MATT WALSH (HOST): So, this is supposed to put a stop to Trump’s deportation efforts. That’s the idea anyway. And it’s — this is completely bogus. It’s illegitimate. It’s ridiculous. Trump should ignore it. That’s the only answer. The Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority to tell the president that he can’t deport illegal aliens. They don’t have the authority to set up — to set policy on, you know, on how that is carried out. They don’t have any authority to do that.

I mean, it’s nice that they’ve given their opinion. So, the Supreme Court has given their personal opinion that they think, you know, if you’re gonna deport an illegal alien, they should get more than 24 hours notice. So that’s their personal opinion. Thanks for letting us know, guys. Really interesting. I’m glad you chimed in. Really interesting opinion. Thanks for that. Anyway, let’s get back to deporting the illegal aliens. Like, that has to be the answer because they don’t have the authority, so Trump should just ignore them.

And what are they gonna do about it? What are they gonna do about it? There’s no enforcement mechanism. They can’t compel him to do anything, so ignore them. And where does that lead? What happens? I don’t know. But it’s — this comes to a head. It’s time for this to come to a head. The judicial branch thinks that it can usurp the authority of the executive branch, and the only way to put a check on this madness, the only way to shut down this power grab by the judicial branch is to disregard them and dare them to try and do anything about it. It’s the only way.

A chilling video confirms what Cassie Ventura said all along—reminding us that consent can be withdrawn, power distorts choice, and belief in survivors should never hinge on perfect timing or proof.

Editor’s note: This story contains graphic descriptions and images that some readers may find disturbing.

The surveillance video is horrifying. It shows Sean “Diddy” Combs grabbing, throwing and kicking his then-partner Cassie Ventura in a hotel hallway. There’s no ambiguity—no “he said, she said.” Just brutal, public violence.

But here’s the more uncomfortable truth: Cassie told us this years ago.

In her 2023 lawsuit, she accused Combs of rape, trafficking and a decade of control. He settled with her in just 24 hours—an outcome that speaks volumes. Yet as the footage resurfaces, so does the backlash: Why didn’t she leave? Didn’t she choose to be with him? Why speak out now?

Let’s get something straight.

Consent is not a contract. It is not permanent. It is not unconditional.

Consent can be enthusiastic and real—and then withdrawn the moment a person feels unsafe, coerced or manipulated. The idea that Cassie’s relationship with Diddy somehow invalidates her testimony is not just ignorant. It’s dangerous.

This is Consent 101, and apparently, a refresher is long overdue.

When a 19-year-old newcomer enters a relationship with a 36-year-old music mogul who controls her career, that’s not an even playing field. That’s power, money and influence stacked against youth and vulnerability. And when that same man isolates her, monitors her, coerces her into sex acts and physically assaults her—what we’re talking about isn’t love. It’s abuse.

Yet Cassie has had to prove and re-prove her pain. She had to bleed in public. She had to let us watch. And still, too many people respond not with outrage at her abuser, but suspicion of her motives.

This is how rape culture works. It casts doubt on victims. It protects men with power. It demands that survivors be perfect and blameless before we grant them belief.

But belief shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be a starting point.

Cassie Ventura is a woman of color who dared to tell the truth about a powerful man. That alone is a radical act in a culture that demands silence from women like her. The system wasn’t built to protect her—it was built to protect him. And still, she spoke.

Her story should remind us that consent is an ongoing conversation. You can say yes on Monday and no on Tuesday. You can say yes once and never again. You can say no silently. You can say no by walking away. And when you say no—no matter when, no matter how—it means stop.

We are long past the point of treating consent like a checkbox. It’s not an agreement you sign and can never undo. It’s not, “she didn’t say no,” or “she stayed,” or “she dated him.” All of those are distractions from the truth.

The truth is: Cassie said stop. He didn’t.

So if you’re still asking why she didn’t leave sooner, ask instead why he didn’t stop.

