26 December 22
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We live in a time when cynicism is easy to summon, when we can readily rattle off long lists of what is wrong, what destabilizes, and what drives us apart. We can tap into deep reservoirs of justifiable anxiety. We can wonder and worry about an uncertain future. Oftentimes it seems like the forces of destruction and nihilism are winning.
In times of great challenge, throughout history, humans have found strength, comfort, and courage in the power of community. We are social creatures. The mythology of the lone hero is just that, a fable that makes for great stories but misses a core truth: Nobody succeeds alone.
We all carry with us the lessons others have taught us. We build upon the knowledge those before us have discovered. We are fed, clothed, housed, entertained, and comforted by the work of our fellow humans. At best, we live in a free and fair marketplace of ideas, goods, and services. Too often, however, the human component of markets is sacrificed for the less worthy measure of money.
We are weakened when we seek short-term gain at others’ expense. We are less resilient when we divide our communities along lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, culture, and religion. We sacrifice the full potential of our intellectual, creative, and empathetic powers when we silence voices that challenge injustice, inequity, and intolerance.
There was once great hope that our age of stunning technological change would bring us together. That dream was dashed by algorithms that monetize short attention spans and the stoking of anger. But we would be shortsighted and not very good students of history to believe that our challenges today are greater than those of the past. Each generation must face its tests, and the world has made great progress in easing human suffering and promoting greater justice — although far too slowly and too unequally for anyone to preach complacency.
We are, as humans, imperfect and constant works in progress. So it makes sense that our institutions of government, commerce, education, and more would also be imperfect works of progress. Each of us can choose to engage in the task of improvement, and this service can take many forms. It can be helping others in our communities, or those in distant lands. It can be in the cause of scholarship, or caring for others, or teaching future generations. It can be in the realms of politics, or art, or social justice. There is so much need, and that means there are so many ways one can help.
Our hope in creating Steady was to forge a community to engage around these topics. We wanted it to be a place that was a counterbalance to the stereotypes around online communication. Could we have thoughtful and respectful discourse? Could we pause and consider new ideas? Could we look at our world through different perspectives? Your participation has exceeded our wildest hopes on all of these counts.
We will have cause to reflect more in the new year. There will undoubtedly be occasions for us to gather around pain and joy, worry and relief, tears and reasons to smile. We are strengthened by the knowledge that whatever comes, we have this forum to share our thoughts, plan our actions, and reflect on what has been accomplished and all that remains to be done.
Thank you all. May those who are hurting in particular find comfort. It is okay not to be okay. More than anything, that is the message that a helpful community can provide.
Steadiness is recognizing that life has highs and lows. All we can do is do our best to forge ahead and help others along the way.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate.
Steady.
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Protesters denounce the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
2023 is going to be a big year for anti-abortion policy: Anti-abortion activists could even harness a 19th-century law to curtail talking about abortion.
Come January, state legislatures across the country will open for business. Conservative lawmakers will try to narrow the last few avenues to abortion available in red states. Abortion rights activists, buoyed by their victories in the midterms, will push for more ballot measures. Many of these legislative and political showdowns will likely end up in the courts.
All these efforts will not only make abortion access even more fraught, but further deepen the divide between red and blue states. They will also raise questions about the clash between the nation’s First Amendment and its long-dormant laws, and fuel a crisis of faith for Republicans: Do they tiptoe around abortion, or double down?
The nation will start to taste the impact of overturning Roe. March will mark nine months since the overturning of Roe v. Wade—and, in all likelihood, the beginning of the births of babies from people who would have otherwise gotten abortions.
“I think poverty of women and child poverty are going to go up,” said Carrie Baker, director of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. “We're going to see significantly an impact on women's labor force participation earnings. We're going to see increased turnover and time off from work among women of reproductive age.
Here’s what’s next for abortion rights in 2023.
State legislatures open in January—and with these openings will come more restrictions.
By the time the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe in June, many of the country’s state legislatures had shut down for the year. In January, state lawmakers will head back to work.
“You have a lot of state legislators who are Republicans who feel very beholden to anti-abortion voters, both from the standpoint of winning primaries and getting donations,” said Mary Ziegler, who studies the legal history of reproduction at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. “But you also have Republicans were worrying that the abortion issue is bad for them and that especially eliminating things like rape and incest exceptions are likely to make the issue even worse for them than it otherwise would be.”
