2025-07-02 20:30:00
To hear many smart AI observers tell it, the day of Wednesday, June 25, 2025, represented the moment when Congress started to take the possibility of advanced AI seriously.
The occasion was a hearing of Congress’s “we’re worried about China” committee (or, more formally, the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party) focused on the US-China AI competition. Members of both parties used the event to express concern that was surprisingly strident and detailed about the near-term risks posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI) or even artificial superintelligence (ASI).
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Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) expressed fear of “loss of control by any nation-state” that “could give rise to an independent AGI or ASI actor” threatening all nations. Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) predicted, “AI systems will soon have the capability to conduct their own research and development,” and asked about the risks that might pose. Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) declared, “Anybody who doesn’t feel urgency around this issue is not paying attention.”
Shakeel Hashim of Transformer, one of the best reporters working on AI today, summarized the hearing this way: “Washington seems to finally be waking up to the potential arrival of AGI — and the many risks that could accompany it.” Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy headlined his post on the hearing, “Congress Has Started Taking AGI More Seriously.”
Yet even as that hearing was unfolding, the Senate was frantically putting the finishing touches on the One Big Beautiful Bill, the gargantuan deficit-exploding legislation to cut taxes, boost military and border spending, and cut to the bone various social programs. As part of their effort, culminating in Senate passage on Tuesday, Republican senators managed to worsen some of the safety net cuts in the House version of the bill and tried (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to add a new tax on clean energy that could make building the energy-hungry data centers AI requires substantially more expensive.
The negotiations were a reminder that, even as some parts of Congress have finally started to appear to take AI seriously, others are on autopilot and taking a series of actions that will make the US less competitive on, and less prepared for, the future of AI.
As I wrote a month ago, the One Big Beautiful Bill, in general, is not the work of policymakers who take the possibility of powerful AI seriously.
The House-passed provision stripping broadband funding from states that regulate AI suggested its authors do not think AI will be a sufficiently important technology that will need to be regulated the way telephones, electrical transmission, the internet, and other major technological breakthroughs have always been by state and local governments. Luckily, the Senate voted to strip this provision from its version of the bill on Monday night, but that hardly means the rest of the bill is harmless.
The bill’s cuts to, and imposition of new work requirements upon, safety net programs, such as Medicaid and SNAP (aka food stamps), suggest the authors do not take the risk of automation-caused job loss at all seriously. If huge numbers of Americans are about to be displaced from their jobs due to technological advancements, the last thing we ought to do is condition more support programs on work. Yet that is exactly what the bill does, and the Senate version is in many ways worse than the House one.
While the Medicaid work requirements in the House bill only apply to adults without children, the Senate bill extends them to parents with children 14 and over. It cuts Medicaid funding to states by changes to policies called “provider taxes.” Its food stamp work requirements are slightly less stringent than the House’s, but both bills open the door to states opting out of the food stamps program entirely if they so choose.
How does this connect to a future with far more powerful AI?
Imagine you lose your job as an Uber driver because of the increased popularity of Waymo and other self-driving services. You suddenly have no income. If, like most Americans, you live in a state that expanded Medicaid as part of Obamacare, you will be eligible for free health coverage as well as food stamps to help with grocery costs while you get back on your feet.
But this bill changes that. Your state might not offer you food stamps at all, and if it does, both them and your health coverage could lapse if you don’t swiftly get a new job, which will be that much harder in a world where AI eats up more and more labor.
This is not what a smart policy for people displaced by advances in AI looks like.
But perhaps the most important AI-related changes to the Senate bill are found on the energy side.
The House bill’s cuts to sources like nuclear and geothermal, which can produce the constant stream of power needed for fueling data centers and AI model training, were so severe that even Energy Secretary Chris Wright asked for them to be tapered back.
The Senate version indeed tapered those back a bit by allowing credits for projects that start construction before 2034, a few years later than the House deadlines. But it makes up for that by repealing wind and solar credits faster. In the House bill, wind and solar companies had to be operational by the end of 2028; in the Senate version, by the end of 2027.
In its initial form, the Senate bill would have taken another hatchet to wind and solar by actively taxing them, proposing a provision to tax wind and solar farms coming online after 2027 if they use components from China. The thing is that essentially every wind and solar farm uses components from China, given how dominant that country is in supply chains for these sources, and that will not change any time soon.
The energy tax was struck from the final version of the Senate bill. But its repeal of wind and solar credits remains a threat to AI as an industry.
For one thing, the bill makes everyone’s electricity, including that for AI training, more expensive. The Rhodium Group modeled an earlier, less severe version of the bill and found it would increase energy costs for industry by 4 percent to 6 percent annually. Most of this comes in the form of increased spending on fossil fuels. Because the economic case for new wind and solar production is so much worse, natural gas and coal will have to be a bigger part of the energy mix, and because they can be more expensive than renewables, that pushes up costs.
