To Republican lawmakers, the 2024 election results were the mandate they’d been hoping for to justify their attacks on transgender rights. After a historically anti-LGBTQ campaign cycle in which more than $200 million was pumped into anti-trans advertisements, GOP elected officials from Congress to state legislatures are feeling emboldened by Donald Trump’s victory—and moving fast to put the next wave of transphobic policies in place.

Ohio is a case in point. Just a week after Trump was declared the president-elect, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a law banning transgender people in K-12 schools and colleges from using “single-sex” facilities that align with their gender identity—everything from bathrooms to locker rooms to dormitories. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who made national headlines almost a year ago when he vetoed the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors (quickly overridden by the GOP statehouse supermajority), quietly signed the new law Wednesday morning. He issued no statement.

The new law prohibits all public and private schools and colleges from offering multi-stall bathrooms that are gender-neutral. Schools can—but are not required to—establish single-user restrooms. Otherwise, to safely use bathrooms, trans students will have to ask permission to access faculty facilities.

“I just don’t foresee a scenario in which schools that are already historically underfunded are going to be able to drop everything and build new bathrooms,” Mallory Golski, civic engagement and advocacy manager at Kaleidoscope Youth Center, a queer youth support organization in Columbus, told Mother Jones after the bill passed. “It’s just not possible.”

Ohio’s ban makes it the 14th state to restrict trans people’s access to restrooms since 2021, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Most bans apply only to K-12 schools; in a few states, including Florida, the ban applies to all government buildings and carries criminal penalties. Ohio’s law explicitly authorizes schools to use students’ birth certificates to verify gender assigned at birth, but doesn’t include an enforcement mechanism—other than the fear it creates in trans students to police themselves.

“I just don’t foresee a scenario in which schools that are already historically underfunded are going to be able to drop everything and build new bathrooms. It’s just not possible.”

Meanwhile in Washington, Republicans have targeted Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first openly trans person elected to Congress. After GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina launched an effort to ban trans people from U.S. Capitol bathrooms, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) vowed to fight any trans woman she sees trying to use a women’s restroom, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that restrooms on Capitol Hill were “reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” Mace then proposed a bathroom ban for all federal property, including museums and national parks.

Republicans contend—without any evidence—that banning trans people from using gender-aligned bathrooms, locker rooms, and dorms is a way to ensure student safety. To the contrary, researchers have found no link between trans-inclusive bathroom policies and safety risks.

Indeed, according to the US Department of Justice, trans people are victimized by violent crime at 2.5 times the rate of their cisgender counterparts, and queer people in general are more likely to experience sexual violence. Research has shown that trans students face greater risk of sexual harassment and assault in schools with restrictive bathroom policies. 

Ohio’s bathroom ban was originally introduced in May 2023, but this summer it was added to an unrelated, bipartisan bill to reform a state program allowing middle and high school students to take college classes for credit. Then the bill sat until the legislature returned from recess after the November election.

“Ohioans and Americans, quite frankly, across this country, don’t want boys in girls’ sports, don’t want boys in girls’ locker rooms, they don’t want boys in girls’ bathrooms,” Sen. Kristina Roegner, a Republican representing the northeast Ohio suburb of Hudson, said during the Senate floor debate in mid-November. “This message was sent loud and clear last week during the national election. I say we listen.” The bill passed 24 to 7, along party lines.

“It’s really not about the bathrooms. It’s about demonizing and frightening people,” Democrat Nickie Antonio, the Ohio Senate minority leader and the first openly gay person elected to the Ohio legislature, said on the Senate floor. “We are telling our children: There are people that are ‘less than,’ they are not the same, they are not allowed to behave exactly like ‘the rest of us.’ That is a terrible message.”

The message rings loud and clear in the ears of Ohio’s trans youth, says Golski of Kaleidoscope Youth Center. Many trans young people who have lived in the state their entire lives—who otherwise want to stay—are taking steps to leave. Golski doesn’t blame them.

“You can’t say, ‘Oh no, stick it out,’” Golski says. “It’s like: Go, run for the hills. Go anywhere but here.”

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

At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishes—foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor. The event, catered by the sushi chef Masa Takayama, was a launch party for Australian cultivated meat firm Vow, which will sell its foie gras at a handful of restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The meal was decadent—one course featured a mountain of black truffle—but that was mostly the point. Vow and its CEO, George Peppou, are angling cultivated meat as a luxury product—an unusual positioning for an industry where many founders are motivated by animal welfare and going toe-to-toe with mass-produced meat. But while growing meat in the lab still remains eye-wateringly expensive, Peppou is trying to turn the technology’s Achilles’ heel into his advantage.

“I feel like the obituary has already been written for our industry,” he says. “But just because Californians can’t do something doesn’t mean something can’t be done.”

It’s for venues that want “to use ingredients to distinguish themselves,” or “that have removed foie gras from their menus due to cruelty.”

That something is making cultivated meat while turning a profit. The big challenge facing the industry—along with the bans and the lack of venture capital cash—is that it costs a lot to grow animal cells in bioreactors. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but one research paper with data provided by companies in 2021 put the cost of cultivated meat between $68 and $10,000 per pound, depending on production methods. A lot of startups say they have drastically cut production costs since their early experiments, but prices are still way higher than factory farmed chicken at around $2.67 per pound.

The two best-funded startups in the space—Eat Just and Upside Foods—have both brought out cultivated chicken products. But Peppou, who leans into his reputation in the industry as something of a provocateur, says that approach doesn’t make sense. “Making chicken was always a terrible idea,” he says.

The fundamentals of cultivated meat are pricey. The business of growing animal cells outside of their bodies is usually the domain of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Animal cells grown in culture are used to make vaccines and medicines, which are sold in tiny volumes for sky-high prices. The cultivated meat industry needs some of the same ingredients to grow the cells it wants to sell as meat, but unlike the pharma industry, it needs to grow huge volumes of cells and sell them at grocery store prices.

The major cost right now is what’s called cell media—the broth of liquid, nutrients, amino acids, and growth factors fed to cells while they’re growing. The off-the-shelf standard cell media for growing stem cells is called Essential 8, and it costs upwards of $400 per liter. That’s fine if you’re a scientist growing a few cells in a petri dish, but growing a single kilogram of cultivated meat might require 10 of liters of media, quickly sending costs sky-rocketing. Cultivated meat companies need to find cheaper sources for their ingredients and buy them in bulk in order to drive their costs down.

“Ultimately the industry needs to prove that it can scale,” says Elliot Swartz, principal scientist for cultivated meat at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit focused on advancing alternative proteins. Just a few crucial ingredients in cell media are a major factor pushing up costs for cultivated meat companies, most of which are still operating at a tiny scale, producing kilograms of meat per production cycle rather than the tons they are aiming for.

“My biggest concern is always the scalability and the ability to industrialize something,” says Ido Savir, CEO of Israeli cultivated meat company SuperMeat. His company has just released a report estimating that—if produced at scale—it could grow chicken meat at $11.80 per pound, close to the price for pasture-raised chicken in the US. But this assumes production in bioreactors up to 25,000 liters—several orders of magnitude higher than the 10-liter scale the company is currently working at. “We’re improving every month,” he says.

Savir is aiming at a much lower price point than Peppou, and hopes to partner with food manufacturers who might license his technology to add cultivated meat into their mix of options. “We’re more interested in the mass market,” he says. Dutch company Meatable has indicated it wants to follow a similar approach—licensing its technology to the handful of firms that already produce much of the US’s meat. Other cultivated meat companies want to sell to consumers under their own brands, but are still targeting the mass meat industry.

Peppou is skewing decidedly in the opposite direction. He declines to name a price, but says his foie gras is at the “higher end” of the market—somewhere in the region of hundreds of dollars per pound. The foie gras is 51 percent Japanese quail cells—which also make up the parfait that Vow has sold in Singapore since April—plus a plant-based fat mix and corn husk flavorings. “It’s either for a venue that wants to use ingredients to distinguish themselves,” says Peppou, or it’s for “large hotels or caterers that have removed foie gras from their menus due to cruelty.”

Conventional foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks or geese until their livers swell with fatty deposits. Production is banned in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and California among other places. Another cultivated meat company, France-based Gourmey, also makes foie gras, although its product is not currently on sale anywhere.

“If you look at a lot of deep technology companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying.”

Vow’s quail parfait is on the menu at around six restaurants in Singapore, including being sold as a $15 (USD) bar snack and as part of a $185 tasting menu. In Peppou’s telling, going high-end is a way to spin cultivated meat’s high costs and low production volumes as a luxury proposition. “I believe the biggest challenge we have is how to shape consumer sentiment around this category. And the most efficient way to do that in my mind is to be in the most influential places with the relatively limited volume we have available.”

SuperMeat’s Savir says that luxury cultivated meat products “have a place,” but that he is more interested in the mass market where he can complement the current production of meat. That will mean continuing to drive production costs down. One option is to mix cultivated meat with much cheaper plant-based ingredients. Savir says that they’re aiming at products that are around 30 percent cultivated meat cells and 70 percent plant-based ingredients. Several other firms are taking a similar strategy. In Singapore, Eat Just sells cultivated chicken strips that are only 3 percent chicken cells.

The industry is also hoping that customers will pay premium prices because of the potential environmental benefits of making meat outside of animal bodies. Savir says he has spoken with a “very big” pizza company that says replacing just 5 to 10 percent of its chicken toppings with cultivated chicken would make a substantial dent in its carbon footprint.

Even replacing a fraction of a percent of the $50 billion broiler chicken industry in the US would require a monumental scaling-up of cultivated meat production. “If you’re competing against chicken, which is the lowest-cost meat product, then you either have to go to very large scales or create hybrid products that have lower inclusion rates,” says Swartz of the Good Food Institute. But with investor dollars in short supply, companies are having to get creative about how they plan to get products into the world and achieve many founders’ ultimate goal of displacing at least some conventional meat production.

Even though he’s targeting the luxury market, Peppou says he still isn’t turning a profit on his cultured quail parfait or foie gras, although his margin is much better than it would be if he were competing with factory-farmed chicken. “If you look at a lot of deep technology companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying,” he says. “And it’s figuring out ways to not die long enough to get good enough to win in a market which probably doesn’t exist yet.”

That means the route ahead for Vow might not look totally different from other cultivated meat companies. “The volumes are going to be low, it’s mostly going to be in restaurants. They’re going to be iterating on these products over time before they get any sort of mass market entry point,” says Swartz. “In the short term, what I’m looking forward to is getting more people that are trying this for the first time, not trying it because they’re excited about cultivated meat, but generally because they’re interested.”

On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, a government agency composed of more than 18,000 employees with an annual budget of $47 billion. Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford University, has no leadership experience in either government or large organizations, but, like some other Trump nominees, he is outspoken about what he sees as the tyranny of public health restrictions and censorship on social media platforms. Bhattacharya came into prominence as a strong critic of Covid vaccine mandates, though he has said publicly that he supports some routine childhood vaccinations, including those that prevent polio and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).

