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From California to Florida, homeowners have been facing a new climate reality: Insurance companies don’t want to cover their properties. According to a report released today, the problem will only get worse.

The nonprofit climate research firm First Street Foundation found that, while about 6.8 million properties nationwide already rely on expensive public insurance programs, that’s only a fraction of 39 million across the country that face similar conditions.

“There’s this climate insurance bubble out there,” said Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications at First Street and a contributor to the report. “And you can quantify it.”

Each state regulates its insurance market, and some limit how much companies can raise rates in a given year. In California, for example, anything more than a 7 percent hike requires a public hearing. According to First Street, such policies have meant premiums don’t always accurately reflect risk, especially as climate change exacerbates natural disasters.

This has led companies such as Allstate, State Farm, Nationwide, and others to pull out of areas with a high threat of wildfire, floods, and storms. In the Southern California city of San Bernardino, for example, non-renewals jumped 774 percent between 2015 and 2021. When that happens, homeowners often must enroll in a government-run insurance-of-last-resort program where premiums can cost thousands of dollars more per year.

“The report shows that actuarially sound pricing is going to make it unaffordable to live in certain places as climate impacts emerge,” said David Russell, a professor of insurance and finance at California State University Northridge. He did not contribute to the report. “It’s startling and it’s very well documented.”

Russell says that what’s most likely to shock people is the economic toll on affected properties. When insurance costs soar, First Street shows, it severely undermines home values — and in some cases erodes them entirely.

The report found that insurance for the average California home could nearly quadruple if future risk is factored in, with those extra costs causing a roughly 39 percent drop in value. The situation is even worse in Florida and Louisiana, where flood insurance in Plaquemines Parish near New Orleans could go from $824 annually to $11,296 and a property could effectively become worthless.

“There’s no education to the public of what’s going on and where the risk is,” said Porter, explaining that most insurance models are proprietary. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t make its flood insurance pricing available to the public — homeowners must go through insurance brokers for a quote.

First Street is posting its report online, and it also runs riskfactor.com, where anyone can type in an address and receive user-friendly risk information for any property in the U.S. One metric the site provides is annualized damage for flood and wind risk. Porter said that if that number is higher than a homeowner’s current premiums, then a climate risk of some kind probably hasn’t yet been priced into the coverage.

“This would indicate that at some point this risk will get priced into their insurance costs,” he said, “and their cost of home ownership would increase along with that.”

Wildfires are the fastest growing natural disaster risk, First Street reported. Over the next 30 years, it estimates the number of acres burned will balloon from about 4 million acres per year to 9 million, and the number of structures destroyed is on track to double to 34,000 annually. Wildfires are also the predominant threat for 4.4 million of the 39 million properties that First Street identified as at risk of insurance upheaval.

“You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns. They don’t belong there,” he said. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.”

First Street hopes that highlighting the climate insurance bubble allows people to make better informed decisions. For homeowners, that may mean taking precautions against, say, wildfires, by replacing their roof or clearing flammable material from around their house. Policymakers, he said, could use the information to help at-risk communities adapt to or mitigate their risk. In either case, Porter said, reducing threats could help keep insurance rates from spiking.

Ultimately, though, Russell says moving people out of disaster-prone areas will likely be necessary.

“Large numbers of people will need to be relocated away from areas that will be uninsurable.” he said. “There is a reckoning on the horizon and it’s not pretty.”

It’s tempting to ignore a budget resolution released just days before the start of the fiscal year that it’s meant to guide, and amid the chaotic debate around a short-term extension of government funding to avoid a shutdown. But House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington’s proposed budget is important for what it illustrates about House Republicans’ disturbing vision for the country: health care stripped away from millions of people, higher poverty and hunger, capitulation to climate change, more tax cheating by high-income people, and large-scale disinvestment from the building blocks of opportunity and economic growth — from medical research to education to child care. It would narrow opportunity, worsen racial inequities, and make it harder for people to afford the basics. It reflects the wrong priorities for the country and should be roundly rejected.

Chair Arrington made clear in his remarks the intent to extend the expiring tax cuts from the 2017 tax law, which included large tax cuts for the wealthy. In addition, the budget resolution itself would pave the way for unlimited, unpaid-for tax cuts that could go well beyond those extensions. The extensions alone would give annual tax breaks averaging $41,000 to tax filers in the top 1 percent and cost more than $350 billion a year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. The budget reflects none of these costs and fails to explain how — or whether — they will be offset.

A shocking share of the spending cuts Chair Arrington specifies target people with low and moderate incomes, including $1.9 trillion in Medicaid cuts and hundreds of billions in cuts to economic security programs, such as cuts to assistance that helps people afford food and other basic needs. Just last week the Census Bureau released data showing that poverty spiked last year, more than doubling for children. Rather than proposing policies that could reverse this deeply troubling trend, the budget proposal would deepen poverty and increase hardship.

The budget would also make deep cuts in the part of the budget that is funded annually through appropriations bills. Disingenuously, the budget resolution shows that these cuts total more than $4 trillion over ten years — but hides the program areas that would be cut, labeling them “government-wide savings.” But this year’s House Appropriations bills — which include substantial cuts — make clear that cuts would fall on a wide range of basic functions and services that support families, communities, and the broader economy, including Social Security customer service, support for K-12 and college education, funding for national parks and clean air and water, rental housing assistance for families with low incomes, and more.

Chair Arrington claims the budget’s deep and damaging program cuts are in the name of deficit reduction. But the failure to identify a single revenue increase for high-income people or corporations — and in fact, to potentially shower them with more unpaid-for tax cuts — is an extreme and misguided approach. Moreover, calling for a balanced budget in ten years is merely a slogan that has little to do with addressing our nation’s needs — and the budget resolution resorts to gimmicks and games to even appear to get there, including $3 trillion in deficit reduction it claims would accrue from higher economic growth it assumes would be achieved by budget policies.

A budget plan should focus on the nation’s needs and lay out an agenda that broadens opportunity, invests in people and families, reduces the too-high levels of hardship and financial stress faced by households across the country, and raises revenues for those investments. But the Arrington budget blueprint would shortchange much-needed investments and lock in wasteful tax cuts to the already wealthy for the next decade.

House Republicans are pursuing a damaging agenda at every turn — first threatening the nation with default, and now demanding deep cuts in an array of priorities in this year’s appropriations debate, risking a government shutdown, and proposing a budget blueprint that would take the country in the wrong direction.

So Mitt Romney is retiring from the Senate. This is bad news. As excerpts from a forthcoming biography reveal, Romney is cleareyed about what has happened to his party and, if what he says is true, is a profile in courage compared with colleagues who share his horror but are unwilling to say anything.