Wind and solar are intermittent sources (it’s not always windy, it’s not always sunny), which is not ideal for projects that need constant power, such as data centers. But with the addition of batteries, wind and solar can provide more constant wattage, and sure enough, data center users like Google have bet on wind/solar-plus-batteries as an energy source for their facilities.
More to the point, AI is moving very quickly and the buildout of these data centers and their power sources has to happen fast. Nuclear can provide clean baseload electricity, but the two most recent nuclear plants in the US took a decade to come online. Enhanced geothermal, the kind that can be installed anywhere and not just in seismically active places like Iceland, is still years away from deployment at scale, despite big recent strides.
Solar/wind plus batteries is a technology that can be deployed fast. The Solar Energy Industries Association (hardly a disinterested actor, but I think it’s right on this) found that while solar and wind plants take on average less than two years from conception to coming online (as do battery plants), natural gas can take twice as long and coal three times. Small wonder that in 2024, 93 percent of new power capacity in the US last year came from solar, batteries, or wind. It’s just about the only electricity source you can get up quickly.
If you can’t get fast clean energy anymore, because Trump’s policies have made it uneconomical, then AI firms are going to have to rely on slow-to-build, dirtier energy. There is a huge shortage of natural gas turbines in the US right now, with waiting times doubling in the past year. That shortage will get worse if the tax bill shifts demand currently aiming for wind and solar toward natural gas. That will, in turn, slow the data center buildout.
It might be tempting, if you’re skeptical of AI’s benefits or worried about its risks, to think that this is a positive. They’re slowing down progress, and progress in this field could be dangerous.
I fear this is failing to think an extra step ahead. The most likely result isn’t that no data centers get built, but that they get built in countries that do subsidize solar, wind, and batteries. It would be very good news indeed for China, for one thing, whose AI firms would gain a great opportunity to match US labs, which they’re not too far behind as it is. It would also be very good news for the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which are putting huge amounts of oil money behind data center projects for AI firms, projects that inevitably will be subject to the pressures of these dictatorships.
The bill would not increase AI safety. It would simply cede leadership in the race to China, and/or force the US to rely on dirty energy and worsen climate impacts to keep up.
If you put a bill before Congress stating that it is the policy of the United States to fall behind China in AI development and to put American firms like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic at a disadvantage to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Tencent, and Huawei, it would get no votes. But this is effectively what the One Big Beautiful Bill is offering.
What Congress seems ready to pass is less an industrial policy than an industrial suicide note. It is truly beyond me that any members of the House or Senate, let alone majorities, are signing it.
2025-07-02 19:00:00
I’ve always found something charming about Canada Day, the July 1 national celebration, landing just three days before America’s Independence Day.
The two holidays are ideologically opposed: Canada Day celebrates the country’s 1867 confederation under British law, while July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution against the crown. Yet after centuries of peace, with the two countries now sharing the longest undefended border in the world, the timing normally feels less like dueling celebrations than a week-long joint birthday party.
So leave it to Donald Trump to reintroduce tension to the holidays.
Last Friday, just as Canadians were getting ready for the pre-holiday weekend, Trump declared that the United States is renewing hostilities in the briefly suspended trade war. “We are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” he wrote on Truth Social, adding that “we will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”
And then, in a Sunday interview on Fox News, he renewed the rhetoric that most infuriated Canadians: his claim that Canada should be annexed by the United States. “Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state. It really should,” he told anchor Maria Bartiromo. “Because Canada relies entirely on the United States. We don’t rely on Canada.”
In thinking through all of this, I’ve found one voice especially clarifying: the Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant.
In 1965, Grant published a short book — titled Lament for a Nation — arguing that Canada’s increasing integration with the United States was a kind of national suicide. This was, in part, a political matter: By hitching its economy and defense to those of a much larger neighbor, Canada effectively surrendered its ability to set its own political course.
But it was also a kind of spiritual death: By embracing free trade and open borders with the United States, Grant argued, Canada was selling its conservative soul to the American ethos of never-ending revolutionary progress. It was, in effect, turning Canada Day into an early July Fourth.
Given the Trump threat, Grant’s argument feels more vital than it has in decades — prompting a round of intellectual reconsiderations. Recent pieces by Patrick Deneen, a leading American “postliberal,” and Michael Ignatieff, a leading Canadian liberal intellectual (and Grant’s nephew), have highlighted elements of the argument that feel especially relevant in the current moment.
