Back in 2003, when Kamala Harris was first running for office in San Francisco, she wasn’t just battling Terence Hallinan, the erratic, older white guy who’d served as district attorney for eight years (and been her boss for 18 or so miserable months). She was running against the city’s powerful Democratic machine.

To win, Harris had to pull together her own support system—a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. One of those early boosters was Andrea Dew Steele, a Hillary Clinton ally and former Capitol Hill staffer who had recently moved to San Francisco. Her dismay at how few women held local office in the early 2000s led her to co-found a training program for women candidates called Emerge California, and a few years later, a national version, Emerge America.

“The minute I met Kamala I thought she should run for office,” Steele told me back in 2007 when I was interviewing her for a profile of Harris. “She is extremely smart and very good on the policy side, but also, such a charismatic person.” But Harris needed convincing. “Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president,’” Steele said. “Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.” Once she was in, Harris proved to be an extraordinarily quick study, honing a clear message, raising lots of money, and winning over some influential pols (including US Senator Dianne Feinstein but not House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a machine stalwart and Hallinan loyalist). After starting the race with just 6 percent name recognition, Harris went on to trounce her old boss with 56 percent of the vote.

“Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president.’ Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.”

That 2003 race was a proof of concept. Twenty years later, Emerge (as it’s known today) and its state affiliates have helped elect more than 1,200 Democratic women currently in office, including two governors, two lieutenant governors, and eight members of Congress. For 2023 races, Emerge claims a 74 percent win rate—nearly 250 alums elected; this November, more than 600 alums are on the ballot. Steele, a social entrepreneur and philanthropic advisor, is now an Emerge emeritus; the organization’s current leadership reflects what it calls the New American Majority—an increasingly diverse and youthful electorate that Harris herself embodies. “I don’t think we’re surprised to see the original Emerge woman at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket,” says A’shanti Gholar, Emerge’s president since 2020. “It is such an exciting moment.” 

But mixed with the exhilaration is also frustration with the racism and sexism that permeate politics and the media. Plus a serious concern with escalating and seemingly pervasive disinformation, which Gholar says, “really spikes when it comes to women candidates,” from the nation’s highest office to down-ballot races. Now, with Harris enjoying a historic candidacy, I was curious to learn more about how Emerge has evolved over these last two decades and what it is doing to make good on its mission of “creating a world where there are no more firsts”—where Black, brown and Indigenous women, young women, unmarried women, and LGBTQ women routinely run for office and win. I spoke with Gholar from her Washington, DC, base. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein—two of the most iconic women politicians of their era—came from San Francisco. But, the city’s Democratic power structure was dominated by men. What kind of hurdles did Harris face in taking that on?

People think, “Oh, San Francisco, it’s a Democratic city. There’s going to be lots of women in politics and expertise to tap into.” But that wasn’t the case when the vice president was starting out, and there was no place for them to go to get those basics of what it takes to run for office. It’s why our co-founders created Emerge. They were learning, right along with Kamala Harris: how to write a good bio. You have to put your contacts in order. You have to do the canvassing. You have to hustle.

Twenty years later, in most parts of this country, women candidates still seem to be outsiders.

Even in blue states, there are still so many offices where a woman has never been elected, a woman of color has never been elected, an LGBTQ person has never been elected. I say our work at Emerge has no end date because there are still a lot of good women that we need to get in office. 

Thinking back to that first Harris campaign, and then fast forwarding to today, what are the most important things you’re trying to give women candidates? Where do you start?

One of the reasons the vice president was able to be so successful was that she had that network of support with her throughout the campaign. From day one, a huge part of Emerge’s training program is making sure that women are not alone when they’re doing this. From the minute you join the program, we are with you throughout your whole journey. From being in the classroom where we’re demystifying what it takes to run for office, to when you put your name on the ballot, to when you are elected and wanting to run for higher office, we continue to give you those tools, those skills, that support that you need to be a great candidate and a great elected official.  

The core Emerge programs include a six-month training for newcomers and “boot camps” for women who are actually running. What do they consist of? I’ve heard they’re really intense.

A key part of our training is that participants are in a room with like-minded women who want to run for office, who have the same goals, the same values. It creates that sisterhood that is so important. 

