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Quick hits from the Mother Jones newsroom

  • Fox News Is Screaming About “Pallets” of Baby Formula Going to the Border. Too Bad Its “Evidence” Is Flawed.

    May 13, 2022

    Okay, deep breath in…deep breath out. I just watched the videos compiled in this Twitter thread showing how Fox News has taken the baby formula shortage as yet another opportunity to paint migrants and asylum seekers as the enemy who’s coming for you. But this time it’s migrant babies. Let me repeat: migrant babies.

    A key part to their “coverage” is what Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fl.) tweeted this week—photos of what she said were “pallets and pallets” of baby formula at Border Patrol holding facilities. Cammack says the images her office has been circulating came from a Border Patrol agent, and now Fox News has been playing them in many shows over the last two days, saying “illegal immigrants are getting top priority” and receiving the baby formula that American parents are unable to find. 

    There are two things I’d like to point out after watching these videos. 

    First, it’s hard to stomach listening to people on national TV say infants in US government custody should go hungry because they weren’t born here. These are babies with desperate mothers who are currently detained in jail-like facilities, and the government has the responsibility to feed them because they can’t leave to purchase their own formula, something immigrant rights experts, among others, have already said on social media.

    Second, from what I can see, the images don’t exactly show pallets full of just baby formula. One of the images Cammack’s office shared shows a fully stocked shelf with baby formula, sandwiched between shelves of fruit pouches.

    And there are a couple other images making their rounds around MAGA world, and appearing on Hannity—The ones with all the supposed “pallets” of baby formula.

    But from what I can see, the images showing pallets and shelves with dozens and dozens of cans are not baby formula, they’re cans of NIDO, which is a milk substitute for toddlers. Assuming these photos show what storage rooms currently look like in a Border Patrol holding facility, most of what anti-immigrant pundits and politicians are freaking out about is milk substitute for kids one year or older, not baby formula. 

    I’m not the only one noticing this. 

    I did a quick search for the NIDO cans in the viral photos and it looks like you can buy them at multiple online and in-store retailers. These are not part of the infant formula shortages. 

    It’s important to note that the last couple months have been stressful for parents who have been having an increasingly hard time finding formula for their babies. The panic is real, and not all infants can easily switch between brands, especially those who need specialized formula. But the shortage has gotten to this point for multiple reasons that have nothing to do with migrant children. 

    That doesn’t seem to matter much to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the National Border Patrol Council (the Border Patrol union), which released a joint statement yesterday saying the Biden administration was “happy to provide baby formula to illegal immigrants coming across our southern border,” as the shortage continues in the United States. 

  • Biden’s Actions to Address the Baby Formula Shortage Are Encouraging. But They’re Not Enough.

    May 13, 2022

    ANTHONY BEHAR/AP

    President Biden on Thursday spoke to the leading manufacturers of baby formula amid deep frustration and panic from caretakers over the nationwide shortage, announcing additional measures from the administration aimed at alleviating the current emergency. These include allowing vulnerable families who rely on WIC benefits to purchase from a wider variety of formula options and cracking down on price-gouging.

    It’s an encouraging step forward. The shortage, a potentially life-threatening scenario for countless infants, had received little attention from lawmakers on either side of the aisle. (Until this week, many seemed wholly unaware that a shortage even existed.) But while it’s a relief to see the White House recognizing the urgency of the situation, the new actions appear limited and do little to answer the most pressing question looming over families right now: when we can start seeing empty shelves replenished. 

    As a new mother who relies on formula to feed her seven-month-old, I couldn’t help but scratch my head at some of the announced proposals. For example, the administration indicated that it’s talking to foreign trading partners over potential imports. But 98 percent of formula is domestically produced. The popular formula brands in Europe are also not allowed to be sold in the States and are highly discouraged by pediatricians. I know because after buying the European brand Holle in the initial days of my son’s life—when the pressure to bring him back to birth weight made breastfeeding incredibly difficult for me—I was immediately instructed not to use it because it wasn’t FDA approved. I’m thankful, amid this shortage, that I never binned it and wouldn’t hesitate to use it should my current supply of FDA-approved formula vanishes.

    The announcement to increase the number of formula products that can be used under WIC is crucial and is sure to be welcomed by low-income families who have been unnecessarily burdened by the program’s restrictions. But the administration, as demonstrated by Thursday’s White House press briefing, still doesn’t appear to have a sufficient response for caretakers struggling to secure formula that go beyond referring to a doctor. While calling up the pediatrician could bring answers for some—though I struggle to believe that they’re in a position to hand out tons of formula at this point—plenty of vulnerable families lack the health insurance to turn to a pediatrician.

    I still have to wonder how much of the current shortage could have been prevented if the government had stepped in earlier. After all, the out-of-stock rate for baby formula started rising in early 2021, only to get significantly worse by the summer. Between November and April 2022, the rate jumped to a staggering 31 percent. 

    Here’s to hoping that we see additional measures announced soon.

  • The Senate Just Voted Not to Codify Abortion Rights

    May 11, 2022

    J. Scott Applewhite/AP

    The Senate’s last ditch effort at codifying abortion rights has failed with a 51–49 vote.