Yet Lament for a Nation is also notable for what it failed to foresee. While Grant predicted America’s liberalism would swallow Canada, it is, in fact, the most philosophically illiberal administration in modern American history that threatens Canadian sovereignty.
And Canadian resistance to Yankee imperialism has rallied under the banner of Liberal Party Prime Minister Mark Carney — a central banker who fully embraces Canada’s modern identity as the most tolerant and multicultural country on the planet.
Lament for a Nation takes, as its central event, the 1963 defeat of then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. His defeat, per Grant, was the moment that Canada’s fate was sealed.
Diefenbaker was the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party (now more simply called the Conservative Party). Grant writes about him a bit the way that some on the intellectual right talk about Trump today: as an imperfect but basically necessary bulwark against the depredations of the liberal elite.
A “prairie populist” raised in Saskatchewan, Diefenbaker was culturally and politically distinct from the traditional power elite in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. These elites, per Grant, believed that Canada benefited from increasing economic and military interconnections with the US, such as eliminating trade barriers and joint participation in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Diefenbaker, in Grant’s telling, took a different approach — one that valued Canadian self-determination over the material benefits of trade and security cooperation. On key issues, most notably the 1962–’63 debate over stationing American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, Diefenbaker resisted the intellectual and political elite’s “continentalist” approach — instead raising concerns that too much integration with the United States would threaten Canadian nationhood.
It is this hesitancy, Grant argues, that brought the wrath of the elite class down on his head, ultimately leading to the Progressive Conservatives’ defeat in the 1963 election. With Diefenbaker cleared away, there was no longer any barrier to a policy of economic and political integration with the United States.
“Lamenting for Canada is inevitably associated with the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His inability to govern is linked with the inability of this country to be sovereign,” Grant writes.
It’s easy to ridicule this sentiment in hindsight. After all, Canada remains standing 60 years after Grant’s predictions of doom. Wasn’t he just wrong that integration with the US meant national suicide?
But to take this line is to misunderstand Grant’s argument. His position was not that the integration with the United States would literally lead to Canadian annexation. Rather, it’s that Canada would lose the ability to chart its own course, surrendering its effective sovereignty and, more fundamentally, sacrificing what made it culturally distinct from the United States.
The United States, per Grant, is the physical avatar of Enlightenment liberalism: a worldview that he described as celebrating the emancipation of the individual from whatever fetters society might put on them. The American ideology of capitalist freedom was a solvent dissolving local cultures and national borders, homogenizing everything into a single mass of modern technological sameness.
Canada, by contrast, took its core identity from British conservatism — a sense that politics is not about individual freedom but rather conserving and incrementally improving the traditions and cultural inheritance that define its essence and maintain its good functioning.
In Canada, Grant says, this conservatism was “a kind of suspicion that we in Canada could be less lawless and have a greater sense of propriety than those in the United States.” Partnering with the French speakers in Quebec (Lament for a Nation made scant reference to indigenous Canadians), the new country was in opposition to the American vision of frenetic capitalist change.
Yet this conservative identity, Grant feared, was weakly rooted — and vulnerable to American imperial influence in the absence of a political class willing to wield nationalist policies in its defense. He narrated its ideological decline in three steps:
First, men everywhere move ineluctably toward membership in the universal and homogenous liberal state. Second, Canadians live next to a society that is the heart of modernity. Third, nearly all Canadians think that modernity is good, so nothing distinguishes Canadians from Americans. When they oblate themselves before “the American way of life,” they offer themselves on the altar of the reigning Western goddess.
Diefenbaker was, per Grant, the last gasp of authentic Canadian conservative resistance to this process. His defeat marked the moment that Canada’s spiritual death at American hands became inevitable.
Today, Canada is facing a nakedly imperialist American president who is attempting to weaponize Canadian dependence on American markets into political submission. Grant, the liberal Ignatieff writes, was “the first to warn us that this was how continental integration would end.”
Yet the circumstances are very different from what Grant might have expected. While Grant warned that American ideology was seductive, that Canadians risked voluntarily submitting to a liberalism that would subtly alienate them from themselves, they are today facing a brash American illiberalism led by a right-wing populist most Canadians revile.
“Even in the fury of Lament for a Nation, America was seen as a benign hegemon — at least to us — who respected the fiction of our sovereignty. Today’s President disdains his allies and can’t stop telling Canada he wishes we didn’t exist,” Ignatieff writes.
For this reason, the anti-Trump resistance has been led not by Canada’s Conservatives but by the Liberal Party.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals won Canada’s April election on the back of anti-Trump resistance. This was not only because Carney took vocally anti-Trump positions, but because his chief rival — Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — was a right-wing populist whose political style seemed far too close to Trump’s for Canadian comfort.
