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At a fundraiser in early January, Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo outright admitted to donors he wasn’t the most inspiring candidate. “I am not enough of a motor—uh, a motivator—as a governor candidate to get them off the couch,” he said on a recording obtained by the Nevada Independent.

“We have a couple ballot initiatives we’re going to initiate in order to get voters out,” Gov. Lombardo reassured the room.

But the governor had a plan to fix it. “We have a couple ballot initiatives we’re going to initiate in order to get voters out,” he reassured the room. One measure would mandate photos IDs at the polls, a policy that targets racial minorities. The other initiative would tap into a newer but no less virulent strain of right-wing grievance: “The second thing we’re going to do is this thing called Men in Women’s Sports,” Lombardo said at another event last October, referring to a Nevada constitutional amendment he proposed earlier this year that would ban trans girls and women from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

“Yay!” a few listeners responded. “Yeah!”

“That’s going to get people out to vote,” the governor continued. “Because, just from the groans in the room, I think they’re going to support it.”

After years of well-funded attacks on transgender people’s rights and dignity by conservative activists and GOP politicians, it’s no news that a Republican official is trying to win votes for the upcoming midterm elections by championing a policy targeting trans teenagers. Voters still largely endorse equal treatment and nondiscrimination for people whose gender identity doesn’t match their birth sex, but they also tend to rank trans rights at the bottom of their priority lists. Meanwhile, public opinion has shifted rightward on a carefully selected set of trans-related wedge issues, from trans girls’ inclusion in girls’ school sports to specialized pediatric healthcare treatments.

Now, Republicans like Lombardo are banking on the attitudes their party has spent years cultivating, putting these pet issues directly to voters in the form of ballot initiatives. Six transgender-related measures have been approved for the ballot so far, in Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Washington. Others are in the works in Nebraska and Arizona, in addition to Nevada.

“This is absolutely being used as ballot candy.”

And while Lombardo might be the only one to say the quiet part out loud, several of the measures look like they could have been designed to drive Republican results in competitive midterm races. “This is absolutely being used as ballot candy,” Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the left-leaning Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), said at a recent press briefing.

Take, for instance, Missouri, where Republican state officials fought tooth and nail to stop a 2024 constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to an abortion prior to fetal viability, which is roughly 24 weeks. Despite their efforts, the measure made it to the ballot and won with a narrow 51.6 percent of the vote, overturning the state’s total abortion ban. In response, this year, state Republican lawmakers proposed their own constitutional amendment. It would make providing abortion illegal again in virtually all cases. And it would touch an entirely different issue as well: It would ban doctors from providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat kids with gender dysphoria.

Trans youth health care is already illegal in Missouri under a law that expires in 2027. But lumping that issue together with abortion appears seems to be making this year’s proposed constitutional amendment more popular with voters. A February survey by St. Louis University and YouGov found that the initiative was polling 7 points ahead, with 12 percent of likely voters still undecided. Just 43 percent of respondents would outlaw abortion in early pregnancy. But two-thirds—including most of the undecideds—would prefer to ban gender transition treatments for minors. The inclusion of a gender-affirming care ban in the constitutional amendment “is going to be the key difference between what we saw, say, two years ago and now,” poll director Steven Rogers, and SLU political science professor, told St. Louis Public Radio.

Missouri isn’t the only state where voters are being asked to cement an already existing anti-trans law in their state constitution. A similar effort is underway in Nebraska, where last summer the governor signed a law banning trans girls from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

Never mind that trans students were barely present in Nebraska school sports to begin with, with fewer than 10 participating in either girls’ or boys’ sports between 2015 and 2025, as NBC News reported. Despite the tiny scale of the issue and the existing ban, a group calling itself Fairness for Girls started gathering signatures in March to add a ban on trans girls playing girls’ sports to the Nebraska constitution. Republican state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, the original sponsor of the sports ban bill (as well as a host of other anti-trans legislation), told Nebraska Public Media that the constitutional amendment was necessary so that future lawmakers couldn’t undo her handiwork. “One of the things we always worry about when we pass a law is that it can be un-passed,” she said.

