Last week, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order that purports to strip citizenship from some Americans. 

This isn’t our first time here: Last year, Trump issued an executive order that attempted to strip citizenship from many Americans born in this country. Months later, in response to a lawsuit brought over Trump’s order, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that everyone born in the United States who is subject to US law is a citizen. The Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara (2026) was hardly a surprise, as the Court first ruled that everyone born in the US and subject to its laws are citizens in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898).

Still, the Barbara decision did invalidate an executive order from Trump. And that made him very angry. The new order appears to be a response to that 2025 Supreme Court decision, though it is much narrower than his original one.

In this sense, Trump appears to be experimenting with where the line is for the justices when it comes to birthright citizenship. When Trump’s first order came before the Court in Barbara, there was more than a century of precedent establishing that the order was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, four justices voted to overrule at least some of that precedent. 

Now, with the new order, Trump is testing whether a smaller bite at the apple is enough to win over one of the justices who voted with the majority in Barbara — two of whom are Republicans. If he manages to hold onto the four dissenters in Barbara and pick up just one more justice’s vote, his new order will stand. It’s a plausible outcome, and one that could potentially foreshadow future efforts to chip away at birthright citizenship.

What does the order actually do?

Trump’s first citizenship order, the one struck down in Barbara, attempted to strip citizenship from many Americans whose mothers were either undocumented or legally-but-temporarily present in the United States when they were born. Had this order been in effect at their birth, it would have stripped citizenship from many prominent Americans, including former Vice President Kamala Harris.

The new order, entitled “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” is much narrower; indeed, it’s unclear some of the categories of people it hopes to denaturalize actually exist. The new order, for example, purports to strip citizenship from children of two non-citizen parents when either parent belongs to a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

So, in the unlikely event that, say, a member of Al-Qaeda impregnated a non-US citizen woman who later gave birth on US soil, Trump’s order would mandate that the child’s US citizenship would be taken away. 

Another provision purports to strip citizenship from the children of foreign nationals who work in their nation’s embassies or in similar diplomatic capacities but who do not enjoy diplomatic immunity from US law. Again, it’s unlikely that all that many children fall into this category, given the relatively small number of these jobs.

The largest group of people that Trump targets in his new order is children whose parents “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States” for their birth, such as by buying a plane ticket to enter the United States while pregnant. But this category is also fairly small. 

In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 9,576 people were born in the United States to residents of foreign countries — out of about 3.6 million annual births — though it is unclear how many of these babies would be affected by Trump’s new executive order, because we don’t know if their mothers entered the United States “to ensure” that their child we be on US soil when born.

So, what does the Constitution actually say about birthright citizenship?

The question of whether people born in the United States are citizens was, until fairly recently, one of the most uncontroversial questions in US law. When Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, handed down the first court decision blocking Trump’s original attack on birthright citizenship, he commented that he’d “been on the bench for over four decades [and]…can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”

The relevant provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” So, everyone born in the US, regardless of their parent’s immigration status, past behavior, or membership in a particular organization are citizens — unless they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

As the Court recently reaffirmed in Barbara, moreover, a child is within US jurisdiction if they are “subject to American law.” So, if undocumented immigrants and their children were not subject to US jurisdiction, that would mean that it was illegal to arrest and deport them. And, if members of foreign terrorist organizations were not subject to US law, that would mean that it is illegal for the US government to prosecute them for committing terrorist acts.

That said, Wong Kim Ark did recognize a few narrow categories of individuals who are present in the US but not subject to its laws — two of which are still relevant today. Children of invading foreign armies do not receive birthright citizenship, nor do children of foreign ambassadors and other diplomats who are immune from US law.

As the Court clarified in Barbara, both of these exemptions are derived from an old English rule that provided that the King could not convey citizenship to “those born in lands that he did not control.” Thus, when a foreign military occupied English soil and stripped the King of his ability to rule over those lands, children born to members of that military were not citizens.

The exemption for ambassadors and some other foreign diplomats, meanwhile, flows from what Barbara described as a “fiction of extraterritoriality.” While senior diplomats are present in the United States, they are nonetheless deemed to “remain on foreign soil” and thus are not subject to US law.

But not all employees of foreign governments qualify for this diplomatic immunity. Consider, for example, the tragic facts of Moncada v. Rubio (2025), a recent federal appeals court decision holding that a man who lived as a US citizen for nearly seven decades was not, in fact, a citizen. 

Roberto Moncada is the son of a Nicaraguan diplomat who worked in the United Nations when Moncada was born in 1950. The US government previously concluded that Moncada’s father served as a “consul” when his son was born, and, thus, Moncada was a US citizen, because consuls and their families do not enjoy diplomatic immunity. But, in 2018, the US government discovered that Moncada’s father was actually an “attaché,” a more senior diplomat who does enjoy immunity. And then, the father’s diplomatic immunity cut the son off from US citizenship.

Under these principles, several provisions of Trump’s new executive order are unconstitutional, at least in part. The provisions stripping citizenship from the children of employees of foreign governments are lawful to the extent that they apply to children of people with diplomatic immunity but unconstitutional to the extent they apply to lower-ranking individuals with no immunity. 

The provision dealing with members of foreign terrorist organizations is also unconstitutional, since people who engage in terrorism on US soil are very much subject to US law — as are babies born on US soil to parents connected to terrorism. Although, in the unlikely event that a foreign terrorist group actually seized control of some portions of US soil, then the exemption for children of invading armies would likely apply. 

The provision dealing with so-called “birth tourists” is also unconstitutional, because a pregnant woman who enters the United States to ensure that their child is a US citizen is subject to US law, as is her child.

Indeed, Trump appears to concede this later point in a separate executive order handed down at the same time as his “Continuing to Protect” order. The second order, entitled “Ending Birth Tourism,” instructs two federal cabinet departments to update their rules to discourage alleged birth tourists from entering the country, including by taking “appropriate action to prevent the entry into the United States of, or the granting of any visa or other travel authorization” to such individuals. But, again, if the United States has the power to deny visas or otherwise bar these individuals from entering the country, that means that they are subject to US jurisdiction.

Why Trump keeps trying to restrict birthright citizenship

So, the Constitution’s text, the Court’s venerable decision in Wong Kim Ark, and its brand new decision in Barbara are all clear about who qualifies for birthright citizenship. All of these authorities establish that much of Trump’s new executive order is unconstitutional, because it purports to strip citizenship from people who are subject to US jurisdiction.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the order will be struck down. While Barbara did little more than reaffirm the same rule the Court announced nearly 130 years ago in Wong Kim Ark, four justices dissented in Barbara — although, these justices also released four separate opinions with four separate definitions of who does and does not qualify for birthright citizenship. So, on this Supreme Court, the mere fact that a legal question has been settled for more than a century does not prevent many of the justices from voting to unsettle it.

Indeed, this Court does not even reliably follow its own recent precedents. The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), which repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act and limited Congress’s power to prevent race discrimination in elections, was wholly at odds with the Court’s three-year-old decision in Allen v. Milligan (2023). The Court’s decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), which repealed a federal law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own doctors, cannot be squared with its decision two years earlier in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023). 

So, while two of the Court’s Republicans joined all three of its Democrats in Barbara, it is possible that at least one of those Republicans will vote with the dissenters on a narrower question, like whether Trump can strip citizenship from the children of so-called birth tourists. And even if all of the justices in the Barbara majority hold the line, if one of them leaves the Court while Trump is still in office, he will almost certainly replace them with someone who opposes birthright citizenship.

So, while Trump’s executive orders often defy the Constitution’s explicit text, Trump also understands something important about US law: It doesn’t actually matter what the Constitution says if you have five votes on the Supreme Court who are willing to do what you want them to do.

In the last 48 hours, President Donald Trump has revived two issues on which the Supreme Court ruled against him at the end of this term: restricting birthright citizenship and firing Federal Reserve governors.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.

This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead. 

Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment. 

The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.

Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.” 

For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.

Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.

Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout. 

Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.

Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public. 

“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.” 

To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.

The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.

Last June, in a case that effectively guaranteed one of Alabama’s Black Democratic members of Congress would be replaced by a white Republican, the Supreme Court used a single word that delighted movement conservatives and made many longtime civil rights advocates want to weep. 