States like Florida, which outlaws abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, or Georgia, which bans it past roughly six weeks of pregnancy, may tighten up those bans to start earlier on in pregnancy. Legislators in those states, Ziegler said, could find themselves mired in debates over whether to allow abortions in cases of rape and incest.
State lawmakers will often pre-file bills in December. Ahead of Roe’s overturning, some anti-abortion activists started murmuring about limiting people’s ability to travel across state lines for abortion, or helping others do so—a practice they called “abortion tourism.” But Elizabeth Nash, principal policy associate of state issues at the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion restrictions, has not yet seen any bills that explicitly limit people’s ability to travel.
That doesn’t mean that abortion foes won’t try to attack the issue obliquely. They could require that abortion funds, which can help people travel, report information to the state, or mandate that they tell abortion seekers misinformation.
“It could kind of go down a laundry list of restrictions that could be placed on abortion funds and practical support organizations that would make it hard for them to operate,” Nash said. “It could have really wide-ranging effects around not only accessing abortion and sharing information about abortion, but even understanding abortion or reading about abortion in the news.”
Steve Aden, chief legal officer for Americans United For Life, warned that trying to stop people from traveling across state lines for abortion is “wrong-headed policy.”
“There is a constitutional right to travel,” Aden said. “States should not seek to, and we don't encourage them to, seek to prohibit people from traveling across state lines, even if it's to secure something that's illegal, like abortion.”
Americans United for Life is famed for its wildly successful playbook of anti-abortion model legislation, which state lawmakers can lift by just writing in their states’ names. Now, the organization is working on model legislation that could cut down on access to abortion-inducing pills, one of the anti-abortion’s greatest goals. Specifically, these bills will require abortion patients to meet in person with a provider if they want a medication abortion, which are induced using pills. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration decreed that people do not need to meet with providers before undergoing that kind of abortion.
“It’s our position, contrary to the Biden administration, that states do have the authority to enact stronger protections for patients generally than the federal drug guidance offers,” Aden said. “And we feel confident that the federal courts that are looking at this issue will come out that way, when it's all said and done, and will affirm that states do have the authority to come to enact stronger control, stronger protections for women considering chemical abortion than the FDA has.”
Americans United for Life has also released model legislation that could also be used to essentially funnel more money to crisis pregnancy centers, anti-abortion facilities that aim to convince people to continue their pregnancies. With thousands of locations, these facilities already far outnumber abortion clinics. Texas, which has long pioneered anti-abortion strategies that then get exported to the rest of the country, has already devoted millions of dollars to its “Alternates to Abortion” program, which has funded crisis pregnancy centers in the past.
One proposed bill in Texas caught Nash’s eye, because it would allow pregnant people to use the HOV lane. Although the bill may seem inconsequential, that language would essentially make a fetus legally qualify as a person—which would have enormous implications for all of U.S. law.
Legal battles over abortion will continue.
Roe’s demise triggered abortion bans in at least 13 states, but not all of those bans are now in effect. Thanks to court battles, abortion rights have flickered to life in states like Ohio, Georgia, and Wyoming. Some of those battles are now stretching into 2023, potentially giving some patients time to still get the procedure.
But the biggest legal challenge to abortion could come in the shape of a lawsuit filed in Texas last month. In November, four doctors and anti-abortion groups sued the FDA, claiming that the FDA had overstepped its authority when it approved the drug mifepristone for use in abortions in 2000. Mifepristone is wildly popular: In 2020, medication abortions, which use mifepristone, accounted for more than half of all U.S. abortions.
If the lawsuit succeeds, it could imperil the entire nation’s access to medication abortion—regardless of whether a state has protected abortion rights.
George Delgado, one of the doctors who has championed the controversial and unproven method of “abortion reversal” is among the doctors who are suing. The doctors and groups are being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the deep-pocketed legal arm of the anti-abortion movement. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which has ties to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, also architected the Mississippi 15-week abortion ban that was ultimately used to overturn Roe.
The lawsuit’s claim about the FDA is likely a longshot. But the lawsuit was also filed in Amarillo, Texas, which means it could end up on the desk of Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed conservative judge who recently took aim at Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program.
There is one other looming legal threat to abortion pills. In November, Students for Life of America launched a petition urging the FDA to require doctors who dispense abortion-inducing pills to treat the fetal remains left from abortions as medical waste, because, the group says, that waste could constitute a threat to the environment. If that petition succeeds, the requirements would be so onerous for providers that access to medication abortions would effectively vanish.