Rainbow Parents of Nebraska, an LGBTQ advocacy group, called the proposed Fairness for Girls amendment “another distraction and an attempt to increase conservative voter turnout.”

Indeed, a look at Fairness for Girls’ campaign finance filings suggests there may be deeper political forces at play. The group, formed March 9, has a war chest of a whopping $1.6 million dollars, provided entirely by a dark money group called Restore the Good Life Inc., according to its March disclosure. While Restore the Good Life Inc. doesn’t have to disclose its funders, the Nebraska Examiner has examined potential links between the group and Sen. Pete Ricketts, the wealthy Republican former governor of the state who now serves as its junior US senator. Restore the Good Life Inc. was last active during the 2022 gubernatorial election to replace Ricketts, when it paid for an attack ad against an opponent of Ricketts’ preferred successor, using one of Ricketts’ talking points, the Examiner reported. Its treasurer is a Ricketts political appointee who has served as his surrogate at at least one political event. Ricketts, in 2022, denied personally contributing to the group. (Ricketts’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment).

Perhaps coincidentally, Ricketts is running for reelection to the Senate this year—and facing a strong challenge from Dan Osborn, a former labor leader running as an independent. As of February, the two candidates were polling neck and neck, a feat for Osborn in a state Trump won by more than 20 points last election cycle. Ricketts, who has repeatedly pushed for a national trans sports ban, is supporting the initiative. Osborn’s campaign did not respond to questions about his stance on the measure.

To recap, someone is spending $1.6 million to duplicate a Nebraska law that would have affected 10 total Nebraskans in 10 years into the state constitution. And it just so happens they’re putting the question on the ballot alongside a close Senate contest involving a fabulously wealthy incumbent who has vocally opposed inclusive policies for trans athletes.

Similar dynamics appear at be at work in Maine, another state with massive spending on a trans sports ballot initiative during a high-stakes Senate election. The race between incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins and likely Democratic challenger Graham Platner could determine which party controls the US Senate.

Last year, at a White House governors meeting, President Donald Trump said that the trans athlete issue would be the political downfall of Gov. Janet Mills, who was another leading Democratic candidate for Collins’ seat until she suspended her campaign in late April.

At the meeting, Trump told Mills he would withhold federal funding if Maine didn’t follow a trans sports ban he tried to impose via executive order.

“See you in court,” Mills told Trump from the other side of the room.

“I look forward to that, that should be a real easy one,” Trump shot back, before adding a thinly veiled threat: “And enjoy your life after, Governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

As the Senate campaigns got underway, Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein—the billionaire owner of the business supply company Uline—started pouring money into a Maine ballot initiative that would not only require public schools to sort athletes onto sports teams according to the sex on their original birth certificates, it would also restrict access to school bathrooms and locker rooms by birth certificate. As of January, Uihlein had given $800,000 to the committee pushing the initiative and was its sole funder. Maine’s lawmakers declined to vote on the measure this spring, which means it will be sent to voters in November. Leyland Streiff, the principal officer of the committee behind the ballot initiative, Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine, said in a statement that the group would have preferred for the Democratic-majority legislature to enact their bill rather than sending it to voters. “Our initiative reflects the will of the people, not the will of one political party,” Streiff wrote, arguing that the measure was needed to prevent “males invading female private spaces.”

As of last year, there were just three trans girls playing girls’ high school sports in Maine.

But opponents of the Maine measure have argued that the issue is being blown out of proportion in service of a larger agenda. A lawsuit filed by the Trump administration against the state education department last year identified just three trans girls playing girls’ high school sports in the state. “We really want Mainers to understand that this is not about sports, it’s about a national extremist attempt to take over Maine politics and drive the conversation in November,” Destie Hohman Sprague, executive director of the Maine Women’s Lobby, told the Beacon.

It’s already driving the conversation, though it remains to be seen whether it will make a dent in voters’ behavior in November. The candidates have weighed in: Collins personally signed the petition to put the measure on the ballot. Platner, on the other hand, called the controversy over trans athletes an “invented culture war scare” on a Slate podcast episode in March.