Yet some of the commentary I’ve seen about Romney comes close to hagiography, which he doesn’t deserve. It’s good to see Romney speaking up now, but the party he’s criticizing is in large part a monster that people like him helped create.

For the basic story of the Republican Party, going back to the 1970s, is this: Advocates of right-wing economic policies, which redistributed income from workers to the wealthy, sought to sell their agenda by exploiting social intolerance and animosity. They had considerable success with this strategy. But eventually the extremists they thought they were using ended up ruling the party.

Before I get into that, let me take on the widespread myth that Romney lost the 2012 election because he was the victim of a smear campaign, and that Democratic nastiness radicalized the G.O.P., paving the way for Donald Trump.

If you remember the 2012 election, which I certainly do, you know that Democrats portrayed Romney as a plutocrat whose policies would hurt ordinary Americans while enriching the wealthy. And this portrayal was … completely true.

In particular, Romney was a strenuous opponent of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which was enacted in 2010 but didn’t take full effect until 2014 — an especially cynical position since Obamacare was very similar to the health reform Romney himself had enacted as governor of Massachusetts. If he had won in 2012, he would almost surely have found a way to block the A.C.A.’s rollout, which in turn would have meant blocking the large reduction in the number of Americans without health insurance after 2014.

But back to the history of the G.O.P. For a generation after World War II (which Donald Trump recently said Joe Biden might lead us into) we were still a nation shaped by the legacy of the New Deal. Under Dwight Eisenhower the top marginal tax rate on the highest-income Americans was 91 percent and roughly a third of American workers were unionized.

And Republicans largely accepted that state of affairs. In a letter to his brother, Eisenhower wrote, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again”; while there were a few conservatives who thought differently, “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Republican Party increasingly came to be dominated by people who did want to roll back the New Deal legacy. Frontal assaults on major programs, like George W. Bush’s 2005 attempt to privatize Social Security and Trump’s 2017 attempt to demolish the A.C.A., generally failed, and were rejected by voters — Democrats retook the House in 2018 largely because of the backlash against Trump’s assault on Obamacare. But tax rates at the top came way down, the power of unions was broken, and income inequality soared.

Why didn’t Republicans pay a big political price for their hard right turn? Largely because they were able to offset the unpopularity of their economic policies by harnessing the forces of religious conservatism and social illiberalism — hostility toward nonwhites, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, immigrants and more. In 2004, for example, Bush made opposition to gay marriage a central theme of his campaign, only to declare after the election that he had a mandate for the aforementioned attempt to privatize Social Security.

Big-money donors attempted a similar play when they poured cash into the DeSantis campaign early this year. It’s doubtful that they shared Ron DeSantis’s obsession with being anti-woke, but they thought (wrongly, it seems) that he could win on social issues and then deliver tax and spending cuts.

But eventually the forces that economic conservatives were trying to use ended up using them. This wasn’t something that suddenly happened with the Trump nomination; people who think that the G.O.P. suddenly changed forget how prevalent crazy conspiracy theories and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Democratic electoral victories already were in the 1990s. The current dominance of MAGA represents a culmination of a process that has been going on for decades.

And for the most part, Republican politicians who probably weren’t extremists themselves went along. For a while this may have been because MAGA was still delivering the right-wing economic goods. Bear in mind that despite all the talk of “populism,” Trump’s main policy achievement was a big cut in corporate taxes. But non-extremist Republicans also, and increasingly, gave in out of fear — for their careers and perhaps even their safety.

It’s to Romney’s credit that he finally reached his limit. But he did so very late in the game — a game that people like him basically started.

One of the key demands by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which is in the fourth day of its historic strike against the so-called "big three" car manufacturers in the U.S., is a reduced workweek to achieve what its leader described as better work-life balance.

About 13,000 workers for Ford, General Motors and Stellantis walked out of their jobs, the first time in history that they are striking against all three companies simultaneously. Their demands include wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments for salaries to match with inflation and profit-sharing plans. They are also asking for "increased work, life, and family balance through increased paid time off and additional holidays."

As part of the work-life balance request, the union is trying to negotiate a 32-workweek for 40 hours of pay that union President Shawn Fain said goes back to the 1940s.

"Our leaders back then were talking about a 35-, a 32-hour workweek," he said.

The debate over four-day workweeks has gained significant traction over the last few years around the world as workers push for more flexibility in their jobs.

In the U.S., about 20 percent of companies surveyed by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans are either considering, piloted, have formally implemented or have instituted four-day workweeks.

The foundation found in results published this month that part of the push for more flexible work arrangements and demand for better work-life balance came with the shift of the nature of work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"As the traditional workweek saw a major upheaval with the pandemic, a few employers are implementing a four-day workweek for recruiting and retention reasons," said Julie Stich, vice president of content at the foundation. "However, most employers, even if interested, are struggling to figure out how to make that a reality while trying to meet business operation goals."

While there is some evidence that shorter workweeks may reduce stress without affecting productivity, companies struggle to implement them.

A study in New Zealand showed that employees appreciated having the extra day and some said it helped with their well-being. But the extra day off was viewed by management as a gift and added more pressure during the four days people were at work.

"There was a feeling of 'a bit more urgency' and 'speeding up your processes,'" the study found. "Some liked what they felt was a quieter and more relaxed climate, whereas others enjoyed the 'exhilarating' and 'full-on' pace. One senior leader perceived that the 'quality of some of the work deteriorated' as a result of staff 'trying to jam 100 percent into 80 percent' of time."

Fain wants to see a more balanced approach to how employees experience their work and home lives.

"We are one of the most overworked populations in the world," he said. "We need to get back to fighting for a vision of society in which everyone earns family-sustaining wages and everyone has enough free time to enjoy their lives and see their kids grow up and their parents grow old."

Researchers say it's difficult to create that balance.

"But we must start with an honest appraisal of how productivity and time trade-offs impact the well-being of workers," occupational psychologist Emma Russell wrote for Harvard Business Review.

Senator Mitch McConnell is not well. Without going too deep into an armchair diagnosis of his recent spate of freezes and falls, it shouldn’t be controversial to say that an 81-year-old man who mysteriously stops talking and can’t start up again is likely suffering from some kind of significant health issue.

If he were a woman, the calls for him to retire would be deafening. If he were a Democrat, the calls would be coming from within his own party. If he were Joe Biden, The New York Times would run a three-part exposé on his nap times while CNN ran a “25th Amendment Tracker” keeping tabs on which cabinet officials had publicly agreed to remove him from power. But McConnell is a Republican man, which means nobody is going to pressure him into getting out of the way so somebody else can frost the glass of representative democracy.

