that are just ambiguous enough that he can deny he was bemoaning a Republican defeat in a recent election. A little more than a week after Democratic President Barack Obama won his 2012 reelection race, Alito spoke to the conservative Federalist Society, where, quoting from one of his least favorite law professors, he warned that America is caught in a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.” Alito has long been the justice most skeptical of free speech arguments — he was the sole dissenter in two Obama-era decisions establishing that even extraordinarily offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment — but this skepticism evaporates the minute a Republican claims that they are being censored. Among other things, Alito voted to let Texas’s Republican legislature seize control over content moderation at sites like Twitter and YouTube, then tried to prohibit the Biden administration from asking those same sites to voluntarily remove content from anti-vaxxers and election deniers. Alito frequently mocks his colleagues, even fellow Republicans, when they attribute government policies to anti-Black racism. After Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion that the states of Louisiana and Oregon allowed non-unanimous juries to convict felony defendants more than a century ago to dilute the influence of Black jurors, Alito was livid, ranting in dissent: “To add insult to injury, the Court tars Louisiana and Oregon with the charge of racism.” Yet while Alito denies that racism might have motivated Louisiana’s Jim Crow lawmakers in the late 19th century, he brims with empathy for white plaintiffs who claim to be victims of racism. When a white firefighter alleged that he was denied a promotion because of his race, Alito was quick to tie this decision to the local mayor’s fear that he “would incur the wrath of … influential leaders of New Haven’s African-American community” if the city didn’t promote more non-white firefighters. Empirical data shows that Alito is the most pro-prosecution justice on the Supreme Court, voting in favor of criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time. But he’s tripped over himself to protect one criminal defendant in particular: Donald Trump. An empirical analysis of the Court’s “standing” decisions — cases asking whether the federal courts have jurisdiction over a particular dispute — found that Alito rules in favor of conservative litigants 100 percent of the time, and against liberal litigants in every single case. Though Alito, who turned 74 last month, is probably in the twilight of his career, his unapologetically partisan approach to judging could very well be the judiciary’s future, at least if Trump secures another term in the White House. Today’s headlines are peppered with names like Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Trump’s stolen documents trial who has also behaved like a member of Trump’s defense team, or Matthew Kacsmaryk, the former Christian right litigator who’s been willing to rubber stamp virtually any request for a court order filed by a Republican. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the powerful federal court that oversees appeals out of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, is now a bastion of Alito-like partisans who treat laws and precedents that undermine the GOP’s policy goals as mere inconveniences to be struck down or ignored. These are the sorts of judicial appointees who would likely appeal to a second-term Trump, as the instigator of the January 6 insurrection looks to fill the bench with judges who will not interfere with his ambitions in the same way that many judges did in his first term. Alito — a judge with no theory of the Constitution, and no insight into how judges should read ambiguous laws, beyond his driving belief that his team should always win — is the perfect fit, in other words, for what the Republican Party has become in the age of Trump. Samuel Alito, by the numbers It’s probably possible to go through any long-serving judge’s record and find opinions that aren’t especially persuasive. So, rather than rely on anecdotal evidence of Alito’s partisanship, let’s start with two empirical analyses of his behavior on the Supreme Court. Political scientist Lee Epstein examined how often each current justice votes for a defendant’s position in criminal cases. Her data, which was first reported by NBC News, shows a fairly clear partisan divide. All three of the Court’s Democrats voted with criminal defendants in over half of the cases they heard, with former public defender Ketanji Brown Jackson favoring defendants in nearly 4 out of 5 cases. All six of the Court’s Republicans, meanwhile, vote with criminal defendants less than half the time. But there is also a great deal of variation among the Republicans. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the most libertarian of the Court’s Republican appointees, voted with criminal defendants in 45 percent of cases. Alito, who once served as the top federal prosecutor in the state of New Jersey, is the most pro-prosecution justice, voting with criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time. Yet Alito’s distrust for criminal defense lawyers seemed to evaporate the minute the leader of his political party became a criminal defendant. At oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the case asking whether Trump is immune from prosecution for his attempt to steal the 2020 election, Alito offered a dizzying argument for why his Court should give presidents broad immunity from criminal consequences. If an incumbent president who “loses a very close, hotly contested election” knows that they could face prosecution, Alito claimed, “will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito’s supposed concern was that a losing candidate will not “leave office peacefully” if they could be prosecuted by the incoming administration. The problem with this argument, of course, is that Trump is a case about a president who refused to leave office peacefully. Trump even incited an insurrection at the US Capitol after he lost his reelection bid. Similarly, in Fischer v. United States, a case asking whether January 6 insurrectionists can be charged under a statute making it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding, Alito peppered Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar with concerns that, if the January 6 defendants can be convicted under this law, that could someday lead to overly aggressive prosecutions of political protesters. At one point, Alito even took the side of a hypothetical heckler who starts screaming in the middle of a Supreme Court argument and is later charged with obstructing the proceeding. Alito can also set aside his pro-prosecution instincts in cases involving right-wing causes such as gun rights. At oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi, for example, Alito was one of the only justices who appeared open to a lower court’s ruling that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders have a Second Amendment right to own a gun. Indeed, many of Alito’s questions echoed so-called men’s rights advocates, who complain that judges unthinkingly issue these restraining orders without investigating the facts of a particular case. Consider, as well, a case analysis by Adam Unikowsky, a Supreme Court litigator who previously clerked for conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. In order to bring a federal lawsuit, a plaintiff must show that they were injured in some way by the defendant they wish to sue — a requirement known as “standing.” Unikowsky looked at 10 years’ worth of Supreme Court standing cases, first classifying each case as one where a “conservative” litigant brought a lawsuit, or as one where a “progressive” litigant filed suit. He then looked at how every current justice voted. Nearly every justice sometimes voted against their political views — Thomas, for example, voted four times that a conservative litigant lacked standing and twice voted in favor of a progressive litigant. Alito, however, was the exception. In all six cases brought by a conservative, Alito voted for the suit to move forward. Meanwhile, in all 10 cases brought by a progressive, Alito voted to deny standing. (Unikowsky also found that Justice Jackson, the Court’s newest member, has not yet crossed over in a standing case, but the data includes only one case, where she joined a 6–3 decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee.) Some of Alito’s standing opinions are genuinely embarrassing. The worst is his dissent in California v. Texas (2021), one of the four cases where Thomas voted to deny standing to a conservative litigant. Texas was the third of three Supreme Court cases attempting to destroy the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. But even many high-profile Republicans found this lawsuit humiliating. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board labeled this case the “Texas Obamacare Blunder.” Conservative policy wonk Yuval Levin wrote in the National Review that Texas “doesn’t even merit being called silly. It’s ridiculous.” As originally drafted, Obamacare required most Americans to pay higher taxes if they did not obtain health insurance. In 2017, however, Congress eliminated this tax by zeroing it out. The Texas plaintiffs claimed that this zero-dollar tax was unconstitutional, and that the proper remedy was that the Affordable Care Act must be repealed in its entirety. No one is allowed to bring a federal lawsuit unless they can show that they’ve been injured in some way. A zero-dollar tax obviously injures no one, because it doesn’t require anyone to pay anything. And so seven justices concluded that the Texas lawsuit must be tossed out. Alito dissented. While it is difficult to summarize his convoluted reasoning concisely, he essentially argued that, even if the zero-dollar tax did not injure these plaintiffs, they were injured by various other provisions of Obamacare and thus had standing. This is simply not how standing works — a litigant cannot manufacture standing to challenge one provision of federal law by claiming they are injured by another, completely different provision of federal law. As Jonathan Adler, one of the architects of a different Supreme Court suit attacking Obamacare, wrote of Alito’s opinion, “standing simply cannot work the way that Justice Alito wants it to” because, if it did, “it would become child’s play to challenge every provision of every major federal law so long as some constitutional infirmity could be located somewhere within the statute’s text.” Alito’s Texas opinion, in other words, would allow virtually anyone to challenge any major federal law, eviscerating the requirement that someone must actually be injured by a law before they can file a federal lawsuit against it. Needless to say, Alito does not take such a blasé attitude toward standing when left-leaning litigants appear in his Court. But, when handed a lawsuit that could sabotage Obama’s legacy, Alito was willing to waive one of the most well-established checks on judicial power so that he could invalidate the keystone of that legacy. Alito’s jurisprudence of white racial innocence In a 2005 speech explaining why he opposed Chief Justice John Roberts’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, then-Sen. Obama explained how he thinks judges actually decide difficult cases. While “95 percent” of cases can be resolved solely by looking at neutral legal principles, Obama said, “adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon” in the especially challenging cases that come before the Supreme Court. In those hardest cases, Obama argued, “that last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” One might think that empathy, which means the capacity to understand the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of another person, would be an essential quality in anyone tasked with judging other people. But Republicans later latched onto Obama’s statement as evidence that his judicial appointees would decide cases based on feelings and vibes, instead of law. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in 2016, “the President’s idea of what’s appropriate for justices to consider is totally at odds with our constitutional system. We are a government of laws and not a government of judges.” Alito’s jurisprudence, however, displays neither the universal empathy touted by Obama nor the kind of mechanical application of legal principles imagined by Grassley. Instead, Alito engages in selective empathy, often mocking the concerns of left-leaning litigants while simultaneously being extraordinarily protective of conservatives. And this selective empathy is most obvious in Alito’s decisions involving race. Alito lashes out at his colleagues when they accuse white lawmakers — even, in one case, white lawmakers in the Jim Crow South — of racism. Yet he showed tremendous empathy for the firefighter who claimed to be a victim of anti-white discrimination. Indeed, one of the unifying themes in Alito’s race cases is his desire to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law — and especially into American voting rights law. Consider, for example, Alito’s majority opinion in Abbott v. Perez (2018), where the Court’s Republican majority rejected a claim that Texas’s GOP-friendly congressional maps were an illegal racial gerrymander. In 2011, the Texas legislature drew maps that never took effect, and that were eventually declared an illegal gerrymander by a federal court. Because of the legal challenges to these maps, the state legislature drew alternative maps in 2012 that were supposed to be used only in that year’s election. Though much of these interim 2012 maps closely resembled the illegal 2011 maps, a court allowed Texas to use them in the 2012 election because otherwise the state would not have been able to conduct the election at all. Then, in 2013, the Texas legislature passed a new law converting the 2012 stopgap maps into permanent maps, meaning that they would be used until the next census in 2020. The state legislature did so, moreover, despite the fact that many of the districts in these new maps were still being challenged as unlawful racial gerrymanders. Alito’s opinion in Perez, however, cut most of these challenges off. He reasoned that “the 2013 Legislature’s intent was legitimate” because the decision to convert the interim maps into permanent maps was not driven by racism. Rather, it was driven by a desire to “bring the litigation about the State’s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.” Alito’s argument, in other words, was that the 2013 maps were permissible because they were enacted to shut down a lawsuit challenging a racial gerrymander. It’s as if the school districts that were declared unlawfully segregated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) had simply passed a new law re-creating the same racially segregated schools that existed before Brown was decided, and then argued that the new law should be upheld because it was enacted to end a lawsuit challenging segregation. Consider, as well, Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), a case asking whether two Arizona election laws that allegedly had a disproportionate negative impact on nonwhite voters violated a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act. In rejecting this claim, Alito simply made up a bunch of new limits on the Voting Rights Act that appear nowhere in the law’s text. He declared, for example, that state laws which purport to fight voter fraud are presumptively legal. He also applied a strong presumption that any voting restriction that was commonplace in 1982 does not violate the 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act. This later presumption is completely ridiculous. The only reason why Congress enacts any law is because it wants to change the status quo. If Congress enacted a new voting rights law in 1982, that means that Congress was unsatisfied with the state of voting rights in 1982 and wanted to change it — not to preserve restrictions that were commonplace at the time. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her Brnovich dissent, Alito’s opinion “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.” Alito’s selective concern about the First Amendment Earlier this month, Alito delivered the commencement address at Franciscan University, a Catholic school in Ohio. Much of his speech echoed the sort of anti-“cancel culture” rhetoric that can be heard on any given episode of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “Troubled waters are slamming against some of our most fundamental principles,” Alito told the graduates, echoing similar rhetoric that he used to describe the reelection of President Obama in 2012. “Support for freedom of speech,” Alito claimed, “is declining dangerously, especially where it should find broadest and widest acceptance.” Alito’s concern about free speech is a little jarring, because he’s long been the justice least likely to back free speech claims by civil rights plaintiffs. In 2010 and 2011, for example, Alito was the sole dissenter in two important free speech cases reiterating the Court’s well-established view that speech is protected by the First Amendment even if it is likely to offend most people. The justice’s more recent free speech decisions, meanwhile, largely turn on whether the party that wishes to shape public discourse is a Democrat or a Republican. In 2021, for example, Texas’s Republican legislature enacted a law that effectively seizes control over all content moderation at major social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. The law was an explicit effort to force these platforms to host right-wing content that they would prefer not to publish. “It is now law that conservative viewpoints in Texas cannot be banned on social media,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said when he signed the law. The law is also comically unconstitutional. The Court held in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), that “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And it held in Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974), a publication’s choice to publish or not publish certain content is subject only to the outlet’s “editorial control and judgment,” and “it has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press.” Yet, when a majority of his colleagues voted to temporarily block this Texas law, Alito dissented, suggesting that Texas’s Republican lawmakers should have more leeway to address “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.” Not long after Alito wrote this dissent, however, the Court heard another case, known as Murthy v. Missouri, which involved an unusual order handed down by the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That order effectively forbade the Biden administration from asking social media companies to voluntarily remove harmful content, such as videos seeking to recruit terrorists or tweets that promote false and potentially dangerous medical advice. Once again, a majority of Alito’s colleagues voted to block this lower court order. Once again, Alito dissented. It should be obvious that the First Amendment cannot simultaneously empower a Republican government to force media outlets to change their editorial policies, while also forbidding a Democratic government from asking a media outlet to change what it publishes — unless, of course, you believe that there is one First Amendment for Democrats and a different one for Republicans. Later in his address to Francisan’s graduating class, Alito had a revealing line about why he believes that freedom of religion is threatened in the United States. “Religious liberty is also threatened,” Alito claimed. Then he warned the graduates that “when you venture out into the world, you may well find yourself in a job, or community or a social setting when you will be pressured to endorse ideas you don’t believe, or to abandon core beliefs.” This warning blurs an important line between the kind of pressure that can plausibly violate “religious liberty,” and the kind of pressure that is just an ordinary part of living in a pluralistic society. Alito is correct that, under some circumstances, a worker who is pressured because of their religious beliefs at work may have a viable religious liberty claim. That’s because federal law requires employers to accommodate their employee’s religious beliefs unless doing so would impose an “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.” So, for example, if a worker’s boss pressured a conservative Catholic employee to sign a statement endorsing the right to an abortion, such pressure would likely violate this worker’s civil rights. But there is no right to be free from pressure, or even social ostracization, because people in your community or social circles find your religious beliefs abhorrent. If freedom of religion means anything, it must include both the right of a conservative evangelical to believe that gay people are sinful, and the right of everyone else to turn up their nose in disgust at anyone who expresses such a viewpoint. Yet Alito hasn’t simply argued that conservative Christians have a right not to be shunned for their views, he’s argued that the rights of gay Americans must be diminished in order to protect the feelings of people who oppose those rights. Hence Alito’s argument that Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, was wrongly decided because “it will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” Thus, in Samuel Alito’s America, Republicans have the power to control media, while Democrats can’t even ask media outlets to change what they publish. Meanwhile, the rights of historically marginalized groups must be diminished to prevent anyone from speaking ill of those who would marginalize them. Can Alito be defended? A 2023 essay by attorney Adam White tries to find a larger intellectual project behind Alito’s jurisprudence, beyond an overarching command that the Republican Party should always win. Alito, White claims, is a “Burkean conservative,” a reference to the 18th-century English conservative Edmund Burke, who is wary of the “dangers of concentrating too much power [in] the hands of elites or elite institutions.” White argues that Alito seeks to preserve traditional ways of organizing society, and to diminish the power of institutions that can cause the United States to depart from such traditions. As White writes, “when government action — especially the swift and sweeping work of agencies, executives, and courts, rather than legislatures — threatens longstanding traditions or the institutions and communities that keep and transmit them, Justice Alito’s instinct has been to begin with a presumption in favor of defending tradition.” Alito, for what it’s worth, appears to think of himself very much as White describes him. In his Franciscan speech, for example, Alito argued that the Constitution “guards against improvident change,” both because the document itself is almost impossible to amend, and because it makes it very difficult for the federal government to make law. The framers of the Constitution, Alito claims, “knew that times would inevitably come when people would be tempted to make hurried and unwise changes,” and they believed that the “country’s well-being depended on the ability to resist these temptations.” Thus, at Franciscan, Alito presented himself as that most conservative of guardians — a judge who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” But if Alito imagines a country that is slow to change its laws, and one where Congress — and not swifter-moving institutions like the courts or executive branch agencies — are the drivers of policy, this vision appears to wax and wane depending on who is in the White House, and whether a new policy benefits liberals or conservatives. Consider two cases, both of which involve court decisions that sought to shape US policy. In Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California (2020), a majority of Alito’s colleagues concluded that the Trump administration failed to complete the appropriate paperwork when it tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA, which had been in effect for eight years when the Court ruled, allows hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children to live and work in this country. When a Republican administration sought to end a program created by Democrats, Alito behaved exactly as White describes him — warning about concentrating too much power in the judiciary. Shortly after Trump officials tried to end DACA, Alito wrote in dissent, “one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked this rescission, and since then, this issue has been mired in litigation.” He complained that “the federal judiciary” had effectively prevented Trump from implementing one of his policy goals “during an entire presidential term.” Three years later, however, one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked a different federal policy. Kacsmaryk, the crusader for the religious right that Trump put on the bench, attempted to ban the abortion drug mifepristone nearly a quarter century after the FDA authorized doctors to prescribe it in the United States. Even on Alito’s very conservative, anti-abortion Court, he was one of only two justices who went along with this attempt to remove a widely available medication from the market by judicial decree. Or consider Alito’s vote in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the challenge to Trump’s decision to ban citizens of several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. Trump did so, moreover, after bragging on the campaign trail about his plan to enact an unconstitutional ban on Muslims entering the United States if elected president. Before Trump took office, Alito was often the Court’s most outspoken proponent of an expansive concept of religious freedom, especially in cases involving conservative Christians. But Alito abandoned this concern for religious liberty, as well as any concerns about the executive branch setting policy, in the Hawaii case. Instead, Alito joined an opinion claiming that federal law “exudes deference” to President Trump. Under President Biden, by contrast, Alito’s been one of the Court’s strongest proponents of the so-called major questions doctrine, a judicially created doctrine that’s been used almost exclusively to strike down policies created by Democratic administrations, and that has no basis in either the Constitution’s text or in any statute. Indeed, Alito’s even wielded this doctrine to strike down Biden administration policies that were unambiguously authorized by federal law. So let’s dispel this fiction that Alito takes a principled, Burkean approach to the law and the Constitution. Alito does often use the sort of rhetoric that is associated with traditionalist forms of conservatism, but that rhetoric only drives his actual decisions when it leads to the outcome he prefers. Samuel Alito is one of the worst judges of his generation. He rejects the very basic idea that courts must decide cases based on the law, and not based on their partisan views. He routinely embarrasses himself in oral arguments, and in his published opinions, with legal reasoning that no sensible lawyer can take seriously. And he even tries to distort public debate and silence critics. But most of all, Alito is one of the most uninteresting thinkers in the country. Here he is, in one of the most powerful and intellectually rigorous jobs on the planet — a philosopher king, presiding over the mightiest nation that has ever existed — and his only big idea is “Republicans should win.”vox.com
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Why Trump’s running mate could be the most important VP pick of our time Former US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at Wildwood Beach in Wildwood, New Jersey, on May 11, 2024. In a normal presidential campaign, the announcement of a running mate gets a lot of media attention — but has little immediate importance. But Donald Trump’s campaign this year is not normal. And his veep pick this year could well be the most important such choice of our time – with major implications for the future of both the Republican Party and American democracy as a whole. The vice presidency of the United States is an odd office. Its main function is to simply have someone on deck if the president dies or resigns. But the office has very few formal powers. Modern presidents sometimes delegate tasks for their vice president to do, but veeps mostly just hang around waiting for their chance at the big job. “I am nothing, but I may be everything,” the country’s first vice president, John Adams, famously said. Veeps matter because they have a decent chance of later becoming president, even though most don’t: 15 of our 49 veeps so far have later gotten the big job. The more common way to do that is the abrupt one — nine ascended because the president died or resigned. But six others later got elected in their own right, including, of course, the current president. So usually, the veep is the (possible) future of the party, but a new veep typically has to wait eight years (through a presidential reelection campaign) to get to that future, and his or her nearer-term importance in governing is less clear. But there are three unusual features about Trump’s situation that mean his veep pick will be more immediately important than usual. 1) Trump is term-limited, and there’s much uncertainty about the post-Trump GOP: Let’s start with the obvious: If Trump wins in November, the Constitution is clear that he can’t be elected for another term in 2028. So unless there’s a total collapse in constitutional government and the rule of law — fingers crossed there’s not! — he starts as a lame duck. Enter his vice president. Modern veeps are nationally known figures who have at least a good shot at winning their party’s presidential nomination in the future. There have been 20 presidential elections since World War II, and 12 have featured a veep — current or former — on the ballot. So Trump’s VP will be widely interpreted as his possible successor. On top of that, Trump’s persona has loomed so large over GOP politics for the past decade that it’s hard to imagine what the post-Trump Republican Party will look like. His choice could well determine whether the party gets even more extreme, or whether there’s a relative return to normalcy. 2) Trump poses threats to democracy — would his VP stand up to him? Typically, the veep’s only formal power of note (besides being the successor-in-waiting) is being the tie-breaking Senate vote, as the president of the Senate. But on January 6, 2021, another VP duty — presiding over Congress’s counting of the presidential electoral votes — became hugely important as Trump tried to steal the election from Joe Biden. The count is usually a formality, but Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to effectively seize control of the vote count, tossing out swing state results where Biden won. Had Pence actually done that, it would have thrown the process into chaos. But, relying on legal advice that he had no such authority — and, perhaps, on his own conscience — Pence refused. What if someone more unscrupulous had been in the VP job on that day? The exact circumstances of the 2020 election crisis are unlikely to repeat. But a second-term Trump may well try to degrade democracy in other ways that are difficult to precisely foresee. Which raises the question: Will Trump’s future veep stand up and defend democracy, or not? The early signs aren’t great. Last week, we saw the spectacle of various veep hopefuls trekking to New York City to spin for Trump outside of his criminal trial, competing over who could come up with the most fulsome protest of how unfairly Trump was being treated by the legal system. With 2028 coming around so soon, the incentives for the VP to remain in Trump’s good graces will be strong, since falling out of his favor could sink any chance of becoming president. That may mean turning a blind eye to Trump’s abuses of power. Or the veep could end up doing the right thing; anything’s possible. 3) Trump’s age and corruption make it more likely he’d leave office involuntarily ahead of schedule: Finally, though veeps have often gone on to be elected president, the more common way they’ve ended up in the job is through its sudden vacancy, due to health or scandal reasons. Both are a bit more likely to befall Trump than the average president. Trump is about to turn 78, and his advanced age makes it somewhat more likely that health reasons would prevent him from making it all the way through another four-year term. The odds of that are probably still low — Trump isn’t known to have serious health problems and would benefit from top-notch care. Still, sometimes old people decline quickly. (All this applies to Biden as well, of course.) Apart from death, the only other reason the presidency has been vacated early is a corruption scandal, when Nixon resigned to avert certain impeachment and removal from office. Trump is famously corrupt and is already the only president to be impeached twice. So it isn’t much of a stretch to suspect that there might be some corruption or abuse of power scandals leading to another Trump impeachment effort in his next term. Conviction seems less plausible: It’s possible that, no matter what Trump ended up doing, there wouldn’t be enough Senate Republicans willing to remove him from power. Still, it is at least theoretically possible that there is a line he could cross that would finally lead to Congress booting him. If so, the vice president would be there to take his job. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.vox.com
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Can lawmakers cap out-of-pocket child care costs? Brittany Kjenaas and her husband live with their three-year-old daughter in northern Minnesota, paying more for child care than their mortgage. Kjenaas, a health care supply manager and her husband, a miner on the Iron Range, cite their daycare bills as the primary reason they’ve abandoned plans to have any more children. “We waited until we were in our ‘30s to start a family and…it’s not an exaggeration to say that the decision was based on the cost of child care,” she said. “She is our only child, and unless something changes in the cost of child care, she will remain our only child.” Kjenaas is not alone in speaking out about how the prohibitive costs of child care are shaping the reproductive decisions of middle class families like hers, families that are ineligible for any of the existing low-income child care assistance programs. In Minnesota state Sen. Grant Hauschild has been sharing how he and his wife considered having a third child but decided against it due to daycare costs. It’s among the top three issues he hears about from constituents on a daily basis, as well as from prospective employers considering setting up businesses in his region. It’s what makes a bill Hauschild introduced alongside Minnesota Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn this year so interesting. Their legislation — known as Great Start Affordability Scholarships — targets middle and upper-middle class families, those earning up to 150 percent of the state median income, or $174,000 for a family of four. Think Small, a local children’s advocacy group, estimated the scholarships would reduce child care costs for 86 percent of Minnesotans with kids under 5. The benefits would be on a sliding scale but could be as high as $600 a month per child, with the state sending payments directly to Minnesota child care providers. The effort aims to ultimately cap family child care payments at seven percent of a household’s annual income, an affordability threshold endorsed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and more recently by a bipartisan Minnesota state task force. (HHS landed on this benchmark about a decade ago after determining that between 1997 and 2011 families spent about seven percent of their income consistently on child care.) A seven percent cap would represent a massive change for most Minnesota families, who pay some of the steepest child care costs in the country. Infant care in Minnesota stands at an average annual cost of $1,341 per month, and $1,021 for preschool. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning national think tank, estimates the average Minnesota family with an infant and a preschooler pays now roughly 37 percent of their household income for care. State leaders like Hauschild have been getting fed up with federal inaction. Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the 2021 Build Back Better fight, and child care funding was excluded from Congress’ Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. While bipartisan compromise on child care seems possible, leaders right now seem to only be able to find common ground on helping low-income families. The Minnesota proposal failed to advance this year, but advocates believe their time lobbying on an off-cycle budget year has positioned them well for 2025 when the legislature embarks on more serious appropriations. Still, whether state lawmakers will be able to ever fully fund the program’s cost (an estimated roughly $2 billion or so annually) without the federal government is unclear. If the proposal passes, Kjenaas said it would do even more than enable her family to grow. “If we pay a few thousand less on child care we’d be able to take our daughter to the zoo, go see a movie, and even plan a fun road trip because we’d finally be able to do so without the stress of how much money it would cost at the end,” Kjenaas testified before a Minnesota House subcommittee in November. “We’d be able to buy healthy food at the grocery store instead of pre-packaged stuff. We’d be able to have time to make healthy meals because my husband wouldn’t have to work overtime to pay catch up on our bills…We’d have room to breathe.” Building a bigger political base for child care Not everyone in Minnesota agrees with the push to expand child care subsidies for wealthier families, especially since low-income families are still struggling. But it helps, advocates say, that the state legislature succeeded a year prior in securing new child care investments specifically for poor families. Armed with a substantial budget surplus, Minnesota lawmakers in 2023 raised early childhood education workers’ pay with a half billion dollar investment, and invested $300 million more into early learning, including new investments in Head Start and low-income scholarships. “For a long time the emphasis has been on most vulnerable kids and we made some really big strides in that area last session,” said Ericca Maas, director of policy and advocacy for Think Small. “We came together after that and said well glaring at us is middle-class families.” Clare Sanford, the government relations chair for the Minnesota Child Care Association, a provider group, said the debates around equity continued this year as advocates lobbied for the Great Start Affordability Scholarships program. Some activists protested pushing to help wealthier families before those with the least resources were fully covered. This debate was never fully resolved, but ultimately, Sanford said, leading groups decided they’d be more successful in the long-term if they could expand their coalition to include more families. “There’s a fundamental agreement that we need to help those who have the least first, and we know we haven’t finished doing that, however part of the strategy, is we need middle class families to see themselves as part of this,” she told Vox. “We need more political will to form a greater political base.” Megan Pulford, a single mother of two in northeastern Minnesota, is the type of parent advocates like Sanford want to bring into their coalition. As a bank loan officer Pulford has never qualified for state child care assistance, but covering the cost of daycare for her two kids comes at nearly $2,000 a month. “Money is just so tight, our bills are just so tight,” she told Vox. “If we didn’t have to pay as much for child care we could actually put more into our local grocers, local businesses.” A big part of the coalition-building strategy is helping middle and upper-middle class parents overcome feelings of shame that they may be struggling with costs at all. Lawmakers have long treated child care assistance as a carrot to induce poor mothers to work, rather than a general investment in the healthy development of all children. “The myth in our country is that very young children are a private responsibility, not a public one,” said Sanford. “Everyone will pay taxes to fund public K-12 schools whether or not they have kids because that’s a commitment we’ve made as a society that an educated workforce is something we all need. We do the exact opposite for ages 0-5.” “We feel the need to help parents really understand that this is a shared experience, and that it’s okay for them to share that they’re not holding up,” Maas, of Think Small, added. The search for simple language continues American child care advocacy is often plagued by cumbersome math and jargon, and the effort in Minnesota this year was no different. In contrast to Canadian politicians who’ve been spearheading a message around child care costs for no more than $10-a-day, US progressives have long stuck with more complicated language around limiting costs to thresholds of annual household income. (The specific threshold to signal affordability used to be ten percent, though was lowered to seven percent about ten years ago.) The seven percent benchmark was recently included in Senate Democrats’ Child Care for Every Community Act, and the Biden administration’s new rule to reduce child care costs for families already receiving subsidies. Rep. Kotyza-Witthuh, the Minnesota House sponsor of the Great Start Affordability Scholarships, said they felt seven percent was a good target because Minnesota lawmakers had already pledged commitment to the goal last year in statute, and because it already exists as a federal recommendation. But advocates acknowledge it can be very confusing, particularly since many families don’t know what seven percent of their household income is, and for some families the goal is to still have them spend less than seven percent. Talking about “capping” child care costs, advocates hoped, would at least provide a clear policy message they could galvanize parents around, but then child care providers started getting nervous, interpreting the cap language as a cap on their expenses, or a cap on the amount of tuition they can charge. “People freak out when you talk about a cap,” Maas told Vox. “Providers freak out about things they charge being capped, and some parents really bristle too at the idea that they couldn’t invest more in their child if they wanted to.” To mitigate this confusion, some advocates started describing the proposed scholarship subsidy as more like a co-pay, similar to health insurance. But health insurance costs are also among the most confusing Americans have to budget for. While the fight was unsuccessful this session, Democratic leaders in Minnesota say they’re keeping it as a goal for 2025. “It is a priority for my caucus and our leadership,” said Kotyza-Witthuhn. “Everyone knows the system is broken.”vox.com
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Massive invasive snakes are on the loose and spreading in Puerto Rico Quiere leer esta historia en español? Haga clic aquí. Night had fallen in Cabo Rojo, a wildlife refuge along Puerto Rico’s southwestern coast, by the time we started our hike. Insects hummed from the grasses, green lizards slept in the trees, and resting water birds, spooked by our approaching footsteps, squawked and flew away. I scanned the canopy and the ground with a flashlight as my companions — a group of research biologists from a local university — had told me to. Hundreds of eyes reflected back at me from all directions: spiders. Moments later, as I neared the rocky coastline, my beam caught something even more unnerving. A few feet from where I stood, a large snake slithered along the forest floor. It was about 3 feet long and armored with a kaleidoscope pattern of green, black, and yellow scales. The snake was a boa constrictor. And it wasn’t supposed to be here. That late-night sighting was a glimpse into a much bigger problem in Puerto Rico: In recent years, three species of large invasive constrictors have been spreading across the island. Boa constrictors, which are native to South and Central America, are now common on the west side of the island. Meanwhile, reticulated pythons, the longest snakes in the world known to reach 30 feet, are abundant in the central mountains. In their native range of South and Southeast Asia, retics, as snake enthusiasts call them, have swallowed humans whole. Yet another invasive constrictor — the ball python — is starting to spread, too. This is highly troubling for the island’s native animals, as well as for pets. Boas and reticulated pythons are apex predators in Puerto Rico, meaning they are at the top of the food chain. And big snakes have big appetites. “It’s very, very bad,” said Alberto R. Puente-Rolón, a biologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and a leading authority on invasive snakes in the region. “We have a serious problem and a serious threat to the bird species here,” said Puente-Rolón, who was with me that night in Cabo Rojo. This problem is especially clear in the wildlife refuge. Cabo Rojo is considered the most important stopover site for migratory species and shorebirds — including rare plovers and warblers — in the eastern Caribbean. These birds are critical pieces of complex and ancient island ecosystems. They help control the number of insects and other small animals that they consume, and they spread nutrients throughout the Caribbean (through their feces). Invasive snakes are similarly threatening outside of Cabo Rojo and across the island, where there are thousands of other native species. Dozens of them are endemic, meaning they’re found nowhere else on Earth. These include birds like the native Puerto Rican parrot, one of the world’s rarest avian species. Because many trees rely on native birds to spread their seeds, losing the parrot would send ripples of destruction through the island’s native forests. Scientists are also concerned that invasive constrictors will introduce diseases that harm the island’s native snakes, including the Puerto Rican boa, a federally endangered species that’s found only on the island. Other regions in the tropics have experienced the devastation wrought by invasive snakes. In Guam, the venomous brown tree snake — which is native to Papua New Guinea and Australia — wiped out 10 of the island’s 12 native forest birds after it was introduced to the territory in the mid-20th century. That loss is now threatening the future of Guam’s forests; like in Puerto Rico, many of the island’s trees need birds to spread their seeds. In south Florida, meanwhile, scientists have linked the spread of Burmese pythons to the severe decline of some native mammals like rabbits and foxes. The situation in Puerto Rico isn’t this extreme yet. While invasive constrictors are already widespread in some parts of the island, they are only just starting to fan out across Puerto Rico, scientists told me. That means local experts and environmental officials still have an opportunity to limit the destruction they can cause. The big question now is whether Puerto Rico, an island in the Caribbean and a US territory, will act fast enough to stem the spread. It faces ongoing financial troubles — rooted in a long history of colonialism — as well as frequent natural disasters, which together stand in the way of progress. And as epicenters of the extinction crisis have demonstrated (see, Hawaii), the US often fails to spend money on interventions until native species have all but disappeared. “Do we have to wait to press the panic button?” Puente-Rolón said. “Or can we be proactive?” Puerto Rico is filling up with invasive snakes On that April night in Cabo Rojo, which is about three and half hours from the capital of San Juan, we spotted two more invasive boas in the next hour. They were larger and wrapped around tree branches several feet above the ground. Encountering three snakes in three hours is not normal. “Now you can understand the problem,” said Puente-Rolón, who has a handful of serpent tattoos on his upper body. (One is of a coral snake that he says almost killed him on a trip to the Amazon.) The boas weren’t far from a flock of shorebirds that nest by salt flats in the refuge. Last summer, researchers found three of them in the nesting area of least terns, small seabirds with black caps and smoky gray plumage that are declining in parts of the US. Two of the snakes were captured and dissected. One of them had the feathers of a young tern in its stomach. “There is an ecological imbalance,” said Ana Román, who manages the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge. “These invasive species don’t belong.” Like nonnative species everywhere, the invasive snakes are here not because of their own actions but because of human beings. Pet traders have been selling constrictors and pythons in Puerto Rico for decades, although owning boa constrictors and retics without a permit is illegal. (The law, scientists told me, is not strictly enforced.) Pet snakes escape, experts warn. Plus, reckless owners sometimes release their animals into the wild when they get too big and hard to care for. There are also potentially stranger routes of entry. In the ‘90s, a zoo just north of Cabo Rojo was robbed and, like a plot point in a cheap horror movie, a reptile cage was damaged and baby boas escaped, according to Puente-Rolón. (I couldn’t identify any Spanish or English news reports from the time to verify this claim, and the zoo has since closed. Puente-Rolón told me that he was at the zoo the day after the alleged break-in because he was studying one of its native snakes.) In the last four months, a team of surveyors led by Fabián Feliciano-Rivera, a wildlife biologist, has captured more than 150 invasive boa constrictors in Cabo Rojo. Puente-Rolón estimates that there are roughly 13 of them per hectare (meaning more than 5 per acre) in the refuge, which is something close to extraordinary, he said. It’s not just the number of snakes that’s surprising but that they’re in Cabo Rojo at all. The habitat here is extreme — it’s hot and dry, and the forest is sparse, leaving snakes with few places to hide. It’s certainly not like the humid forests full of fresh water that these snakes tend to prefer. To Feliciano-Rivera, that suggests boa constrictors are so abundant that they’re spreading to more challenging habitats. As snakes disperse across the island, they’re showing up in backyards, chicken coops, and even cars. When people find them, they typically kill the animals or call local authorities, who retrieve the snakes and hand them over to DRNA, Puerto Rico’s wildlife agency. DRNA then brings them to a place called Cambalache. A holding facility for exotic animals, Cambalache gets invasive snakes almost daily. Many of them come from the wild, though others are confiscated from breeders who sell them illegally. Cambalache looked like a rundown zoo when I visited the facility one afternoon in April. A few dozen metal cages scattered around outside held nonnative monkeys. I saw large tubs of alligator-like reptiles called caimans. Cages inside of a small concrete building, meanwhile, were full of sugar gliders, adorable, palm-sized possums with large skin flaps that allow them to glide from tree to tree. Rangers had confiscated more than 50 of them from a breeder earlier in the week. Then there were the snakes. Tons of them. Outside in a wooden pen, roughly the size of a small storage shed, were some 30 writhing boas and reticulated pythons. One of the pythons was 11 feet long. “My cats are gone, my chickens are gone. It’s a problem.” —Odalis Luna, python hunter Timothy Colston, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Puerto Rico, picked up one of the pythons. The snake coiled itself around his arm and, like a blood pressure cuff, caused the skin around it to bulge. (Colston, who’s been bitten by dozens of snakes, said it felt like a “little hug.”) No one knows how many invasive snakes there are in Puerto Rico. Hardly any scientific literature or public government documents have been published on the topic. That’s partly because the invasion is still new. It’s also because the island’s government and scientific institutions lack resources to study it (for a number of complicated reasons). But there’s no doubt that invasive snakes are spreading. One sign is the sheer number of boas in Cabo Rojo and Cambalache. Puente-Rolón has also noticed a surge in social media posts and news stories about sightings. In the last few years, scientists have also received intel from a small number of python hunters on the island, civilians who volunteer their time to capture invasive snakes. Just seven or so python hunters, also known as reticuleros, can catch 20 snakes a month, according to Jean P. Gonzalez Crespo, a doctoral researcher and invasive snake expert at the University of Wisconsin. Do you have information about the spread of invasive species in Puerto Rico? Contact the author of this story here. I talked to a group of these reticuleros on a recent afternoon. They work normal jobs by day — one runs a pizzeria, another works in recycling — but by night they’re hunting snakes. It’s a way to safeguard their local community and the island’s rich biodiversity, said Odalis Luna, a reticulero who hunts with a small crew that includes her husband and their friend Wilson Maldonado. In the last three years, Luna said, they’ve captured around 170 snakes across several counties. Their reptile bounty includes babies, which suggests that invasive pythons are now breeding in the wild. Finding the snakes is relatively easy, said Luna, who once caught a 17-foot reticulated python in front of her house. “We need to find more, because my cats are gone, my chickens are gone,” Luna said. “It’s a problem.” The uncertain fate of Puerto Rico’s native wildlife Scientists at the University of Puerto Rico are now racing to study the spread of invasive snakes. They still have a lot of unanswered questions — including where they are and which native animals they threaten most. Those studies start by wrangling these scaly reptiles. When we’d come across an invasive boa in Cabo Rojo, one of the biologists would grab it using a specialized pole with a hook on the end and then put it in a pillowcase. The researchers also collect snakes from Cambalache, the DRNA holding facility, and from reticuleros. Most of those snakes are then taken to a lab at the University of Puerto Rico. Visiting the lab was a shock to the senses: Fluorescent lights lit up several tables, on which a handful of euthanized snakes were stretched out. It smelled of alcohol and rotting flesh. I watched as Colston and a group of students began slicing open the animals using surgical scalpels and poking around inside. On the most simple level, the researchers are trying to figure out what the snakes are eating. In some cases, it’s obvious: In late 2020, they pulled a cat out of a boa constrictor’s stomach, like some kind