In 1969, then California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law into existence, allowing couples to legally separate without having to prove wrongdoing by one party. It soon rippled out throughout the country. The change had immense benefits for women; it bolstered economic independence and provided a safer route for domestic violence survivors. States that allowed one partner to solely push for divorce saw about a 20 percent decline in female suicide, per a 2003 working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

This blip in Reagan’s legacy stands in stark contrast to his resounding rhetoric around family values. (Reagan, according to his son, would later call backing no-fault divorce his “greatest regret” in life.”) In the 1970s, the right took a cultural turn—emphasizing domestic strength through “the family.” It was a politics that smeared efforts by women, queer communities, and other groups to obtain equal rights and representation as decadent degradation of the status quo. Abortion and gay marriage were among the myriad of issues the right fretted meant the death of the nuclear family and, in turn, the strength of America. While these fights didn’t disappear, they ebbed throughout the beginning of the 21st century. Yet, recently, as we’ve seen with increased attacks on reproductive justice and LGBTQ health and safety, conservatives are legislating and discussing them with renewed fervor.

As part of this push, Republican politicians across the country have been revitalizing the desire to roll back no-fault divorce—couching it in faith, and patriotism. This fight spans from provocateur–podcasters like Steven Crowder to the official GOP platforms in both Texas and Nebraska. Some politicians are all in—ready to scapegoat no-fault divorce for the ails of our society—while others are beginning to flirt with the idea.

Here is an evolving list of some of the current and hopeful elected officials who have a lot of thoughts about who should be able to get divorced, and how.

Did we miss a politician who has publicly called for the end of no-fault divorce? Email and let us know.

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2024 CANDIDATES

Dusty Deevers

Upon winning Oklahoma’s Senate District 32 special primary election in October, Dusty Deevers rejoiced: “The spirit of 1776 is alive and well in Southwest Oklahoma!” Deevers, a far-right Christian pastor, has said he wants “morality brought back into government.” In an appearance on “The Sword and The Trowel,” a podcast by the Southern Baptist group Founders Ministries, Deevers shared his vision for Oklahoma and the country. 

“I want to see pornography abolished. I want to see no-fault divorce, come back to at-fault in divorce—and even public shaming for those who are at fault in divorce. I want to see abortion abolished. These are the kinds of morality and government issues that we need to get back to.” 

Matt Krause

For Matt Krause, trying to roll back no-fault divorce isn’t new. In 2016, the then-Texas lawmaker proposed a bill that would have required couples to cite a specific reason for why their marriage needed to end. At the time, he said that he wanted to “promote and encourage strong Texas families,” and that meant ensuring marriage wasn’t something to “get in or out of easily or quickly.”

Now, he’s running for Tarrant County Commissioner in Fort Worth. 

Seven years ago, at the end of 2016, Krause took to Twitter to share news about his proposal to end no-fault divorce. “I am your constituent,” an account responded, “I am opposed to this bill. No-fault divorce is a very important right for both men and women.” 

“Marriage,” Krause replied, “as recognized by the US Sup Ct, is a fundamental right. No-fault divorce is not. We’ll have to agree to disagree here.”

Vivek Ramaswamy

Vivek Ramaswamy is a Republican presidential candidate, multimillionaire, former biotech executive, and author of Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. Recently, he has been toying with the idea of ending no-fault divorce. On a recent episode of the podcast he hosts, entitled “The Assault on Family: How Society is Losing its Most Important Institution,” Ramaswamy sat down with Terry Schilling from the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank. 

“Part of the reason it feels like we’re lost in the desert in America today is that we’ve not only lost our sense of nation,” Ramaswamy explained, “we’ve also lost our sense that the family is itself a grounding institution, one that matters, one that is worth preserving.” 

Schilling responded: “The reason we see so much dysfunction across our society today is because we’ve had decades long of a regime of no-fault divorce.”

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ELECTED OFFICIALS

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.)

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is probably the most well-known elected official who has discussed weakening no-fault divorce laws, and he’s been talking about it for decades. 

Johnson and his wife Kelly were one of the first couples in Louisiana to opt for a covenant marriage, a religion-based contract that makes it significantly harder to get divorced. During his time volunteering at the Louisiana Family Forum, Johnson helped craft the covenant marriage bill. Louisiana is one of just three states—Arizona and Arkansas are the other two—which give couples the option to choose a covenant marriage. Largely, these marriages have been unpopular. Between 2000 and 2010, just about 1 percent of couples in Louisiana chose a covenant marriage. A fact that Johnson has chalked up to covenant marriages being “just unknown.”

“In my generation, all we’ve ever known is the no-fault scheme, and any deviation from that seems like a radical move,” Johnson said in 2001. 

In a 2016 sermon, Johnson, in part, blamed no-fault laws—in addition to things like abortion access expanding—for our “completely amoral society” that causes young people to go “into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio)

While Vance has not introduced legislation to end no-fault divorce, he has discussed the cultural rot of divorce. Before he was elected as a senator in Ohio, Vance shared some of his thoughts on marriage to a California high school in a video obtained by Vice News:

This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like, ‘Well, OK. These marriages were fundamentally … they were maybe even violent, but, certainly, they were unhappy, and, so, getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear—that’s going to make people happier in the long-term….And maybe it worked out for the Moms and Dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.

Vance, who authored Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, then continued his implication that those experiencing domestic violence in marriages should consider sticking it out, for the sake of the kids, citing how his grandparents came together, despite the violence in their relationship, to raise him.

“My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s,” he said.

State Rep. Tony Randolph (R)

According to South Dakota’s branch of the ACLU, state representative Tony Randolph has introduced a bill to remove irreconcilable differences as grounds for divorce each year since 2020. Around 97 percent of divorcing couples in South Dakota cite irreconcilable differences in their separation. 

“Under the proposed law,” Stanton Anker, a Rapid City-based attorney explained, “a woman abused by her husband would have to face him in court, and a controlling husband could force his wife to stay in the marriage unless she abandoned it or faced going to court to prove that he had done something wrong.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)

Cotton legislates in one of the three states with covenant marriage as an option and, like his congressional colleague Mike Johnson, has railed against no-fault divorce in his past. In fact, he wrote about it as a Harvard undergrad. 