Bhattacharya, who didn’t respond to a list of questions emailed by Mother Jones, has held several appointments at Stanford, including at the university’s libertarian-leaning Hoover Institution. But it was during the pandemic that he emerged as a high-profile public health iconoclast, criticizing lockdowns, and then mask and vaccine mandates. Bhattacharya was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 document—developed at a meeting of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank—that recommended that the United States achieve Covid herd immunity by employing a strategy of mass infection. Bhattacharya and his co-authors—biostatistician Martin Kulldorff and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta—suggested sequestering vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, while permitting other citizens to go about business as usual.

At a conference hosted by the anti-lockdown group the Brownstone Institute in November 2021, nearly a year after the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.” He has repeatedly criticized the agency he is now poised to lead, suggesting that it punishes scientists who buck consensus by denying them funding.

Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.”

Bhattacharya’s critique of pandemic protocols caught on in right-wing circles, and he became a regular at conservative gatherings. He railed against what he called the stifling of academic freedom at events at the ultra-right-wing Hillsdale College, as well as the rally where then–presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced lawyer and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.

But in other venues, Bhattacharya’s criticisms of pandemic management haven’t gone over as well. The Great Barrington Declaration was panned by the American Public Health Association; in a public letter in the Lancet, a group of 80 scientists called it “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” In 2021, as journalist Walker Bragman reported, Bhattacharya testified in a Tennessee court in favor of Gov. Bill Lee’s order to allow parents to send their children to school unmasked. The US district judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw, blocked the order and wrote that Bhattacharya’s “demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda.”

Bhattacharya has questioned the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of Covid, often citing a 2023 review by the medical database Cochrane Library. “It has been disheartening to watch once reputable experts discount the Cochrane review’s negative verdict on community masking to prevent Covid spread in favor of low-quality evidence,” he posted to his 548,000 followers on X. “Medicine has rejected evidenced-based medicine.” Yet Cochrane itself disagrees with Bhattacharya’s conclusion. “Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” wrote Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library.

Meanwhile, Bhattacharya’s connections with powerful conservative groups and Silicon Valley titans have increased his status and visibility. PayPal founder and conservative super-donor Peter Thiel praised Bhattacharya and referred to him as his friend at the 2021 National Conservatism conference, WhoWhatWhy’s Allison Neitzel reported. The following year, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter, Musk invited Bhattacharya to the Twitter headquarters, where the two discussed the platform’s alleged “blacklisting” of him for his tweets that criticized public health guidelines around the pandemic.

It will take some time to find out more about what led Twitter 1.0 to act so imperiously, but I am grateful to @elonmusk, who has promised access to help find out. I will report the results on Twitter 2.0, where transparency and free speech rule.
4/4

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 11, 2022

In 2023, a promotional video for Teneo Group, a political strategy organization helmed by the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo, included a montage that briefly showed Bhattacharya.

Since the start of the pandemic, Bhattacharya has been outspoken about the censorship that he claimed was silencing scientists who, like himself, questioned the wisdom of the government’s approach to pandemic restrictions. He was especially critical of the censorship he saw at his own university—specifically the pandemic disinformation-tracking work at the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project. Bhattacharya claimed that the group served as “a conduit to launder Biden Administration social media censorship activities” and embedding “within social media companies and pass on gov’t censorship demands.” Renée DiResta, a disinformation scholar who served as the group’s technical research manager, said she was instructed by her bosses not to publicly refute Bhattacharya’s claims—and that the damage he did to the group’s reputation may have contributed to the dissolution of the group earlier this year. Bhattacharya’s criticisms, she told me, “led to continued public pressure and the university deciding that some of the work was not worth continuing to support.” Stanford University didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

In 2022, Bhattacharya joined a group of plaintiffs in suing the Biden administration, claiming that the US government had pressured social media companies to suppress posts that criticized pandemic policies. He was represented pro bono by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal group that says it aims to “tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies,” and the case wound its way up to the US Supreme Court, which dismissed it earlier this year because the plaintiffs lacked standing.

As the pandemic increasingly receded from view, Bhattacharya became involved in causes beyond public health. Today, he serves as an adviser to Third Rail, a consulting group that says it helps “neutralize” “self-censoring environments” and “counterproductive DEI initiatives.” The group’s founder is former New York City Community Education Council president Maud Maron, who has crusaded against transgender inclusivity initiatives. Last year, Bhattacharya joined independent journalist Rav Arora in creating a podcast called Illusion of Consensus, in which the two hosts “dissect the misconceptions of consensus in science, from COVID-19 policies to gender-affirming care.” Earlier this year, Neitzel reported, Bhattacharya joined a group of scientists who aim to convince the public that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak.

If confirmed as the director of NIH, Bhattacharya would be in charge of the agency responsible for allocating government funding for biomedical and public health research in the United States. He would help shape the research goals of the 27 institutes within the agency, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the group that Dr. Anthony Fauci led until he retired in 2022.

In a post on X, before he was announced as the official nominee, Bhattacharya vowed to his followers that “no matter what happens, I will do my best in the coming years, in whatever role I have, to help support the reform of the American scientific and public health institutions after the Covid era fiasco so that they work for the benefit of the American people.”

In recent days, an invitation from people affiliated with American Values 2024, a super-PAC that supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, has been sent to people in his sphere offering “cocktails and dinner” with Kennedy at Mar-a-Lago.

The invitation refers to Kennedy as “incoming secretary, Health & Human services,” although Kennedy has not yet been formally nominated, let alone confirmed by the Senate for that position.

“These donors are getting special access to someone who’s trying to serve the public.”

The price of enjoying Kennedy’s company at the fundraiser, set to take place on the Trump-owned club’s Lakeview Terrace, is $25,000 each, or $40,000 for a couple. Experts on federal election law say that such a bald exchange—a large donation in exchange for access to a powerful incoming government official—is technically legal, but ethically ill-advised. 

The invitation, an image of which was shared with Mother Jones, requests RSVPs at an email address associated with American Values 2024. The fundraiser’s listed hosts are Tony Lyons, a co-founder of the PAC and the owner of Skyhorse Publishing, which publishes Kennedy’s books; Robert and Perri Bishop, respectively the founder and chief operating officer of Impala Asset Management, who have donated generously to American Values and various Republican candidates; Candace McDonald, who the PAC’s CEO and also previously headed the anti-vaccine organization Generation Rescue; and Leigh Merinoff. Merinoff has spoken at a conference put on by Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization. Her bio for that event described her as the owner of Meadows Bee Farm, “an experimental farm and raw milk dairy” in Vermont. FEC records show she also donated to American Values 2024.

The Washington Post recently described how cabinet contenders and political hangers-on have once again descended on Mar-a-Lago, rubbing shoulders with Trump-allies who will soon be in government. A person who answered the club’s phone confirmed a “Bishop fundraiser” is set for December 10, by invitation only. “They have a headcount,” she added. “Make sure your name is on the list.”

Kedric Payne, the senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, says that as a technical matter, laws that govern ethical conduct and permitted political activity for federal officials, including the Hatch Act, don’t apply to Kennedy until he takes office. But from an ethics perspective, “it’s important that you avoid not only an actual conflict of interest but the appearance of one,” he says. “There could be an appearance that these donors are getting special access to someone who’s trying to serve the public. I’d advise someone to avoid that situation.”  

Recently, Kennedy’s campaign has recently sent emails to supporters asking for donations to pay off $5.5 million in campaign debt. Exactly how funds taken in at the PAC-hosted, Mar-a-Lago event will be used is not specified on the invitation, but Lyons told Mother Jones that Americas Voice uses the money it raises “to advocate for public policy and initiatives that improve the health of American children and adults.” He added that the organization “has been doing this work for years and we are glad to host an event with RFK Jr whose views we support.”

Kennedy’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Trump’s transition acknowledged a request for comment, but did not provide a statement before publication. 

During his own campaign, and in his decades as an anti-vaccine activist, Kennedy railed against the influence of money in politics. “Typical candidates rely on big corporate donors + influencers to fund their campaigns,” he tweeted in September 2023. “In return, candidates advance the agenda of their donors.”

“Both Republicans and Democrats have sold out to special interests and their top donors for decades,” he tweeted in March. “I’m not beholden to anyone but you.”

In August 2015, Donald Trump sat down to talk with then–Fox News host Bill O’Reilly about one of his central campaign promises: the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants. “Our country is going to hell,” Trump said. “We have to start a process where we take back our country.”

O’Reilly found the plan ridiculous. Such a colossal and expensive undertaking, the conservative host said, would take decades. Before then, the courts would stop sweeping raids. The idea, O’Reilly continued, was just “not going to happen.” Perhaps the most obvious reason why, he said, was the 14th Amendment, which “says if you’re born here, you’re an American—and you can’t kick Americans out.” O’Reilly almost screamed at one point: “If you’re born here, you’re an American—period! Period!”

Trump was unconvinced. “Many lawyers are saying that’s not the way it is,” he insisted. The incoming president’s view then, and now, is that the American children of undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to automatic citizenship. And, if prompted to weigh in on this issue, he thought the courts would agree.

“I’d much rather find out whether or not ‘anchor babies’ are actually citizens,” Trump said, “because a lot of people don’t think they are.”

The first Trump administration didn’t test this theory. The second one likely will. The former president has made the end of birthright citizenship a cornerstone of his immigration agenda and mass deportation plan. Automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, Trump said in a campaign video from May 2023, “is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law.”

In his next term, Trump will aim to dispute more than a century of legal precedent and deal a blow to a bedrock constitutional understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. He cannot change everything with the stroke of a pen. But Trump can—and says he will—begin the long task of dismantling birthright citizenship. There is a playbook, decades in the making.

The process would begin with a presidential action. Couching it as an attempt to tackle the threat of an “illegal foreign invasion” in the form of unlawful migration, Trump has promised to sign an executive order on day one that would challenge birthright citizenship. The proposed rule would instruct federal agencies to deny passports and Social Security numbers to children born to immigrants, unless one of the parents is a citizen or green card holder. Crucially, his candidacy platform stated, the executive order would “explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment.”

The 14th amendment’s Citizenship Clause establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Ratified after the Civil War to nullify the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which ruled that Black Americans couldn’t be citizens of the United States, it defined citizenship and enshrined the long-standing doctrine of jus solis (“right of soil”)—meaning citizenship by place of birth—in constitutional law.

While the president-elect can’t end birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants with an executive order alone, he can conceivably set up a legal challenge to the reigning interpretation. As Trump hinted at in the 2015 interview with O’Reilly, he and his allies might look at the courts to do their bidding. And they have a playbook for it: undermine the lesser-known Supreme Court landmark decision in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case reaffirming the guarantee of citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States.

For years, opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants have toyed with the possibility of overturning the Wong Kim Ark precedent. Increasingly, such a line of attack seems less hypothetical—especially in light of a Supreme Court conservative supermajority that has demonstrated a willingness to undo their major rulings, like Roe v. Wade, regardless of what the political repercussions and real-life consequences might be.

Inviting the Supreme Court to revisit Wong Kim Ark, explains Robert L. Tsai, a professor of constitutional law at Boston University, “would give the Trump administration the opportunity to ask the court to either overrule or narrow” the well-established legal precedent. “You’ve got a president and a bunch of people around him who disagree fundamentally with notions of citizenship and how they’ve been done for a very long time,” he says. “We’re going to find out just how far they can push those changes.”