of sick magic trick. But often, the team has to analyze the snakes’ feces. That morning, Mia V. Aponte Román, an undergraduate, squeezed poop out of a snake’s intestines and into a strainer. When she ran it under water, a handful of claws appeared. “Green iguana,” said Puente-Rolón, who was standing next to her, peering into the sink. Puente-Rolón’s team has examined the guts of more than 2,000 invasive boas, he said. That analysis — which hasn’t yet been published — suggests that the snakes are most frequently eating rats and mice, followed by a variety of birds and lizards, including iguanas. When I first learned this, I wondered if the panic about invasive snakes was overblown. Rats and iguanas are invasive species, too. Aren’t the snakes just doing their own version of pest control? This is not how ecology works. “The rats are going to end at some point,” Puente-Rolón says, meaning their numbers will eventually dwindle. “What we have learned from Guam with the brown tree snake is that mammals are going to disappear and then birds are the next target.” (Other places have learned the same lesson. In Hawaii, enormous colonies of free-ranging cats eat rats, but they’ve also decimated endangered birds.) Cutting open snakes also serves another, deeper purpose: helping scientists understand how exotic species adapt to their new homes once they arrive. Typically, scientists try to predict the harm that invasive animals will cause by looking at what they do in their native range. Where do they live? What do they eat? But according to Colston, who studies evolution, invasive species can also evolve after they move in, picking up new behaviors. Importantly, some of those behaviors may make these animals more damaging invaders. In their homeland, boas and pythons have to contend with other large snakes and predators, such as big cats. These are constraints that shape their behavior, and their evolution. Here in Puerto Rico, however, invasive constrictors have no natural predators and few competitors. Under these conditions, it’s possible that they may evolve traits that help them thrive in all kinds of habitats on the island. Colston’s team at the University of Puerto Rico will analyze DNA from snakes captured across the island to try and figure this out. They’re looking for ways in which the genome is changing — and how those changes might manifest in the animal’s body and behavior. There are actually hints that some of this evolution may already be underway. In Cabo Rojo, boa constrictors are smaller than those elsewhere on the island. Miniaturization could be an adaptation to drier conditions; smaller bodies retain water more easily. (It’s not clear whether the snakes are actually evolving to be smaller, generation after generation, or just failing to reach a larger size within their lifetimes. Colston’s work will likely provide answers.) A worst-case scenario is still avoidable That’s the good news. Sure, there are loads of giant snakes slithering through the forests and grasslands of Puerto Rico right now, not far from homes and rare species. But so far, the damage to the island’s native species has been minor. “We are in the phase that the impact is not that bad on our species,” Puente-Rolón said. To stop the snake problem from becoming a crisis, the state needs to act quickly, scientists say. Authorities — or an educated public — need to quickly ramp up efforts to remove snakes that are already in the wild and clamp down on the illegal pet trade. To date, DRNA, the island’s wildlife agency, has done frustratingly little on both accounts, according to a number of biologists I spoke to for this story including Puente-Rolón, Feliciano-Rivera, and Gonzalez Crespo. They say the biggest issue is a lack of personnel and funding, they said. “They don’t have biologists, they don’t have the money,” Puente-Rolón said of DRNA. “If you have a forest infested with snakes and you only have one manager, what can he do?” —Ricardo Lopez-Ortiz, DRNA Instead of proactively removing snakes from the forest, DRNA rangers typically just respond to calls about sightings, and often only if someone is available, the scientists told me. Meanwhile, the wildlife holding facility is falling apart from a lack of upkeep and damage from hurricanes, a constant and worsening force of destruction. Remarkably, it’s likely that snakes have actually escaped from Cambalache, several biologists told me. This isn’t difficult to fathom: On the morning I visited Cambalache, a monkey that had apparently broken out of its enclosure was rattling some of the other cages. What’s more is that officials at the municipal level, who are often the first to get calls about invasive snakes, have been slow to share information about where, exactly, they’re picking up the animals. That information would help scientists map the spread. “We really don’t get any help from the local government,” Gonzalez Crespo said. I brought this up with Ricardo Lopez-Ortiz, who leads DRNA’s commercial fisheries division and is one of the few people at the agency who focuses on invasive species, including snakes. He acknowledged that there’s a lot to do, starting with getting more information. “We don’t know much,” he said of the spread of invasive snakes, adding that it’s possibly the “worst scenario” of any invasive species on the island. “We need to do more,” he told me. A lack of money isn’t the main issue, he said; the agency can get grants from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. But staff shortages have indeed been a serious problem, he said. “We don’t have enough personnel,” he told me. (More than a decade ago, when the country faced a financial crisis, the agency lost a large number of employees in an effort to cut government spending, he said. It’s been slow to refill the positions ever since, he added.) “If you have a forest infested with snakes and you only have one manager,” Lopez-Ortiz said, “what can he do?” (DRNA did not respond to a request for comment regarding the state of Cambalache facility. Lt. Ángel E. Atienza Fernández, a DRNA employee who oversees the Cambalache facility, also did not respond to direct requests for comment.) Puerto Rico also faces a number of forces that work against efforts to eradicate invasive species that are largely out of DRNA’s control, from natural disasters to the island’s much broader financial hardship. That leaves wildlife conservation lower on the government’s list of priorities. DRNA isn’t doing nothing. Lopez-Ortiz says the agency is developing a project in collaboration with biologists to study a number of invasive species including reticulated pythons and boas. That will involve gathering data from municipal authorities who are often the first to respond to snake calls. The agency is also working with government employees who manage state forests to help them identify and monitor invasive species. “We have plans and we are working,” he said. In the meantime, the heaviest burden of managing Puerto Rico’s snake problem falls on academic scientists — and the reticuleros, the python hunters. “This is going to be a problem in the long run,” Luna, one of the reticuleros, said. On my last night in Puerto Rico, Colston took me python hunting. Like most of my experiences in Puerto Rico that week, it was the stuff of nightmares. Colston had gotten a tip earlier in the day from a DRNA official that we might find snakes in an abandoned sports stadium in the mountains south of San Juan. We drove to the stadium and, after dark, went inside. The building was enormous, a huge ring of concrete surrounding a large, covered arena. Clumps of moss and plants grew in the stands. Old mattresses were strewn about. Bats flew overhead. And giant toads hopped around the stadium floor. Invasive snakes would fit right in. But we never saw any. This left me feeling conflicted. I honestly wanted to see a python in the wild, mostly for the thrill of it. At the same time, I knew there was hope in their absence. Certainly one python-free night means nothing; snakes avoid people and can be hard to spot, even in areas with loads of them. Still, it was a subtle reminder of something important: It’s not too late to act.vox.com
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What the death of Iran’s president could mean for its future Iranians gathered to mourn the death of President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in a helicopter crash the previous day, at Valiasr Square, on May 20, 2024 in Tehran, Iran | Majid Saeedi/Getty Images The Iranian regime is unlikely to change course in the near term, but Ebrahim Raisi’s death could affect crucial succession plans. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died Sunday in a helicopter crash, a shocking turn of events that immediately raised questions about the Islamic Republic’s future. In the short term, Raisi’s passing is unlikely to alter the direction of Iran’s politics. But it does remove one possible successor to 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the long term, Raisi’s unexpected death may prove more consequential. The question of Khamenei’s succession is increasingly urgent because of his advanced age. Though Iran’s president can be influential in setting policy, the Supreme Leader is the real seat of power, controlling the judiciary, foreign policy, and elections. Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian’s helicopter made a hard landing sometime on Sunday in Iran’s mountainous northwest, where weather conditions made travel difficult and dangerous. Iranian state media announced the deaths of the two politicians and six others onboard, including three crew members, on Monday after rescue teams finally reached the crash site. The deaths of both Raisi and Amirabdollahian come at a time of internal and external challenges for the Iranian regime. A harsh crackdown after the widespread protests of 2022 and significant economic problems domestically have eroded the regime’s credibility with the Iranian people. Internationally, Iran is embroiled in a bitter regional conflict with Israel as well as a protracted fight with the US over its nuclear program. In the near term, the first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, will be the acting president as the country prepares to hold elections within the next 50 days as dictated by its constitution. (The Iranian government includes vice presidencies overseeing different government agencies, similar to US Cabinet-level secretaries; the first vice president is roughly equivalent to the US vice president.) Raisi was considered a potential successor to Khamenei, having already been vetted by the ruling clerics during his 2021 presidential run and having been committed to the regime’s conservative policies. With his death, amid one of the regime’s most challenging periods, Iran’s long-term future is a little less certain. Within Iran, succession is the biggest question A hardline conservative cleric, Raisi always wore a black turban symbolizing his descent from the prophet Muhammad. His close relationship with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fueled speculation that he could succeed Khamenei. The paramilitary force exerts significant sway over internal politics and also wields influence throughout the broader region through aligned groups and proxy forces in Iraq and Syria, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. Raisi was initially elected in 2021 with 62 percent of the vote, though turnout was only 49 percent — the lowest ever in the history of the Islamic Republic, evidence of the crisis of legitimacy in which the government increasingly finds itself. “People don’t want to legitimate the government by participating in what they consider either fraudulent or just non-representative political outcomes,” Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Walter H. Annenberg professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told Vox. Throughout his judicial career, Raisi is alleged to be responsible for or implicated in some of the government’s most brutal repression and human rights abuses since the 1979 revolution, including serving on the so-called Death Committee, which was tasked with carrying out thousands of extrajudicial executions of political prisoners in the 1980s. During and after the Iran-Iraq war, there were a number of groups opposed to the regime, as well as supporters of the Iraqi position and even an attempt to attack Iran from Iraq. In order to preserve the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered a sweeping purge of the opposition; many of the dissidents who were arrested were chosen for execution arbitrarily. Following the disputed 2009 election — which birthed the Green Movement, the most significant threat to the regime in decades — Raisi, then a high-level member of the judiciary, called for the punishment and even execution of people involved in the movement. And as president, he helped oversee the violent backlash to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that erupted following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Raisi’s unpopularity due to his repressive past and worsening living standards for ordinary Iranians had helped further erode the government’s legitimacy, which may affect the upcoming presidential contest. “On the one hand, bringing people to the ballot boxes is going to be difficult,” Ali Vaez, director of the Iran program at the International Crisis Group, told Vox. “On the other, I think [the Council of Guardians, which oversees elections in Iran] also don’t want, necessarily, the people to come to the ballot boxes. And they also don’t want to have an open election, because the entire focus of the leadership right now is on ideological conformity at the top, they don’t really care about legitimacy from below.” That will mean a highly manicured list of candidates in the upcoming election. Though there are possibilities for some marginal change, Negar Mortazavi, a journalist and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, said during a panel discussion Monday that there will be little room for any significant shift. “[Raisi] could potentially be replaced by someone like Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf,” the current speaker of the Parliament, who is not a cleric and may be less socially conservative, Mortazavi said. “So I see a little bit of openings in the enforcement of, for example, mandatory hijab, the lifestyle policing of young Iranians. That’s the one area that we could potentially see any policy change direction or enforcement of existing laws and regulations.” But the next president, whoever it is, will likely be a caretaker and not the successor to Khamenei. That person — potentially Khamenei’s own son, Mojtaba — will be the conduit for power and policy in Iran over the coming decades. Iran’s political future will also be dictated by the IRGC, which has grown its power, visibility, and centrality in recent years. “What the [Iranian] deep state wants is a leader who’s no longer supreme, and is basically a frontman for the current office and the Revolutionary Guards to be able to preserve their vested economic and political interest in the system,” Vaez said. “There are clerics who would fit that profile — either Ayatollahs who are too old to be able to actually run their own affairs, and they certainly would not be able to run the country, or are too young and too inexperienced and lack constituency of their own.” Iran’s international precariousness, explained Raisi’s death comes as Iran is engaged in a deepening proxy war with Israel as the Jewish state fights Hamas in Gaza, particularly through Iran’s affiliated group in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Its allies in Yemen, the Houthis, have traded fire with US forces in the Red Sea, and Syrian and Iraqi militias have attacked US anti-terror installations in those countries. In April, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of an Iranian military official in Damascus, Syria earlier that month. It was the first time Iran had launched such an attack on Israeli territory from its own, and prompted further retaliation from Israel in the form of its own missile and drone attack. Iran’s conflict with Israel usually comes through allied non-state groups in its “axis of resistance” across the Middle East, like the militias in Syria and Iraq that attack American positions or Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which trades rocket fire with the Israeli military over the southern Lebanese border. Those international efforts are not likely to change significantly in the near future following Raisi’s death. Amirabdollahian was close to the IRGC command, the Associated Press reported Monday, and they are likely to maintain significant sway over Iran’s internal and external affairs. Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani will take over as acting foreign minister until a new government is formed. His portfolio includes negotiation over Iran’s nuclear program, which will continue to be a critical part of its foreign policy agenda. Some experts fear that any uncertainty about Iran’s internal politics, given the nuclear stakes, elevates the risk of direct conflict between Iran and the US or Israel. “Iran is already a nuclear weapons threshold state, and regional tensions are high,” Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said in a panel discussion Monday. “We’ve seen this uptick in Iranian statements about weaponization potential. So the risk of the United States or Israel miscalculating Iran’s nuclear intentions was already quite high, and any injection of domestic political turmoil increases the risk of misinterpreting Iranian actions. I think that the risk of miscalculation will remain.” On the other hand, this period of turnover, during which the Iranian government’s priority will likely be to mitigate any risk of major change or upheaval, could present an opportunity for the international community and the Biden administration to de-escalate relations with Iran, particularly concerning its nuclear projects, Davenport said. “I think the Biden administration should be prepared to try to put a package on the table that incentivizes Iran to take some short-term steps that reduce proliferation risk,” she added. Real change in Iran will not come through a single person, but through systemic change, Kashani-Sabet told Vox. “Iran needs a new political framework; we need a new constitutional framework,” she said. “I think this is really the only way out for Iran — a constitutional framework that helps to forge a more participatory and inclusive political culture.”vox.com