In a 1997 article in The Harvard Crimson, Cotton praises covenant marriages and blames feminists for lax divorce laws. “Men are simple creatures. It doesn’t take much to please us. The problem is women,” he wrote in the first sentence.

Cotton then explains how he polled women on their greatest fears, to which he claims they answered a man leaving them.  “Feminists say no fault divorce was a large hurdle on the path to female liberation. They apparently don’t consult the deepest hopes or greatest fears of young women,” Cotton wrote.  

The article is an intimate look into the type of ideology that exists behind the shouts to keep marriage sacred—misogyny lightly veiled behind religion and nationalism. 

“Talk to a psychologist, a sociobiologist or a mother and you learn that men are naturally restless and rowdy, maybe even a little incorrigible,” Cotton explained. “Throughout time, though, women and social institutions have conspired to break man’s unruliness. In the past few decades, however, they have largely abandoned that noble and necessary project.”

Everyone’s favorite “self-driving” car is experiencing technical issues…again. On Wednesday, Tesla issued a recall for over 2 million vehicles due to reported insufficiencies in the software designed to monitor a driver’s attention while using the Autopilot function. It comes after a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of over 1,000 crashes involving the self-driving function. A recent Washington Post story also detailed at least eight Tesla crashes on roads where Autopilot should not have been engaged. 

If you own one of the following models, according to NHTSA, your car could experience technical difficulties:

• TESLA/MODEL 3/2017-2023
• TESLA/MODEL S/2012-2023
• TESLA/MODEL X/2016-2023
• TESLA/MODEL Y/2020-2023

Thankfully, there appears to be an easy fix: a software update that the company will reportedly provide free of charge. However, this recall is just one more bullet point in the long list of safety issues involving vehicles over the past few years. As my former colleague Abigail Weinberg reported last year, Tesla’s Autopilot function has been linked to multiple deaths. 

In 2022, the NHSTA reported that Tesla made up over 68 percent of the 392 crashes involving vehicles with an advanced driver assistance system. On December 10, the Washington Post claimed that issues with the car’s “Autosteer” function—an element of the self-driving Autopilot function—go beyond driver inattention, citing dash cam footage from a 2019 crash showing a Tesla “blowing through a stop sign, a blinking light and five yellow signs warning that the road ends.”  In a statement released on X, Tesla called the Post’s claims “egregious in its misstatements.” Neither the company nor its CEO, Elon Musk, have publicly responded to the recall.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that he’d like to see journalists investigated for possibly colluding against Donald Trump in 2020. Vance’s appearance on Tapper’s Sunday talk show followed a letter Vance sent last week to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding to know if the Department of Justice would investigate a Washington Post columnist for talking about “open rebellion” by blue states if Trump is elected in 2024.

In his comments to CNN, Vance echoed comments made by former Trump aide Kash Patel, who last week pledged that a future Trump adminstration would pursue and prosecute critics in the government and media.

“We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media,” Kash said on the podcast of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Both Patel and Vance are considered strong candidates for senior roles in a second Trump administration, with Vance even discussed as a potential running mate. On CNN, when Vance was asked about Patel’s comments, he didn’t shy away from supporting them. Vance said there was evidence that the media colluded with Biden to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop before the 2020 election. Notably, the laptop was widely reported on, and no evidence has emerged that it contained anything implicating Joe Biden in wrongdoing. Still, conservatives point to reports that Twitter buried links to a New York Post story on the laptop. 

“[We] need to look seriously at how there was collusion between members of the press and big technology companies and members of national security state,” Vance told Tapper on Sunday. “It is not journalism to take your security clearance, lie to the American people, and then persuade the big technology companies to censor anti-Joe Biden stories. That’s not journalism. That is cooperation between the government and journalism.”

Meanwhile, in his letter to Garland, Vance said that federal prosecutors are trying to prosecute Trump for intimidating voters with his complaints about the 2020 election’s legitimacy. If that’s true, Vance argued, then why shouldn’t Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan be prosecuted for his recent column in which he mused about the ways that blue state governors could legally resist a new Trump administration?

During his CNN appearance, Vance also said it was “preposterous” that Trump would abuse his power, even though the former president recently told crowds at a political rally that he wouldn’t be a dictator, “other than Day One.”

University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned on Saturday in the wake of her disastrous appearance at last week’s congressional hearing on anti-semitism on college campuses. Magill appeared at the hearing alongside the presidents of Harvard and MIT, and although all three offered condemnations of anti-semitism on their campuses, all three struggled in the face of aggressive questioning led by MAGA firebrand Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Magill, in particular, struggled to articulate whether calling for genocide on campus would violate the university’s codes of conduct.

At one point in the hearing, Stefanik asked Magill if calling for the genocide of Jewish people constituted bullying or harassment.

“If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment,” Magill answered, before adding, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”

That response, which suggested to many that Magill was refusing to unequivocally condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, set off a firestorm of protest that built as the week went on. By Friday, 70 lawmakers, led by Stefanik but including at least three Democrats, wrote a letter calling for Magill’s firing, and separately other congressional Democrats called for the same. And on Saturday, the most powerful Democratic politicians in Pennsylvania, including Gov. Josh Shapiro, also were calling for Magill to go. With the threat of big donors pulling their money, Magill resigned on Saturday evening, and the university’s chairman of the board of trustees, Scott Bok, also resigned.

After Magill’s resignation, Stefanik celebrated by tweeting, “One down. Two to go,” a reference to the presidents of MIT and Harvard whom Stefanik also has demanded be fired.

On Friday, the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution backed by nearly every other member of the Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

The U.S. was the lone veto in the 13-to-1 vote; Britain abstained.

U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood said that a ceasefire is “not only unrealistic but dangerous: it would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7.” In response to Hamas’ attack, which killed 1,200 people, “Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism, consistent with international law.”

The war in Gaza, now entering its third month, has killed more than 17,000 Palestinians and displaced millions. The United Nations and other aid groups are warning that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is escalating further as civilians struggle to access basics, like food and medicine. “By continuing to provide diplomatic cover for the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, the US is signaling that international humanitarian law can be applied selectively—and that the lives of some people matter less than the lives of others,” said Doctors Without Borders USA’s Executive Director Avril Benoit.

After the veto, foreign ministers representing several Arab countries met with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and “expressed deep dissatisfaction with the inability of the Security Council to carry out its responsibilities,” the Saudi foreign ministry said in a statement. Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, called the veto “a mark of shame that will follow the United States for many years,” according to the New York Times. 

Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan, meanwhile, thanked the United States for its support on social media, saying, “A ceasefire will be possible only with the return of all the hostages and the destruction of Hamas.”

While American officials have urged Israel to do more to limit civilian deaths and displacement, the U.S. continues to support Israel’s war efforts. On Saturday, the Department of Defense announced approval of the sale of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel, bypassing the congressional review typically required for arms sales to other countries. According to the announcement, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken determined that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale to the Government of Israel.”

On Friday night, the Texas Supreme Court paused a lower court’s ruling that had granted an emergency abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal condition.

The ruling was the latest in a quickly-unfolding case challenging the limits of the state’s strict abortion bans. On Thursday, a judge in Travis County granted the request for an abortion for Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, and protected her doctor from civil or criminal liability. Cox’s fetus has been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder that is nearly always fatal for the fetus, and Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, has already been to the emergency room several times during her pregnancy.

“Continuing the pregnancy,” the lawsuit read, “puts her at high risk for severe complications threatening her life and future fertility, including uterine rupture and hysterectomy.”

Within hours of Thursday’s ruling, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Supreme Court to block the order, arguing Cox didn’t meet the criteria for medical exemption under the state’s abortion bans. On Friday, the state’s all-Republican Supreme Court said it was temporarily halting the lower court’s order “without regard to the merits” to allow more time to issue a final ruling. 

Yet timing is of the essence for Cox. “While we still hope that the Court ultimately rejects the state’s request and does so quickly, in this case we fear that justice delayed will be justice denied,” said Molly Duane, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox. In a filing on Friday, Cox’s lawyers indicated that she is still pregnant. 

The state Supreme Court is also considering a separate lawsuit backed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, in which women and doctors are arguing that pregnant people with medical complications are not getting needed care. Texas’s abortion bans include exemptions in cases in which the patient could die or face “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” But the vague language of the law has left doctors “terrified” to deliver needed care, Duane told the court last month.

As the cases make their way through court, Cox is left waiting—for a ruling to come down, and for her pregnancy to unfold. She said in her petition, “It is not a matter of if I will have to say goodbye, but when.”

Chris Christie said the quiet part out loud at the fourth Republican debate Wednesday night. The dominant figure in the Republican Party—former President Donald Trump—isn’t on the debate stage, and when the debate began, nobody talked about him despite his dominance in the polls.

When the former New Jersey governor finally wrestled some airtime from his three opponents—Vivek Ramaswamy, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—he noted that none of them had taken on Trump directly.

“We’re 17 minutes into this debate and…we’ve had these three acting as if this race is between the four of us,” Christie said. “The fifth guy, who doesn’t have the guts to show up and stand here, he’s the one who, as you just put it, is way ahead in the polls.”

“The fact is that when you go and say the truth about somebody who is a dictator, a bully, who has taken shots at everybody…then I understand why these three are timid to say anything about it,” he added, calling Trump “Voldemort, he who shall not be named.”

During his first time speaking in tonight's GOP debate, Chris Christie criticized his debate competitors and moderators for not bringing up Donald Trump or clearly denouncing the former president's falsehoods and recent comments about being a “dictator.” https://t.co/kN48tKlMMu pic.twitter.com/3aNfIwvXYK

— POLITICO (@politico) December 7, 2023

Ramaswamy spent the early part of the debate railing against the “woke industrial complex” while attacking Haley. Haley and DeSantis, meanwhile, battled over who was more anti-trans. 

Christie has a point: Trump is, of course, leading President Joe Biden in five out of six battleground states, according to a sobering New York Times/Siena College poll that dropped last month. He’s also leading in Iowa, polling at over 45% just a month ahead of the caucus.  

But for all Christie’s grandstanding, he eventually took the bait. Just minutes later, he too was sparring with Ramaswamy, calling him “the most obnoxious blowhard in America” before dragging Ramaswamy for “attacking Nikki Haley’s basic intelligence, not her positions, her basic intelligence.” 

Later in the debate, the moderators forced the candidates to confront the elephant in the room: Trump’s fitness for office.

Christie came out swinging, alleging his opponents were “afraid to offend” and explicitly condemn Trump.

DeSantis conceded that he thinks “we need to have somebody younger.”

Ramaswamy alleged his three opponents had been “licking Donald Trump’s boots,” adding that he thought the real enemy was “the deep state” that he claimed Trump was unafraid to take on.

President Biden condemned accounts of rape and sexual violence reportedly perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli girls and women, stating that “the world can’t just look away at what’s going on.” 

Biden made the comments at a campaign fundraiser in Boston on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press, adding that the world must condemn “without equivocation” and “without exception” the “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty” shared by survivors over the past few weeks. 

“Reports of women raped—repeatedly raped—and their bodies being mutilated while still alive—of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them,” Biden said, according to the AP. “It is appalling.”

Hamas has denied allegations of sexual assault.

Biden’s comments come as evidence of sexual atrocities perpetrated by Hamas mounts and officials increasingly demand an investigation.

A report published by NBC News on Tuesday notes that evidence provided by Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces—including interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, graphic images, eyewitness accounts, and testimonies from first responders and morgue workers—suggests dozens of Israeli women were raped, sexually abused, or mutilated during the October 7 attack perpetrated by Hamas. Graphic accounts of rape on October 7 have also been published by the Associated Press and the Washington Post. 

At a United Nations panel on Monday, public figures including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg demanded international aid groups denounce the allegations of sexual violence. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said that the UN panel featured “incredibly compelling firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses and first responders and physicians about Hamas’s sexual violence against women and girls on that day.”

UN Women said in a statement last week that its leaders are “alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.” The gender equity arm of the UN also noted that the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, has opened submissions for people to share accounts of gender-based crimes that have occurred in Israel and Gaza since October 7.

While human rights investigators believe that Hamas perpetrated the sexual violence on October 7, they’re unsure about the scale of the attacks and don’t yet have access to a significant body of evidence, according to NBC News. Many rape victims were killed by their attackers, and the priority among officials in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was to identify bodies rather than to preserve evidence, the AP reported. 

A spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told the AP that it has sought access to the areas where the October 7 attack unfolded, but Israel has not responded to its requests—while Israeli officials have claimed that the UN office holds a bias against Israel and that they will instead seek other independent methods of investigation.

