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Russia launches largest Ukraine attack
The strikes come as Moscow suffers battlefield setbacks, even as its war coffers are boosted by the conflict in the Middle East.
Investors warn of rising interest rates as inflation worries mount
A month ago, traders were betting on a 93% chance of US Federal Reserve rate cuts this year; that has now essentially flipped.
US sends more troops to Gulf, despite talk of Iran deal
The arrival of 2,000 more troops suggests that Trump is maintaining the option of escalating hostilities, even as he said talks with Iran were taking place.
Senators reach deal on capping insulin costs at $35
Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Susan Collins of Maine have spent years crafting the agreement, which has conservative and progressive clout but no Trump backing yet.
Not Even Mar-a-Lago Is Safe from the Blue Wave
Our MAGA president is now repped by a rookie Democrat!
Kat Abughazaleh on Losing, Mutual Aid, and What Comes Next
In the space of a year, Kat Abughazaleh’s campaign for Illinois’s 9th district went from internet oddity (“the first Gen Z influencer to run for Congress!”) to a movement dangerous enough to attract over $5 million in spending from AIPAC—as well as some late-stage dark-money handouts to any mercenary TikToker willing to take a snipe at Abughazaleh in 30-second increments. She lost to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss by fewer than 4,000 votes in a 14-person field. But she ran a winning campaign in at least one sense: She had a visionary idea of what a campaign can, and maybe should, be. Her organization embraced the idea that a congressional race could function as a community-building apparatus, complete with a mutual aid hub at its center, punk shows instead of donor happy hours, and livestreaming instead of call time. People who stopped by her office were able to get food, books, coats, even the overdose antagonist Narcan. Her policy positions sit at the progressive edge of the Democratic Party, but what was truly radical was the structure—a rehearsal on the stump for a whole different kind of politics in the halls of power. How are you processing your loss?I’ve spent most of the time since sleeping—catching up on a year of sleep. I still don’t fully know. I also have to get my affairs in order because I’m in debt. Not from the campaign itself, but from just having to balance the money aspect of existence while running for office when my job was a conflict of interest.That’s something people don’t talk about much—the personal financial cost of running.It’s almost impossible if you’re a working-class person. The first thing you’re asked when you run for office is how many people can you call on day one to max out [donations] to your campaign. For me, that answer was zero. Some people straight-up hung up the phone while I was trying to set up campaign infrastructure. There have been proposals to the [Federal Election Commission] to allow candidates to use campaign funds to help pay rent up to a certain point—I think that’s a fantastic idea. Running for office is already stressful, but the most stressful part for me was the financial precarity. I don’t even understand how a parent—much less a single parent—would ever be able to run for federal office. And then if you lose, you’re fucked. It leads to a Congress where the average age is 58, while the average American is 38, and where half the members are worth a million dollars or more.You closed the gap significantly in the final week. What do you think you figured out too late—or did you just leave it all on the field?I truly feel like we left it all on the field. But with another week, that’s another week of dishonest AIPAC ads, or them straight-up advertising for my progressive opponents to split the field. They had to invent new forms of rat fucking because they couldn’t win clean. I was talking to my therapist this morning, and I told her it just feels unfair—we never went after anyone’s personal life, we didn’t do any dirty tricks. She asked if I could go back, would I have done those things? And the honest answer is no. But it doesn’t make it suck less.Your campaign used mutual aid as a core organizing strategy. Explain what that actually looked like.Our office doubled as a mutual aid hub. The entire front part was filled with clothes, food, Narcan, baby formula, books, diapers—anything anyone could need. People came in every single day: first mostly the unhoused community, then a lot of undocumented folks, then low-income families. We don’t require anyone to show ID, nothing. They take what they need and go. And often they come back and bring things other people can use.For those unfamiliar: Mutual aid isn’t charity. It’s the idea of you give what you can and you take what you need. Especially in immigrant and Black and brown communities, people have been doing this forever to support each other outside the structures our government has created—because so many programs allegedly intended to help people just create more and more hurdles to access that help.How did that connect to actual voter engagement?A lot of people feel helpless watching our slide into fascism, and they don’t want to doomscroll. So we said: Come with us to clean up a park, knit hats during a cold snap, fold clothes for kids in the community. It gave people an outlet. The volunteer numbers were huge. We increased voter turnout. We won McHenry County—the only part of the Chicagoland area that’s voted Trump the last three elections—outright. Young white men, minority communities, low-income people, students: Those were our people.When I covered extremism, one thing you see over and over is that the number one driver of right-wing radicalization is a scarcity mindset. When people’s material needs aren’t met, they’re far more likely to align with someone who says: “Be scared, and the answer is hating your neighbor.” Fear is playing politics on easy mode. It’s the most primal human emotion we have. Mutual aid is a direct counter to that.What do you want other campaigns to take from what you built?Mutual