Carney won, in short, because Canadians saw conservatism as too American — and Carney’s liberalism a better representation of Canadianness in the current moment.
This irony owes itself, in part, to Canada’s national reinvention since Grant’s original publication. In the past several decades, Canada has engaged in a collective nation-building project to redefine its national identity around ideas of tolerance and multiculturalism. This effort has been extraordinarily successful: Canada has a notably higher percentage of foreign-born residents than the United States, yet faces a far weaker anti-immigrant backlash.
Grant would surely see this as vindication of his thesis: Canada has abandoned its traditional identity in favor of a Canadian copy of America’s Ellis Island narrative. Yet what Grant didn’t foresee is that this kind of liberalism could form an effective resistance against Yankee imperialism.
Canadian nationalism today is not just about symbols, like the flag or the crown, but about a sense that Canadians do not want their politics to take on the bitter ugliness of Trumpified American politics. Their attraction to what Grant identified as too-American liberal ideals of freedom and progress forms a key part of the hard ideological core uniting Canadians against American pressure.
In this sense, and perhaps this sense only, Canadians have become more American than the Americans. This year, July Fourth may have come three days early.
2025-07-02 18:00:00
There are two big winners in the Supreme Court’s most recent term.
One is social and religious conservatives. In the last two days of its term, the Court imposed heavy new burdens on public schools at the request of religious conservatives, and it rendered much of federal Medicaid law unenforceable in a case lashing out at Planned Parenthood. It heard its first major pornography case in over two decades, upholding a Texas law that seeks to limit youth access to porn. And the Republican justices handed a historic defeat to transgender Americans, permitting states to block at least some trans people from receiving gender-affirming medical care.
Four justices also voted that the Constitution requires most states to fund religious public charter schools. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was recused from this case, is likely to provide the fifth vote for religious public schools in the future.
Indeed, as I’ll explain in more detail below, the Court’s Republican majority is willing to tear down major American institutions in order to advance the cultural right’s political goals.
Another winner is President Donald Trump. One year after the Republican justices ruled that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, these same justices continue to treat him as the special favorite of the laws.
The Court’s most high-profile Trump-related decision, Trump v. CASA, placed vague new restrictions on lower courts’ power to block Trump administration policies. This decision is defensible — the Biden administration sought a similar ruling while it was in power — but it is notable that the justices waited until a Republican was president before weakening lower courts’ power to rein in the executive.
Even before the CASA decision, however, the Court frequently blocked lower courts that ruled against the Trump administration. When lower courts block Trump’s policies, the Republican justices routinely reinstate those policies on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices consider on an expedited basis.
There was also one unexpected loser this term: the business and fiscal conservatives that have historically dominated the Republican Party. In the same week that the Court handed down most of its biggest decisions, it also rejected an attack on Obamacare. And it waved away a request to put drastic new limits on federal agencies’ power to regulate business.
So, while the Court now hands out victories to the cultural right as if it were passing out candy on Halloween, several of the GOP justices did show more moderation on the kinds of issues that preoccupied Republicans as recently as a decade ago. It was a lot to keep track of, especially given Trump’s ability to dominate the news, so here’s a quick rundown of how the Court reshaped the law during its recent term.
At least two cases this term did serious harm to institutions that millions of Americans depend upon, both in decisions that benefited cultural conservatives.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court’s Republican majority ruled that public schools must inform parents before their children are taught a lesson those parents might object to on religious grounds, and that those parents must be given an opportunity to opt their child out of that lesson.
The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect.
Mahmoud arose out of a dispute over queer-themed books — Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters that could be used in classroom instruction. But the First Amendment prohibits discrimination among people with different religious beliefs. So, if parents with anti-LGBTQ religious views have a right to notification and an opt-out, so too does every parent who might object to any lesson on any religious ground.
This rule, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warns in a dissenting opinion, is likely to cause “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.” Requiring every public school teacher to anticipate which lessons might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs “will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” especially in a nation as diverse as the United States.
In the past, courts have rejected similar lawsuits brought by parents who object to books or lessons that feature magic, women who have achievements outside the home, and include topics as diverse as divorce, interfaith couples, “immodest dress,” and “false views of death.” After Mahmoud, however, all of these parents now have a right to advance notice.
Schools that fail to predict that a lesson about a Jewish woman with a career, a Hindu husband, or an immodest wardrobe will offend a parent’s religious belief will now face very serious financial consequences. Federal law often lets the “prevailing party” in a suit about constitutional rights collect attorney’s fees from the losing party. So lawyers can hunt for parents with idiosyncratic religious views, file a lawsuit against a school, and demand payment to avoid litigation that will be even more expensive for the school district.
The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect, out of concern that the Constitution should not be read to prevent such an important institution from functioning.