It would be nothing short of seismic. “It’s really 100 years of accepted interpretation,” Hiroshi Motomura, a scholar of immigration and citizenship at UCLA’s law school, told me of birthright citizenship. Ending birthright citizenship would cut at the core of the hard-fought assurance of equal treatment under the law, he said, “basically drawing a line between two kinds of American citizens.”

To understand how an attack on birthright citizenship could be mounted, let alone prevail, it’s important to know what stands in the way of it.

Wong Kim Ark was careful. Before he departed California in 1894—boarding a steamship to visit his parents in the Guangdong province of China—Kim Ark ensured he had all the required documents to return. Born in San Francisco in the 1870s to immigrants of humble means—who resettled in China after several years of permanent residence in America—Kim Ark had made the trip before without much trouble. In one of those travels to the family’s ancestral home, in 1889, he married Yee Shee, with whom he would have four children.

But this time, anti-Chinese animus, violence, and laws were on the rise. In 1882, the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law barred the naturalization of Chinese nationals and the immigration of laborers from China, who were perceived as a threat to the white working class. It marked the first federal restriction on immigration explicitly based on race.

As Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov detail in their 2021 book, American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship, Kim Ark, who worked as a cook from an early age, carried with him an affidavit signed by three white men as witnesses to prove he had been born in California. Still, when he arrived at the San Francisco port aboard the Coptic in August 1895, a customs collector by the name of John Wise denied him entry. Kim Ark was held offshore for five months.

Wise, known for his anti-Chinese bias, considered himself a “zealous opponent of Chinese immigration.” He made it exceedingly difficult for even those exempted from the ban—such as merchants, diplomats, and teachers—to be allowed into the United States. Once, Wise even wrote a poem mocking a Chinese man he had ordered deported that read, “So just to make this poor Wong Fong feel very good and nice, I’ve sent him back to China where he can eat his mice.” 

At the time, anti-Chinese exclusionists had been looking for a test case to challenge birthright citizenship. They considered Chinese Americans incapable of assimilating. But the law had been clear that did not matter. A federal court had ruled just a few years earlier that a 14-year-old born in California to Chinese immigrants—who had been barred by customs officials—was a citizen under English common law and the 14th Amendment. In Kim Ark, they thought they had found an opportunity to set a different legal precedent.

With help from the Chinese Six Companies organization and lawyer Thomas Riordan, Kim Ark filed a habeas corpus petition challenging his confinement and defending his right to reenter the United States as a recognized native-born citizen. “Think of all the people in this country who have been born of parents who owed allegiance to either Great Britain, Germany, Italy, or some other European power,” Riordan argued in court. “Are all of these people to be declared not citizens?”

His goal beyond helping Kim Ark, Nackenoff and Novkov write, was to “have the broad principle of citizenship settled for all time.”

On behalf of the federal government, US District Attorney Henry S. Foote made the case that Kim Ark had become a citizen by “accident of birth” and his “education and political affiliations remained entirely alien to the United States.” Because Wong’s parents were ineligible for naturalization and “subjects of the Emperor of China,” the argument went, Kim Ark himself was “by reason of his race, language, color and dress, a Chinese person.”

A district court judge disagreed, finding that “it is enough that he was born here, whatever was the status of his parents” and that a ruling against Kim Ark, would have resulted in countless people “denationalized and remanded to a state of alienage.”

The government appealed and the case went before the Supreme Court. Delivering a 6–2 decision in March 1898, the justices determined that Kim Ark was indeed a citizen, regardless of his parents’ ancestry. “The 14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory” Justice Horace Gray wrote for the majority, “including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.”

To exclude “from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries,” the opinion continued, “would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”

Chief Justice Melville Fuller dissented, arguing that the 14th Amendment didn’t “arbitrarily make citizens of children born in the United States of parents who, according to the will of their native government and of this Government, are and must remain aliens.”

Nonetheless, the majority’s understanding of the 14th Amendment provided, in no uncertain terms, that birthright citizenship extended to the children of immigrants, even those unable to naturalize. The case had little repercussion in the press at the time and its details have probably eluded many Americans since. Kim Ark and his sons even continued to encounter a myriad of obstacles when traveling in and out of the United States in the ensuing years. But had it not been for Wong Kim Ark, University of New Hampshire historian Lucy Salyer told the Post in 2018, the United States would not be a nation of immigrants, but rather “colonies of foreigners.”

Most legal scholars consider the issue of birthright citizenship settled law. They agree that the key language of the Citizenship Clause—“subject to the jurisdiction”—carves out only two exceptions: the children of foreign diplomats and Native Americans under tribal rule. (In 1924, Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans born in the country.)

But for years, immigration restrictionists have continued to advocate for amending or reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, charging that birthright citizenship serves as a “magnet” for unlawful immigration and so-called “birth tourism.” Specifically, they argue that children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because of their parents’ irregular status.

Trump attorney John Eastman has said, being born on US soil is not sufficient to confer automatic citizenship. That right should be contingent on “a total and exclusive allegiance” to the United States. In a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, former Trump national security official and Hillsdale College lecturer Michael Anton made the case that Congress could “clarify legislatively that the children of noncitizens” are not citizens under the 14th Amendment.

In the absence of congressional action, some on the right believe Trump should take matter into his own hands. “Judges faithful to their oaths will have no choice but to agree with him,” Anton wrote. “Birthright citizenship was a mistake whose time has gone.” For modern-day critics of birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants, undermining or, at least, circumventing the well-established legal precedent in Wong Kim Ark could be the way to set things in motion.

Opponents like Anton and Eastman have argued that the justices’ ruling in Wong Kim Ark merely applied to the children of legal immigrants like Kim Ark’s parents and never directly addressed the question of those born to unauthorized noncitizens. Attacking the Wong Kim Ark decision as “erroneous and overly-broad,” Eastman has urged the courts to revisit or limit its interpretation.

Rogers M. Smith, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor and co-author of Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, is part of a minority of constitutional scholars who share that perspective. “It makes no reference whatsoever for the status of unauthorized aliens, which is why I think it doesn’t address that topic,” he told me. “Lots of people think it does by implication, but that’s clearly an argument that could be challenged.”

How the justices would respond to it is anyone’s guess. During the confirmation hearing of Justice Samuel Alito in 2006, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York asked the nominee if he agreed that “all persons mean all persons” according to the 14th Amendment and if a statute to deny citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented parents would be constitutional. Alito did not respond one way or the other, but nodded at “active legal disputes about the meaning of that provision.” If the question came before him as a sitting justice, he said on the occasion, it could “turn out to be a compelling argument or a frivolous argument or something in between.” More recently, Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to opine on the matter.

Because Wong Kim Ark is overwhelmingly considered good law, the Trump administration could also try to work around it. Instead of arguing that the case should be overruled, they could refer to a specific line in the decision: the exemption of children “of enemies within and during a hostile occupation.” Per that reasoning, unauthorized immigrants could be declared perpetrators of an “invasion” of US territory and their children excluded from the birthright citizenship guarantee under the 14th Amendment.

“It’s kind of an ugly analogy,” Smith says, “but that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court won’t accept it.” He attributes the untested argument to a changed political context in which “conservative judges on the bench have opened the doors for right-wing constitutional arguments that were previously viewed as beyond the pale, as too extreme.”

And they might have already found an opening. Judge James C. Ho, who Trump appointed to the ultraconservative 5th Circuit and is thought to be a contender for a vacant seat in the Supreme Court, recently appeared to signal he would consider this theory against birthright citizenship—in what observers have flagged as a notable departure from his previously unflinching endorsement of the accepted understanding and a not-so-subtle effort to prove his loyalty to Trump.

“Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment,” Judge Ho wrote in 2006. “That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.” He added: “Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most US-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.”

But in an interview with conservative law professor Josh Blackman, Judge Ho suggested there is “a direct connection between birthright citizenship and invasion.” He was alluding to the idea that migrants coming to the United States constitute an “invasion,” a largely dismissed theory advanced by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and others to justify states taking extraordinary actions to crackdown on migration. “Birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion. No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship,” Judge Ho said.

“Effectively, what he’s saying is that even though there’s a guarantee of birthright citizenship,” explains Evan Bernick, an assistant professor of law at Northern Illinois University and co-author of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, “the president can kind of turn it off by declaring an invasion and try to remove whoever he says is invading…It’s not even a loophole, it swallows the entire guarantee.” The fact that Trump referred to a foreign invasion in his campaign video, he adds, suggests they might be anticipating litigation and trying to “boost as much as possible their very minimal odds.”

In combination with a touted denaturalization program, it could be a “prelude” to mass deportation. “Even if this ultimately dies in the sense that a majority of the Supreme Court ultimately rejects it,” Bernick says, “it’s worth taking both literally and seriously. It’s not something that can be laughed off in the way that the proposition that a 33-year-old is eligible for the presidency can be laughed off. It’s real. It’s serious. These people believe it and they’re not just doing it because they think Trump wants it. There’s a real constitutional conviction on the part of the people who argue this.”

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

The world’s largest cruise line company is responsible for producing more carbon dioxide in Europe than the city of Glasgow, a report has found.

An analysis by the Transport and Environment (T&E) campaign group, provided to the Guardian, found Carnival to be the most climate-polluting cruise company sailing in Europe in 2023.

The data covered all Europe-bound cruise ships last year, including 53 that belonged to Carnival. The second most climate-polluting cruise company in Europe was MSC, followed by Norwegian Cruise Line, the group found.

Carbon emissions for Carnival’s Europe-bound ships totalled 2.6 million metric tons of CO2 last year. The latest emissions figures for the city of Glasgow, from 2021, with a population of 620,700, were 2.43 million metric tons, according to the city council. MSC emitted 1.4 million and Norwegian 0.84 million. Analysts from T&E used official data on carbon emissions supplied by vessels sailing in the European Economic Area, as required by EU law.

“Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap.”

“The larger companies have more vessels and bigger ships,” said Jacob Armstrong, shipping policy manager at T&E. “But bigger isn’t better when it comes to emissions.”

Cruising is one of tourism’s fastest-growing sectors. The number of cruise vessels has grown significantly, from 21 in the 1970s to 515 today, and T&E research shows the world’s biggest cruise ships have doubled in size since 2000.

Carnival Corporation plc, a Miami-based British and US company, made $2 billion profit in 2023, after losses of $4.4 billion and $7.1 billion in 2022 and 2021, during the Covid pandemic. In 2023, 12.5 million passengers travelled on its 92 ships.

In a separate ranking of environmental harm by cruise companies in 2024, by Friends of the Earth (FoE) US, Carnival and its subsidiaries also emerged lowest among 21 cruise lines.

An annual “cruise ship report card” awarded five of Carnival’s nine lines—Costa Cruises, P&O Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, Cunard, and Seabourn—the grade of F overall. Four factors taken into account were air pollution reduction, sewage treatment, water quality and transparency.

Marcie Keever, ocean and vessels programme director at FoE, said Carnival’s continued use of “scrubbers” in its fleet, which, while approved by the International Maritime Organization, allows the use of dirtier fuel and causes water pollution. “Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap,” she said.

This factor, along with a lack of transparency, and not all ships being equipped for shore power, resulted in the F grade, the lowest ranking.