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Samuel Alito: The smallest judge who ever lived Joe Biden was about to become president, and the Alito household was in distress. On Thursday evening, the New York Times reported that, during the tense period between the January 6 insurrection and Biden’s inauguration, Justice Samuel Alito’s family displayed an upside-down American flag outside their home. An upside-down flag is a distress signal — a way that soldiers or ships at sea show that they are in extraordinary danger. Taken in isolation, it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions from this flag. The Times reports that many supporters of the “Stop the Steal” campaign — former President Donald Trump’s failed effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election — embraced an inverted American flag to signal their belief that the United States was in grave danger. Alito claims that the flag was raised by his wife “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” But this flag is hardly an isolated incident. On the bench, Alito is the Supreme Court’s most unrelenting Republican partisan — a reliable vote for whatever outcome is preferred by the GOP’s right wing, regardless of whether there is any legal support for that position. Alito isn’t simply a bad judge; he is the negation of law, frequently embracing claims that even intellectual leaders within the conservative movement find risible. The morning before the Times published its flag scoop, for example, Alito published a dissenting opinion claiming that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was unconstitutional. The opinion was so poorly reasoned that Justice Clarence Thomas, ordinarily an ally of far-right causes, mocked Alito’s opinion for “winding its way through English, Colonial, and early American history” without ever connecting that history to anything that’s actually in the Constitution. Off the bench, meanwhile, Alito has a long history of making partisan statements that are just ambiguous enough that he can deny he was bemoaning a Republican defeat in a recent election. A little more than a week after Democratic President Barack Obama won his 2012 reelection race, Alito spoke to the conservative Federalist Society, where, quoting from one of his least favorite law professors, he warned that America is caught in a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.” Alito has long been the justice most skeptical of free speech arguments — he was the sole dissenter in two Obama-era decisions establishing that even extraordinarily offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment — but this skepticism evaporates the minute a Republican claims that they are being censored. Among other things, Alito voted to let Texas’s Republican legislature seize control over content moderation at sites like Twitter and YouTube, then tried to prohibit the Biden administration from asking those same sites to voluntarily remove content from anti-vaxxers and election deniers. Alito frequently mocks his colleagues, even fellow Republicans, when they attribute government policies to anti-Black racism. After Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion that the states of Louisiana and Oregon allowed non-unanimous juries to convict felony defendants more than a century ago to dilute the influence of Black jurors, Alito was livid, ranting in dissent: “To add insult to injury, the Court tars Louisiana and Oregon with the charge of racism.” Yet while Alito denies that racism might have motivated Louisiana’s Jim Crow lawmakers in the late 19th century, he brims with empathy for white plaintiffs who claim to be victims of racism. When a white firefighter alleged that he was denied a promotion because of his race, Alito was quick to tie this decision to the local mayor’s fear that he “would incur the wrath of … influential leaders of New Haven’s African-American community” if the city didn’t promote more non-white firefighters. Empirical data shows that Alito is the most pro-prosecution justice on the Supreme Court, voting in favor of criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time. But he’s tripped over himself to protect one criminal defendant in particular: Donald Trump. An empirical analysis of the Court’s “standing” decisions — cases asking whether the federal courts have jurisdiction over a particular dispute — found that Alito rules in favor of conservative litigants 100 percent of the time, and against liberal litigants in every single case. Though Alito, who turned 74 last month, is probably in the twilight of his career, his unapologetically partisan approach to judging could very well be the judiciary’s future, at least if Trump secures another term in the White House. Today’s headlines are peppered with names like Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Trump’s stolen documents trial who has also behaved like a member of Trump’s defense team, or Matthew Kacsmaryk, the former Christian right litigator who’s been willing to rubber stamp virtually any request for a court order filed by a Republican. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the powerful federal court that oversees appeals out of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, is now a bastion of Alito-like partisans who treat laws and precedents that undermine the GOP’s policy goals as mere inconveniences to be struck down or ignored. These are the sorts of judicial appointees who would likely appeal to a second-term Trump, as the instigator of the January 6 insurrection looks to fill the bench with judges who will not interfere with his ambitions in the same way that many judges did in his first term. Alito — a judge with no theory of the Constitution, and no insight into how judges should read ambiguous laws, beyond his driving belief that his team should always win — is the perfect fit, in other words, for what the Republican Party has become in the age of Trump. Samuel Alito, by the numbers It’s probably possible to go through any long-serving judge’s record and find opinions that aren’t especially persuasive. So, rather than rely on anecdotal evidence of Alito’s partisanship, let’s start with two empirical analyses of his behavior on the Supreme Court. Political scientist Lee Epstein examined how often each current justice votes for a defendant’s position in criminal cases. Her data, which was first reported by NBC News, shows a fairly clear partisan divide. All three of the Court’s Democrats voted with criminal defendants in over half of the cases they heard, with former public defender Ketanji Brown Jackson favoring defendants in nearly 4 out of 5 cases. All six of the Court’s Republicans, meanwhile, vote with criminal defendants less than half the time. But there is also a great deal of variation among the Republicans. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the most libertarian of the Court’s Republican appointees, voted with criminal defendants in 45 percent of cases. Alito, who once served as the top federal prosecutor in the state of New Jersey, is the most pro-prosecution justice, voting with criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time. Yet Alito’s distrust for criminal defense lawyers seemed to evaporate the minute the leader of his political party became a criminal defendant. At oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the case asking whether Trump is immune from prosecution for his attempt to steal the 2020 election, Alito offered a dizzying argument for why his Court should give presidents broad immunity from criminal consequences. If an incumbent president who “loses a very close, hotly contested election” knows that they could face prosecution, Alito claimed, “will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito’s supposed concern was that a losing candidate will not “leave office peacefully” if they could be prosecuted by the incoming administration. The problem with this argument, of course, is that Trump is a case about a president who refused to leave office peacefully. Trump even incited an insurrection at the US Capitol after he lost his reelection bid. Similarly, in Fischer v. United States, a case asking whether January 6 insurrectionists can be charged under a statute making it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding, Alito peppered Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar with concerns that, if the January 6 defendants can be convicted under this law, that could someday lead to overly aggressive prosecutions of political protesters. At one point, Alito even took the side of a hypothetical heckler who starts screaming in the middle of a Supreme Court argument and is later charged with obstructing the proceeding. Alito can also set aside his pro-prosecution instincts in cases involving right-wing causes such as gun rights. At oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi, for example, Alito was one of the only justices who appeared open to a lower court’s ruling that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders have a Second Amendment right to own a gun. Indeed, many of Alito’s questions echoed so-called men’s rights advocates, who complain that judges unthinkingly issue these restraining orders without investigating the facts of a particular case. Consider, as well, a case analysis by Adam Unikowsky, a Supreme Court litigator who previously clerked for conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. In order to bring a federal lawsuit, a plaintiff must show that they were injured in some way by the defendant they wish to sue — a requirement known as “standing.” Unikowsky looked at 10 years’ worth of Supreme Court standing cases, first classifying each case as one where a “conservative” litigant brought a lawsuit, or as one where a “progressive” litigant filed suit. He then looked at how every current justice voted. Nearly every justice sometimes voted against their political views — Thomas, for example, voted four times that a conservative litigant lacked standing and twice voted in favor of a progressive litigant. Alito, however, was the exception. In all six cases brought by a conservative, Alito voted for the suit to move forward. Meanwhile, in all 10 cases brought by a progressive, Alito voted to deny standing. (Unikowsky also found that Justice Jackson, the Court’s newest member, has not yet crossed over in a standing case, but the data includes only one case, where she joined a 6–3 decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee.) Some of Alito’s standing opinions are genuinely embarrassing. The worst is his dissent in California v. Texas (2021), one of the four cases where Thomas voted to deny standing to a conservative litigant. Texas was the third of three Supreme Court cases attempting to destroy the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. But even many high-profile Republicans found this lawsuit humiliating. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board labeled this case the “Texas Obamacare Blunder.” Conservative policy wonk Yuval Levin wrote in the National Review that Texas “doesn’t even merit being called silly. It’s ridiculous.” As originally drafted, Obamacare required most Americans to pay higher taxes if they did not obtain health insurance. In 2017, however, Congress eliminated this tax by zeroing it out. The Texas plaintiffs claimed that this zero-dollar tax was unconstitutional, and that the proper remedy was that the Affordable Care Act must be repealed in its entirety. No one is allowed to bring a federal lawsuit unless they can show that they’ve been injured in some way. A zero-dollar tax obviously injures no one, because it doesn’t require anyone to pay anything. And so seven justices concluded that the Texas lawsuit must be tossed out. Alito dissented. While it is difficult to summarize his convoluted reasoning concisely, he essentially argued that, even if the zero-dollar tax did not injure these plaintiffs, they were injured by various other provisions of Obamacare and thus had standing. This is simply not how standing works — a litigant cannot manufacture standing to challenge one provision of federal law by claiming they are injured by another, completely different provision of federal law. As Jonathan Adler, one of the architects of a different Supreme Court suit attacking Obamacare, wrote of Alito’s opinion, “standing simply cannot work the way that Justice Alito wants it to” because, if it did, “it would become child’s play to challenge every provision of every major federal law so long as some constitutional infirmity could be located somewhere within the statute’s text.” Alito’s Texas opinion, in other words, would allow virtually anyone to challenge any major federal law, eviscerating the requirement that someone must actually be injured by a law before they can file a federal lawsuit against it. Needless to say, Alito does not take such a blasé attitude toward standing when left-leaning litigants appear in his Court. But, when handed a lawsuit that could sabotage Obama’s legacy, Alito was willing to waive one of the most well-established checks on judicial power so that he could invalidate the keystone of that legacy. Alito’s jurisprudence of white racial innocence In a 2005 speech explaining why he opposed Chief Justice John Roberts’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, then-Sen. Obama explained how he thinks judges actually decide difficult cases. While “95 percent” of cases can be resolved solely by looking at neutral legal principles, Obama said, “adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon” in the especially challenging cases that come before the Supreme Court. In those hardest cases, Obama argued, “that last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” One might think that empathy, which means the capacity to understand the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of another person, would be an essential quality in anyone tasked with judging other people. But Republicans later latched onto Obama’s statement as evidence that his judicial appointees would decide cases based on feelings and vibes, instead of law. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in 2016, “the President’s idea of what’s appropriate for justices to consider is totally at odds with our constitutional system. We are a government of laws and not a government of judges.” Alito’s jurisprudence, however, displays neither the universal empathy touted by Obama nor the kind of mechanical application of legal principles imagined by Grassley. Instead, Alito engages in selective empathy, often mocking the concerns of left-leaning litigants while simultaneously being extraordinarily protective of conservatives. And this selective empathy is most obvious in Alito’s decisions involving race. Alito lashes out at his colleagues when they accuse white lawmakers — even, in one case, white lawmakers in the Jim Crow South — of racism. Yet he showed tremendous empathy for the firefighter who claimed to be a victim of anti-white discrimination. Indeed, one of the unifying themes in Alito’s race cases is his desire to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law — and especially into American voting rights law. Consider, for example, Alito’s majority opinion in Abbott v. Perez (2018), where the Court’s Republican majority rejected a claim that Texas’s GOP-friendly congressional maps were an illegal racial gerrymander. In 2011, the Texas legislature drew maps that never took effect, and that were eventually declared an illegal gerrymander by a federal court. Because of the legal challenges to these maps, the state legislature drew alternative maps in 2012 that were supposed to be used only in that year’s election. Though much of these interim 2012 maps closely resembled the illegal 2011 maps, a court allowed Texas to use them in the 2012 election because otherwise the state would not have been able to conduct the election at all. Then, in 2013, the Texas legislature passed a new law converting the 2012 stopgap maps into permanent maps, meaning that they would be used until the next census in 2020. The state legislature did so, moreover, despite the fact that many of the districts in these new maps were still being challenged as unlawful racial gerrymanders. Alito’s opinion in Perez, however, cut most of these challenges off. He reasoned that “the 2013 Legislature’s intent was legitimate” because the decision to convert the interim maps into permanent maps was not driven by racism. Rather, it was driven by a desire to “bring the litigation about the State’s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.” Alito’s argument, in other words, was that the 2013 maps were permissible because they were enacted to shut down a lawsuit challenging a racial gerrymander. It’s as if the school districts that were declared unlawfully segregated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) had simply passed a new law re-creating the same racially segregated schools that existed before Brown was decided, and then argued that the new law should be upheld because it was enacted to end a lawsuit challenging segregation. Consider, as well, Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), a case asking whether two Arizona election laws that allegedly had a disproportionate negative impact on nonwhite voters violated a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act. In rejecting this claim, Alito simply made up a bunch of new limits on the Voting Rights Act that appear nowhere in the law’s text. He declared, for example, that state laws which purport to fight voter fraud are presumptively legal. He also applied a strong presumption that any voting restriction that was commonplace in 1982 does not violate the 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act. This later presumption is completely ridiculous. The only reason why Congress enacts any law is because it wants to change the status quo. If Congress enacted a new voting rights law in 1982, that means that Congress was unsatisfied with the state of voting rights in 1982 and wanted to change it — not to preserve restrictions that were commonplace at the time. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her Brnovich dissent, Alito’s opinion “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.” Alito’s selective concern about the First Amendment Earlier this month, Alito delivered the commencement address at Franciscan University, a Catholic school in Ohio. Much of his speech echoed the sort of anti-“cancel culture” rhetoric that can be heard on any given episode of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “Troubled waters are slamming against some of our most fundamental principles,” Alito told the graduates, echoing similar rhetoric that he used to describe the reelection of President Obama in 2012. “Support for freedom of speech,” Alito claimed, “is declining dangerously, especially where it should find broadest and widest acceptance.” Alito’s concern about free speech is a little jarring, because he’s long been the justice least likely to back free speech claims by civil rights plaintiffs. In 2010 and 2011, for example, Alito was the sole dissenter in two important free speech cases reiterating the Court’s well-established view that speech is protected by the First Amendment even if it is likely to offend most people. The justice’s more recent free speech decisions, meanwhile, largely turn on whether the party that wishes to shape public discourse is a Democrat or a Republican. In 2021, for example, Texas’s Republican legislature enacted a law that effectively seizes control over all content moderation at major social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. The law was an explicit effort to force these platforms to host right-wing content that they would prefer not to publish. “It is now law that conservative viewpoints in Texas cannot be banned on social media,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said when he signed the law. The law is also comically unconstitutional. The Court held in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), that “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And it held in Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974), a publication’s choice to publish or not publish certain content is subject only to the outlet’s “editorial control and judgment,” and “it has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press.” Yet, when a majority of his colleagues voted to temporarily block this Texas law, Alito dissented, suggesting that Texas’s Republican lawmakers should have more leeway to address “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.” Not long after Alito wrote this dissent, however, the Court heard another case, known as Murthy v. Missouri, which involved an unusual order handed down by the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That order effectively forbade the Biden administration from asking social media companies to voluntarily remove harmful content, such as videos seeking to recruit terrorists or tweets that promote false and potentially dangerous medical advice. Once again, a majority of Alito’s colleagues voted to block this lower court order. Once again, Alito dissented. It should be obvious that the First Amendment cannot simultaneously empower a Republican government to force media outlets to change their editorial policies, while also forbidding a Democratic government from asking a media outlet to change what it publishes — unless, of course, you believe that there is one First Amendment for Democrats and a different one for Republicans. Later in his address to Francisan’s graduating class, Alito had a revealing line about why he believes that freedom of religion is threatened in the United States. “Religious liberty is also threatened,” Alito claimed. Then he warned the graduates that “when you venture out into the world, you may well find yourself in a job, or community or a social setting when you will be pressured to endorse ideas you don’t believe, or to abandon core beliefs.” This warning blurs an important line between the kind of pressure that can plausibly violate “religious liberty,” and the kind of pressure that is just an ordinary part of living in a pluralistic society. Alito is correct that, under some circumstances, a worker who is pressured because of their religious beliefs at work may have a viable religious liberty claim. That’s because federal law requires employers to accommodate their employee’s religious beliefs unless doing so would impose an “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.” So, for example, if a worker’s boss pressured a conservative Catholic employee to sign a statement endorsing the right to an abortion, such pressure would likely violate this worker’s civil rights. But there is no right to be free from pressure, or even social ostracization, because people in your community or social circles find your religious beliefs abhorrent. If freedom of religion means anything, it must include both the right of a conservative evangelical to believe that gay people are sinful, and the right of everyone else to turn up their nose in disgust at anyone who expresses such a viewpoint. Yet Alito hasn’t simply argued that conservative Christians have a right not to be shunned for their views, he’s argued that the rights of gay Americans must be diminished in order to protect the feelings of people who oppose those rights. Hence Alito’s argument that Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, was wrongly decided because “it will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” Thus, in Samuel Alito’s America, Republicans have the power to control media, while Democrats can’t even ask media outlets to change what they publish. Meanwhile, the rights of historically marginalized groups must be diminished to prevent anyone from speaking ill of those who would marginalize them. Can Alito be defended? A 2023 essay by attorney Adam White tries to find a larger intellectual project behind Alito’s jurisprudence, beyond an overarching command that the Republican Party should always win. Alito, White claims, is a “Burkean conservative,” a reference to the 18th-century English conservative Edmund Burke, who is wary of the “dangers of concentrating too much power [in] the hands of elites or elite institutions.” White argues that Alito seeks to preserve traditional ways of organizing society, and to diminish the power of institutions that can cause the United States to depart from such traditions. As White writes, “when government action — especially the swift and sweeping work of agencies, executives, and courts, rather than legislatures — threatens longstanding traditions or the institutions and communities that keep and transmit them, Justice Alito’s instinct has been to begin with a presumption in favor of defending tradition.” Alito, for what it’s worth, appears to think of himself very much as White describes him. In his Franciscan speech, for example, Alito argued that the Constitution “guards against improvident change,” both because the document itself is almost impossible to amend, and because it makes it very difficult for the federal government to make law. The framers of the Constitution, Alito claims, “knew that times would inevitably come when people would be tempted to make hurried and unwise changes,” and they believed that the “country’s well-being depended on the ability to resist these temptations.” Thus, at Franciscan, Alito presented himself as that most conservative of guardians — a judge who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” But if Alito imagines a country that is slow to change its laws, and one where Congress — and not swifter-moving institutions like the courts or executive branch agencies — are the drivers of policy, this vision appears to wax and wane depending on who is in the White House, and whether a new policy benefits liberals or conservatives. Consider two cases, both of which involve court decisions that sought to shape US policy. In Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California (2020), a majority of Alito’s colleagues concluded that the Trump administration failed to complete the appropriate paperwork when it tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA, which had been in effect for eight years when the Court ruled, allows hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children to live and work in this country. When a Republican administration sought to end a program created by Democrats, Alito behaved exactly as White describes him — warning about concentrating too much power in the judiciary. Shortly after Trump officials tried to end DACA, Alito wrote in dissent, “one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked this rescission, and since then, this issue has been mired in litigation.” He complained that “the federal judiciary” had effectively prevented Trump from implementing one of his policy goals “during an entire presidential term.” Three years later, however, one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked a different federal policy. Kacsmaryk, the crusader for the religious right that Trump put on the bench, attempted to ban the abortion drug mifepristone nearly a quarter century after the FDA authorized doctors to prescribe it in the United States. Even on Alito’s very conservative, anti-abortion Court, he was one of only two justices who went along with this attempt to remove a widely available medication from the market by judicial decree. Or consider Alito’s vote in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the challenge to Trump’s decision to ban citizens of several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. Trump did so, moreover, after bragging on the campaign trail about his plan to enact an unconstitutional ban on Muslims entering the United States if elected president. Before Trump took office, Alito was often the Court’s most outspoken proponent of an expansive concept of religious freedom, especially in cases involving conservative Christians. But Alito abandoned this concern for religious liberty, as well as any concerns about the executive branch setting policy, in the Hawaii case. Instead, Alito joined an opinion claiming that federal law “exudes deference” to President Trump. Under President Biden, by contrast, Alito’s been one of the Court’s strongest proponents of the so-called major questions doctrine, a judicially created doctrine that’s been used almost exclusively to strike down policies created by Democratic administrations, and that has no basis in either the Constitution’s text or in any statute. Indeed, Alito’s even wielded this doctrine to strike down Biden administration policies that were unambiguously authorized by federal law. So let’s dispel this fiction that Alito takes a principled, Burkean approach to the law and the Constitution. Alito does often use the sort of rhetoric that is associated with traditionalist forms of conservatism, but that rhetoric only drives his actual decisions when it leads to the outcome he prefers. Samuel Alito is one of the worst judges of his generation. He rejects the very basic idea that courts must decide cases based on the law, and not based on their partisan views. He routinely embarrasses himself in oral arguments, and in his published opinions, with legal reasoning that no sensible lawyer can take seriously. And he even tries to distort public debate and silence critics. But most of all, Alito is one of the most uninteresting thinkers in the country. Here he is, in one of the most powerful and intellectually rigorous jobs on the planet — a philosopher king, presiding over the mightiest nation that has ever existed — and his only big idea is “Republicans should win.”vox.com
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How screens actually affect your sleep It’s about more than just the blue light. We’ve all heard that using our phones before bed is bad for us, but do we actually know why? One of the most commonly cited reasons is that our phone’s blue light is disrupting our ability to fall asleep — but study after study has shown that just changing the color of light, or turning on night mode or night shift, isn’t enough to counteract the effects of our screens. The truth is that color temperature is just one aspect of how our phone light is stimulating our brains. Sleep science suggests that the key to getting good rest is much more complex. So if using night mode on our phones is not the only solution, and we know we’re likely going to keep scrolling before bed, is there a better way to use our phone at night, without disrupting our sleep? To find out more, check out Vox Video’s latest.This video is presented by Brilliant. Head to https://brilliant.org/vox/ for a 30-day free trial and 20% off your annual subscription. Brilliant doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this possible.vox.com
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Biden promised to defeat authoritarianism. Reality got in the way. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken performs “Rockin’ in the Free World” with members of The 1999 band at the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv on May 14, 2024. | Brendan Smialowski/Pool/AFP via Getty Images Still rockin’ in the free world? When Secretary of State Antony Blinken strapped on a guitar and took the stage at a Kyiv rock club last week to sing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he didn’t amuse many of the Biden administration’s critics, who questioned whether the jam session was in good taste at a time when children are starving in Gaza and when Russian forces are making rapid gains in eastern Ukraine, partly due to the long delay in delivering US weapons to the front. But the song’s eponymous chorus (Blinken skipped the far more caustic verses, which make it clear that Young was being ironic) is a good representation of how the Biden administration would like its foreign policy to be viewed, particularly when it comes to support for Ukraine. As Blinken told the crowd, Ukraine’s forces “are fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world — and the free world is with you too.” Almost from the beginning, President Joe Biden has defined his administration as locked in a struggle to push back against the global erosion of democracy and “win the 21st century” against authoritarian powers like China and Russia. He has often described this struggle as guiding not just America’s foreign policy but its domestic priorities, saying America must prove that democracy “still works” to deliver economic growth and prosperity. This type of rhetoric only intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Biden has framed as a test of the democratic world’s resolve. The democracy versus autocracy framing drew a stark contrast with Donald Trump, who as president took a narrowly transactional view of foreign policy, had chummy relationships with leaders like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the Saudi royal family, and undermined democratic norms at home. It also drew a more subtle contrast with Barack Obama, whose signature foreign policy achievements — the Iran nuclear deal, the diplomatic opening to Cuba, breakthrough climate change diplomacy with China — often involved doing business with some of the world’s most repressive governments. “I believe that — every ounce of my being — that democracy will and must prevail,” Biden told the Munich Security Conference a few weeks after taking office. Putting that belief into practice has been more difficult. What’s the US actually doing in the world? In practice, the Biden administration’s foreign policy has been more conventional than the rhetoric suggests: “Realpolitik from top to bottom,” as international relations scholar Paul Poast put it earlier this year. The goal has not so much been to defeat authoritarianism writ large as to compete with and contain particular authoritarian powers: China, Russia, and Iran. Sometimes, as in US support for Ukraine’s war effort and military aid to Taiwan, this can fairly be described as standing up for a beleaguered democracy. Sometimes, as in the upgrading of relations between the US and Vietnam that came during Biden’s visit to the country last year, it’s hard to see it that way. Conveniently for the US, Vietnam — a major American trade partner — is increasingly wary about China’s territorial aims in the South China Sea, but the two countries have very similar political systems: single-party Communist regimes without national elections. When the US convened a virtual “summit of democracies” in 2021, a good portion of the coverage and commentary focused not on the meetings themselves, but on the guest list. For instance, Hungary, a country whose government was backsliding on democracy and the rule of law and becoming increasingly friendly to Russia, was excluded. Poland, a country whose government was (at the time) backsliding on democracy and the rule of law, but was staunchly anti-Russian, was not. In 2022, the US hosted the Summit of the Americas — a periodic gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders — but excluded Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, all authoritarian governments subject to US sanctions. The administration’s principled pro-democracy stance was undercut somewhat by the fact that the White House was simultaneously planning a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, as they have from numerous previous administrations, evidently get a pass when it comes to Biden’s freedom agenda. The president famously promised on the campaign trail to make Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, a “pariah” over his role in the killing of journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi. In 2022, with the war in Ukraine putting pressure on global oil markets, Biden and “MBS” shared an awkward fist bump in Riyadh. More recently, the administration has been pushing an ambitious deal under which Saudi Arabia would formally recognize Israel in exchange for concessions from Israel on Palestinian statehood and formal security guarantees from the US. The US hasn’t agreed to a pact like this with any country since Japan in 1960. Then there’s India, where nearly a billion voters are going to the polls this month, but where moves by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to sideline its opponents and crack down on the media have raised questions about how much longer the “world’s largest democracy” will live up to that title. The administration has been conspicuously quiet about the democratic backsliding in a country it considers a vital bulwark against Chinese power. This soft touch has continued even in the face of compelling evidence of plans by India’s intelligence services to kill the government’s critics on US soil. And finally, there’s Israel’s war on Gaza. The administration’s arguments that countries in the Global South should be doing more to back Ukraine and punish Russia in the name of the rules-based international order fall a little flat when the US continues to provide weapons to a country that even the State Department concludes is likely violating the laws of war. This administration is hardly the first to fall short of its own rhetoric when it comes to democracy and human rights. And it’s not as if Trump would do more to advance democracy or human rights if elected instead — not when it comes to Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or any other country. But the sweep and ambition of this president and his team’s rhetoric make it hard not to note the inconsistencies as they rock on in an increasingly unfree world. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.vox.com