McConnell, of course, shows no sign of being willing to retire. In private calls, he has allegedly assured Republicans that he is “fine,” and I guess everybody is supposed to take his word for it. The most simple reason for his intransigence is the pride that seems to afflict every octogenarian politician in this broken republic. For reasons I hope to live long enough to discover, old politicians seem to think they are indispensable and will continue to run for office and cling to power until the great Voter in the Sky escorts them to a farm upstate. McConnell may simply be doing what others in his generational cohort do: refuse to cede the floor to the future.

But that explanation risks treating McConnell as a normal person, and McConnell is far from normal. He is perhaps the most successful congressional operator since Henry Clay and a man who wouldn’t turn on a light switch unless it somehow helped Republicans win political power. Whether or not McConnell wants to retire is irrelevant; from his perspective, he probably can’t. That’s because his home state of Kentucky has a Democratic governor, and a law McConnell helped engineer to limit that governor’s choices on McConnell’s replacement is probably unconstitutional.

In 2019, Kentucky shocked the country by electing Andy Beshear, a Democrat, as its governor (yada, yada, all politics is local). This year, Beshear is up for reelection, and he’s running against McConnell ally Daniel Cameron, who was last seen refusing to indict the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor. Beshear leads Cameron by eight points, according to recent polling data.

Kentucky is one of 46 states that allow their governor to fill US Senate vacancies until a special election can be held and the voters can determine who will finish the senatorial term. (North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin are the only states that don’t allow these kinds of temporary gubernatorial appointments but instead go straight to special elections.) This means that if McConnell retires while Beshear is in office (which might be for a long time yet), Beshear gets to fill his seat temporarily.

But there’s a catch. In 2021, at the urging of McConnell, Kentucky became the 11th state to limit the governor’s choices for a replacement senator. The Kentucky law requires the governor to pick a senator from the same party as the retiring senator, and requires the governor to pick from a list of three candidates provided by the executive committee of the departing senator’s political party. The Kentucky legislature passed the law over Beshear’s veto.

If that scheme sounds odd to you, it should, because it almost certainly violates the 17th Amendment of the Constitution. The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, provided for the direct election of senators by popular vote. The amendment also empowers the “executive authority of the state”—which means the governor—to fill Senate vacancies, as long as the legislature gives them authority to do so before a special election is held. Before the change, senators were chosen directly by state legislatures, which meant that party bosses were able to hand out Senate appointments as if they were a patronage position.

Kentucky’s replacement law is exactly the kind of thing the 17th Amendment was meant to stop. In his veto statement, Beshear explained the constitutional problems with the law as well as I can. The governor wrote: “The Seventeenth Amendment does not authorize legislatures to direct how the Governor makes an appointment to fill vacancies, and the legislature may not impose an additional qualification on who the Governor may appoint beyond the qualifications set for a United States Senator set forth in the Constitution.”

If McConnell retires, the most likely thing for Beshear to do would be to appoint whomever he wants, let the Kentucky legislature sue him, and take the case to the Supreme Court. Despite Republican control of the court, I think Kentucky’s law is likely to lose. Even conservative legal commentators have noted the potential constitutional weakness of the Kentucky replacement scheme.

Still, even if Kentucky’s legislature manages to overcome the 17th Amendment, there is yet another wrinkle: Who is going to tell Beshear’s replacement senator to go home? Remember, as of now, Democrats still control the Senate. Beshear would name a replacement; that replacement would present his credentials to the Democratic-controlled Senate; and that’s just about all it takes to make a new incumbent a senator. By the time the appeals made it to the Supreme Court, Kentucky would be at or near the special election anyway.

McConnell, of all people, understands how raw political power works, and he surely understands that Democrats have it right now, regardless of Kentucky’s constitutionally questionable law. Even if McConnell’s Senate seat flips to a Democrat for only a few months, those are a few months during which the Democratic majority would be freed from the clutches of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. A motivated party could push through a lot of federal judges in a few months.

Whether McConnell retires “gracefully” or orders his staff to Weekend at Bernie’s him until 2026 probably depends on whether Beshear wins reelection in Kentucky. McConnell may be unwell, but I doubt he’s forgotten “how to do politics.” Ironically, McConnell’s entire accursed career has probably done the most work to create the Senate conditions that require him to hang on until the bitter end. The Senate that McConnell created is one devoid of grace: It’s now just a raw exercise in obstruction, where even human frailty is exploited for partisan gain. Somewhere, I bet Ted Kennedy (whose death McConnell exploited to deny the inclusion of a public option in the Affordable Care Act) is watching McConnell’s travails with great interest.

McConnell’s legacy is partisanship, whatever the costs. That seething commitment to do only what is in the best interests of the Republican Party means that right now, McConnell is locked into his role as another Republican vote, at the cost of his dignity and health.

Donald Trump has been signaling for months that he considers the Republican Party’s anti-abortion stance to be his party’s greatest liability. On Sunday, he explicitly severed himself from his party’s position on the issue. In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump not only denounced Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban (“I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake”) but endorsed an amorphous compromise while casting himself as a neutral party.

“What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months,” Trump said. “You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy.” He promised to “sit down with both sides” and said, “I’m almost like a mediator in this case.”

Obviously, Trump is engaging in a significant level of bullshit here. If there was “a number” that both sides could agree on, then somebody would have identified it by now. However, that doesn’t mean his comments tell you nothing about his stance. There are several important ramifications of Trump’s position.

1. Trump does not want to spend any more political capital advancing the anti-abortion cause. After the 2022 midterm elections, Trump blamed the party’s disappointing performance on the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. That interpretation was both self-interested (it deflected blame from Trump’s own role in the election results, having promoted a series of extreme nominees) and deeply hypocritical (given that Dobbs was a direct result of Trump’s own justices overturning precedent).

He is now calculating that abortion is one of the Republican Party’s greatest political disadvantages and believes he needs to win back some of the secular voters who deserted Republicans in the midterms.

2. Trump is happy to let DeSantis outflank him. DeSantis has campaigned as an archreactionary, attacking Trump as insufficiently right wing on issues like vaccines and trans rights in addition to abortion. Those attacks have failed to land because, despite their literal correctness, they feel implausible. And the reason they feel implausible is that Trump’s personality has reconstructed the political spectrum. Trump’s authoritarianism, bigotry, and misconduct now define the main scale of partisan conflict. The most “right-wing position” is whatever is most loyal to Trump, and, however hard DeSantis may try, nobody can be more pro-Trump than Trump.