An open letter from 39 representatives of Palestinian women and civil society organizations noted their “profound concern” with the UN Women statement, claiming that it did not address “the ongoing refusal of the Israeli occupation to cooperate with various international investigation commissions appointed by the United Nations to probe into the crimes committed against Palestinian women in the past,” NBC News reported. The letter also urged UN Women to establish committees to investigate “sexual crimes and acts of genocide perpetrated by the Israeli occupation in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

In Gaza, Palestinian women and children have accounted for more than half of those killed by Israeli forces, Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said in a statement last month, noting that Palestinian women have also been among those subjected to sexual violence since October 7.

The Biden administration pledged on Saturday to phase out coal power plants alongside dozens of other countries, a change that would go a long way toward curbing global warming.

US Special Envoy John Kerry announced that the United States would join 56 other nations in the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a group launched by the UK and Canadian governments in 2017 to transition away from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. The alliance has committed to stop building new power plants and to phase out existing ones.

“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities,” Kerry said in a statement. The United States was one of seven countries to join the alliance this weekend as the United Nations hosted the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai.

At #COP28 , I joined President @EmmanuelMacron & other leaders to proudly announce the United States is joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance.

We will work with partners around the world to phase out unabated coal, an absolutely essential step for keeping 1.5 C within reach. pic.twitter.com/ZnIgLr7hvY

— Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry (@ClimateEnvoy) December 2, 2023

A timeline was not given for phasing out existing plants, but other regulations in the United States and international commitments will require them to be gone by 2035. “We were heading to retiring coal by the end of the decade anyway,” climate analyst Alden Meyer of the European think tank E3G told the Associated Press, noting that no new facilities are being constructed in the United States because natural gas and renewable energy are both cleaner and more cost effective. About 20 percent of US electricity now comes from coal, and the country is burning less than half of what it was in 2008.

The Biden administration has been encouraging other countries to follow suit and stop building new coal plants, especially China and India. The decision to join the anti-coal alliance “sends a pretty powerful international signal that the US is putting its money where its mouth is,” Meyer added. Coal emits significantly more heat-trapping carbon dioxide than other fuels such as natural gas and gasoline. 

Also on Saturday, as my colleague Ari Berman reported, the Biden administration announced a new plan to reduce methane emissions, another major cause of global warming. For the first time, the US government will require oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of methane, a change that Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, described as “the most impactful climate rule that the United States has ever adopted in terms of addressing temperatures we would otherwise see.” The Environmental Protection Agency estimated the policy would prevent 58 million tons of methane emissions from 2024 to 2038—which is pretty close to the amount of carbon dioxide that’s emitted each year by all power plants in the United States.

One helpful characteristic of Covid, if there is such a thing, is that those who become infected shed the virus through their poop. Over the last few years, public health officials capitalized on this fact, and built a system to track Covid levels across the country using our sewage. Now, nearly four years after the start of the pandemic, as rates in many states swing upward yet again, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a helpful new tool for visualizing those trends.

With the agency’s Covid wastewater dashboard, users can chart historic, national Covid trends, identify which variants are on the rise, and view the states where “viral activity levels” are highest, meaning there may be an increased risk of infection. (Today, for instance, the levels are particularly high in the Midwest.)

New wastewater dashboard from the CDC! With national and regional trends at last! This is huge ⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/w4cd4D3yiP

— betsy ladyzhets 📊 (@betsyladyzhets) November 28, 2023

As I’ve reported, the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System, or NWSS, has been around since September 2020. But as CDC advisor Niall Brennan put it, the government’s first wastewater data visualizations were “underwhelming to say the least.” In putting the new dashboard together, he wrote on X, the CDC “willingly ripped up the rule book” to make the charts “more accessible to a wider audience.” 

Introducing the brand spanking new CDC wastewater data home https://t.co/jlWlF0XpdF

— Niall Brennan (@N_Brennan) November 29, 2023

Well-understood wastewater data, however, isn’t just for curious nerds. It can also save lives. In March, I visited Houston, Texas—home to one of the country’s most effective wastewater surveillance systems—to see how their local wastewater tracking efforts worked. Here’s a bit of my dispatch from the trip:

[W]hat I found most compelling about Houston’s program is how city officials have used its sewer data to fight the virus. For one, explains Dr. David Persse, the city’s chief medical officer, it’s allowed hospitals to know when to expect a surge in patients, and when to avoid scheduling elective surgeries that would otherwise limit capacity. The city also conducts “pinpoint testing” at sewers just outside of schools, jails, homeless shelters, and assisted living facilities. (This requires a two-person team to physically visit each location and in some cases hoist sampling devices from cockroachey manholes.) Particularly in the early days of Covid, this site-specific testing served as a warning system: If the virus appeared in a nursing home’s wastewater, Persse says, “[we’d] test everybody, all the employees, residents—bada bing, we found it. And then they could control it.” According to Persse, just 8.4 percent of Covid deaths in Houston have been related to long-term care facilities, compared to an estimated 23 percent nationally.

Similarly, at a national level, wastewater surveillance “can be an early indicator that the number of people with COVID-19 in a community is increasing or decreasing,” according to the CDC. As I wrote this summer, it’s a bit like checking the weather, but for Covid. But unlike other types of COVID-19 surveillance methods, like collecting nasal swabs, “wastewater surveillance does not depend on people having access to healthcare, people seeking healthcare when sick, or availability of COVID-19 testing.” And the primary resource it does depend on—poop—is pretty darn reliable.

Former Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels, one of the primary challengers to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), mentioned a reason he thinks she’s unfit for office: Omar is allegedly “not cute enough.”

During his appearance last week on The Break Down, a weekly politics podcast, one of the co-hosts asked Samuels to elaborate on his critiques of Omar’s alleged “lack of town halls [and] constituent services” (you can hear the question start at about the 22-minute mark). Here’s how he responded:

To see government not be responsive like that, to the people that pay them, it is offensive to me. And to not be responsive and available to those people, to meet with them and find out what their concerns are and to answer their tough questions? To not get back to people on the phone? Who do you think you are? And who do you think you’re working for? You’re not cute enough, you don’t dress well enough, nothing about you is attractive enough to overcome that deficit.