Anti-abortion activists could harness a 19th-century law to curtail even talking about abortion.
In 1873, a century before the Supreme Court decided Roe, Congress enacted the Comstock Act. Technically meant to block people from sending “obscene” materials through the mail, though it did not define what, exactly, counted as “obscene,” the Comstock Act was essentially a cudgel that could be wielded against all efforts to expand information and access to birth control and abortion. Now, some abortion opponents have seized on the 19th-century law, arguing that the federal provision trumps any state laws to protect abortion rights.
The city council of Pueblo, Colorado, recently passed an ordinance that would amount to banning abortion within city limits. That ordinance flies in the face of Colorado law, which protects abortion rights. But Mark Lee Dickson, a prominent anti-abortion activist who has helped more than 60 cities essentially ban abortion by declaring themselves “sanctuary cities for the unborn,” has said that the ordinance is legal thanks to the Comstock Act.
“No decision of the Colorado court and the Colorado legislature can change the fact that in the 1870s, Congress passed these laws that are on the books. So until Congress repeals those laws, these are the laws we're under,” Dickson told a local news outlet. He added, “This was written to survive a challenge. If the state of Colorado does want to challenge that, then there's a place that we can take this, and that's the Supreme Court of the United States.”
The lawsuit filed in Amarillo also references the Comstock Act, claiming that the FDA has failed to follow laws that “expressly prohibit the mailing or delivery by any letter carrier, express company, or other common carrier of any substance or drug intended for producing abortion.”
Aden suggested that, if a Republican administration were in power, it could one day use the Comstock Act to limit abortion. “If we either had a pro-life administration or at least one that respects the role of the executive branch, we would be discussing how and under what circumstances the federal law prohibiting sending abortion-inducing drugs in the federal mails applies,” he said. “I wish that we were having that discussion.”
The Comstock Act almost certainly won’t be anti-abortion advocates’ only attempt to curb people’s ability to share information about abortion. Even before Roe fell, states passed laws requiring doctors to give patients misleading information about the procedure. The controversial Texas six-week abortion ban, enacted last year, also targeted people who assist in procuring an abortion, which could include passing on information about how to get one.
Now, without Roe’s protections, similar efforts will likely only intensify. The National Right to Life Committee, one of the nation’s oldest anti-abortion organizations, has proposed model legislation that would go after people “aiding or abetting an illegal abortion.” Aiding and abetting, in the eyes of the group, includes providing any information about self-managing an abortion or obtaining an illegal abortion, or even having a website that “facilitates efforts” to get an illegal abortion.
To stay out of legal trouble, institutions may even start to self-censor. In September, the University of Idaho warned employees in a memo that they could be fired if they referred students for abortions or even offered them birth control. The memo also said that, in light of Idaho’s new abortion ban, employees should not to provide birth control at all. Even condoms could only be offered “for the purpose of helping prevent the spread of STDs and not for purposes of birth control.”
“The line between giving information and advising people or encouraging or conspiring—what's that line?” Baker said. “I have no doubt that they will try to make that line, ‘If you say “the A word,” you're encouraging it. Therefore, it's an act, not speech, and therefore, we can throw you in jail.’”
Don’t expect ballot initiatives to save abortion.
For decades, anti-abortion groups promised Republicans that opposing abortion was a winning issue at the ballot box. But, after Roe’s overturning, that didn’t exactly pan out.
The first hint that something had gone dramatically wrong for anti-abortion politicians arrived in August, when voters in Kansas—the literal middle of the country—decided not to strip their state constitution of abortion rights. Then, in November, abortion opponents went zero for five on abortion-related ballot measures. California, Vermont, and Michigan—a decidedly purple state—all voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution. Montana voted not to adopt a measure that involved legislating doctors’ treatment of infants, which anti-abortion advocates had pushed. Even voters in deep-red Kentucky, home of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, decided against affirming that their state constitution does not support abortion rights, giving abortion rights supporters a narrow path to one day bringing abortion rights back to the state.
These stunning victories demonstrated that abortion, long an afterthought for American voters, was finally inching up their priority list. Abortion rights supporters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Ohio all started to crow about their plans to give voters the chance to comment directly on abortion.
“It’s a when,” Kellie Copeland, executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio, told the Ohio Capitol Journal. “It’s not an if.”