3. Trump is a more supple politician than his critics give him credit for. Trump is not a smart person. But he does have the advantage of not caring at all about policy. His entire motive for running for office is a combination of self-aggrandizement, love of power, and self-enrichment. This combination of motives has led him to the Republican Party, and the party’s pathological internal culture has made its base a perfect vehicle for a personality cult that has enabled him.

But these traits have paradoxically liberated him from hewing to certain unpopular rhetoric. An important source of Trump’s political success has come from distancing himself rhetorically from Republican positions on taxes (he promised to tax the rich at higher rates before reneging), health care (ditto), and foreign policy. In 2016, only 21 percent of voters called Trump “a lot more conservative” than themselves in contrast with the 34 percent who considered Hillary Clinton a lot more liberal than themselves.

Many liberals have trouble understanding how a figure as obviously unfit for office as Trump has managed to get anywhere close to the presidency. One answer is that he pays attention to what the people say they want and promises to give it to them, a method that often beats paying attention to what party-aligned interest groups want.

4. Trump could always flip back in office. The fact that Trump doesn’t care about right-wing policy goals does not mean he opposes them on principle. Trump reversed much of his moderate campaign rhetoric in office, pursuing regressive tax cuts and rollbacks in health-care coverage. Likewise, in 2016, he stated that women who seek abortions should be punished, before realizing conservatives prefer candidates not to say that publicly — but then appointed staunch abortion opponents to the Supreme Court seats who made the decisive ruling.

All this is to say Trump will do whatever benefits Trump. Once in office, he (probably?) won’t run again and could be free to reward conservative activists without fear of political repercussions.

5. Trump is a bad trade for conservative interest groups. Nominating Trump is a pretty unattractive deal for conservative activists, especially ones whose policies Trump is willing to throw overboard. They are spending political capital on Trump’s misconduct and corruption and ceding political capital on policy. They’d prefer to do the opposite by nominating somebody who will win voters with his persona and spotless family life while hewing strictly to the views of the right-wing catechism.

6. Conservatives will probably go along with it anyway. DeSantis is going to seize the abortion opening as his last, best chance to overtake Trump in Iowa and make the primary a race. But anti-abortion activists are showing every sign that they expect Trump to win and won’t punish him for his heresy.

Conservative pundit Mollie Hemingway, who is equally fervent in her hatred of abortion and slavish devotion to Trump, called Trump’s abortion comments “wrong” but only deep inside a column devoted principally to attacking Meet the Press for asking him hard questions, headlined “NBC’s Kristen Welker Lied Repeatedly About Democrats’ Extreme Abortion Position.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of SBA Pro-Life America, gave the New York Times a limp response to Trump’s heresy: “We’re at a moment where we need a human rights advocate, someone who is dedicated to saving lives of children and serving mothers in need … Every single candidate should be clear on how they plan to do that … It begins with focusing on extremes of the other side, and ambition and common sense on our own. Anything weaker than 15 weeks as a federal minimum standard makes no sense in this context.”

7. Trump thinks the primary is over. The Republican Party has a clear anti-abortion majority, and Trump is handing DeSantis an opportunity to wedge him away from the party’s base — especially in Iowa with its overconcentration of social conservatives. Trump would do this only if he believed the primary was effectively over and he could focus on the general election.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Speaker Kevin McCarthy is running out of options as he races Monday to come up with a plan to keep the federal government from shutting down as even a plan to include hardline border security provisions wasn’t enough to appease the far-right flank in his Republican House majority.

The speaker told his Republican conference that they should be prepared to stay through this weekend to pass a stopgap measure, called a continuing resolution, that would keep government offices open past the Sept. 30 deadline. But many are already bracing for the heavy political fallout of a federal shutdown.

McCarthy suggested Monday that time is still on his side.

“This isn’t the 30th —we’ve got a long ways to go,” he told reporters at the Capitol.

McCarthy panned the idea of compromising with Democrats as he tries to pass the annual spending measures on his own, saying there were “a lot of good ideas” still coming from Republicans.

McCarthy on Sunday night House Republicans pitched a Thursday vote on passing a one-month funding bill that was negotiated between the hard-right House Freedom Caucus and a group of pragmatic-minded conservatives known as the Main Street Caucus, according to those with knowledge of the call.

The package was intended to win support from the conservative wing of the Republican Conference by including a 1% cut to last year’s spending levels as well as a slew of Republican proposals for border security and immigration.

With the Senate controlled by Democrats unlikely to accept any of the conservative options, the best hope McCarthy has at this point is to simply pass a measure to kickstart debate with the other chamber. But even that route is uncertain with time dwindling to strike a deal.

McCarthy planned to hold a vote on a Department of Defense spending bill on Wednesday, then the stopgap funding measure the next day.

“There’s quite a few people that are against it right now,” said Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., leader of the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative faction in the House, adding that he was still considering the proposal and that a lot of work was happening “behind the scenes” to get the votes to pass it.

Leaders of the so-called “five families” — the various conservative factions that make up the House Republican majority – are expected to convene later Monday behind closed doors in the speaker’s office.

It’s crucial that they find an agreed-upon path forward for McCarthy, who is staring down just eight working days in session before funding runs out.

“This framework secures the border and it keeps the government open. Republicans need to focus on those things,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., who is chair of the Mainstreet Caucus and helped craft the proposal.

Time is running short for Congress to act. Though McCarthy still contends he has time to maneuver before the government’s fiscal year ends, he has also tried to warn his party that a government shutdown is likely to backfire on Republicans politically.

“I’ve been through shutdowns and I’ve never seen somebody win a shutdown because when you shut down, you give all your power to the administration,” McCarthy said in a Fox News interview on Sunday.

“How are you going to win your arguments to secure the border if the border agents don’t get paid? How are you going to win the arguments to get wokeism out of the Department of Defense? If even our own troops aren’t being paid. You have no strength there.”

But McCarthy is already facing resistance. A handful of Republicans took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, shortly after the Sunday call to criticize even the package with spending cuts and border measures as woefully insufficient.

Many are readying for a government closure next month. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a memo Monday to the business community saying there is a “substantial consensus” that there will be a long shutdown and warning that there is “no clear path for reopening the government.”

“Individuals and businesses rely on the discretionary functions of government on a daily basis,” the Chamber wrote. “From passports and permits to clinical trials and contractors, a well-functioning economy requires a functioning government.”

The Biden administration is also highlighting the potential damage from a funding stoppage. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on CNBC Monday, “We’ve got a good, strong economy and creating a situation that could cause a loss of momentum is something we don’t need.”

McCarthy could potentially turn to House Democrats to pass a stopgap measure if he was willing to strip the conservative policy wins out of a funding bill. But several right-wing members are threatening to try to oust him from the speakership if he does.