Omar responded to Samuels’ comments in a post on X, calling them “beneath the dignity of any adult, let alone someone seeking public office” and “reminiscent of the worst kinds of lies and misogyny that we are hearing from people like Donald Trump, who think they can say anything about women and get away with it.”

This is beneath the dignity of any adult, let alone someone seeking public office. It is reminiscent of the worst kinds of lies and misogyny that we are hearing from people like Donald Trump, who think they can say anything about women and get away with it. Like Trump, instead of… https://t.co/9j7BK3UehX

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 29, 2023

Omar’s senior advisor also disputed Samuels’ claim about her alleged lack of town halls, writing on X that the congressperson “has held multiple town halls every quarter this year.” (An Eventbrite page advertising Omar’s town halls appears to show she has held six this year, five of which were in person.) 

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Samuels—who nearly ousted the three-term congresswoman as the Democratic House nominee in the 2022 primary, coming up just about 2,500 votes short—said Omar’s repost mischaracterized his comments, which he claims weren’t about her specifically but were instead about “politicians who talk the talk versus walk the walk.”

“In listening to my full answer, it’s abundantly clear that I’m talking broadly about politicians who value their own celebrity over the needs of their constituents,” Samuels added. “We shouldn’t be surprised Rep. Ilhan Omar saw herself in my response.”

When he announced his challenge to Omar earlier this month, Samuels—who has also come out swinging against Omar’s critiques of U.S. support for Israel and policing in Minneapolis—pointed to last year’s contest, claiming that that race “laid the foundation for a rematch that holds the promise of a better future for our district.” But that was also before he insinuated that the incumbent’s appearance shapes her ability to govern.

Sexism isn’t a rarity in politics, nor is it a partisan problem: Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was accused of misogyny earlier this month after dismissing former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” at the last Republican debate. Whether sexism is enough to shape an election’s outcome, though, is another question: Trump, of course, was still elected after a leaked tape showed him bragging about sexual assault.

The United Auto Workers union, in a closely watched vote, has officially ratified its deal with General Motors, bringing the months-long saga of history-making strikes to a close. On Thursday, the union posted the final results, showing that approximately 55 percent of the 36,000 GM union members voted in favor of the deal, according to Forbes.

Since September, union members, under the leadership of President Shawn Fain, have been mobilizing against the nation’s three largest automakers—Ford, GM, and Stellantis—to demand better pay and working conditions. It’s the first time such an extensive labor action has upended the centuries-old industry. With GM being the final automaker to agree to a new a deal, the end of this chapter in the monumental fight for labor rights is now on the horizon.

The final contract for General Motors’ employees includes 25 percent pay increases over the next four years, cost of living adjustments to combat inflation, and organizing opportunities for other non-unionized automakers in the US, according to a UAW statement from October. While the votes on the remaining contracts with Ford and Stellantis are still pending, they are expected to pass, according to CNBC. 

Editor’s note: The author of this post and other Mother Jones workers are represented by UAW Local 2103.

More than 130 former Obama campaign staffers and political appointees have sent the ex-president a letter demanding he “leverage” his influence with President Joe Biden and other elected officials to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and broker the return of hostages, the Intercept reported Tuesday. 

“You always called on us to be courageous in reaching our hands high to help bend the arc toward justice,” the letter says. “Today, we call on you to stand with us, to do the same.”

The signatories—who signed the letter with their former or current titles, not their names—referenced Obama’s own words. In a Medium post last month, Obama wrote that Palestinians “continue to be forcibly displaced by a settler movement that too often has received tacit or explicit support from the Israeli government.” In Jerusalem a decade ago, the staffers pointed out, the former president said: “Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.” 

Representatives for the Obamas and the Obama Foundation didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Obama letter is part of a growing trend of onetime campaign staffers using their former bosses’ words to implore political figures to call for a ceasefire. More than 500 former Biden campaign staffers sent him a letter last week demanding he call for a ceasefire, among other measures, noting: “As you have said, silence in the face of human rights violations is tantamount to complicity.” (Biden has said there is “no possibility” of a ceasefire.)

More than 400 former staffers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign sent her a letter last month requesting she “demand an immediate ceasefire in Palestine and the return of Israeli hostages, and take concrete steps to end Israeli occupation,” explaining that “one of your last calls to action for us at the end of your presidential campaign was to ‘always choose to fight righteous fights.'” Warren said she respects her former staffers and that they’re “doing exactly what I have always encouraged them to do—stand up and fight for what they believe in,” Politico reported.

Over 400 former staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns sent him a letter—five days after Warren’s former staffers sent theirs—asking the Vermont senator to introduce a companion bill to the House resolution calling for a ceasefire, work to end US military funding to Israel, and facilitate more humanitarian aid to Gaza.

“Many of us, your former staff, are Muslim and/or Arab, and were inspired to support your campaign because of your calls to end the ‘Forever Wars’ waged against people who look like us and worship like us,” they wrote.

Sanders doesn’t appear to have directly responded to the letter, but told the Washington Post that the “tragic reality” is that Hamas wants “permanent war and the destruction of Israel” and wouldn’t abide by a ceasefire. Sanders thinks Israel should enact an “extended” humanitarian pause.

“I wish there was a simple solution,” he told the paper. “There isn’t.”

Federal officials are also calling on their current bosses to support a ceasefire: as I reported yesterday, dozens of State Department employees and hundreds of USAID staffers have voiced dissent internally and called for the administration to support a ceasefire. And more than 400 officials anonymously sent Biden a letter yesterday protesting his support for Israel and demanding he call for an immediate ceasefire, according to a New York Times report.

The White House doesn’t appear to have publicly commented on the letter—but a White House spokesperson pointed Mother Jones to a letter that more than 115 former officials signed in support of Biden’s policy toward Israel, as first reported by CNN yesterday.

The letter, which includes the names of signatories, praises Biden’s “moral clarity, courageous leadership, and staunch support of Israel, one of our nation’s strongest allies, in the aftermath of the worst massacre of Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust.” It also says that “a ceasefire is not possible at this time” and that a more than two-year ceasefire had been in effect when Hamas carried out its attacks on Oct. 7.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shares that perspective, writing in the Atlantic yesterday that a full ceasefire “would give Hamas a chance to re-arm and perpetuate the cycle of violence” and “would leave the people of Gaza living in a besieged enclave under the domination of terrorists and leave Israelis vulnerable to continued attacks.”