Ask why we keep expecting survivors to save themselves while we refuse to believe them. Ask why we need a leaked video to take a woman at her word.

Ask yourself: Whose silence are you protecting?

Arlita Walker lives a fairly quiet life in southwest Memphis, Tennessee. The 60-year-old grandmother was employed with Federal Express for 15 years while she also raised her daughter. But when the toll of lifting heavy packages started to harm her health, Walker had to quit; she’s been grappling with health challenges since 2013.

Since then, Walker has managed to get her high blood pressure and diabetes under control, but she still battles with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which at times makes it difficult for her to breathe. She relies on a prescription medication called Trelegy Ellipta, an inhaler that she uses once a day. It carries a hefty price tag — $800 for a 30-day supply.

Medicaid has helped Walker to afford this life-saving treatment. It also has covered her blood thinner, copays, and transportation to her doctor’s appointments. But that access is in doubt for her and the 72 million people — one-fifth of the U.S. population — enrolled in the government health care program for low-income people and people with disabilities.

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, which manages Medicaid, has been directed to locate $880 billion in savings, and some Republican lawmakers want to include work requirements or make cuts to the program.

A key committee in the process, the House Budget Committee, advanced a bill late on Sunday that includes stricter work requirements, though it will likely undergo more changes before it passes the full House. The bill will almost certainly face challenges in the Senate.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has set a Memorial Day deadline for passing the bill through the chamber, though delays are expected.

Black Americans would bear the brunt of a Medicaid overhaul: About 20% of Medicaid enrollees are Black, while Black Americans make up just 14% of the U.S. population. Making big changes to the program also could devastate rural hospitals that depend on Medicaid reimbursements.

“What I’m worried about is that we will have to come out of our pockets [to pay]. And we all live on a fixed income, so we really don’t have that kind of money,” Walker told Capital B. 

Walker’s monthly income stems from $1,170 in disability and $58 in food assistance. These payments must cover rent ($750), utilities ($200), and expenses for her 11-year-old granddaughter, who lives with her.

“And she can eat,” Walker said with a laugh.

If she has to finance her medical affairs without any help, she said, she’ll go bankrupt. 

“It’s a lot of trying to figure out how to rob Peter to pay Paul, right? And make sure that everybody gets something,” she said. “You can’t win for losing.”

Medicaid’s uncertain future has left enrollees feeling helpless.

“I don’t like this [waiting],” Walker said. “If you want to do something, then give us a heads-up and do what you’re gonna do. Because we’re gonna have to find a way to make things happen.”

Democratic lawmakers have been condemning their Republican colleagues’ plans to target Medicaid.

“Medicaid has been a lifeline for millions of families in this country, but it has also helped us address critical disparities in health for Black communities,” U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware told Capital B in a statement, referring to how the program has helped to address the Black maternal health crisis. “Without access to this care, we risk exacerbating deep-rooted inequalities and putting lives at risk.”

Read on for a look at what might lie ahead for Medicaid — and how different lawmakers are responding. This story will be updated as legislative developments occur.

What changes are lawmakers considering?

Republican lawmakers are scrambling to figure out how to find billions of dollars in savings.

This month, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie released a plan that would establish work requirements for “able-bodied adults without dependents.” People can meet these monthly requirements by “working at least 80 hours, completing at least 80 hours of community service, participating in a work program for at least 80 hours, enrolling in an educational program for at least 80 hours, or a combination of these activities for at least 80 hours.”

Some Republican lawmakers are calling for cutting certain payments permitted through the Affordable Care Act, or capping that spending on a per beneficiary basis. Under the ACA, states can expand Medicaid to adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level (which for a single person in 2025 is $21,597). The federal government covers 90% of these additional costs.

Forty states — including many red states — and Washington, D.C., have adopted Medicaid expansion, which has brought in some 20 million adults and has helped to shrink racial and ethnic disparities in coverage and access to care.

If Republican lawmakers were to eliminate the federal match rate, the U.S. government could save $626 billion over the course of a 10-year period, according to a recent KFF analysis.