For now, the speaker showed no sign of compromising with Democrats to prevent a shutdown. He told reporters Monday that Republicans were still putting forward “a lot of good ideas.”

The 2022 midterm elections were in many ways a referendum on the future of American democracy, and in key states candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election and could have used their power to overturn future elections lost. In the six major battlegrounds where Donald Trump tried to reverse his defeat, election-denying candidates for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general all lost.

But it would be naive to conclude that the threat to free and fair elections has disappeared or even dissipated. Twenty-three election deniers in 17 states serve as either governor, attorney general, or secretary of state, according to a new report released this week by the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for fair elections. That means a third of the country has an election denier in statewide office overseeing their elections.

According to the group, three election deniers are running for president—Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and California radio host Larry Elder—while a number of other GOP presidential hopefuls have amplified false claims about the 2020 election. Five election deniers are on the ballot in key statewide races in Louisiana and Mississippi this year.

“Even though voters overwhelmingly rejected election denier candidates in 2022, the movement is alive and well and continues to undermine trust in our democracy,” says Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action.

The impact of this anti-democratic movement has been evident in a number of states this year.

Based on misinformation spread by far-right conspiracy theorists, nine GOP-controlled states have withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate partnership that helps make sure voter rolls are accurate by comparing voter registration data among states.

In Wisconsin, Republicans in the state Senate voted Thursday to oust the nonpartisan administrator of the state’s elections commission, Meagan Wolfe, in a bid to give election deniers and conspiracy theorists more control over how elections are run in the state. (The state’s attorney general is challenging the move in court, claiming Republicans don’t have the power to remove Wolfe because she was not formally renominated by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.)

In North Carolina, Republicans are on the verge of enacting two bills that would undermine fair elections. The GOP-controlled legislature passed one bill last month that undercuts Election Day registration, gives voters less time to cast ballots by mail, and expands voter challenges. The legislation was inspired, at least in part, by conservative activist Cleta Mitchell, one of the architects of Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Another bill that is close to final passage would prevent the state’s Democratic governor from appointing a majority of members to state and county election boards and lower the threshold needed to redo an election.

In Texas, the GOP-controlled legislature voted in May to abolish the position of election administrator and give the GOP-appointed secretary of state the power to take over election operations exclusively in Houston’s Harris County, the most populous blue county in the state.

“In some states, legislators are taking all sorts of steps to make life harder for trusted nonpartisan election officials, including firing them and stripping away their power,” Lydate says. “All fueled by conspiracy theories. This is just one piece of an entire election denier industry. It’s in state legislatures, on the campaign trail, in the media. It’s a whole movement that puts lies above free and fair elections, and we have to call it out everywhere we see it.”

No matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse.

This reality will be on full display in a few weeks, when the justices return for the Court’s new term at the beginning of October. Indeed, on October 3, the second day of that term, the Court will hear a case where the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit declared an entire federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, unconstitutional.

In the unlikely event that the justices uphold this decision, a brief filed by the banking industry explains to the Supreme Court, the entire US mortgage market could seize up, as banks will have no idea what rules they need to comply with in order to issue loans. Worse, because home-building, home-resale, and related industries make an estimated 17 percent of the US gross domestic product, such a decision risks economic devastation unheard of since the Great Depression.

And this case, known as CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association, is one of at least six cases the Court will most likely decide this term where Fifth Circuit judges issued legally indefensible decisions that will have calamitous results if they are not reversed. That court, which is dominated by the most reactionary Trump appointees and similarly minded judges, has become the forum of choice for litigants pushing preposterous legal arguments that are unlikely to fly elsewhere, even in a very conservative judiciary.

By next June, the Supreme Court is likely to toss out a Fifth Circuit decision nuking the federal government’s power to prevent companies from defrauding investors. It is also likely to reverse a Fifth Circuit decision holding that people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders — meaning that a court has determined that they are a violent threat to their romantic partner or their partner’s child — have a constitutional right to possess a gun.

And, on top of these three cases, which the Court has already agreed to hear in its upcoming term, it will also likely take up three other cases where the Fifth Circuit took leave of its senses. These include Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, which attempts to ban the abortion medication mifepristone; Doe v. Mckesson, which effectively strips political organizers of their First Amendment right to organize a protest; and NetChoice v. Paxton, which allows Texas’s GOP-controlled legislature to seize control of content moderation at social media sites like Twitter or YouTube.

At least for now, in other words, the Court’s upcoming term could potentially be very different from the two that proceeded it, where the Court’s GOP-appointed majority seemed to be on a mission to seek out longstanding precedents that are out of favor within the Republican Party, and destroy them. Those decisions appear to have emboldened the most reactionary voices within the judiciary, leaving the justices with a whole lot of messes to clean up.

Which is not to say that Democrats will have much to celebrate when the justices leave town again next June. Many of the Fifth Circuit’s decisions are so poorly reasoned, and so destructive of the interests of the United States, that it would be genuinely shocking if a majority of the justices sign onto them. The Supreme Court will deserve no credit for moderation simply for reversing these decisions.

That is, if it does reverse them. The Supreme Court is still dominated by conservative Republicans, three of whom were appointed by Donald Trump. So there’s always some risk that a majority of the justices will accept even the most outlandish arguments by their fellow Republican appointees on the Fifth Circuit.

Meanwhile, the Court will hear at least one case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, involving a legal doctrine reviled by the conservative Federalist Society. Loper Bright asks the justices to overrule something known as the “Chevron doctrine,” which limits the power of the federal judiciary (which is currently controlled by the Republican Party) to overrule decisions made by the executive branch (which is currently led by a Democrat).

Additionally, the Court will hear cases that could weaken many civil rights laws, and that could invigorate racial gerrymandering. And it’s likely that the Court will take up one or more cases involving state laws that target transgender youth before the upcoming term is complete.

Even so, it’s hard to miss just how much the Fifth Circuit looms over the justices’ upcoming term. And, while the Court is unlikely to show much moderation, it is likely to remind the Fifth Circuit that the judiciary does not exist to sow chaos for its own sake. The Fifth Circuit’s CFPB decision could trigger a global economic depression if it is upheld by the justices

Congress created the CFPB two years after a toxic mix of unwise mortgages and unsafe financial assets threw both the US housing market and US lending markets into turmoil.

As the Supreme Court has explained, the CFPB “has the sole responsibility to administer 19 separate consumer-protection statutes that cover everything from credit cards and car payments to mortgages and student loans.” Many of these statutes are longstanding banking regulations and consumer protections that were previously overseen by other agencies — that authority was transferred to the CFPB by the 2010 law creating the agency.

