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2025-11-12 03:50:29

On Monday night, the Senate passed a bill that marks the first step towards potentially reopening the government after the 42-day shutdown.

For Democrats, the bill comes with a major cost: It does nothing to address the rapidly-approaching expiration of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies which, according to health policy think tank KFF, will more than double enrollees’ monthly premiums. While Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has pledged to hold a vote on the issue next month, it’s unlikely to pass in any form Democrats would want in the Republican-controlled Congress, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to commit to holding a vote on the matter in the House. (Spokespeople for Thune did not respond to a request for comment.)

But the 60-to-40 vote passed thanks to seven Democrats, and one Democrat-aligned independent, who defected to pass the bill. As Mother Jones‘ editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery pointed out on Bluesky, none of the lawmakers are up for reelection next year. The officials have said they cast their votes because Americans were already being harmed by the shutdown—low-income Americans have gone without food stamps and flights have been delayed at the busiest time of year for holiday travel—and they felt confident in Republicans’ commitment to give them a later vote on extending the ACA subsidies. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), one of the defectors, also cited the fact that the bill has a provision to rehire federal employees who lost their jobs during the shutdown and to provide back pay to those who had been furloughed.

Predictably, all this has caused even more infighting among Democrats, who have already been sparring over their party’s future following President Donald Trump’s reelection and the party’s subsequent internal reckoning over how it happened. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called it “a very bad vote,” and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said, “there’s no way to defend this.” Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) told Axios the bill is “complete BS,” while Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said it “sounds like a lousy deal to me.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have also opposed the bill for failing to address the expiring ACA subsidies—but Schumer is also facing blowback from congressional Democrats who say the defection of some members proves he is not up to the task of leading Democrats in the Senate. (A spokesperson for Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mother Jones readers are also, overall, quite angry about the Democrats’ response. When I asked subscribers to our daily email newsletter yesterday to weigh in with their thoughts, we received a flood of replies. Many described being, as one anonymous reader put it, “mad as hell.” Reader Andrea Scharf called the vote “disgraceful” and “another show of weakness.” Tom Chojnacki wrote: “Those Democrats are weak minded cowards. They are aiding and abetting the Republicans goal of remaking the US into an oligarchy.”

The word “spineless” came up frequently to describe the eight defectors: Steve Anchell said, “I think they are spineless cretins that don’t deserve to hold public office. The only thing they seem to be good at is begging for campaign money.” Angela Ross wrote: “I THINK THEY ARE SPINELESS, MEALY MOUTHED, BLOOD SUCKING, TWO FACED BOTTOM FEEDERS.”

Several joined in the calls for Schumer to be ousted as the Senate Minority Leader. Eileen, who did not give her last name, said Schumer “needs to hand over the minority leader position to a Democrat who will fight tooth and nail.”

Other said the defectors were mistaken to believe the Republicans would actually vote to extend the ACA subsidies. “Trump and the GOP have time and time again broken promises. They will do so again,” wrote David Clayman. “The pain inflicted upon the populace has been in vain.”

Some, like Grace Hammond, said they believed the Democrats gave up leverage they had following their spate of wins in last week’s elections. “Democrats had clear, tangible leverage for the first time in this fight, undeniable pressure, and they cave,” Hammond wrote. “I was having a glimmer of hope after the elections,” Suzann Cornell said. “Now that we caved, those hopes are dashed again.” (Polling also showed that most Americans blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the shutdown.)

A smaller group of respondents, such as Kathy Walker, reported having “mixed feelings” due to “too many people suffering” during the shutdown. Some readers reported already feeling those effects themselves.

“Our son and wife will be unable to afford medical insurance until next year when they will qualify for Medicare. In the meantime, I, nearly 90, will have to help them pay their premiums from my Social Security benefits,” wrote Dell Erwin.

Michelle Mellon said her family’s premiums will triple next year, adding, “It’s this politicized, short-term, zero-sum thinking that’s going to be our downfall as a nation.” Christine Morrissey said the premium increases “are forcing families, including mine, to cancel insurance policies in favor of paying for energy costs, grocery costs, rent costs, mortgage costs, and home owner’s insurance costs, all [of] which have also increased since Trump became president.”

A handful of anonymous readers shared stories about how ACA subsidies helped them, and their family members, receive necessary treatment and medications. Without the subsidies, they wrote, they will lose their coverage, and potentially their health. As one put it: “I am distraught. I feel betrayed by the Democratic Party.”

2025-11-11 20:30:00

On the morning of August 13, Paulo Cesar Gamez Lira was pulling up to his mother’s house in Horizon City, Texas, when three unmarked cars blocked the driveway. Seven officers in plain clothes—some wearing masks, at least one armed—surrounded Gamez Lira’s truck. They ordered him to turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle.

Gamez Lira, 27, looked startled. He had somewhere he needed to be. His 3-month-old daughter had left the hospital less than a month earlier after being born with a condition known as gastroschisis. Gamez Lira was dropping off his other children with his mother and heading to a doctor’s appointment for the infant.

Still, Gamez Lira did not resist as the men handcuffed him—and, in the process, according to a habeas corpus petition Gamez Lira’s counsel later filed in federal court, dislocated his shoulder. His 3- and 7-year-olds, who were in the car, cried as their father was detained. The kids’ screams are audible in a video recorded by a home security camera.

As the agents moved on him, Gamez Lira’s mother rushed outside. She pleaded with the men: Her son should not be a target; he had protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The policy safeguards certain undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation. But the men carried on with the arrest. In a matter of minutes, they put Gamez Lira in a car and drove away.