    The plan was doomed from the start, since Democrats lacked the 60 votes needed to enact the legislation. All 50 Republicans, including the purportedly pro-choice Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME), voted not to proceed with the measure. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) crossed party lines to vote against it.

    Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) actually tried to argue today that Republicans could seize the rollback of abortion rights as an opportunity to expand social safety nets for children and mothers. There’s a glaring problem with this: Republicans have almost uniformly objected to any policy that would actually make parents’ lives easier, from paid family leave to universal pre-K.

    “What resources are [states] prepared to provide to support these women and the children they’ll bear?” Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) said today. “The answer, we know—and I fear—is none.”

  • This Is What Happens When Private Equity Takes Over Your Soccer Team

    May 11, 2022

    Burnley player falling

    A proper football man of Burnley Football Club.Imago/Zuma Press

    Burnley Football Club is not one of the planet’s great soccer powers. Over the last decade-and-a-half the Lancashire-based squad has gone back and forth between the bottom half of the English Premier League—the world’s best domestic league—and the country’s second division, which is, for reasons not worth getting into, called the Championship. The team’s style of play is grass-stained, low-scoring, and deeply frustrating. Their nickname is “The Clarets.” Their field is called Turf Moor. Their manager, until he was fired quite recently for reasons I will get to, had the look of a man who would glass you at the pub if you spoke ill of the pea wet. But he was actually a nice enough guy, by most accounts, and Burnley has been more competent for a while than they really ought to be.

    Now that you’re all caught up on what Burnley is, let’s talk about why it’s screwed. For a long time, English soccer teams—especially ones in small cities with names like “The Clarets”—were not especially great investments for people looking to make money. The profit margins weren’t huge and were often non-existent, and the system of demoting the worst teams every year means that it is actually possible for a club to fail. The Premier League sends the three worst teams down to the Championship at the end of the season. The Championship does the same to its bottom three teams. And so on. In English leagues, you don’t get to just kind of putter around for a while hoarding draft picks until you find the right formula. If you don’t win, you go down, and you take a massive hit in your revenues, which come from TV rights. Up until 2020, Burnley’s chairman was a guy named Mike Garlick, who grew up near Turf Moor and ran a successful job-recruitment consulting firm. He was the 19th-richest owner in a 20-team league at one point—sort of the Burnley of owners.

    Related

    How Private Equity Looted America

    But as the Premier League’s revenues and stature have grown, it’s become a destination for genuine global wealth. Middle-Eastern petro-states, Russian oligarchs, and NFL owners all bought clubs. And as with every other asset class these days, from dentist offices to prisons to single-family homes, you can also find a private equity firm sniffing around. In 2020, Garlick and another minority owner, John Banaszkiewicz, agreed to sell their stake in Burnley to a firm called ALK Capital, which was helmed by a Citi alum named Alan Pace. Many fans were optimistic about the deal, hoping that a new injection of cash would give the team more money to spend on on-field talent.

    That’s not what’s happened, though. The takeover was a classic leveraged buyout. When ALK took over the club, it did so in a way that depleted the team’s cash reserves to pay off the old owners, and then saddled the club with massive loan debt. Burnley effectively paid for its own takeover on the predication of its future value. As The Guardian’s David Conn reported last year:

    Sources with knowledge of the deal did, however, confirm some essential elements: the initial payments to Garlick, Banaszkiewicz and the other sellers have been financed with a loan from MSD UK Holdings, the investment firm of the US tech magnate Michael Dell, said to be approximately £60m. The loan is charged like a mortgage on Turf Moor and the club itself, which will have to repay it from its own revenues, with interest at a rate ALK has not yet publicly stated.

    This is not really how you or I might envision “buying things,” but it’s a perfectly normal kind of private-equity deal. In the best-case version of the industry, this new management would unlock new sources of revenue and efficiencies. But Burnley now faces the worst-case scenario: relegation and demotion to a lower league. This is, in effect, what happens with many PE takeovers: The promise of loading a company up with debt against the idea that financial gurus will create greater returns and results (or, in this case, continue pulling off the heroic feat of staying in the Premier League) is running up against the fact that that is actually pretty hard to do.

    Now, though, the stakes for Burnley going down are much higher. Since the club is already loaded up with debt it could put them in a real danger zone—that way lies more relegations, bankruptcy, and receivership; you look up one day and you’re at the bottom tier, kicking off in a cow pasture against Cockermouth FC. And Burnley’s arrangement, as it happens, is actually written in ways that raise the stakes of relegation. According to The Athletic, if the team is relegated, the loan repayment timeline accelerates, “with a significant proportion of the capital loan value required shortly after the end of the football season.”

    As Conn noted, other American owners have taken similar approaches to Premier League teams. The Glazer family, which owns the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, saddled Manchester United with huge debts in order to finance its own takeover, and the club has since had to make £1 billion in various payments related to that debt. Fans have literally taken to the streets to protest the Glazers. But while United hasn’t been as successful under the Glazers as it was before the Glazers, it is still one of the biggest brands in global sports; you can see why investors considered it as an asset worth mining. Burnley, as we’ve discussed, is Burnley. Short of a takeover by, like, the sovereign wealth fund of Hell, that’s never going to change.