What could these changes mean for coverage?

Advocates have warned that adding work requirements would result in people losing coverage.

“People are busy, and a monthly administrative burden is enormous,” Michael Linden, a former senior official with the Office of Management and Budget, told Capital B. “A lot of people end up not getting Medicaid because they miss a month of filing, or the forms are complicated, or they’re just trying to put food on the table.”

Eliminating the ACA expansion match rate would have a major impact on the health care landscape.

States would have to decide whether they want to absorb billions of dollars in costs to keep the Medicaid expansion coverage that millions of Americans use. Doing this would require that states increase taxes or scale back benefits.

Additionally, 12 states have “trigger laws” that would immediately terminate Medicaid expansion or require some sort of change in policy if the federal match rate ended or decreased. Enrollees in these states would be in jeopardy of losing coverage. Some states are attempting to abolish such legislation; others are seeking to enact it.

Trigger laws would likely have a disproportionate effect on Black communities. North Carolina, for instance, is a trigger law state and has some 3 million Medicaid enrollees, with more than 640,000 enrolled in the expansion program. Just 22% of the state’s population is Black, but Black residents make up 36.7% of expansion enrollment.

What impact could restructuring have on rural hospitals?

Straining Medicaid could put tremendous pressure on hospitals, which would still need to care for patients even though that care might not be paid for. This stress could result in the shuttering of hospitals — an outcome that would be especially devastating for residents in rural areas that already suffer from limited access to health services.

Communities in Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee are working to reopen the rural hospitals that Black residents need, but turning the lights back on is a massive challenge.

“True systemic change is a grassroots effort, but you will need people from the top pushing legislation that’s going to allow rural hospitals to survive or reopen,” Eva Rawls, a Black registered nurse who worked at a hospital in Tennessee, told Capital B in 2024.

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein underlined the precarious situation facing rural hospitals in a March letter addressed to House and Senate leaders.

“The damage to North Carolina’s health care system, particularly rural hospitals and providers, would be devastating, not to mention to people who can no longer afford to access health care,” he wrote. “These are significant and immediate consequences.”

What are moderate Republican lawmakers saying?

Medicaid has helped people in both red states and blue states, and some Republican lawmakers are voicing opposition to legislation that threatens it.

“We won’t vote for something that takes away benefits from seniors, disabled and vulnerable people that we represent who rely on Medicaid,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York said in April.

Earlier that month, she and 11 other House Republicans — all of whom are in competitive districts where taking politically perilous actions could cost them their seats — wrote a letter to House leaders warning that they wouldn’t support a bill that erodes Medicaid.

“We cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations,” the letter read.

Some Senate Republicans, including Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, also are expected to challenge legislation that chips away at or eliminates Medicaid.

What has been the response from Democratic lawmakers?

Democratic lawmakers have been rallying around protecting Medicaid for months.

Most recently, on April 27, top Democratic lawmakers — including Sen. Cory Booker and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — held a sit-in on the Capitol steps. They highlighted what they said is the “moral urgency” of pushing back against legislation that would undermine health care access.

“We’re either going to choose the side of the American people, or we’re going to choose this cruel budget that Republicans are trying to jam down the throats of the American people,” Jeffries said.

Weeks before, Booker of New Jersey used a record-setting speech — it lasted 25 hours and 5 minutes, from March 31 to April 1 — to criticize the administration’s agenda, including its Medicaid plans.

“They are trying to gut Medicaid and Medicare, programs on which nearly a third of our country rely — all to pay for tax cuts to billionaires and corporations,” Booker said.

And on March 4, U.S. Rep. Al Green of Texas protested during President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress.

Toward the start of Trump’s speech, when the president claimed that the 2024 election — in which he received 49.8% of the popular vote and Kamala Harris received 48.3% — offered him “a mandate like has not been seen in many decades,” Green interrupted. He shouted that Trump has “no mandate” to dismantle Medicaid.