“Barely three weeks had passed since our baby finally left the hospital and we were enjoying our new life as a family, when [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] unjustly took him away,” Gamez Lira’s wife, Alejandra, said in a September statement about the arrest. “In that instant, they destroyed our family.”

When President Barack Obama established DACA more than 13 years ago, he explained that protecting undocumented youth was simply “the right thing to do.” It made no sense, in his words, to purge immigrants who were American in every way except for their lack of papers. “We are a better nation than one that expels innocent young kids,” Obama said then. That commitment enjoyed public support, even if the administration conceived of DACA as a stopgap—a temporary fix until Congress could help Dreamers, as the young people who came to the country as children are often called, get a path to permanent legal status by hashing out a bipartisan consensus on immigration.

Hundreds of thousands of Dreamers like Gamez Lira took the administration at its word. They entrusted the US government with their personal information and whereabouts in exchange for the assurance that they would be shielded from immigration enforcement. For a teenage Gamez Lira, brought to the country from Mexico as an infant, the program was an opportunity to come out of the shadows, work lawfully, and build a better future.

“DACA gave him hope,” Alejandra recounted during a press call. Gamez Lira did everything that the government asked of him—paid fees, submitted to background checks, reapplied every other year—to earn that protection. In fact, he had recently renewed his two-year status through August 2026.

But Congress never acted, and then Donald Trump won the presidency twice on a platform that demonized immigrants. His administration, helmed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and border czar Tom Homan, has made mass removals a priority, pushing for 3,000 arrests a day and 600,000 deportations by the end of the year. But as ICE and other federal agencies storm cities across the country in a sweeping immigration crackdown, one seismic policy change has largely flown under the radar: the assault on DACA and the more than 515,000 recipients currently in the program.

Many like Gamez Lira have been arrested, detained, and put in removal proceedings, despite having protection from deportation under the policy. The attack on DACA has wrought fear, uncertainty, and chaos on the lives of young people who bought into the American Dream that the US government sold to them. “What the government is trying to do is really unprecedented,” said Rebecca Sheff, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who represented Gamez Lira, describing it as “a real betrayal.”

That abandonment marks a major shift in the federal government’s attitude toward one group of immigrants that has, for years, been seen on both sides of the aisle as perhaps the most obvious candidates for legalization: those who were brought here as children and have barely lived anywhere else.

It also threatens to disrupt every corner of DACA recipients’ lives—from their health care to their chance at education. In June, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized a rule excluding DACA recipients from eligibility for health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. In July, the Department of Education launched an investigation into five universities over scholarships for students with DACA status. That same month, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the quiet part out loud: DACA beneficiaries “may be subject to arrest and deportation” and should consider the option to self-deport.

Just a few weeks later, Gamez Lira was hauled away from his life as a forklift driver and father of four US citizen children. After Gamez Lira’s arrest, the men took him to a Customs and Border Protection facility near a port of entry in El Paso, Texas. He was then transferred to ICE’s Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico. (DHS pinned his arrest on the fact that Gamez Lira pleaded guilty almost a decade ago to disorderly conduct from a reduced charge for marijuana possession.)

His wife, Alejandra, was left to care for their baby, who needs daily medication, while Gamez Lira languished in ICE custody. She said her husband felt “betrayed by the only country he has ever called home.”

DACA has long been under threat, and the fate of its beneficiaries vulnerable to volatile court rulings and political whims. But these days, the potential cost of that uncertainty is higher. The specter of a Trump crackdown has DACA recipients on edge. Many are fearful of drawing unwanted attention.

A Houston-era beneficiary of the program, whom I’m calling Fernando because he asked not to use his real name, said he lives with constant caution. When driving, he looks around for cars that could be federal immigration officers. Before leaving the house, he checks social media for information about ICE sightings. He also carries his driver’s license and work authorization as proof that he’s a DACA recipient—even if that might no longer prevent him from being detained.

“It’s scary to hear these cases happening,” Fernando, who moved to Texas from Tamaulipas, Mexico, at age 3, told me. “It’s a risk that I have to recognize.”

In September, the Home Is Here coalition launched a tracker documenting cases of DACA recipients, and other Dreamers, who have been detained or deported, counting nearly 20 instances across the country.

They include a myriad of worrying cases. There is the Kansas resident with DACA status who was stopped at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in March after returning from abroad and was promptly denied entry and flown back to Mexico, despite having valid travel authorization. And there is the DACA recipient from Miami and father of two, JeanCarlos Alexis Fiallos Manzanares, who has been detained since May. (His DACA and work permit renewal were recently approved for two more years, according to Fiallos’ sister.)

Over the summer, a deaf DACA recipient was picked up during an ICE worksite raid at a car wash in California’s San Gabriel Valley and spent more than 20 days in detention without contact with family or lawyers. In August, CBS News reported that a DACA recipient was among the detainees at Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz. And in October, ICE detained a Filipino activist and photojournalist after the Trump administration reportedly moved to revoke his DACA status because he has been outspoken on social media against Israel’s war on Gaza and the detention of pro-Palestinian protesters.

“These are just the cases we know of,” said Ayah Al-Durazi, campaign manager for Home Is Here, warning that there could be others that haven’t yet been covered in the media or come to the attention of immigrant rights groups and lawyers.

One arrest in particular has stood out to advocates for what it shows about the administration’s brazenness and resolve in sweeping up DACA recipients. In 2005, community organizer Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago’s parents moved the family from Oaxaca, Mexico, to South Florida, where they settled as farmworkers. She was 8 at the time. 