    Competing against some of the world’s richest and most successful clubs, Burnley’s margin for error has always been small, and this edition of the team has been putrid, hovering around the relegation zone all year. Last month, the chairman from ALK finally fired the club’s longtime manager, leading to a brief flurry of strong performances. It still might not be enough to stay up.

    Burnley’s private-equity ownership did come up with one new source of cash though—last year they announced that they were teaming up with a blockchain company to produce a new “publicly traded digital security token” fans could own. “We’re excited to get our supporters involved on a whole new level,” Pace said in a statement at the time. 

    But maybe don’t put your retirement savings into Burnley-coin just yet. The tokens’ value, the team announced, would be linked to “club revenues.”

  • Elon Musk Says It Was a “Mistake” to Ban Trump’s Twitter

    May 10, 2022

    Joe Maiorana/AP

    Today, Elon Musk, who is set to take over Twitter, said that it had been a “mistake” to ban Donald Trump’s account. The 45th president, you’ll recall, was permanently banned from the platform following the January 6 insurrection, which he couldn’t stop egging on with his usual array of Oddly Capitalized Posts.

    “I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme,” Musk said of the ban during an event hosted by the Financial Times, the Washington Post reported.

    “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” the Tesla founder added. “I think that was a mistake. … It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”

    Since his expulsion, Trump has tried to create buzz around his new social media empire, the poorly named TruthSocial. It’s not going great. Still, Trump has sworn that he’s dedicated to it and won’t be returning to Twitter, regardless of an invite from Musk. We’ll see how long that lasts. Meanwhile, former advisers have actually described it as a good thing that Trump is no longer on Twitter because, in theory, it took some spotlight off his characteristic unhinged behavior.

    Anyway, I’m curious about what Musk thinks of Trump’s persistent efforts to claim that the presidential election had been stolen from him, especially after the violence of January 6, and what that could mean for a free speech platform. (I once attempted to ask Henry Kissinger, who the FT also interviewed this week, with no response.)

    In any case, it sounds like it’s time to welcome back Trump tweets. As always, sorry to the haters and losers.

  • Men Are Offering Quick Solutions to the Baby Formula Shortage. Surprise, They’re Wrong.

    May 10, 2022

    Orbon Alija/Getty

    Since I published my thoughts on the nationwide baby formula shortage, dozens of women have replied to share their struggles, many expressing deep frustration over the lack of attention the crisis has received. I’ve been moved by these anecdotes, and also genuinely appreciative of those who admitted to not having known about the shortage until this week. It turns out most of Congress, the people who should know better, hadn’t heard of it either.

    Men have also offered solutions. A few appeared kind and sympathetic in their curiosity over whether I had tried this or that. But far more comments featured snark that smacked of ignorance on how to keep a baby alive for more than a handful of hours at a time. That’s on top of the angry tweets I received over daring to ask what more the Biden administration could do to alleviate the crisis. While I’m not sure what to tell people who apparently have more concern for the feelings of the man in the White House than the countless families struggling amid a crisis, I can outline three of the biggest misconceptions that have come my way:

    Switch brands

    A popular suggestion in the wake of the formula shortage has been to simply readjust one’s preferred brand. But any caretaker of a newborn will know, with searing intimacy, that switching formula risks introducing a host of side effects ranging from increased fussiness to serious digestive issues like bloody stools and severe constipation—particularly if your young one has underlying health issues that require specialized formulas. I experienced this firsthand when my son was first learning to fart, maybe a month or two into an already exhausting breastfeeding journey. The piercing screams as Owen tried to pass gas—which came suddenly and always at 2 in the morning—will never leave me. At first, I attempted to eliminate dairy from my diet out of fear that the breastmilk, already so precious to me, was now a potential culprit. After one harried appointment at the pediatrician’s office, where we were told that this was, unfortunately, par for the course and that we should probably just stick to our routine, my husband and I swiftly ignored that advice. We drove to Target and blindly snatched up any can labeling itself as a tummy salve. But the process of formula experimenting made things infinitely worse, and we soon turned to something called a “gas passer”—a plastic tube we’d stick into the butthole of a furious, wailing baby until, by god’s good grace, a sludge of green to yellow poop barreled into our hands. The screaming would stop—until the next night. Eventually, we returned to our first formula brand.

    Use regular milk

    Why can’t babies just man up and drink normal milk? Any pediatrician will tell you that that’s just wrong; cow’s milk, when introduced before the recommended 12-month mark, can lead to serious issues like intestinal bleeding, and contains far too many proteins and minerals for an infant’s kidneys to manage. Plus, the milk you and I drink doesn’t contain anywhere close to the number of nutrients needed for an infant to thrive. So I was startled at how many, again almost always men, have pointed to cow’s milk as a viable solution for the current shortage. One even proudly shared that his grandmother had fed her seven children goat’s milk, so what’s the problem? It’s pretty damning for men to be pushing cow’s milk as a substitute for formula, only to reveal just how removed from the process of caretaking they are. 