But these ballot measures won’t be enough to protect or restore abortion access across the United States. In total, there are 22 states that have a near-total or six-week abortion ban on the books, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. (Some are active, thanks to legal and logistical challenges—on any given day, about 12 to 14 states tend to have an abortion ban in effect.) Of those 22 states, 15 don’t allow citizens to initiate constitutional amendments.
Republicans in Ohio are also moving to make it harder for voters to amend the constitution; they want to create a spring 2023 ballot measure that would, in the future, require citizen-led ballot measures to garner 60 percent of the vote in order to pass. (That rule wouldn’t apply to ballot measures generated by the GOP-controlled state legislature. They would still only need a simple majority to pass.)
Even if you gave people in some states the chance to vote on abortion rights, they’d still likely choose to ban them. While most Americans wanted to keep Roe, a majority of voters in states like Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana all think abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, according to data collected by Civiqs.
The midterm results from state legislatures highlight voters’ mixed feelings about abortion. And that’s where voting on abortion can matter the most next year, given that the vast majority of abortion restrictions are state-level. Democrats held off Republican victories in state legislatures like North Carolina, where the GOP was hoping to secure a veto-proof majority that would allow them to further restrict abortion in the state. But Republicans held onto governor, attorney general, and state legislative seats in states that enforced abortion restrictions in the wake of Roe’s overturning. In other words, they kept their ability to keep abortion restricted, or limit it further, in red states.
“Blue states protected abortion rights as expected,” Catherine Glenn Foster, president of the powerful anti-abortion group Americans United for Life conceded in an op-ed. “But public officials who have supported or enforced limits on abortion in nearly 20 red states were re-elected.”
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, tweeted that the midterms demonstrated the need for abortion opponents to focus on federal restrictions for abortions. “This is why our mission in the pro-life movement is two-fold, changing minds AND laws,” she tweeted. “And this is why we need federal protections for preborn children. Like other injustices our nation faced in our past, some states will just refuse to acknowledge human rights and progress.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, has already introduced a bill to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. So far, it’s amassed little support in Congress.
“The national Republican Party doesn't want anyone to do anything about abortion at all at the moment,” Ziegler said.
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Supreme Court justices have spent longer this term on arguments than in past terms. (photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images)
On paper, the arguments are not different in length than in decades gone by. In most cases, each side is allotted a half hour, or in some cases five minutes more; in extraordinary cases, where there are multiple major issues, or multiple consolidate cases, the court will, on occasion, allocate more time.
The court has a mechanism to keep the lawyers on the straight and narrow. To alert counsel when there are only five minutes left, a white light goes on at the lectern, and a red light when time's up.
Historically, time for arguments has shrunk
Dating back to the early days of the Republic, Supreme Court advocates sometimes argued their cases for days. Not so in modern times. In 1925, the court imposed a time limit of an hour on each side. In 1970 Chief Justice Warren Burger put in place a shorter limit of a half hour on each side, with additional time allotted in certain circumstances. The court has always been quite strict about enforcing its allotted time limits. In the '80s and '90s, then Chief Justice William Rehnquist literally stopped lawyers mid-sentence when the red light went on. His one-time clerk, the current chief justice, John Roberts, allowed a tad more leeway when he succeeded Rehnquist in 2005, but not more than a few minutes.
Now arguments are expanding
Yet, this term, while most cases were scheduled for 60 minutes total, and three cases were scheduled for 90 minutes or slightly longer, the court, on average for all cases, asked questions for an additional 31 more minutes over the allotted time.
Additionally, in the big cases, the justices ran long by, on average, 80%. And with three sittings now completed, the trend continues steadily upward.
So what accounts for this change in behavior?
Basically, it dates back to the pandemic lockdown. Remember that the justices continued to hear arguments, but by phone, because they thought Zoom wasn't safe from crashers and crashing. But when you hear arguments by phone, you can't see each other. So, to prevent the justices from constantly interrupting each other, the questioning went in order of seniority, with each justice allotted just a few minutes, instead of the usual free-for-all.
When they returned to the bench in 2021, they could now see each other again, but instead of returning to the old discipline, they started to speak longer and longer. And, the system that now exists at the court is that for however long a lawyer has — let's say, a half hour — he or she faces the basic free-for-all that used to exist pre-pandemic. But instead of the oral argument ending there, the justices do a whole second round, with each justice going in order of seniority, followed by a final check from the chief justice to make sure his colleagues have no more question.