When DACA became available in 2012, Santiago and her brother Jose applied. Jose remembers the anxiety of “giving all your information to immigration and having to go through this whole background check and always being afraid of eventually this ending.” Still, he added, the program was like a “safety net…knowing we can’t be detained or deported.”

Over the summer, that anxiety proved justified. In the early hours of August 3, two CBP agents stopped and arrested Santiago without a warrant as she prepared to board a flight from El Paso to attend a conference in Dallas. One of the officers, a video Santiago recorded shows, told her to turn off her phone so they could question her about her documents.

“What’s the questioning for?” Santiago asked.

“How you got the employment authorization,” the officer replied.

When Santiago, 28, demanded to see her lawyer, one of the officers said it wouldn’t be possible because they were already past the security checkpoint.

Reflecting back on that day, Santiago, who is Indigenous Zapotec, told me she thought about how it marked the anniversary of the 2019 racist mass shooting at a Texas Walmart and El Paso’s history of racialized violence. She described the agents’ line of interrogation as “fearmongering,” saying they asked about her relatives and where they lived.

“I was angry and frustrated, but I couldn’t feel anything else at the time,” Santiago said. “I was pretty much just trying to numb my feelings as a way to get through.”

Santiago was then taken to ICE’s El Paso processing center, where she said one officer mocked her, saying, “Are you scared we’ll deport you?”

In statements to the media, DHS referred to Santiago as a “criminal illegal alien,” pointing to one conviction and other charges for disorderly conduct in connection with civil disobedience actions and an arrest in Arizona for alleged trespassing and possession of drug paraphernalia. (Prosecutors dropped that case due to “insufficient information.”)

In early September, an immigration judge terminated Santiago’s removal proceedings because she had valid DACA status that prevented her from being deported—at least until April 2026. Santiago sought release in federal court, challenging her detention as unlawful. Her lawyers argued that US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of visas and other benefits, had never attempted to revoke her DACA status and noted that past criminal charges and conviction had not disqualified her from successfully renewing it six times.

But the government, while acknowledging that Santiago could not be deported due to DACA, fought to keep her in custody, claiming it could remove her after her protection expires in the spring. Advocates and lawyers worried the administration was arguing that it should be allowed to indefinitely detain DACA recipients without cause, while running out the clock on their reprieve from deportation. The end result, Santiago’s legal counsel team argued, would be a “de facto termination [of DACA] without any process whatsoever.”

On October 1, a federal judge in El Paso concluded that the government had no “individualized explanation of any kind” to detain Santiago and ordered her immediate release. “A core benefit of DACA is that it allows recipients to live, study, and work in the United States without fear of arrest or deportation,” Judge Kathleen Cardone wrote in her decision. “It would be incongruous to find that DACA recipients acquire a constitutionally protected interest in their DACA benefit, but not one of its essential facets: their liberty.”

That freedom afforded by DACA appears to be what the administration is trying to undo, Santiago’s US citizen spouse, Desiree Miller, told me: “At its core, [the case] was about whether or not the administration can get away with trying to deport people with DACA and claiming that it no longer protects people from deportation.”

In a response to emailed questions from Mother Jones, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “An activist judge chose to grant a criminal illegal alien who has previously been charged for trespassing, possession of narcotics, and drug paraphernalia bond and to be free on American streets. We will not let one judge put the safety of the American people at risk and will explore every available option to remove this criminal from our country.”

Santiago, who is eligible to adjust her immigration status to a green card based on marriage, said the experience has made her more aware of the injustices of the for-profit immigration detention system and the narrow views around who is deserving of a place in America. “I find myself angrier at how this world has been organized,” she said, “and at the same time feel moved by the small things that I get to do now that I was restricted from doing.”

During his first term, Trump tried to rescind DACA, only to be blocked by the Supreme Court. After his reelection fueled by a mass deportation agenda, some worried that he would try again. But in December 2024, NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the then-president-elect whether undocumented youth should worry. “The Dreamers are going to come later,” Trump said. “And we have to do something about the Dreamers.” When probed further on whether he wanted them to be able to stay in the country, Trump said yes, then blamed Democrats and then-President Joe Biden for not having worked out a solution for that group.

The reality is more complicated. Both Democrats and Republicans have failed to take the political goodwill toward DACA recipients and turn it into a path to permanent residence and citizenship, said Andrea R. Flores, who served as an immigration policy adviser during the Obama and Biden administrations and worked on getting DACA off the ground. “Trump actually being the one to now try and deport them is the biggest violation of this group, but the reason he can is because they were betrayed long before that,” she said.

Without a permanent solution in sight, DACA’s legality has instead wound through the courts, creating openings to either shore up or chip away at the program, depending on the political winds. Biden took the former approach: After a federal judge in Texas found DACA unlawful and blocked new applications in 2021, Biden rolled out a regulation to codify and strengthen the original policy. This year, a federal appeals court partially upheld that prior ruling but continued to allow active recipients to renew their status.

As the litigation moves forward, the Trump administration has staved off taking an official stance on DACA’s future, while also targeting individual recipients. When CBS News asked USCIS Director Joseph Edlow whether the Trump administration planned to end the program, he demurred: “We’re still engaging in conversation…We’ll see where we land.” Edlow, who has called DACA “de facto amnesty,” attributed the absence of a stated policy from the White House to the pending legal battle.