Like the right to free exercise of religion, the right to free speech is also protected by the First Amendment. That is why the Court held in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) that public school students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
But Tinker recognized that free speech should not be used as a weapon that can shut down classroom instruction altogether — if any student could get up in the middle of class and start yelling, for example, their right to free speech would destroy every one of their classmates’ right to an education.
And so Tinker also held that public school students may not engage in speech that “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” The Court struck an appropriate balance between protecting free expression by young people, and making sure that public schools continue to produce an educated workforce that ultimately benefits every single American.
That decision stands in stark contrast to Mahmoud, which establishes that the rights of religious objectors must be advanced at all costs, even if it would mean imposing such enormous burdens on public schools that every child receives an inferior education.
A similar dynamic was in play in Medina, which pitted the GOP’s disdain for abortion providers against a federal law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own doctors. Just as in Mahmoud, the Republican justices handed a sweeping victory to social conservatives — seemingly without any regard for how their decision would damage Medicaid.
Federal Medicaid statutes are riddled with provisions establishing who must be covered by Medicaid, how that coverage should be provided, and what minimum standards of care Medicaid patients are entitled to receive. South Carolina illegally forbade Medicaid patients from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health care provider. Rather than ordering South Carolina to comply with the law, in Medina the Republican justices effectively repealed the choice-of-provider provision.
The question of which Medicaid laws can be enforced through federal lawsuits, and which provisions are essentially worthless, is one of the most important questions in American poverty and elder law and has been litigated for decades. But two years ago, in Talevski, the Supreme Court finally settled on a clear rule that judges could apply to identify which provisions are enforceable.
If you want to know more about these many decades of litigation, I explain many of those details here. But the most important thing to know about Talevski is that it established that Medicaid laws which are “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” and that “focus on the benefitted class” are enforceable. So, if a specific provision of Medicaid law mentions Medicaid patients, or otherwise names the individuals who are supposed to benefit from that law, it is enforceable.
The choice-of-provider provision at issue in Medina refers to “any individual eligible for medical assistance.” So it was enforceable under Talevski. Medina should have been an open and shut case.
Yet, instead of following Talevski, the Republican justices produced an incoherent opinion that does not even announce a new legal rule, beyond a vague statement that Medicaid laws are “especially unlikely” to be enforceable. Much of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina fixates on seemingly random facts about the choice-of-provider provision, such as the fact that it “appears in a subsection titled ‘Contents,’” as if that’s somehow relevant to the question of whether this provision is a meaningless husk.
It is impossible to come up with a principled explanation for why, two years after Talevski, the Republican justices decided to abandon that decision and replace it with a new legal standard that renders much of federal law completely useless. But it’s certainly possible to come up with a political explanation. Unlike Medina, Talevski did not involve an abortion provider. Several of the Court’s Republicans appear to have flipped their votes between Talevski and Medina in order to lash out at Planned Parenthood.
The worst thing about the Medina decision is that the Republican justices could have come up with some good-for-this-ride-only legal reasoning that denied Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, but that otherwise left Talevski intact. Instead, they appear to have overruled Talevski and replaced it with a vague new rule that does little more than tell lower court judges that Medicaid plaintiffs should nearly always lose.
It seems that, in order to spite Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court stripped tens of millions of Americans of countless rights protected by federal law.
Many of the Court’s most consequential decisions were handed down on its shadow docket, a process that allows a party that lost in a lower court to seek an immediate Supreme Court order blocking that decision.
This term, the Republican justices used the shadow docket to temporarily nullify the Convention Against Torture, a treaty that is supposed to prevent the United States from deporting noncitizens to countries where they may be tortured. The Court also used its shadow docket to effectively repeal federal laws protecting the leaders of several federal agencies from being fired by Trump, and to prevent lower courts from interfering with the chaotic work of Elon Musk’s former office, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). (In an unusual liberal victory on the shadow docket, the justices also ruled that Trump must give certain immigrants due process before he ships them off to a notorious Salvadorian prison.)
Traditionally, the Supreme Court takes months or even longer before it decides a case. With rare exceptions, a case must be heard by a trial court and at least one appeals court before the justices will even consider taking it up. And getting the justices to hear a case is a bit like winning the lottery.
Lawyers hoping the Court will review their case file over 8,000 petitions seeking such review in any given year, but the justices only grant about 60–70 of these petitions. Then, once a case is granted, that’s only the beginning of a months-long process where lawyers submit briefs, the justices review them and hold oral arguments, and then they spend months working on the final decision. Contentious suits can wait an entire year for a decision, even after the justices announce that they will hear the case.