We also want to get them into the immediate mindset of, “Yes, you.” We start the first day by saying, your candidacy begins today, and really getting the women to start to see themselves as candidates, as future elected officials, and honing in on their “why.” For most women who run for office, there’s a singular “why” that drives them.

We then get down to, OK, how do you put your name on the ballot? How do you hire campaign staff? How do you fundraise? How do you do public speaking, debates, canvassing, phone banking— everything that you need to know, going through that very intensively. It’s not “OK, Phone banking 101.” It’s, “How do you run an effective phone bank? What are the different scripts that you need based upon the voters in your community?” A big piece is, calculating your win rate—what are the number of votes that you need to win? And helping build that campaign and their overall operation to be a great candidate.

So many of our alums say, “There’s no way I would have won if I didn’t do Emerge.” We’ve had alums who said, “I literally thought campaigning was going to be me canvassing in my heels, in a suit, because I still had to look professional.” And we’re like, “Please don’t do that!”  

Campaigning in heels sounds extremely painful!

One of the most important things we impart to our alums is to be authentic. You don’t have to change who you are in order to get people to vote for you and to get elected. We see that with Vice President Harris. She has an authenticity that is showing through. Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them. Candidates who are from the community, who have the same shared experiences, who want to do good work—those are the candidates that people are looking for. 

“Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them.”

You also mentioned hustle. In some quarters, it could have a bit of a negative connotation— “Oh, Harris is just hustling us.”

There’s a story the vice president told at our annual meeting this year that I love. She talked about putting her ironing board in her car and then setting up the ironing board at the grocery store—during that first campaign, that was her table. She was very grassroots; she had good hustle. I think that is something that we will continue to see from her.

You gotta be scrappy. I’ll take this from the fundraising point of view. We know that women candidates, especially first-time candidates, will almost always get heavily outspent. And we say, what you don’t have in money, you make up with in shoe leather and a good message. It’s putting your ironing board in the backseat of the car. Contacting that friend who is a great cook and asking them to do the catering for your event. It’s throwing house parties in the backyard to create an intimate environment. Just you DM-ing that local reporter saying, “Hey, do you want to come to my home, sit on my couch, and talk about my race?” Because that can lead to good press. Our alums regularly beat those smooth, “I-got-tons-of-consultants” type of candidates with their scrappiness and their hustle.

A lot of people are really surprised by how well Harris has been doing since The Big Switch. You hear all the time, “She doesn’t seem like the same candidate she was in 2019, or 2020.” And, “Where did she learn to give speeches like this?”

The person we see now is who the vice president has always been. I think that some people don’t want to recognize it, they don’t want to see it, and that’s something that we’re also very honest about. We tell our alums, “You’re not going to be for everyone.” 

We also have to look at the role that the media plays in shaping the narrative about women candidates. I mean, there can be a race full of women, and they will somehow find ways to make the article about what they wore and not their policies. We see it all the time. We’ll hear, “Those men are running for the same seat.” But the women, “They’re running against each other.” We can have multiple men, but, why do there need to be multiple women? Why do there need to be two Latino women?

I’m very honest in telling our alums: We can teach them how to be confident on the campaign trail. We can make it a lot less lonely when they’re running for office. But we can’t take away racism and misogyny. At the same time, every time a woman puts her name on the ballot, every time a woman is elected, we are changing that narrative. When you see multiple women running for the same position, we’re normalizing that. 

Another frequent complaint from journalists: Why hasn’t Harris done any press conferences? Why won’t she sit down for more interviews? 

The reality is, we know that the vice president has done interviews before. There have been lengthy articles about her. It goes back to the whole media narrative: “Where’s Kamala? What’s Kamala doing?” My response is, “Everything and everywhere!” I get the e-mails from her team, and reading her daily schedule makes me exhausted. 

They’re not avoiding the press, they’re being thoughtful about it. Frankly, they should be thoughtful because it’s a coveted interview—she is the prize. I say, take your time and do it right. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. 

When she did finally sit down with CNN, how do you think it went?