For immigrant rights advocates, the arrests and detention of immigrants with valid DACA protection is proof that the administration is trying to create something of a loophole: undermining the program’s core protections piecemeal without formally—and publicly—terminating it through regulation. “The administration doesn’t want to look like it’s going after DACA in a full-frontal attack,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us. “I think our concern is they may try to slowly grind down the program” and condemn DACA to a death “by a thousand cuts.”

Like with Santiago, the courts also reaffirmed DACA’s safeguard against detention in the case of Gamez Lira, the father arrested in his mother’s driveway. “For the last ten years, he lived under the understanding that he was unlikely to be subject to enforcement proceedings,” US District Judge William P. Johnson wrote in a September order to prevent the government from transferring Gamez Lira outside of New Mexico. “At the very least, he justifiably expected that his DACA status would not terminate without notice and the opportunity to respond. In contravention of that expectation, Gamez Lira was not provided any process at all in the course of his arrest, processing, and detention in immigration custody.” Later that month, the judge ordered Gamez Lira to be released from detention.

A DHS spokesperson reiterated in an email to Mother Jones that DACA recipients “are not automatically protected from deportations” and “may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons including if they’ve committed a crime.”

“What’s been truly new and concerning here is the government saying, ‘No, we’re not necessarily taking away your DACA right now, but we’re saying we can detain you,’” attorney Sheff said. “It just doesn’t make any sense other than the government trying to strike fear in the hearts of immigrant communities.”

Crystal Sandoval, with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, an organization working on Gamez Lira’s immigration case, agrees. “They’re basically getting away with it and terrorizing the community,” she said. “What else are they going to do? It makes me very scared about what’s going to come next.”

2025-11-11 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Christine Peringer attended her first United Nations climate conference in 2019, she was not exactly impressed. As a professional facilitator and a member of Mediators Beyond Borders International, she said she was “appalled” by the “lack of sophistication in their methods of running the meetings.” 

She described the typical rigmarole: First, delegates gather for a plenary session, where they can deliver surface-level position statements about some draft text prepared by the conference’s chair. Then they break out into small groups and “just start working things out very quickly,” with people agreeing or objecting as they go—sometimes they talk over one another, sometimes they fail to translate interjections into non-English languages. It gets worse in the final hours, when delegates crowd around a single sheet of paper, making revisions in ink.

“I don’t know how they come up with anything in such a haphazard process,” Peringer said. 

Peringer’s experience is typical of those attending the U.N.’s annual climate negotiations, known as COPs (for “conference of the parties”), which have been going on for more than 30 years and aim to align global efforts to combat climate change. The dysfunction has had consequences: Since the early ’90s, annual greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 40 percent, despite the climate pledges made under the Paris Agreement, which was itself a product of COP21 in 2016. No country on Earth has a climate pledge in line with the agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target, according to the collaborative research project Climate Action Tracker; instead, the pledges made by countries a decade ago are projected to cause up to 3.1 degrees C (5.6 degrees F) of warming.

Many other observers have called the conferences “broken,” “mayhem,” and a “circus,” and each year, there are calls for reform. These range widely, from banning fossil fuel lobbyists at the negotiations to limiting opportunities for greenwashing.

One mundane procedural issue stands out, however: voting. Due to the concerted efforts of oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, participants in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC—the treaty that kicked off the yearly COP negotiations—are unable to vote on contentious issues. Instead, they have to pursue consensus, giving every country a de facto veto power over proposals they don’t like. Environmental groups have called this a “poison pill” that has undermined climate progress for decades. Many are trying to stop it from sullying other international environmental agreements, like the UN plastics treaty.

Now that COP30 in Belém, Brazil, has kicked off, the question is once again rearing its head: Should the negotiation’s participants be able to vote? Mads Christensen, Greenpeace International’s executive director, wrote in September that a lack of voting was “at the heart” of the COP’s paralysis: The conferences must “push ahead with science, justice, and majority voting to ensure progress,” he said. Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, made a similar suggestion in August. But it’s not clear whether this is possible, or the extent to which it would actually resolve the climate treaty’s problems.

It’s unusual that the UNFCCC precludes voting. Most UN bodies, including its General Assembly, Security Council, and Economic and Social Council, allow voting in at least some circumstances. The same is true of several other U.N. environmental treaties, like the Stockholm Convention. 

The difference with the UNFCCC is that oil-producing countries blocked the adoption of the agreement’s “rules of procedure” way back in 1991—the part of the treaty that lays out its decision-making protocols. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and their allies objected to a mundane provision allowing two-thirds majority voting as a “last resort,” once efforts to achieve consensus had been exhausted. On the advice of US-based climate denial groups, they insisted that the treaty’s decisions be made by consensus only.

Since then, the rules of procedure have only been provisionally applied to the annual climate conferences, with the text about voting cordoned off in brackets to indicate that it hasn’t been agreed to and thus can’t be used. Formally adopting the rules of the procedure to allow voting would, ironically, require consensus, due to the rules of the United Nations. According to Joanna Depledge, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, “adoption of the rules of procedure” is now the longest-standing unresolved item on the COP agenda.

“I would say that the climate regime has settled into a kind of routine,” Depledge said. 

There are benefits to consensus. Incorporating every country’s viewpoints gives decisions greater legitimacy and makes it more likely that they’ll be adhered to and enforced. The Paris Agreement, for all its flaws, had such a high level of buy-in because of the decade of negotiations preceding it, in which delegates haggled their way toward a universally acceptable outcome.

But these are benefits of a consensus-building process, not necessarily of consensus itself. Most UN treaties, even those with voting, recognize this and ask countries to always seek the broadest level of agreement before putting something to a vote.

“The only reason consensus works is because there is a threat of a vote,” said Melissa Blue Sky, a senior attorney with the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law. 