The reason for this slow, highly selective process is that the Supreme Court has the final word on questions of US law. So if it gets a case wrong, that mistake can linger uncorrected for decades. The Court’s plodding deliberation is supposed to minimize the risk of that happening.
Beginning in Trump’s first term, however, the Court started relying heavily on a separate, much less cautious process to decide cases involving Trump and his government.
Historically, the Court’s shadow docket was used primarily for death penalty appeals, where the petitioner seeking Supreme Court review would be killed if the justices did not act very swiftly. Litigants in non-death penalty cases could seek expedited review on the shadow docket, but it was so discouraged, and shadow docket petitions were so rarely granted, that smart lawyers typically decided not to annoy the justices with them. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Justice Department sought shadow docket review about once every other year.
Now, however, whenever the Trump administration claims that it must have a Supreme Court order blocking a lower court’s decision, the Court treats that claim as an emergency that must be tended to immediately.
In Nken v. Holder (2009), the Supreme Court held that a party seeking shadow docket relief must do more than simply show they are likely to prevail if the Court hears their case on the merits. Among other things, they must also show that they “will be irreparably injured” if the justices do not immediately block the lower court’s decision.
But, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in a pair of opinions dissenting from two shadow docket orders, the Republican justices seem to have decided that the Trump administration is exempt from Nken, as they often grant shadow docket relief to Trump even when he cannot show irreparable injury. In Social Security Administration v. AFSCME, a case about whether DOGE may access highly sensitive Social Security data, Trump’s lawyers didn’t even make an argument that his administration would experience irreparable harm without Supreme Court intervention. Yet the Republican justices intervened anyway.
As law professor Steven Vladeck has pointed out, the Court granted, at least in part, “each of the last 14 [shadow docket] applications filed by the Department of Justice.”
The federal government’s exemption from Nken, moreover, only appears to be in effect when a Republican occupies the White House. In one dissenting opinion, Jackson pointed to several Biden-era cases where the Justice Department sought shadow docket relief from lower court orders. In some of those cases, the Court left the lower court’s injunction in place for as much as a year, before finally concluding that the injunction was illegal after the case went through the much slower, traditional appeals process.
The Republican justices, in other words, are manipulating the Court’s calendar to benefit Trump. When ordinary litigants — or a Democratic administration — seek shadow docket relief, the justices often apply the traditional rules and norms that prevent them from granting those requests. But when Trump asks the Supreme Court to do him a favor, the Republican justices swiftly oblige.
While the cultural right was one of the biggest winners in the Court’s recent term, the Republican Party’s traditional business constituency fared less well. On the final decision day of the term, the Court handed down a ruling upholding provisions of Obamacare that require health insurers to cover certain treatments, as well as a decision rejecting an aggressive attempt to limit federal agencies’ power to regulate business. Earlier in the term, a unanimous Court also rejected a suit challenging the FDA’s decision to pull many nicotine vaping devices off the market.
The Court’s Obamacare decision, known as Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, aligns with broader trends within the Republican Party. During Trump’s first term, the GOP famously tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. Eight years later, the party has a more modest health care agenda, at least when compared to their ideas from 2017. Congressional Republicans are likely to enact deep cuts to Medicaid, but they are not pushing for full repeal of Obamacare.
Decisions like Braidwood and Medina, in other words, closely track the Republican Party’s agenda in Congress. Like their counterparts in Congress, the Republican justices voted to drastically cut back on Medicaid in Medina. But many of them voted to uphold key provisions of Obamacare in Braidwood.
One common element in the Braidwood, the agency power case (FCC v. Consumer’s Research), and in the vaping case, (FDA v. Wages & White Lion Investments), is that they all arose out of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court dominated by MAGA-aligned judges who routinely hand down decisions that are too extreme even for this Supreme Court.
In recent years, the Fifth Circuit has done everything from declaring entire federal agencies unconstitutional to attempting to pull a popular abortion drug from the market. It once ruled that Texas Republicans may seize control over content moderation at all of the major social media platforms. Many of the Fifth Circuit’s judges have taken positions that, if they were embraced by the Supreme Court, risk triggering a second Great Depression.
The Supreme Court frequently balks at the Fifth Circuit’s decisions, but it does not do so all of the time. Just last week, for example, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify that their users are over age 18, despite a 21-year-old Supreme Court decision that struck down a nearly identical law. The Court took up the Free Speech Coalition case after the Fifth Circuit decided it wasn’t bound by that two-decade-old decision.
The best lesson to draw from cases like Braidwood, White Lion, and Consumer’s Research, in other words, is that no matter how partisan or ideological the Supreme Court may be, there will likely be other voices within the judiciary pushing the justices to go harder. These voices will even sometimes succeed, as they did in the Free Speech Coalition case.