Not everyone supports the public shaming of elected officials. According to New York columnist Jonathan Chait, the staffers protesting their current bosses should either quit or accept their cog-in-the-machine status: 

If an elected official hires you to look out for their interests, and instead you attend rallies and sign petitions labelling that elected official a moral monster, I’d say your professional credibility is very much in doubt. Indeed, that behavior indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of the job of congressional staffer.

What that seems to ignore is that getting on the federal payroll—or that of a onetime presidential campaign—doesn’t mean that staffers can’t dissent from their bosses or the candidates they once supported, particularly on an issue the majority of American voters agree with them on and that has left thousands of children dead, injured, and traumatized. 

As the letters show, the signatories are simply asking the politicians to live up to the ethical stances—or the “professional credibility”—they’ve campaigned and governed on. And they might even be helping make sure that Democrats can keep getting elected: a new poll conducted by Marist, NPR, and PBS shows that 56 percent of Democrats—and nearly half of people under 45—think Israel’s response to the Hamas attack went “too far.”  

With Biden facing tough headwinds against former President Donald Trump going into an election year—and with presidential campaigns notoriously relying on the grueling labor of young people—that poll isn’t promising for the Biden campaign. As Juliana Amin, a former official on Warren’s campaign, told Vox, the letter signers are “the people who do the work that campaigns need, that wins elections, that uplift people and their platforms, and I know a lot of people who aren’t willing to do that work anymore if Democrats continue to enable genocide.”

Not only that, but with Biden’s original promise of student loan relief being struck down by the Supreme Court in June, he has a tough road ahead if he wants to win the votes of young people. Biden has long cast Trump as a threat to democracy, and himself as the saner alternative. But as long as he’s backing this war, all signs point to a vote for him being harder for young Democrats to justify next November.

As a Democratic strategist told my colleague Noah Lanard, Biden’s response to the war could “absolutely” cost him the election. 

Correction, November 15: This post has been updated to better reflect who signed a letter urging Obama to call for a ceasefire.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) became Speaker of the House less than a month ago. Since then, a national audience has become aware of a slew of questionable remarks, associations, and policy positions: The congressman has been criticized for blaming school shootings on no-fault divorces; he has been critiqued for working hand-in-hand with legislators like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to gut gender-affirming care for teens; it has been mentioned that Johnson even claimed that if people gave birth to more “able-bodied workers,” then Republicans wouldn’t need to cut Social Security and Medicaid.

Where could he get such ideas? There has been extensive reporting on Johnson’s connections to Christian nationalist organizations, too. Now, another troubling fact about the House’s most powerful man has surfaced.

On Wednesday, NPR reported that the speaker has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, an extreme far-right Christian movement seeking to dissolve the US’s separation between church and state by “any means necessary.” Johnson reportedly has fostered relationships with several NAR leaders, including Pastor Jim Garlow, who has hosted online prayer sessions for “U.S. election integrity”

“I’m so grateful for the ministry and your faithfulness,” said Johnson during an August interview on Garlow’s radio show. “It’s a great encouragement to me and others who are serving in these sometimes rocky corners of the Lord’s vineyard.” But, the NAR isn’t your average conservative Christian cohort. Unlike other believers, they have wholeheartedly embraced and led an effort to spread Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election results. As my former colleague, Emily Hofstaedter, wrote:

NAR adherents share goals with other conservative Christians—outlawing abortion, fighting marriage equality—and were especially instrumental in the movement to keep a defeated Trump in power. In his audio documentary Charismatic Revival Fury, Matthew Taylor, a scholar at Baltimore’s Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, explains how 15 charismatic leaders met with high-level Trump administration officials in the lead-up to January 6 to discuss “spiritual warfare strategies”; of the six protest permits issued that day, four went to NAR-affiliated charismatic church groups. “A lot of NAR people just embrace the Big Lie,” says [André] Gagné, propelled by the claims of their prophets: “‘It’s not true, and God showed us.’”

Johnson’s bonds with this movement shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s even faintly familiar with his rhetoric. The Louisiana legislator has spent nearly two decades trying to cram religion into secular spaces under the guise of “religious freedom,” with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful conservative organization where he spent years as a spokesperson and an attorney.

More than 400 federal officials sent President Joe Biden a letter today protesting his support for Israel and demanding he call for an immediate ceasefire, according to a report in the New York Times.

The letter, obtained by the Times, was anonymously signed by officials of various faith backgrounds representing 40 government agencies, including the National Security Council, the FBI, and the Justice Department. The document begins by denouncing the Oct. 7 attack on Israelis carried out by Hamas and implores the president to facilitate moving more aid into Gaza, the newspaper reported.

“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a cease-fire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians; the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services; and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” the letter says, according to the Times. 

It also notes that Biden’s approach to supporting Israel is unpopular among voters, linking to a poll from the progressive think tank Data for Progress, issued last month, showing that 66 percent of voters—and 80 percent of Democrats—agree that the US should call for a ceasefire in Gaza. As my colleague Noah Lanard has reported, young progressives in particular are disgusted with Biden over the support he has shown for Israel—a reality that Democratic strategists say could cost him the election.

According to the Times, the letter adds that “Americans do not want the U.S. military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle East.”

The White House hasn’t yet publicly responded to the letter and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Tuesday morning—but Biden said last week that there’s “no possibility” of a ceasefire, noting instead that he had asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to implement daily four-hour pauses to allow civilians to flee, which Israel’s military has agreed to.

The letter comes as the latest example of growing dissent within the Biden administration over its support for Israel: the Times reported yesterday that dozens of State Department employees sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken three internal “dissent” memos urging Biden to call for a ceasefire. Blinken responded in an email to State Department employees, obtained by the Times, saying he’s aware “some people in the department may disagree with approaches we are taking or have views on what we can do better” and that officials are “listening” to these concerns. 

State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters Monday that Blinken “encourages people to provide feedback” and “to speak up if they disagree.”

“It doesn’t mean that we’re going to change our policy based on their disagreements,” Miller added. “He is going to take their recommendations and make ultimately what he thinks is the best judgment and make his recommendations to the president about what we ought to do.”

Hundreds of USAID officials also signed a letter calling on the Biden administration to push for a ceasefire, Foreign Policy reported last Friday.