Tim Miller and JVL talk Vice President JD Vance’s comments on Ukraine, framing it as “Joe Biden’s war” and casted doubt on continued U.S. support.

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Two days before President Donald Trump announced dramatic plans for “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign imports, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sold stock in almost three dozen companies, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

The Feb. 11 sales occurred near the stock market’s historic peak, just before it began to slide amid concerns about Trump’s tariff plans and ultimately plummeted after the president unveiled the details of the new tariffs on April 2.

Disclosure records filed by Duffy with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show he sold between $75,000 and $600,000 of stock two days before Trump’s Feb. 13 announcement, and up to $50,000 more that day.

Transportation secretaries normally have little to do with tariff policy, but Duffy has presented himself as one of the intellectual forefathers of Trump’s current trade agenda. As a congressman in 2019, his last government position before Trump elevated him to his cabinet post, Duffy introduced a bill he named the “United States Reciprocal Trade Act.” The proposed legislation, which did not pass, in many ways mirrors Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan. Duffy worked on that bill with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. Trump’s tariffs were “the culmination of that work,” Duffy posted online, referring to his own bill in the House.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned in the course of their official duties could violate the law. However, it’s unclear whether Duffy had any information about the timing or scale of Trump’s reciprocal tariff plans before the public did.

Trump had repeatedly promised to institute significant tariffs throughout the campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume Trump wouldn’t adopt the far-reaching levies that led to the market crash following his “Liberation Day” announcement.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Transportation Department spokesperson said an outside manager made the trades and Duffy “had no input on the timing of the sales” — a defense that ethics experts generally consider one of the strongest against questions of trading on nonpublic information.

His stock transactions “are part of a retirement account and not managed directly by the Secretary. The account managers must follow the guidance of the ethics agreement and they have done so.”

“The Secretary strongly supports the President’s tariff policy, but he isn’t part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson dismissed the notion that knowledge of Trump’s coming tariffs could constitute insider knowledge because “President Trump has been discussing tariffs since the 1980s.”

Duffy is the second cabinet secretary to have sold stock at an opportune time.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. A government ethics agreement required Bondi to sell the shares within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have given her until early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. After the market closed that day, Trump presented his tariffs, sending the market reeling.

Following ProPublica’s story, at least two Democratic members of Congress called for investigations. Bondi has yet to answer questions about whether she knew anything about Trump’s tariff plans before the public did. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about the trades.

Disclosure forms for securities trading by government officials do not require them to state the exact amount bought or sold but instead to provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

Duffy’s disclosure records show he sold 34 stocks worth between $90,000 and $650,000 on Feb. 11 and Feb. 13. Per the ethics agreement he signed to avoid conflicts of interest as head of the Transportation Department, he was required to sell off stock in seven of those companies during his first three months in office. Cabinet members are typically required to divest themselves of financial interests that intersect with their department’s oversight role, which in Duffy’s case involve U.S. roadways, aviation and the rest of the nation’s transportation network. The ethics agreement was dated Jan. 13, and Duffy was confirmed by the senate on Jan. 28, meaning he had until late April to sell. His spokesperson said he provided his account manager with the ethics agreement on Feb. 7.

The stocks he sold in the other 27 companies were not subject to the ethics agreement. Those shares were valued somewhere between $27,000 and $405,000, according to the records. Among them were Shopify, whose merchants are impacted by the tariffs, and John Deere, the agricultural machinery manufacturer that has projected hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs because of Trump’s tariffs.

Other companies Duffy sold, like gambling firm DraftKings and food delivery service DoorDash, are less directly vulnerable to tariff disruptions. But even those companies will be impacted if Americans have less disposable cash to spend. Few stocks were not hit hard by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. The S&P 500, a broadbased index, fell almost 19% in the weeks that followed Duffy’s sales and 13% specifically after Trump unveiled the details of his reciprocal tariff plan. Since Trump unexpectedly walked back much of those initial tariffs, the market has rebounded.