If Trump gets to replace any members of the current Court, moreover, he could potentially replace relatively moderate justices with the kinds of judges who dominate the Fifth Circuit. No matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse.
2025-07-02 04:00:00
Senate Republicans have passed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing a work requirement for the first time and restricting states’ ability to finance their share of the program’s costs. If the bill ultimately becomes law after passing the House and receiving Trump’s signature — which could all happen before Friday — American health care is never going to be the same.
The consequences will be dire.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would slash Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion and that nearly 12 million people would lose their health insurance. Republicans added a last-minute infusion of funding for rural hospitals to assuage moderates skittish about the Medicaid cuts, but hospitals say the legislation will still be devastating to their business and their patients.
When combined with the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year, which were not addressed in the budget bill, and the other regulatory changes being made by the Trump administration, the Republican policy agenda could lead to an estimated 17 million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, according to the health policy think tank KFF.
Fewer people with health insurance is going to mean fewer people getting medical services, which means more illness and ultimately more deaths.
One recent analysis by a group of Harvard-affiliated researchers of the House Republicans’ version of the budget bill (which included the same general outline, though some of the provisions have been tweaked in the Senate) concluded that 700,000 fewer Americans would have a regular place to get medical care as a result of the bill. Upward of 200,000 fewer people would get their blood cholesterol or blood sugar checked; 139,000 fewer women would get their recommended mammograms. Overall, the authors project that between 8,200 and 24,600 additional Americans would die every year under the Republican plan. Other analyses came to the same conclusion: Millions of Americans will lose health insurance and thousands will die.
After a painful legislative debate in which some of their own members warned them not to cut Medicaid too deeply, Republicans succeeded in taking a big chunk out of the program to help cover the costs of their bill’s tax cuts. They have, eight years after failing to repeal Obamacare entirely, managed to strike blows to some of its important provisions.
So, for better or worse, they own the health care system now, a system that is a continued source of frustration for most Americans — frustrations that the Republican plan won’t relieve. The next time health care comes up for serious debate in Congress, lawmakers will need to repair the damage that the GOP is doing with its so-called big, beautiful bill.
The effects of the budget bill won’t be limited only to the people on Medicaid and the people whose private insurance costs will increase because of the Obamacare funding cuts. Everyone will experience the consequences of millions of Americans losing health coverage.
When a person loses their health insurance, they are more likely to skip regular medical checkups, which makes it more likely they go to a hospital emergency room when a serious medical problem has gotten so bad that they can’t ignore it any longer. The hospital is obligated by federal law to take care of them even if they can’t pay for their care.
Those costs are then passed on to other patients. When health care providers negotiate with insurance companies over next year’s rates, they account for the uncompensated care they have to provide. And the fewer people covered by Medicaid, the more uncompensated care hospitals have to cover, the more costs are going to increase for even people who do have health insurance. Republicans included funding in the bill to try to protect hospitals from the adverse consequences, an acknowledgement of the risk they were taking, but the hospitals themselves are warning that the funding patches are insufficient. If hospitals and doctors’ offices close because their bottom lines are squeezed by this bill, that will make it harder for people to access health care, even if they have an insurance card.
The effects of the Republican budget bill are going to filter through the rest of the health care system and increase costs for everyone. In that sense, the legislation passage marks a new era for US health policy. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats have primarily been held responsible for the state of the health care system. Sometimes this has been a drag on their political goals. But over time, as the ACA’s benefits became more ingrained, health care became a political boon to Democrats.
Going forward, having made these enormous changes, Republicans are going to own the American health care system and all of its problems — the ones they created and the ones that have existed for years.
For the past decade-plus, US health care politics have tended to follow a “you break it, you buy it” rule. Democrats discovered this in 2010: Though the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions did not take effect for several years, they saw their popularity plummet quickly as Republicans successfully blamed annual premium increases that would’ve occurred with or without the law on the Democrats and their new health care bill. Voters were persuaded by those arguments, and Democrats lost Congress in the 2010 midterms.
But years later, Americans began to change their perception. As of 2024, 44 million Americans were covered through the 2010 health care law and two-thirds of the country say they have a favorable view of the ACA. After the GOP’s failed attempt to repeal the law in 2017, the politics of the issue flipped: Democrats scored major wins in the 2018 midterms after successfully campaigning against the GOP’s failed plan to repeal the ACA. Even in the disastrous 2024 election cycle for Democrats, health care policy was still an issue where voters trusted Kamala Harris more than Trump.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is already unpopular. Medicaid cuts specifically do not poll well with the public, and the program itself is enjoying the most popularity ever since it was first created in 1965. Those are the ingredients for a serious backlash, especially with government officials and hospitals in red states railing hard against the bill.