Then he put a finer point on it. Maine’s ballot initiative “is funded by an out-of-state billionaire to make sure that we have this discussion,” Platner said, “and we don’t talk about raising his taxes.”

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Conservatives force abortion rights back into spotlight Republicans apparently wanted to remind voters who killed Roe v. Wade ahead of the midterms. Trump regime isn’t done tormenting federal workers Even when there’s adequate staffing, there’s not adequate staffing.

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | In California’s governor race, an afterthought surges to the top…

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It seems like President Donald Trump may have recently taken one of his favorite cognitive tests. Speaking at a White House event on Monday, he bragged about being the only president to ever take a cognitive test and have the tenacity to distinguish between an alligator and a squirrel. “No president has ever taken one, except me,” Trump said. “I’ve taken three of them, and I’ve aced each one.

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A man spotted carrying a gun in the vicinity of the White House by plainclothes officers and agents was shot by law enforcement Monday after he opened fire on them near the Washington Monument, the Secret Service said. Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn said plainclothes agents spotted the man around 3:30 PM in the area near the White House complex and saw the imprint of the weapon on…

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Looks like Fox News doesn’t plan to stop exploiting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting any time soon. During an episode of “The Faulkner Focus” on Monday, pundit Ben Ferguson somehow managed to take it a step further, this time by comparing criticism of President Donald Trump to shaming a victim of rape. “It’s victim shaming 101. This is no different than if someone’s raped…

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Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz told Fox News that while he’s a “big fan of hospice” care, he’s ready to shut it down in California, Minnesota, and New York. “It’s clear, 1 in 3 hospices in America are in Los Angeles, not California, LA,” Oz claimed. “I mean how many people are dying there? Obviously it’s fraudulent, and the red flags that were…

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Shortly after she was fired as attorney general, Pam Bondi refused to appear before the House Oversight Committee to testify about her mishandling of the Epstein files, saying that since she was subpoenaed in her official capacity and was no longer in her job, she wouldn’t show up. Now that she’s agreed to appear in her private capacity, however, she seems to be getting official…

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A group of Florida voters filed a lawsuit Monday challenging the state’s new congressional district map just hours after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law. The lawsuit argues that the redrawn map violates Florida’s Fair Districts constitutional amendment, as it clearly favors the GOP. It alleges that DeSantis and other state Republicans drew it in secret, releasing it first to Fox News…

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | How Democrats plan to fight the Supreme Court’s racist ruling…

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“Who would you never invite back to the Met Gala?” 

That’s what Late Late Show host James Corden asked Anna Wintour, then-editor-in-chief of Vogue, in 2017, during a game called “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts.”

“Donald Trump,” the fashion executive answered, to thunderous applause. And although neither Trump nor his immediate family have been present at fashion’s biggest night since before the start of his first term, Wintour seems to have no issue with MAGA-adjacent benefactors of his administration’s assault on culture—as evidenced by this year’s lead sponsors and honorary co-chairs: Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who were front and center at Trump’s second inauguration.

In defense of the guest list which she oversees, Wintour, who stepped down as editor-in-chief of Vogue last June but remains Vogue’s global editorial director and head of the Met Gala, told CNN that she’s “grateful” for Sánchez Bezos’ “generosity.” (The amount contributed by Sánchez Bezos and her husband, Jeff, is currently unknown.) Wintour added that Sánchez Bezos is “a great lover of costume and obviously of fashion, so we’re thrilled she’s part of the night.”

Examining the broligarchs’ foray into fashion, in which they attend shows in Milan and Paris clad in couture and court the luxury fashion industry with charity, I can’t help but feel that no matter how many runway shows they attend or which designers they wear, they still come up short in their struggle to conquer cool.