There’s no indication that the cash from Duffy’s sales was immediately reinvested. He appears to have held on to parts of his portfolio, including a Bitcoin fund, treasuries, S&P 500 funds and stock in Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, an American biopharma company. (Duffy also purchased some Microsoft shares, one of the stocks he’s prohibited from holding, days earlier on Feb. 7, only to sell them on Feb. 11 with the rest of his sales.)

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through their jobs could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. The 2012 law clarified that executive and legislative branch employees cannot use nonpublic government information to trade stock and requires them to promptly disclose their trades.

But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. Current and former officials have also raised concerns that Trump’s Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission would not aggressively investigate activities by Trump or his allies.

The president’s selection of Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation was somewhat unexpected. Duffy, who came to fame when he starred in the reality show “The Real World” in the late 1990s, had last held public office in 2019 during Trump’s first term when he served as a Wisconsin congressman.

As a lawmaker, Duffy introduced the bill that would have made it easier for Trump, or any president, to levy new tariffs, a role that had long been largely reserved for Congress. The bill would have allowed the president to impose additional tariffs on imported goods if he determined that another country was applying a higher duty rate on the same goods when they were coming from America.

The bill did not pass, but Trump has essentially assumed that power by justifying new tariffs as essential to national security or in response to a national emergency. His Feb. 13 announcement called on his advisers to come up with new tariff rates on goods coming from countries around the world based on a number of restrictions he said those countries were placing on American products — not just through tariffs, but also with their exchange rates and industry subsidies.

Even the public rollout of Duffy’s bill and Trump’s tariffs were similar. Duffy released a spreadsheet showing how other countries tariffed particular goods at a higher rate than the U.S. Trump also used a spreadsheet during his rollout to show that his new tariffs were the same or lower than the trade restrictions other countries had placed on American goods.

More recently, Duffy has been a booster of Trump’s trade policies.

“LIBERATION DAY!!We’re not gonna take it anymore!,” he tweeted two days after Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on April 2. “This week, @POTUS took a historic step towards stopping other countries from ripping off the American worker and restoring Fair Trade. In Congress, I helped lead the US Reciprocal Trade Act with @RealPNavarro and the @WhiteHouse to expand the President’s tariff powers in his first term. I am so proud to have been able to share the culmination of that work, Liberation Day, with my family this week. Thank you at POTUS!”

The Trump administration’s relentless assault on the rule of law is a kind of arson: It is setting so many blazes that the fire department is having trouble putting them all out at once. Last week, Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to cut off the water.

Trump’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants—which flagrantly overrides law, Supreme Court precedent, and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment—has, at least for now, reached the justices primarily as a procedural question. At issue during oral argument before the Court was the constitutionality of nationwide injunctions put in place by district-court judges, rather than the merits of the order itself.

Nationwide injunctions are not an inherently partisan issue—leaders of both parties have complained at one point or another about an overreaching federal judge. But in this case, allowing the federal government to revoke birthright citizenship would create a logistical nightmare for states that would have to figure out how to verify the citizenship of babies in order to allocate or administer benefits. An entire class of stateless infants would be created overnight. Indeed, one could imagine a ruling that narrows the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions to specific circumstances but that would still allow for such an injunction in this extraordinary case. That may be where the justices are headed, although there was no apparent agreement  at oral argument on how to do so.

After listening to the arguments, I was convinced by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s observation that, in many cases, “universal injunctions” are just the courts “telling the defendant, Stop doing this thing that the court has found to be unlawful.” However frustrating nationwide injunctions may be when you oppose them, they seem preferable to the alternatives floated. Yes, they sometimes lead to judges making overbroad decisions, as with the abortion-medication case unanimously reversed by a very conservative Supreme Court. But the Trump administration’s view that such injunctions are unconstitutional, and that district-court judges should be able to bar the executive order revoking birthright citizenship with respect to only individual parties, would produce even worse outcomes, in which the federal government would be free to trample the constitutional rights of anyone who doesn’t specifically assert them unless the Supreme Court decides to act.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor attempted to put this in a context that her conservative colleagues might understand. “So when a new president orders that because there’s so much gun violence going on in the country, and he comes in and he says, ‘I have the right to take away the guns from everyone,’ then he sends out the military to seize everyone’s guns, we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every named plaintiff gets—or every plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?” Sotomayor asked.