Though the primary purpose of the CFPB is to protect consumers from potentially abusive behavior by banks and other lenders, it also provides an important service to the banking industry itself. In the last dozen or so years, the agency has promulgated various rules telling lenders how to comply with their obligations under federal law — laying out which disclosures lenders must make to borrowers, and providing a “safe harbor” to banks that issue loans below a certain rate.

Without these rules in place, the mortgage industry warns in a brief to the justices, lenders and other players in this industry simply would not know how to comply with the law. “This would leave market participants unable to certify compliance and invite challenges relating to past certifications, representations, and warranties,” the brief explains. “As a result, the mortgage market could grind to a halt.” And if it did, it could very well bring the rest of the global economy down with it.

Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Community Financial Services v. CFPB, a case the Supreme Court will hear in October, invites all of these catastrophic consequences and more. The Fifth Circuit’s decision claims that the mechanism Congress used to fund the CFPB is unconstitutional, a decision that would potentially invalidate everything the agency has ever done because it would mean that the CFPB was not allowed to spend a single dollar on anything, including hiring regulators to write lending rules.

Nor is it entirely clear that the government could unravel this mess over time, at least without passing a new law that would have to clear the Republican-controlled House. When Congress created the CFPB, it transferred administration of 18 preexisting federal banking and lending laws from other agencies to the CFPB. And the Fifth Circuit’s decision doesn’t restore this authority to those other agencies, it merely forbids the CFPB from doing — well, anything at all that requires funding or paid staff.

The Fifth Circuit claimed that the CFPB’s funding stream violates a clause of the Constitution that provides that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” There are two important things to know about this provision of the Constitution. One is that, according to the Justice Department, before the Fifth Circuit struck down the CFPB, “no court has ever held that an Act of Congress violated” this clause.

The other important thing to know about the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause is that the Supreme Court said in a 1937 opinion that it “means simply that no money can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated by an act of Congress.” Congress passed a law in 2010 creating a funding stream for the CFPB. Therefore the CFPB is constitutional.

Additionally, the justices will review — and hopefully reverse in its entirety — the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Jarkesy v. SEC. That decision attempted to neutralize much of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s authority to protect investors from fraud, but it also reaches much further than that.

Among other things, the Fifth Circuit’s Jarkesy decision questions the constitutionality of administrative law judges, officials employed by about 30 different federal agencies to resolve disputes ranging from whether an investment fund defrauded its investors to whether an impoverished American is entitled to federal benefits. There are about 2,000 of these ALJs in the federal government, more than twice the number of Article III judges (judges who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate).

If AFJs are not allowed to do their jobs, in other words, the federal government would lose about two-thirds of its capacity to adjudicate legal disputes, hindering enforcement while simultaneously forcing vulnerable Americans to wait years to learn if they will receive Social Security and other benefits. The Supreme Court needs to clean up a giant mess it created with an irresponsible Second Amendment decision

The Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) is a grand experiment in originalism, the idea that the only legitimate way to read the Constitution is to determine how it was understood around the time when it was drafted or ratified.

Bruen scrapped a framework the courts had used for more than a decade to decide Second Amendment cases, and replaced it with a novel new framework that required judges to ask whether gun laws are “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Among other things, Bruen ruled that, when a challenged gun law “addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century, the lack of a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem is relevant evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.”

A little more than one year after Bruen, it is now clear that this experiment with originalism is a failure. Judges simply have no idea how to conduct the sort of historical inquiry that Bruen demands. Headlines evaluating the decision warn that “Clarence Thomas Created a Confusing New Rule That’s Gutting Gun Laws” or that judges are “Confused by Supreme Court’s Historical Test for Gun Laws” or that Bruen “creates confusion over which firearm restrictions are constitutional.”

Even some lower court judges, a cohort that is typically reluctant to criticize the justices because the Supreme Court has more or less limitless power to sabotage a lower court’s decisions, have warned that Bruen is riddled with “methodological flaws” and that Bruen invites judges to cherry-pick historical sources to “fit the needs of people looking for ammunition in their causes.”

One consequence of Bruen is the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Rahimi, which struck down a federal law prohibiting individuals from “possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order.” That is, the Fifth Circuit held that people who have been determined, by a court, to be a violent threat to their romantic partner or their partner’s child have a constitutional right to own a gun.

The most alarming thing about this decision is that it is far from clear that the Fifth Circuit was wrong in Rahimi, at least if you accept Bruen as legitimate. Domestic violence certainly existed before the 19th century, but no state made assaulting one’s spouse a crime until 1871, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that a husband and wife “may be indicted for assault and battery upon each other.”

A responsible Supreme Court would recognize that Bruen is unworkable, and seize upon the Rahimi case as an opportunity to overrule it. Realistically, however, that outcome is unlikely.

That said, several of the Court’s Republican appointees have endorsed creating categorical carveouts to the Second Amendment for individuals who are potentially a threat to others. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, supports “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote, when she was still a lower court judge, that “legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns.”

It is fairly likely, in other words, that the Court will hold that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders are outside the scope of the Second Amendment — even if the justices insist on maintaining the folly that is Bruen. We may find out what the justices actually think about voting rights

One year ago, if the Supreme Court were planning to hear Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, an appeal of a lower court’s decision striking down a racially gerrymandered congressional district in South Carolina, that would have been a cause of considerable alarm for anyone who supports liberal democracy in the United States.

Until recently, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority appeared quite hostile toward the right to vote, and especially toward the right to be protected from race discrimination at the polls. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), for example, the Court’s Republicans ruled that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act violates “‘fundamental principle of equal sovereignty’ among the States,” a principle that appears nowhere in the Constitution, and that seems to have been made up solely to attack this one provision of law.

Similarly, in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the Court’s Republicans simply invented a bunch of new limits on the Voting Rights Act, such as a strong presumption that voting restrictions that were commonplace in 1982 are lawful, that appear nowhere in any law or in the Constitution. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, Brnovich “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.”

But then, last June, the Court surprised pretty much everyone who pays close attention to voting rights litigation by affirming a lower court decision that struck down a racial gerrymander in Alabama, in a case called Allen v. Milligan (2023). That decision not only reaffirmed longstanding voting rights protections that Chief Justice John Roberts has opposed for most of his career, but it is also expected to garner the Democratic Party an additional seat in the US House.

Alexander will offer another test of whether the Court has changed course from its decisions in Shelby County and Brnovich, or if Milligan was just a one-off that won’t lead to any meaningful shift in the Court’s posture toward democracy.