FoE awarded expedition cruise lines Hurtigruten and Hurtigruten Expeditions a B+, the highest score, while Disney Cruise line got a B. Hurtigruten vessels plug into shore power instead of running their engines, thus reducing air pollution at shore power-enabled ports. Neither Hurtigruten nor Disney use scrubbers on vessels, and all three were awarded A for transparency.

“There are more cruise companies getting higher grades than in previous years, so we are seeing some progress,” Keever said.

A Carnival Corp and plc spokesperson said: “We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental technologies and solutions, which together with our other decisive climate actions are yielding strong results.”

Carnival’s 2023 total greenhouse gas emissions were 9.7 million metric tons, compared with 10.9 million in 2011. The spokesperson said it was on track to cut its emissions per passenger-equivalent by 40 percent by 2026, compared with 2008 levels.

An MSC cruise spokesperson said improving the environmental performance of its fleet was of “crucial” importance. “We have already made significant progress, and our ships are 40 percent more efficient than they were 10 years ago.”

A spokesperson for Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings said: “We are proud of the progress we are making towards our goal of reducing greenhouse gas intensity per capacity day by 10 percent by 2026 and 25 percent by 2030, using a 2019 baseline.”

When Gwen Williams’ mother was dying, taking her to an in-person appointment to get more medicine seemed impossible. So Williams made a telehealth appointment with the doctor—a video call. It was that easy.

“Her comfort was paramount,” Williams, who lives in Minnesota, recounts. “My mother wasn’t conscious during the visit, but [the doctor] was able to see her and was able to get the hospice medications and everything refilled.” 

Williams’ mother was on Medicare, as is she. Since 2020, Medicare has covered a wide range of remote medical services, some in critical situations like theirs, and others for routine care. Around one in four telehealth appointments are made by people on Medicare.

Around one in four telehealth appointments are made by people on Medicare.

The fact that Medicare will abruptly cut off that coverage for most specialties on January 1—barely a month away—Williams said, “just blows my mind.”

What we now call telehealth, an umbrella term for remote and digitally assisted medical care, was first developed by NASA in 1960 as a suite of tools to monitor astronauts’ health in space. While it has been gaining traction as a widespread, normalized aspect of care since the beginning of this century, telehealth really exploded in 2020 with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Until then, for Medicare patients—which includes most Americans over 65, and some younger disabled people—remote care coverage had been limited. In rural areas, for instance, people on Medicare could speak to a non-local specialist via telehealth, but not from home; they still had to go to a local hospital to place the call.

But on March 6, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services temporarily expanded Medicare’s telehealth coverage to all specialties. That expansion, renewed in 2022, is set to expire at the end of the year, impacting more than 65 million Americans.

Multiple bills have been introduced in the 118th Congress to preserve Medicare telehealth provisions and continue allowing people on Medicare to use telehealth flexibly, but all still await votes in both the House and Senate. Perhaps the likeliest to pass, the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2024, introduced by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), received widespread, bipartisan support from members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its subcommittee on health.

“Seniors, individuals with mobility issues, and those living in rural areas rely on telehealth,” Rep. Carter said in a statement to Mother Jones, calling the act “critical legislation that will extend telehealth flexibilities to get Medicare beneficiaries the life-saving health care they need.”

Where so many other health issues can be partisan or controversial, says Telehealth Access for America executive director Alye Mlinar, telehealth manages to be bipartisan. Mlinar hopes the bipartisan support “critical for really any issue” that telehealth has garnered will help lead to another congressional extension.

Epilepsy Foundation chief medical officer Dr. Jacqueline French’s organization has supported telehealth access for people with epilepsy even before the start of the Covid pandemic.

“There’s nothing that we learn from a physical exam that we could not learn from just talking to a person,” said French, who is also a professor of neurology at New York University Langone Health’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. The Epilepsy Foundation is one member of Telehealth Access for America, a consortium that includes, among other groups, the American Medical Association, Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Down Syndrome Society.

There are plenty of patients who can’t make long journeys at all—but for many others, telehealth is still a way to avoid travel risks. Traveling with uncontrolled seizures, for instance, can be dangerous, French notes.

Even if Congress does not extend its current, wide coverage of telehealth for Medicare recipients, a handful of protections—mainly around dialysis, strokes, and mental health—would remain.

Williams, whose mother also relied on telehealth, also praised the separate ways it benefits her: When the doctor who prescribed their mental health medication moved away, telehealth prevented a disruption in her care. She likens the often needless in-person visits to “a meeting that could have just been an email.”

“Just have to have a conversation with your doctor,” Williams said, “paying for transportation, paying for parking if you drive—it’s a real barrier when all you need is to have a conversation, to continue care, or ask a question.”

But there are limitations to a blanket extension of the program, argues Medicare Rights Center senior counsel Casey Schwarz. 

“We had really hoped Congress would take the opportunity to look carefully at what a telehealth benefit could and should look like, because while the pre-pandemic status quo is inadequate,” Schwarz told Mother Jones, “A complete lack of restriction or breaks on telehealth services is also inappropriate, and we think has some risk for beneficiaries.”

Schwarz said that she had heard from Medicare recipients “who have received what they believe to be substandard care through telehealth because something that they think would have been noticed or caught in an in-person visit was missed.”

An investigation by Mayo Clinic researchers found that diagnostic accuracy for people on telehealth ranged from 77 percent for ear, nose, and throat doctors to 96 percent for psychiatrists across a 90-day period in 2020. However, specialists, such as rheumatologists, were more likely to request an in-person appointment to continue care, in comparison to primary care doctors. 

Schwarz also says that telehealth cannot replace other forms of compliance with civil rights laws around accessibility, like the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“We don’t want to see telehealth fill in a way for providers to indicate that they do not need to meet physical access requirements because they provide telehealth services,” she said.

In-person services, especially from specialists, can’t always be replaced—and people like Schwarz raise the risk of telehealth, often cheaper for providers, being used to justify cuts to in-person services. Williams, for instance, does see their neurologists in-person, so they are able to assess her reflexes and the progression of their neuropathy.

With just weeks until the end of the year and Medicare’s telehealth termination, there is not much time for individual bills to pass through Congress and be signed into law by President Biden. 

Mlinar, however, is optimistic that an extension for Medicare telehealth recipients will be part of an annual end-of-year package negotiated by Congress “given the overwhelming support.”

“The biggest question at this point,” Mlinar said, “is [for] how long.”

Donald Trump has gotten away with causing a violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as part of scheme to overturn the 2020 election, hiding top secret documents from the federal government, and other alleged crimes.

Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday made official what Trump’s election victory made clear, moving to dismiss the election interference case in which Trump was charged with promoting conspiracies to defraud the United States, obstruct an official government proceeding, and deprive Americans of their civil rights through his attempts to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. Smith said he was dropping the case due to a Justice Department policy that bars prosecuting a sitting president.

“The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed,” Smith said in the filing.

The motion leaves Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution of Trump and various former aides as the only standing criminal case related to Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election. Willis has vowed to continue that prosecution. But with her case mired in appeals proceedings related to Willis’ past romantic relationship with the prosecutor she picked to run it, her odds of securing a conviction of the president-elect appear dismal.

Smith also moved Monday to dismiss his case against Trump for obstructing justice by hiding from the Justice Department highly classified documents he had secretly removed from the White House. (Smith did not drop the charges against two Trump co-defendants.) Smith hopes to continue his appeal of a July ruling in which which Aileen Cannon, a notoriously pro-Trump district court judge in Florida, dismissed Smith’s case based on a legally unprecedented ruling that Smith’s appointment was invalid. But that appeal is aimed at preserving the legal standing of special counsel appointments and will not result in Trump’s continued prosecution even if Smith prevails.

Smith said that the January 6 and documents cases need not to be dismissed “with prejudice.” That leaves the theoretical prospect that they could be revived after Trump leaves office. But it’s unlikely the Justice Department would be willing or able to successfully renew either case eight years after the alleged crimes occurred.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said last week that it would agree to postpone Trump’s sentencing in a case where he was convicted of falsifying business records as part of a criminal scheme to cover up payments made to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels, who has said she had sex with Trump in 2006. The district attorney Alvin Bragg has opposed efforts by Trump lawyers to have the case dismissed altogether.

These outcomes mean that Trump has avoided legal consequences for four separate cases in which he was indicted—including one in which he was convicted—despite receiving no acquittal or exoneration from a judge or jury.

That impunity, coupled with the Supreme Court’s highly controversial declaration that presidents enjoy “absolute immunity” from prosecution for official actions, appears set to enable Trump to pursue his goals—including using the Justice Department to prosecute critics—with few legal restraints.

After taking office, Trump reportedly plans to fire Smith’s entire legal team, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution. Pam Bondi, a lobbyist and former Florida attorney general who Trump plans to nominate for US attorney general, has said prosecutors who brought cases against Trump “will be prosecuted.”

With a pass for alleged past crimes and a pliant Supreme Court, Trump in his second term may be the first US president to operate above the law. He will probably not be the last.

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

The world’s largest cruise line company is responsible for producing more carbon dioxide in Europe than the city of Glasgow, a report has found.

An analysis by the Transport and Environment (T&E) campaign group, provided to the Guardian, found Carnival to be the most climate-polluting cruise company sailing in Europe in 2023.

The data covered all Europe-bound cruise ships last year, including 53 that belonged to Carnival. The second most climate-polluting cruise company in Europe was MSC, followed by Norwegian Cruise Line, the group found.

Carbon emissions for Carnival’s Europe-bound ships totalled 2.6 million metric tons of CO2 last year. The latest emissions figures for the city of Glasgow, from 2021, with a population of 620,700, were 2.43 million metric tons, according to the city council. MSC emitted 1.4 million and Norwegian 0.84 million. Analysts from T&E used official data on carbon emissions supplied by vessels sailing in the European Economic Area, as required by EU law.

“Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap.”

“The larger companies have more vessels and bigger ships,” said Jacob Armstrong, shipping policy manager at T&E. “But bigger isn’t better when it comes to emissions.”

Cruising is one of tourism’s fastest-growing sectors. The number of cruise vessels has grown significantly, from 21 in the 1970s to 515 today, and T&E research shows the world’s biggest cruise ships have doubled in size since 2000.

Carnival Corporation plc, a Miami-based British and US company, made $2 billion profit in 2023, after losses of $4.4 billion and $7.1 billion in 2022 and 2021, during the Covid pandemic. In 2023, 12.5 million passengers travelled on its 92 ships.

In a separate ranking of environmental harm by cruise companies in 2024, by Friends of the Earth (FoE) US, Carnival and its subsidiaries also emerged lowest among 21 cruise lines.

An annual “cruise ship report card” awarded five of Carnival’s nine lines—Costa Cruises, P&O Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, Cunard, and Seabourn—the grade of F overall. Four factors taken into account were air pollution reduction, sewage treatment, water quality and transparency.

Marcie Keever, ocean and vessels programme director at FoE, said Carnival’s continued use of “scrubbers” in its fleet, which, while approved by the International Maritime Organization, allows the use of dirtier fuel and causes water pollution. “Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap,” she said.

This factor, along with a lack of transparency, and not all ships being equipped for shore power, resulted in the F grade, the lowest ranking.