The numbers are pretty amazing
To get a picture of what it's like, let's take the last sitting in which there were nine cases argued over six days. Three were big cases: one involving the so-called independent state legislature theory; another involving public accommodations laws that require equal treatment for everyone, including same-sex couples, and a third was an important immigration case.
Although the two previous sittings also had major cases, at this last sitting, the numbers were the worst to date. The big case arguments lasted more than twice as long as scheduled. To be precise, a whopping 107% longer than scheduled. The same-sex marriage case, with 70 minutes allotted for argument, lasted instead for 141 minutes; the independent state legislature case, with 90 minutes allotted for argument, lasted instead for 174 minutes; and the immigration case, scheduled for the usual 60 minutes, ran a stupendous 136 minutes.
Indeed, as this reporter once joked, "I hear that there was a major disturbance this morning at Arlington National Cemetery ... it was the late Chief Justice Rehnquist turning over in his grave."
But the truth is that while the lengthy arguments make it much more difficult for reporters to meet their deadlines, the justices like it this way. They like that they don't leave an argument with some of their questions unanswered. And therefore the chief justice doesn't impose the discipline of the clock, even when the justices are more than an hour over the allotted time.
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In Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won re-election and Democrats took control of the Legislature, Ms. Whitmer is considering backing automatic voter registration. (photo: Brittany Greeson/NYT)
After retaining most of the governor’s offices they hold and capturing the legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats are putting forward a long list of proposals to expand voting access.
Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released from prison and criminalizing election misinformation.
Since 2020, Republicans inspired by former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies sought to make voting more difficult for anyone not casting a ballot in person on Election Day. But in the midterm elections, voters across the country rejected the most prominent Republican candidates who embraced false claims about American elections and promised to bend the rules to their party’s advantage.
Democrats who won re-election or will soon take office have interpreted their victories as a mandate to make voting easier and more accessible.
“I’ve asked them to think big,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said of his directions to fellow Democrats on voting issues now that his party controls both chambers of the state’s Legislature.
Republicans will maintain unified control next year over state governments in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Georgia. In Texas and Ohio, along with other places, Republicans are weighing additional restrictions on voting when they convene in the new year.
Democratic governors in Arizona and Wisconsin will face Republican-run legislatures that are broadly hostile to expanding voting access, while Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor-elect of Pennsylvania, is likely to eventually preside over one chamber with a G.O.P. majority and one with a narrow Democratic majority.
And in Washington, D.C., the Supreme Court is weighing a case that could give state legislatures vastly expanded power over election laws — a decision with enormous implications for the power of state lawmakers to draw congressional maps and set rules for federal elections.
Democrats have widely interpreted that case — brought by Republicans in North Carolina — as dangerous to democracy because of the prospect of aggressive G.O.P. gerrymandering and the potential for state legislators to determine the outcome of elections. But it would also allow Democrats to write themselves into permanent power in states where they control the levers of elections.
The Supreme Court’s deliberation comes as many Democrats are becoming increasingly vocal about pushing the party to be more aggressive in expanding voting access — especially after the Senate this year failed to advance a broad voting rights package.
Adam Pritzker, a cousin of Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and co-founder of the States Project, a Democratic group that pumped more than $60 million into state legislative races this year, warned against what he described as his party’s reflexive complacency. “Democrats never cease to amaze me,” he said.“They go from like waving the white flag in states to then thinking that we won, then wanting to take the foot off the gas pedal. It just seems a little bit dangerous to think that way.”
Mr. Walz was among more than a dozen Democratic governors and governors-elect who gathered in early December in New Orleans, where the topic of defending and expanding voting access was a frequent topic of conversation in the ballrooms and hallways of the Democratic Governors Association’s annual winter gathering.
Republicans have sought additional voting restrictions for decades. Those efforts were amplified after the 2020 election, when several Republican-led states passed new laws with measures that included requiring voters to show photo identification, stripping control from local election boards and curtailing some early voting.
The effect of these voting laws remains unclear. In Georgia, which passed a major election law in 2021, turnout was strong, but mail voting plummeted under the new requirements.
The most popular Democratic plan on voting access is to join the 20 states that have already enacted or approved automatic voter registration, a system that adds anyone whose information is on file with a government agency — such as a department of motor vehicles or a social services bureau — to the voter rolls unless they opt out. Oregon, which in 2016 became the first state to adopt the practice, had the highest percentage of voter turnout in the country last month, a distinction held in recent elections by Minnesota.