USAID Spokesperson Jessica Jennings said in a statement provided to Mother Jones on Tuesday that the agency “will continue to work with our trusted partner organizations to help meet urgent needs in Gaza for medical commodities, shelter, access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and food.” Jennings added that “agency leadership has held numerous listening sessions with staff to offer appreciation for their work and hear their concerns.” 

Instead of a ceasefire, the Biden administration has requested $14 billion in aid for Israel, while bundling an aid request for Palestinians into a $9 billion request for humanitarian aid for Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine as a group—without specifying how much of it would actually go towards Palestinians.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war.

On Sunday, the World Health Organization said Sunday that 521 people—including 16 healthcare workers—had been killed in “attacks on healthcare” in Gaza, and that hospitals lack adequate food, water, and fuel. Human Rights Watch said today that Israel’s attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel should be investigated as war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

This story has been updated with statements from the State Department and USAID.

“Mr. President, you care about Jewish people. As a rabbi, I need you to call for a cease-fire right now,” called Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg last week, interrupting Biden at a campaign reception in Minneapolis.

Biden responded with “I think we need a pause.” It was the first time Biden had wavered from his unconditional support for Israel, though he clarified that “a pause means give time to get the prisoners out. Give time.”

Rosenberg, a Reconstructionist rabbi, author, and organizer, is a member of the rabbinical council of Jewish Voice for Peace, a large coalition of anti-zionist Jewish Americans calling for a ceasefire in the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Organizers say that JVP protestors’ mass arrests in recent weeks are the largest scale arrests of Jews for civil disobedience in US history.

The internet quickly caught on to Rosenberg’s comments. While many voiced support, hate against Rosenberg, an LGBTQ+ woman, also exploded on social media. Some was from the expected sources, like conservative talk show host Megyn Kelly, who said she “was a man pretending to be a woman” who may be “pretending to be a rabbi too.” Kelly emphasized that Rosenberg has a beard (5-10 percent of cisgender women in the United State naturally grow beards). 

“I’m so proud to be a queer and visibly gender non conforming femme woman who could take that action,” Rosenberg says about her appearance and her confrontation with Biden. “Let all, especially SWANA and Jewish bearded femmes see ourselves in power and unafraid.” (SWANA refers to Southwest Asia and North Africa, the region commonly referred to as the Middle East.)

Such transphobic, nasty comments are not surprising from Kelly. But she wasn’t the only one: Stella Inger, a Jewish news anchor from the One America News Network, tweeted a video of Rosenberg’s comments, calling her a “biological man.” Local Brooklyn politician Yaakov Kaplan, highlight headshots of Rosenberg to question her legitimacy as a woman, Jew, and Rabbi. In a different incident, a feud unfolded online between two queer, Jewish content creators. One of them, Michael Valdes, supports Israel, and made a halloween costume meme of Matt Bernstein, who he described as a “Self-hating Jew” and “Queer for Palestine” with a “lack knowledge of Jewish history” and “desires to be wanted by the ‘wokes’.”

This vocal transphobia from supporters of Israel is telling, considering how so many defend the country as a bastion of safety for LGBTQ+ people in the Middle East. On October 29th, Israel’s official Twitter account posted: “Looking forward to seeing Hamas raise the rainbow flag across Gaza.” After the October 7 attacks, David Kilmnick, founder of the LGBT Network, wondered why more LGBTQ+ people hadn’t come out in support of Israel considering it is the “only country [that] protects LGBT people from discrimination and violence.” Mark Segal, a Jewish LGBTQ+ activist and journalist who participated in Stonewall, wrote an op-ed “Hamas hates you as well,” directed at the Pro-Palestine queer community. 

In reality, things in Israel are more complicated, and critics of the country have long accused it of “pinkwashing,” a term created by Palestinian activists. For example, Israel doesn’t allow same sex marriage or adoption. 

For Rosenberg,  support of justice in Palestine is directly related to her queer and Jewish identity. “Supporters of Israel say, ‘This is being done for your safety,'” explains Rosenberg. “As a queer person and as a Jew, my bodily autonomy and safety is very visceral. The idea that somehow LGBTQ identity can be safeguarded by a military occupation and displacement of people is just absurd. What kind of freedom is that?”

Jay Saper, a lead organizer for Jewish Voice for Peace, explains that the dynamic of receiving anti-LGBTQ+ hate from supporters of Israel is not new. “The most deeply homophobic and transphobic remarks that I personally have received are from Zionists,” says Saper, “but we’re going to continue to speak up and to take action like never before, to work to bring about a ceasefire and justice for Palestinians.”

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia will not run for reelection next year. 

The conservative Democrat called the choice—which he shared the news of in a video he posted to X—”one of the toughest decisions of my life.” Instead of running for Senate, Manchin said he would be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.” 

If you think that sounds insufficiently vague…I agree. Which is why I reached out to Manchin’s press team in a bid to get some clarity. And specifically, to ask: Is he running for president?

No word yet. (Though, I’m not quite holding my breath: after my colleague David Corn reported a Manchin scoop back in 2021—that he was considering leaving the Democratic party and formulating an exit plan if the Build Back Better plan wasn’t dramatically cut down to his liking—the senator denigrated the Mother Jones story as “bullshit.” We stand by the story.)

In the meantime, NBC News reports that a person “with direct knowledge” of the politician’s future plans said “nothing is off the table” and “no specific decisions have been made other than a commitment to find a way to change the country’s political dialogue.”

Manchin essentially said the same thing on “Fox News Sunday” back in June, claiming (after some prodding) that he was “not ruling anything in, not ruling anything out.” During the same appearance, Manchin also discussed what sounded like his admiration for the centrist nonpartisan group No Labels—which the New York Times reported in May is seeking to put a third-party candidate on the ballot, with Manchin at the top of their list—saying that they’ve been “making common-sense decisions.” 

Manchin has been a longtime headache for Democrats in the Senate, casting the only Democratic vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, opposing filibuster reform, standing in the way of retaining the expanded child tax credit, and threatening to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which he helped negotiate, just by way of a few examples. 