FoE awarded expedition cruise lines Hurtigruten and Hurtigruten Expeditions a B+, the highest score, while Disney Cruise line got a B. Hurtigruten vessels plug into shore power instead of running their engines, thus reducing air pollution at shore power-enabled ports. Neither Hurtigruten nor Disney use scrubbers on vessels, and all three were awarded A for transparency.

“There are more cruise companies getting higher grades than in previous years, so we are seeing some progress,” Keever said.

A Carnival Corp and plc spokesperson said: “We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental technologies and solutions, which together with our other decisive climate actions are yielding strong results.”

Carnival’s 2023 total greenhouse gas emissions were 9.7 million metric tons, compared with 10.9 million in 2011. The spokesperson said it was on track to cut its emissions per passenger-equivalent by 40 percent by 2026, compared with 2008 levels.

An MSC cruise spokesperson said improving the environmental performance of its fleet was of “crucial” importance. “We have already made significant progress, and our ships are 40 percent more efficient than they were 10 years ago.”

A spokesperson for Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings said: “We are proud of the progress we are making towards our goal of reducing greenhouse gas intensity per capacity day by 10 percent by 2026 and 25 percent by 2030, using a 2019 baseline.”

When Gwen Williams’ mother was dying, taking her to an in-person appointment to get more medicine seemed impossible. So Williams made a telehealth appointment with the doctor—a video call. It was that easy.

“Her comfort was paramount,” Williams, who lives in Minnesota, recounts. “My mother wasn’t conscious during the visit, but [the doctor] was able to see her and was able to get the hospice medications and everything refilled.” 

Williams’ mother was on Medicare, as is she. Since 2020, Medicare has covered a wide range of remote medical services, some in critical situations like theirs, and others for routine care. Around one in four telehealth appointments are made by people on Medicare.

Around one in four Medicare patients takes advantage of telehealth.

The fact that Medicare will abruptly cut off that coverage for most specialties on January 1—barely a month away—Williams said, “just blows my mind.”

What we now call telehealth, an umbrella term for remote and digitally assisted medical care, was first developed by NASA in 1960 as a suite of tools to monitor astronauts’ health in space. While it has been gaining traction as a widespread, normalized aspect of care since the beginning of this century, telehealth really exploded in 2020 with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Until then, for Medicare patients—which includes most Americans over 65, and some younger disabled people—remote care coverage had been limited. In rural areas, for instance, people on Medicare could speak to a non-local specialist via telehealth, but not from home; they still had to go to a local hospital to place the call.

But on March 6, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services temporarily expanded Medicare’s telehealth coverage to all specialties. That expansion, renewed in 2022, is set to expire at the end of the year, impacting more than 65 million Americans.

Multiple bills have been introduced in the 118th Congress to preserve Medicare telehealth provisions and continue allowing people on Medicare to use telehealth flexibly, but all still await votes in both the House and Senate. Perhaps the likeliest to pass, the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2024, introduced by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), received widespread, bipartisan support from members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its subcommittee on health.

“Seniors, individuals with mobility issues, and those living in rural areas rely on telehealth,” Rep. Carter said in a statement to Mother Jones, calling the act “critical legislation that will extend telehealth flexibilities to get Medicare beneficiaries the life-saving health care they need.”

Where so many other health issues can be partisan or controversial, says Telehealth Access for America executive director Alye Mlinar, telehealth manages to be bipartisan. Mlinar hopes the bipartisan support “critical for really any issue” that telehealth has garnered will help lead to another congressional extension.

Epilepsy Foundation chief medical officer Dr. Jacqueline French’s organization has supported telehealth access for people with epilepsy even before the start of the Covid pandemic.

“There’s nothing that we learn from a physical exam that we could not learn from just talking to a person,” said French, who is also a professor of neurology at New York University Langone Health’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. The Epilepsy Foundation is one member of Telehealth Access for America, a consortium that includes, among other groups, the American Medical Association, Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Down Syndrome Society.

There are plenty of patients who can’t make long journeys at all—but for many others, telehealth is still a way to avoid travel risks. Traveling with uncontrolled seizures, for instance, can be dangerous, French notes.

Even if Congress does not extend its current, wide coverage of telehealth for Medicare recipients, a handful of protections—mainly around dialysis, strokes, and mental health—would remain.

Williams, whose mother also relied on telehealth, also praised the separate ways it benefits her: When the doctor who prescribed their mental health medication moved away, telehealth prevented a disruption in her care. She likens the often needless in-person visits to “a meeting that could have just been an email.”

“Just have to have a conversation with your doctor,” Williams said, “paying for transportation, paying for parking if you drive—it’s a real barrier when all you need is to have a conversation, to continue care, or ask a question.”

But there are limitations to a blanket extension of the program, argues Medicare Rights Center senior counsel Casey Schwarz. 

“We had really hoped Congress would take the opportunity to look carefully at what a telehealth benefit could and should look like, because while the pre-pandemic status quo is inadequate,” Schwarz told Mother Jones, “A complete lack of restriction or breaks on telehealth services is also inappropriate, and we think has some risk for beneficiaries.”

Schwarz said that she had heard from Medicare recipients “who have received what they believe to be substandard care through telehealth because something that they think would have been noticed or caught in an in-person visit was missed.”

An investigation by Mayo Clinic researchers found that diagnostic accuracy for people on telehealth ranged from 77 percent for ear, nose, and throat doctors to 96 percent for psychiatrists across a 90-day period in 2020. However, specialists, such as rheumatologists, were more likely to request an in-person appointment to continue care, in comparison to primary care doctors. 

Schwarz also says that telehealth cannot replace other forms of compliance with civil rights laws around accessibility, like the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“We don’t want to see telehealth fill in a way for providers to indicate that they do not need to meet physical access requirements because they provide telehealth services,” she said.

In-person services, especially from specialists, can’t always be replaced—and people like Schwarz raise the risk of telehealth, often cheaper for providers, being used to justify cuts to in-person services. Williams, for instance, does see their neurologists in-person, so they are able to assess her reflexes and the progression of their neuropathy.

With just weeks until the end of the year and Medicare’s telehealth termination, there is not much time for individual bills to pass through Congress and be signed into law by President Biden. 

Mlinar, however, is optimistic that an extension for Medicare telehealth recipients will be part of an annual end-of-year package negotiated by Congress “given the overwhelming support.”

“The biggest question at this point,” Mlinar said, “is [for] how long.”

Donald Trump has gotten away with causing a violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as part of scheme to overturn the 2020 election, hiding top secret documents from the federal government, and other alleged crimes.

Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday made official what Trump’s election victory made clear, moving to dismiss the election interference case in which Trump was charged with promoting conspiracies to defraud the United States, obstruct an official government proceeding, and deprive Americans of their civil rights through his attempts to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. Smith said he was dropping the case due to a Justice Department policy that bars prosecuting a sitting a president.

“The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed,” Smith said in the filing.

The motion leaves Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution of Trump and various former aides as the only standing criminal case related to Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election. Willis has vowed to continue that prosecution. But with her case mired in appeals proceedings related to Willis’ past romantic relationship with the prosecutor she picked to run the case, her odds of securing a conviction of the president-elect appear dismal.

Smith also moved Monday to dismiss his case against Trump for obstructing justice by hiding from the Department of Justice highly classified documents he had secretly removed from the White House. (Smith did not drop the charges against two Trump co-defendants.) Smith hopes to continue his appeal of a July ruling in which which Aileen Cannon, a notoriously pro-Trump district court judge in Florida, dismissed Smith’s case based on a legally unprecedented ruling that Smith’s appointment was invalid. But that appeal is aimed at preserving the legal standing of special counsel appointments and will not result in Trump’s continued prosecution even if Smith prevails.

Smith said that the January 6 and documents cases need not to be dismissed “with prejudice.” That leaves the theoretical prospect that they could be revived after Trump leaves office. But it’s unlikely the Justice Department would be willing or able to successfully renew either case eight years after the alleged crimes occurred.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said last week that it would agree to postpone Trump’s sentencing in a case where he was convicted of falsifying business records as part of a criminal scheme to cover up payments made to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels, who has said she had sex with Trump in 2006. The district attorney Alvin Bragg has opposed efforts by Trump lawyers to have the case dismissed altogether.

These outcomes mean that Trump has avoided legal consequences for four separate cases in which he was indicted—including one in which he was convicted—despite receiving no acquittal or exoneration from a judge or jury.

That impunity, coupled with the Supreme Court’s highly controversial declaration that presidents enjoy “absolute immunity” from prosecution for official actions, appears set to enable Trump to pursue his goals—including using the Justice Department to prosecute critics—with few legal restraints.

After taking office, Trump reportedly plans to fire Smith’s entire legal team, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution. Pam Bondi, a lobbyist and former Florida attorney general who Trump plans to nominate for US attorney general, has said prosecutors who brought cases against Trump “will be prosecuted.”

With a pass for alleged past crimes and a pliant Supreme Court, Trump in his second term may be the first US president to operate above the law. He will probably not be the last.

In March 2024, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and failed presidential candidate whom Donald Trump has tapped to be director of national intelligence, created a political action committee called Defend Freedom, Inc. The group posted a bare-bones website featuring photos of Gabbard and declared it “was organized to elect patriots who will fight to defend America’s Peace, Security, Prosperity, and Freedom.” It asked for donations of up to $5,000 to “make an impact across America.” Tens of thousands of people contributed to Gabbard’s PAC. Through mid-October it raised $1.9 million, including a $16,552 transfer from another Gabbard PAC called Team Tulsi.

Of all the money it pulled in, Defend Freedom, Inc. devoted only $20,000 to contributions for a small number of candidates, all far-right MAGA-ish Republicans: US Senate candidates Kari Lake and Tim Sheehy, and US House contenders Joe Kent, Brian Jack, and Mayra Flores. (Before running for a congressional seat in 2022, Flores published social media posts promoting QAnon.) Where did all the money go? Gabbard’s outfit spent $1.3 million on operating expenses—at least $1 million on fundraising and direct mail, according to its filings with the Federal Election Commission. Like many PACs, it acted mainly as a money-churning machine that generated donations that mostly profited vendors and consultants.

“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes. The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”

Defend Freedom, Inc. is one of a network of organizations Gabbard has assembled in recent years, and they warrant a thorough review as part of her Senate confirmation process.

Gabbard is a highly unconventional candidate for the DNI job, which entails overseeing all 18 agencies in the US intelligence community (including the CIA and the NSA). She has espoused fringe views often in sync with Moscow talking points. She provided a preemptive defense of Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and afterward boosted the conspiracy theory advanced by Russia that the United States had been collaborating with Ukraine to develop biological weapons to deploy against Russia. Her fondness for Putin has earned her favorable coverage from Russia’s propaganda outlets, and her appointment, if she is confirmed, will likely spook intelligence services throughout the world and make them hesitant to collaborate with US intelligence. She also has no experience managing or holding a senior position within a large organization, let alone an agency with the task of safeguarding the nation. Consequently, an extensive vetting of Gabbard ought to focus on her own political operation.