Bezos and Sánchez attended the Met Costume Institute’s spring exhibit and annual fundraiser in 2024. And Big Tech firms like Amazon, TikTok, and Apple, with their deep pockets and powerful algorithms, have been welcome sponsors of the event since the early 2010s. But this year’s benefit has attracted increased scrutiny since Silicon Valley officially hitched its wagon to the Trump train, with anti-billionaire protestors papering the New York City subway with posters calling on passersby to “boycott the Bezos Met Gala” and criticizing Amazon for its allegedly poor working conditions. 

Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2024 inauguration fund and subsequently spent a baffling $75 million on a vanity doc about Melania. And as owner of the Washington Post, Bezos blocked the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election.

While the Met Gala has long been dismissed as a gross display of wealth (tickets cost $100,000, more than the median down payment on a house in the US), the involvement of the third-richest man in the world, whitewashing his reputation through a fundraiser for one of the country’s most storied museums while contributing to Trump’s war on culture, sort of obscures the costumes with its glaring irony. 

Since taking office last January, Trump has canceled National Endowment for the Arts grants, imperiling hundreds of arts organizations across the country; threatened museums via executive order to comply with his anti-“woke” agenda; and taken over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, renaming it after himself. 

Bezos isn’t just a passive observer in these attacks on arts and culture. Under his leadership, the Post laid off wide swaths of its staff as subscribers fled, shuttering its books section and dealing a severe blow to media coverage of the arts. 

As the Bezoses, Wintour, and a trio of famous women greet celebrity guests on the Met steps Monday evening, socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani and first lady Rama Duwaji reportedly have other plans. (It’s probably for the best, considering the debacle over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2021 “Tax the Rich” dress and recent uproar over boots Duwaji borrowed for her husband’s inauguration earlier this year.)

Still, though, I know they would have come dressed to impress—and slayed, effortlessly.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and President Donald Trump’s never-right counselor Peter Navarro held a press conference Monday blaming inflation—particularly sky-high beef prices—on former President Joe Biden and what Rollins described as the “hoax” of climate change. Pointing to a shrinking cattle supply and federal policies, “whether that was through grazing allotments or climate…

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For a little while, crypto mogul Justin Sun represented everything the digital currency industry could want from Donald Trump. But Blockchain Camelot is over, and the dueling lawsuits are here.

Sun, a Chinese-born crypto-billionaire known for his antics—he is the guy who paid $6.2 million for a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel—was already facing a slew of civil fraud allegations leveled by the Biden-era SEC when he entered the Trumps’ orbit. Shortly after the 2024 election, Sun made a huge investment in digital tokens issue by World Liberty Financial, the newly launched crypto firm run by the Trump family and their allies.

Sun tweeted loudly about his, and the crypto industry’s, love for Donald Trump, and when the new administration came to power, his regulatory and legal troubles eased. The SEC agreed to put its lawsuit against him on hold; he recently settled the case for the relatively low sum of $10 million. Sun and Trump, it seemed, embodied a new political and economic order.

But it didn’t last.

Today, we are filing a lawsuit against Justin Sun for defamation. Sun has launched a coordinated media smear campaign against World Liberty Financial and refused to stop even when confronted with the truth.

Here's the story.

— WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) May 4, 2026

Two weeks ago—after a months-long dispute—Sun filed a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial, accusing the company of “engaging in an illegal scheme to seize property” by preventing him from selling his tokens. On Monday, World Liberty Financial hit back, filing a defamation lawsuit that accuses Sun of trying to ruin the company with lies. Sun, who usually doesn’t hold back his opinions on anything, quickly responded, insisting that the suit was “nothing more than a meritless PR stunt.”

The alleged defamation lawsuit that World Liberty announced on X today is nothing more than a meritless PR stunt. I stand by my actions and look forward to defeating the case in court.