aid, obviously. But also ditching call time. Call time is the worst thing in the world—the candidates hate it, the people getting the calls hate it, and it inherently relies on oligarchy to function because you are calling rich people and begging them for money. We replaced it with livestreaming, and it was the single best thing for my mental health on this campaign. Every candidate I know is wildly jealous of it. When you ask why campaigns still do call time, the answer is: That’s how it’s always been. That’s never a good enough reason.What difference do you think this campaign actually made?Just proving that good things are possible. So much of what we did was actively laughed at by the establishment—the mutual aid hub, the punk shows instead of fancy happy hours, ditching call time for livestreaming. And it worked anyway. In America, we fetishize misery. We treat suffering like a virtue, and it’s not. We live in the wealthiest country in the world. We don’t have to live like this. If we could open that idea for even some people—that they deserve good things, that we can expect more from our representatives—that’s a big deal. Breaking that norm helps other people break those norms too.What’s next for you?We’re trying to figure out how to scale the mutual aid model—not just keeping our hub going but offering it as almost a pilot program for voter turnout to candidates across the country, especially at the state and local level. A lot of people running have already reached out asking for advice on working with 501(c)(3)s, making events accessible, keeping the barrier to entry low. We want this to be the expectation, not the exception.And tonight? It’s my birthday. I’m going to go sing karaoke with my friends.
A Simple Way to Make Housing Cheaper Is Languishing in the GOP House
The House of Representatives is sitting on bipartisan legislation sent to it by the Senate that could potentially help solve the housing affordability crisis. But Republican leadership is too busy trying to make it harder for some Americans to vote.The housing bill, which passed 89–10, aims to make home building faster and cheaper, in the hope that increased supply will drive down the costs of renting and buying. Among the provisions is one that waives a seemingly obscure requirement: Manufactured homes—as the industry refers to what are commonly known as mobile homes—would no longer have to be built on a steel chassis, an outdated requirement left over from a time when these homes were truly meant to be mobile.Manufactured homes are already built at about half the cost of homes constructed on-site, and waiving the requirement would make them even cheaper. It could also pave the way for more multifamily projects built from manufactured homes. But first, the bill has to pass the House, where it has stalled amid pressure from President Donald Trump to pass the SAVE Act, the GOP’s desperate bid to suppress voter turnout ahead of the fall midterm elections.“No one gives a [expletive] about housing,” Trump allegedly told House Majority Leader Mike Johnson earlier this month. Ironically, better and cheaper access to manufactured homes could help Republican voters the most.Almost all economists and policymakers agree that the country needs more homes, both single and multifamily, for home prices and rents to become more affordable. The lack of supply isn’t the only reason housing costs are increasingly out of reach for many low-income, working-class, and even middle-class families, but it is a big one.“Manufactured homes” refers to those built according to a national standard set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They’re built in a factory, on a permanent steel chassis, with electrical and plumbing already installed. These are often the familiar single- and double-wide trailers that in the past might have been truly mobile, moving from one park to another as families looked for seasonal work or better opportunities. But today the vast majority of manufactured homes sold in the United States spend their lives on one plot of land. That became especially true after building standards were modified and updated in 1994, which made the homes safer, higher quality, and more expensive—and thus more appealing as a permanent housing option. If the bipartisan housing bill becomes law, manufactured homes would no longer need to use a steel chassis for structure; instead, they could be transported on a removable steel chassis and attached to a foundation on-site, and the chassis could be reused for the next delivery. (The bill doesn’t require that the chassis be removed. Some families could choose to keep them if they wanted a truly mobile home.) Removing this requirement could save buyers anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, a significant amount for homes that cost an average of $88,500 for single-wides and $152,900 for double-wides, according to Rocket Mortgage.But the bigger potential impact might be that it makes it easier to build multilevel manufactured homes or homes with different designs. That could open up more possibilities to multifamily housing built off-site quickly, or more innovative, energy-efficient designs.Laurie Goodman, of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said removing the chassis requirement would also allow modular homes, which are now mostly built in factories but aren’t finished with plumbing and electrical work, to count as manufactured homes under the national standard. Modular homes, which come in many sizes and designs, currently are considered on-site builds, and can’t be completely finished before delivery, she said. Today they must meet state and local requirements, which can slow down their construction and limit their market reach. With the elimination of the steel chassis requirement, modular homes could fall under the same national standard as manufactured homes do. “I think it does fundamentally change the economics for modular construction, so I think it has a big impact there,” she said.Homes built in factories can be built quickly, and the controlled environment allows for better quality control and access to year-round labor and better materials. (That’s especially important for rural areas, where manufactured homes are already relied on and where those resources may be lacking.) Making them cheaper and easier to build could inspire more competition, which could help them overcome their historically bad reputation for being cheaply made. If these homes become more appealing, and perhaps incorporate more higher-end materials, they could spread to new markets. That will especially be true if the loosened rules allow foreign competitors to enter the U.S. market.