Steve Simon, a Democrat who won re-election as Minnesota’s secretary of state, said that automatic voter registration and preregistering 16- and 17-year-olds before their 18th birthdays would be atop the voting access agenda for his state’s Democratic legislators.
Mr. Simon lamented how Minnesota had been surpassed in turnout by both Oregon and Maine, but he said his proposed changes would help put his state back on top.
“We will likely, it looks, be third, but we’re on the medal stand,” Mr. Simon said. “They’re worthy successors and temporary holders of the traveling trophy.”
In Michigan, voters in the last two midterm elections have approved constitutional amendments that expanded early and absentee voting, created an independent redistricting commission and expanded the use of drop boxes.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said at the recent governors’ gathering that she was considering backing automatic registration and making it easier for out-of-state students attending Michigan universities to register to vote. (Republicans in some states have sought to make it harder for out-of-state college students, who tend to lean Democratic, to vote, arguing that they should cast ballots in their home states.)
The Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a fellow Democrat, said that while her office worked to carry out the election changes approved by voters, she would like to see sweeping new rules and penalties for disseminating and amplifying misinformation that interferes with voting — things like fliers or mailers with the wrong dates for an election or deceptive language on petitions that are gathered for proposed ballot amendments.
“The greatest threats to our democracy right now continue to be the intentional spread of misinformation and the threats and harassment of election officials that emerge from those efforts,” Ms. Benson said. “We owe it to voters on all sides to ensure we are seeking accountability for anyone who would intentionally try to essentially block someone from voting through misinformation.”
Ms. Benson said she believed the measures she was seeking would withstand any challenges on First Amendment grounds.
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Shapiro has rare powers to appoint the top election official, in contrast to most other states, where elections are run by other elected officials or appointed boards.
He pledged to pick someone “pro-democracy” and said he was optimistic that Republicans would agree to change the state’s law that forbids the processing of absentee ballots and early votes before Election Day. Mr. Trump’s allies used the law to sow chaos in the state after the 2020 election, falsely claiming that absentee ballots tallied after Election Day were evidence of vote-rigging.
Mr. Shapiro, whose defeated Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, ran on a platform of vast new voting restrictions, said he was willing to consider some G.O.P. proposals and “meet in the middle” if it meant expanding voting access.
“I’m certainly willing to have an honest conversation about voter I.D., as long as that is something that is not used as a hindrance to voting,” Mr. Shapiro said. “I’m not willing to negotiate with people who are engaged in conspiracy theories and spewing nonsense about 2020. I’m willing to talk to people who come to the table with honest beliefs on how we can expand voting rights and voting participation.”
Democratic governors in states that are not national political battlegrounds expressed less motivation to make big changes to their voting laws. Wes Moore, the governor-elect in Maryland, said he did not see much to change. Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, which has a Republican-led Legislature, said that “most Kansans are pretty satisfied with the way it works now.”
And in Oregon, the first state in recent years to institute a host of methods to expand voting access, including universal vote-by-mail, Tina Kotek, the governor-elect, said she would aim to enact limits on campaign contributions from people and corporations. Phil Knight, the Nike founder, spent millions in a failed effort to defeat her.
In two other battlegrounds, Arizona and Wisconsin, there is likely to be far less space for Democratic governors to work with Republican legislators.
Wisconsin Republicans spent much of the last two years passing more than a dozen voting bills that wound up being vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who won re-election last month. Republican leaders have said they will not reintroduce those bills only for Mr. Evers to veto them again in 2023.
“I think it’s done,” Mr. Evers said of the state’s pitched fight over voting laws. “They may try to pass some laws to make it more difficult to vote. And they know I’ll veto those.”
And in Arizona, where Kari Lake, a Republican, has yet to concede defeat in the governor’s race, Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs described a relationship with Republican State Senate leaders that is so strained, she has had no communication with them and does not plan to.
Ms. Hobbs said that while she was “hopeful we can find some common ground” on voting issues, she was not optimistic.
“These people are claiming fraud when there is none, these people mounted an insurrection on the Capitol, they’re the ones who have broken the trust,” she said in New Orleans. “You can’t coddle these people that have been misled by the people they have upheld as leaders. These so-called leaders need to be held accountable.”