— H.E. Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) May 4, 2026

The details of what exactly each side is alleging are also quite representative of the crypto industry—complicated, arcane, and full of protestations of transparency and insistence that the other side is not what it seems. But here’s the gist:

• Sun owns 4 billion World Liberty tokens, including 1 billion that the company awarded to him in exchange for serving on a World Liberty advisory board. The tokens were awarded very early in the company’s existence, and company rules barred him from selling them quickly. The tokens are supposed to grant holders the right to vote on major decisions about World Liberty’s future.
• Sun said in his lawsuit that he should have become eligible sell some of his tokens last September. But without warning, according to Sun, World Liberty froze his accounts, blocked the sale of his tokens, and wouldn’t tell him why. In addition, Sun claims, World Liberty’s management never allowed Sun, or any other token holders, any substantial amount of say in company decision-making and instead have focused on enriching themselves.
• In its own lawsuit, filed Monday, World Liberty Financial said it knows Sun’s secrets. The company claims he engaged in transactions with World Liberty tokens when he shouldn’t have; improperly purchased tokens for other people; and secretly engaged in short-selling.

In short, World Liberty says Sun has been a bad investor who secretly seeks to undermine the company. And Sun says World Liberty has been a bad company that secretly seeks to undermine its investors.

One thing that is clear is that the price of World Liberty—or WLFI, for short—tokens has been plummeting for months. WLFI first hit the market last August, at $0.45. That turned out to be its peak price. Since then, it’s fallen more than 80 percent (though it did rise on Monday). It’s now worth about 7 cents per token.

The people involved are what makes this otherwise extremely complicated, crypto-bro fight more than just a blockchain nerd squabble. Sun may own 4 billion WLFI tokens, but Donald Trump and his family own about 22.5 billion. The Trumps have a controlling interest in the company. But one of other partners is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, aka the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ monarch, who controls a trillion-dollar investment fund and runs the small Arab country’s intelligence apparatus. He paid $500 million for his stake. And a World Liberty Financial affiliate has signed deals with Pakistan’s government, under the watchful eye of that country’s army chief.

So this odd little crypto company and its sliding token price are suddenly in the middle of everything.

Call it Schrödinger’s war. We may or may not be at war in Iran—depending on the day and the whims of President Donald Trump. In the latest development, we’ve somehow ended the war, but the U.S. military also needs to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz—which is only necessary because of Trump’s war. But first, let’s rewind to see how exactly we got here. Remember how we all…

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This is a story about how we—you and us here at Mother Jones—beat Jeff Bezos. Let me explain.

Remember the moment, a couple of months back, when Stephen Colbert was at a loss for words: “I don’t even know what to do with this crap,” he said on his show, before crumpling up a memo from his network bosses and depositing it in a dog poop bag. “I’m just so surprised that this giant global corporation would not stand up to these bullies!”

In the “crap” statement, CBS explained why it had essentially forbidden Colbert from airing his interview with Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas: The network said it had received “legal guidance” that the interview might violate the Federal Communications Commission’s equal time rule—a rule that late-night talk shows have been exempt from for almost 20 years. Surely it was ­coincidental timing that CBS chose to obey in advance just as its parent company, Paramount, sought the Trump administration’s blessing for its proposed merger with Warner Brothers Discovery. Just like last year, when then–­Paramount owner Shari Redstone reportedly let it be known that 60 Minutes shouldn’t offend President Donald Trump until she consummated the network’s sale, which also needed approval. Or when the current owners of Paramount—David Ellison and his billionaire father, Larry—appointed Bari Weiss, who made her name attacking major media as too far left, CBS’s editor-in-chief.

It’s not just CBS that has been plagued by coincidences in the Trump era. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Soon after sitting onstage at Trump’s second inauguration, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages would henceforth publish only pieces supporting “personal liberties and free markets.” A year later, the Post laid off 40 percent of its staff.

None of this was coincidental. It was a result of the longest-running problem plaguing American journalism: that we’ve entrusted this vital public service (mostly) to for-profit companies whose allegiances shift with the political winds and the bottom line. CBS began squeezing its news division to grab ratings and profits in the mid-1980s (add Broadcast News to your Netflix queue) and suppressed its landmark interview with tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand in 1995 (watch The Insider next). The New York Times missed the boat on the AIDS epidemic and, along with other big newsrooms, fell for the racist “superpredator” narrative in the ’90s. In the runup to the war in Iraq, the Post buried its own—excellent—reporting on the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction while the Times let reporter Judith Miller amplify the WMD lies.