In February, Gabbard established a Super PAC called For Love of Country, Inc. Its name echoed the title of a book she would release in April with the subtitle “Leave the Democrat Party Behind.” Gabbard had quit the Democratic Party in 2022, proclaiming herself an independent, and she went on to become a highly partisan commentator, hurling harsh rhetoric at her former party. The promotional material for this book claimed that the Democrats were now “controlled by an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by woke ideology and racializing everything.” It slammed the Democratic Party as “a clear and present threat to the God‑given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.”

Around the time of the book’s publication—at a point when Gabbard’s bizarre political journey had taken her from a Democratic presidential bid to appearing on the short list of Trump’s potential running-mates—her For Love of Country, Inc. PAC banked hefty checks from several big-money Republican funders. The biggest amount came from a donor named David Flory, who sent Gabbard’s PAC a whopping $100,000. On the PAC’s FEC filing, it neglected to note—as it is compelled to do—Flory’s occupation and employer.

There was something odd about this contribution. The name David Flory matches that of a Miami investor and former Washington, DC, lobbyist who in recent years has donated millions to Republican candidates and committees, including the Trump campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the PAC run by John Bolton, a GOP hawk. But the David Flory recorded on the PAC’s filing listed a different address than the one used by the David Flory who made all those other contributions. The address on the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC filing was for a modest-looking apartment building on the western edge of Miami—a residence unlikely to be the home of a $100,000 donor. The Flory with the record of big-bucks donations lives in a Miami Beach apartment worth an estimated $4.1 million.

According to public records, there is no David Flory who resides at that apartment building in western Miami. But a fellow named David Flor once lived there. He died in 2013.

Looking to talk to the David Flory of Miami Beach, a Mother Jones reporter reached his wife, Julie Flory on her cell phone, and asked if she was familiar with the Miami address associated with the $100,000 donation to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC. She said did not know it. She then conferenced her husband David into the call. Asked about the $100,000 contribution to Gabbard’s PAC and the address tied to it, he said, “Doesn’t sound familiar,” and he tried to end the conversation. Pressed as to whether he had made a donation to Gabbard, he said, “I’m not interested in talking to you about it.” Sounding irritated, he addressed his wife, “Julie, don’t take these calls. Just hang up on them.” He then left the call.

Another early major donor to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC was John Calnan, the head of a Massachusetts construction company, who kicked in $25,000. He gave $200,000 to the Trump campaign this year. A few months later—shortly after Gabbard endorsed Trump—disgraced Las Vegas mogul, Steve Wynn, a close pal of Trump, cut this PAC a $60,000 check.

All told, from February through mid-October, For Love of Country, Inc. raised $280,000. It only spent $49,000. Ten thousand dollars of those expenditures paid for an event in Las Vegas. Almost all the rest covered payments to Gabbard’s political staff and advisers.

The PAC described itself as “Tulsi’s vehicle for messaging in the 2024 election, including a national ad campaign to communicate with middle-of-the-road voters, disenfranchised Democrats, and undecided Independents.” It claimed, “For Love of Country PAC will use traditional and disruptive methods to blend the tried-and-true approach with innovation to reach otherwise unlikely voting demographics.” Its expenditures through mid-October do not indicate there was much of an effort of that sort made by Gabbard’s PAC. It looks as if this PAC funded by pro-Trump Republican money-bags mostly existed to cover the costs of Gabbard’s political team.

Gabbard controls yet another PAC, Our Freedom, Our Future, which was launched in 2023. Its mission, according to its website, is “to protect our freedoms and support leaders who share her commitment to uphold and protect our God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution.” It declared, “Our founders envisioned a government that is of, by, and for the people—not of, by, and for the powerful elite. We need to elect leaders who are committed to the same.” From mid-2023 until October, it raised only $45,000, with the lion’s share of that money going to pay Gabbard’s spokesperson and another adviser. It made a $1,000 contribution to a Republican candidate in Ohio who lost a congressional primary contest.

“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes,” says Sarah Bryner, a political scientist and campaign finance expert. “The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”

Gabbard also created a nonprofit called We Must Protect. In its tax filing, the group stated its mission was to “engage in research and public education for the benefit of those vulnerable populations in our community that deserve to be honored and cared for.” It drew only $2,500 in funding in 2022. After the horrendous wildfires on Maui last year, We Must Protect tried to raise money to aid the victims and promised “every dollar” contributed will “help people affected by the devastating fires.” The nonprofit’s 2023 tax filing is not yet available. So its fundraising and relief efforts related to the fires cannot be publicly evaluated. Nor are its donors publicly disclosed. In October, Gabbard said that We Must Protect had raised $331,000 to aid survivors of Hurricane Helene.

Last week, Mother Jones sent Tulsi Gabbard a long list of questions regarding her PACs and We Must Protect, which shares a phone number with Gabbard’s office and her Defend Freedom, Inc. PAC. We requested We Must Protect’s 2023 tax filing and information about its donors and its work regarding the Maui fires. The list included queries about the PACs’ spending and whether they did the work they claimed to do, about their high spending on fundraising, and about the $100,000 contribution attributed to David Flory.

Gabbard declined to respond to any of the questions or provide any information on We Must Protect’s donors and activities. Erika Tsuji, her spokeswoman, forwarded the list to the Trump transition office. Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for the transition, replied with a statement that did not address any of the queries. She only offered praise for We Must Protect and claimed Gabbard’s Defend Freedom PAC and For Love of Country PAC “enabled her to engage millions of Americans…encouraging them back pragmatic GOP candidates nationwide, including electing Donald. J. Trump.”

One Gabbard PAC did recently encounter trouble with the FEC. On November 4, the commission sent a letter to Thomas Datwyler, the treasurer of the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC, notifying the outfit that it had apparently placed $151,000 of its donations into the wrong account and setting a December 9 deadline for a response.

Datwyler, a longtime financial consultant for GOP candidates, is also the treasurer for Defend Freedom, Inc.; Our Freedom, Our Future; and Team Tulsi. Last year, he was caught up in the George Santos scandal. In the midst of the controversy over the then-GOP congressman’s false claims about his campaign finances—among his many lies about his background and career—paperwork filed with the FEC indicated that Datwyler had replaced the original treasurer for several of Santos’ campaign committees. But Datwyler’s attorney quickly informed the FEC that Datwyler had not agreed to become treasurer for the Santos entities. This added yet another level of mystery to the Santos scandal.

Months later, there was another twist to this story: Datwyler’s attorney wrote the FEC to withdraw his previous statement that denied Datwyler had become the treasurer for those Santos committees. He noted that “public reporting has caused me to lose confidence in the accuracy and veracity of the information provided by Mr. Datwyler at the time I submitted those communications on his behalf.” The Daily Beast had reported that that “Datwyler had in reality operated as a shadow treasurer for Santos—despite disavowing that role to the public, to the FEC, and apparently even his own lawyer.”

Datwyler did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the Santos episode and Gabbard’s PACs. Gabbard, too, did not respond to questions about Datwyler.

If Gabbard reaches a Senate confirmation hearing, there will be much for the senators to grill her on, especially her sympathetic views regarding Putin and Russia and her support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, as well as her efforts to help Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who each exposed top-secret information that caused damage for the intelligence community. A key question will be whether someone as excessively partisan as Gabbard can be a fair-minded and even-handed overseer of the intelligence agencies, the intelligence they produce, and the covert actions they mount. Senate Intelligence Committee investigators should be sure to examine the network of organizations she has built and the flow of money in and out of her nonprofit. There are few jobs in the federal government as important as managing the sprawling US intelligence community. With no direct intelligence experience, Gabbard deserves scrutiny of all matters that can shed light on her fitness for this post.

Additional reporting by Russ Choma.

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

India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.

Last week, officials in the Punjab province in Pakistan imposed lockdowns on the cities of Multan, population 2.1 million, and Lahore, population 13.7 million, after reaching record-high pollution levels. “Smog is currently a national disaster,” senior Punjab provincial minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said during a press conference last week. Schools shut down, restaurants closed, construction halted, highways sat empty, and medical staff were recalled to hospitals and clinics.

Across the border in India, the 33 million residents of Delhi this week are breathing air pollution that’s 50 times higher than the safe limit outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The choking haze caused 15 aircraft to divert to nearby airports and caused hundreds of delays. Students and workers were told to stay home.

Global health authorities say air pollution has reduced the average life expectancy by 2.3 years, and contributes to almost 7 million deaths annually.

Despite all the disruption, air pollution continues to spike year after year after year.

Why? The dirty air arises from a confluence of human and natural factors. Construction, cooking fires, brick kilns, vehicles, and burning leftovers from crop harvests are all feeding into the toxic clouds. The Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains to the north of lower-lying areas like Lahore and Delhi hold the smog in place. In the winter, the region experiences thermal inversions, where a layer of warm air pushes down on cool winter air, holding the pollution closer to the ground.

As populations grow in South Asia, so will the need for food, energy, housing, and transportation. Without a course correction, that will mean even more pollution. Yet history shows that air pollution is a solvable problem. Cities like Los Angeles and Beijing that were once notorious for dirty air have managed to clean it up. The process took years, drawing on economic development and new technologies. But it also required good governance and incentives to cut pollution, something local officials in India and Pakistan have already demonstrated can clear the air. The task now is to scale it up to higher levels of government.

There’s no shortage of science showing how terrible air pollution is for you. It aggravates asthma, worsens heart disease, triggers inflammation, and increases infection risk. It hampers brain development in children and can contribute to dementia in adults.

On average, air pollution has reduced life expectancies around the world by 2.3 years, more than tobacco. It contributes to almost 7 million deaths per year, according to WHO, about one in nine deaths annually. It sucks trillions of dollars out of the global economy.

The toll is especially acute in South Asia. Air pollution drains 3.9 years of life in Pakistan. In India, it steals 5.3 years. For workers who spend their days outdoors—delivery drivers, construction crews, farm laborers—the damage is even higher. Many residents report constant fevers, coughs, and headaches.

Despite the well-known dangers and the mounting threat, it remains a persistent problem.

Part of the challenge of improving air quality is that air pollution isn’t just one thing; it’s a combination of hazardous chemicals and particles that arise in teeming metropolises in developing countries.

One of the most popular metrics around the world for tracking pollution is the Air Quality Index, developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The index is not a measurement of any one pollutant, but rather the risk from a combination of pollutants based on US air quality standards. The main villains are ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particles. The particles are subcategorized into those smaller than 10 microns (PM10) and smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). (Earlier this year, the EPA modified the way it calculates the AQI, so numbers from this year are not an apples-to-apples comparison to levels from previous years.) The tiny particles are pernicious because they penetrate deep into the lungs and trigger breathing problems.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before.”

An AQI below 50 is considered safe to breathe. Above 200, the air is considered a health threat for everyone. At 300, it’s an emergency. In Delhi, the AQI this last week reached 1,185. Lahore reached 1,900 this month. If a person breathes this air for over 24 hours, the exposure is roughly equivalent to smoking 90 cigarettes in a day.

However, air pollution poses a threat long before it’s visible. “Your eye is not a good detector of air pollution in general,” said Christi Chester Schroeder, the air quality science manager at IQAir, a company that builds air quality monitoring instruments and collects pollution data. “The pollutant that you have to be really careful about in terms of not being able to see it but experiencing it is ozone. Ozone levels can be extremely high on sunny days.”