In the first sentence of its decision in Allen v. Milligan (2026), most of the justices concluded that there is a tension between the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark law that ended Jim Crow-era race discrimination in elections, and “our colorblind Constitution.” All three of the Court’s Democratic members dissented in Allen.

The word “colorblind” might not suggest, to many casual observers, the gravity of what the phrase means, how much power it has to roll back civil-rights reforms enacted in the 1960s — and the major ideological change ushered in by this Supreme Court. Proponents of colorblindness argue that any law that draws distinctions on the basis of race, for any reason whatsoever, is equally repugnant under the Constitution. Under this theory, laws like the Voting Rights Act and similar efforts to lift up historically disadvantaged racial groups are legally indistinguishable from the very kind of Jim Crow discrimination that the VRA sought to abolish. 

It’s an idea that cuts across the Roberts Court’s race decisions, including its decisions abolishing affirmative action in nearly all universities, its decisions undercutting public school integration, and its decisions dismantling the VRA. Under the colorblind thesis, the Constitution sees a modern law intended to guarantee some Black representation in Congress as precisely as intolerable as a 19th-century law forbidding Black people from voting at all. 

As Chief Justice John Roberts summarized colorblindness in a 2007 opinion, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

And lest there be any doubt, the Court’s commitment to this project extends far beyond a few pithy quotes. Just over one month before Allen, in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the Court’s Republican majority imposed colorblindness on the laws governing US elections, effectively killing a 1982 amendment to the VRA — which was signed by President Ronald Reagan — in the process. Three years earlier, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the same justices implemented colorblindness in college and university admissions, ending affirmative action in nearly every institution of higher education in the country.

Allen’s reference to “our colorblind Constitution” confirms the breadth of this project, because if the colorblind thesis is imposed by the Constitution itself, that means that judges must strike down any law or government program that takes account of race, whether in hiring, federal contracting, university admissions, elections, or the military. (Though it is notable that the Harvard decision did dodge the question of whether service academies such as West Point may take account of race in admissions, after military leaders raised concerns that a racially diverse enlisted corps would resent being commanded by a corps of officers who do not resemble them.)

This shift in the Court’s approach to race cases is likely to lead to a purge of programs intended to benefit historically disadvantaged groups. Armed with precedents like Callais and Harvard, pro-colorblindness advocacy groups have filed a wide range of lawsuits challenging scholarships for minority youth, targeting groups that promote minority-owned businesses, and even trying to prevent universities from conducting surveys of Black students.

The GOP’s hard-right turn against laws like the Voting Rights Act is a recent development. Callais, after all, neutralized a law signed by Reagan, a Republican. An earlier Supreme Court case invalidating much of the VRA, Shelby County v. Holder (2013), struck down an extension of the VRA that was signed by Republican President George W. Bush. A significant faction within the GOP has fought against the VRA since the Nixon administration, but they repeatedly lost in the two elected branches of government and only prevailed after they captured an unelected judiciary.

But the victory of the “colorblind” theory in the conservative legal movement is also the result of decades of work. It is largely a story of how a once-fringe faction within the Republican Party took over both that party and then the Supreme Court. And, now that it controls the Court, that faction seeks to lock its approach to racial questions in place forever.

The pre-Roberts Court’s approach to race

Proponents of the colorblindness thesis often trace its origins to Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court’s infamous decision permitting racial segregation. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote in that dissent, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Yet, while Harlan was a racial progressive by the standards of late 19th-century legal elites, his views would offend nearly all modern-day Americans. The full context of Harlan’s famous “color-blind” line suggests that he rejected segregation, at least in part, because he viewed it as unnecessary to maintain white supremacy. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power,” Harlan began the very same paragraph that includes the line about colorblindness. “So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.”

The truth is that modern legal arguments regarding the Constitution’s racial equality provisions did not fully take shape until late in the 20th century. The Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) spoke only of a right to racially integrated public schools: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” After Brown, the Court handed down a series of unexplained orders affirming lower court decisions that struck down segregation at public beaches, municipal golf courses, parks and elsewhere. But many of these orders were just one sentence long, and they hardly answered the question of why segregation is unconstitutional outside of the public school context.

By the 1970s, legal scholars began to split between two competing theories of how the Constitution approaches race. The first theory, which Yale law professor Reva Siegel labels the “antisubordination” principle, contends that “it is wrong for the state to engage in practices that enforce the inferior social status of historically oppressed groups.” On this theory, Brown was correctly decided because the purpose of school segregation was to subordinate Black people, and the Constitution does not tolerate a racial underclass.

The other theory, which Siegel labels the “anticlassification” principle, simply declares that “government may not classify on the basis of race.” And thus any law that draws any distinction on the basis of race is constitutionally suspect, even if that law was enacted to undo the legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court of the 1970s and ’80s, however, did not divide into two neat camps. Every late 20th-century justice was at least a moderate proponent of Siegel’s anticlassification principle. While Justice Thurgood Marshall, for example, argued that the Constitution views laws which seek to “remed[y] the present effects of past racial discrimination” with less skepticism than it does laws that enforce white supremacy, he still would have subjected affirmative action and similar programs to “intermediate scrutiny,” which is the same test that courts apply to laws that discriminate against women.

Such laws are unconstitutional unless the government can provide an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for them.

Meanwhile, while a majority of the Court ultimately concluded that both Jim Crow-like laws and programs like affirmative action must survive the same exacting legal test — known as “strict scrutiny” — the Court also permitted at least some affirmative action programs to exist. The seminal case was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which recognized that students from underrepresented racial groups bring “experiences, outlooks, and ideas” to the classroom “that enrich the training of its student body and better equip its graduates.”

And thus, if universities could not take some steps to racially diversify their student bodies, all of those students, including the white ones, would receive an inferior education.

The pre-Roberts Court, in other words, took a pragmatic approach to race cases that avoided drawing rigid lines or categorically declaring well-meaning programs intended to achieve racial equality off-limits. The justices of this era also understood that institutions outside of the Court often had far more expertise on how to foster a pluralistic society than nine lawyers in black robes.

Take Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in Bakke, which said that “it is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment and creation,” and which ultimately concluded that universities “must be accorded the right to select those students who will contribute the most to the ‘robust exchange of ideas.’” 

Powell was a white Southerner who, as chair of the Richmond, Virginia, school board, left office six years after Brown with only two of Richmond’s 23,000 Black children attending school alongside white students. But he was also humble enough to recognize that universities knew something about how to educate university students to succeed in a diverse nation that he and his fellow justices did not. And so he gave these universities some leeway to exercise that expertise.

Indeed, if anything, the current Court’s most defining feature is the complete absence of the very kind of humility that Powell showed in Bakke — especially on questions of race.

Writing colorblindness into the Constitution was one of Roberts’s top priorities as chief justice

John Roberts became chief justice of the United States in 2005. Less than two years later, he made his first big push to write colorblindness into the Constitution.

In a sharp break with earlier school segregation decisions, which concluded that public schools may require each school to have “a prescribed ratio of Negro to white students reflecting the proportion for the district as a whole,” Roberts wrote that public schools are forbidden from voluntarily integrating themselves.

Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) involved two school districts, one in Seattle and another in Louisville, that allowed families to select which schools they wanted their children to attend. If more students chose a particular school than that school could accommodate, however, the districts gave a preference to children who would make their chosen school more diverse. The idea was that, since the districts had to come up with some way to determine who got to attend oversubscribed schools, it should do so in a way that fostered racial integration.

This was the case where Roberts declared that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Indeed, Roberts even wrote that these two districts’ attempt to integrate public schools was no less odious than Jim Crow segregation. “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” The school districts in Parents Involved, he claimed, asked his Court to “allow this once again — even for very different reasons.”

This is the essence of the colorblind theory of the Constitution. According to Roberts, the Constitution draws no distinction between white supremacist laws that segregate children by race, and an administrative scheme that tries to slightly increase the racial diversity of public schools.

It’s worth noting that Roberts’s views did not fully carry the day in Parents Involved, although a total of five justices agreed that the two school districts’ assignment schemes must be struck down. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, wrote a separate opinion criticizing Roberts for going too far. “In the administration of public schools by the state and local authorities,” Kennedy concluded, “it is permissible to consider the racial makeup of schools and to adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition.”