It was more about asking her to respond to a lot of the things that we have been hearing on the right from Donald Trump, and not a lot about her vision, how she’s going to govern. I felt it could have been a lot more forward-looking. That question about her ethnicity—“They’re saying you aren’t Black enough, you’re not Indian enough”—was that really something they needed to ask her? She gave the perfect response. But why are we constantly asking women to defend who we are?

As you see the candidate Harris has become, is there something she does that you wish you could bottle and hand out to all your Emerge candidates? 

I actually will take this back to the vice presidential debate in 2020. It was her being there in her power. She let Mike Pence be Mike Pence, just like I expect she’s going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump when they debate. And she’s going to focus on answering the questions about the real issues and talking about why she is the perfect candidate for this moment.

It’s what I love about her, something that women are seeing on the campaign trail and that little girls are seeing as they grow up. People are trying to diminish her, but she is not letting that happen. She is keeping that energy going and not letting the negativity seep in. Because the negativity, the racism, the sexism are all a part of wanting to scare us into not wanting to run for office and not making change. When she says, “You do not let people tell you who you are—you show them who you are,” it is such a masterclass in leadership and women owning their power.

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they did like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”

Believe it or not, Usha Vance once had a view in common with the majority of Americans: she reportedly believed Trump was responsible for inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, and found it “deeply disturbing.”

That’s according to a Washington Post report published Saturday, based on interviews with more than two dozen of her friends, former co-workers and classmates. “Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” one friend told the Post. Vance also registered to vote as a Democrat at least twice, according to the Post, and until this month worked as a litigator at a progressive San Francisco law firm.

The friend added to the Post: “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”

But then again, so was her husband, Trump’s newly-crowned running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). As Mother Jones has covered, J.D. Vance once called Trump “cultural heroin,” “reprehensible,” and “a cynical asshole…or America’s Hitler.” (On Facebook, according to the Post, Usha Vance praised her husband’s 2016 essay for the Atlantic, in which he called Trump “cultural heroin,” for publicly taking a “firm stand against Trump.”) Since then, though, he—and, apparently, his wife—have gone through something of a metamorphosis. J.D. Vance has called people arrested for their role in the insurrection “political prisoners.” And as my colleague David Corn reported this week, he also endorsed a book that praised the January 6 rioters and called progressives “unhuman.” (And as I reported, this is not the only book by a right-wing extremist that Vance has endorsed.)

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and a representative for J.D. Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday afternoon about the Post‘s reporting on Usha Vance. But in a statement a spokesperson for J.D. Vance provided to the Post, Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist and family friend, said that Usha Vance “had a similar shift in views [to J.D.] and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November.”

This spin—that the Vances’ apparent joint evolution on Trump is not hypocritical, but genuine—can have a real benefit for the Trump campaign, as my colleague Jacob Rosenberg wrote:

Trump wants to show people that liberals were bent out of shape, and he is not that bad. And when you get past the unnecessary yelling about Trump, his agenda is what America needs. To prove it? His running mate in 2024 is one of the people who was used to yell Trump was too dangerous the loudest.

Usha Vance’s apparent shift on Trump does not exist in a vacuum. There’s a long history of women supporting misogynistic men—including those they are married to—because it can help put them in proximity to power, or keep them there. (Consider, for example, the 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump in 2020.) Doing so, though, often requires sacrificing themselves.

“I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now,” Usha Vance said in an interview with Fox and Friends before Trump named her husband as his running mate, “but I believe in J.D., and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life.”

Believe it or not, Usha Vance once had a view in common with the majority of Americans: she reportedly believed Trump was responsible for inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, and found it “deeply disturbing.”

That’s according to a Washington Post report published Saturday, based on interviews with more than two dozen of her friends, former co-workers and classmates. “Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing,” one friend told the Post. Vance also registered to vote as a Democrat at least twice, according to the Post, and until this month worked as a litigator at a progressive San Francisco law firm.