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Why are whole-body deodorants suddenly everywhere? Getty Images Maybe you actually smell fine. Whole-body deodorants are upon us. They’re not an entirely new concept: Axe Body Spray, Unilever’s fusion of fragrance and deodorant, has been singeing nostrils since 1983, and in 2018, Lumé, created by an OB/GYN, came on the scene for “pits, privates, and beyond.” This spring, legacy brands jumped on board en masse: Since the start of 2024 alone, Secret, Dove, Old Spice, and Native launched whole-body products consumers can apply as sticks, sprays, and creams. What the funk is going on? “It is either, at best, an absurd, comical money grab — and at worst, a concerning phenomenon for your health,” says Sarah Everts, author of The Joy of Sweat. Sweating is a human superpower, she says; few other species can use sweat to avoid overheating. To Everts and other critics, the existence of whole-body deodorants should raise our curiosity about why we feel the need to smell a certain way — or not. They should also make us wonder who stands to profit by changing social norms about sweat, hygiene, and odor. Sweat and the strategies for managing it might seem relatively simple, but they’re not. The market for deodorants, especially the kind intended for application everywhere, rests on a foundation of collective confusion about how these products and our bodies actually work. Different parts of the body make different kinds of sweat — and different kinds of smells Not all sweat is created equal: Human bodies have two kinds of sweat glands, and their products are not exactly the same. Apocrine sweat glands are typically concentrated in the places where hair grows during puberty — the armpits, the groin, and the butt. These glands make a waxy substance that certain bacteria love to eat, and it’s the byproducts of that microbial banquet that create the musky aromas most commonly associated with body odor. “The sweat in our armpits is different — quite different — from the sweat that covers your body,” says Andrew Best, a biological anthropologist who studies sweat at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. That’s because the rest of your body is covered with eccrine sweat glands, whose product is a more watery, salty liquid that’s less appealing to bacteria but does a bang-up job of keeping us cool. Eccrine sweat is what covers most of our body during exercise. It might occasionally evoke recently ingested food and drink, with particularly piquant notes after a garlic bread binge or a very boozy night. Still, because it’s not well-suited for bacterial consumption, eccrine sweat just doesn’t usually generate the odors that apocrine sweat does. There is such a thing as dysfunctional sweating: About 10 million Americans produce way more sweat than their body’s temperature-regulating needs, either as a consequence of certain medical conditions or medications, or just because it’s the way they’re wired — a condition called hyperhidrosis. Other, less common medical conditions produce particularly pungent sweat. But most of the sweat most people produce serves a positive biological function: “Sweating is almost always good,” says Best. Deodorants and antiperspirants aren’t the same The over-the-counter products available to combat sweat typically do one of two things: They either prevent sweat glands from producing sweat to begin with (antiperspirants), or they change the smell of the sweat (deodorants). Antiperspirants block sweat pores using one of several aluminum-containing compounds. In the Food and Drug Administration’s book, the fact that antiperspirants change the way a body part functions — in this case, a sweat gland — makes them over-the-counter drugs. That classification means companies face more restrictions if they want to include these aluminum compounds in products. (A rumor literally spread by an email chain letter in the 1990s and a long-abandoned 1960s-era hypothesis have led many people to avoid using aluminum-based odor control products due to fears about breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively; heaps of science have since shown these fears are unfounded.) Although many products intended for underarm application combine an antiperspirant with a deodorant in one, products labeled as deodorants alone aren’t supposed to contain these aluminum compounds. They’re not intended to block your sweat pores; rather, they aim to change the odors that result from the sweat once it’s already on your skin. Distinguishing between antiperspirants and deodorants is important because sweat actually plays a huge role in keeping us cool when we’re overheating, and blocking too much of it could threaten a person’s ability to regulate their temperature. In part for that reason, antiperspirants are typically labeled for use only under the arms (conveniently, the origins of most of the smells people using these products are trying to control). Deodorants, on the other hand, can use a range of approaches to reduce the smell of sweat all over the body without interfering with its cooling function, says Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist in Cincinnati. (Dobos has never worked for any of the companies now marketing full-body deodorants, although she has in the past done non-deodorant-related work for the parent company of Ban, which now makes a deodorizing lotion for private parts.) Dobos reviewed the ingredient lists of a range of whole-body deodorants, including legacy brands and newer brands. The spray products typically contained little more than alcohol and fragrance — they’re basically perfumes, she says, and the alcohol concentration in these products probably isn’t high enough to kill the good bacteria living on your skin, which have a staggering range of protective functions. Meanwhile, several of the creams contained lactic or mandelic acids, whose low pH creates an environment that favors the growth of those good, non-stinky bacteria, crowding out odor-causing germs. A handful of sticks and creams contained starch, aimed at absorbing wetness. Some brands’ entire ranges contained zinc compounds known to neutralize stinky molecules; other active ingredients include compounds called cyclodextrins intended to absorb odor, and enzymes called microbial ferments that purportedly degrade odor-causing molecules. Many of these ingredients also turn up in standalone deodorants intended for underarm application. One product, a Lumé “sweat control” deodorant cream, contained an aluminum compound that’s actually an antiperspirant, which raises concerns about a problem with the product’s labeling, says Dobos. “I have a feeling the FDA will give them a call.” Do most people actually need full-body deodorant? With the exception of improperly labeled products, most whole-body deodorants can do …whatever it is they do without hijacking the body’s cooling system. Still, before people decide to fork over the money for yet another cosmetic product, it’s worth thinking about whether sweat from behind your knees, your skin folds, or even your nether regions is actually a problem in need of a solution. After all, these products are not meant to target odors from underarm sweat. Rather, they take aim at odors due to apocrine sweat in the groin — not something casual contacts typically perceive because groins are (usually) under a few layers of fabric and a few feet away from others’ noses — and eccrine sweat elsewhere on the body, which is largely inoffensive to most noses, even when there’s a lot of it. “Just bathing should take care of whatever quote-unquote ‘problem’ you think you have. And if you need to be throwing more at your microbiome than a simple daily shower,” Best says, “it’s probably your perceptions of your smell that are the problem, not actually the smell.” “Nobody’s being fooled into thinking that you’re a citrus fruit,” added Everts. Because deodorants qualify as cosmetics and not as drugs, the companies that produce them don’t have to do safety or effectiveness testing before selling them to the public. That means products that could cause skin irritation or allergic reactions — especially in the more sensitive skin of the groin — can still be freely marketed for whole-body use. “It is the Wild West,” says Adam Friedman, a dermatologist at George Washington University who is also a faculty member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society. Sweat itself can irritate the skin, and for people with pathologic sweating such as those with hyperhidrosis, whole-body deodorants are likely to disappoint because they don’t actually reduce sweat output. “[They’ll] have no effect on excessive sweating and may even cause harm,” says Friedman — but because people with these conditions are so desperate for help, it’s a marketing no-brainer to try to sell them solutions. When it comes to skin conditions, he says, it’s “very easy to take advantage of those suffering.” If you try a whole-body deodorant, avoid applying it to mucous membranes (the wet surfaces beyond labial folds and anuses) and use it only on select portions of intact, non-irritated skin to lower the chances the product causes more problems than it solves. Dobos noted the ingredients in most whole-body deodorants are largely benign and probably won’t disrupt your skin’s microbiome too much if used in moderation. In her view, these products are unlikely to be biologically problematic. “But they’re probably still culturally problematic [in that they set] the wrong expectations for young people regarding how their body should smell,” says Best. Hygiene norms can be manipulated to make money (off of you) Body odor exists on a spectrum, and one end of that spectrum includes smells that are globally recognized as gnarly, much as there’s broad human consensus that sewage and dead animals have offensive aromas. So yes, human sweat can smell quite bad. As early as the first century BCE, the Roman poet Catullus dissed a male contemporary for the “grim goat” housed in his armpits, saying (poetically) it was the reason he never got laid. But it’s also true that a lot of American norms around body odor originated with people who had a financial stake in creating them. The inventors of the first modern antiperspirant couldn’t get people to buy it for the first decade after they developed it; sales only took off after a 1919 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal hinted that women with insufficiently “dainty and sweet” underarms would never land a husband. Americans may be particularly easy marks for advertising campaigns that promise conspicuous hygiene. The nation’s peculiar association between cleanliness and godliness, imported by Puritans and Quakers centuries ago, helped personal odor become a particularly strong signifier of moral, physical, and racial purity in the US early in the nation’s history, writes anthropologist Marybeth MacPhee. These ideas led to olfactory discrimination against Black Americans, creating a particularly strong incentive to “smell clean” as a strategy for acceptance into (or protection from) white society; they have also been used to disparage immigrants with different diets and fragrance norms as diseased or low status over the years. Such concepts clearly have commercial utility, as well: They’ve helped create a lucrative market for dubiously necessary hygiene products in the US — especially among women and sometimes to their detriment, as in the cases of douching and talcum powder. If you have a problem with smells coming from your groin, “you need to be going to a doctor, not a store,” says Everts. But with whole-body deodorants, companies are urging consumers to sanitize all body aromas — not just the goat-y ones. Among the experts I spoke to, there was strong consensus that whole-body deodorants exist largely to make money for the companies that sell them. Deodorant and antiperspirant sales have been pretty steady for the past few years, says Dobos; adding a new product with new uses potentially increases the amount of money both manufacturers and retailers can make. “They’ve manufactured a problem so they can sell us a product to fix it,” says Best. Whether you’re buying or not, it’s worth thinking about what it means to reject all of your body’s natural smells, not just its most offensive ones. The fundamental odor unique to each of us — not the stuff coming out of our armpits, but the rest of the aromas our bodies make — is part of our identity, says Everts. “It’s a symphony of subtle smells that make you who you are and help the people who love you and spend time with you identify you,” she says. “Why would you mess with that?”vox.com
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If Trump wins, what would hold him back? Paige Vickers/Vox; Joan Wong for Vox; Photo by Mark Peterson/Associated Press The guardrails of democracy reined him in last time. But they’re weakening. Seven days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump threw the nation into crisis. The country had wondered whether the new president would follow through on the extreme and authoritarian proposals he’d put forward in his campaign. On January 27, 2017, by executive order, Trump imposed an extreme version of his “Muslim ban” — barring people from seven mostly-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Even people already approved as lawful permanent residents — people with green cards, who had been legally living and working in the US, often for years — could all of a sudden be turned away, refused entry to their adopted home. Chaos unfolded at airports, nationwide protests erupted, and to many, it felt like something new and genuinely frightening was taking place: a slide into an oppressive regime. But then the crisis ebbed. Just two days after the ban was imposed, widespread criticism pushed the administration to water down the policy — “clarifying” green card holders were exempt. Five days after that, a judge blocked the rest of the order from going into effect. The guardrails protecting democracy had, it seemed, held. This pattern recurred during Trump’s presidency. The president ordered or considered something outrageous. He faced pushback in response. And he usually, ultimately, ended up constrained. Sometimes Trump would eventually end up with a scaled-back version of what he wanted: a retooled travel ban, made less blatantly discriminatory, did eventually get court approval. Sometimes he’d manage to go quite far — as in his attempt to steal the 2020 election — before being thwarted. But often he’d fail entirely. All this has led to a sort of complacency among many Americans about what a second Trump term would bring. There’s a mentality of: “It won’t be that bad — we got through it last time, right?” We did get through it last time. But that wasn’t for lack of Trump’s trying. It was because of the guardrails: those features of the political system, both formal and informal, that so often prevented Trump from actually doing the undemocratic things he tried to do. So to assess the peril a second Trump term poses for American democracy, we need to assess the condition of the guardrails. Worryingly, most of them have weakened since Trump first came to power; some have weakened very significantly. None appear to have gotten stronger. We’re still a very long way from a system where the president can truly rule without any checks on his power. We can’t know right now exactly how often the guardrails would still hold Trump back, or how future crises would play out. But it’s easy to see how a more determined and radicalized Trump, in a system with significantly weaker guardrails, could lead American democracy to even more dangerous places. The guardrails: What they are To understand what exactly the guardrails protecting American democracy are, think about how Trump’s corrupt ambitions were so often frustrated during his first term. When he fired FBI Director James Comey, he ended up with special counsel Robert Mueller. When he wanted Mueller fired, it didn’t happen. When Trump urged prosecutors to charge his political enemies, they largely didn’t. He tried to punish CNN for negative coverage by blocking their parent company’s sale to AT&T; the sale went through. He tried to get Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on the Biden family, but that effort blew up in his face and got him impeached. He never went through with other things he mused about — like delaying the 2020 election due to the pandemic or using the military to crack down on racial justice unrest. And though his attempt to overturn Biden’s election win went further than almost anyone expected, it ultimately failed too. In all these instances, there was pushback from part of the political system — often multiple parts — that either convinced or impelled Trump to back down. We can think of the forces constraining Trump in two categories. First, there are all the other government officials, among whom power in the system is dispersed. These include: Executive branch appointees, many of whom often refused to carry out Trump’s orders even though Trump himself appointed them The career civil service — the permanent government employees who can’t be fired Members of Congress, who pass or block laws, confirm nominees, and raise a stink when the administration does something they don’t like The courts, charged with enforcing the law, who often ruled against Trump State and local officials, such as the election administrators who certified Biden’s swing state wins in 2020 Second, there are the informal constraints. These include: The Republican Party, which, broadly defined, includes politicians, party officials, and interest groups Trump wants to keep on his side The press, which can unearth damaging news and hammer a president with critical coverage The public, who, when roused, can speak out, take to the streets, or vote politicians out of office To be truly successful, a would-be authoritarian would need to coopt, weaken, or smash many of these rival power centers. Some of Trump’s second-term agenda is designed to do just that. The executive branch: Can the “deep state” protect democracy? The president is, in theory, in charge of the executive branch. In practice, things are more complicated. The chief executive’s instructions have to be carried out by people — people who can refuse to go along. About 2.2 million civil servants work across the federal government in career posts, in addition to 1.3 million active duty military personnel. They cannot be fired at the president’s say-so. In his book American Resistance, David Rothkopf argues that many such officials across different ages acted “in an informal alliance” during Trump’s first term to keep him “from doing irreparable damage to the United States.” At the top of these federal agencies are the political appointees Trump actually gets to pick. They number about 4,000, of which around 1,200 require Senate confirmation. But these hand-picked appointees also often slow-walked, argued against, or refused to carry out President Trump’s orders. This is an interesting phenomenon, and it’s worth thinking about why it happened. One reason may be that Trump often appointed “the wrong people” — that is, GOP establishment or nonpartisan figures rather than cronies and personal loyalists. But another reason could be that top government posts themselves have a sort of pragmatizing effect to many who hold them. Once sworn in, appointees have to deal with the reality of their agencies’ capabilities, as well as with the practical and legal perils of putting Trump’s more extreme ideas into effect. This dynamic was demonstrated most dramatically during the election crisis, when officials in the Justice Department, the White House Counsel’s Office, the Department of Homeland Security, the military, and other agencies declined to aid Trump’s schemes, as did Vice President Mike Pence. Not everyone balked, though. Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official, made clear he would happily denounce swing state election results as fraudulent if Trump put him in charge of DOJ. Warned that riots would break out across the country if Trump illegally stayed in power, Clark answered, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act” — suggesting Trump could use the military to suppress protests of his power grab. (Trump nearly named Clark acting attorney general, but backed down after other DOJ officials made it clear they’d resign if he did.) Clark shows there’s nothing guaranteed or automatic about the phenomenon where top officials constrain Trump’s worst impulses. Clark did end up facing serious consequences — he is being criminally prosecuted alongside Trump in Fani Willis’s Georgia case and may be disbarred too, but he was willing to take that risk. So if Trump could reliably identify and appoint many more Jeffrey Clarks to top posts, he’d be far better equipped to corrupt the executive branch. And what if he could turn thousands of career civil servants into mini Jeffrey Clarks, too? Trump’s team has a plan for that. They say Trump will use his executive authority to reclassify tens of thousands of high-level career posts as political jobs, and then fire many of the people currently in those jobs, replacing them with prescreened MAGA loyalists. Despite the big talk, there’s a question of whether Trump’s team really can pull this off. “A lot will depend on the efficiency and effectiveness of his team,” Rothkopf told Vox. “As we’ve seen in the past he doesn’t always attract the A-Team. They’re not always good at this kind of thing.” If they can make it happen, though, the result could be a federal government that, at every level, is far more corrupt and willing to be weaponized against the president’s enemies. Congress and the Republican Party: two weakened guardrails Congress has a long history of frustrating and checking the ambitions of presidents, whose bold legislative agendas typically get dramatically downsized. In Trump’s first term, he adopted House Speaker Paul Ryan’s legislative agenda of repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, shelving his own hopes for an infrastructure bill due to lack of GOP support. Then, centrist Republican senators thwarted the Obamacare repeal bill. And in the midterms, the GOP lost the House, sharply constraining Trump’s legislative ambitions for his next two years. So far, so normal. But the modern Congress is a deeply partisan institution, and in recent years, the Republican Party has changed. At first, Trump was to a large extent coopted by the GOP, but since then, he has flipped the power dynamic. He has used his influence over the party’s base to make clear that if you refuse to defend his corrupt conduct, he’ll brand you an enemy — and your future in the party will be short. This transformation has been particularly evident in the House of Representatives. Despite perennial drama among the chamber’s conservatives, House Republicans have become increasingly sycophantic supporters of Trump — often because, they believe, this is what their voters want. More than half of the House GOP voted to overturn Biden’s wins in swing states. Vocal Trump critics keep losing primaries or quitting the party, while the speakers keep going to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee. A GOP House would be far less likely to constrain Trump next time around. The most obvious way Congress can strike back against a corrupt president is by impeaching and removing him from office. But even after Trump’s attempt to steal the election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a mere 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him. Only two of them still remain in Congress. Partisanship has defanged the threat of impeachment. Any resistance would likely be concentrated in the Senate. The current Democratic majority will very likely flip to the GOP if Trump wins, but still, senators have six-year terms that insulate most from imminent primary pressure. The chamber was frequently a thorn in Trump’s side in his first term, and it has never been a MAGA power base; only eight senators were hardcore MAGA enough to vote for throwing out Biden’s swing state wins in 2020. Yet the Senate has gotten more Trumpist. Only three of ten GOP senators who voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy) will still be in office in 2025. Mitch McConnell, who’d bitterly feuded with Trump, is stepping down from his leadership post later this year. And a favorable map gives the party an opportunity to make big Senate gains. The bigger a majority that Republicans win, the less Collins’s and Murkowski’s opinions will matter. Nominations would be the first test to see if the Senate would still constrain Trump — swing senators could withhold their votes from nominees they believe to be extreme or unqualified. But there would likely be immense party pressure on senators to back Trump’s picks if he wins. And if the Senate blocks some, Trump may well try to slot them in anyway, by naming them “acting” appointees, and betting they’ll roll over and accept it. The fate of the filibuster, which in practice requires 60 Senate votes for all bills except the limited category of “budget reconciliation,” will also matter hugely. A new Republican Senate majority could change its rules to kill the filibuster. If the filibuster stays, Trump’s legislative ambitions will be sharply constrained; he will need Democratic votes to pass almost anything. If it goes, the sky’s the limit. Currently, key Senate Republicans are saying they want to keep the filibuster. Would they stick to that or cave to Trump’s demands to get rid of it? In the end, the Senate’s effectiveness in constraining Trump will come down to the fortitude of a few key Republicans in the chamber. The courts, the rule of law, and the Constitution One of Trump’s most consistently expressed opinions is that he would like his political enemies — a broadly defined group that stretches from Joe Biden to his own former appointees John Kelly and Bill Barr — to be prosecuted. Having largely failed to make that happen in his first term, in his second, Trump wants to tear down the wall separating Justice Department prosecution decisions from the White House. Yet that effort would face another important obstacle: the courts. Judges throughout the federal court system can throw out baseless prosecutions. They can also block Trump’s executive branch actions or strike down new laws passed by Congress. With lifetime appointments, judges are theoretically immune from political pressure and free to uphold the rule of law and the Bill of Rights against authoritarian threats. And judges frequently frustrated Trump during his first term — even, importantly, conservative judges, and judges Trump himself appointed. From the Supreme Court downwards, many of his judicial nominations were Federalist Society die-hards rather than MAGA die-hards, meaning they were often hard right but also willing to rule against Trump on various issues. The Supreme Court also refused to help his effort to steal the 2020 election, to Trump’s great annoyance — he has reportedly said that following the Federalist Society’s advice on appointees was one of his greatest mistakes. (Though, if he tried to make his own loyalist picks, he might have had difficulty getting them confirmed.) But there are some judges who do seem to be fully in the tank for the former president, like Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s prosecution over classified documents in Florida, making rulings slanted in the former president’s favor and proceeding at a pace that rules out a trial before the election. The Supreme Court, too, could well do Trump a favor with a ruling that effectively delays his most important trial until after November — meaning, if Trump wins, it likely wouldn’t happen at all. There’s also the prospect that a more emboldened Trump could choose to simply defy the courts. It is far from clear how much any Supreme Court would be able to constrain a president truly bent on defying them. In 2021, while running for office, now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) urged a confrontation here. Vance said that Trump should fire thousands of civil servants, and “when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” Still, the US Constitution and the courts upholding it present various other problems for a budding authoritarian. Strongmen rising to power in other democracies often change their countries’ constitutions. But the threshold for changing the US Constitution — two-thirds of both houses of Congress plus three-quarters of state legislatures — is so absurdly high that it’s functionally impossible to meet on any polarized topic. Effectively, that means the two-term limit that prevents Trump from running again can’t be revoked, except in the event of a total collapse of constitutional government. State and local governments: bulwarks of resistance? Another major obstacle for would-be American authoritarians is the dispersed nature of governmental power under federalism. States and cities elect their own governments and run their own elections. So under a Trump second term, like in his first, blue states and cities would surely continue to resist his agenda, filing lawsuits, refusing to cooperate with federal law enforcement on certain topics, and so on. But Trump’s team has been making plans about how to “enforce order” in blue America with the military. Some on Trump’s team have long been drawn to the idea of crushing demonstrations or riots via an old statute known as the Insurrection Act. Last year, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s team had drafted a second-term plan to invoke the act on his first day in office so he could “deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” What would happen next would be anyone’s guess. But a president using the power of the military to quell domestic dissent may be a first step down a path leading to further repression. Another area of confrontation could be elections. Trump has already set the precedent for how Republicans can deny any Democratic wins: just make baseless claims of rampant voter fraud in cities, evidence be damned. And one scary part of the 2020 election crisis is that it actually wouldn’t have been that difficult, if Republican officials in key states were sufficiently corrupt, to throw out Biden’s wins or at least stall the process of certifying the outcome. And yet, despite Trump’s pressure, key Republican governors, legislators, and election officials refused to steal the election in 2020. Since then, Congress approved changes to the Electoral Count Act to make any such attempts more difficult to pull off. And in 2022, importantly, “election denier” Republicans running for roles with oversight over elections in key swing states lost. The guardrails around elections still look to be in decent shape, but in the end, the system will only work if enough people in key posts agree to let it. The press and the public: Condition unclear Finally, beyond the government itself, both the press and the public can challenge and effectively constrain a would-be strongman leader. In Trump’s first term, if a government official got wind of a crazy or corrupt thing Trump wanted to do, the response was often to leak it to the press. Critical coverage and damning reporting about Trump was everywhere during his first term, and the mainstream media made it very clear that his claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 were baseless. Nowadays, Trump is still being covered negatively. But the mainstream media as a whole seems less influential and important, than it was during Trump’s term, a time of soaring subscriptions, ratings, and web traffic. The audience is increasingly fractured, with conservatives inhabiting their own media ecosystem and young people looking at TikTok. Business models are shot, with widespread layoffs and even collapses of publications. Still, that pesky First Amendment means Trump doesn’t have many great options to shut up the press. During a second Trump administration, leaks would continue and critical reporting would be in ample supply. The real question is: Will the public care? Currently, Trump is doing better in the polls than at any point in his previous two presidential campaigns. Per polling, he is the favorite to win. So in one sense, the public is more in his corner than ever before. But there are other signs that the intensity of Trump’s support is down. His small-dollar donations have declined. Traffic to conservative media outlets is plunging. There have been no sequels to the January 6 violence yet. All this is likely stemming from a broader, bipartisan trend toward reduced engagement in politics. Political drama was omnipresent during the Trump years, but during Biden, the public has increasingly tuned out. (Hence those declining ratings and web traffic numbers.) On the left, the main issue spurring activist energy isn’t defeating Trump — it’s protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, including Biden’s support of it. If Trump wins, would left-of-center society mobilize to check him like they did during the travel ban rollout, and at other points in his first term? Or are too many people now too burned out and disillusioned to care? The silver lining is that the far right doesn’t seem to have mass support and enthusiasm throughout society as demonstrated by the rising fascist dictators of the past. But authoritarianism can rise due to apathy, too, if people don’t care enough to stop it. Has Trump lost his sense of self-restraint? In part, it’s reassuring that there are so many guardrails in the American political system. And yet none of these are automatic or, necessarily, permanent. Yes, we have a system with laws and norms and institutions. But in the end, whether this system continues to function depends on the choices of the individual people in these institutional roles. “There are a lot of people right now who are thinking, ‘What legal steps do I have to constrain a wannabe autocrat?’ and are preparing for those battles,” said Rothkopf. Democracy’s future would also depend on Trump’s own choices and capabilities. One question is about Trump’s competence. Some believe that, even if Trump in his heart of hearts would like to impose an authoritarian agenda, he simply lacks the competence, focus, and discipline to make it happen. Others worry that his loyalists have already gotten far more experience in how to get their way in government, and that they’ve had four years to stew over why they failed so often last time and plan about how to do things differently next time. But even an effort as shambolic as Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election can still be quite dangerous, as the violence of January 6 showed. A second question is about Trump’s own willingness to restrain himself. Often, during his first term, it was the president himself who chose to back down from some provocative action. He had a sense of political self-preservation that often spurred him to step back from the brink — calculating this firing or that action would be too far. This self-control badly weakened as he tried to overturn Biden’s win. Pundits and top Republicans initially assured us that there would be nothing to worry about. “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power,” one anonymous GOP official told the Washington Post that November. They thought they had Trump figured out, but the president stopped listening to the advisers counseling restraint, instead escalating the crisis more and more, leading to the chaos on January 6. Still, even during that crisis, Trump could have gone further. For instance, he could have installed Jeffrey Clark at the top of the Justice Department, if he really wanted to. But that political self-preservation instinct meant he still feared the fallout from other top DOJ officials resigning in protest. Trump, if he returns to power, will have no future reelection to make him worry about voters this time. And his rhetoric during his years out of office has grown far more extreme. If Trump has lost any inclination toward restraint, and he really wants to drive headlong into the guardrails, he could do it. And then we’ll really see how strong they still are.vox.com