But the Court’s overarching conclusion that racial integration can violate the Constitution still shocked the seniormost member of the Court. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “it is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

A justice ready to take colorblindness from a fringe idea into the law of the land

Stevens, however, should not have been surprised that the new chief justice would reach such a conclusion, because Roberts had spent nearly his entire career fighting for the most absolutist version of the colorblindness thesis.

In 1982, President Reagan signed an amendment to the Voting Rights Act which clarified that state election laws that have a disproportionate negative impact on racial minorities violate the VRA, even if the plaintiffs cannot prove those laws were enacted with racist intent — this was the amendment that Roberts’s Court effectively repealed in its Callais decision. Reagan did so over the objections of a conservative faction within his administration, and one of the most vocal members of this faction was a young lawyer named John Roberts.

As a Reagan White House attorney, according to journalist Ari Berman, Roberts “wrote upwards of 25 memos opposing” the 1982 law. He “prepared administration officials for their testimony before the Senate; attended weekly strategy sessions; and worked closely with like-minded senators on Capitol Hill.”

Meanwhile, in an unrelated 1982 memo to Attorney General William French Smith regarding Smith’s upcoming meeting with the chair of the US Civil Rights Commission, Roberts urged Smith to “reiterate our commitment to the color-blind principle” in that meeting.

Though Roberts, and the conservative faction that he belonged to, lost the fight to get Reagan to veto the 1982 law, this movement was hardly a flash in the pan. The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 included a provision requiring states with a history of racist election practices to “preclear” any new election laws with federal officials to ensure that those laws would not prevent people of color from voting. This provision was initially set to expire in 1970, which meant that there was an internal fight within the Nixon administration over whether President Richard Nixon should sign an extension.

The conservative faction lost that fight too. They also lost similar fights over Voting Rights Act extensions in 1975, 1982, and 2006, all under Republican presidents. The 2006 extension, signed by President Bush, passed the House by a 390-33 margin, and it passed the Senate 98-0.

Ultimately, however, a conservative faction that was too weak to convince a single senator to oppose the 2006 extension had the last laugh. While this faction was only a minor player in Bush-era electoral politics, it dominated conservative legal groups like the Federalist Society and successfully pushed its own candidates for the Supreme Court. And so, in 2013, that Court struck down preclearance in Shelby County. Roberts wrote the opinion, which was joined by all of the Court’s Republicans.

The piecemeal death of the Voting Rights Act, in other words, wasn’t just the triumph of a once-impotent faction within the GOP over a voting rights law, it was a triumph over the democratic process itself. Time and time again, this faction lost its fight against the VRA in the two democratically elected branches of government. But none of that matters to a faction that controls the Supreme Court.

The colorblindness thesis is ahistorical

One irony of this fight over how the Constitution approaches race is that, while the most recent version of the Republican Party embraces colorblindness, it does so despite a lack of evidence that the Constitution’s racial equality provisions were originally understood to support this thesis. In Republican legal circles, it’s currently fashionable to tout originalism, the idea that the Constitution’s meaning was fixed at the time it was drafted or ratified, and that judges must interpret constitutional provisions in line with this original meaning. Several of the current justices, including Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, are outspoken originalists.

But within the Supreme Court it was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights lawyer turned liberal justice, who first examined how the 14th Amendment, with its guarantee that no one will be denied the “equal protection of the laws,” was understood by the post-Civil War Americans who drafted and ratified it. And that evidence does not support colorblindness.

“The Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment is the same Congress that passed the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act, an Act that provided many of its benefits only to Negroes,” Marshall wrote in a separate opinion accompanying the Bakke decision. He also quoted members of Congress who complained during debates over this act that it gave Black people “favors that the poor white boy in the North cannot get,” as well as lawmakers who defended the “very discrimination” the Freedmen’s Bureau “makes between ‘destitute and suffering’ negroes and destitute and suffering white paupers.”

Seven years later, in 1985, legal scholar Eric Schnapper wrote a seminal paper fleshing out Marshall’s argument. Schnapper identified “eight Reconstruction measures establishing programs limited, in varying degrees, to blacks.” These laws included the Freedmen’s Bureau named by Marshall, as well as less significant laws offering targeted benefits to Black Americans. One law appropriated $15,000 “for the relief of freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia.” Another provided safeguards for Black veterans of the Union army.

For more than four decades, no justice even attempted to rebut Marshall and Schnapper’s originalist case for affirmative action. Indeed, the Court’s originalists were so silent that, in a 2013 article, conservative legal scholar Michael Rappaport complained that they have “not made any real effort to justify their affirmative action opinions based on the Constitution’s original meaning.”

Justice Thomas did finally attempt to rebut at least some of Marshall and Schnapper’s evidence in a concurring opinion in the Harvard case, but his response to the originalist case against colorblindness was quite feeble. Thomas’s opinion did “not contend that all of the individuals who put forth and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment universally believed” in colorblindness, and he claimed that the historical record is “sparse.” 

Regarding the Freedman’s Bureau, Thomas argued that the laws authorizing it “applied to freedmen (and refugees), a formally race-neutral category, not blacks writ large,” even though “freedmen” is a category that consisted entirely of Black people. Regarding the other Reconstruction-era laws identified by Schnapper, Thomas discussed two of them.

Thomas acknowledged that “an 1866 law adopted special rules and procedures for the payment of ‘colored’ servicemen in the Union Army,” but anachronistically claimed that this law does not show that its 19th-century drafters rejected colorblindness because it may survive the strict scrutiny test that the Supreme Court devised during the 20th century. Thomas also conceded that “another law, passed in 1867, provided funds for ‘freedmen or destitute colored people’ in the District of Columbia,” but speculated that Congress “may have enacted the measure” — which again, used the words “colored people” — “not because of race, but rather to address a special problem in shantytowns in the District where blacks lived.”

All of which is a long way of saying that the colorblindness thesis is a far more recent invention than its most prominent proponents acknowledge. It was primarily devised, not by post-Civil War lawmakers seeking to undo the legacy of slavery, but by late 20th-century conservatives who opposed programs like affirmative action. 

If there was a serious originalist case for colorblindness, one of the justices would have made it in the 45-year period between Marshall’s opinion in Bakke and Thomas’s opinion in Harvard. And when Thomas finally did attempt to rebut the evidence gathered by Marshall and Schnapper, key prongs of his argument rested on anachronism and conjecture.

The fate of affirmative action and similar programs should be decided by elected officials, not by judges

In 2006, the people of Michigan voted to end affirmative action in that state’s university system. This ban sparked a far-fetched lawsuit claiming that it was somehow unconstitutional for the state to enact such a policy. As Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote about this suit, the plaintiffs’ argument “transforms a potential virtue of affirmative action into a vice,” because “if there is one feature of affirmative-action programs that favors their constitutionality, it is that they grow out of the democratic process.” 

The question of what, if anything, should be done to racially diversify campuses — or to otherwise lift up communities that faced hundreds of years of enslavement, segregation, or other forms of government-sanctioned racism — is fraught. It is entirely reasonable to believe, as Chief Justice Roberts argued in Shelby County, that the same aggressive civil rights policies that were necessary to tear down Jim Crow in the 1960s are no longer needed two generations later. It is also reasonable to believe that, in a nation where the median white household earns over $36,000 more per year than the median Black household, that not enough is being done to close this gap.

Judge Sutton’s insight, in other words, should cut both ways. In a democracy, we are supposed to resolve these sorts of fraught questions through elections, not litigation. As the original history of the 14th Amendment shows, the United States did not ratify the post-Civil War constitutional amendments to prevent Harvard from diversifying its campus, and we certainly did not do so to prevent Congress from requiring former Confederate states to give some legislative representation to Black people. 

Similarly, proponents of colorblindness are more than capable of enacting their preferred policies without having to bypass democracy. Unlike the disenfranchised families who brought the Brown case, advocates of colorblindness do not need a judicial decree to advance their political goals — they can enact their preferred policies the same way that they did in Michigan’s 2006 election, by persuading voters that they are correct.

Nevertheless, by constitutionalizing colorblindness, the Republican justices have attempted to lock in place what could be, at most, a very transient electoral consensus around their preferred racial policy. If the American people decide, in the 2028 election or beyond, that the recent turn against laws like the Voting Rights Act was a terrible idea, they will have to replace the Supreme Court before they can reinstate those laws.