The Supreme Court has said that federal courts may not undo partisan gerrymanders, maps that are drawn to benefit a particular political party, but they may sometimes intervene to block racial gerrymanders — that is, maps that are drawn to diminish the voting power of voters of a particular race. In Alexander, the lower court determined that South Carolina Republicans essentially used race as a proxy to determine which voters are Democrats. They then limited the number of Black voters who would be placed within the state’s First Congressional District, in order to increase the chance that this district would elect a Republican — the First District is currently represented by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).

This map, in other words, was both a racial gerrymander and a political gerrymander.

The Supreme Court held in Cooper v. Harris (2017) that “if legislators use race as their predominant districting criterion with the end goal of advancing their partisan interests,” then that use of race is presumptively unconstitutional, even if the lawmakers were motivated by partisan goals and not by overt racism. As Cooper explained, “the sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics.”

But only five justices joined the majority opinion in Cooper, and one of them was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who Trump replaced with the conservative Barrett. So it is unclear whether this Court will still honor the rule it announced in Cooper.

In any event, after the Court’s surprising decision in the Alabama gerrymandering case, it’s difficult to predict how the Court will approach Alexander. And it is entirely possible that there will be five justices who agree that South Carolina’s racial gerrymander must be struck down. The Court could concentrate even more power within the Republican-controlled judiciary

Myriad federal laws delegate some amount of policy discretion to an agency within the executive branch of government. A 2003 federal law known as the Heroes Act, for example, gives the Secretary of Education broad authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs ... as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

This statute is the reason why the Biden administration's now-defunct plan to cancel many borrowers’ student loans was legal. It was explicitly authorized by an act of Congress.

But, of course, if you are waiting for the loan cancelation that you are legally entitled to, you’re going to have to wait a really long time. That’s because, in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), the Court’s Republican majority effectively eliminated most of the power that Congress gave to the education secretary when it passed the Heroes Act.

Nebraska relied on something known as the “major questions doctrine,” a new legal rule that was recently invented by the Supreme Court and that effectively allows the courts to veto any action by a federal agency that they deem to be too big.

By its own terms, however, this major questions doctrine only allows judges to veto agency actions involving matters of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Most policies handed down by federal agencies deal with much smaller issues than Biden’s loan forgiveness program — issues like how much nitrogen may be discharged by a wastewater treatment plant, or how to conduct hearings that determine which coal mine workers are entitled to certain disability benefits.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court will decide whether to overrule its seminal decision in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council (1984), which held that courts should defer to an agency’s reading of federal law if it is unclear whether the agency had the legal authority to promulgate a particular regulation. Chevron typically required judges to defer to policymaking decisions by agencies, regardless of whether those decisions involved major or minor questions. So decisions like Nebraska have already overruled Chevron with respect to the most consequential actions by agencies.

Loper Bright, in other words, tees up the question of whether the courts will have the final word on pretty much every policy question that Congress intended a federal agency to resolve. If Chevron is overruled, the GOP-controlled federal judiciary will gain the power to micromanage virtually any policy decision made by officials within the Biden administration, including small-bore decisions that do not fit within the so-called major questions doctrine.

As a practical matter, that would make the United States government both less democratic and less competent. The Chevron decision was grounded in two insights. One is that “judges are not experts” in the kind of specialized and technical questions that often come before federal agencies. So, if we give too much regulatory authority to judges, we’re going to wind up with a very poorly governed nation.

The other insight is that requiring unelected federal judges to defer to policy decisions made by the executive branch is more democratic than the alternative. “While agencies are not directly accountable to the people,” the Court said in Chevron, agencies answer to a president who is accountable to the voters. And so “it is entirely appropriate for this political branch of the Government to make such policy choices.” The Court could preemptively shut down wealth taxes

Ordinarily, a taxpayer’s profits on an investment are not taxed until they are “realized,” meaning that the investor has sold the investment or otherwise received the value of those profits. This rule, the Supreme Court explained in Helvering v. Horst (1940), is “founded on administrative convenience.” It is often difficult to determine how much an investment is actually worth — especially if that investment is in something other than a publicly traded company — until the investment is sold.

Delaying taxation until the taxpayer’s profits are realized eliminates the problem where neither the taxpayer nor the government can determine how much the taxpayer actually owes on an unsold investment.

That said, the tax code does currently tax some unrealized investments. Securities dealers, for example, are taxed on the unrealized gains from those securities. Certain foreign investments are also taxed prior to realization.

In Moore v. United States, the plaintiffs ask the justices to rule that the Constitution effectively forbids taxation of unrealized assets. The case was brought by investors who want a refund on taxes they paid on a foreign investment, but Moore is widely viewed as a stalking horse against the sort of wealth taxes supported by many Democrats.

Several leading Democrats, including President Joe Biden, support various proposals to tax extremely wealthy individuals on their accumulated wealth. If the Court decides to prohibit taxes on unrealized profits, however, these proposals are likely dead in the water. A terrible civil rights lawsuit could lead to some terrible civil rights law

Four decades ago, in Havens Realty v. Coleman (1982), a unanimous Supreme Court held that civil rights organizations may use “testers” to challenge discrimination by private businesses.

In Havens Realty, a civil rights organization sent two individuals, a Black person and a white person, to “test” whether two apartment complexes would discriminate on the basis of race. Sure enough, the white tester was told that the complexes had vacant apartments available, while the Black tester was allegedly lied to and told that no apartments were available.

The Constitution does not permit anyone to file a federal lawsuit unless they have been injured in some way by the defendant — a requirement known as “standing.” Havens Reality held that the Black tester had standing to sue the apartment complexes because she was allegedly treated differently than white testers, a classic case of racial discrimination.

Testers are an important part of civil rights enforcement because they can smoke out discrimination that might otherwise go undetected. Ordinarily, if a family inquires about renting an apartment and is told that none are available, they are likely to simply walk away. And, even if they suspect discrimination, how are they to prove it unless they happen to know about a family of another race that received contradictory information from the same landlord?

But this term the Court will hear a case brought by a self-described “tester,” Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, which seriously tests the limits of constitutional standing.

The plaintiff in Acheson Hotels is a woman who, according to the defendant’s brief, has “sued over 600 hotels ... claiming that they failed to post accessibility information on their websites,” in violation of a federal regulation that requires hotels to inform potential customers of whether their rooms are accessible to disabled people. (The regulation does not actually require the rooms to be accessible, but it is intended to prevent disabled patrons from booking a room and traveling to a distant town, only to learn that their room is inaccessible to them.)

Significantly, this plaintiff apparently has no intention of actually staying in any of these hotels.