    Shop on Amazon

    So far, I’ve been relatively successful at purchasing our preferred brand of formula on the internet. But that’s far from a guarantee as the shortage gets worse. Nor is it a common, widely shared experience. In fact, since writing on the formula shortage, many have shared their frustrations around getting shipments suddenly canceled, repeatedly pushed back, and left scrambling jumping from chain to chain in order to secure food for their infants. Still, some men seem woefully unaware of these hardships, as well as the fact that the online marketplaces are rife with price-gouging. (Dudes, did you even try buying sanitizer on Amazon in March 2020?) Offering the internet as a kind of obvious solution, as if people with the means hadn’t already thought of that, also willfully ignores whole swaths of the population that simply don’t have the access. Now, imagine with me a world where we saw beyond our individual circumstances. For some of the men hiding in my mentions right now, that seems to be an awfully tall order. 

  • Why Isn’t Biden Doing More to Address the Baby Formula Shortage?

    May 9, 2022

    Paul Hennessy/ZUMA

    It surprises me too, but damn it, I’ve got to agree with Tom Cotton here.

    The Republican senator from Arkansas is normally poor at defining crises. Some of his favorites: immigration, Black Lives Matter protests, defense of the filibuster. But, on the current crisis surrounding the lack of baby formula across the country, Cotton is right. The government needs to take action.

    Haven’t heard of the shortage? It’s nothing short of a disaster. 40 percent of formula stock has vanished. Fueled by persistent supply-chain issues and a recent recall from Abbott (one of the four biggest manufacturers of baby formula), retailers are starting to limit how much you can buy if you do happen to stumble upon a rare stash. I can say anecdotally that friends are panicking. At the risk of exposing myself as a pandemic hoarder, I’ll admit to recently buying five more cans than necessary out of fear that I’ll soon have to start regularly bidding on eBay in order to feed my 7-month-old son. That’s on top of relentless Covid dodging for the sake of my unvaccinated roommate (my baby) and flailing as a new parent in general.

    For many women, breastfeeding is simply not an option. Some experience medical issues, which are common and wide ranging. For countless others, breastfeeding is an acute struggle that can make an already difficult post-partum journey infinitely more arduous. So, it shouldn’t be a tough thing to understand that most babies in the United States are not exclusively breastfed. Yet the ignorance is laid bare when people, particularly men, still reflexively point to the method as a kind of obvious solution to our current nationwide formula shortage.

    It’s against this backdrop that the crisis doesn’t feel as though it’s receiving the kind of urgency with which parents are having to drive from Target to CVS to Walmart on any given day in search of a basic need (food) for their babies. Sure, it’s making a few headlines. But you’d think that babies on the brink of going hungry would give way to a giant federal response. Lawmakers demanding action. Everyday updates. 

    I can’t help but think that isn’t the case simply because the shortage reads like a Woman’s Problem. As Jia Tolentino wrote in a terrific Mother’s Day essay, “the further you are from essential labor, the easier it is to forget, or never grasp, the worth and honor in that work.” The misguided notion that a woman could simply turn on her left breast like a kind of free-flowing spigot, coupled with a blanket ignorance of the basic understandings of how babies literally stay alive, is frankly embarrassing. But that’s the logical dead end to a society where, “the social and political potential of parenting is largely erased by this privatized vision of motherhood,” as Tolentino describes.

    Still, ignorance is no excuse for inaction, particularly from those who know better. A failure to address an everyday struggle affecting countless parents, caregivers, and of course, literal humans who by definition rely on others for their basic needs is bound to give credence to the notion, fair or not, that life under the Biden administration just isn’t working out. That it sucks, that we’re living the ramifications of inflation, and the government seems a bit too chill about it. These emotions, whether rooted in fact or fiction, are the kinds of things people will remember this November when they ask themselves whether they’re satisfied with the current occupier of the White House.

  • Jill Biden Is Spending Mother’s Day in Ukraine

    May 8, 2022

    First Lady Jill Biden meets with Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska in Ukraine.Susan Walsh/AP

    On Sunday, First Lady Jill Biden made an official visit to Ukraine, becoming the latest in a series of high-ranking US officials and political figures to travel to the war-torn country. Biden, who had been on a swing through Eastern Europe, entered Ukraine via Slovakia, which is host to almost 400,000 displaced Ukrainians. The first lady heard several of their stories, according to the Washington Post:

    Victoria Kutocha, a mother of three whose husband remained in Ukraine to fight in the military, told Biden of her journey to Slovakia and her outrage at Russia’s explanation for its invasion.

    “They come to our land,” she told Biden. “They kill us, but they say we protect you.”

    Hugging her 7-year-old daughter, Yulie, Kutocha described the difficulty of explaining to her children why they had to leave their home. “It’s impossible,” she said. “I try to keep them safe. It’s my mission.”

    “It’s senseless,” Biden said.

    The first lady’s show of support follows visits last week by top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress. In Ukraine, she had a private chat with Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, telling her Ukrainian counterpart that she “wanted to come on Mother’s Day” to “show the Ukrainian people that this war has to stop.” Zelenska thanked her for the visit and the risks that came with it: “We understand what it takes for the US First Lady to come here during a war when military actions are taking place every day, where the air sirens are happening every day—even today.”