Nicholas Bagley: The birthright-citizenship case isn’t really about birthright citizenship

This is more or less what is happening now with birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let Trump run riot over the Constitution indefinitely while narrowing the ability of those affected to challenge violations of their constitutional rights. And its proposed remedy—class-action lawsuits—is something that it also believes to be legally suspect, and that it would presumably attack later. As Solicitor General D. John Sauer made clear to the justices, “I do not concede that we wouldn’t oppose class certification in this particular case.” It was reminiscent of when, during Trump’s second impeachment, his lawyers argued that impeachment was unnecessary because he could be criminally prosecuted; once prosecutions began, those same people argued that prosecuting him was unconstitutional. There is no acceptable way to oppose Trump and his agenda.

At one point, Sauer complained that nearly 40 nationwide injunctions against the administration have been issued in the past four months. His implication was that the courts are out of control. But another explanation is also available: An out-of-control executive who ignores constitutional restraints on his authority also results in a lot of injunctions. Even accepting the premise that there are too many nationwide injunctions, executive—not judicial—overreach seems like the actual problem here.

Nationwide injunctions certainly aren’t a perfect solution to the problem of a lawless president, but class-action lawsuits are even more flawed. To begin with, a class action requires that a group get a lawyer and persuade a judge to certify it as a class. That’s already a difficult task—and likely not a speedy process—and in doing so, those bringing suit might reveal themselves to the federal government, which now claims that it can clap undocumented people in irons, put them on a plane, deport them to an overseas Gulag in El Salvador, and then refuse to bring them back. Many people likely would not participate for fear of this outcome. Then there’s the fact that the Trump administration has successfully bullied so many white-shoe law firms out of doing pro bono work opposing it that those seeking to assert their constitutional rights may find themselves short of advocates.

Even beyond this nightmarish but realistic scenario, the government’s solution is to impose ever-heavier administrative burdens on the people whose rights are at stake. This is the reverse of how it should be. Having each individual get a lawyer to assert his or her constitutional rights is much more difficult and complicated than one judge telling the government to stop breaking the law.

“Your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Jackson told Sauer. “Your argument says, We get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

To appeal to a higher court, one has to lose a case. Winners cannot appeal, meaning that if the administration lost in the lower courts, a final resolution on the question would be elusive, and a lawless administration could continue to violate the Constitution. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, under the Trump administration’s theory, the government could lose in one part of the country and then decide not to appeal, allowing it to keep enforcing an unconstitutional executive order elsewhere. “The government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court, because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies,” Kagan said.

That’s why the nationwide injunctions are necessary for getting cases to the Court. “If the Court narrows the scope of the nationwide injunction or eliminates it entirely, it means that the administration will have free rein to basically bring these cases in whatever district they want, and they’ll get unfavorable resolutions, and then they just sit on them, and there’s no way to actually get to a final resolution where the court weighs in on the merits,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “They can win by losing by simply sitting on their hands and not appealing any of their losses.”

The argument against birthright citizenship is an entirely ahistorical and atextual one that would restore the antebellum understanding of citizenship, in which one inherits the status of their parents—a kind of “blood guilt” where the sins of the parents are visited on the child. As the legal scholars Anthony Michael Kreis, Evan Bernick, and Paul Gowder dryly put it, “There was, to be sure, one circumstance where the American founders permitted degraded legal status to be heritable, but we hope that it is not one that today’s denationalizers would embrace.” (They mean slavery.)