As a constitutional matter, this plaintiff should not have standing to sue all of these hotels. The Supreme Court has long held that a party filing a federal lawsuit must allege a “particularized” injury, meaning that they must have been injured in some way that is specific to the plaintiff, and that is not shared in common by the general public. But the plaintiff in Acheson Hotels does not allege any kind of particularized injury. She merely alleges she is unable to find information online that is also unavailable to everyone else in the world.

That said, there is a risk that the current, very conservative Supreme Court will use Acheson Hotels not simply to hand down a narrow decision preventing this particular woman from suing any hotel in the country, but to attack the power of testers who actually experienced a legitimate injury — such as the Black tester in Havens Realty who was actually treated differently than a white tester — to file civil rights suits. We are about to learn just how dangerous the Supreme Court’s current majority really is

Let’s bring this discussion back to where it started. While the Court will hear several important cases this term that were not previously heard by the most reactionary members of the Fifth Circuit, this term will require the justices to review an alarming volume of decisions handed down by judicial arsonists.

One completely normal thing that happens when the Supreme Court moves to the right is that the mix of cases heard by the justices also lurches sharply rightward. Liberal lawyers become cautious about bringing lawsuits they are likely to lose, while conservative lawyers try to shoot the moon — raising arguments that would have no chance of prevailing before a more moderate bench.

It is also inevitable that many of these conservative moonshots will overreach, making arguments that go too far even for the likes of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Thus far, at least, most of the current justices have shown little patience for legal arguments that seek to dismantle entrenched parts of the US welfare state. Or that fundamentally threaten democracy in the United States. Or that could trigger a second Great Depression. Thus, there is good reason to think that the justices will rein in the Fifth Circuit.

But, make no mistake. The Fifth Circuit has crossed a dangerous line. And the Supreme Court must step in and correct them. Harshly.

If it does not, that would mean that the Supreme Court of the United States has been captured by a reactionary political movement that seems to be engaged in a systemic campaign to dismantle US state capacity.

For almost three years now, Republicans have defended or embraced Donald Trump’s authoritarianism — from lies about his 2020 loss to inciting an insurrection — which backfired as Americans proved unexpectedly eager to vote in defense of democracy in the 2022 elections as well as in contests this year.

But Republicans aren’t giving up — they’re going even further. To an unappreciated degree, they have responded to these electoral losses with even more flagrantly anti-democratic maneuvers all around the country.

The pattern is becoming clear: Even as voters are mobilizing to protect democracy at the ballot box, Republicans are redoubling their commitment to the former president’s anti-majoritarian mode of politics. And this, in turn, is motivating voters even more.

Call it the “MAGA doom loop.” It’s playing out in state after state.

Let’s start with Michigan, where Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 led MAGA loyalists to reshape the state Republican Party around devotion to the “big lie.” Then Democrats resoundingly captured full control of the state’s government in the 2022 midterms, in which election-deniers across the country lost races up and down the ticket.

Now, the Michigan GOP is in shambles. Just this month, the chairman again called for scrutiny of supposed 2020 fraud, prompting infighting over debunked conspiracy theories. And as the New York Times reports, the party’s descent into MAGA mania is alienating donors, draining volunteer enthusiasm and driving away swing voters. All of that will further dim Trump’s 2024 chances in this crucial battleground state.

Or take Wisconsin. The GOP-controlled state legislature is threatening to impeach state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who won her seat earlier this year by 11 points, handing liberals a majority. Democrats ran ads about protecting democracy to boost Protasiewicz, arguing that her ascent would thwart attempts to overrule the state’s 2024 outcome.

Given that this message already proved successful with Democrats and swing voters, it’s all the more striking that Republicans want to respond with impeachment. Rather than causing introspection, their landslide election loss has them dredging up comments that Protasiewicz made about abortion and gerrymandered maps during her campaign — a concern dismissed by a nonpartisan state panel — as grounds for removal.

But that absurdity aside, Democrats will surely be able to use those MAGA-approved tactics to mobilize voters against Trump and Republicans in 2024. “The threat to overturn an election through impeachment pushes MAGA attacks on democracy to the top of voters’ minds,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me.

Then there’s North Carolina, where the GOP legislature is attempting to strip Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s control over the State Board of Elections and to pass new voting restrictions. Oddly, Trump won the state in 2020, yet Republicans — who maintain supermajority control of both state chambers — justify these moves by insisting that voting was dubious anyway, apparently consumed by continued MAGA preoccupations with Trump’s defeat.

This weird disconnect has persuaded North Carolina Democrats that Republicans are worried about the sheer closeness of Trump’s 2020 margin (just over one point), leading the GOP to limit voting by Democratic-leaning constituencies.

“They know North Carolina is getting bluer and more college educated,” Morgan Jackson, a Democratic consultant in the state, said of Republicans. Trump is still heavily favored there, but Democrats can highlight these anti-democratic moves to try to hasten that evolution. “Nothing motivates our voters more,” Jackson told me.

And in Ohio, after watching numerous pro-choice ballot measures pass last cycle, state Republicans recently pushed a referendum to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution to 60 percent of votes. The tactic was rejected by a decisive majority, suffering a crushing 14-point defeat.

While Trump is still very likely to win Ohio in 2024, the dizzying MAGA doom loop can work against Republican priorities even in red states.

As former Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper shows in his book “Laboratories of Autocracy,” states have a long history of such anti-democratic retrenchment. What’s remarkable now is how they’re forging ahead even as Americans are getting more accustomed to voting in democracy’s defense.

A new analysis by Nate Cohn of the New York Times sheds some light here. Despite President Biden’s unpopularity, recent Times polling shows his surprising resilience in swing states — and Cohn suggests this partly reflects backlash against MAGA-fied state parties in these places. By embracing Trump’s efforts to nullify his loss, they are only reminding voters that democracy is once again in peril, including whether their own votes will be counted next time.

All of this syncs up with what political science tells us: Issues become salient for voters when elites talk about them a lot. That has certainly been the case with democracy and that will surely continue next year. Big events — such as Trump’s prosecution for Jan. 6, 2021-related offenses and the GOP’s continued devotion despite those criminal charges — will only reinforce what’s at stake.

“As long as the MAGA-Trump faction remains a threat to free and fair elections, a consequential slice of the electorate will continue to vote on this issue,” political scientist Lee Drutman told me.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the MAGA doom loop might keep on working its magic — all the way through 2024.

FTA:

One of the criticisms I’ve gotten in the last couple of days is, I can’t believe you’re leaving all these poor kids behind while you’re going off to a place that already has a lot of medical professionals. What I’ll say to that is, I came here and I came back here after a fellowship to dedicate my career to Louisiana. And Louisiana pushed me out.

[Emphasis mine.]