The Basel Convention, for instance, has successfully reduced the international trade of hazardous waste—like discarded electronics—largely by consensus. Likewise, with the Stockholm Convention, which rarely actually uses voting but has still been able to phase out a number of toxic pesticides. Other treaties that allow voting but don’t often use it include the 2013 Minamata Convention, which aims to protect people and the environment from mercury, and the 1987 Montreal Protocol to prevent the destruction of the ozone layer, which didn’t vote on anything until 2016. 

When differences are irreconcilable, however, voting allows a way forward, as demonstrated earlier this year by the International Maritime Organization. More than 60 countries voted to approve a new target for reducing the shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, overcoming opposition from 16 countries and abstentions from 24. (A vote to officially adopt the regulations was delayed for another year, however, after interference from the Trump administration, which is opposed to them.)

Delegates to the climate COPs understand the unfortunate dynamic they’ve gotten themselves into. The countries that don’t want strong climate policies—mostly those with a significant fossil fuel sector—see a huge advantage from consensus. Because they’re OK with the status quo, they can simply refuse to compromise on key “red lines” and just wait for the rest of the world to compromise instead. The former president of the Maldives put it well during COP17 in 2011 when he said that “two parties reach an agreement, a third one comes along and says it doesn’t agree and it reduces the ambition of the others.” He called the negotiating process “stupid, useless, and endless.”

A diplomat from Bangladesh expressed a similar sentiment during COP27 in 2022: Consensus was leading to “lowest common denominator” outcomes, and any decision reached on this basis would be “so weak, so ineffective that it is not going to be anywhere near the challenges of today.”

There have been some attempts at reform. During COP17 in 2011, Mexico and Papua New Guinea submitted a creative proposal to amend the UNFCCC, rather than its rules of procedure. This would have circumvented the need for consensus; changes to the UNFCCC can be made by a three-fourths majority vote. But the idea never got enough support to move forward, and it has remained on the subsequent conferences’ provisional agendas.

At another conference, in 2013, a procedural issue led Russia to request a legal review of the UNFCCC’s decision-making processes. This was placed on the agenda for COP19 and could have been an opportunity to bring up voting rules, but it never was discussed.

Depledge, with the University of Cambridge, thinks the Mexico-Papua New Guinea proposal or another one like it is the most likely path to voting at the COPs—she said it would be “nigh on impossible” to ever adopt the rules of procedure outright. Earlier this year, she wrote an op-ed suggesting that new voting rules should require a supermajority or a double majority of developed and developing nations. “We should have voting rules, and they should be deployed as much as possible,” she said. She is, however, skeptical that this will be sufficient to change the trajectory of global climate action. A lack of voting “is not the number one reason why we are not achieving as much as we could be.” 

Depledge added that the voting issue is unlikely to come up in Belém, due to geopolitical issues—President Donald Trump’s assault on international institutions, war in Gaza and Ukraine—and related questions around the future of international climate diplomacy itself.

The experts Grist spoke to were hesitant to predict how past climate negotiations would have been different had negotiators been able to vote. But one could imagine stronger language around a “phaseout” of fossil fuels, rather than a “phase-down,” or stricter requirements for wealthy countries to lend money and other resources to poor countries that have done little to cause global warming yet are suffering the most from its consequences. Going forward, COP30 and future meetings might yield stronger collective commitments to ratchet up emissions reductions, even if they’re not legally binding and mostly serve as a “norm-setting” function for the rest of society.

Short of trying to introduce voting rules, Peringer, the professional facilitator, thinks future climate conferences should reinterpret consensus. Instead of conflating consensus with unanimity—meaning the enthusiastic, affirmative agreement of all parties—what if consensus meant that each country could simply “live with” a given decision?

“You only block consensus if you really believe that this is, like, so detrimental to the whole process, or in opposition to values that are held dear,” she said. 

In an academic paper elaborating on this idea in 2023, Peringer suggested that COP facilitators should play a more active role in determining when consensus has been reached, and then asking any holdout countries to “stand aside” in the interest of the larger group. There’s already some precedent for this within climate negotiations, notably from COP16 in 2010. In order to adopt a package of decisions called the Cancún Agreements, then-COP president Patricia Espinosa overruled a last-minute objection from Bolivia, saying that “consensus does not mean that one country has the right of veto, and can prevent 193 others from moving forward.”

Of course, it takes a skilled and confident facilitator to do something like that, and many of the recent COP presidents have not demonstrated this leadership ability. Plus, the tactic is less likely to work if there’s a larger group of countries blocking consensus.

One risk of moving away from the consensus decision-making model is that countries may feel alienated from the UNFCCC or Paris Agreement. If they’re overruled in an important decision, they may choose to simply opt out and walk away. This would obviously affect the treaty’s efficacy, since those countries most likely to leave are those with the deepest commitment to continuing to use oil, gas, and coal. 

But to Erika Lennon, a senior attorney with the Center for International Environmental Law, the risks could be worth it. Oil-producing countries are already not participating in good faith, she said, and other nations are watering down their own ambitions to accommodate their delaying tactics. She and Blue Sky said they’re open to smaller coalitions of countries working at a much more ambitious level to phase out fossil fuel products, and using trade policy to influence other nations that refuse to get on board. This is an approach that has increasingly been floated in the context of the U.N. plastics treaty, which also lacks a voting mechanism and has similarly been plagued by delay tactics from petrostates. 