IQAir has a network of air quality sensors across South Asia, including regions like Lahore and Delhi. The company tracks pollution in real time using its own sensors as well as monitors bought by schools, businesses, and ordinary people. Their professional-grade air monitors can cost more than $20,000 but they also sell consumer air quality trackers that cost $300. Both sources help paint a picture of pollution.

Many schools and businesses across South Asia have installed their own pollution monitors. The US maintains its own air quality instruments at its consulates and embassies in India and Pakistan as well.

Schroeder noted, however, that IQAir’s instruments are geared toward monitoring particles like PM2.5 and don’t easily allow a user to make inferences about concentrations of other pollutants like sulfur oxides and where they’re coming from. “When you’re looking at places that have a really big mixture of sources—like you have a mixture of transportation and fires and climate inversion conditions—then it gets to be much murkier and you can’t really sort of pull it apart that way,” Schroeder said.

Air quality monitors in India and Pakistan show that air pollution can vary over short distances—between neighborhoods or even street by street—and that it can change rapidly through the day. Nearby bus terminals, power plants, or cooking fires contribute a lot to local pollution, but without tracking systems in the vicinity, it can be hard to realize how bad the situation has become.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before,” Schroeder said.

Another complication is that people also experience pollution far away from where it’s produced. “This automatically creates a big governance challenge because the administrator who is responsible for providing you clean air in your jurisdiction is not actually the administrator who is governing over the polluting action,” said Saad Gulzar, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

Take crop stubble burning, which accounts for up to 60 percent of the air pollution in the region this time of year. In late fall, farmers in northern India and Pakistan harvest rice and plant wheat. With little time between the reaping and sowing, the fastest and cheapest way for many farmers to clear their fields of leftover stems, leaves, and roots is to burn it. The resulting smoke then wafts from rural areas into urban centers.

Motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution.

The challenge is that farmers and urbanites are different political constituencies, and it’s hard to demand concessions from the former to benefit the latter. It has led to bitter political fights in both countries and between them. Farmers also point out that the reason they have so little time between crops is because of water conservation laws: To cope with groundwater depletion, officials in India imposed regulations to limit rice planting until after monsoon rains arrive in the early summer to top up reservoirs. Delaying planting means delaying harvest, hence the rush to clear their fields.

Both India and Pakistan have even gone as far as to arrest farmers who burn crop stubble, but there are millions of farmers spread out over a vast area, stretching enforcement thin. However, local efforts to control smoke from crop burning have proven effective when local officials are motivated to act.

Gulzar co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature, looking at air pollution and its impacts across India and Pakistan. Examining satellite data and health records over the past decade, the paper found that who is in charge of a jurisdiction plays a key role in air pollution—and could also be the key to solving it.

When a district is likely to experience pollution from a fire within its own boundaries, bureaucrats and local officials take more aggressive action to mitigate it, whether that’s paying farmers not to burn stubble, providing them with tools to clear fields without fires, or threatening them with fines and arrest. That led fires within a district to drop by 14.5 percent and future burning to decline by 13 percent. These air pollution reductions led to measurable drops in childhood mortality. On the other hand, if the wind is poised to push pollution from crop burning over an adjacent district, fires increase by 15 percent.

The results show that simply motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution and that progress can begin right away.

But further air quality improvements will require a transition toward cleaner energy. Besides crop burning, the other major source of air pollution across India and Pakistan is fossil fuel combustion, whether that’s coal in furnaces, gas in factories, or diesel in trucks. These fuels also contribute to climate change, which is already contributing to devastating heat waves and flooding from torrential monsoons in the region. Both countries have made major investments in renewable energy, but they are also poised to burn more coal to feed their growing economies.

At the COP29 climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, India was asking wealthier nations to contribute more money to finance clean energy within its borders and to share technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality.

Solving the air pollution crisis in India and Pakistan will take years, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. But there are lifesaving measures both countries can take now.

Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) is not taking Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R-S.C.) bait.

In her first interview after Mace’s weeklong, social media–fueled campaign—which included nearly 300 posts on X—to ban her from the women’s bathroom in the House of Representatives offices, McBride showed how a member of Congress who is actually interested in governing, not grabbing headlines, acts.

“I’m in Congress to deliver for my constituents, to make health care, housing, and child care more affordable,” McBride said in a Sunday interview on MSNBC’s The Weekend, adding that she plans to support pro-union legislation as well as bills focused on paid leave and affordable childcare. “I’m so grateful to have this opportunity. I think on November 5, Delawareans showed the country what I’ve known throughout my life: that in our state of neighbors, we judge candidates based on their ideas and not their identities.”

Mace kicked off this past week by introducing a resolution seeking to bar transgender members and employees in the House from using the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity in the Capitol building, baselessly alleging that allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms “jeopardizes the safety and dignity” of cisgender women. (In fact, research has found that there is “no link” between trans-inclusive bathroom policies and safety, and that reports of “privacy and safety violations” in bathrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms are “exceedingly rare.”) Though Mace’s resolution did not mention McBride—the first openly transgender person elected to Congress—by name, Mace admitted it was “absolutely” meant to target her.

On Wednesday—which also happened to be the annually recognized Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day meant to memorialize trans people murdered in violent acts of bigotry—House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) threw his support behind Mace’s effort, telling reporters he was simply formalizing what has long been an “unwritten policy”; he also noted in an emailed statement that all Members have private bathrooms in their offices and there are several unisex bathrooms throughout the Capitol. But Johnson has not clarified how the policy will be enforced or whether he will include it in the rules package the House will vote on in early January.

“I worried that the heart of this country wasn’t big enough to love someone like me, and over the last decade, I have been able to bear witness the change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid.”

Johnson also has not addressed whether or not he condemns the threats of physical violence Mace and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) reportedly made against any trans person who violates the bathroom ban. (I’ve repeatedly asked Johnson’s spokesperson if he condemns these threats and if members would face consequences for carrying them out, but have yet to receive a direct answer.)

Getting what she wanted did not make Mace dial back her bigotry, though: She has continued to repeatedly misgender McBride and denigrate trans people on social media. But on Sunday, McBride dismissed all that as “noise”—without mentioning Mace by name—and said she is focused on honoring the weight of history in her new role.

“I have to be honest, this week was awe-inspiring, being at orientation, despite all of the noise,” McBride said. “Because as you were there, you realize you are in the body that Abraham Lincoln served in. We walked onto the House floor, and you’re in the space where they passed the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment, where women got the right to vote. You’re sitting in the chairs in the job where people passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And you feel that responsibility, but also you feel that you are part of a tradition, because every single one of your predecessors served in incredibly tumultuous, challenging times, and enough of them fulfilled their responsibilities to be stewards of our democracy and that is our calling in this moment, and I feel it very deeply.”

Sarah McBride: "I worried that the heart of this country wasn't big enough to support someone like me. And over the last decade, I have been able to bear witness to change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid that it was almost incomprehensible … I carry that with me." pic.twitter.com/YKLnhQMeJl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 24, 2024

She also spoke about her own trailblazing role in Congress, which she said proves that anything is possible. As a college student, she said, “I worried that the heart of this country wasn’t big enough to love someone like me, and over the last decade, I have been able to bear witness the change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid—that was almost incomprehensible—and I have seen it not only become possible, but become a reality. And I carry that with me in this moment, because I think in so many ways, this country—on both sides of the political divide—this country is facing its own crisis of hope. And I know we still have both the individual and collective capacity meet the scope and the scale of the challenges that we face. And I know, because I have seen it, that nothing is truly impossible.”

Mace, meanwhile, spent the morning posting a Bible verse about the creation of “woman” all over social media.

Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointees are not the only source of controversy in his transition back to the White House.

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote the Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the functioning of federal agencies, to warn that the Trump transition team has refused to sign memoranda of understanding with the Biden-Harris administration. All prior presidents-elect have signed the agreements, which outline how the administrations will work together; one of them, for example, would allow the FBI under the current administration to conduct background checks on Trump’s nominees. Another would facilitate the Trump team’s national security clearances required to receive classified intelligence briefings before he assumes office. “The Trump team’s unprecedented refusal to sign agreements with the outgoing administration threatens the American public by hamstringing incoming officials’ ability to govern responsibly,” Warren writes.

The refusal to publish the ethics code heightens “the risk of the incoming administration governing for the benefit of special interests rather than the American public.”

On top of that, Trump’s transition team has yet to publish a full ethics code on the GSA website addressing how he will deal with his conflicts of interest, as required by a law that Trump himself passed in 2020. Warren’s letter notes that while the Trump team has published its own ethics code, “it includes nothing about how President-elect Trump will manage his own extensive financial conflicts of interest—which experts anticipate will be one of the most alarming corruption challenges of the incoming administration.” The refusal to publish the ethics code, Warren says, heightens “the risk of the incoming administration governing for the benefit of special interests rather than the American public.”

As the New York Times reported Sunday, it’s possible these “special interests” could, in fact, be helping to fund the Trump transition: Because the Trump team has not signed a memorandum of understanding with the GSA that was due Sept. 1, they have been able to shield the names of donors to the transition. If the Trump transition had entered into the agreement, they would have to publicly disclose donors, each of whom would have an individual giving limit of $5,000—but the Trump team would have been able to access $7.2 million in federal funds to help with the costs of the transition.

Trump is also reportedly the first president to circumvent this agreement, which seems to suggest his team thinks he can raise more from donors without being limited to the $5,000 cap per individual donor. But as one expert told the Times, it could come at a serious ethical cost:

“When the money isn’t disclosed, it’s not clear how much everybody is giving, who is giving it and what they are getting in return for their donations,” said Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies presidential transitions. “It’s an area where the vast majority of Americans would agree that they want to know who is paying that bill.”

In her letter to the GSA, Warren asks them to respond by December 5 to questions about how the agency is engaging with the Trump transition and the impacts of the Trump team’s lack of compliance with federal law. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team and the GSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning.

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

It’s November and it’s unseasonably warm as John John Brown, a Muscogee elder, works to replant peach saplings. “I haven’t had much luck growing them from seed,” he says. The reason, he thinks, is because peaches need lower temperatures. 

Around him, tiny peach trees the size of pencils stand above the browning grass underneath their parent tree. Brown harvested around 200 peaches this year from his small orchard—enough for his family and neighbors—but he had competition: A fox has been poking around. “The animals know when the peaches are ripe quicker than I do,” Brown laughs. “They start coming in and stealing my peaches.”

Brown’s peaches aren’t your everyday peaches, they’re heirlooms: direct descendants of peach seeds brought across the continent on the Trail of Tears. Brown calls them “Indian peaches” while other Muscogees call them “Trail of Tears peaches.” There has been little research on this particular variety, and it’s unknown just how many genes they share with commercial peaches. While grocery store peaches are soft and fleshy, Indian peaches don’t get much bigger than a lemon and are extremely firm but sweet.

The Indian peach is threatened by climate change. Where hurricanes, flooding, and higher temperatures have massive impacts on crops, including peaches, around the nation, heirloom varieties, like the Indian peach, are also threatened. This fruit, that crossed a planet, carried by traders and travelers, and eventually by a few Muscogees along The Trail before they found a new home outside Sapulpa, Oklahoma, is a connection to another time and place. 

“One of the greatest gifts Creator gave me is these peaches and the ability to share these trees with our community and everyone,” Brown said. 