“Manufactured homes definitely have an unduly negative reputation in the United States compared to Japan, where they are often considered premium products and have higher tech and can be turned around extraordinarily rapidly,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, an economist and founder and CEO of Blue Lotus Strategies. “So the performance and durability in light of the strict Japanese building and zoning requirements have also contributed to their highly positive reputation in Japan.”The new factory-finished homes would also allow for more design potential, which means neighbors might be happier to see them on empty spots of land. “You can start building homes that don’t stand out for the reason that they appear to have been manufactured, but instead stand out because they look innovative, highly functional, including the energy efficiency, resistance to hurricanes, because they’re put down properly in the right foundation and are built with potentially even higher-quality materials,” Dutta-Gupta said. “Especially if there is a savings here from relaxing this requirement from the steel chassis, then that money could also be put back into higher-quality windows, exteriors, interiors, et cetera.”Of course, none of this would solve all the problems with using manufactured homes to help increase supply. These homes have historically been difficult to finance. Some families choose personal property loans to buy them because they don’t have good enough credit for a home mortgage, but some states treat manufactured homes more like personal property for titling and tax purposes—like a car rather than real estate. That can mean families spend more than they need to on loan payments because they don’t have access to traditional 30-year mortgages, or struggle to keep up with maintenance because it’s harder to borrow to make repairs.“Unfortunately for manufactured housing, sometimes it can be much more difficult to get financing, like home equity lines of credit and loans in order to, say, fix the roof, or a water heater, or something like that,” Rachel Siegel of the Pew Charitable Trusts said. Manufactured homes’ reputation for poor quality may stem in part from building standards, but “some of it is access to credit, when credit’s needed to be able to keep these homes up and ensure that they stay in good shape,” she said.State and local zoning laws also pose obstacles, as do objections from neighbors to new or unfamiliar developments. But some states, like Kentucky, have passed laws requiring municipalities to treat manufactured homes like any other single-family home. Convincing people to accept them as such undoubtedly will take longer.In the end, increased access to modular and manufactured homes might be the best solution for rural areas, where such homes are common already, and smaller, less dense cities where building a giant apartment tower wouldn’t make sense—in other words, places where Republicans are either in power or at least are politically competitive. Contrary to Trump, everyone in America—not just those living in expensive blue cities—gives a shit about housing. If the GOP doesn’t pass this bill, it may find that out the hard way.
Where Do Conservative Supreme Court Justices Get Their Information?
Thirteen years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia gave an unusually candid interview with New York magazine’s Jennifer Senior. (Candid by the standards of Supreme Court justices, that is, not by Scalia’s standards.) The then dean of the court’s conservative wing discussed Richard Nixon, sex discrimination, and the metaphysical existence of Satan, among other things.Perhaps the most enlightening topic was the justice’s media diet. “Where do you get your news?” Senior asked. “Well, we get newspapers in the morning,” Scalia replied. “I usually skim them. We just get The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times. We used to get The Washington Post, but it just … went too far for me. I couldn’t handle it anymore.”The Journal, at the time, had the most prominent conservative editorial board among major newspapers, while the Times had an even more right-wing reputation. What’s wrong with the Post, Senior asked? “It was the treatment of almost any conservative issue,” Scalia explained. “It was slanted and often nasty. And, you know, why should I get upset every morning? I don’t think I’m the only one. I think they lost subscriptions partly because they became so shrilly, shrilly liberal.”Scalia went on to explain that he got most of his news on the radio while driving back and forth to work. “Sometimes NPR,” he said, “but not usually.” His favorite radio program was by his “good friend” Bill Bennett, a prominent conservative pundit and former Reagan Cabinet member. “He has a wonderful talk show,” Scalia explained. “It’s very thoughtful. He has good callers. I think they keep off stupid people.”That glimpse into how Scalia, one of the country’s most powerful people at the time, formed his daily worldview came to mind for me during Monday’s oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee. The case involves a GOP legal challenge to a Mississippi election law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received by the state up to five days later. More than two dozen other states have similar laws.The basic legal question—whether federal election laws preempt the Mississippi law and require ballots to be received on or before Election Day itself—is an important one for the upcoming 2026 midterms, and for future U.S. elections where voters can participate by mail. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the court’s conservative justices appear to either not understand how American elections work or actively believe in conspiracy theories surrounding them. It raises significant questions about where the justices get their information.Justice Samuel Alito led the charge. In a somewhat muddled question, he asked Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stuart whether it was “legitimate for us to take into account Congress’s desire—Congress’s passage of the Election Day statutes for the purposes of combating fraud or the appearance of fraud.” There is no indication that Congress enacted those statutes for that reason; Alito has a long history of reading his own policy preferences into federal election laws.In the same breath, Alito also cited friend-of-the-court briefs that claimed “confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome of the election [on] the day after the polls close is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash of ballots that flip the election.” Though couched in the terms of submitted briefs, Alito was making an unambiguous reference to election-fraud theories around recent presidential elections.This phenomenon is known as the “blue shift” or the “red mirage,” depending on whom you ask. It is rooted in a basic fact of election administration: Votes that are cast on Election Day are typically counted very quickly, while votes that are counted by mail take longer to count. This is particularly true when states allow ballots that are postmarked by Election Day to be counted for a certain number of days afterward, as in this case.Only in 2016 did this dynamic become politically significant. Trump had a thin lead in the popular vote on election night that year, which turned into a three-million vote lead for Clinton within a few weeks. The president-elect’s response to this public repudiation was to falsely claim that it was the result of fraudulent or illegally cast ballots in some states. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he wrote on Twitter.Four years later, the Covid-19 pandemic upended election administration across the country. Multiple states changed their laws to allow more widespread use of mail-in ballots. Trump, anticipating his potential defeat, spent the run-up to the election spreading misinformation about mail-in ballots. His apparent plan was to declare victory after taking an early lead before all votes could be counted, then mount spurious legal challenges to mail-in ballots in court in the hope of maintaining it.That plan fell apart, however, when Fox News election experts called Arizona for Biden on election night and demolished his hopes of proclaiming an early victory. (Whether this plan would have worked anyway is also doubtful, since Trump’s postelection lawsuits were consistently rejected by the courts.) Trump spent the postelection period claiming that he lost because of fraudulent mail-in ballots. He has renewed that crusade since retaking office, as well, even though he personally votes by mail in Florida.One of the conservative legal establishment’s main goals when filtering through prospective judicial nominees is finding ones who will resist what they call the “Greenhouse effect.” The mildly clever term refers to the now-retired New York Times legal reporter Linda Greenhouse and the perception among some legal conservatives that certain moderate justices were motivated by favorable press coverage. Some commentators have taken it more literally, as Patrick Buchanan complained in a 2008 column about John Paul Stevens and the death penalty.This is the effect on aging and weak-minded Republican justices, like Harry Blackmun, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and John Paul Stevens, of the lure of fawning publicity, if they will but recant their convictions and embrace the agenda of the left.The Faustian bargain these justices are offered is favorable media, comparisons to great liberal jurists of yesterday like Louis Brandeis and Hugo Black, and repeated references to how they have “evolved,” and “grown,” and are being accorded a strange “new respect.”When they accept such media favors, these justices, nominated by Republican presidents to restore constitutionalism to the court, begin to receive ovations at establishment dinners and turn up on the most desirable party lists. Where once they were the “clones of Scalia,” suddenly, they are jurists of “independent thought.”While there was no evidence to support this perception, legal conservatives strongly believe this story. As a result, they have gone to great lengths to create their own counter-establishment of sorts to push Republican judicial appointees in the other direction. Those who toe the line, so to speak, are feted at annual Federalist Society galas in D.C. or met with approving public remarks by conservative legal columnists and scholars. When the Smithsonian opened its museum on African American history a decade ago, Republicans sharply criticized it for not paying sufficient tribute to Justice Clarence Thomas alongside Justice Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first Black justice and a titanic figure of the civil rights era.Conservative justices who stray from orthodoxy, on the other hand, are met with stern rebukes. Legal conservatives have never really forgiven Chief Justice John Roberts for voting to uphold the Affordable Care Act, despite his many other achievements for their cause. Justice Neil Gorsuch also received immense blowback for writing a majority opinion in 2022 that extended federal workplace-discrimination protections to gay and transgender Americans. Justice Amy Coney Barrett has also received an outsize share of criticism for perceived ideological slippage. To be a member of the conservative legal elite is to constantly have to prove and re-prove your bona fides to a social circle that lives in constant fear of the next David Souter.Alito, to my knowledge, has never given Americans a Scalian glimpse into his preferred news sources. But it is worth noting that right-wing media outlets are often awash in spurious