A court case involving President Donald Trump’s efforts to sabotage voting by mail reached the Supreme Court on Monday. The executive order at the heart of Trump v. California is one of many attempts by Trump and his Republican Party to make it harder for voters to mail their ballots and to potentially invalidate lawfully cast ballots that are submitted by mail. 

The executive order is particularly significant, because, with it, Trump is claiming the unilateral authority to change US election policy in ways that, at least according to the Constitution, can only be done by Congress or by state governments. Trump and many of his Republican allies have previously urged other institutions, such as Congress or the Supreme Court, to shift US election rules to benefit the GOP. But now, he’s claiming the power to rewrite those rules himself.

The March executive order at issue in California claims to be an effort to prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections. But several provisions of the order seem designed to intimidate state and local election officials by threatening them with illegal prosecutions. Another provision would forbid the US Postal Service (USPS) from delivering many mailed ballots, which would have political benefits for Trump. 

Democrats have been more likely to vote by mail than Republicans since at least the Covid-era 2020 election, and this trend has continued post pandemic. So, any election policy that suppresses mailed ballots will harm Democrats and help Republicans.

In late June, a federal district court determined that several provisions of Trump’s executive order exceed his authority and must be struck down. 

The issue before the Supreme Court in California, however, does not concern whether the executive order is legal or not. Instead, Trump’s lawyers claim that the district court acted prematurely by invalidating the executive order before it was fully implemented and before several federal agencies have an opportunity to flesh out how its provisions will actually work. Those lawyers, in other words, want to buy time for federal agencies to implement parts of the order before it can be challenged in court.

This is actually a plausible argument, as Trump’s brief to the justices makes several significant concessions that, if embraced by the justices, would significantly weaken Trump’s order at least for the time being. As Trump’s lawyers now characterize his order, it doesn’t do much of anything until several federal agencies take additional steps.

Still, the stakes in this case, which arises on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices often decide very quickly, are quite high. Even if the justices do hold Trump to the promises his lawyers made in their brief and issue an opinion explicitly stating that the order currently imposes no obligations on anyone, that will still set up a future reckoning on whether Trump’s efforts to suppress voting by mail are valid. Eventually, those agencies will act, and several of them are likely to do so before the midterms, and, then, the question of whether Trump can fundamentally alter how US elections are conducted will have to be decided by the courts.

Trump’s executive order, if fully implemented, could potentially change the results of federal elections and place Republicans who did not win in office. It also matters because Trump claims the power to decide how states conduct federal elections, despite no statute that authorizes his order — thus, potentially expanding his own powers and the power of all future presidents.

So, what does Trump’s executive order do?

Trump v. California primarily concerns two sections of Trump’s executive order.

Section 2 of the order includes a thinly veiled threat that state and local election officials will face prosecution if they allow voters who aren’t pre-approved by the Trump administration to vote by mail. 

On the surface, the first part of this section seems innocuous. It requires the Department of Homeland Security “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” During a lower court proceeding in California, Trump’s Justice Department conceded that any such list would “necessarily be incomplete.” But the federal government’s decision to compile a partial list of eligible voters does not actually prevent anyone from voting.

The problem with Section 2 is that Trump’s call for DHS to compile this list is coupled with a statement that “the Attorney General shall prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials or any others involved in the administration of Federal elections who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.” 

Thus, as Judge Indira Talwani determined in her order blocking this provision, Section 2 “implicitly threatens enforcement…against election officials who furnish ballots to voters excluded” from the Trump administration’s incomplete lists. While the order does not explicitly state that an election official who mails a ballot to a lawful voter whose name does not appear on the Trump administration’s list will be prosecuted, Trump’s decision to couple his demand that the list be created with a threat of prosecution sends a clear message to election officials that they allow voters who are not on the list to vote at their own risk.

Moreover, as Talwani wrote in her opinion, one major reason why the federal government cannot compile an accurate list of all eligible voters is because the federal government’s records “do not necessarily track name changes (such as when a woman changes her name at marriage).” Women are more likely to vote for Democrats than men.

Additionally, Section 3 orders USPS to come up with new rules that require states to provide the federal government with a list of all voters who will receive a mailed ballot “no fewer than 60 days before the election,” and it forbids the post office from delivering ballots from voters whose names do not appear on the list. This section also outlines requirements for a specific kind of envelope for mail voting with certain design features — which, at the very least, creates a problem for states that have already purchased envelopes that do not comply with these new design requirements.

The Constitution gives states and Congress, not the president, the power to decide how federal elections are conducted

The Constitution provides that states, and not the federal government, get to decide who is eligible to vote in a federal election. Article I of the Constitution, for example, provides that voters who possess “the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature” may vote for members of the US House. And the 17th Amendment uses similar language to describe who may vote for US senators.

Thus, because each state gets to determine who may vote in its state legislative races, states also have the power to determine who can vote for members of Congress.

The Constitution’s language governing presidential elections, meanwhile, is even more explicit that states — and not Trump — get to decide who is an eligible voter. That language provides that “each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” its presidential electors.

Thus, as Talwani concluded, no federal official, including the president, has the power to determine that only “United States citizens who will be above the age of 18” may vote in a particular federal election; only states have the authority to decide who may vote for members of Congress or the president. And the federal government certainly does not have the power to compile a list of eligible voters and threaten prosecution of any state official who provides a ballot to someone not on that list.

A separate provision of the Constitution lets states determine the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” while also permitting Congress to “make or alter such Regulations.” Thus, while the federal government cannot determine who is eligible to vote in federal elections (except through constitutional provisions such as the 15th or 19th Amendments), Congress could conceivably pass a law regulating voting by mail.

But Trump is not Congress. And, according to Judge Talwani, “no law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS.”

Trump’s lawyers defend his executive order by claiming that it doesn’t do anything…yet

In their brief to the justices, Trump’s Justice Department did not actually argue that the executive order is legal (although they will likely do so in a later stage of this lawsuit). Instead, they argued that Judge Talwani’s decision blocking the executive order was “premature.” 

The thrust of DOJ’s argument is that, while the executive order announces several new election-related policies, it does not actually implement any of those policies. The executive order tasks DHS with compiling the incomplete list of eligible voters, it tasks DOJ with prosecuting state officials, and it tasks the Postal Service with coming up with the specific rules governing mailed ballots.

The Constitution does not permit anyone to file a lawsuit challenging a federal policy unless they can show they were injured in some way by that policy. Trump’s lawyers argue that, until the new election policies are fully implemented, none of the California plaintiffs can know whether they will be harmed by these policies or not.

It’s a plausible argument, but largely because DOJ’s brief makes a number of concessions that strip the executive order of any real vitality, at least until it is fully implemented by federal agencies.

The brief insisted, for example, that Section 2 should not be read to authorize prosecutions against state officials who send a ballot to someone who is not on Trump’s approved list of voters. “The Order does not deem it a crime, or even evidence of a crime, for States not to use the Lists when determining voter eligibility, and it does not direct the Attorney General to bring charges on such a theory,” it read.

Similarly, it denied that any of the executive order’s new policies governing envelopes and pre-approved voters who may vote by mail must actually be implemented, at least before the postal service issues its own rules regarding Trump’s new policies. According to the brief, “the Order does not ‘direct various changes to the voting-by-mail process,’” it merely “directs the President’s Executive Branch subordinates at the Postal Service to begin a deliberative policymaking process that may ultimately include some changes.”

While at least some of these concessions take liberties with the language of the executive order, they do potentially give the justices a third option to consider before they decide the California case. The justices could leave Talwani’s decision in full effect, or they could allow Trump to implement his new restrictions on voting. But they could also block Talwani’s order while simultaneously pointing to DOJ’s concessions and indicating that they expect Trump to honor those concessions.

If the justices take this third option, that would mean that the order would impose no obligations on the states for the time being and would similarly impose no new restrictions on voters until the agencies act. Litigation over the executive order would pause, and it would resume once the order is implemented by further agency action.

The Justice Department’s concessions in this case are fairly extraordinary, and they suggest that even Trump’s own legal team recognizes that it will be easier to persuade the courts to delay a reckoning over the executive order than it will be to convince them that the order is lawful. It remains to be seen, however, whether this Supreme Court will actually enforce the Constitution in this case — and whether they will do so right away or at some future date.