    President Biden has yet to visit Ukraine, citing security concerns, but he has worked to shepherd an unprecedented series of multibillion-dollar aid packages to Ukraine in recent weeks. After Congress approved an initial $14 billion delivery of military and humanitarian support, Biden requested an additional $33 billion to back Ukraine’s continued resistance to Russia’s invasion.

    “We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom,” Biden said at the White House. “It’s not cheap. But caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen.”

  • SNL Just Got Medieval on Justice Alito’s Abortion Views

    May 8, 2022

    "I was outside watching the sheriff throw left-handed children into the river and I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about a new law."Will Heath/NBC/Getty

    The big topic on last night’s Saturday Night Live, surprising absolutely no one, was the Supreme Court. For its cold open, the show took aim at Justice Samuel Alito’s now-infamous leaked draft opinion, which would overturn the abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. 

    Alito’s extremely dubious reasoning is based on an ahistorical rendering of abortion as fundamentally inconsistent with American “history and tradition.” As my colleague Becca Andrews smartly pointed out, that simplistic formulation ignores the history of abortion and reproductive care among indigenous American women, let alone enslaved Black women and other women in the colonial era.

    The SNL cast, noting that Alito’s opinion relied on a “treatise from 13th-century England,” turned back the clock to “that profound moment of moral clarity, almost a thousand years ago, which laid such a clear foundation for what our laws should be in 2022.” In a vaguely medieval setting, three men (Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Dismukes, and actually-good Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson) debate the appropriate punishment for abortion—until a woman played by Cecily Strong intercedes. Although she still hasn’t hit “the child-bearing age of 12,” she insists that women deserve “the right to choose.”

    The three dudes are less than receptive to that incredibly popular idea. Instead, says Cumberbatch’s character, expectant mothers should simply receive maternity leave—”when you’re done with 20 years of continuous maternity, you can leave!”

    Watch the rest of the sketch here: 

  • The Unbearable Futility of Rehashing the Trump Years at Every Turn

    May 6, 2022

    Sipa/AP

    Who could the pussy hats possibly be for this time? Who’s left to convince that we matter?

    Alright, maybe I should have expected the return of “Nasty Woman” shirts and warnings of the Republic of Gilead. But in the wake of the Supreme Court’s draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, I couldn’t help but frown at the instinct by some to dig out their Future Is Female’s best. Don’t these outdated protest aesthetics feel like relics now, reminders that we had naively miscalculated what it would take to take down an alarmingly well-organized, decades-long mission? For me, spotting these worn tactics at the protests this week rendered the renewed fight limp on arrival. 

    Protests are critical. The fiercer the better when facing a decision dripping in nostalgia for a brutally unequal past. Still, it’s worth examining the curious compulsion to dust off yesterday’s tactics in order to protest what those tactics failed to stop. 

    An effort to recall the urgency with which hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in the 2017 women’s march to counter Donald Trump’s inauguration is an understandable one. But these reflexive urges feel at once out of step with the cruel reality that’s been laid bare this week. Despite years of resistance, from the aesthetic to the ballot box, the right to legal abortion is about to get destroyed. Despite voting—as we were relentlessly instructed to do—and ultimately winning—we still lost.

    Of course, the reemergence of resistance gear is a small embarrassment when measured up against the predictable cast of characters rising like zombies this week in order to wag fingers at those who declined to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. That crowd reliably pushed back with equally dated defenses. Frequently slipping to the margins of these squabbles is what happens to the countless women on the verge of losing access to health care. But who cares when the same Twitter fights of the Trump years refuse to die? 

    Not to be outdone, arguably the most egregious bout of deja-vu came from Democratic leaders, who in their scramble to respond to this week’s SCOTUS bombshell, effectively copied and pasted language ripped straight from the Trump era in order to try and rally the base from despair.

    “The elections this November will have consequences because the rights of a hundred million women are now on the ballot,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told a crowd one day after the SCOTUS leak. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Meanwhile, most Dems still can’t come out and say the word “abortion.” Sure, President Biden, in his first statement on this week’s leak, did manage to squeak out the word. But as Rebecca Traister points out, it’s no accident that it got buried four paragraphs deep in a statement otherwise cloaked in the safe language of a woman’s choice.

    With leadership like that, who can blame people for reaching for their RBG pearls right now? 

    One would think that after years of warnings from repro rights groups, we’d be better equipped for this moment. Instead, Democrats have resurrected tired themes for an exhausted crowd. That same fatigue is what makes the instinct to rehash the Trump years at every turn, down to the literal same hats, simply unbearable. 

    When people donate, they want to see the federal government opening its fat wallet to fund abortion pills. When they protest, they want to see more lawmakers reacting with the same fury Senator Elizabeth Warren had marching alongside demonstrators. When they vote—and deliver control of Congress and the White House—they expect leaders to start acting with all the authority they earned at the ballot. As my colleague Madison Pauly noted at one Oakland protest this week, “the 2017 vibes are strong.” That’s just not going to cut it anymore.

  • I Counted All the Scholars Cited in the Leaked Roe Opinion. Can You Guess How Many Were Women?