There are only 50 Indian peach trees on the Muscogee reservation that Brown knows of—some grow in some peoples’ backyards, and some at a local daycare—and between climate-driven changes to growing cycles and high temperatures, they face a difficult future. Luckily, they have people like Brown working to protect them.

Peach cultivation is thought to have begun around 8,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China. One of the first mentions of peaches in literature appears in the fictional novel Journey to the West, written in 1592, that describes peaches as a fruit that could grant longevity and “make a man’s age equal to that of Heaven and Earth, the sun and the moon.”

From China, peaches made their way to Europe, then to the Americas in the 1600s on Spanish ships—the beginning of a kind of crop exchange between the continents: potatoes and tomatoes from South and Central America went to Europe while peaches made their way to the Georgia coast, and quickly, into Indigenous diets. 

“Indigenous people were already caring for and managing forests and other kinds of tree foods,” said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz at Pennsylvania State University, who studies archaeology and ethnohistory. “That would have allowed them to adopt peaches super quickly and know really well how to create healthy peaches.”

Within a few decades, and with the help of a vast network of trade routes, peaches made their way across the continent, as far as the Southwest, where tribes like the Navajo sun-dried and stewed them. 

Around 1780, thousands of peach trees tended by the Seneca and Cayuga tribes along the Finger Lakes in western New York State were destroyed by President George Washington, in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Indigenous peoples from the region. Washington wrote in a letter to one of his generals that the goal was “to lay waste all the settlements.” He added, “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act that led to the Trail of Tears—a death march that forced around 60,000 Indigenous people to leave their homes and move west, across the Mississippi River, to Oklahoma. 

Vernon Courtwright grew up eating Indian peaches. Now 75 years old, the Muscogee elder and veteran says his family brought Indian peach seeds and planted them when they were done walking The Trail. “That was the beginning of our life and the peaches’ life in Oklahoma,” he said. When he was a child, his grandmother, Emma Bruner, was the one who taught him about how to grow and tend to the fruit. “We grew up eating these peaches.”

Courtwright says in the 1970s, he began to see Indian peaches disappear. With each passing year, there was less on the landscape. “I just knew that our orchard had to be taken care of,” he said. When his grandparents passed, he took on the work of caring for the trees, and eventually, met John John Brown, who helped cultivate seeds and saplings to give out to other Muscogees.

“It’s our legacy,” said Courtwright. “It’s my family’s legacy to the tribe.”

Georgia, the Peach State, produces nearly 25,000 tons of peaches every year, but falls far behind California, which produces nearly 475,000 tons each year. Globally, nearly 24 million tons of peaches are grown each year, with most coming from China.

Climate change is having a big impact on those numbers, though. One of the biggest threats to the peach industry is rising temperatures. Peaches need “peach chill”—a certain amount of time in temperatures that are under 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Without adequate peach chill, peach trees won’t produce, and with rising temperatures, blooms will sprout too early.

In 2017, around 70 percent of peach losses could be attributed to lack of peach chill. “Lack of chill is something that we think is going to be the biggest issue for us and our industry,” said Dario Chavez, a peach geneticist at the University of Georgia. “If you are in a northern climate, you don’t worry too much about the chill. But I think they’re starting to see the physiological responses to issues with chill.”

Then there are extreme weather events supercharged by climate change that can inflict immediate, wide-spread damage. This year, Hurricane Helene killed at least 226 people. It also devastated Georgia’s agricultural economy to the tune of nearly $6.5 billion dollars.

But Helene’s path was only the beginning. Hurricanes bring flooding, which is especially bad for peaches—peach trees don’t like to be too wet and can prematurely drop fruit if under water. They’re also susceptible to diseases like brown rot, which can be triggered after heavy storms.

For the Indian peach, peach chill and extreme weather aren’t as big a threat as they are in the South. However, Oklahoma is expected to become around two and a half degrees hotter in the next 20 years. Even though the peach is a resilient plant, peach chill will become an issue. Natural disasters like floods become more of a threat to the lives and livelihoods of tribal members—tribal lands in Oklahoma are the most prone to flooding in the state. 

But to protect Indian peaches, and a little part of tribal history, John John Brown has been giving out saplings for the better part of a decade to anyone interested in growing them.

Brown regularly travels to Georgia and Alabama to visit the proposed Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and Preserve—located on Muscogee homelands. On his drives, he often passes peach orchards filled with the variety most Americans are used to. “You don’t think they would be able to produce peaches,” he says as he eyes the tightly-pruned rows. “They cut ’em back real small.” 

He goes down to the homelands to remind settlers in the area that the Muscogee survived despite the United States attempts at genocide and demos making canoes and bows the traditional way out of local wood during the annual Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration. To Brown the peaches are a symbol of resilience. 

“When our ancestors brought these peaches up from the South you think about how devastating it was, to lose loved ones, and not know if the seeds will sprout,” he said. “I do this to honor them, and their strength.”

A growing number of law enforcement authorities and Democratic leaders across the country are speaking out about their plans to thwart one of President-elect Donald Trump’s top immigration priorities: Mass deportation. Taking lessons from the first four years of the Trump era, many have vowed to stand their ground and refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement in arresting undocumented immigrants. They are also preparing counter-lawsuits to have ready to take the incoming administration to court as soon as officials attempt to begin deportations, which they’ve promised to kick off on day one.

In interviews with Politico published Saturday, prosecutors in six Democratic-led states described their plans to pursue legal challenges against actions Trump may take to carry out his immigration agenda.

These include the potential deployment of the US military domestically to find undocumented people, violations of immigrants’ rights to due process, the withholding of funds from s0-called sanctuary cities, and attempts to deputize the National Guard from red states to carry out arrests and detentions in blue ones.

These prosecutors said they’re also preparing to fight scenarios where the administration tries to send immigration agents into schools and hospitals, or where they withhold federal funds from local law enforcement to force them into compliance with deportation plans.

Earlier this week, Trump reaffirmed his plans to declare a national emergency in order to use federal troops to round-up targets for deportation.

“If he’s going to want to achieve that type of scale, the largest deportation in US history, as he says, by definition he’s going to have to target people who are lawfully here and … go after American citizens,” Matthew Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general told Politico, likely referring to the fact that millions of undocumented people live with US citizens, including those whose children were born on American soil. Those children would have to leave the country with deported parents in order for families to stay together. “We’re not going to stand for that,” Platkin added. The goal of top prosecutors across blue states, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association Sean Rankin told ABC News, is to put up a “unified front” against Trump’s immigration agenda.

The Trump administration will inevitably face not only legal but logistical obstacles if they attempt to deliver on the promise of conducting an unprecedented mass deportation campaign. As Dara Lind with the American Immigration Council recently wrote in the New York Times, deporting one million undocumented immigrants per year—a fraction of the estimated 11 million living in the country—would cost an annual $88 billion. The limited number of detention beds and immigration courts’ years-long backlog will also inhibit a massive crackdown.

Still, Tom Homan, Trump’s new “border czar,” who won’t require Senate confirmation, has indicated the administration will push hard against jurisdictions that get in their way. “If we can’t get assistance from New York City,” Homan told Fox News recently, “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. Because we’re going to do the job. We’re going to do the job without you or with you.” And in fact, Homan has a history of pushing forward extreme immigration policies: As a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official during Trump’s first term, he was the architect of the “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of parents from their children at the border. To this day, many have not been reunited.

Several Democratic leaders have publicly said they won’t go along with mass deportation efforts. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who sued the Trump administration 100 times as attorney general, said they would use “every tool in the toolbox” to protect the state’s population. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island State Police said while they cooperate with ICE, “they are not immigration officers and will not expend any time and resources to support mass deportation efforts.”

Top prosecutors in states like Massachusetts are also trying to dispel the unsupported claims, repeatedly reinforced by Trump, that immigrants are more prone to committing crimes. Instead, according to Politico‘s reporting, they hope to make the case that mass deportation would be bad for the US economy. As I’ve previously reported, the mass deportation of undocumented workers would drastically reduce the GDP, make inflation rise, and even result in fewer jobs available for American citizens.

In the early 1990s, Justin Pourier was a maintenance man at Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. One day, he says he stumbled upon small graves in the school’s basement. For nearly 30 years, Pourier would be haunted by what he saw and told no one except his wife. 

“Those are Native children down there…hopefully their spirit was able to travel on to whatever is beyond this world,” Pourier says. In 2022, he urged school officials to search the basement for the graves.

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The hunt for unmarked graves of Native children isn’t happening just at Red Cloud, now called Maȟpíya Lúta. It’s one of more than 400 Indian boarding schools across the country that were part of a program designed by the federal government to “kill the Indian and save the man”—those were the actual words of one of the architects of the plan to destroy Native culture. In a historic first this fall, President Joe Biden apologized to Native Americans on behalf of the United States for the country’s past Indian boarding school policies.

This week on Reveal, in a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children with ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe. She’s been writing about these schools for more than two decades. 

This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in October 2022.

Continuing the string of MAGA loyalist picks to serve in his administration, President-elect Donald Trump on Friday evening tapped Russell Vought to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget—again. Vought, a self-avowed Christian nationalist and key contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a conservative presidency, led OMB during Trump’s first term, transforming the powerful agency—charged with developing and executing the federal budget, and reviewing executive branch regulations—into a vehicle to deliver on the president’s wildest dreams.

In a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on X, in which the former Fox News host said he was “very likely to run OMB again,” Vought described the agency as the “nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch.” He recounted having provided Trump with a plan to divert funding from the Department of Defense to fund his border wall without congressional approval, a move disavowed by the White House counsel and later ruled illegal. “Presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” Vought said, characterizing it as “the president’s most important tool to deal with the bureaucracy.”

Vought described what kind of person would be best suited to wield the power of this agency on behalf of President Trump. “What you need is people who are able to absorb political heat,” he told Carlson. “They don’t have a fear of conflict. They can execute under withering enemy fire. They are up to speed and they are no-nonsense in their own ability to know what must be done. And they’re unbelievably committed to the president and his agenda.” Vought also advocated for doing away with the notion of independent agencies, singling out the Department of Justice as a target.

Vought most recently led the conservative Center for Renewing America, which he has described as a “shadow” OMB outside the government. He is a big proponent of reviving an executive order from the final days of the first Trump administration that would upend the federal workforce in service of Trump’s goals. Known as Schedule F, the order would reclassify potentially thousands of career civil servants working in policy-related positions as at-will employees and strip them of job protections, making it easier for political appointees to fire them and fill the openings with candidates hand-picked to support MAGA priorities.

At OMB, Vought tried to reclassify almost 90 percent of the agency’s workforce as at-will employees, hoping to set an example for other government heads. As a former OMB worker and author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence put it to me, Vought’s first round leading the agency was nothing short of “traumatic.”

Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”

And that appears to be the same approach Vought plans to take when restored to his old job next year. In previously undisclosed videos of 2023 and 2024 private speeches obtained by ProPublica, Vought talked about wanting the “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” adding they should “not want to go to work” when waking up in the morning. “We want to put them in trauma.”

He also suggested creating a “shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable a crackdown on anti-Trump dissent. “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.” A new Trump administration,” Vought declared, “must move quickly and decisively.”