‘Yeah, That’s Not Going to Happen’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and other Senate Republicans are resisting two aspects of Donald Trump’s latest demand that they pass the SAVE Act voter suppression bill: they don’t want to give up or delay their August recess to do so, and they don’t want to nuke the filibuster.

Scrapping the filibuster would allow the SAVE Act to pass with 51 instead of 60 votes. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Thune told ABC News yesterday.

“If the result is only achieved by nuking the legislative filibuster, we don’t have the votes to do that and so that’s not a — that’s just not a realistic option,” he reportedly added.

Trump in recent days has again demanded that both Houses of Congress turn their attention to the SAVE Act and the SAVE Act alone. He has threatened not to sign any legislation until the SAVE Act is passed. In a Monday Truth Social post, he insisted that the Senate delay its recess, and that it nuke the filibuster. “Stupidity always brings LOSING & DEATH!” he warned Thune. Other, vocal right-wing senators, including Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rick Scott (R-FL), are also calling for recess to be delayed.

Thune also dismissed the demands to nix recess, saying it was pointless for the Senate to stay in session without adequate votes for the SAVE Act.

All of this doesn’t entirely close the door on Trump’s push. The House and Senate still have some maneuvers they can try to advance the SAVE Act through budget reconciliation in the next few days, Punchbowl writes. And while the kind of SAVE Act that could be accomplished through reconciliation is not as dramatic as the sweeping election overhaul Trump has been pushing, it would still be ample reason for concern, as law professor and longtime congressional advisor Charles Teifer wrote for us last week.

Trump’s Attempt to Control Elections Through Executive Order Arrives at SCOTUS

A prong of Trump’s attack on the midterms has reached the Supreme Court, the first to do so. It has immediately become one of the most significant issues before the Court.

• Yesterday afternoon, the administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that have blocked his executive order on elections from March.
• The March order was not his only attempt to seize control of election processes through executive action, but it was one of the most sweeping: it called for federal agencies to compile lists of eligible voters, and for them to exercise control over who can vote by mail.
• The Constitution gives the executive branch no role in setting election rules.
• There are other reasons the Court might be expected to turn the administration back. “If the Supreme Court followed its own guidance with any consistency, the Purcell principle — which prevents courts from changing voting procedures close to elections — would have some heft here, as the administration is demanding enormous and ill-defined changes when the midterms are already underway in many states,” Kate Riga wrote for TPM yesterday. “In recent years, though, the Roberts Court has tended to invoke or ignore Purcell in accordance with Republican preferences.”
• Not unrelatedly, a new Gallup poll finds the Supreme Court’s approval has hit a record low.

Tabs

• Trump recently urged RFK Jr. to do more to investigate supposed links between autism and vaccines, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• The political operative who recruited Graham Platner was himself credibly accused of sexual assault, Marisa Kabas reports for the Handbasket.
• The very extreme far-right candidate James Fishback beat an attempt to kick him off the ballot over questions of his residency, the Miami Herald reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. Mitch McConnell, not yet back in Congress and drawing demands from Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear (D) that he “directly, verbally” address his constituents to explain what’s going on.

Are We at War?

Sort of. Trump claims there is a “good chance” for a deal with Iran during this lull. Hear that, stock market?

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

The story of modern gun culture is partly about how reactionary forces worked lawmakers and the judiciary to transform America’s relationship with firearms. Congress granted extraordinary liability protections to the gun industry, while the Supreme Court reframed the Second Amendment, ignoring the long-held view that its reference to “a well-regulated militia” was not a fusty preamble but a commonly understood restraint.

In Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, I explore how these legal victories freed politicians, businesses, and Wall Street players to seek power and profits by making gun ownership a cultural identifier. And the gun lobby worked especially hard to cultivate a younger generation of gun owners by making rifle shooting a school physical education activity and conducting social research on how to get kids interested in firearms.

The heedless integration of firearms into American life is not solely explainable by historical undercurrents, such as the grand schemes of the NRA and the gun industry to inculcate pro-gun attitudes in young people. Larger cultural and social forces have also become increasingly important.

As I began exploring them more deeply, it quickly became apparent that modern-day gun culture has entered a phase akin to the late-stage Roman Empire, when success and power devolved into selfish extravagance. No longer was it enough to argue that sports shooting, hunting, and self-defense justified an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment—simply having fun with guns was now a God-given right.

On a 550-acre desert expanse in the unincorporated township of Pahrump, Nevada, you can pay for Rolling Thunder, an “adrenaline-fueled experience” of high-speed tactical shooting from an off-road vehicle, offered by Staccato Vegas, an offshoot of the Staccato gun company. A marketing brochure shows a blond woman wearing mirrored shades blasting away with a semiautomatic rifle painted like an American flag.

For a $1,000 annual Patriot membership plan, you get 50 percent off on “run-n-gun” courses, free firearms cleaning, and unlimited monthly guest passes. If you’re willing to pay $3,000 to upgrade to the Freedom plan, you get additional perks such as concierge services, on-demand food and beverage, preloaded magazines for your pistol or rifle when you arrive, and exclusive access to the Staccato 368 Lounge (368 supposedly was a code used for the word liberty by Revolutionary War patriots).

If all of this sounds rather silly, Staccato wants you to know that it is their solemn obligation as red-blooded Americans. At Staccato, you see, “We believe in protecting freedom and celebrating liberty: “It’s a part of who we are as Americans, allowing us the freedom to be individuals and for each of us to pursue our own unique happiness.” To join this assembly of patriots, you must buy at least one Staccato Pistol. 

Sport-shooting clubs have been around for at least a century. In olden days, they mostly entailed well-to-do men gathering at some secluded retreat to drink, smoke, play cards, and occasionally shoot bolt-action rifles at targets or maybe go out for a hunt. They were genteel affairs. In recent decades, entrepreneurs have taken this concept and jacked it on steroids. Numerous oases of controlled violence dot barren landscapes in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, with indoor facilities as well in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In Las Vegas, the Range 702 offers bachelorette parties, where ladies can shoot machine guns and get a free shot glass, followed by drinks and a “limo to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club.”

Luxury is a defining theme. An NRA blog post from 2017 explained the emergence of a new name to describe the phenomenon: guntry club. Acknowledging that “gun culture could inspire thoughts of dark and cold ranges, dusty or muddy outdoor environments or even loud, brash and unforgiving crowds,” guntry clubs sought to combine the shooting experience with luxury accoutrements of traditional country clubs.

Some of these places are fashioned as family theme parks, combining sightseeing, swimming, and horseback riding with shooting machine guns and grenade launchers. “Drive a tank! Crush cars!” blares an ad for Bullets and Burgers, an apocalyptic playground of sorts in Arizona. If you’re willing to part with $2,300, the Super Platinum Shooting Package gets you access to eight machine guns of your choice, a flamethrower, and a gigantic .50-caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifle “used in several Hollywood hits including Jumanji and Rambo II.”

In 2014, Alex MacLachlan, an Ivy League-educated investment banker from New Jersey, and his wife, Alison, visited Bullets and Burgers. Their nine-year-old daughter was allowed to shoot an Uzi submachine gun, but lost control of it, accidentally killing the shooting instructor who was guiding her.

The relative wealth and professional status of the tragedy-struck MacLachlan family came as somewhat of a surprise to me. I suppose that betrays my own biased assumptions about the type of person who would want to go to a place such as Bullets and Burgers. Part of my preconception was based on my experience in the 1990s visiting gun ranges such as the one in Kentucky where you could pay to blow up gas-filled barrels—“Machine gun and flame thrower rentals available Friday, Saturday and Sunday!” It was the epitome of “loud, brash and unforgiving.” Since then, it seemed, the audience had expanded to include a demographic

I had not thought would be as interested in it. When I learned about the MacLachlan incident it immediately brought to mind an eerily similar case I knew of involving a physician from Connecticut. In that tragic incident, the doctor’s eight-year-old boy was accidentally shot in the head when he lost control of an Uzi submachine gun he was given at a range in Massachusetts (unlike the Arizona case, this one led to criminal indictments and changes in the law). Well-educated, well-off parents with the freedom to choose any number of healthy, memorable adventures for their children gravitated to ones centered around instruments of lethal violence as entertainment. Some of this was undoubtedly influenced by the gun lobby’s decades-long effort to position firearms as an acceptable way to teach responsibility to kids by making shooting a family-friendly pastime.