    May 5, 2022

    Getty

    If you read the leaked draft of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, and especially if you have a uterus, you may notice several factual errors about women and pregnancy made by its author, Justice Samuel Alito. (My colleague Pema Levy, in fact, chronicles a few here.) Those errors, it turns out, may have something to do with whom Alito is citing: In all its 98 pages, the draft cites very few women.

    I know because I counted. Or, at least, I tried. The opinion includes more than 75 citations from legal experts, historians, and scholars of philosophy. By my tally, just four are women. I also counted the number of times Alito cited a judge, either on the Supreme Court or lower courts. In all, he cites a judge or justice more than 90 times. Of those, just five were women. 

    I’d also like to point out that Alito cites himself at least six times. I repeat: The man who authored the opinion to effectively end the right to abortion in the United States has cited himself more times than he cited female scholars combined.

    Before anyone blows a gasket, allow me to list a few caveats: First, this was by no means a scientific endeavor. I am not going to submit this analysis for any awards. It has not been peer-reviewed. It was simply a good faith effort to read Alito’s draft closely and record every reference, both in the text and footnotes, made by name. In every case, I tried my best to identify each individual with a simple Google search.

    Mind you, I counted every citation that mentions a scholar, regardless of why they were cited. Several of the female citations did little to support Alito’s argument for overturning Roe. In fact, of the five times he cites a female judge, three of those citations reference the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an advocate for abortion rights. And in another case, Alito cites a female scholar only to characterize her work’s inclusion in Roe as “irrelevant.”

    Here’s a section in which Alito lists some scholarly criticisms of Roe’s “reasoning.” He exclusively cites men: 

    All in all, Roe‘s reasoning was exceedingly weak, and academic commentators, including those who agreed with the decision as a matter of policy, were unsparing in their criticism. John Hart Ely famously wrote that Roe was “not constitutional law and g[ave] almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Ely 947. Archibald Cox, who served as Solicitor General under President Kennedy, commented that Roe “read[s] like a set of hospital rules and regulations” that “[n]either historian, layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded …. are part of… the Constitution.” Archibald Cox, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government 113-114 (1976). Laurence Tribe wrote that “even if there is a need to divide pregnancy into several segments with lines that clearly identify the limits of governmental power, ‘interest-balancing of the form the Court pursues fails to justify any of the lines actually drawn.” Tribe 5. Mark Tushnet termed Roe a “totally unreasoned judicial opinion.” M. Tushnet, Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law 54 (1988). See also [Philip] Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate 157 (1982); [Akhil Reed] Amar, Foreword: The Document and the Doctrine, 114 Harv. L. Rev. 26, 110 (2000). 

    The asymmetry in Alito’s draft is, to put it mildly, disappointing. But it also reflects who held—and often continues to hold—power in this country. After all, this is a document that may effectively govern the bodies of millions of uterus-owners. Shouldn’t we have more of a say in it?

  • Christian Smalls to Congress: It’s Time to Stop Helping Corporations

    May 5, 2022

    Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, testifies before the Senate Budget Committee.Tom Williams/AP

    At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Christian Smalls, the interim president of the Amazon Labor Union, delivered a message to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham: “You forgot that the people are the ones who make these companies operate.”

    The hearing comes a month after the workers Smalls represents at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted to form the company’s first union.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the head of the Senate budget committee, organized the hearing to look at whether the federal government should be awarding contracts to companies that have broken federal labor laws. The focus was on Amazon, which has racked up more than $75 million in fines for violating federal discrimination and wage laws, according to a committee press release.

    “I think [Graham] suggested that a hearing like this is radical,” Sanders said after Smalls and other witnesses delivered their opening remarks. “You know what, I think he’s right. In a Congress dominated by corporate lobbyists and wealthy campaign contributors, the idea that we would actually hear from the working class of this country is in fact radical.” Sanders continued: “I make no apologies for that.”

    Smalls also responded to Graham by saying that the hearing was necessary because the process for holding companies accountable has not been working. “It’s not a left or a right thing. It’s not a Democrat or Republican thing,” Smalls said. “It’s a workers issue. And we are the ones that are suffering in the corporations that you’re talking about.”

    The criticism of Amazon was, at times, bipartisan. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), citing his own business experience, argued that companies that are conscientious, pay high wages, and treat workers like family hang on to their employees.

    “When somebody does get out of line, when wealth gets too concentrated, when you got 150 percent turnover rates, high accident rates,” Braun said referring to Amazon, “you’re gonna have to have a medium to vent your grievance and unions vis-a-vis largely companies, [are] probably the only way you can do it.”

    Earlier this week, workers at a neighboring Amazon facility voted against joining the Amazon Labor Union. The company is also trying to throw out the results of the April election won by the union. Smalls and fellow Amazon Labor Union members are focused on getting a strong contract for the more than 8,000 workers at that warehouse. 

  • Report: Kevin McCarthy Suggested Invoking the 25th Amendment to Oust Trump

    May 4, 2022

    Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Zuma

    New leaked audio reveals just how close Republican leadership came to supporting the movement to oust former President Donald Trump in the days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The audio was obtained by two New York Times reporters who detailed the conversation in their new book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.