Sauer, for his part, kept insisting that “the Fourteenth Amendment related to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens who weren’t even present as a discrete class at that time.” The Framers could have easily written “the descendants of the emancipated” if they had meant it that narrowly. Instead, they enshrined nonracial citizenship in the Constitution with the phrasing “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship

Indeed, President Andrew Johnson complained that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, parts of which were later adopted in the Fourteenth Amendment, extended citizenship to “the Chinese of the Pacific States” and “the people called Gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood.” Yes, and that was the point. “A liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt,” Frederick Douglass declared in 1869. “It would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race color or creed.”

The text of the Constitution is at odds, however, with the Trumpist project. The conservative legal movement has done what it does best, which is fabricate a historical justification for a contemporary political goal. Former Justice Warren Burger called the transformation of the Second Amendment into a personal right to firearm ownership a “fraud,” but that interpretation of the right to bear arms at least has a long cultural tradition of firearm ownership behind it. Trump’s executive order is an attempt to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment by fiat as the Confederacy would have written it—the precise opposite of the intent of the Republicans who drafted it.

“They wanted everyone to have citizenship. They did not want to leave it up to the political parties, and they wanted it to be clear,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “They said, We’re going to resolve this question of citizenship once and for all, and if we leave it unclear, we’re afraid a future political party who doesn’t share our view of basic equality will have a different view.” That was prescient, although they couldn’t have imagined that the party that would not share that view would be their own.

A few days ago, Chief Justice John Roberts warned in an appearance at Georgetown Law School that the rule of law is “endangered.” One reason for that is Roberts’s own opinion that the president is nigh immune to criminal prosecution for lawbreaking, a finding that has emboldened Trump to ignore the law. Immunity is apparently insufficient, however—Trump also wants the ability to violate the Constitution at will without meaningful resistance from the courts. In the cases involving his deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration has already begun to ignore the judiciary and the Constitution. Here, Trump is asking permission. Have the justices learned their lesson yet?

It took just a few hours for devotees of the “Make America healthy again” movement to question former President Joe Biden’s prostate-cancer diagnosis. Tumors of the prostate are the most common serious malignancy identified in men: Even aggressive ones like Biden’s are diagnosed roughly 25,000 times a year in the United States. Although Biden’s condition is conventional, a certain segment of the public has been beguiled into blaming mainstream medicine for every unexpected death or health-related tragedy it comes across. The anti-vaccine community, including the group formerly led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spent years promoting the idea that mRNA vaccines for COVID regularly push tumors into overdrive. (Rare anecdotes aside, there is no evidence to support this fear.) Now, predictably, the claim is cropping up again on social media. “Prostate cancer takes years to metastasize to bone unless super aggressive or turbo cancer,” the Kennedy-endorsed physician Craig Wax suggested.

That an 82-year-old man who had aged out of prostate-cancer-screening tests has been found to have an advanced malignancy should not be surprising. In my experience as a doctor who diagnoses cancer, many tumors are discovered out of the blue. Prostate cancer in particular may not become apparent until an individual goes to his doctor with a minor complaint—in Biden’s case, urinary symptoms, according to the announcement—only to have further testing discover the worst. (Biden’s cancer isn’t curable; people with Stage 4 disease like his live for about three years on average—although the outlook is worse for men who are more than 80 years old.)

Cancer is an enigmatic disease, one that is simultaneously influenced by genetics, environment, personal habits, the aging process, and—not to be discounted—bad luck. But its muddled nature can be uncomfortable for those who share the view that nearly all sickness is preventable with virtuous behavior and a clean environment. According to Kennedy, the current leader of the U.S. health-care system, tumors are a product of not only the vaccines in our arms, but also the fluoride in our water, the toxins in our school lunches, the signals from our phones, and surely many other ubiquitous aspects of modernity. Indeed, in MAHA land, cancer is not just a misfortune, but a cover-up. Before he became health secretary, Kennedy ominously suggested that doctors might find its cause in the “places they dare not look.”