But there were deeper societal currents working as well. Legally purchasing and maintaining a decent firearm has never been cheap. One consequence of restricting imports of expensive guns such as so-called Saturday night specials—which in the 1960s and early ’70s could be bought for as little as $10—is that it allowed American-made guns to be sold at even higher prices. Gun control advocates such as Sen. Thomas Dodd were often accused of pushing import bans, in part, to protect homegrown manufacturers, such as Colt, Winchester, and Sturm, Ruger in Dodd’s state of Connecticut.

Import restrictions under the 1968 Gun Control Act required firearms to be for “sporting purposes” and go through licensed dealers. The foreign-made guns that continued to be imported, such as the Beretta, tended to be higher quality and thus more costly. And as the AR-15 took off as a cultural icon, the money required to partake in the fun increased exponentially. Gun industry marketing adjusted to target higher earners, who could more easily afford the advanced weaponry they were selling.

By 2014, households earning more than $90,000 were nearly twice as likely to have guns in the home than those earning less than $50,000. A 2019 study found that “slightly less than half of US guns were owned by persons whose household income was $100,000 a year or more.”

At the same time, the typical education level of the people buying these weapons was also on the rise. In 1994, 29 percent of gun owners had some college education. By 2017, that figure had risen to 34 percent, and by 2022 it was 40 percent. Of course, educational attainment for Americans in general has been trending upward, but the concentration of gun ownership among wealthier households outpaced the extra income that accompanies higher levels of schooling.

There is no better window into this phenomenon than the history of the Staccato Vegas gun range in Pahrump, Nevada. The place actually began under a different name and ownership. It started as the vision of Ignatius Piazza, a chiropractor from California, who founded a firearms training program he called Front Sight. But it wasn’t just about shooting.

From the beginning, Piazza imagined more than dusty target ranges nestled in the desert canyons. He obtained a development agreement with the county to build a “vacation club and resort” that would include thousands of time-share condos, single-family homes, a hotel, and a recreational park, among other amenities—a veritable town dedicated to gun lovers.

To join Front Sight required paying membership fees that could reportedly exceed $200,000 at the topmost “lifetime” tiers, which included a luxury home site. I had a hard time believing anyone would actually pay that much, but fortunately there was a way to find out: Front Sight filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022, and buried in the thousands of court records I found a list of close to three thousand members and the amounts they were said to have paid. The membership costs ranged from $500 to $350,000.

There was the real estate sales and investment consultant from California who paid $165,000; an oncologist and vineyard owner, also from California, was in for $148,000; a corporate lawyer in Illinois paid $106,000; for a physician in Arizona it was $50,000; a tech consultant in New Jersey, $48,000. And on and on.

The chief operating officer of Front Sight once described the Clientele this way: “We’ve got people that are college students to Forbes 400 guys. The economic spectrum is quite broad, but what we find is there’s very few, like forty or fifty, who actually want a residence. What they want is an upscale place to stay for the week or two that they’re out here.”

What motivates them? Bruce, a “gold status” member and CEO of a tech company in Orange County, California, explained why he brought his fourteen-year-old son and members of his family’s church group to the range: “The feeling of security that I come home with, that I’m able to protect my family with all the craziness going on in this world.”

Michelle, a tax accountant from Liberty, Missouri, spent weeks at Front Sight with relatives and “girls from my office” learning to shoot and “be ready to defend our family.” Grant, a software-company executive from Bloomington, Minnesota, came with friends because “it’s really important to be able to defend myself and defend my family if I ever got into that situation.”

As much as self-defense may be the practical, mature rationale participants offer when asked, many also gravitate to these guntry clubs for entertainment. The industry has been remarkably successful at selling the eat-your-spinach objective of skills training in a sugary wrapper of fun, comfort, or excitement. And for that, the lure of cool “forbidden” stuff comes in handy.

Desert Wolf Tours in Arizona offers packages for bachelor and bachelorette parties and corporate retreats that combine off-road ATV driving with shooting machine guns, which they are licensed to operate. One of them, priced at $314 per person, is the Machine Guns and Suppressors Adventure, which is cosponsored by a company that makes silencers or, in the industry’s preferred parlance, suppressors: “Shoot REAL, Federally-Restricted Machine Guns and Suppressors! These are the REAL DEAL!”

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The use of guns for entertainment and over-the-top recreation may be all in good fun (the wisdom of it notwithstanding), but a darker element to the modern idolization of firearms and violence can be found in our political discourse. Here, the societal effects are especially profound because, for better or worse, our elected leaders both reflect and set the tone for what’s considered “normal.”

For schoolchildren, a visit to their class by a politician once conveyed a sense of seriousness and civic duty. Students today could be forgiven for confusing it with professional wrestling.

To be sure, American politics has a long history of bare-knuckle excesses. The 1828 presidential campaign featured accusations, circulated in dueling handbills, that Andrew Jackson was a cannibal and John Quincy Adams a pimp. In modern times, negative attacks on opponents have tended to emphasize fear as much as slander and innuendo. Democrats can lay claim to one of the most notorious examples — The “Daisy ad” of 1964, showing a little girl plucking flower petals followed by a nuclear blast, the unsubtle message being that a vote for Republican Barry Goldwater meant the end of the world.

At the same time, as the NRA made support for gun rights a potent political signifier, it became increasingly common for candidates from both parties to flaunt their love of firearms. Traditionally, they struck relatively tame poses—hunting ducks or shooting at targets—just enough to reassure voters for whom guns were important. But in the 2010s, political messaging around guns took a sharp turn. Conservative opposition to President Obama and the rise of the Tea Party movement propelled a class of antiestablishment Republicans to the fore, along with increasingly agitated campaign ads of a different caliber—literally.

In Arizona, there was Pamela Gorman bragging about her NRA rating in 2010 by firing a machine gun, an AR-15, and a semiautomatic pistol. Another Arizona candidate, Jesse Kelly, promoted a campaign event that year where supporters could “shoot a fully Automatic M16” with him. Around the same time, Christina Jeffrey in South Carolina ran an ad in which she brandished an AK-47 while asserting that gun rights were necessary “to ensure that our limited government stays limited.”

Will Brooke, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Congress in Alabama in 2014, ran an ad in which he used a small arsenal of semiautomatic weapons to blow holes in a printed copy of the “Obamacare” law. He was mimicking a milder ad from four years earlier showing West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, shooting a bolt-action rifle at a different bill.

In the 2016 Missouri governor’s race, Eric Greitens, a Republican and former Navy SEAL, took gun imagery to new heights in two ads, one showing him firing a mounted machine gun while pledging to “fight Obama’s Democrat machine and their corrupt attacks.” In the other, he shot an assault-style rifle at an unseen target until it blew up. And in 2018, there was the not-so-subtle ad for Republican Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, showing two men loading pistols at a range while saying they are “sick of those DC politicians” and that Ms. Ivey “protected our monuments.”

What was different about these is that the political messaging featured a firearm but, unlike in the past, the focus was neither progun nor pro–gun control. Rather, the gun itself was a prop used as a sort of ominous exclamation point for some other argument. The careless flaunting of firearms by these twenty-first-century pols stood in stark contrast to earlier generations of elected leaders, who may have supported gun rights but didn’t shove it in people’s faces. The discourse had become so militant that even John Dingell, the archetype of the pro-gun politician, was having doubts.

In a memoir published shortly before he died in 2019, Dingell recounted watching his wife, who had succeeded him in Congress, give a speech pleading for reason and a spirit of compromise to address gun violence. Thinking about it the next day, he said he found himself regretting that “the gun debate had gotten too polarized.” “As Debbie had said with such passion the night before, ‘Can’t we have a discussion?’” Dingell wrote. “And I thought about the role I know I played in contributing to that polarization.”

Compromise, however, does not sell as well with certain constituencies as performative antics, which have only gotten more extreme in the years since Dingell’s ruminations. Republican Congressmen Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent out

Christmas cards in 2021 showing their families posing with assault rifles. A Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, Josh Clark, held weekly giveaways of AR-15s in 2022 to ensure voters are equipped to “fight tyranny and evil” and filmed himself with his kids shooting one of the rifles. And in 2024 in Missouri, Republican attorney General candidate Will Scharf fired a grenade launcher at a stack of documents from Trump-related court cases.