The race to fill Manchin’s seat has already been heating up in West Virginia—a red state where Manchin was, for years, the only Democratic elected to statewide office—with Republican Gov. Jim Justice and Trump-backed GOP Rep. Alex Mooney in the race. As the Associated Press notes, Manchin’s decision means Democrats will have to fight to keep 23 seats—including three held by Independents—while Republicans will only need to fight to keep ten. Senate Republicans are celebrating what Manchin’s decision may mean for those odds: National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines issued a statement saying, “We like our odds in West Virginia.”

To the West Virginians who have put their trust in me and fought side by side to make our state better – it has been an honor of my life to serve you. Thank you. My statement on my political future: pic.twitter.com/dz8JuXAyTL

— Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) November 9, 2023

It took the GOP presidential candidates more than 90 minutes to address abortion rights during Wednesday night’s televised debate—even though they were gathering just one day after Ohio became the latest state to enshrine a constitutional right to access abortion. 

The candidates were forced to acknowledge that voters have resoundingly endorsed abortion rights on the state level all over the country—including in Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana—after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade last year.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott was the only candidate on the debate stage who said he would endorse a 15-week federal ban—a position that has become increasingly rare as the Republican candidates reassess their stances in the face of political headwinds, with the front-runner, former President Donald Trump (who, once again, skipped the debate), also refusing to say whether he’d support a federal ban. While running for president the first time, Trump said, “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who received illegal abortions—a statement he later walked back, stating that “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.”

The other four candidates seemed to implicitly concede to the reality that, as polls show, Americans overwhelmingly support abortion access. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who during the second debate said he would sign a 15-week ban, appeared to evade reiterating that position, saying instead that he stands “for a culture of life.” (He signed a six-week abortion ban into law in his state earlier this year.) 

“At the same time, I understand some of these states are doing it a little bit different,” he continued, adding that Republicans “have been caught flat-footed on these referenda, and they have been losing on these referenda.”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie—who said earlier this year he wouldn’t support a federal ban—took a similar position, calling abortion “an issue that should be decided in each state.”

“I trust the people in each country, state-by-state, to make the call for themselves.” 

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who previously pledged to sign a federal ban, focused instead on emphasizing that “no Republican president can ban abortions” alone, noting it would also take the support of Congress. When pressed, she said she “would support anything that would pass.”

She said that while she’s “unapologetically pro-life,” she doesn’t “judge anyone for being pro-choice and I don’t want them to judge me for being pro-life.” 

And, as usual, Vivek Ramaswamy zigged when others zagged—calling for “sexual responsibility for men,” which he characterized as “the missing ingredient in this movement.” (He has said he’s against a federal ban…but supports six-week state bans.) 

Five GOP presidential candidates sparred at the third Republican debate Wednesday night, and one of the most contentious issues was…TikTok. 

The Chinese-owned video app has long been a boogeyman for lawmakers who fear the Chinese government could use it to obtain Americans’ data. The NBC News debate moderators asked the candidates if they would “ban or force the sale of TikTok” if they became president, referencing an essay by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) about, in Gallagher’s words, “pro-Hamas propaganda” allegedly proliferating on the app.

“TikTok is not only spyware—it is polluting the minds of American young people all throughout this country, and they’re doing it intentionally,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, adding he’d ban the app in his first week in the Oval Office.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also pledged to ban TikTok, calling it part of a “full-spectrum approach to be able to fend China off.” (He has signed legislation to restrict the app as governor.)

After moderator Hugh Hewitt asked Vivek Ramaswamy how he’d ban TikTok given that Ramaswamy actually uses it, the candidate got personal. He said that while former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley had previously criticized him for using the app, Haley’s own daughter—25-year-old Rena Haley—uses it, too.

“You might want to take care of your family first,” Ramaswamy said to Haley.

“Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Haley replied. (NBC News reported that Haley’s daughter was actually in the debate audience Wednesday, and she appeared on stage at the end of the night.) 

Ramaswamy’s barb garnered boos from the crowd—and another sharp rebuke from Haley. “You’re just scum,” she muttered.

Tonight's GOP debate took a nasty turn when Vivek Ramaswamy accused Nikki Haley of hypocrisy for criticizing him for being on TikTok when her daughter uses the app.

Haley's response: "You're just scum."https://t.co/WWpfhN6IRm pic.twitter.com/la3X8VSj5O

— POLITICO (@politico) November 9, 2023

After months of interviews, TV appearances, and hype, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin—and his vision of himself as the new standard bearer of how to win as a Republican—ran into a problem: He lost. On Tuesday, Youngkin’s dreams of helping bring about a GOP-led General Assembly were crushed. The state’s Democrats secured the majority in both the House of Delegates and the state senate. The loss thwarted the GOP’s effort at complete legislative control and potentially finished Youngkin’s presidential aspirations. In the process, millions of dollars in PAC donations were flushed down the toilet.

Call me sometime Glenn.

I want to hear you say it. pic.twitter.com/WkPWdknzEh

— L. Louise Lucas (@SenLouiseLucas) November 8, 2023

“The emperor has no clothes except for a red sweater vest,” Sen. Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) told the Virginia Mercury as the election results were announced. With all 140 legislative seats up for grabs, Democratic candidates flipped the Republican’s previous 52-48 majority in the House and maintained their control in the Senate, according to unofficial elections results. 

As my colleague Ari Berman, reported, this year’s election cycle was a particularly critical one. Virginia’s previously divided government prevented Youngkin, and the formerly Republican House, from passing contested pieces of legislation, including a 15-week abortion ban. The governor spent a good chunk of 2023 touring the Old Dominion state to change that. And his political action committee, Spirit of Virginia, was reportedly one of the largest spenders in this election cycle, which was already poised to be notably costly compared to others. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis noted, The Spirit of Virginia poured $7.7 million into this year’s legislative candidates. Youngkin, a former CEO for a major private equity company, even included $500,000 of his own cash towards their election efforts, according to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP). None of it mattered. He lost.

“Virginia voters sent a very clear message by resoundingly embracing inclusion, equity, and civil rights at the ballot box,” said Del. Marcia Price (D) in a statement to Mother Jones. “They rejected fear-mongering and destructive culture wars. Not even the Republican’s dog whistles and scare tactics could suppress the people’s support for the common sense solutions that Democrats prioritize.”

During the lead-up to these elections, there was plenty of talk about how a Republican win could propel Youngkin, who’s been candid about a potential bid for the presidency, into the 2024 Republican candidate lineup. Well, good luck trying that now.