At least one other international treaty, the Ottawa Treaty, followed this trajectory. After failed attempts by the UN to negotiate a ban on land mines, Canada launched its own process to hammer out an agreement in the late ’90s. The Ottawa Treaty now has more than 160 signatories, though several have recently withdrawn in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“There is something to be said for saying, ‘We want everyone on board,’” Lennon said, referring to global climate negotiations. “But what we see is really just a stalling of progress…and the consequences of it are measured in people’s lives or livelihoods and in the destruction of potentially whole countries.”

2025-11-11 06:16:16

On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services made an announcement that it promised would change the lives of millions of American women for the better: Hormone replacement therapy, the combination of hormone drugs that can treat the symptoms of menopause, was about to be depathologized.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had decided to remove a black-box warning on the medication that cautioned patients that its use could cause cancer and stroke. HHS Secretary RFK Jr. and FDA commissioner Marty Makary said that the warning, which first appeared in 2003, had been based on an overblown interpretation of a decades-old study. “The FDA is announcing today that it will remove the misleading black-box warnings from all HRT products,” said Kennedy. “For the first time in a generation, the FDA is standing with science and standing with women.” 

The change was welcome news to many doctors who treat the often-debilitating and long-dismissed symptoms of menopause: hot flashes, brain fog, insomnia, and recurrent urinary tract infections, to name but a few. “This decision aligns with the latest evidence-based research and helps eliminate the unnecessary fear that this warning has long perpetuated,” the Menopause Advocacy Working Group, a group of physicians that promotes increased awareness around menopause, said in a statement on social media. (Two of the group’s members were among the speakers at Monday’s event.)

But the specialists with whom Mother Jones spoke said that Monday’s panel, which included doctors with robust social media presences, had at times overstated both the negative health effects of menopause and the science on the benefits of hormone replacement therapy. Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to questions for this story.

Here are just a few of the more questionable claims they made:

Menopause causes divorce.

Dr. Kelly Casperson, a urologist and “expert and advocate for sexuality and hormones,” warned that “families fracture” if women don’t get treated for the symptoms of menopause. Dr. Makary listed “divorce” alongside well-documented symptoms like mood swings and hot flashes. For Adrian Sandra Dobs, a professor of Medicine and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, this claim was “pretty ridiculous.” She continued, “It is true that there can be mood swings and this can affect a marriage,” but to blame a divorce on menopause is “really stretching it.” 

Menopause kills women.

“HRT has saved marriages, rescued women from depression, prevented children from going without a mother,” Dr. Makary said. “Menopause shortens women’s lives,” added HHS Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health Director Alicia Jackson. Dr. Esther Eisenberg, a Professor Emerita at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who is working on the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) forthcoming guide to menopause, called the notion that menopause kills women “absurd.” Menopause, she said, “has nothing to do with a woman’s lifespan.” Dr. Jen Gunter, a gynecologist and the author of the 2021 book The Menopause Manifesto, noted in a Bluesky post that, on average, women actually live longer than men.

HRT improves the lives of all women.

“We have the opportunity to add up to a decade of healthy years to the life of every woman that you love!” proclaimed Dr. Jackson. Except for, as Drs. Dobs and Eisenberg noted, the millions of women for whom HRT is contraindicated—such as those with a previous history of blood clots or stroke, certain blood conditions, and many of those with a history of breast cancer. 

Lifelong vaginal estrogen therapy helps breast cancer patients live longer.

“They need their oncologist to know that women with breast cancer who use it may actually live longer, and they need their primary doctors to know how to write the prescription, recommend it for life,” said panel member Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual medicine specialist. Dr. Dobs wasn’t so sure. “I can’t agree with that,” she told Mother Jones. “We shouldn’t be afraid of it, but I couldn’t make a statement that vaginal estrogen makes women with breast cancer live longer.” (Breast cancer patients and survivors are typically advised to avoid most forms of HRT, though emerging evidence suggests vaginal estrogen may be safer.) 

Doctors should test the estrogen levels of patients in perimenopause before prescribing HRT.

“We are sticking with our philosophy that the government is not your doctor,” said Dr. Makary. Nonetheless, he did recommend “having a doctor evaluate your estrogen levels to figure out when is the right time to start.” Yet the North American Menopause Society explicitly recommends against testing for estrogen levels in perimenopausal women because they fluctuate so much throughout a woman’s cycle. Instead, doctors should prescribe estrogen based on a woman’s symptoms. Of Makary’s advice for women to ask their doctors to test their estrogen levels, Dr. Eisenberg said, “that recommendation comes out of the sky.” 

Makary cast these claims as the results not only of “a robust review of the latest scientific evidence” but also of “listening to women who have been challenging the paternalism of medicine.” In a surprisingly feminist statement, Makary added, “A male-dominated medical profession, let’s be honest, has minimized the symptoms of menopause, and as a result, women’s health issues have not received the attention that they deserve.” 

Makary’s criticism of paternalism in medicine might strike some as being particularly ironic when considering some of the other recent actions the FDA has taken on women’s health, which have included adding warnings to medications already proven to be safe. Back in July, for instance, the agency convened a so-called expert panel to discuss the use of antidepressants by pregnant women. The event featured a majority-male panel, several of whom called for adding a black box warning to SSRIs for pregnant women, which reproductive health experts say could increase stigma for women who could benefit from taking the pills. The members of that panel mostly spewed misinformation while railing against the use of antidepressants during pregnancy, to such an extent that the president of ACOG promptly released a statement calling the meeting an “alarmingly unbalanced” event that “did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated perinatal mood disorders in pregnancy.” 