Watching these ads, I found myself thinking of another politician from a bygone era, Robert F. Kennedy, and his remarks about gun ownership after his brother, the president, was assassinated: “We have a responsibility to the victims of crime and violence. It is a responsibility to think not only of our own convenience but of the tragedy of sudden death. It is a responsibility to put away childish things, to make the possession and use of firearms a matter undertaken only by serious people who will use them with the restraint and maturity that their dangerous nature deserves and demands.”

Copyright © 2026 by Mike McIntire. From Ricochet by Mike McIntire, published by One Signal/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

There was an unintentionally revealing moment in acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing last week. After Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Blanche whether he and President Donald Trump are friends, the leader of the United States Department of Justice replied, “I’m his lawyer,” before correcting himself and saying he “was his lawyer.”

Blanche previously defended Trump in three criminal cases brought while the president was out of office, but he is emphatically not supposed to be Trump’s lawyer right now. As acting attorney general — Blanche currently leads the DOJ because the attorney general’s job is vacant and Blanche is the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general (DAG) — Blanche’s client is the United States, not the person who happens to occupy the White House. 

But it’s easy to see why he misspoke: Blanche has largely acted as Trump’s hammer since he was confirmed as the DOJ’s No. 2 official, overseeing numerous prosecutions of Trump’s perceived enemies. Now Trump wants to promote him to the DOJ’s top job — a sign of Trump’s confidence in his former criminal defense lawyer turned personal enforcer.

It’s unusual for a president to put his own defense lawyer in such a powerful position — indeed, it’s unusual for a president to have a criminal defense lawyer at all. But Trump has a long string of attorneys who’ve defended him and his companies against an equally long string of criminal allegations ranging from tax fraud, to falsifying business records, to illegally taking classified documents, to charges arising from his failed attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election. 

And he’s put at least five of those criminal defense lawyers in top federal jobs. 

Trump’s decision to turn much of his criminal legal team into powerful government officials matters for two big reasons. The first is that two members of that team, Blanche and Solicitor General John Sauer, are leaders within the Justice Department. Next to the military, there is no more fearsome government institution than the DOJ, which has the power to arrest people and try them for federal crimes. 

The DOJ is supposed to exercise this authority with restraint — and often with restraints imposed by the Constitution itself — but Blanche has used the Justice Department’s power against Trump’s political enemies who appear to have committed no crime and removed constraints on Trump and his Justice Department, all while Sauer has worked consistently to convince the Supreme Court to remove other constraints on Trump.

Meanwhile, three of Trump’s former criminal lawyers, Emil Bove, Justin Smith, and Matthew Schwartz, now have lifetime appointments as US Court of Appeals judges, placing them one rung on the judicial ladder down from the Supreme Court. The judiciary, of course, is the branch of government that is supposed to prevent the president from breaking the law, so every Trump loyalist appointed to this branch weakens the remaining legal constraints on Trump and his administration.

Trump, of course, isn’t the only president to place close confidants in the Justice Department or the federal bench. President John F. Kennedy famously named his brother attorney general. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Abe Fortas, who represented him in a 1948 election dispute, to the Supreme Court in 1965.

But Trump’s decision to place someone willing to pursue his personal vendettas in charge of the Justice Department is, at the very least, a break with post-Watergate norms established to prevent the DOJ from becoming a political weapon. And Fortas, who resigned in disgrace after fewer than four years on the bench, is more of a cautionary tale than a model of good governance.

Although the current Supreme Court is dominated by conservative Republicans, some of these justices do break with Trump on questions that divide the Republican Party — such as whether Trump should unilaterally impose high tariffs on many nations. But if Trump gets to turn his personal cronies into justices, that could change quickly. A judiciary controlled by MAGA loyalists means that all remaining checks on Trump’s authority could end. Many of his former-lawyers-turned-appointees are already working to make an unchecked Trump administration a reality.

How are Trump’s former personal lawyers already reshaping American legal norms?

Smith, who worked on the Trump v. United States immunity case, was confirmed last month. And Schwartz, who worked on the false documents case that led to Trump’s conviction, joined the bench last week. So there’s not much to say about these two men’s record in federal office — yet.

But Blanche, Bove, and Sauer have all displayed ruthless cunning in their efforts to advance Trump and his causes.

Blanche has been DAG since March 2025, a role that oversees the federal government’s criminal prosecutions and its 93 regional US attorneys’ offices. He’s led the entire Justice Department since April, after former Attorney General Pam Bondi — another of Trump’s former personal lawyers — left office.

So Blanche oversaw several dubious federal prosecutions targeting people Trump perceives as enemies, including criminal proceedings targeting former FBI Director James Comey and current New York Attorney General Letitia James. There’s also evidence that Blanche has played an unusually direct role in the Justice Department’s decision to bring meritless charges against prominent Democrats.

In May 2025, for example, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, showed up at an ICE detention facility in his New Jersey city and asked to tour it. He was briefly let inside the gate, where he was confronted by about a dozen law enforcement officers and asked to leave, which he did.

But then one of these officers received a phone call. A video, later submitted to a federal court, shows the officer turning to his colleagues after the call and announcing, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States.” That deputy attorney general, of course, was Blanche. (In a September court filing, DOJ confirmed that officers arrested Baraka “after consulting with the Deputy Attorney General.”)

Yet, despite Blanche’s apparent decision to personally order Baraka’s arrest, the DAG forgot to check whether Baraka had actually done something that could support criminal charges. The mayor was only charged with misdemeanor trespassing, and those charges were dismissed two weeks later. At the court hearing formally dropping these charges, a federal magistrate judge admonished prosecutors for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.”

Blanche also unsuccessfully attempted to establish Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” which would have been used to distribute money to Trump’s allies — including, potentially, Trump supporters who participated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Although the fund appears dead after it received bipartisan pushback in Congress, a DOJ press release announcing the fund said it was “established” by the attorney general, a role performed by Blanche, and that the fund would be administered by five people chosen by Blanche.

Before Trump took office, Bove was Blanche’s law partner. Shortly before Bove joined the bench, he briefly served as principal associate deputy attorney general — essentially the DAG’s top deputy, which meant that Bove was Blanche’s right-hand man. In that role, he was often described as Trump’s “enforcer.” 

Bove spent only about half a year as Blanche’s lieutenant, but he managed to spark a mini-revolt in one of the Justice Department’s most prestigious offices during his short tenure. After Bove ordered the DOJ to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams “without prejudice,” a maneuver that would allow the charges to be reinstated if Adams did not cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, seven federal prosecutors resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order. 

One was Danielle Sassoon, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon. Another, Hagan Scotten, wrote in his resignation letter to Bove that “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” Scotten clerked for Republican Chief Justice John Roberts and for future Republican Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Meanwhile, a whistleblower complaint by another former DOJ lawyer claims that Bove said, in a meeting about a court decision halting some deportations, “that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order.”

Trump appointed Bove to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last September. Federal appeals courts typically spend months deciding cases, so his tenure on the Third Circuit has thus far been less eventful than his time at the DOJ. But there are early signs that he remains loyal to Trump even after moving into an independent branch of government. Bove attended a Trump rally in December, a highly unusual move for judges who are supposed to remain nonpartisan. And the background image on his iPhone is reportedly an image of a defiant Trump raising a fist, or at least it was months after he joined the bench.

That leaves Sauer, who, as solicitor general, is tasked with defending federal government programs in the Supreme Court. That includes the Trump tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down last winter, and Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to strip many newborn Americans of their citizenship.

Despite these losses, Sauer has an impressive winning record before the Supreme Court, largely because the Court is controlled by six Republicans who are highly sympathetic to Trump and his agenda. This is, after all, the same Court that said that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, after Sauer argued as much. 

Sauer has been particularly effective in persuading the Republican justices to block lower court rulings against Trump on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a once rarely used mix of emergency motions and other matters that became a routine part of Supreme Court litigation during Trump’s first term.