Newspaper jobs have declined by 80 percent—faster than coal mining jobs.

Throughout, America’s media companies delivered a lot of fantastic reporting. But they also had to deliver quarterly returns for multinational parent companies (GE, Westinghouse, Verizon, Comcast) and hedge funds (Alden Global Capital) to whom news was a sideshow at best, an inconvenience at worst. This is why, for decades now, we’ve heard that giant sucking sound of newsrooms being emptied out across the country. Newspaper employment stood at 425,000 in 2000. By 2026, it was down to 79,000—a drop of more than 80 percent. Coal mining jobs, by comparison, have declined 50 percent.

Which brings us to Mother Jones. This magazine was founded 50 years ago as an independent nonprofit precisely because, even in 1976, it was clear that journalism was never going to be the driving passion of a plutocrat.

Fifty nail-biting, scratching and clawing, experimenting and innovating years later, we are still here and bigger—if not in budget, then in impact—than many for-profit newsrooms. Our newsroom is still a lot smaller than the Post’s, but our audience on YouTube—where many, especially younger people, get their news—is growing faster; about 50 percent more people watch each of our videos, on average, than the Post’s. Their print circulation is down almost 90 percent from 20 years ago; ours is up more than 10 percent. (And along the way, we’ve published some killer exposés on Amazon.)

Would MoJo have made good use of the cash—at least $700 million—that Bezos sank into the Post? Hell, it would have covered our entire budget for more than 25 years. Am I crazy proud of our team for doing better than a billionaire despite all the headwinds? Hell yes.

And who else am I crazy proud of and grateful for? You. You are the only reason we are still here after 50 years, the reason we have been able to grow as corporate media crumbled around us. You are why we can stand strong as others bend the knee. And together, we even beat Bezos and all his billions. So thank you, and bravo.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took time away from being extremely rich to join Fox News and inspire confidence amid our chaotic timeline, describing the two-month spike in gas prices as a “short-term blip.” “We are cognizant that this short-term blip up in prices is affecting the American people,” Bessent said with his trademark unmoving face. “But I am also confident, on the other side of…

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The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily reinstated a Food and Drug Administration rule allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and dispensed through the mail. 

The order, by Justice Samuel Alito Jr., paused a ruling by the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that sought to block nationwide access to mifepristone by cutting off online providers. The Fifth Circuit ruling, issued Friday, caused providers, advocates, and patients to scramble all weekend to put in place contingency plans to keep abortion medication available. Almost two-thirds of abortions in the US now occur with pills, and nearly 30 percent take place via telemedicine.

Louisiana filed suit against the FDA last fall, claiming that a 2023 rule change by the Biden administration allowing mifepristone to be prescribed by telemedicine was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and politically motivated. The drug, part of a two-pill regimen that also includes the medication misoprostol, was approved by the FDA in 2000.

Louisiana had asked lower courts to issue a nationwide injunction on the telemedicine rule and reinstate a requirement that abortion pills be prescribed and dispensed in person. The trial court judge declined to do so, but the Fifth Circuit, packed with anti-abortion ideologues, complied. The telemedicine rule “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone,” the Fifth Circuit said in a 3-0 ruling. “Both injuries are irreparable.”

In Monday’s order, Alito granted temporary relief to mifepristone’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, and a generic manufacturer, GenBioPro, which had filed emergency appeals of the Fifth Circuit ruling over the weekend. Alito’s order pauses the case until at least May 11.

Alito, of course, is the ultraconservative author of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended the national right to abortion. Monday’s order comes almost exactly four years after the Dobbs opinion was leaked, throwing abortion access into a state of turmoil from which it has never recovered.

As I have written, the Louisiana lawsuit “reflects widespread anger within the anti-abortion movement over the continued availability of abortion pills in the post-Roe era, even in states with near-total bans.” Louisiana, for example, prohibits abortions in almost all cases, classifies the abortion medications mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled substances,” and equates abortion providers with “drug dealers.” Yet every month, nearly 1,000 patients there are getting abortion pills from telemedicine providers.