    Publicly, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has toed the party line, but behind closed doors, he brainstormed ways to remove Trump from office. “What the president did is atrocious and totally wrong,” McCarthy said in a call on January 8, 2021.

    McCarthy didn’t stop there. He also reportedly discussed the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office before he demurred because, “That takes too long.”

    McCarthy had long publicly denied ever threatening Trump’s power, but last month, audio clips revealed that he had in fact told Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) that he intended to call President Trump and tell him that he should resign. The new audio reveals just how deep McCarthy’s private opposition to Trump went, no matter how loudly or repeatedly he attempts to deny it.

    “I do think the impeachment divides the nation further and continues the fight even greater,” he said. “I want to see about us meeting with Biden, sitting down, make a smooth transition.”

  • Nearly Half of All Americans Live in States Where Abortion May Soon Be Banned

    May 4, 2022

    Almost half of all Americans could lose access to abortion in their states if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, an outcome that seems all the more likely after a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion was published on Monday, sparking protests and calls to enshrine the landmark ruling in federal legislation.

    A Center for Reproductive Rights analysis of state laws found that 25 states and three territories are “hostile” to abortion rights, meaning they could immediately prohibit abortion. The generally Southern and central states are home to 158 million Americans. The states encompass 47 percent of the United States land mass. It would mean a radically increased burden on the people who already have to travel long distances for reproductive care. (These states also imprison people at rates nearly double those found in states that have expanded access to abortion, according to a Mother Jones analysis of 2020 Decennial Census.)

    Three more states plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have no existing state protections, making it unclear if legislatures there would enact a ban. Abortion rights are either protected by state law or guarantee expanded access in the 22 other states. 

    The 25 hostile states already had far fewer abortions per person than other states between 2010 and 2019, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Abortion Surveillance data.

    Review our methodology and reproduce this analysis using code from our GitHub page. 

  • Protesters Rally to Support Abortion Rights as Roe v. Wade Hangs in the Balance

    May 4, 2022

    Isabela Dias

    Pro-choice supporters across the country sprang into action on Tuesday, a powerful show of solidarity for abortion rights in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. 

    “Where’s Joe?” demonstrators outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, demanded. 

    “For context, this sign is from 2018,” said a 26-year-old law student carrying the sign “Mr. President: How long must women wait for liberty.” Another from the same protest read “The people have lost all confidence in SCOTUS.”

    In Baltimore, one protester held the sign “Remove the rapist in the court.”

    Mother Jones reporters Isabela Dias, Mark Helenowski, Emily Hofstaedter, and Madison Pauly were on the ground in DC, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland, respectively, where palpable anger over the Supreme Court’s likely intent to overturn the landmark ruling that protected the right to an abortion flowed among the crowds. Scenes from the protests below:

    Emily Hofstaedter

    Isabela Dias

  • “Back to the Dark Ages of Women’s Health”: Protesters Gather in DC to Rally Behind Roe

    May 4, 2022

    Protesters decry leaked draft of Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. WadeIsabela Dias

    For the second day in a row, demonstrators gathered in Washington, DC,  on Tuesday to protest a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade the landmark decision that established the constitutional right to abortion.

    Over chants of “pro-life is a lie, they don’t care if people die” and “where’s Joe?,” the large crowd stood in front of the steps of the Supreme Court building holding signs that read “keep your politics out of my uterus” and “bans off our bodies.”

    “I am here because I am angry and I am here because the United States Congress can change all of this,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of several lawmakers who attended the protest, told the crowd. “I have seen the world where abortion is illegal and we’re not going back. Not ever!” Warren continued, warning that the Supreme Court’s draft opinion would overwhelmingly burden the poor, working mothers, and young victims of abuse and rape—not wealthy women. 

    Teal Quinn, who works at an animation study, drove with their 11-year-old child from Maryland after they insisted on taking part in their first protest. “I just want them to have the same rights I have,” Quinn said. “I trust women to make their own decisions and they ought to have the freedom to do that.”

    At 69, Mickey Goldberg also came from Maryland with her husband to attend the rally. 

    A second-year medical student at Howard University said he felt angry after reading the news about the draft decision.

    Several protesters stressed that overturning Roe would not lead to a total ban on abortions, only on safe abortions. Others expressed their discontent towards the justices with signs saying “abort the Court” and “the people have lost all confidence in SCOTUS.”

    Constanza Guarino, 27, stopped by the rally in DC on her way back to New York after a workday. “I think this is a pretty monumental moment,” she said. “I am a strong believer that people should be able to decide what is best for themselves and no one should be forced into carrying a pregnancy.”

    For Kathy Doan, a 59-year-old Christian, abortion is an issue of justice. “I think the assumption is that Christians don’t support women’s right to choose, but many like myself do,” she said. “If you care about women and children, abortion should be legal and safe.” Outlawing abortion, she added, “basically turns a woman’s uterus into a crime scene. Is that what we want?”  

    Pro-choice rally outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, May 3. 

    Constanza Guarino, 27, stopped by the rally in DC on her way back to New York.

    Teal Quinn drove with their 11-year-old child from Maryland. 