So Trump has taken several of his personal lawyers and transformed them into some of the most well-credentialed — and in some cases, the most powerful — figures in the legal profession. Thus far, the evidence suggests that these individuals remain loyal to Trump, even when they move into jobs that are supposed to be nonpartisan. Three of them already have lifetime appointments. 

Any nation governed by the rule of law must have government officials who will obey whatever constraints the law imposes — whether they be federal agency leaders who follow the law out of a sense of duty, or judges who rein in executive branch leaders who refuse to do so. Institutions like the Department of Justice also depend on informal norms, many of which are a response to similar abuses of power during the Nixon administration, that have long constrained federal prosecutors.

But Trump’s DOJ is often actively hostile to these norms, and the growing legal power of Trump’s personal lawyers is just the latest example. Their steady reshaping of the judiciary clears the way for a federal government that is not constrained by anything.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a homebuilder in Houston, woke up before sunrise, ate breakfast prepared by his wife, and drove his construction crew to work. Around 6:50 AM, federal immigration agents surrounded Salgado Araujo’s van and shot him through an open window. Struck in the stomach, he died at a hospital a few hours later. 

The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement that evening which claimed that immigration officers stopped Salgado Araujo’s van as part of a “targeted” operation, and that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him “in self-defense” after he “weaponized his vehicle” in an attempt to run agents over. Later, DHS admitted that Salgado Araujo was not the target of an investigation. And video evidence and witness reports revealed that Salgado Araujo did not aim his vehicle at ICE agents, who shot him from the passenger side of the van.

Just a few days later, the same deadly scenario played out all over again. On July 13, around 7 AM, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero left his apartment in Biddeford, Maine, to go to work. Mere feet from the front door, federal immigration agents fired at least four shots into his car. Nearby, his 3-year-old daughter looked on, in her Bluey pajamas, and cried.

Again, the Trump administration initially claimed that Guerrero was the “target” of an arrest warrant, and that officers shot him after he “weaponized” his car. Again, the administration later admitted that Guerrero was not the target of an investigation. An ICE spokesperson eventually abandoned the self-defense claim, too, saying only that agents shot Guerrero out of an amorphous concern for “public safety.”

The American Civil Liberties Union published a report on Thursday that examined more than 1,200 incidents of immigration enforcement across eight states that occurred during President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House. The report concluded that in 432 of those incidents—representing more than one in three of the reviewed enforcement actions in 2025—agents used or threatened force, used intimidation tactics, or retaliated against observers. The ACLU also identified 130 instances in which agents brandished weapons and 16 incidents in which agents used lethal force.

The report stresses that the misconduct of immigration agents is not the result of “a few bad apples.” Rather, the fault lies with “a culture of abuse” encouraged by the Trump administration, and “a broken system of accountability.” Basically, when immigration agents are free to break the law without personal consequence, there are deadly consequences for everyone else.

I wanted to direct your attention to this podcast episode from Slate. It’s actually the first episode of a series Slate is doing on popular constitutionalism. (The page linked above is paywalled. But, I’m told, the ‘By the People’ pod series itself is not. So you should be able to find it on podcast platforms.) It brings together in a engaging and coherent way a number of themes we’ve been discussing over the last couple years about the problem of and the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it frames the question around a 20-year-old book on popular constitutionalism by Larry Kramer (The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review).

Caregivers in the U.S. are paid just under $26,000 a year on average for the most important work there is. And this June, we learned the government drew up a plan to mark many of them dead.

Let’s back up: When someone who receives Social Security dies, the government owes nothing for the month of the death, even if she lived to its final day. Benefits run a month behind, so her last payment lands after she’s gone, and the bank is told to send it back. We have a system that can find a dead woman’s last dollar and claw it back inside a month. It’s made to ignore the living woman who bathed her, fed her, and sat with her at the end.

And now we know just how little this government values her.

Last month, The Washington Post reported on a whistleblower disclosure from senior Social Security Administration executive Jeremiah Schofield, filed with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. It describes a plan, devised by Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security, to enter nearly 2.7 million living immigrants into the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, the database used by banks, employers and agencies to confirm who has died. To be marked dead is to be severed from wages, banking and all social benefits.

That was the point: make immigrants miserable enough to self-deport. Two memos reportedly from then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to the acting Social Security Commissioner, Leland Dudek, waved off the legal warnings, the disclosure says, stating “death is a state of ineligibility.” It didn’t matter that the people were alive.

The agency says the plan wasn’t carried out. But roughly 6,000 immigrants were marked dead last year, some of whom had to walk into a government office and prove they were still breathing. And when they did, Immigration and Custom Enforcement was there waiting to arrest them.

Even without the fear that this stunt evoked, aides and the night nurses are already leaving — their protections revoked, status in question — but the need for them isn’t shrinking. Over the next decade, the U.S. will have 10 million openings in direct care. We’ll squeeze this need into the margins.

The care crisis will be intensified by the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe, which clears the way to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians by July 10. This decision has been covered as a healthcare-staffing crisis, and it is that. But that is smaller than the truth: This will be a whole-lifespan problem, as the same workforce holds up both ends of American caregiving, elder care and childcare.

The PHI, a national research organization for the direct-care workforce, has already warned that without immigrant care workers, family caregivers will be forced to leave the workforce or cut their hours to fill the gap. That loss lands hardest on women across every sector and level of the workforce — caregiving is already the number one reason women voluntarily leave their jobs, cited by 42% of those who quit, according to Catalyst research — at a moment when women’s declining labor force participation is already draining the U.S. economy to the tune of an estimated $650 billion a year, or 2.9% of GDP.

New York and Massachusetts sit among the states with the most engaged care policy in the country. Florida and Ohio sit near the opposite end of that spectrum. It hardly matters. Take the caregivers out, and all four states end up in the same place: families with no one to turn to. No state legislates its way out of this loss. Without a caregiver, there is no care. Hard stop.

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In much of East Asia, however, shaped by Confucian ideals of filial duty, and in Latino families bound by familismo, tending to the old and the dying is a calling claimed with pride. In the Philippines, which sends caregivers to the whole world, the work is a point of honor.

Other societies put public money in the place of reverence. The Netherlands has covered long-term care under universal insurance since 1968 and now devotes more of its GDP to it, about 4%, than any country tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Sweden, Norway and Denmark similarly fund it as a public good, not a private scramble.

In Japan, the two meet. A Confucian, deeply familial culture, it wrote care into law, requiring every citizen over 40 to carry long-term care insurance, and spending, in 2020, 67% more of its economy on that care than we did. Reverence and infrastructure, together.

The U.S. managed neither. We file care work under menial; overwhelmingly staff it with women, people of color, and immigrants; and pay as if they could feed their families on the sheer joy of being useful.

The reverence born in other countries arrives here, carried by the first generation, and finds nothing to hold onto: no paid leave, no funded care, no status, no relief. If it survives, it does so against the steady pull of a country that degrades and ignores caregiving. The further individuals get from arrival, the easier it becomes to forget cultural standards. That is not immigrants shedding their values. It is a country that imports devotion and budgets nothing to keep it alive.

And now we are chasing away the immigrants.

One in five of the people caring for our children are immigrants — more than 40% in New York City, half in LA — more than half of whom are not citizens. When these hands go, the need remains. Intense work lands on the daughter, the wife, the sister, who absorbs the collapse, on top of her own life and career, uncompensated. It lands on the Panini Generation, pressed between aging parents and young children without paid leave or reprieve.

That daughter is often the one the family was proudest to send away. Education carries a woman farther from home — two to three times farther from her family, research finds, than her less-schooled peers. In her memoir, “My Life In Full,” Indra Nooyi, who left her parents in India to ultimately run PepsiCo, wrote that her mother raised her with “one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake, to go succeed and then come back to family.”

So, we lose. We lose in our communities, as neighbors disappear and businesses shutter with a workforce afraid to show. We lose in our homes, where we need those extra, loving hands. We lose in our accounts, drained by the care no one will fund. We lose in our companies, as women leave when caregiving can’t be negotiated. We lose in our relationships. We lose our people. And then, we reach our melting point and quietly lose ourselves.

The U.S. machine can find the dead and reclaim their last dollar inside a month. It purposefully leaves destitute the people who rocked, fed, bathed, lifted and bury us. Whose hands have caught everything this country dropped and asked almost nothing back. That’s what they get — and we lose.

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