In addition, Kenedy and Makary confirmed in a September letter to Republican attorneys general that they would undertake a review of the safety of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortion, even though more than 100 scientific studies have confirmed the pills are safe and effective—including when they are prescribed virtually and mailed to patients. Reproductive rights advocates are concerned that this “review” could lead to a decision to restrict access to the pills by recommending they should not be prescribed virtually and mailed to patients, or that they should not be used through ten weeks’ gestation, as the FDA currently allows. (Abortion advocates say the pills can be safely used later in pregnancy, and the World Health Organization guidelines note they can be used anytime in the first trimester.) 

The newfound enthusiasm for HRT has been building over the past few years, as awareness of menopause, its symptoms, and the myths around hormonal medications has increased. All the attention on menopause, though, has elevated a new cadre of doctor-influencers, two of whom were featured speakers at Monday’s event. Casperson, a urologist who hosts a podcast and has written two books about menopause and sex, has 435,000 Instagram followers. At her Bellingham, Washington clinic, which doesn’t accept insurance and instead offers memberships that start at $3,000 for 4-6 months of treatment. Casperson says she aims to help women “stop should-ing all over your sex life.” Rubin, also a urologist who doesn’t accept insurance, has 185,000 followers on Instagram. She trained under the controversial physician Irwin Goldstein, who advocated for the first-ever women’s libido drug, which the FDA approved back in 2015. 

Dr. Dobs cautions against relying on influencers selling supplements or claiming that HRT will solve all women’s health problems. “Unfortunately, nothing really keeps us young except things like stopping smoking, exercising, and lifestyle modification,” she said. “There’s a lot of hype to hormones—we think they’re going to cure everything, and they really don’t.” 

2025-11-11 03:51:02

Donald Trump has reportedly pardoned high-profile attorneys accused of joining in his plot to try to steal the 2020 election, along with dozens of so-called fake electors alleged to have played small roles in the effort. The pardons were announced by Ed Martin, the president’s pardon attorney, who posted a proclamation by the president outlining them on X.

The pardons, which on Monday afternoon had not appeared on White House page listing Trump’s clemency grants, are symbolic. They are part of Trump’s larger effort to downplay his attempt to subvert the 2020 election and his responsibility for the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress. None of the people he pardoned Sunday—including lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Jeffrey Clark—face federal charges. But many on the list have been charged with state crimes related to the fake elector scheme. The president has broad clemency power over federal crimes, but has no authority over state charges.

Mother Jones first reported in June that Martin, who is himself a former “Stop the Steal” organizer and activist attorney for January 6 defendants, was working on a plan for Trump to pardon alleged fake electors. A person familiar with the pardon plan acknowledged at the time that such pardons would have no legal weight, though the source argued that attorneys for defendants might cite the presidential proclamation in court filings urging judges to dismiss fake elector cases.

Prosecutors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have charged so-called fake electors in those states with crimes including fraud. These are mostly small-time Republican activists who falsely asserted that they were legitimate electors, claims that were part of Trump’s push to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the legitimate election results and accept pro-Trump slates of electors that could throw the election to him. The circumstances in each state differ, but generally, local prosecutors are struggling to persuade judges that the defendants broke the law by claiming to be legitimate electors. Many defendants may not welcome Trump’s legally worthless but politically charged attempt to intervene in their cases.

The Sunday pardons are part of a recent clemency spree by Trump. His latest pardons include former New York Mets star Darryl Strawberry and Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Strawberry is one of various celebrities Trump has pardoned. Zhao is one of several Trump pardons that appear corrupt: Zhao, who pleaded guilty to US money laundering charges in 2023, paid Trump associates to lobby for his pardon, and Binance earlier this year cut a deal with Trump World Liberty Financial, a crypto company launched by Trump’s sons, that has helped to enrich the Trump family.

Martin served as interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia until his nomination to hold the job permanently failed in the Senate in May. He has since worked as Trump’s pardon adviser and head of a so-called weaponization task force in the Justice Department, efforts he has aggressively publicized. He has touted his role in federal prosecutions of New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in statements that bolster widespread views that those cases are acts of political retribution.

Martin’s original plan for fake elector pardons went further than Trump did on Sunday. For example, Martin considered recommending that Trump pardon John F. Kennedy supporters who in 1960 signed paperwork saying they were Hawaii’s presidential electors when a recount left the actual winner of the state uncertain. Kennedy won Hawaii, and those electors were accepted as the state’s legitimate slate and never accused of crimes. Also, they are dead.

But pardoning them, the person familiar with the plan said, would have been a gesture aimed at boosting Trump supporters’ claims that 2020 fake electors did nothing wrong. The source did not explain why that part of the fake elector pardon plan did not move forward. But it may have been a step too far, even for Trump.

2025-11-11 01:58:00

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Ever since the reasonable woman lost to a narcissistic, racist, and misogynistic autocrat wannabe, the Democratic Party has been going through yet another painful round of the all-too-familiar debate: Should the party move to the center or adopt a more progressive stance to amass an electoral majority? This face-off has been recurring within the party for decades. For all the jawboning over the years, it has produced no consensus, and this fight is…boring. With the election results last week—a Democratic sweep everywhere—the debate is over. Or, at least, it should be.

That doesn’t mean there’s a resolution to the binary argument. One can end a debate without an ultimate and final decision. That’s what the Democrats ought to do. There’s never been a clear answer to the center-or-left question. And this election showed that within the party, lefties, such as Zohran Mamdani in New York, and centrists, such as Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, can each kick ass. Many commentators have made the obvious point: Candidates need to match the local electorate. Mamdani likely could not win statewide office in Virginia, and Spanberger likely could not excite the young voters who turned out in NYC for the democratic socialist.