     
    Photos: Isabela Dias

  • Abortion Advocates in Baltimore Protest the Supreme Court’s Leaked Roe Opinion

    May 3, 2022

    Emily Hofstaedter/Mother Jones

    Late on Tuesday afternoon, a quiet but determined crowd began to gather outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore in a show of support for abortion rights. Like many others around the country, the protesters had organized after a draft opinion, published in Politico last night, showed that the Supreme Court is on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade. They held signs saying, “Abortion is healthcare,” “Bans off our bodies,” and “We will not go back.” 

    “This fundamental right that has been in place for decades is at the precipice of being rolled back,” Maryland state Sen. Shelly Hettleman told the crowd as it grew. “What we have also learned is that elections have consequences…It matters who is setting those laws in each state. It matters who is in Congress. Tomorrow, if the Senate of the United States decided to protect our right to choice, it could do so.” Other speakers described the latest developments as “shocking” and “heartbreaking.” 

    “It is devastating to potentially lose Roe, but this is something that we have been seeing and preparing for for a long time,” said Lynn McCann, co-director of the Baltimore Abortion Fund. “So while it hurts, we are also here to acknowledge that Roe has never been enough for thousands of people.” Maryland has already been taking steps to anticipate a post-Roe world: Last month, the state legislature voted to allow more health professionals to perform abortions and to ensure that abortion care will be permanently covered by the state’s Medicaid program. McCann said that if Roe were overturned, Maryland could be a hub for people seeking abortions from neighboring states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where Republicans are working to restrict the procedure. 

    One protester, Brian Appel, brought his two daughters, eight-year-old Sophia and four-year-old Beatrix. The girls held signs in front of their sunscreen-smeared faces that read, “Abortion is Normal.” Appel said he worries about what the future will look like for his daughters. “They might one day choose to get an abortion, and we don’t want that to be mixed up with any political debate,” he said. “My wife and I are expecting a baby, and we were really proud when my oldest daughter said, ‘I just want to make sure it’s your choice to have it.’” 

  • It’s Official: Trump-Endorsed J.D. Vance Has Won the Ohio Senate Primary

    May 3, 2022

    Joe Maiorana/AP

    J.D. Vance, the Peter Thiel-ally and Hillbilly Elegy author, has won the highly contested Republican Senate primary in Ohio. Vance’s victory over a group of Ohio politicians, including former State Treasurer Josh Mandel and state Sen. Matt Dolan, is more evidence that Donald Trump’s towering influence over the Republican Party has yet to abate. 

    At the start of his campaign, Vance shocked the media by adopting an explicitly Trumpian persona and an agenda that mirrored the former president’s policy positions. Vance initially struggled in the polls, hampered, in part, by his reputation as an erstwhile anti-Trumper. However, he became the frontrunner virtually overnight after beating out his opponents to receive Trump’s coveted endorsement and maintained that status through the election. If you’re curious to read more about his transformation, here’s a non-comprehensive list I pulled together of his craziest statements. 

    Vance will now advance to the general election, where he’ll take on moderate Democrat Tim Ryan. Although Ryan remains broadly popular among Ohioans, he faces a steep uphill battle in the increasingly red state. 

  • Outraged Protesters Descend on Lower Manhattan to Rally for Abortion Rights

    and May 3, 2022

    Mark Helenowski/Mother Jones

    A noisy crowd of many hundreds converged on downtown Manhattan’s Foley Square Tuesday evening, one day after a Politico bombshell revealed the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

    “Abortion is a human right, not just for the rich and white!” they chanted, banging drums and brandishing brightly colored signs, one that read, “My arms are tired from holding this sign since the 1960s.”

    The rally, outside the barricaded steps of the federal courthouse near City Hall, was just one of a number of snap demonstrations called from coast to coast, channeling an eruption of outrage after the draft decision became public. Hannah Jacobs, a 29-year-old lawyer from Jersey City, told our Senior Digital Producer Mark Helenowski that this was her first-ever protest: “A group of men that are 70, 80-years-old—who have lifetime appointments, that have not been voted into office—should not have a say over whether I choose to have a baby or not.”

    “They’re not ‘pro-life,’ they’re ‘pro-birth’,” she said. “As soon as the baby comes out, they don’t give a damn who that baby is, they don’t give a damn about the mom, they don’t give a damn about health care… they just want to exert control over our bodies.”

    Mark is on the ground talking to attendees. Here’s what he is seeing and hearing:

  • Elizabeth Warren on Codifying Roe: “They Just Need to Do It.”

    May 3, 2022

    Rod Lamkey/CNP/Zuma

    “The United States Congress can keep Roe v. Wade the law of the land,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a brief but heated interview recorded in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday by Willy Lowry of the National. “They just need to do it.”

    Warren joined the growing chorus of pro-choice politicians who support codifying Roe as national law. But doing so with an evenly divided Senate would likely require a vote to reform the filibuster, which Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) seem unwilling to do.

    “Republicans have been working toward this day for decades,” Warren said. “They have been out there plotting, carefully cultivating these Supreme Court justices so they could have a majority on the bench who would accomplish something that the majority of Americans do not want.”

    According to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 59 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

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