The friend added to the Post: “She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”

But then again, so was her husband, Trump’s newly-crowned running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). As Mother Jones has covered, J.D. Vance once called Trump “cultural heroin,” “reprehensible,” and “a cynical asshole…or America’s Hitler.” (On Facebook, according to the Post, Usha Vance praised her husband’s 2016 essay for the Atlantic, in which he called Trump “cultural heroin,” for publicly taking a “firm stand against Trump.”) Since then, though, he—and, apparently, his wife—have gone through something of a metamorphosis. J.D. Vance has called people arrested for their role in the insurrection “political prisoners.” And as my colleague David Corn reported this week, he also endorsed a book that praised the January 6 rioters and called progressives “unhuman.” (And as I reported, this is not the only book by a right-wing extremist that Vance has endorsed.)

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and a representative for J.D. Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday afternoon about the Post‘s reporting on Usha Vance. But in a statement a spokesperson for J.D. Vance provided to the Post, Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist and family friend, said that Usha Vance “had a similar shift in views [to J.D.] and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November.”

This spin—that the Vances’ apparent joint evolution on Trump is not hypocritical, but genuine—can have a real benefit for the Trump campaign, as my colleague Jacob Rosenberg wrote:

Trump wants to show people that liberals were bent out of shape, and he is not that bad. And when you get past the unnecessary yelling about Trump, his agenda is what America needs. To prove it? His running mate in 2024 is one of the people who was used to yell Trump was too dangerous the loudest.

Usha Vance’s apparent shift on Trump does not exist in a vacuum. There’s a long history of women supporting misogynistic men—including those they are married to—because it can help put them in proximity to power, or keep them there. (Consider, for example, the 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump in 2020.) Doing so, though, often requires sacrificing themselves.

“I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now,” Usha Vance said in an interview with Fox and Friends before Trump named her husband as his running mate, “but I believe in J.D., and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life.”

On Sunday night, more than 40,000 Black women reportedly gathered on a Zoom call.

Their purpose: To rally around Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly launched campaign to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Part of how that support manifested was through a massive influx of cash: Black women on that Zoom call raised $1.5 million in three hours, according to Win With Black Women, the organization that convened the virtual gathering.

Black women have long been recognized as the most crucial voting bloc for the Democratic party. But experts say their role in contributing to Harris’ record-breaking first 24 hours of fundraising—when she raised raised more than $80 million, according to her campaign—makes clear that Black women’s political power goes far beyond party loyalty.

“Until [Sunday], Black women weren’t necessarily associated with being powerhouse fundraisers,” Aimee Allison, founder and president of the organization She the People, told me. “For Black women to raise money like that is evidence of Black women’s political power in another way.”

Money, Allison said, “is the fuel of American politics—and we can play there as well.”

Win With Black Women has been holding weekly, off-the-record Zoom calls for years to discuss Black women’s political power, according to Allison and Glynda Carr, president, CEO and co-founder of the group Higher Heights for America, which works to elect progressive Black women to office. But the calls have never been as well attended as Sunday’s, which had upwards of 40,000 listeners, according to organizers. Typically, the calls reach a maximum attendance of 1,000 people, according to Allison. (Spokespeople for Win With Black Women did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Monday.)

Black women played a major role in grassroots fundraising for former President Obama’s campaign, Carr noted, adding that Black people also tend to donate a higher share of their wealth than white people do. Though Harris has already raked in a huge sum of cash, that kind of windfall is uncommon for Black women running for federal office, who research shows tend to have less cash on hand than other candidates. Of course, it’s hard to make any comparison between Harris and other Black women candidates given that she would be the first woman of color ever to win the Democratic Party’s nomination. This early financial support for Harris from Black women is notable, and shows that “this is a growing space for Black women,” Carr said.

Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics also sees it as “symbolic of something more”: the “support and enthusiasm” crucial in powering Harris’ candidacy to victory. “If that type of organizing is already happening,” Dittmar said, “that bodes well for the Harris campaign.”

Carr’s organization is already planning on how to capitalize on the enthusiasm for Harris’ candidacy, she said, including by growing Higher Heights’ network of Black women supporters in the coming months.

“There’s a real opportunity to harnesses [Black women’s fundraising]—not just for Kamala Harris’ presidency,” Carr said, “but candidates inspiring Black women’s political spending up and down the ballot.”