Read: The inflated risk of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest

It’s not just Kennedy. Trump’s health-care team routinely draws from the logic of this wellness-paranoia complex. Last year, Marty Makary, who has since become the FDA commissioner, told a group of MAHA wellness influencers convened by Senator Ron Johnson that cancer is a consequence of “low-grade chronic inflammation” induced by a poisoned food supply. (Years ago, he also speciously declared that undetected medical errors were a leading cause of death.) Casey Means, Trump’s new nominee for surgeon general, has claimed that “the biggest lie in healthcare” is that high blood sugar, malignant tumors, and clogged arteries “are totally different diseases requiring separate doctors and pills for life.” The truth is “simpler than we are told,” she said. (Buy her book to find out what it is.) And Mehmet Oz, the former lifestyle guru and current Medicare administrator, recently informed Americans, “It’s your patriotic duty to be as healthy as you can. It’s our job to help you get there, make it easy to do the right things.” Never mind that you can do everything right and still get sick. (For now, none of the administration’s major health officials has weighed in on Biden’s diagnosis.)

Read: Did a famous doctor’s COVID shot make his cancer worse?

Joe Biden is no stranger to tough luck. His son Beau died of a brain tumor at age 46 in 2015, leading to Biden’s participation in a government-funded “cancer moonshot” to combat the condition. The moonshot initiative was an old-fashioned approach to medicine, one that sought to ameliorate illness through advances in science and technology. RFK Jr. and his MAHA acolytes are naturally suspicious of this approach. Now their weird discomfort with disease—and their outré views on cancer in particular—is being refracted through a sea of false, indecent speculations. No, Biden’s cancer was not “courtesy of the mRNA shot.” One can only hope that the government’s bevy of vaccine skeptics will be able to resist the siren’s call to join in saying otherwise.

Hey fam: I’m doing an AMA on our subreddit this Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. in the East. If you want to hang come over to r/thebulwark.

I’ll remind you on Wednesday.

First: Please pray for Joe Biden and his family.

Second: Biden’s failures have been well chronicled. And yet, in this litany, people usually ignore his most consequential mistake.

Third: Biden’s biggest failure was that his theory of America was wrong.

He could have governed as a radical intent on destroying the populist project. This would have meant aggressively pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his confederates. It would have meant forgoing normal legislation in order to pursue broad, systemic change. Such a course would have been risky and—probably—unpopular.

Instead, Biden governed like a normal president in a normal moment. He pursued mostly popular, mostly incremental reforms. He forged bipartisan majorities. He passed a lot of legislation, most of it focused on concrete items to improve the lives of American citizens even—especially—in red states.

Biden’s belief was that the Trump moment was an aberration and that America could return to its liberal equilibrium if he governed normally and gave the Republican party space to heal itself and turn away from its authoritarian project.

Biden’s theory of the case was shredded by events.

There’s no way he could have known it would be. The course he chose looked like wisdom at the time; had he taken the radical path it would have been dangerous and there are no guarantees that it would have worked, either.

But we can say, without qualification: Biden’s strategy for defeating populist authoritarianism failed.

It’s odd that no one talks about this failure, even though it’s infinitely more important than his student loan scheme or the Hunter Biden pardon.

Fourth: Instead we focus on his failure to abandon his presidential re-election sooner.

I understand this fixation. Let’s stipulate that:

• Knowing what we know now, Biden should not have attempted to run.

• He and/or his inner circle undermined Kamala Harris’s chances during the race and—to their discredit—have abused her since.

• Perhaps Trump would have been defeated if Biden had declined to run; or pulled the plug sooner; or called for a primary instead of endorsing Harris; or endorsed Harris but then not hobbled her effort.

Yet I don’t think any of that is why we fixate on Biden’s “original sin.”

The reason we—and by “we” I mean everyone who is not part of the MAGA ummah—have made Biden the scapegoat is because the reality is too dark.

It wasn’t just Joe Biden who failed. It was America. All of it.

Let us list our failures.