claims about voter fraud in particular and vote-by-mail in general. Leading Trumpworld figures like Steve Bannon have used conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants casting fraudulent votes by mail to justify draconian restrictions on the polls, all in an effort to suppress and intimidate Democratic voters ahead of the 2026 midterms.A good way to tell that these voter-fraud fears are unfounded is that Trump and his allies never point to relevant examples of it. Paul Clement, the lawyer who represented the Republican National Committee, could only draw upon distant historical anecdotes in passing. “Postmarks have their own problems,” he claimed at one point, noting that in Illinois, it is possible to get a letter postmarked after polls close at 8 p.m. local time. “Now I’m not here to say that there could ever be voting fraud in Chicago,” he quipped, to mild laughter, in an apparent reference to rumors about the 1960 presidential election.Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the four justices who are younger than that joke, echoed Alito’s concerns by invoking a brief submitted by NYU law professor Richard Pildes, who argued on policy grounds that states should not accept otherwise lawful ballots after Election Day. To do so, Kavanaugh suggested, would “destabilize the election results.”“If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing due to late-arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode,” Pildes had argued in the relevant passage quoted by Kavanaugh. “The longer after Election Day any significant changes in vote totals take place, the greater the risk that the losing side will cry that the election has been stolen.” Kavanaugh then asked whether that claim should “factor into how we think about how to resolve the scant text and the maybe conflicting or evolving history here?”Stewart replied that while he “respect[s] the perception,” it was “helpful” for his case that “there has not been much of a showing about actual fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt itself.” Kavanaugh was not deterred by that obstacle. “Well, I think Justice Alito referred to and I think this quote refers to the appearance of fraud,” he persisted. “And is that a real concern? Is that something we should be thinking about, confidence in the election process?” (Ironically, the high court no longer places much weight, if any, on lawmakers’ concerns about the appearance of corruption when drafting campaign finance laws.)Gorsuch went in an even more fanciful direction. He raised a hypothetical where a “large portion” of a state electorate mails in their ballots on or around Election Day. “Then the day after the election, a story breaks that one of the lead candidates engaged in an inappropriate sexual escapade or perhaps is concluding [sic] with a foreign power,” he continued. “Again, not far-fetched, I think. And the competing candidate immediately goes on the airwaves and urges voters to recall their ballots and to tell the common carriers not to deliver them.“And many common carriers will do that with anything that you send through them,” Gorsuch claimed. “FedEx, you just call them up and say I want it back. In that hypothetical, did the election happen on Election Day? Oh, by the way, it swings the election.” Stewart explained that, in his view, the election still happened on Election Day. “When somebody submits their ballot by mail, it’s final.” He also noted, much more relevantly, that Mississippi does not allow ballot recalls.It is unclear whether Mississippi’s law is doomed or whether the court will hand down a seismic and suppressive change to mail-in voting. While Thomas also appeared skeptical of voting by mail, Roberts and Barrett asked more ambiguous questions that did not clearly tip their hand. The court’s three liberal justices, for their part, took no issue with the law in question and sharply criticized Clement’s arguments against it. Another important caveat is that oral arguments can be an imperfect guide for how the Supreme Court will ultimately decide a case. Sometimes justices ask questions and raise hypotheticals that do not actually represent their views on the matter before them, often to test weaknesses in each side’s argument. But their questions can still be revelatory enough at times to be concerning.During oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the infamous “presidential immunity” case, Alito asked another slightly too specific hypothetical question about the dangers of not granting immunity to presidents. “Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement,” he asked, “but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”That was, despite Alito’s denials, an unambiguous reference to Trump’s own refusals to cede power. It reads like a justification for granting him immunity: If he knows he won’t be imprisoned for his crimes after leaving office, maybe he won’t try to carry out another coup attempt like the one on January 6, 2021. This is an absurd, lawless argument—and it also formed the unspoken rationale behind the court’s eventual decision to invent presidential immunity for Trump.There are persistent rumors (and a very real book release slated for October of this year) that suggest the 75-year-old Alito is planning to retire at the end of this term, thereby allowing Trump to choose his successor and maintain the conservatives’ grip on the high court. Senate Democrats can’t do much to stop their Republican colleagues from confirming a nominee to replace Alito if he steps aside before the midterms. If there is a confirmation hearing this year, I hope that one of the senators asks about the nominee’s media diet.What newspapers and magazines do you read? What news channels do you watch? What about digital media? A Supreme Court nominee won’t tell the Senate anything specific about how they’d rule in future cases. But we might learn a lot about them by learning which sources of information they trust to inform and influence their view of the world—and how susceptible they are to misinformation and propaganda.
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