It turns out the most consequential reproductive rights case before the Supreme Court this past term—arguably, the most significant since the overturn of Roe v. Wade—wasn’t the religious right’s attack on the abortion drug mifepristone, or the battle over whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions in states with strict bans. It was a fight over who should pay to monitor commercial fishing boats so they don’t deplete the herring population off the Atlantic coast.

Reproductive health and gender equality advocates are just beginning to digest the sweeping implications of the ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, in which the court’s conservative supermajority overturned a 40-year-old cornerstone of US administrative law known as “Chevron deference.” In doing so, the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies to issue regulations on everything from financial markets to industrial pollution to drug pricing to workplace safety. 

And abortion. And birth control. And trans equality. And pregnant workers’ rights. 

“It’s hard to overstate the significance of the Loper Bright and Relentless decision” on reproductive and gender issues and federal policy more broadly, says Shaina Goodman, director for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women and Families. “It has deep and far-reaching consequences that we will see play out over the coming years.” That’s because many of the major regulations protecting or expanding reproductive and gender rights have been the result of federal agencies interpreting statutes enacted by Congress.

Certainly, anti-abortion groups were pleased at their new power to disrupt how federal laws are made and implemented. Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a leading law firm focusing on religious issues, called Loper Bright “a landmark ruling” for groups that oppose abortion and birth control, such as nuns who’ve been fighting the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate for a decade. He predicted that the decision “would likely be the death knell” for, among other things, new Biden administration rules interpreting the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to include workplace accommodations for people having abortions. 

“From this day forward,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “administrative agencies can be sued in perpetuity over every final decision they make…Even the most well-settled agency regulations can be placed on the chopping block.” 

Then the Supreme Court gave the foundations of American law another vigorous shake. On the last day of the term, the same coalition of far-right justices amplified the likely impact of Loper Bright by opening the door to new, broad challenges to regulations long after they take effect. In Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a case involving a North Dakota truck stop and debit-card swipe fees, the court granted litigants virtually unlimited time to file suit over federal rules they claim cause them harm, instead of the six-year statute of limitations that had been in place.

If the implications for reproductive rights weren’t immediately obvious, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made the stakes clear in a blistering dissent. She pointed to efforts by anti-abortion doctors to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of mifepristone—a case the justices rejected in June on the narrow grounds that the doctors didn’t have standing to sue. Now, Jackson suggested, the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 would be “fair game.” “From this day forward,” she wrote, “administrative agencies can be sued in perpetuity over every final decision they make…Even the most well-settled agency regulations can be placed on the chopping block.” 

Taken together, the Loper Bright and Corner Post decisions cast a new light on the justices’ strategy this term to essentially punt the mifepristone suit and the federal-vs-state battle over EMTALA. Both of those cases centered on federal rules that are likely to be challenged under the court’s new reasoning—along with rules governing many other areas of health policy for decades to come, the think tank KFF warns.

The impact is likely to be felt particularly strongly in ideologically “combustible” issues such as reproductive health, gender rights, and climate change, predicts Georgetown Law professor Lisa Heinzerling. “These are areas where, it seems to me, [courts are] treating any protective regulation with some hostility,” she says. Long-settled federal rules on issues such as birth control and emergency contraception could make especially tempting targets for conservatives under Corner Post, legal experts say.

Some of the first effects are being felt in cases involving trans issues. Two days after the Supreme Court term ended, federal judges in Mississippi, Texas and Florida cited Loper Bright to block the Biden administration from enforcing a new rule that interpreted the Affordable Care Act to bar discrimination in health care on the basis of gender identity. “Any deference that would have been automatically given to the Biden administration has just been completely eliminated,” Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. 

As my Mother Jones colleagues have written, this term’s Supreme Court rulings were the culmination of a years-long campaign by conservative groups to throttle the federal government’s regulatory power and dismantle what they like to call the “administrative state.” Overturning the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council was central to that goal. In Chevron, the justices held that when a federal statute was ambiguous on a certain issue, administrative agencies with specific expertise, such as the FDA or the Environmental Protection Agency, had wide latitude to issue rules interpreting and implementing the law—and if those rules were reasonable, lower courts had to defer to them. The rationale was simple: Congress couldn’t possibly weigh in on every last practice of every industry to which a law might apply. So it made sense for agencies to make the rules and for judges to mostly go along.