The case is similar in key ways to 2024’s FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, also from the Fifth Circuit, in which a coalition of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors sought to overturn the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as well as the more recent rules’ changes. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the doctors lacked standing to bring the lawsuit because they could not show that the FDA regulations caused them any direct harm. But the ruling left open the possibility that states might have standing to sue the FDA on their own. Last fall, Louisiana brought its own case in federal court, as did Texas and Florida in a separate lawsuit. A third suit, involving three states, is pending in Missouri.

As I noted last week, the Louisiana case puts abortion on the SCOTUS docket at a critical political moment.

[T]he Fifth Circuit ruling suddenly makes abortion a huge issue in the midterm elections—something Donald Trump has been hoping to avoid, says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Telemedicine “has been why people in abortion-ban states have been able to get access to abortion,” she says. “It’s been the centerpiece of absolutely everything.” Voters who have been showing signs of complacency over the abortion issue, thanks in large part to telemedicine, won’t be complacent any longer, she says. “It’s going to be a major political pressure point.”

Last Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) released a report showing just how intensely the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has failed students. The report found that there were zero resolution agreements in 2025 “involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment, or discriminatory school discipline.”

Overall, just one percent of complaints submitted to the Ed Department’s OCR received a resolution agreement. Sanders noted that OCR has been “decimated”—nearly half of OCR employees received a reduction-in-force notice in March 2025. The report highlighted the fact that 2025 saw the fewest resolution agreements in 12 years.

“When a child with a disability is denied the education they are entitled to, when a student faces racial or sexual harassment — they turn to the Office for Civil Rights for help,” Sanders said in a press release. “Yet the Trump administration has decimated this office. As a result, tens of thousands of students facing discrimination have been left with no recourse. That is beyond unacceptable.”

Department of Education—which President Donald Trump keeps trying to dismantle–is led by Secretary Linda McMahon, who claimed she believes that “discrimination is a bad thing.” But, no one would know that based on how the office is run.

Individuals and their families can still sue schools for discrimination in court, but this can be an expensive processs, unlike how OCR investigations are supposed to work. Essentially, if anyone feels that they are discriminated against in schools, they can file a complaint and OCR is supposed to seriously consider an investigation.

A Government Accountability Office report from January 2026 also found that 90 percent of cases received between March and September 2025 were dismissed outright. The report recommends encouraging staffing in the Education Department’s OCR.

While it is harmful that there have been few resolution agreements across types of discriminatory categories, the lack of resolutions when it comes to disability issues is telling. This is because, as ProPublica noted in February 2025, OCR staff were specifically instructed to continue with disability focused cases and to ignore ones pertaining to gender and race. However, ignoring race in disability discrimination cases will lead to OCR dropping the ball, for instance, in situations where a Black disabled male student may be disproportionately secluded in comparison to a white disabled male student.

Still, rates for disability-focused cases remain low. In 2025, zero resolution agreements were reached for cases involving seclusion and restraint, with 172 pending cases on this topic. For disability harassment, there was one resolution agreement and 595 pending cases. For cases involving access to appropriate education, there 1,887 pending cases and just 40 agreements.

“This report shows federal civil rights enforcement in education, an essential tool provided by Congress to help fight disability discrimination, is being denied to students with disabilities,” said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, in a press release. “OCR is where families turn when a student is denied accommodations or accessibility, pushed out of learning time, or harassed or disciplined unfairly because of disability. 

The Trump administration is blaming the recent shutdown of Spirit Airlines on decisions made under the former Biden administration to protect consumers from airline price hikes, but it was Trump’s decision to attack Iran that was the final nail in the troubled company’s coffin. Spirit announced on Saturday that it was shutting down operations after it failed to get a hoped-for bailout from…

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We’re nearing the end of the third week of the migration, and the team is still working through our punchlist of fixes, improvements, enhancements, and additions. A few notes before updated to-do list. If you’re experiencing logout issues, please check out Allison’s story. She’s collecting information to help troubleshoot. We’ve added a new sidebar widget, “Trending Conversations.”…

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