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There were six attacks across power stations in Oregon and Washington earlier this month. (photo: John G Mabanglo/EPA)
Christmas Day outages add to an alarming string of incidents with similar power grid vandalism in Oregon and North Carolina
The Pierce county sheriff said in two statements that no suspects have yet been identified for the incidents.
The Christmas Day outages add to an alarming and increasing list of similar incidents in the US. There were six attacks across power stations in Oregon and Washington earlier this month, following a similar attack on a power grid in North Carolina at the beginning of December.
In the attack in North Carolina, assailants shot gunfire into two stations, with some claiming that it was done in order to halt a local drag show.
While there are no suspects in the string of attacks, there are concerns that at least some of these assaults are carried out by extremists, motivated by online conspiracy theories and pursuing a far-right agenda.
The most recent incident in Washington unfolded on Christmas evening, there was a fire on the premises of Puget Sound Energy substation following a burglary. “The suspect(s) gained access to the fenced area and vandalized the equipment which caused the fire,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement on Sunday.
Early on Christmas morning, around 2.30am, an energy utility company Puget Sound Energy experienced a power outage “where the fenced area was broken into and the equipment vandalized”, said another statement from the sheriff’s office.
At about 5.30am, a break-in and vandalism in a Tacoma Public Utilities facility about 10 miles away, led to a power outage.
Following that, just a couple of miles away, there was a “forced entry” at a substation where nothing was stolen.
Tacoma Public Utilities said in a statement on Sunday that the issue was a lot more severe than they had initially thought.
“Unfortunately, the impacts to our system from today’s deliberate damage are more severe in some places than initial testing indicated,” they said on Sunday evening in an update in a live feed on Facebook.
Pierce county Sgt Darren Moss has said that it’s likely the incidents are related.
“There’s a good possibility they are related, we are going to be investigating to see if this was coordinated by a specific group or people,” he told news station KING 5, “but at this time all we know is that we have burglaries where the power was purposefully knocked out.”
Of those affected, more than 7,000 customers were out of power before the sun was up on Christmas morning, KING 5 reported.
Protesters opposed to Lula's election have been camped out outside the barracks. (photo: BBC)
Following the arrest in Brasilia of a supporter of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly trying to set off a bomb to create chaos ahead of the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as Brazil's new president, the BBC's South America correspondent Katy Watson examines the risks that hardcore Lula opponents pose for his presidency.
Draped in Brazil's flag, they are chanting: "Armed forces, save Brazil." Some are waving banners with the words: "Our flag will never be red - out with communism".
Around them, dozens of tarpaulin tents have been set up, most of them green, blue and yellow, the colours of the national flag, which are now associated with the country's far-right.
One young man who introduces himself as Rodrigo is camping out in one of them, along with four other people.
He pitched up just after October's presidential election in which the far-right candidate he was backing - incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro - narrowly lost to left-winger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
"It's a greater cause," he says, explaining that he is here to stay and not considering returning home.
When asked whether Jair Bolsonaro is the driving force behind his decision to stay on and protest, he admits he is.
"He's influential on social networks - the things he posts about family, God, liberty, which are our principles, make us stay here."
But fellow protester Luca Oliveira disagrees - he says their movement is bigger than the soon-to-be former leader.
"Our voting system? It's a fraud," says Luca. He claims Brazil's electronic voting system is prone to irregularities and that the "biased" Supreme Court is doing nothing about it.
It is a familiar argument. Jair Bolsonaro made it throughout the election campaign, providing no proof to back it up. But repeat the allegations over and over again, and that is enough to keep this group of people on the streets.
"We are calling for something different," Luca says, without defining exactly what that is.
The truth is, people here want the military to get involved.
"I come here mainly because we have reason to believe that the elections were not done in a clean manner," explains 22-year-old Sofia, a law student who did not want to give her surname.
"Lula da Silva is an ex-convict. Having him become president is basically saying it's OK for you to be a criminal here in Brazil," she says referring to the time the president-elect served in jail before his conviction was annulled.
Sofia argues that under Brazil's constitution, it falls to the army to intervene to take care of national security in cases when there is something wrong with the elections or the electronic voting machines.
She says that the armed forces should take "whatever measures necessary" to ensure "the election is correct".
But there is no sign that Brazil's military wants to intervene.
A report by the armed forces on the security of Brazil's electronic voting system found no evidence of fraud during the elections, although it did point out some vulnerabilities that it said could be exploited.