Conservatives began to argue that courts shouldn’t have to defer to the expertise of federal agencies to decide whether a regulation should be upheld; instead, judges should be able to use their own judgment.

At first, Chevron was seen as a victory for conservatives, becoming one of the most-cited precedents in American law. But when the Obama administration began using Chevron to push through its policy agenda, they changed their tune. In law journal articles and amicus briefs, conservatives began to argue that courts shouldn’t have to defer to the expertise of federal agencies to decide whether a regulation should be upheld; instead, judges should be able to use their own judgment. In his majority opinion in Loper Bright, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with those arguments, asserting that agencies “have no special competence” to resolve statutory ambiguities. Whereas, he said, “courts do.” 

The Corner Post case received much less attention while it was moving through the courts, perhaps because what it was proposing—basically ending the statute of limitations to challenge federal regulations—seemed so improbable. Certainly, its potential consequences for reproductive issues flew under the radar. According to the official transcript, the words “abortion,” “mifepristone,” and “gender” didn’t come up once during oral arguments this past spring.

But there were plenty of signs that anti-abortion groups were keenly interested in the outcomes of both cases. The law firm challenging the federal regulations in Corner Post happens to be the same firm representing the main Idaho lawmaker suing the Biden administration over EMTALA and emergency abortion care. In Loper Bright, a group of Christian businesses, represented by the powerhouse religious law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, filed an amicus brief that lists a string of issues that conservative groups are likely to target now that Chevron has been overturned, including Biden administration rules on Title X family planning funds, the mailing of abortion pills, pharmacy requirements for stocking contraceptives, and the patient privacy law known as HIPAA. (“Unelected federal bureaucrats frequently disrespect Americans’ most cherished liberties by imposing personal political agendas that ignore science and that bypass what Congress has authorized,” ADF senior counsel Julie Marie Blake said in an email, adding that thanks to the new SCOTUS ruling, courts are now “recognizing their duty to interpret these laws as written.”)

By contrast, with all their attention focused on the potentially blockbuster mifepristone and EMTALA cases, reproductive and LGBTQ rights organizations did not file amicus briefs in either Loper Bright or Corner Post. Now they are scrambling to figure out how to proceed. And because many of the coming battles will be happening in the super-wonky administrative law context, with courts chipping away at regulations one easily-overlooked decision at a time, repro groups could have a much harder time stirring up the level of passion among their supporters that has made the Dobbs decision one of the defining issues of the 2024 election cycle. 

That’s ironic, because Loper Bright and Corner Post are likely to intensify the ideological battles around abortion and reproductive rights. “We’re unsettling 40 years of administrative precedent in a way that is really going to politicize a lot of these issues,” warns Skye Perryman, the CEO and president of Democracy Forward, a national legal organization that focuses on democracy issues and social justice. “Under Chevron deference, you had judges that might be considered to be conservative upholding rules that came out of liberal administrations. You had judges that might be considered liberal upholding rules that came out of conservative ones. Chevron really operated right to help depoliticize a lot of these things.” 

Another irony: Those court battles are likely to be much more frequent and more heated if Joe Biden is reelected, says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “Clearly Corner Post makes it a lot easier to win if you’re a conservative advocacy group, even when the statute of limitations would otherwise have expired,” she says. But with Trump officials running the administrative state, “conservatives may not be as enthused to argue that the courts rather than agencies should have primacy. There may not be as much of a need for those lawsuits if you have a Trump administration doing your work for you.”

Take, for example, the Chevron deference: Back in 1984, the case was a clear victory for the deregulation-minded Reagan administration. Overturning that precedent was part of “a strategy devised by conservatives at a time when federal agencies were mostly in the hands of Democrats,” Ziegler says.

There could well come a time when progressive lawmakers and courts could use Loper Bright to their own advantage, she adds. “It’s kind of like presidential immunity,” she says. “Obviously, if Trump is vowing to prosecute Biden, maybe that looks different to you. [Regulations and opinions] that are written with an eye to the world as it is now, may read differently if the White House changes hands.”