There’s no need for the Democrats to continue shooting at each other and feeding the notion they have an identity crisis. The message is simple for them: We have a large tent and, dear voters, we offer you a buffet.

Looking for a politician to identify with? We give you a choice: Mamdani, Spanberger, Sherrill, Gavin Newsom, AOC, Andy Beshear, and others. Take your pick. No single one of them must be anointed the leader of the party. Desire a fierce progressive who will (rhetorically) kick Trump in the teeth? There’s this young buck in New York. Want a savvy strategist with a mostly liberal record who strives not to be seen as too liberal? Check out the governor of California. Looking for less-splashy, nose-to-the-grindstone workhorse politicians (big on mom energy), see Virginia and New Jersey. The Democratic Party can be a choose-your-own-adventure party. It is not in disarray. It is diverse. It even has something of a unifying message—affordability—which can be tailored to different electorates. In New York City, Mamdani vowed to address high rents; in New Jersey, Sherrill focused on rising energy prices.

This is the opposite of the current GOP, which is no more than a homogeneous cult of personality tied to one man and his whims. It has jettisoned principles and policies to serve an erratic authoritarian. It’s nothing but Trump. Love him, love the party. Otherwise, you’re out of luck. The Democrats, in contrast, reflect a wider swath of the electorate. That’s not a weakness. It’s a strength they should embrace.

Indeed, the party will more tightly define itself when it chooses a presidential nominee. That’s a winner-take-all process. One person gets the party crown and campaigns for the highest office. In European parliamentarian systems, parties as a whole compete to gain control of the executive branch. Not so here. In the United States, parties must select and swing behind a single politician who comes to represent the party. That will happen in 2027 and 2028, and what’s likely to be a competitive and robust primary contest will produce the party’s banner carrier. Until then, the Democrats should not obsess over the left-center branding issue.

For about 60 years—ever since Southern conservative Democrats bolted the party in response to its support for civil rights measures—the Democrats have been a center-left party. Both sides by now ought to understand that they need each other. It’s my hunch—and you might disagree—that a fully left party probably could not succeed on the national level in the United States within its two-party duopoly. And given the profound threat posed by Trump and his cronies, the formation of a popular front that covers a wide stretch of the ideological gamut is essential. Last week’s elections demonstrate that the Democrats, with the help of independent voters, can build that.

Mamdani’s triumph was stunning, his win a tremendous accomplishment for the party’s left wing. He’s a generational talent. And now he will have the opportunity to prove whether a democratic socialist can successfully implement left-wing proposals—which should yield important lessons for progressives. Governing the sprawling Big Apple government, which too often has been prone to corruption, is a tough task, let alone changing its culture and injecting into it an ambitious agenda. Let’s wish him well. The question now is not whether a democratic socialist is good for the party, but whether one can succeed governing the biggest city in the nation.

In a way, the New Jersey race was more of an indicator of the current state of politics in America. Sherrill led Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a GOP businessman who had twice run for governor, by only a few points in the polls prior to Election Day. He had previously positioned himself as a not-so-Trumpy Republican. In this race, he campaigned with MAGA personalities and enthusiastically accepted Trump’s support. But he did not dwell on the president. A poll in October showed incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s job approval rating at 35 percent—lower than Trump’s.

This looked like a tight contest, especially since four years ago Murphy beat Ciattarelli by only 3 points in this Democratic state. Yet Sherrill won by a whopping 13 points. Jersey voters rallied behind this centrist Democrat more than New Yorkers flocked to Mamdani. And it’s hard not to read her margin of victory as a referendum on Trump. Though voters were dissatisfied with the Democratic governor and upset with rising food prices and skyrocketing health care premiums, they did not take it out on Sherrill. They renounced the candidate of the Trump Party. This is the election that Republicans across the country—especially those few House members in swing districts—ought to worry most about. Their biggest concern should not be a young socialist, but a working mom who campaigns as a mainstream Democrat.

At this moment, the barbarians are not at the gate; they are inside the White House, attacking democracy and deconstructing the United States of America. Millions of citizens are at risk of going hungry and losing their health care. The Democratic Party does not have time for navel-gazing. It’s a to-the-barricades moment.

I have no illusions. There will be squabbling over strategy and tactics. Centrists will still fear the agenda of progressives, and the progressives will gripe about opposition and obstacles posed by centrists. Look at the disagreement within the party over resolving the government shutdown. Yet these election results are a sign that that Democrats can win without settling this big who-are-we matter. Voters are not waiting for this debate to be concluded and a winner proclaimed. Few are interested in it. Precisely calculating an ideological course that appeals to a particular group of voters is not the key to Democratic victory. It can be a distraction. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Mao said that. He was a dictator who did not stick to his own advice, but that’s the right idea. Different strokes for different folks, as Sly Stone sang.

These off-year elections—let’s call it the Ballroom Blowout—included surprising Democratic wins in Mississippi and Georgia, and there’s a lesson for Democrats. With Trump continuing his cruel mass deportations, holding let-them-eat-cake parties while threatening food stamps for millions, razing parts of the White House and showing off his new marble bathroom, turning tariffs on and off recklessly, doing little to address economic concerns, and ignoring court orders, the Democrats are presented with much opportunity. Continuing to argue among themselves is counterproductive. They don’t need consensus to succeed. They need authentic candidates who have something to say and who convince voters they will be fighters for them. Remember what a Republican president once said about a house divided. The Democrats have been shown the way.