That sliver of doubt is enough to keep these protesters hoping for a radical U-turn from the authorities.
It is a scene replicated across Brazil since Lula won the presidential elections at the end of October.
One demonstrator is carrying a sign which reads "#Brazilianspring" in a reference to the mass protests in 2013, when more than a million people took part in anti-government protests in about 100 cities across the country.
Political scientist Jonas Medeiros says these protests are nothing like on the scale of the unrest the country experienced back then.
But he does caution that what is happening now is worth paying attention to. "There is a tendency in the progressive camp as well as the media to minimise their [the protests'] importance," says Mr Medeiros.
"That they are just a minority of interventionist pariahs, so don't give them any attention. But these people are building networks, possible civil organisations and this is the seed for the future of the opposition that Lula will have to deal with for the next four years."
Michele Prado is also a political scientist. She knows first-hand how these protesters operate, because until recently she was one of them.
She voted for Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and talks about having become "radicalised" before she realised that many of arguments she had read on right-wing WhatsApp groups "weren't democratic".
She says she fell for the narrative which "appeared to defend democracy and liberty".
But even though Ms Prado may have had a change of heart, she insists Mr Bolsonaro's influence remains strong.
"Just look at his behaviour until now. He's still not given a declaration [after Lula's victory]," she says referring to the fact that the outgoing president has not admitted defeat.
"He left the door open for extremist mobilisation to continue. He legitimises this radicalisation and the extreme right because he himself spent his entire mandate attacking democratic institutions, disrespecting minorities, the separation of power," she explains.
Law student Sofia is one of those still holding out for the armed forces to somehow prevent the handover of power from happening.
She says she believes "the armed forces will actually do something" to stop Lula from taking office.
It is an unlikely outcome that those protesting alongside her outside the army barracks may still be holding out for, but one that few Brazilians truly believe will occur.
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Snow blankets a neighborhood, on Sunday in Cheektowaga, N.Y. (photo: John Waller/AP)
For six days, a blast of polar air from Canada has been wrecking holiday travel plans as it lumbers across the country, leaving power outages, canceled flights and dangerous roads in its wake.
About 60% of the U.S. population faced some sort of winter weather advisory over the holiday weekend. Drastically low temperatures stretched from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande.
Western New York saw days of sustained blizzard conditions, which dropped over 48 inches of snow and sent temperatures plummeting to minus 22 degrees when accounting for wind chill. The region accounted for 27 of the overall storm-related deaths across the country.
On Sunday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said almost every fire truck in the city of Buffalo had been stranded amid super-size snowdrifts.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told NPR's Morning Edition that his city's emergency responders have gone "car by car" to perform hundreds of rescues of stranded motorists.
"This has been called a generational storm — a once-in-a-generation storm," Brown said. "It's unlike anything that even the city of Buffalo is used to getting."
The city's current death toll, 14, is expected to rise. A driving ban in the region and airport closure remained in effect Monday.
"At one time, over 20,000 people were without power in the city of Buffalo," Brown said.
"That number is now below 10,000, and we will continue to work aggressively and strategically with National Grid all day today to continue to reduce that number and get everyone's power restored," he added, referring to the local utility.
Communities from coast to coast have lost power over the course of the week, but the worst of rolling blackouts appeared to have subsided. A mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM interconnection, said Sunday that utilities could meet the day's demand after it initially asked 65 million customers to conserve energy amid Saturday's freeze.
As of Monday morning, about 183,000 customers were still without heat and lights, down from a peak of 1.7 million earlier in the week, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.
The National Weather Service said conditions are expected to remain frigid and hazardous on Monday, but start to moderate on Tuesday then continue to slowly improve as the week moves ahead.
That could be good news for winter travelers. Airports continued to report thousands of flight cancellations and delays Monday morning, with those flying to or from the Great Lakes region looking most impacted.
The NWS still advises caution for anyone looking to venture outside: High wind speeds and low temperatures are a recipe for frostbite, which can take root in less than 10 minutes of exposure.
Local authorities have reported storm-related deaths from a host of causes. In Niagara County, N.Y., a 27-year-old man was poisoned by carbon monoxide after snow blocked his furnace. In Ohio, a utility worker was electrocuted. A Wisconsin woman fell through river ice. A falling branch claimed the life of a Vermont resident. And at least six were killed in car crashes in Missouri, Kentucky and Oklahoma.
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