Democrats have more work to do on explaining to the public what the bill does and how its implications will be felt by millions of people. Recent polling suggests that many Americans don’t understand the specifics. A contentious debate among Republicans, with several solitary members warning against the consequences of Medicaid cuts, have given politicians on the other side of the aisle good material to work with in making that case: Democrats can pull up clips of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on the Senate floor, explaining how devastating the bill’s Medicaid provisions would be to conservative voters in Republican-controlled states.
Republicans will try to sell the bill on its tax cuts. But multiple analyses have shown the vast majority of the benefits are going to be reserved for people in higher-income brackets. Middle-class and working-class voters will see only marginal tax relief — and if their health care costs increase either because they lose their insurance or because their premiums go up after other people lose insurance, then that relief could quickly be wiped out by increased costs elsewhere. That is the story Democrats will need to tell in the coming campaigns.
Medicaid has served as a safety net for tens of millions of Americans during both the Great Recession of 2008 and since the pandemic recession of 2020. At one point, around 90 million Americans — about one in four — were covered by Medicaid. People have become much more familiar with the program and it has either directly benefited them or helped somebody that they know at a difficult time.
And difficult times may be coming. Economists have their eyes on concerning economic indicators that the world may be heading toward a recession. When a recession hits — that is, after all, inevitable; it’s just the normal cycle of the economy — people will lose their jobs and many of them will also lose their employer-sponsored health insurance. But now, the safety net is far flimsier than it was in previous crises.
Republicans are going to own those consequences. They took a program that had become an essential lifeline for millions of Americans and having schemed to gut the law ever since the Democrats expanded Medicaid through the ACA more than a decade ago, have finally succeeded. This Republican plan was a reaction to their opponent’s most recent policy overhaul; the next Democratic health care plan will need to repair the harms precipitated by the GOP budget bill.
In the meantime, the impetus is on Democrats and truth tellers in the media to help Americans understand what has happened, why it has happened, and what the fallout is going to be.
2025-07-01 23:22:40
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and the stakes are high.
The bill has four major pillars: renewing his 2017 tax cuts, implementing new tax cuts, spending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the military, and increasing the debt ceiling. The bill itself is a smorgasbord of policy and could also affect clean energy programs, student loans, and food assistance, but perhaps the most consequential changes will be to Medicaid.
The bill was approved by the House in May and passed a key Senate vote on Saturday. Republicans are divided over competing priorities; some want to extend Trump’s tax cuts and boost immigration and defense spending, while others worry about the $2.6 trillion cost and cuts to Medicaid. Republican lawmakers aim to pass the bill by Friday using budget reconciliation, but it’s unclear if all 53 Republican senators will agree.
This is a developing story. Follow along here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.
2025-07-01 22:00:00
Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma and vice president of development Nisha Chittal announced today that veteran video journalist Christina Vallice has joined the brand as head of video. She begins her new role on July 7.
“I’m thrilled to welcome Christina to Vox. She is an exceptionally talented video journalist and newsroom leader who will be instrumental in shaping the next chapter of Vox video,” Chittal said. “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and understands how to break down complex topics in an accessible way. I can’t wait to see how she will take Vox’s explanatory video journalism to new heights.”
In her role, Vallice will oversee Vox’s award-winning video department, continuing the brand’s signature explainer videos as well as leading expansion and experimentation with new formats in vertical shortform video and podcast video. She will oversee video strategy and publishing across all of Vox’s platforms, including Vox’s flagship YouTube channel with over 12 million subscribers, Instagram, TikTok, and website and owned platforms.
Vallice joins Vox after serving in leadership roles at the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, and Vice, following more than a decade producing at NBC News.
Most recently, Vallice was the director of video series and events at Yahoo Finance. There she led a team to deliver in-depth, original reporting on the investments that are leading to advancements in tech, science, and AI, newsmaker interviews with prominent CEOs and business leaders, and spearheaded the cross-newsroom coordination for major coverage events.
At the Wall Street Journal, Vallice served as the senior executive producer of news and specials, directing a global team spanning New York, London, and Singapore to produce daily news videos, in-depth explainers, international features, video investigations and documentaries across various platforms. Under Vallice, the Journal earned two national Emmy nominations for its first feature-length documentary and its first video investigation.
Before her time at Yahoo Finance and the Journal, Vallice was a supervising producer at Vice, and helped launch the award-winning HBO broadcast, Vice News Tonight. Prior to that, Vallice spent 11 years at NBC Nightly News, delivering fast-turn stories under tight deadlines both in edit and in the field, producing coverage on a wide variety of major news stories.
Vallice received her master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications after earning her undergraduate degree at Binghamton University.